by Tanith Frost
Daniel walks toward me. There’s no urgency in his steps, no concern, no outrage at the intrusion into our space or threat to my safety. My muscles tense as anger flashes through me, quick and hot.
“Where the hell were you?” I demand, turning on him.
He holds his hands up in surrender, though his expression doesn’t change. “Right there.”
“He could have attacked me.”
“He didn’t. You handled that well.”
I cross my arms. “A little support might have been nice.”
“And it would have made you look weak if I’d assumed you needed me. Which you didn’t. You may have noticed that he didn’t bring any backup of his own.”
His words do nothing to cool my blood. I know I’m more angry at Silas than at Daniel, but I can’t help thinking about what might have happened. There’s a good chance I could take Silas in a fight, but not without getting hurt.
I’m shaken, though he didn’t touch me. The implied threats—wild animals, his knowledge of sleep patterns that leave us defenceless—make me want to load a gun with Paul’s silver bullets.
And that’s what Silas wanted, I have no doubt. To put me in defence mode, to make me focus on that instead of whatever he’s up to. I won’t let him get to me like that.
But dammit, Daniel should have had my back.
I stop and take a deep breath, filling myself with the cool, spruce-scented night air, and let my power flow through me. I am strong. I am resilient. Letting myself explore a strange power threw me off, but I’m fine.
He’s right. I can handle anything.
My shoulders relax as my anger cools.
Daniel is watching. “You can’t rely on me.”
“I know.” In the end, I only have myself, and I have to be enough. I am a vampire. Though I am loyal to clan Maelstrom, I need no one but myself. Daniel isn’t my boyfriend, my mate, or any such thing. A friend, I think, but one who’s as self-sufficient as I should be. My once-trainer, and still a mentor who wants to see me develop my skills for the good of Maelstrom. A fantastic lay, but that doesn’t mean we share anything deeper.
I can’t be mad at him for doing his job and letting me stand on my own two feet. I just wish it felt like there was someone around to catch me if I fall.
He looks away. “At least we know where we stand with him. What did he say?”
“Not much. Warned me against sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Insulted vampires as a group. Pleasant guy.”
I’m impressed with the casual indifference in my voice. I’m not going to write Silas off as just an alpha male jerk—which he literally is, I suppose, given his position as pack leader—but I’m not going to let him under my skin, either.
I have a face to put to the name and the reputation now. That’s more than I had before he showed up.
But if he thinks I’m going to back down, he’s wrong.
“You coming in?” Daniel asks.
I look again toward the north end of the yard, where Silas disappeared.
“Yeah. I need to talk to Paul about getting that fucking fence fixed.”
The Jeep starts up in the garage as we’re walking back, and Paul backs out. He rolls down the window and gestures back over his shoulder with one thumb.
“Gotta take this one back out,” he says. “She’ll be turning soon. Might as well convalesce among her own people.”
I look in through the tinted back window and see nothing but the white teeth bared at me.
I’m not sorry to see her go. One less thing to worry about.
I know I should offer to jump in and help out, but Paul doesn’t ask, and I don’t offer.
I’ll have plenty of time to get to know any wolves that dare to cross my path.
The rest of the night is for paperwork. Paul insists I fill out an incident report about Silas, though I tell him it wasn’t a big deal. Apparently a were being inside the gates without permission does qualify as an incident, whatever my personal feelings on his threats may be.
So I sit at the smaller desk in the dreary little office and write my notes, letting Paul take care of the few male weres who drop by to sign in or out. I focus on my work, glancing up to mark their faces in my memory, then ignoring their curious stares as I record every detail.
I’m not going to cover for Silas. His record’s probably a mile long, anyway.
I say as much to Paul when I hand the form in, and he shakes his head. “Not like you might expect based on the past few nights, actually. Now, half of that is that he’s so damned good at not getting caught. I don’t doubt that he was involved the night someone broke into the shed and took half the non-perishables in there, but we never found evidence. Not sure what he was trying to prove with that little stunt. It’s not like we don’t give them all the food they ask for, anyway. Probably just making a statement about not wanting to have to sign for it. Claiming territory.” He rolls his eyes and leans back in the desk chair, where he’s working on his own report about the visit with Joseph. “Guess we’re lucky he can manage to sign at all, given the education he’s had.” He looks over the report I’ve handed to him and frowns. “You think Silas was talking to Joseph?”
“I don’t know how else he’d know my name. I certainly didn’t introduce myself on the road the first time we met. Unless you were talking to him before we came?”
Paul rubs a hand over the dark stubble on his jaw that would be an evening shadow on a living man, but on a vampire has to be a week’s growth. “Definitely not that. This is the first time I’ve heard of Silas actually approaching a vampire in all the years he’s lived here. I’ve talked to him about incidents from time to time, reminded him about registration and getting his pack members here well before they’re forced into a change.” He drums his fingers on a messy pile of papers on the desk, a year’s worth of registration pages waiting to be filed. “He keeps his distance, though, even then. Aloof is what he is. More like a cat than a dog, as far as I can tell. Doesn’t give half a shit about us or what we want. Or the good of the sanctuary, for that matter.”
He reads over my report again. “Most unusual, for sure.” He looks up at me with a savage smile, revealing fangs I’d almost forgotten he had. Paul hardly seems like a vampire. “Maybe he likes you, eh? Doubt he gets far with the female pack, doesn’t go to town much as a human now that he’s got responsibilities here.”
I remember the way Silas looked at me, far more predatory than flirtatious. “I very much doubt that. But it could be that he’s not sure what to make of me. Wanted to see if he could expect anything different from me compared to other caretakers.”
“Well if he expects you to go easy on them, I hope he’ll be disappointed,” Paul says as he shoves my report into a file in the bottom drawer of the army-green cabinet in the corner. “Don’t give that one so much as an inch.”
“No worries there,” I tell him.
“Good. You hungry? We should head out to feed tonight. There’s a young couple in right now as well as the resident fellow, so there should be enough to go around.”
“Sounds good.” Though I’m hardly starving, I’m not likely to ever turn down a chance to feed. I pause on the way out the door. “Does that mean there’s usually only one for us to feed on?”
“Nah. The clan’s good about sending one out to stay with Delvin, so there’s usually two. Three is unusual.”
“Do they get traded out much?”
He shrugs. “When someone else wants to come. We do better in the summer when the long-term stock want to come out this way for a quiet vacation without giving up what we offer, but it can be slim pickings otherwise. But I don’t find I need to feed much out here. We try to make them last. Relax as we can, lay low, avoid excitement. We’ll leave at dusk.”
I guess that means I’m dismissed.
It’s not that I expected more or better. I suppose we’re fortunate that anyone wants to come out here at all to keep us fed. Without our stock, we’d be lost. Forced t
o go back to St. John’s, or worse, to go rogue. But with just a few of them in the village, we can’t possibly thrive. They need time to recover, and I don’t imagine this resident guy is much good to us if he’s feeding someone once a week. It’s no wonder Paul looks a bit run down.
I head back to my room and don’t see Daniel anywhere on the way. I consider calling him to see if he wants to join me, but think better of it. There’s a part of me that wants to spend as much time with him as I can before he leaves, but a bigger part knows doing that will only make it hurt more.
I change into pyjamas, climb into bed, and remember Silas’ comment about our sleep patterns.
Fucker.
I get up and check the locks on my window and the door before settling back in. Everything seems fine, but we can’t be too careful about security when we’re resting. I climb back into bed and pull the covers tight around my shoulders.
Falling asleep is like dying again, every time. No frail, filmy dreams creeping in. Nothing to remember when I wake. Just deep, unyielding darkness I have no choice but to release myself into.
I used to wake up screaming back at the recovery facility.
Now I’m just glad to be waking at all.
Chapter Five
“That’s it?”
Paul nods. “Not much to look at, but it’s what’s inside that counts. Or in this case, beyond.”
Bloody Bight sounds like something straight out of a horror movie, but its name isn’t out of place here in Newfoundland. In a province with towns named Heart’s Desire, Deep Bight, and Dildo, you expect some variety. The town sits on the water, as most on the island do, but not on the coast. The bight referred to in the town’s name is a sweeping bend in a slow-moving river that doesn’t show up on most topographical maps.
We cross a rusted metal bridge to approach the town from the south. Whitewashed saltbox-style houses intermingle with a few big log cabins, set out in tiers up a hill that rises from the bank of the river. Maybe thirty homes in all, surrounded by scrubby black spruce and scattered birches and maples. Most have their porch lights on, but they don’t do much to hold back the dark or distract from the star-strewn sky above us.
Paul turns up a road into the woods before I can see more.
“How many living here?” I ask.
“Little over a hundred fifty,” he says. “A few old families too stubborn to leave. And then there are the newer arrivals. They tend to be… special.”
His hesitation before that last word piques my curiosity. “Special how?”
“Well, this place is different. That’s one of the reasons we chose to put the sanctuary here, and it’s why there’s no other settlement in the area. It’s hard to explain.”
“Please try.”
Paul clears his throat. “Don’t make fun of me now. It’s… protected. On a supernatural level.”
I laugh. “Paul, I’m a vampire. I just got settled into my new job at a werewolf sanctuary. You could tell me it was guarded by aliens and I’d be inclined to believe you.”
He chuckles. “Guess you have a point there. I just don’t know how to explain it. It’s got something to do with the energies of the island, I guess, and how they’re concentrated here. It’s resistant to discovery. The people who make it through the forest without being turned aside are what you might call sensitive. Open to the supernatural. They seem to sort of find their places here, and aren’t inclined to leave even when they find out about the wolves.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickles. “They know about them?”
“Yep. We’re too damn close to the village for them not to. No werewolf has ever attacked a human here, but they went after the livestock once or twice in early years. We dealt with it, but we couldn’t really hide them.” He frowns at the gravel road ahead. “The old-timers sort of live and let live. Some of the newcomers are a bit out there and seem to think the wolves are somehow mystical protectors of the town. It’s not a safe way to think about predators, no matter how good their safety record, but it is what it is.”
“And what do they think about us?”
“A handful of the older ones are suspicious, but they don’t make any fuss about it. And Delvin knows, of course. Our permanent stock, the one that hosts the others when they come out. We’re headed to his house now.”
I guess that’s why we didn’t drive through town. Better to keep our visits unobserved so as not to raise questions.
“Mystical protectors,” Daniel muses from the back seat. It’s the first time he’s spoken since we left the compound. “You don’t think they’d see us as their guardian angels if they knew our true nature?”
Paul snorts. “I don’t know. Is your bite record as good as the wolves’?”
“Point taken,” Daniel says, and settles back in his seat.
No one mentions kill records, but my skin goes colder than it usually is. These wolves have me beat on that one, too.
Delvin’s house is made from logs, but that’s where the similarity to Joseph’s cabin ends. This is a proper house. Two storeys, solidly built, with a big window on the upper level that must allow for a spectacular view of the river and town. It would be the only part of the property visible from anywhere below. Everything else is shrouded by thick tree cover. The yard is small, with a fenced-in garden off to one side.
There’s no bright porch light here. Just a few dim lamps lighting the path up to the front door.
A pretty young woman in a yellow dress steps out the door as we exit the Jeep, then hurries back in and closes it without greeting us.
“Friendly,” Daniel comments.
“She’s a guest. They don’t generally act friendly until they know who’s come to see them,” Paul answers, and leads the way up the steps to the wide porch.
It’s remote and rustic, but this house gives the impression of wealth. Not quite what I expected.
The door opens again, and a living man of maybe sixty years old offers a hand to Paul, who shakes it cordially. The man, who I presume to be Delvin, isn’t tall, but is quite fit. Handsome in a soap opera star kind of way. He wears his shirt open at the neck, revealing a string of faint scars that mark him as one of our regulars.
The handshake is interesting. We have no such formalities back in town at the Inferno. They come, we offer, they consent, we feed, everyone leaves happy and relatively anonymously. Things must work differently when you visit the same stock week after week in their own home, especially when you expect them to entertain strangers to keep you fed.
It will take some getting used to. I struggled for a long time with caring too much about the living, more than is appropriate for a vampire. While I still believe humans are worth protecting, I made a great leap in my separation from them when I killed—when I felt the last scrap of my soul being swept away on a dark wave of pleasure as my victim’s life left him and entered me.
I shudder. I can’t let myself think about it.
We’ll just see how this goes. It’s not like I have a lot of other options for feeding now.
Delvin gives me and Daniel a quick once-over, nods politely, and motions for us to follow him in.
The interior of the house confirms my first impression. The rustic theme continues inside with the gorgeous wood panelling in the entryway. It continues down the hallway that stretches toward the rear of the house and up the wall beside the staircase that rises in front of us, complementing the plush burgundy carpets. Tasteful paintings line the walls at appropriate intervals, and I suspect at least some of them are originals. The living room to our left, where Delvin guides us, is decorated in warm fabrics and heavy, finished wood, and a fire roars in the big stone fireplace.
I glance back over my shoulder. The door across the hallway at the bottom of the stairs is closed.
Delvin must be independently wealthy, or we’re paying him very well to be out here. I suspect the former. Vampires know well enough that people will go a long way for money, but it can’t buy true loyalty. More li
kely he’s a lucky break for us, a wealthy recluse willing to help out if it means he gets to live in something like seclusion while having his addiction catered to.
Hell, we deliver ourselves to his doorstep. Not bad for him at all.
The woman is waiting in the living room. She doesn’t look much older than I do, but seems comfortable enough with our presence, so I suppose she’s done this more than a few times. She nods a greeting and settles on the edge of a brown leather sofa.
“Appreciate you calling ahead, Paul,” Delvin says, and pours himself a whisky from the bar in the corner. If the architect of this house meant for the room to be a pretty parlour, its inhabitant has missed the mark by a mile. Still, I like it. It’s warm and comfortable, and refined in a rough, masculine way.
“Wanted to make sure three wouldn’t be an imposition,” Paul tells us. “Normally Delvin is fine with us dropping by as needed, but I thought Gordy might have stopped in to feed before he left.”
“And so he did,” Delvin said. “I feel up to another, though, if one of you isn’t especially hungry. Gordon only took enough to see himself back to the city.”
It feels wrong to be discussing this so openly with our stock. They don’t get to have opinions, to know why we need them. Daniel looks uncomfortable, too. The vampires Miranda has in charge of stock management wouldn’t send out anyone who isn’t trustworthy, but still. It seems risky. We should remain aloof, mysterious, offering them what they want while taking what we need, certainly not shaking their hands and letting them call us by name. Even when I struggled with a connection to the living, I never treated stock in the club as though they were my equals. From the day I stepped into Daniel’s care as his trainee, I understood that we are more.
“Where’s the other one?” Paul asks, but he’s already giving the woman a serious once-over, sizing her up for feeding potential. She’s got her eye on Daniel, but returns Paul’s smile politely enough. Paul’s standing up straighter than he usually does, and his hunger has given him a wild air that simmers under his unimpressive physique.