Sunglasses at Night

by Jessica Lynch

  Shame that didn’t stop the man from leaving headquarters to visit her in her newly rented apartment.

  Three days. She’d only been in town for three days. Barely got used to the apartment she was subletting, and there he was. Eddie Daniels. Who, she knew from experience, would bang on the door all night if she didn’t let him in now.

  She pulled open the door. There, standing in the hall, was a man who had more than a head in height on her, with closely-cut dark hair, deep brown eyes, a rugged jaw, and a crooked smile.

  “What are you doing here?”

  His eyes seemed to twinkle in delight at her welcome. “Is that any way to say hello?”

  Resisting the urge to sigh, she matched his grin. “Well, hello, Eddie. It’s been so long! What was it? Three days? Four?”

  With a laugh, he let himself into her apartment. “It’s nice to see that some time and a bit of distance between us hasn’t made you any less of a smartass.”

  “You love me anyway.”

  The words just slipped out. She had a habit of that happening. It only made it worse when he didn’t even try to deny it.

  Ugh.

  Refusing to let the situation become awkward, she reluctantly followed him into her living room. “Seriously. What’s up? I thought Boone said I was the only slayer he was sending into Grayson unless it got out of hand.”

  “I’m not here because I’m on the job. I already finished one up this afternoon. A haunting where a ghost just didn’t understand why its anchor was refusing to let it into the house.” He shrugged. “Simple misunderstanding. They’ll work it out. And since that was easy enough, and Grayson was only about a half-hour out from Maytown, I thought I’d—”

  “Check up on me?”

  “See how you’re doing.”

  Suuure. “I’m alright. Got a couple of leads on the mysterious wannabe, I think. Snagged a hot Nightwalker last night.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad to hear it. Things are going well back at HQ, too. Your uncle says ‘hi’.”

  Her uncle called her on the phone only an hour ago for a report. Funny how he didn’t mention that Eddie was in the area.

  When Tabby didn’t respond to that, Eddie filled the quiet. He was good at that. Honestly, the guy never shut up.

  And that was saying something coming from her since talking was the one thing apart from hunting that she was good at.

  Leaning into her, he made small talk. Tabby pretended to be interested in it.

  After a few more minutes of it, she decided that he was getting too close. She knew she was smaller than most slayers, and Eddie was tall, but did he have to loom like that? He had a tendency to take over any room he was in—but this was her room.

  Well, for as long as she was in Grayson it was.

  Drowning him out, Tabby sank onto the nearest couch, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a pack of bubble gum. She unwrapped a piece, balling the wrapper up and tossing it absently on the floor in front of her. Popping the gum into her waiting mouth, she started to chew while unsheathing her weapon.

  Still yapping, Eddie bent down. He picked up the wrapper, shaking his head as he crossed into the cramped kitchen, placing the wrapper into the garbage can. She rolled her eyes. It shouldn’t bother her as much as it did and, yeah, maybe she was being childish, but damn it! If she threw the wrapper on the floor, let it stay on the floor, right? She would’ve picked it up eventually.

  When Eddie walked back into the room, Tabby busied herself with inspecting Venice.

  That caught his attention. Or maybe he realized that she couldn’t care less about the new security system Boone was installing at HQ.

  They were slayers. They were the security.

  “You still using that sticker?” he said. She couldn’t tell if that was a sneer or simply surprise before deciding it didn’t matter. She didn’t care what he thought either way. “I’m sure your uncle could get you a better piece than that.”

  Tabby was sure he was right, but “better” was in the eyes of the beholder. To her, Venice was the best weapon she could have. A sixteenth-century long dagger that had been enchanted lifetimes ago to be a slayer’s weapon, she—and Venice was always a she—never grew dull, and despite being only ten inches long and five inches wide to suit her smaller hands, Tabby never failed to cut through the muscles, the tendons, the meat of any targets she was hunting.

  No matter what kind of Para she ran across, you couldn’t go wrong with a little decapitation. Well, except for phantoms. Good thing they were surprisingly law-abiding.

  Unlike pop culture would have you believe, slayers didn’t only target rogue vamps. Her too-many-times great relative—Abraham Van Helsing—and his time with Dracula might’ve been the humans’ first example of the slayers who worked behind the scenes, but it was only one example.

  The story of Van Helsing and Dracula getting out actually was the main catalyst behind the Slayer’s Code being finalized and enforced. Centuries of silence almost went up in smoke when Stoker blabbed her family’s secrets. From then on, the rules that made up the Society’s tenets weren’t just guidelines anymore.

  They were laws.

  And Tabby knew better than most what the cost for betraying the Society and its code was. It was the reason why her parents were gone—and the reason why she’d been raised by her uncle.

  At the unpleasant reminder, Tabby got up.

  Shake it off, Tab. It couldn’t be helped.

  The only thing she could do now was follow the code herself and get the job done.

  Still, while slayers were responsible for policing all of the paranormal races, most members of the Society had a specialty. Tabby’s was the Nightwalker which meant that she had to kill her targets more often than not, and that she had the weight of the Claws Clause on her side. Because Nightwalkers who killed once—draining their victims to take every last drop of blood they had—would only kill again.

  Rogue Nightwalkers didn’t get to go in a Cage. They were executed. And Tabby was one of the ones who wielded the executioner’s ax.

  Well, dagger.

  Same shit.

  “Eddie. I appreciate you checking in on me.” How she didn’t choke on that whopper of a lie, Tabby would never know. It was necessary, though. Last thing she needed was her uncle’s lapdog running back to him and complaining. “But you’re wasting my time.”

  Oof. Probably not the most diplomatic way to put it.

  Boone would understand. More than anything, her uncle hated people who wasted his time. Tabby was like him in that way.

  And Eddie knew it.

  “Tab—”

  “Look. I’m here because my uncle wants to know why the number of targets here only keeps growing. Not even targets, either. Except for me, there isn’t another slayer working in this city, but they’ve been finding a bunch of ashed out Nightwalker corpses every week. Someone’s hunting here. Para or human… we don’t know. But since they’re not a licensed slayer, I’m here to shut it down. Permanently.”

  Those were her orders and she was tickled pink that Boone trusted her with such an important job. And if it killed her? She’d prove to her uncle that he was right to have faith in her skills and abilities.

  “Now, if you don’t mind.” Tabby slipped Venice back into her sheath with more force than necessary. She tempered the violent push with a cheery grin. “It’s time for me to start hunting for the night.”

  Then, because she wouldn’t put it past Eddie to be so thick-headed as to not realize she was kicking his ass out of her apartment, she flounced to the door, pulling it inward before waiting for Eddie to step out into the hall.

  Once he did, she turned off the lights and closed the door behind them. No wards, but she made sure to lock the place up tight.

  Still hovering over her, Eddie followed Tabby down the stairs that spiraled to the bottom floor. She could’ve taken the elevator, but it never even occurred to her. With her nervous energy—something she experienced leading up to e
ach and every hunt before the adrenaline kicked in and took over—she needed to bound down the four flights. Plus, she really didn’t want to be trapped in a small metal box with Eddie Daniels breathing down her neck. The stairs were bad enough.

  As soon as they made it to the porch, Eddie reached out to lay his hand on her elbow.

  As if he had permission to touch her.

  Nope.

  Her reflexes, as always, were excellent. At the merest brush of his fingers on her skin, she jerked away, looking out into the night.

  He sighed. “If you need me…”

  I won’t.

  “I’ve got your number,” Tabby reminded him.

  And hell would freeze over before she actually dialed it.

  She could sense that Eddie struggled to find a reason to linger. If she gave him any hint that she’d welcome his company, Tabby had no doubt that he’d tag along with her. As if that would happen. She’d been running solo for the last ten years, ever since she was fifteen and Boone decided it was time she progressed from training to hunting.

  Well, except for Rosie. But since hunting dogs didn’t count against the Slayer’s Code, she had been able to keep Rosie at her side until the old girl earned her retirement. Boone was watching her back at headquarters while Tabby started her temporary assignment in Grayson and, even though it had only been a couple of days since she last saw Rosie, she already missed her terribly. She’d have to start the bonding process all over again with another hunting dog, but that could wait until after she finished her assignment in Grayson.

  Because that was the thing. It wasn’t that Tabby didn’t want to fight alongside someone else. Person or pup, she just wanted it to be a partner that she chose.

  And it would never, ever be Eddie.

  What could she say? Tall, dark, and handsome might do it for some girls, but he wasn’t her type. Throw in his blind obedience to her uncle, the way he seemed to think he had some kind of imaginary claim on her, and his inability to take no for an answer, and Tabby refused to even consider it.

  She was good with a fling. If she had an itch to scratch, she had no problem going out and finding someone to scratch it. It got lonely hunting the streets at night, knowing that she was more dangerous than most males she met. She’d never gotten off on the idea of someone overpowering her, but was it so much to find a guy who respected her abilities and still made her feel protected?

  Ah, well. It didn’t matter. She’d be fine on her own.

  She always was.

  It wasn’t until Eddie climbed into the black SUV he rode into town with and reluctantly pulled away from the curb outside of her apartment building that Tabby took a deep breath and smiled.

  Ah. Grayson, sweet Grayson.

  She liked the city. More suburban than urban in most parts, it had a cozy downtown area, a rural spot that backed up against the far edge of the local Bumptown’s acreage, a seedy section that she’d avoid if she could, and a couple mile stretch of businesses, clubs, and skyscrapers that helped it pass for one of the bigger cities in the state.

  It was big enough to get lost in. Diverse enough to be a perfect home for a slayer. And, for as long as it took for her to find the person responsible for the rising tally of Para kills in town, it was hers.

  “Next.”

  Against his better judgement, Adam stepped forward.

  He couldn’t believe he was doing this. On the one hand, he was glad that the D.P.R. respected that, like humans, not everyone could run on the same schedule. Back when he was a fresh-faced officer, new to the Grayson PD, his CO put him on more than a few overnight patrols. In a way, it was similar to what life was like as a vamp: stay up all night, sleep during the day, and never see the sun. Doing everyday errands became a major pain in the ass with a schedule like that. One time, he had to stop by Motor Vehicles to update his driver’s license and he could never make their hours.

  At the Department for Paranormal Regulation, the pencil pushers who ran the place recognized that there was a whole race of paranormals who could never make it during the day. Luckily, they kept the government building open around the clock, even if there were fewer windows open—and, to Adam’s overwhelming frustration, more of a wait time.

  It had been the same song and dance the first time he came down here to get his provisional P.I.D. They gave him the runaround, sending him from one window to the next, even nitpicking when it came to the application they forced him to fill out. If it wasn’t for the fact that he knew a Para caught without a P.I.D. was looking at Cage time, Adam would’ve huffed out of the D.P.R. Since being locked up with other paranormals wouldn’t help him track down Rafe Silverson, he got the damn I.D.

  Of course it had been provisional. Another ridiculous clause in Ordinance 7304: newly turned vampires were like teens getting on the road for the first time. Driving was a privilege, not a right, and so was freedom to a fledgling Nightwalker, it seemed.

  God, he fucking hated it. It made it even worse that, after only a handful of months, he was due a permanent P.I.D. as if he just checked off another item on the list that brought him closer to being a full-fledged Para instead of the human he wished he could be.

  So, no surprise he was in a shitty mood when the human dick at Window A scanned his request form and immediately sent him off to Window G.

  There had been a line of four other Paras—two Nightwalkers, a sneering shifter, and an eerily quiet dark-haired guy that Adam couldn’t even begin to figure out what he was—ahead of him at the window. Each kept their distance, an unspoken rule to keep the more predatory Paras from hissing at one another. Adam huffed and waited, anxiously tapping his claws against his sweatpants while wishing the brunette behind the window would hurry the hell up.

  He purposely dressed down. A plain white t-shirt, a pair of grey sweatpants, his running shoes. It was petty as fuck, but he didn’t want to walk in there as if he belonged or that he was trying too hard. As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t be avoided. Just another errand he had to get through before he went out for the rest of the night.

  It seemed like forever before it was his turn. He stalked toward the window, scowling at the woman’s appraising look.

  Not too long ago, he was the one on the other side of a glass partition, demanding to see P.I.D.’s before he would let a Para visitor into the Cage. The irony wasn’t lost on him that now he was the one being dicked around. Especially since her appraising look wasn’t the female clerk trying to figure out what kind of Para he was but, instead, checking him out.

  Fucking wonderful.

  Before he turned, it would’ve almost been expected. Adam wasn’t vain, but he knew damn well that he was a good-looking guy. He worked hard at it, between exercising and styling his blond hair just so, and he’d heard from more than one of his past lovers that his dimples were a panty-dropper.

  Of course, all that changed after his turning.

  His tan was gone, leaving him more like a washed-out shell of the man he once was.

  His warm brown eyes were iced over to a mirror-like silver.

  As for the dimples? Impossible to show those suckers off when he hadn’t had a thing to smile about in way too long.

  The whole last year had been shit. It wasn’t just his attack and his turning, either, though that was the cherry on the top of the shit sundae as far as he was concerned. Go back to last summer and, for a few short weeks, Adam thought his life might’ve started to turn around. His year’s time working in the VIFPD—formally the Voluntary Incarceration Facility, Paranormal Division, though everyone thought of it as the Cage—was almost up. After waiting for three years to make his move on his childhood sweetheart, Adam was finally in a committed relationship with Evangeline Lewis. He was on the fast track for a promotion, so close to becoming a corporal he could almost taste it.

  And then, wouldn’t you fucking know it, but a Para ruined everything.

  Typical.

  No wonder Adam held a grudge.

  Maddox Wolfe�
�� a big brute of a beast, an alpha wolf shifter who spent those same three years locked inside the Cage because he was under the impression that his bonded mate was dead. Adam hated him almost immediately, mainly because Wolfe’s bonded mate—Adam’s Eva—was the one woman that he saw himself settling down with one day. She wasn’t dead, though that car crash had nearly killed her, and Adam was a-okay with making sure she never discovered the truth about being a shifter’s mate once it became clear that she didn’t remember Wolfe.

  For three years, he waited for Evangeline to recover from the accident, hoping against hope that she never regained her memories. Did it make him an asshole? Probably. But he was an asshole who was in love.

  Ah, well. He got his just desserts anyway. It eventually got to the Para that Eva was still alive and nothing—Adam, the warden, the prison board, not even the Claws Clause—could keep him inside. Sure, the elder Wolfe brother kidnapped his mate to remind her that she was, well, his mate, but once they were bonded, Adam was shit out of luck.

  He lost Eva to her bonded mate.

  Three months later, when Fiona Wright passed away suddenly, he lost his beloved mother.

  Three months after that, Julian Koenig and Rafe Silverson stole his humanity.

  And, wouldn’t you know, after another three months slipped by—most of it spent adjusting to the change—Adam gave up the last thing that made him happy. Handing over his gun and his badge to his sergeant, he left the Grayson PD in order to devote all of his time and energy to eliminating Rafe.

  It was the only thing that kept him going. And when it became clear that the bastard Nightwalker had seemed to up and disappear, he turned vigilante. Instead of protecting Grayson behind the shield of his title and his uniform, he stalked the nights, guided by his enchanted sword, and tried his best to do some good.

  Since losing Eva to Wolfe, though, he gave up on women. From the moment he heard about her accident all those years ago, Adam convinced himself life had given him a second chance to woo her again and try to keep her for his own. Turned out, there was no beating fate, especially when he was still a human. He’d been celibate for three years for no reason—it didn’t feel right having casual sex when he was devoted to the gorgeous, leggy brunette—and by the time he was ready for a rebound lay, the Nightwalkers had started to hunt in Grayson and he channeled his jealousy and lust into rage at the thirsty, killer Paras.