Hunted: A New Adult Urban Fantasy Novel (Shadow Reapers Book 1)

by Jack Knight

  “Actually, there is,” Asher corrected me. “Each of those deaths happened either in an alley or right outside a car.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, so the vampire stalked his victims. Lots of vamps do that.”

  “Sure, but if you look at the huge cluster, you’ll see it’s near a bar. A bar that’s notorious for women being roofied.”

  It took a second, but I figured out the point Asher was trying to make. I flipped through the file again, looking for the deaths that happened farther away. Each of those people had just gotten out of a car that had crashed. I had assumed the vampire had caused the accidents, but now I knew what really happened.

  My shoulders sagged and I threw the file back at Asher. “We have a newbie vamp who can barely control himself, so he’s taking out bad people.”

  Asher tapped the file a couple of times with his finger and gave a quick nod. “My guess, he’s killing drunk drivers and guys who are doing some even worse shit.”

  “This is why we have to find him before the Hunters do,” I said immediately, “he’s a good person and he isn’t actually doing anything wrong.”

  “One could argue murder is kind of bad,” Asher pointed out.

  I didn’t even bother to respond, I just started toward the door.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  Asher laughed and followed as quickly as he could, stumbling a little as we made our way back to the car.

  Asher was a lot better at driving than he was at walking, which didn’t make any sense to me. There was no way in hell I was driving in Sacramento, though. The people there were somehow worse than the drivers in San Francisco.

  We arrived at the bar a few minutes later and stayed in the car. We had parked close enough to the entrance that we could see the face of every person that walked out, we could even hear every word of the music that was blaring inside.

  Asher kept babbling on, trying to tell me more about the other Reapers, but I wasn’t even trying to pay attention. As the minutes dragged by, I got pretty good at blocking him out completely. By the time we had been there an hour, I might as well have not been able to hear his voice.

  I did watch the people leaving the bar, though. Lots of people looked shady enough to be our murderer, but none of them were vampires. I hoped that we would get lucky and he would be obvious, baring his fangs or running at superhuman speed as he left the bar, but I watched every movement of every person just in case.

  Finally, something happened. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.

  Asher slapped my arm.

  “Ow, bitch! What the fuck?” I yelled at him as I flinched.

  Asher was pointing out the front windshield. “Look at that guy.”

  He was pointing at a guy that looked to be in his early twenties. He was clean shaven and wearing a shirt that was a tad too small for him so that it showed every curve of his muscles.

  “Great, douchebag who works out too much to overcompensate. So what?” I asked.

  “You notice the girl?”

  Actually, I hadn’t. I just thought the guy was walking funny. As he got a little farther from the bar’s entrance, I realized he had an arm around his neck. A few more steps and I saw the girl walking beside him, sort of.

  The girl, a skinny, blonde chick who was wearing a bubblegum pink dress, wasn’t really walking on her own and her head was flailing around like she couldn’t keep it up by herself.

  To most people, it would look like some guy helping a severely drunk girl out of a bar. To me, it looked like some guy who spent way too much time at the gym hauling away the first girl he could roofie.

  I reached for the car’s door handle, but Asher grabbed my arm. “Wait.”

  I ripped my arm out of his grasp. “Wait? Are you fucking joking? You see that guy, you know exactly what’s about to happen, I’m not waiting.”

  Asher gave me a serious look and spoke in a calm, clear voice. “I know, but we need to wait for just a second to see if our vampire tries to stop it.”

  “And what if he doesn’t?” I screamed.

  Asher glanced back at the bar and then pointed again, “He will.”

  I looked up and saw him. He was absolutely not what I expected.

  The guy Asher pointed at was tall and gangly with short brown hair, wearing a Darth Vader t-shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of square framed nerd glasses. His acne was worse than anyone I had ever seen in person, and there was a chance that he never saw the light of day before he became a vampire.

  There was no doubt in my mind that he was the one we were looking for, though. He was following along behind the muscled guy, who I could now see was leading the barely conscious girl into an alley.

  “Let’s go,” I growled as I jumped out of the car.

  Asher hurried to keep up with me, because I started running as soon as I shut the car door behind me. I dodged through the other cars in the parking lot as I ran to catch the vampire.

  On the way there, I decided I might have to delay Asher just a little bit. Yes, we were supposed to save people. Yeah, I had signed up to stay with the Reapers because I didn’t like the Hunter’s methods of killing whenever they wanted. However, I had found an exception to the idea that killing was always wrong.

  The geeky looking vamp ducked into the alley right as I heard a girl’s muffled scream. Asher dashed past me before I could stop him, and I did the only thing I could think of.

  I quickly slid my knife from my belt, slashed it across my left hand, and muttered, “Caderis.”

  To my absolute shock, Asher tripped over nothing at all and slammed into the ground, skidding a few feet along the parking lot’s asphalt before he groaned and started to stand.

  I returned the knife to my belt before I caught up with him. “Nice one,” I said, doing my best to cover over the fact that I had made him fall.

  “Just go stop the vamp,” Asher said as he picked himself up.

  There was no way I was doing that. I waited for Asher to stand up and we ran together into the alley, right as the girl in the pink dress stumbled out of it, leaning heavily against the wall for support.

  “No! Stay out of there!” she mumbled frantically as we passed her.

  The alley was pretty small, only about thirty feet long with nothing in it except a dumpster and a back door to the bar the vampire had just walked out of.

  And, of course, our douchebag, who currently had a vampire’s fangs in his neck.

  Asher continued on at full speed, I let myself slow down a bit and allowed myself a smile. If someone had to die tonight, at least it was someone that deserved it.

  Asher reached the vampire, pulled him off the musclehead, and slammed him up against the brick wall beside the bar. For someone who had never killed anything before, Asher could be pretty aggressive.

  “Wait, no, please stop!” the vampire squeaked as I caught up with Asher. “He was going to hurt her, I was helping.”

  Asher let the vampire go and looked at me with an expression of utter bewilderment. “That’s not how I expected that to go.”

  Asher had released the vampire, and he wasn’t fighting back or running away. He was standing with his back against the wall, his hands up in surrender, and he was trembling like a leaf. This was our mass murderer?

  “Explain, quickly,” I threatened as I pulled my knife back out of my belt and pointed it at the vamp.

  “I can’t stop... biting people. I’m hungry all the time, and I feel like I can’t breathe if I go more than a day without...” he trailed off and shook his head. Slowly, red tears started leaking from his eyes. The guy was actually crying.

  “Yup, okay, I’m at a loss. Maddi, next move, please?” Asher said, chuckling to himself.

  “We’re not going to kill you, we just have some questions,” I said sternly to the vampire.

  The guy slowly lowered his hands and looked up at me. “Really?” he asked.

  “Do you have powers other vampires don’t?”

  The guy gave an awkward, s
haky shrug. “I... I don’t know. I don’t... um...”

  Asher let out a sigh. “Nobody explained anything to him.”

  Great. This guy wasn’t going to be much help.

  “Alright,” I growled as I lowered the knife. “Tell us everything you can, then.”

  The vampire shrugged again. “I mean, a few weeks ago I woke up in, like, a jail cell or something. This guy said I was made to kill, said I had to drink blood from people. My job was to turn people into whatever I am and wait until the army was big enough to take down some big bad guys or something. I just ran the first chance I got. But, sunlight burns and... I just sort of stopped here because I... needed to drink blood.”

  “Where did you run from, exactly?” Asher asked.

  “I don’t know, I just got out of there. Some big building in San Francisco.”

  “How many more of you were in the building?”

  “I... maybe a hundred?”

  Chapter 18

  ASHER KEPT GLANCING over at me as he drove us back to the Reaper’s church. The sunlight streaming through the car’s windshield was more annoying than anything I had ever experienced before, probably because I only got about two hours of sleep before we started heading back.

  “Do you think that was the right call?”

  That was the first thing Asher had said to me after we left the Velvet Rose.

  “He needed someone to teach him. He didn’t deserve to die,” I answered in a growl. I was too tired to care about being polite.

  Asher sighed. “Maybe not, but he could have helped us find the place he was Turned. If someone is creating an army of vampires to kill someone, we might need to know where they’re held up.”

  I ran through the long night in my head.

  We had thrown the dead douchebag into the dumpster, the geeky vamp had already drained him by the time we got there, and then taken the guy to the supe bar we had gone to the day before. It took Asher all of five minutes to find someone who was willing to show the new vamp, named Jason, the ropes. We left the kid with his new mentor and that was that. I didn’t see any other course of action that felt remotely better.

  I shook my head and slid lower into the seat. “He didn’t know anything, he was just a scared kid.”

  Asher sighed and looked out the front windshield. “We’re going to have to look into this. If someone is making a bunch of vampires with new powers, we need to figure out how and why.”

  “Great, Asher, please explain how we do that,” I grumbled.

  “Gen,” he answered simply.

  I was not in the mood for meeting new people, but I didn’t argue. I was just as curious about what the hell was going on as Asher was.

  As if my life wasn’t bad enough, my phone started ringing at that moment. I was too tired to deal with people, but I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw that it was Mr. O’Grady.

  Shit.

  “Hello?” I said in resignation when I answered.

  “Hey, there, Maddi,” Mr. O’Grady answered. He sounded uncomfortable. I could already tell where this was going.

  “Sorry, I know I’ve missed... a few shifts.” Honestly, I had completely forgotten about my job.

  “Yeah, you know, I tried to wait it out, just fig’red you had some trouble with the Hunters, ya know? But, this is a long time to go without so much as a call.”

  I sighed. Yup, fired.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m sorry, but, I’m gonna hafta replace ya, Maddi.”

  “Totally get it. I’m sorry about the days I missed.”

  “Yeah, well, if ya ever get outta whatever’s goin’ on, I’d be happy ta give ya another shot, alright?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. O’Grady,” I said before I hung up.

  “What was—”

  “Just shut up and drive,” I interrupted quickly.

  We made it the rest of the way to the church in silence. Asher led me straight into the building and down the hallway that led to the bedroom he had told me was mine.

  As much as I hated the idea of living here, if the room already belonged to me, why not go in and sleep for the next ten hours or so?

  Asher didn’t even give me a chance to think about it. As soon as the idea occurred to me, he pushed open one of the doors in the hallway and leaned inside.

  “Oh, Genevieve! You in here?” he called into the room.

  “It depends on why you’re asking,” a voice called back.

  Asher grinned at me. “That’s her.”

  He pushed the door the rest of the way open and walked inside. I followed mainly out of curiosity. That did not sound much like Felicity Smoak to me.

  When I took a step into the room I felt my jaw drop open. This was not what I expected to be in a church.

  The space wasn’t much bigger than the room that I had been told was my bedroom, but it looked considerably different. Every wall was taken up with desks. Each one had a monitor, at least two dozen of them, all placed right next to each other, so it looked like one long computer screen ran around the room. There were dozens of chairs running the length of the desks, but only one was occupied.

  The girl turned her chair around to face us when we walked in. She was a little shorter than me, and a lot skinnier. She had short, straight, blonde hair and glasses. Her face was a little more angular than I would have expected, even though I had supposedly seen her before. She kind of looked like a real life version of Tinker Bell.

  “Ash, I’m kinda busy,” the girl said, sounding a little impatient.

  I followed a few more steps and then stopped walking, looking around at all the monitors. Each one showed something different, and most of them were filled with computer code that I could never understand. Tinker Bell definitely didn’t spend as much time on computers as this chick did.

  “How did people create vampires?” Asher asked, ignoring Gen’s complaint.

  Just in time to see Gen’s eyes go wide with excitement and a smile break across her face, I looked up at the sound of the question. In my exhausted state, I doubted I had the mental capacity to endure the onslaught of excited nerd that was about to spew out of Gen.

  “That’s actually a really good question!”

  She pushed herself away from the monitor that she had been sitting at, her chair rolled her almost all the way across the room and she landed directly in front of another one, that she started typing away on like she was in a hurry. I got the feeling that Gen spent a lot of time typing and rolling her chair from one monitor to another. I would have bet she only left the room to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom.

  “Okay, so this is what I’ve been able to dig up on the origin of vampires,” Gen answered as she pulled up a bunch of files.

  “Reader’s Digest, please,” Asher chuckled.

  Gen turned her chair around to look at us again. “Okay, so basically, some group of people made shifters, right? They did it so that their tribes could hunt better and ward off attacks from other tribes, which was pretty smart. But, they knew almost nothing about magic. Mages back then were like a mix between wizards and witches now.”

  Whoa, the history lesson would have been a lot to take in even if I had been fully rested. Also, she was talking so fast I could barely keep up. I was not ready for all of this.

  “Gen, even more digest, please,” Asher pressed.

  Gen let out a sigh. “Okay, people in another tribe made vampires to fight off the shifters, except they weren’t actually shifters, they were werewolves, kind of. Long story, point is, it was a spell.”

  “So many questions,” I mumbled to myself as I shook my head.

  “Gen is the smartest person you will ever meet,” Asher said with a laugh. “If you ask a question about anything, you’ll get way more than you bargained for.”

  “Thanks, Ash,” Gen said, I couldn’t tell if it was sarcasm or not, because she turned around to look at the computer screen again.

  “So, if someone was making new vampires,” I said, trying to w
ade my way through the ocean of information Gen had just let loose, “they just need a spell.”

  “Did you know someone was creating new vampires?” I asked suspiciously.

  “I’m smart,” she answered simply, then she paused right in the middle of typing.

  Slowly, Gen turned around again. She looked at me like she was suspicious of something.

  “You don’t have it, do you?” she asked quietly.

  I looked up at Asher, who just shrugged. At least he didn’t understand what was going on either.

  “Have what?”

  “The grimoire with the spell to create vampires,” Gen said, as if it was obvious.

  I took a step back and leaned against the desk behind me. “You’re telling me that there’s a book out there with a spell to create vampires? Just one book?”

  “Yes, one spell was done to create vampires specifically to fight werewolves. They were made with the exact abilities and detriments the mages who casted the spell wanted them to have. Now, please don’t lean on my desks.”

  I rolled my eyes as I stood up. This Gen was a touchy little nerd.

  “Okay, so if someone is making more powerful vampires now,” Asher reasoned, “they have this book and they’re giving them new powers on purpose?”

  Gen nodded. “They’d have to be. The spell was apparently super complex, nothing could be an accident. You guys looking for the vamp factory?”

  “Yeah,” Asher nodded. “We just can’t figure out why they’re doing it. Apparently, they’re making an army of them.”

  “More powers means stronger enemies,” Gen said matter of factly. “The vampires were originally given speed, strength, and the ability to heal so they could compete with the shifters, who had those abilities, too. If someone is making vampires with new powers, it’s because they want them to kill something that could take down a vamp or shifter or whatever.”

  Something occurred to me, but I couldn’t believe the idea. It was impossible, and yet the only thing that made any sense.

  “Gen, is there any way you could look at any weird deaths that happened in this city in the last... I don’t know, month?” I asked.