A Bead of Blood

by R. E. Butler

  Chapter 6

  I didn’t dream while I slept. I tended to relive my past as an observer, seeing images from my life pop up like sections of a DVD that’s been scratched, jumping randomly.

  Today, I felt the heaviness of Griegs’ arm around me and the gentle motion of him breathing deeply in sleep as I was taken back to my first real memory.

  It was dark outside, and I was hungry. I could smell something sweet and delicious on the air, and I followed it to the source — the child of one of our servants. I snatched his arm in my hand and sank my teeth into his wrist while he shouted and pushed at me. He was strong, but I was stronger, and I didn’t let him go. Minutes passed as I drank the sweet tasting liquid from his body before I was pulled away from his twitching body by my father.

  Inside our large home with the shiny white marble floors and colorful tapestries on the walls, my father sat me on his knee and asked, “Why did you bite that boy, my darling?”

  “He smelled like juice,” I replied.

  He growled and looked over my head at my mother. I looked at her. She was nervous, afraid. “I told you trying to mask what she needs to survive by hiding it in a lidded cup and calling it ‘juice’ was a ridiculous idea. Now look what’s happened. The pack will want retribution.”

  My mother sniffed and frowned. “I did what I thought was best.”

  “Well done, Mina, we may have a war on our hands. That was the son of the alpha.”

  She blanched and sat down, one of her ladies in waiting attending her with a fan. My father brought my attention back to him. “You are a vampire, Sabrina. You are not like the servants in this house who move about in the daylight — they are wolves. We drink blood to live, we stay inside out of the sunlight, and we don’t feed from shifters. They can’t be tricked into giving us their blood willingly and made to forget what we are. I’ll teach you to hunt humans, little lovely, and you’ll never be hungry again.”

  The scene shifted and I was standing with the jar of Lara’s ashes, placing it reverently in her family mausoleum.

  It’s not fair, I thought bitterly, that her boyfriend can get away with this. I closed the cabinet where she would be kept safe forever and walked out into the frigid winter night. I was in the airport an hour later, on my way to the headquarters of the North American Vampire Council. I waited all night for someone to meet with me, and no one came. I went to a hotel for the day and repeated the process for five more nights before someone finally came to see why I wouldn’t go away.

  “We’re overloaded with cases,” the prim assistant said dismissively. “We’ll get to your friend’s death when we have the time and resources.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” I yelled, standing up and stalking over to her. She startled backwards, tripping on her high heels.

  “Someone help!” she screamed, and two men in military garb came out of nowhere and pushed me away from her. I hadn’t even realized I had wrapped my hands around her throat.

  They took me to Etienne who listened to my story as he twirled a pen in his long fingers. “I can’t help you, Miss Chalice. Not directly, anyhow. What I can do is train you to become a Hunter.”

  “What the hell good would that do?” I folded my arms across my chest and slumped down in the chair.

  “If you join my team, you might find yourself needing to interrogate a certain young male. And maybe he gets stuck in one of our east-facing cells above ground and maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, maybe you forget to cover the window.”

  I sat up straight. “I can have my revenge if I join your team?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say anything about revenge. But shit happens around here. I was just speaking hypothetically. I’d have to write you up, of course, if you were so careless as to do such a thing, but he’d be dead and who would know exactly what happened, except you?”

  I joined up with the Hunters immediately. Once my training was complete, the first thing I did was find Lara’s ex and bring him in for questioning on a trumped up charge. Close to dawn, I locked him in the cell that faced the rising sun. The steel shutters for the window were buried in a hall closet where no one could find them in time. He was my first real kill. The first time I killed with malice to set things right.

  The scene drifted away, and my memories skipped around here and there.

  The last time I saw my father, when he kissed me goodbye before he went off to war against the werewolves and I never saw him alive again.

  A trip I took with Lara before she was killed.

  The way Griegs looked at me in the warehouse before he killed those vampires to save my life.

  The sun was setting. I could feel it’s descent in the sky like it was being pulled through molasses. While the earth was settling down for the night, my kind were rising up to embrace the darkness.

  Griegs growled in my ear and pulled me against his growing erection. “You smell incredible when you wake, milani.”

  I shifted to my back and looked up at him. It was dark in the tent, but my heightened senses allowed me to see him fairly well. I traced the line of his jaw with my thumb and hooked my fingers behind his neck and pulled him down for a kiss. We made love slowly, bodies pressed tight, eyes locked together, hearts pounding in unison.

  When we were showering afterwards, he ran lathered hands across my shoulders and down my arms. “I liked that.”

  “Hmm?” My hands slicked around his lean hips and up his back.

  “Waking up with you, not in the hotel, but someplace that feels like home.”

  My home, or at least what I thought of when I thought of home, had been burned to the ground during the werewolf uprising. I could still picture it clearly in my mind. No place had ever felt like home after that, but here in the den was as close as I’d come in many, many decades.

  “I liked it, too.”

  We rinsed and dried off, and he wrapped the towel around his waist and told me to stay put, disappearing from the tent. He was gone only a minute, and I heard him just outside the tent asking someone to fetch a member of his family. He stepped back into the tent, and after a few minutes, someone approached. He opened the flap and looked out.

  “Sabrina and I need clothes, Ash.”

  “Sure thing, I’ll be right back.”

  “We’ll go back to the hotel and clear out your things, and I’ve got my own stuff in storage to go through,” he said, turning to where I sat with my towel wrapped around myself.

  I nodded, not pointing out that I had perfectly good clothes the night before, if he hadn’t decided to give them a good shredding in the throes of passion. Not that I minded, exactly, but if I’d known he was going to go all caveman on me, I wouldn’t have worn my favorite shirt.

  When the clothes arrived, I dressed in a khaki skirt and a long sleeved, brushed cotton top in dark turquoise. I stepped into my shoes and watched as Griegs put on the jeans and t-shirt brought for him. He pulled at the loose waist and looked at me. “I’ve definitely lost weight. I was bigger than Ash before I was taken.”

  “Shifting will help your body return to normal?” I stepped out of the tent as he held the flap and he joined me, taking my hand firmly in his.

  “Yes, but it’ll take awhile. I can’t undo two years worth of damage overnight.”

  We joined the den in another dinner celebration, and before everyone ate, Griegs announced our joining as a mated pair, and he was branded by his father with a ceremonial brand bearing the symbol of my name in their native tongue. The image was burned into his chest over his heart. An arrow faced up with a number two backed against it, the bottom portion of the number striking through the arrow. The brand scarred and would remain forever, thanks in part to the silver alloy used in the brand and a liberal dose of magical elements mixed with it.

  In the eyes of the den, we were mated. Bonded forever. Even though we both considered our beloved bond to be so much more powerful, I knew it was important for him to share this with his family. The den ate heartily, an
d I fielded questions by Adriel about my job as a Hunter.

  When the meal was finished, Griegs took me to where his things were stored. All of his belongings had been packed up after he’d been gone for six months. His family had paid his rent for all that time, unsure of what had happened to him, but finally decided that when he came home, he could just gather his things and move into a new place. It was clear they felt guilty about his capture and slavery. They had simply assumed he ran off to lick his wounds and would contact his family when he was ready. They’d left messages with bear dens all over the country for him, assuming that he would eventually hook up with another den. I couldn’t imagine what they suffered through, but Griegs felt terribly guilty even though it wasn’t entirely his fault. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault but the men who captured him...those sick, twisted fucks who got their jollies watching were-animals fight each other to the death.

  In a storage room in the den were more than a dozen boxes and a few pieces of furniture. Up in the barn under a tarp was his black pickup. He sat down on an overstuffed leather chair in the storage room and pulled me into his lap.

  “We need to talk.”

  “About what?” I asked, sliding my fingers through his now neatly trimmed hair. Just before the meal, one of his clan-mates had cut his hair, shaving the sides and leaving the top slightly longer.

  “What we’re going to do, where we’re going to live.”

  “Okay. Well, you can work with me as a Hunter. We can be a team. As far as where we’ll live, I don’t really have a place. When I’m not working, I sometimes go see my mother down in South America, but that usually depresses me. What were you thinking?”

  “I want us to have a place to live, baby, a place that is ours. I’ll work with you, of course. There’s no way in hell that I’d let you go out hunting rogue vampires on your own. Not after what I saw you and your demon pal try to take on alone.”

  I smiled at his protectiveness. “I didn’t have plans to go rushing off into danger alone, anyway.”

  He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. “Why does your mom depress you?”

  I sighed and settled my head against his shoulder. What was I supposed to say about my mother? That she’d always been self-absorbed and delicate and hadn’t really wanted to deal with the messiness of children? I grew up having stronger feelings for my nanny than her, and when my father was killed, she lost what little interest she had in me. It was fortunate for me that I was old enough to take care of myself when he died. Being left alone while she went out attending parties, I felt like a burden more than a treasured member of the family.

  He brushed his thumb across my frown. “I can see you’re ashamed of your upbringing, but you shouldn’t be, milani. We take what we want from our childhoods. You chose to follow in your father’s footsteps and fight for your people, even against your own kind, to keep harmony and balance. If you learned nothing but self-reliance from your mother, then I would say it was a lesson well-taught. You’re independent and successful. You would make any parent proud.”

  My heart clenched at his sweet words. I framed his handsome face with my hands, and I pressed my lips to his. “Just when I think you can’t be any more irresistible, you raise the bar.”

  His brow arched. “So don’t resist, milani.”

  “I won’t.”

  * * * * *

  We stayed in the den for two more days. I had studiously ignored my cell phone, going so far as to keep it in the glove compartment of my SUV so I didn’t feel tempted to work. I hadn’t ever really taken a vacation, and spending time with my beloved and his family as they reacquainted themselves was wonderful. Griegs had asked me if I wanted to take a trip down to my mother’s, but I didn’t. Using Ash’s computer in their home above the den, I sent her an email to let her know I’d chosen a were-bear as a beloved, and her quipped reply a day later was that she hoped I was happy.

  Griegs’ family, though, was quickly filling the lost gaps of my life. Where I’d had no father figure for decades, suddenly Adriel was that lovingly strict male figure. The mother I’d envied other children having was within arm’s length in Filene, who seemed always ready with a smile. And the siblings I’d never had were in full force around me. I found two sisters in Elizabeth and Shaylee, who included me immediately in their lives as if we’d known each other forever, and four brothers, who amazed me with the protectiveness they showed to each member of their family.

  “If he’s half the fighter you claim him to be, he will be a most welcome addition to the Hunters,” Etienne said when I called him after sunset.

  I hadn’t exaggerated a bit, but I knew that it would sound fantastical, even to a seasoned fighter like my boss.

  “He’s going to want to set up a home, so I’m going to need to limit my traveling.” I leaned against my SUV and looked up at the night sky. Griegs was a few yards away, giving me the illusion of privacy while still being able to hear everything with his superior shifter ears.

  “Ohio?” Etienne mused.

  “I’d be the first to set up a base here. Mishka’s coven is the largest in the state, but Columbus, Dayton, Akron, and Cincinnati have large vampire presences as well.”

  “I imagine you would be kept quite busy. I’ll want to meet your beloved first, of course, but it is strictly a formality. When he passes the training, we’ll induct him into the ranks, and you can set up wherever you wish.”

  “We’ll be there in a few days.”

  I signed off and found myself surrounded by Griegs’ arms before I had finished pressing ‘end.’ “Good news?”

  I hummed in my throat. “You’re certain you don’t want to just be here in the den and everything? I could retire.”

  “At a hundred? You’re far too young to retire, milani,” he chided and kissed my neck. Turning me in his arms, he smiled. “Besides, it’s important to me that my family is safe and being a Hunter with you is one way to insure that. We can stay in Ohio and continue to keep the vampires under control.”

  I peered up at him. “You know it’s just us. It’s not like we have the cavalry or an entire police force behind us. Humans can’t handle vampires on a good day, and most of the time when I’m called in, it’s because the vampire is a nut job and killing randomly for sport.”

  His large hands locked at my lower back and he pulled me tightly against him. “Do I look worried?”

  * * * * *

  When we left to head to Etienne’s office in Chicago, we’d made several decisions that were going to be carried out on our behalf while we were gone for the month-long training and testing that Griegs was going to go through to become a Hunter. Den members were building a tent for us to use in the den during the full moon gatherings, when we were able to commune with them. Above ground, a half-mile from Elizabeth, Ash, and Axe’s home, a home was being built for us under Axe’s direction. Among other things, it would serve as an office for both of us, since Griegs promised to take on the paperwork I loathed doing as a Hunter. The home would have an automatic shutter system installed, making the house light-tight from dawn until dusk. For the first time since I left home, I was putting down roots.

  When we picked up a rental car from the airport parking lot in Chicago, we journeyed to the headquarters of the northern states’ North American Vampire Council offices. The gothic ten-story building boasted columns and stone gargoyles that overlooked the city.

  On the tenth floor, we waited outside of Etienne’s plush office for mere minutes before he called us in. After introductions were made, Etienne gestured for us to sit in the upholstered chairs across from his desk.

  Steepling his fingers, he looked at Griegs. “You’re certain you wish to join up with the Hunters? You’ve got a month of training and testing ahead of you. I’m bumping it up only because Sabrina is one of my best Hunters, and she not only vouches for you, but will be with you from now on and that carries a lot of weight with it. If you were some guy off the street, you’d be looking at a year or better
before I let you even take an easy case.”

  “I am certain that I will not allow Sabrina to continue as a Hunter if I am not able to be with her. It is my right as her mate to demand her safety and to provide protection for her.”

  Etienne’s brows rose. “You really think you could stop her from doing her job?”

  I almost said, ‘You’ve obviously never been in love before,’ but the words caught in my throat. I hadn’t told Griegs about my growing feelings for him, and our relationship was still so new. I didn’t want the first time I told him I loved him to be an excited utterance to my boss.

  I chuckled and shook my head, finding more appropriate words. “You’ve got no idea what I wouldn’t do for this man, Etienne. If he asked me to stop, I would.” I clasped Griegs’ hand with mine and looked at him. A small smile touched the corner of his mouth before he turned back to look at Etienne. My heart thudded erratically in my chest and I wondered, did he love me already?

  “Fair enough.” Etienne nodded.

  Half an hour later, Griegs was filling out a stack of paperwork while I played a game of poker on my cell.

  “You could help you know,” he complained, flexing his fingers.

  “That would be cheating. Besides, this is just the basic information stuff, and I can’t answer everything. Don’t worry, the worst is yet to come.”

  “Oh, thanks. It’s a good thing you’re worth it.”

  I blew him a kiss and turned back to my game.

  An hour after that, Griegs and I drove to the training compound where we would spend the next month. While he learned everything there was to know about vampires — from kill methods, to myths, to hunting styles — I worked on the dreaded backlog of paperwork, including everything I had learned about The Doc and the were-animal abuse. I checked in with the alpha wolf Lit, who informed me that the rescued wolves were doing well and many had returned to their home packs already.

  That night, as Griegs as I lay tangled together before dawn rose, I told him that I loved him and he stared into my eyes so deeply I felt as if he could see into my very soul. “I love you, too, Sabrina, my beloved vampire mate.”