by Martha Woods
THE VAMPIRE’S REVELATIONS
BOOK 12 OF THE FATAL ALLURE SERIES
MARTHA WOODS
ROMANCE BOOKS 4 U
CONTENTS
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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© 2019 - Romance Books 4 U
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All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CHAPTER 1
I’d been sitting in this bar for what felt like hours at this point, and for the last ten minutes I’d been more or less staring off into complete space, Anthony’s so-called revelations leaving me without much in the way of things to say or think. I’d come here looking for answers just like any other normal person would, especially when the person you’re going to just admits that they were spying on your city for months, but what he was saying… it just didn’t make any sense.
“Amy?” He asked me, tilting his head in what looked to be concern and sympathy, “Are you alright?”
“Yes I’m… I’m fine,” I answered, “Can you… say that again?”
“Alright, I said…” Anthony cleared his throat, “Damon has run across this hunter before, years ago, and it is very likely that the two of them know each other.”
“But…” But that didn’t make sense, was what I wanted to say, but why wouldn’t it? After all, hunters across the country, hell, across the world were connected so intimately that it was likely every single hunter in a given city would know when another was even just thinking about moving through their territory, the idea that he wouldn’t have run into an extremely prolific hunter only a few states away was… unlikely, to say the least. It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t possible… it was that I didn’t want to even think about believing it.
“I know, it’s a lot to deal with, isn’t it?” Anthony said, not unkindly, “The idea that someone that you know and love might not be the person you thought that they were. I’ve felt that, and I know that a lot of people have thought that about me, and I’m sure that it hurts every time. But you have to remember that I’m not saying that he is still working with him, or whatever he did in the past hasn’t change him now, if you believe that he is a good, kind man then there is no reason to think otherwise, that’s the nature of change.”
“But something as big as this… surely keeping a secret as big as this means something, if he wasn’t ashamed of what he did, if he didn’t want to hide anything from me, then why did he?”
“You’re an investigator Amy, you know better than anyone that human beings and rationality don’t walk hand in hand at the best of times. And something like this? Working with an enemy that threatens to wipe out everyone that you care about now, when you were all too happy to use their services for your own ends in the past?” He drained his glass, pupils finally starting to show some level of intoxication. “I have no doubt that it’s something he did feel ashamed about, and when you feel ashamed enough there is no limit to the things you will do to make sure that you forget ever having done them, and never speaking of it again is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to that.”
That gave me something to think about, if he was ashamed enough of his actions that he had intended to never bring them up to anyone, then what was it that he had been a part of? What could have been so bad that Damon never wanted to think of it again, even when he had been one of the most gung-ho hunters I’ve ever met in my life? There were a number of things that I could think of, none of them good, but few were approaching the level of irredeemable that it would be likely for him to be capable of, right? He’d killed, he’d hurt, but what could he have done that was so evil for even him to be proud of in his most militant days?
“If you’re anything like what I’ve been thinking, you’re probably going through all the worst possibilities in your head right now, aren’t you?” Anthony smiled, shaking his head with a fondness that I wasn’t sure I was a fan of right now. “I can assure you that you’ll only be hurting yourself by doing that, you’re coming to a conclusion on your own without even having a single bit of evidence to go off of, you very well might believe that he did something amazingly terrible but find that he only did something comparatively minor.”
“Do you know what he did?”
“No, I haven’t a single clue,” He said, “All I know for sure is that at some point a long time ago they knew each other, maybe for a while, maybe for only a single day. I have no idea what he did, what words were shared, or even if they liked each other. All I know is that there was a meeting.”
“Well if what you told us was correct, it must have been friendly, or at the least civil. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would have left Damon alive if they hadn’t been happy with how the meeting went, they probably would have strung him up and left him to die horribly in all likelihood.”
“That much is true, but I don’t want to say anything to risk leading you down a wrong path. My job is to observe and report on the things that I see now, I don’t delve too much into the past as a rule but I thought that this was something that you may need to know. If this was something that could come back to bite you because of our involvement then I don’t want to be the cause of anything that could have gone wrong, not if I could have helped prevent it. Hopefully… however it is that this goes down, you will remember that it was us who gave you this warning, that we saw the possibility for you blaming us and elected to tell you anyway, do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding, “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t blame you for something like this, not if you had nothing to do with it. I… appreciate you telling me this, even if I don’t really like what it was that you had to tell me.”
“The truth is rarely something that anyone wants to hear, that much I’ve learned,” He said, “But it’s a lot like getting an injection really. That pinch at the beginning, the overwhelming fear when you see the needle coming for you, but once it’s all over and it gets pulled out you realize that there was never really anything to be scared of at all, you were only scared of what you thought would go wrong, not what was happening.”
“I’m not really a fan of needles, so maybe you’re right there.” I wasn’t a fan of being lied to either, even by omission, but that was a topic for another time and another person, a person who was no doubt going to be gone to god knows where by the time I get back to the apartment. Though he had stayed last night, and that fact alone was actually making me feel kind of bad about all of this, even if I had no real need to feel guilty about this at all. I wasn’t devoid of sympathy though, the first time that he spends the whole night with us and he wakes
up to me questioning him on a past that he never wanted to think of again, in terms of things that would make him eager to spend more time with us this was somewhere near the bottom.
“I feel bad for you,” Anthony said, before raising his hands hastily, “I don’t mean that I pity you by any means, that’s not what I was going for. I only mean that I feel bad for giving this news to you when you’re already dealing with so much, news about someone so dear to you is by far the last thing that you need when you’re so focused on helping people who don’t really mean that much to you by comparison.”
“I’ve made a career out of that,” I said, “Always having to put other people ahead of the relationships that I’ve had dear to me, always having to give up dates because someone was killed or went missing, always having to shove my personal feelings aside so that I could make sure that everyone else was safe for a night. With Damon and Vincent, it feels different but… if I have to shove them aside one too many times, who is to say that they won’t decide that they want to leave as well? If they can find better elsewhere, why shouldn’t they?”
“First off, I want to say that I know you’re not single, so don’t take this as flirting by any means. Second, have you looked in a mirror? And I don’t mean to just look at yourself, I mean to observe the kind of person that you really are, body and soul. There is not a man or woman on earth who would say no to being with you, not if they really knew your worth as a human being, and even from a brief meeting I can tell that the two of them absolutely know your worth. It’s written all over their faces, in the depths of their eyes, they’ve felt the way you can make them feel and they will do everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t change. That’s something special, you shouldn’t doubt them so easily.”
“When did you become a relationship counselor?” I asked, “Is that a requirement of being a spy too?”
“No, just a happy little bonus. I need to make sure that people can open up around me, that I can have a conversation with them that keeps flowing easily so I get as much information out of them as possible. I just need to know what someone is thinking and what they need to hear, and in cases like this it works out pretty well, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it does, I suppose it does.” There wasn’t much else that I could think of to say, it was still so surreal to be speaking so easily to a self-proclaimed spy as easily as I would any of my friends, when he could have been working against us all this time and we wouldn’t have been able to figure it out at all. But that was the nature of trust wasn’t it? We were all going to move forward once we got the answers that we wanted and build something new from all of this… mess. The mess, unfortunately, now included my relationship with Damon, though to be honest it had been a mess for a while, we just had a reason for why that might have been now. All this time, and he hadn’t told me a single thing about this hunter, though to be fair we’ve both been pretty cagey with what we’ve done in the past. Not because we were trying to hide anything, or because we were ashamed of our actions or anything like that. I can’t speak for him but me… I just had things that weren’t really worth telling him. There was no need for it, we could still care for each other fully with no negatives to not knowing that one part of my life, and everyone could still be happy.
Though to be fair my little secrets were about my dating habits in college, not working with genocidal mad men, so there was that. Rick kind of turned into one of those near the end, but he wasn’t like that most of the time that I knew him, that was a recent thing. He really made up for lost time though.
Now I’m thinking about Rick, this is great, another man who felt that he couldn’t just talk to me, and look at how that turned out. Not that Damon was going to flip out and decide to kill all paranormals just because he felt like he couldn’t talk to me but… wait, he had already been trying to do that once upon a time, and he only just stopped relatively close to when we met.
Shit.
“Are you ok?” Anthony asked, placing his hand on my shoulder, “You look like you’re doing that thing again.”
“Thing? Oh, right, overthinking.” I nodded, there was no real need to say it out loud, it was obvious to myself and everyone else what it was that I was doing, and speaking honestly it was a stupid thing to be doing. The best thing to do right now would be to get up out of my chair, march back to my apartment and actually do the work to figure out how I can make things better between us, and the best place to start would be to actually sit down with Damon and go through everything step by step, and try to figure out a way that we can learn to properly trust each other with even the worst parts of ourselves. There is no relationship without trust, and the last thing that I ever want in the world is to lose him, we’d both gone through so much to be together that to just throw it away would be… laughably foolish, to say the least.
“Thank you for talking to me,” I told Anthony, “But I really should be going. I’ve got a lot of plans to make if we’re going to be taking in your people, and I don’t think this hunter is going to be a very big fan of a group of outsiders interfering in his business, do you?”
“Absolutely not, he’s likely to turn his eyes towards your group as well, though maybe we will get lucky and he will recognize an unwinnable fight before striking the first blow. He’s formidable, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’t have an army the size of the one that you do.”
“No, but have you read about some of the battles that have happened through history?” He shook his head in the negative, and it was all that I could do to avoid quoting Sun Tzu at him. “A bigger army doesn’t guarantee victory, it all depends on what you do with them and what you are willing to do to win, if you’re superior in that regard then you will win every time, against every enemy you could ever think to come across. Simple as that.”
“I’ll admit that I’m not an expert on battlefield tactics, my domain lies quite a while behind the lines. I’m surprised to see that you are though.”
“Required reading for going into my field, or, well, what was my field. If you’re going to be a good investigator then you need to know how to think like your enemy, otherwise the only thing you’ll ever be doing is dicking around in a lab coat.”
“I think that I would really like to hear more about the sort of things that you studied, or the people that you helped catch.” Anthony shrugged, standing from his seat and placing my coat around my shoulders. “But for now, I think that you’ve got some people that you need to talk to, don’t you? I’ve found that it’s best not to sleep on things as big as this, not when you want to keep everyone around afterwards.”
“Thanks Anthony,” I said, “You’re not so bad… for a spy I mean.”
“That’s one of the nicest compliments that someone like me can get, believe me, normally people are glad to be rid of me as soon as they can.” He smiled, walking backwards towards the entrance. “But I like this town, I think I might stick around if I can, if only so that I can wear out my welcome!”
The bell dinged behind him, door flapping open and shut and welcoming in soft gusts of the early morning air, the breeze chilling the skin on my arms and driving a shiver through the core of my body. It had been getting colder lately, and though I was getting used to the cold I wasn’t sure I was ready for everything that came with winter coming through. People went crazy during the cold months, maybe they weren’t getting enough sunlight, maybe they were just trying to find some way to occupy themselves through the dark, cold days of the next few months, but either way that didn’t change the fact that winter during my days as an investigator were always the worst, year after year.
That was when I was investigating human crimes, and even though humans were capable of extreme cruelty and they’d done some truly revolting acts in my time, sometimes it couldn’t hold a candle to what some of the paranormals that I knew could just do on a whim. The amount of crime scenes that I’d come to where a victim had been torn limb from limb could be counted on less than ten finger
s, but Vincent and Joseph started fights by doing exactly that. That’s definitely something to think about I guess, the sheer levels of brutality that everyone could be capable of, and for what reason.
Which is why… I should try not to judge Damon so harshly for dealing with this hunter god knows how many years ago. For all I know it was just a casual meeting, and even if it wasn’t… we all had things in our past that we weren’t proud of, and sometimes… sometimes you did what you had to do, even if what you had to do would haunt you for the rest of your life. I wasn’t proud of everything that I’d done to get Vincent back, or to clear my name after Rick framed me, but I did what I had to do to get here. That’s all that matters to me in the end.
“Shit,” I groaned to myself, stretching my arms above my head and rising from my seat. Shrugging on my coat, I tried not to think too much about the conversation that was waiting ahead of me but… there wasn’t really much choice in the matter was there? When it came to talking very seriously to someone that you loved there wasn’t much that you could do other than think about it until it happened. “Whatever, let’s just get this over with.”
THE DRIVE back to my apartment wasn’t long enough in my opinion, even as sunlight was starting to crest over the tips of the skyline and the darkness in the corners of the alleyways was starting to vanish slowly but surely. The last that I had seen him Damon was well and truly asleep next to Vincent, exactly where he had promised to stay and where Vincent was determined to keep him within his power. It was hard to sneak anything past Vincent at the best of times, he was as alert as someone who had spent their entire life at war, to be able to get past him would be quite impressive indeed.