by SK Ryder
Jackson braced himself at the base of the polished oak staircase. He wouldn’t take no for an answer this time. He couldn’t afford to. Neither could Cassidy.
He closed his eyes, gathering himself. This should have been so simple.
Cassidy all but fleeing from him the morning after being bitten could mean only one thing. She was compelled. She had to be. Compelled to rush into the vampire’s arms and certain death.
Jackson had been unprepared for the blood-sucking vagrant that surprised them on the beach last night. The small full-spectrum flashlight he always kept in his pocket had only managed to surprise the creature and chase it away, not kill it, saving Cassidy’s life at great risk to his own. But even then he doubted he’d seen the last of this demon.
The serum its bite left in her bloodstream made her easy to manipulate, even at a distance. The vampire would be able to find her or summon her and place into her head anything it wished, as it already had since she remembered none of what happened and was bound and determined to leave him. The only way to stop her would have been to physically restrain her, but that would have done irreparable damage to their already-shaky relationship.
So he’d let her go.
Following her and putting the bloodsucker down well before sunset should have been a straightforward operation. He should have scored his first kill. It would have taken a couple of weeks after that for the serum to leave her system and the compulsion to wear off, but then Cassidy would have been back to normal, remembering little if anything. Simple.
Except it wasn’t.
Instead of bee-lining to a vampire’s lair, she spent hours checking out every hotel and motel in town, apparently at a genuine loss as to where to stay. By the time Jackson lost her at a red light on US 1, frustration boiled in his gut like a vat of acid.
He waited until well after dark to call her. She was by no means excited to hear his voice. He tried to get a sense of her whereabouts through background noises. A microwave beeped. Drawers slammed.
“Just making sure you’re all right, babe,” he said, smiling at her clipped tones of lingering anger. No hint of distraction or the radical personality change typical of someone under a vampire’s influence. She was fine, at least for the time being.
But that still left a vampire hunting Orchard Beach, one that could decide to finish what it started with Cassidy. The faster Jackson put the creature out of its eternal misery, the better. There was, however, only one way to accomplish this now—straight up these stairs.
Resolve in place, he ascended to the Striker Foundation’s inner sanctum, a windowless room on the mansion’s third floor, guarded by an electronically sealed steel-core door. He jammed his thumb to the reader, willing the indicator to turn green with a pleasant warble. Instead it buzzed red. His fist curled tight, and he knocked. Hard.
As Jackson hoped—and feared—it was Uncle Garrett who tore open the door, looking like a thundercloud preparing to hurl lightning. Garrett’s scowl eased a bit when he saw his nephew. After giving him an assessing look, he turned away, letting Jackson catch the door and enter before it shut in his face.
Dry, super-cooled air enveloped him, permeated with the aromas of ancient paper and oiled leather. A hint of blood, too, he imagined, the scent of secret history. Between the towering, well-stocked bookcases hung the stoic portraits of generations of Striker patriarchs, keepers of the Foundation, his father and uncle among them. Their eyes appeared to follow him, judging, and finding him lacking. The way his father had found him lacking earlier. Why else would Warren refuse to intercede with his brother on his son’s behalf if not because he didn’t believe Jackson was ready to do the job he was born to?
“I’m still not on the Grid?” Jackson ventured, taking a tight hold of his nerves.
“Nothing gets by you, does it?”
Jackson tried not to wince. If his uncle doubted his nephew’s competence before, he’d deem him useless beyond all hope if he learned what all had gotten by him in the past twenty-four hours.
A massive, ornately carved wooden desk dominated the center of the parquet floor, its surface cluttered with yellowed manuscripts. Three sleek LCD monitors sat off to one side, scrolling data, but Garrett ignored these as he sat, picked up a pen, and continued a note in what Jackson recognized as the Register of Primary Targets.
While waiting to be acknowledged, he clasped his hands behind his back, rubbing at the stumps of his two missing fingers with his thumb. They served as constant and bitter reminders of the price of impatience. He would much rather track down Cassidy and stand guard over her regardless of the fight she’d put up. But that could get them both killed. His only hope lay in finding the vampire first—during the day.
“Shouldn’t you be out looking for a new bride?” Garrett said, not looking up. His broad shoulders bunched and light gleamed off his thinning, neatly combed hair that held not a hint of gray. At fifty-eight, Garrett Striker maintained a vigor and fitness level on par with his twenty-four-year-old nephew.
“I have a bride.” At his uncle’s raised brow, Jackson forced an agreeable expression even as his heart geared up to slam around his chest. “I think you met her when you humiliated her at dinner on Friday. Her name is Cassidy Chandler, soon to be Striker.”
Garrett’s eyes narrowed. Taking off his glasses, he sat back and tossed them, together with his pen, on the desk. “Attitude. Well, this is new.” He considered his nephew. “She’s run off, and someday you’ll thank me. Trust me.”
“She’ll be back,” he countered with only the smallest hesitation. “Trust me.”
The alternative was unthinkable. Over the past two years, Cassidy had almost filled the hole in his soul left by his twin brother’s death. Losing her would be like losing Justin all over again. This time, he wouldn’t survive. That simple realization snapped everything into sharp focus and filled him with quiet certainty.
“But I’m not here to talk about my relationship. I came to tell you that I believe there’s a target in the area.”
“Oh. Do you?” Garrett said in a too mild tone of withering displeasure. “And what would make you think that?”
Jackson took a deep breath. “The so-called gang war killings over the last couple of months. They—”
“Are not vampire victims.”
“They’re unusually violent.”
“Exactly. Only a youngling could leave a trail of corpses like that, and no sire would tolerate that much risk of exposure. They’d put it down before things got this far out of hand. You should really know that,” he finished on a patronizing note.
Jackson did. These were facts borne out by centuries of research. But if he was to keep Cassidy’s involvement—and his own botched attempts at hunting—off Garrett’s radar, this was the only plausible option for alerting his uncle to a local vampire problem.
“Maybe this is a new pattern,” he offered.
“Now you’re reaching.”
“Think about it. All these bodies are dismembered, and even if the heads are found, they’re too decomposed to prove anything. Doesn’t that sound like someone’s trying to hide something more than just a murder?”
Garrett sighed and shook his head. “Kid, it’s a sad fact that humans can be as brutal as any vampire. But they are humans. And human laws and authorities will deal with them. Not us. We’re here for the monsters they don’t know about, the ones that humans don’t stand a chance against.”
“Maybe that’s what some bloodsucker wants us to think. Throw the humans off the idea that anything unusual is going on while he kills at will.”
“Then at least he’s cleaning up the streets while he’s at it.”
“You can’t be serious. What if he expands his menu in the future? What if he already has?”
“Jack, slow down.” Garrett gestured for calm with on
e hand. “These are not vampire victims. There’s no precedent for that anywhere in their history or even their legends.” He indicated the bookshelves groaning with those histories and legends.
Jackson shifted his voice into a more reasonable gear. “But you know it could be. There could be things we don’t know about them yet.”
“After five hundred years? Not likely. But even if that were the case, what do you expect me to do about it? Even if there are vampires involved, we need to know where they spend their days, not where they hunt, which in this case would be random and all over the state. I have genuine leads to follow up on. I can’t be wasting my time on your fantasies.”
Jackson set his hands amidst the fragile papers on the desk and glared. “Then get me on the Grid. Let me track this one and put it down. Let me get into the Foundation’s mission. I’m ready.”
His uncle didn’t hesitated. “You were ready three years ago. Not now.”
He felt as though he’d been slapped. “Three years ago I watched my brother die,” he ground out. “The only thing I was ready for was therapy, and obviously I couldn’t have that.” He had found it though, in the Colorado mountains outside Boulder. With Cassidy.
“When you fall off a horse, you get right back on. Wait this long, and—”
“I didn’t fall off a fucking horse. I watched the other half of me get ripped to fucking pieces by something the rest of the world doesn’t even know exists.” The words, suppressed too long, exploded out of him in a rush of fury. The memories followed in short order, drowning him in a chilling black horror. Very quietly he repeated, “Pieces.”
For many seconds, perhaps a full minute, the only sounds in the room were the humming computers and the tick-tock of an antique grandfather clock. Then the leather chair creaked as Garrett sat back and steepled his fingers.
“That right there is why you’re not ready to come back,” he said, all calm and reason. “You’ve had way too much time to think about this. Whatever edge you had is gone.”
“We were twenty-one years old and on our first hunt. We didn’t have . . . an edge.”
“Just the same, kid. I can’t allow you to go out like this. Emotions like that will get you killed. You’re the last of the line. We can’t afford to lose you, too.”
“If you think I will ever be without emotion about—”
Garrett held up a hand. “No one expects that. But you have to learn to channel it. And I don’t mean revenge. That’s just another emotion they’ll exploit.” The gentle tone—as though he were explaining proper conduct to a five-year-old—only infuriated Jackson more.
“Who are you to say that to me? Except for one apparently expendable nephew, you’ve never lost a thing to these demons.”
“Careful.”
He leaned in close, lowered his voice to a snarl. “You kill them, but they’ve never touched you. They can’t. You know why? Because you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself and the Foundation. You’re like a fucking machine.”
Garrett shot out of his chair. “That’s enough.”
Jackson straightened but said nothing more. He held his uncle’s furious stare, years of intimidation crumbling around him. Uncle Garrett was, after all, merely human. Human and feeling more than a little emotional right now. He watched his uncle run a quick hand over his hair and adjust his white Striker Capital company polo shirt before sitting back down.
“I lost Andi to them,” he said. At Jackson’s baffled look he clarified, “Antonia Striker.”
“My father’s first wife?”
“She may have been his wife, but she was the love of my life.”
Jackson stared, unsure what to make of this revelation or its implications. “I don’t understand. She died in a car accident.”
Garrett nodded, his face softening in a way Jackson had never seen on his hard-nosed, no-nonsense uncle, not even when Justin was killed. “She and her four children, yes.”
A horrific accident on I-95 involving an explosion that killed eight, Antonia Striker and all her children among them. That’s all Jackson knew about the long-ago incident that turned his father, Warren, into a young widower who married the destitute and also widowed socialite Lillian Reynolds, Jackson’s mother. In exchange for a life of plenty for herself and her daughter, she gave Warren the sons he wanted, sons the Foundation needed.
Jackson’s destiny had been sealed at his conception—which would never have happened if not for that accident. A chill dropped into his belly.
“What . . . really happened to them?”
Garrett pushed the pen around on the desk, lost in thought, before he said, “Their driver took their car into the path of a tanker truck. On purpose. We found out about him only much later. His name was Rafael.” His lip curled over the name with contempt. “He’d been enslaved by a vampire I put down almost three years earlier. And he plotted his revenge since the night I took that bitch’s head. He infiltrated the house staff, watched us, and figured out how I felt about Andi. Saw how I treated those kids as if they were mine.” He nodded, his face tensing into a grimace. “And then he made me pay with everything that was dear to me. Everything.”
Jackson swallowed hard. Every hair on his body rose in silent alarm at the sudden, mad vehemence flaring across his uncle’s hard face. It vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.
“But I can’t afford to think about that, and neither does your father,” Garrett continued with a small shrug. “The Foundation’s mission is our purpose. Our only purpose.”
Jackson lowered himself into the wingback chair in front of the desk, his head spinning. His father, Warren, couldn’t hunt. Chronic back pain from an accident in his youth saw to that. Instead, he dedicated himself to running the Foundation’s legitimate business operation, and had an international reputation for putting together deals flush with profits. But Uncle Garrett was the most ruthlessly efficient vampire hunter in the Foundation’s history, bar none. Now Jackson knew why.
His own method of dealing with the death of his brother had involved leaving Yale for the University of Colorado, running from both his memories and his life. There he had met Cassidy, and it was her bright and equally troubled spirit that had helped him face his grief and stop running.
“Until you can tell me the same, kid, I can’t let you hunt.”
Jackson looked up. Garrett leaned across the desk now, all business.
“Revenge is an emotion vampires will exploit without mercy. It muddles your mind, blinds you to what is, and it doesn’t take much of that to get you killed. If you can’t set aside everything you remember about the night your brother died, you will share his fate.” Garrett smiled without humor. “And that would really put a crimp in my retirement plans.”
“I can absolutely tell you the same,” Jackson said and cleared a knot out of his throat. “The Foundation is my life.”
His uncle looked dubious. Jackson clenched his jaw against blurting out how his inbred hunter’s instincts had hummed through him during the attack on Cassidy. How his mind could focus on logistics and possibilities instead of the fear or anger in his heart. How he’d managed to drive off the menace in time to save Cassidy’s life in spite of being so unprepared. Garrett wouldn’t see it that way. He’d take him to task for foolishly allowing himself to be caught off-guard in the first place—again—and, after miraculously surviving, losing the target on top of it.
Jackson took a deep, steadying breath. “I need to do the job I was born to. I’m ready.”
Garrett rubbed his smooth chin, considering. “Isn’t your father keeping you busy enough getting you trained to take over the company?”
“Since there’s only one of me, shouldn’t I be getting trained on both the official and the clandestine Striker operations?”
His uncle scowled. Jackson suppressed a tight s
mile.
“Fine. I’ll get you set up on the Grid, and you can start doing some research in your spare time. We’ll see how that goes.”
Now Jackson did smile, allowing himself a small thrill of victory for securing the tool he needed to get serious.
Garrett slid his glasses back on his nose and glanced at the monitors. “The other thing you can do is get married and make some heirs before you do get yourself killed. I’ll get you a list of some young ladies who’d be agreeable. You can still make your mother happy and have that wedding she’s planning.”
“Don’t bother. I’m marrying Cassidy,” Jackson declared, getting up to leave.
“The girl who ran off. Right.”
“She’ll be back.” He couldn’t resist adding, “She just needs to get past her impulse to hand you your balls on a platter.”
Garrett shot him a look that threatened to draw blood. “What do you mean she’ll be back?” He straightened, eyes narrowing. “Please tell me she doesn’t still have that ring.”
“She’ll be back,” Jackson said again, trying to sound more certain than he felt. She hadn’t mentioned the ring when they spoke. No telling where it was. He wouldn’t put it past the damn cat to eat the thing.
“For the love of God, kid. What do you think you’re doing?” Garrett got up and rounded the desk to close in on his nephew as he might close in on a target. “The last thing you need is a journalist wife digging into this family and asking questions to which she can never know the answers. That sort of thing can get us all killed.”
This Jackson hadn’t even considered, confident Cassidy would trust him and accept that portions of his life needed to remain private. Like every other Striker wife in history. Or not, he thought with a sudden flash of insight.