extremely high price.
Chief of Police Sorrel Marx comments: “O’Neill has always been a big name in
Westham and it’s difficult to believe he’s behind something this horrendous, but
we’ve been surprised before. The police are working day and night to solve this.
Vampires are new to society but we will fight to protect their rights just as we would
for humans.” The case is still being investigated. Jennifer Lawson, O’Neill’s fiancée,
has no comment on the topic but she’s been questioned by police about her
involvement and she continues to be under public scrutiny.
I frowned and read the article again.
“Looks like your mark is in a lot of trouble.”
“He said he had to change to get out of it,” I mumbled, more to myself than to Joel, but he’d heard me.
“He what? You spoke to him?”
I closed my eyes for a moment and scolded myself for slipping up.
“I ran into him when I was searching his house,” I said. I wasn’t going to lie to Joel. There might have been times where I didn’t tell him the whole truth, but I wouldn’t lie to him.
“How much did you get out of him before you killed him?”
“No enough,” I said. I hadn’t killed him, of course, but that counted as omission of truth. Besides, I should have asked more questions. And after this, I would if I saw him again. If I could control myself to not kill him right away.
Right.
“Was this in the newspapers?” I asked.
Joel nodded. I didn’t read the papers, but then again, neither did Joel.
“Someone’s been lying to me.” I thought back to the conversation with Jennifer. It must have been convenient to her that I didn’t know about the whole scandal. I would have a word with her, too.
“Who wrote this?” I asked, a thought suddenly dawning on me. Joel scrolled down, squinting at the screen.
“A Celia Clemens,” he said.
Clemens. It sounded familiar. A name I could trace besides Jennifer and Connor.
“Thanks for this,” I said to Joel, getting up. “And I’m sorry about your place. I’ll sort it out.”
“You just worry about your face. If she could do that to my hardware I’d hate to know what she’ll do to someone that bleeds.
Chapter 9
I left the mall feeling frustrated and tired, and that made me grumpy. I tore down the road, speeding tickets to hell. My head spun with information and my fingers itched for some action. I hadn’t slept yet before my last set of kills, but I needed to get this poison out of my system.
I hated being the one that wasn’t on top of things. I hated being on the bottom rung of the game. And this woman, whoever she was, was messing with my people. And with me.
And on top of that, Connor and vampire trafficking? I had no kind of loyalty to vampires, I was a killer for crying out loud. But trafficking? That just seemed wrong. The whole idea of life stretching to infinity and laced with torture made me feel uncomfortable. I shook my head, my view of the road shaking in my helmet. I had to get my mind straight. I couldn’t pick and choose. I couldn’t hate them and protect them at the same time.
But what did I feel, then? Why did this news upset me so much? It felt like a stake, lodged under my ribs and it moved painfully around every time I moved, every time I breathed. This was why I had to kill him. This was why it had been such a carnal mistake that I’d let him go. Everyone had flaws. Being half vampire, or even completely, was the least of it, it seemed.
I thought suddenly of Jennifer. How much had she known about it? How much had she been involved with? Giving the police a story was one thing. I was starting to wonder about her motivation to find him. I was pissed she’d lied to me. People didn’t just lie to me and get away with it. Was it to give him up? Or was it to save him and by definition save herself?
My head spun with all the questions and thoughts, and by the time I got home the only thing that I permitted to keep rolling around my mind was the fact that my people were being messed with, and someone had to pay.
Who would have guessed I was a territorial animal? For someone who passed as human I was a wild and possessive. Go figure.
I fell into bed, but not before I reloaded the Glock under my pillow with new ammunition, and slid the Smith & Wesson under my bed instead of returning it to my gun safe. Nervous much? The fact was that if I woke up with a blond bitch hovering over my face I wanted to end it with the least amount of effort. I was done playing games. I was never one to toe the line. I just stepped over the damn thing and started shooting.
I woke up to three messages on my phone and a handful of missed calls from private numbers. None of them were from Aspen, and that was enough for me to relax.
Ruben had tried to get a hold of me. I dialed his cell.
“Anxious to see me?” I asked when he picked up on the first ring.
“I want to make sure you’re getting your ass in here the moment the sun goes down and taking care of business. I want this finished.”
“You sound like someone’s chewing your ass.”
He took a deep breath and I knew it was to calm down before he broke something on his end of the line. The downside of violence was that it was no fun when it wasn’t in person. “You have no idea what’s at stake here.”
“A lot of cash?
He chuckled without emotion. “If it were only that easy. Your life is simple enough. You pull a trigger and you troubles are over. I have mine live long enough to come back and bite me.”
“I’ll be there,” I said and hung up. My life was easy, was it? Because I could just shoot my troubles and go to bed without a headache.
If only it were that easy. The problem with killing was that those really did come back to haunt you, no matter how justified. And there had been plenty reasons for me to pick up a gun in the first place. But it was safer to let Ruben believe that his life was difficult, cocooned in the safety of his office while I got blood on my hands. There were some things that couldn’t be repaid otherwise, even if it meant returning it in death.
I got dressed in my leathers and looked at myself in the mirror. I tried not to do it. I looked as deadly as my father, with my dark hair and haunted eyes. I curled my lips back for the confirmation that I was only looking at myself. No fangs. No threat. I shuddered and shrugged into my holsters. The guns against my body were a kind of security. It was something I understood, something solid. A gun was something I could trust. It didn’t pretend that it of loved me when all it could offer was death.
It hardly ever misfired, so the pull of a trigger was a sure fire way of doing the right kind of damage, and it was heavy and grounded the way trust should be.
I looked at the clock. It was still early. The sun cast a fiery glow through my window. I walked out the door anyway, and got on my bike. I switched it on and let it idle, letting my thoughts go. I twisted the throttle and pulled out into the street, with the intention of driving around until it was time to head to the office.
Instead, I ended up in front of Westham Penitentiary. The big grey building sat squat, like it had sunken in on itself with the weight of its content. It was divided up into two sides, the one half reinforced with metal within the walls and no windows to keep mythical creatures in and guards had silver bullets. The visitor queues shifted from the human building during the day to the vampire building at night. The realization of where my body had taken me when my mind was occupied swirled like nausea in my stomach.
I walked inside and went through the motions, filling out the forms and producing my ID. Eventually I sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair with the thick glass in front of me. I shivered and my chest felt like lead. Suddenly I wanted to run, but just as I motioned to get up, he walked through the door.
He wore an orange jumpsuit and his black hair was almost completely grey now. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. But it was what was under the hai
r and clothes that scared me. My father looked like he had doubled in age. His face sagged and his cheeks were sunken, his blue irises watered down so much it was difficult to tell what color they had been once. And at the same time the face that stared back at me was still the face of the father I’d grown up with. And still the monster I hated.
He picked up the phone attached to the partition, and held it against his ear. I did the same. The receiver was cold and heavy against my cheek.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” my dad said.
“I didn’t expect to come.”
A silence hung between us filled with everything we couldn’t say.
“How’s Aspen?”
“She’s doing alright,” I answered stiffly. No thanks to you, I added silently. “I’m doing well too, thank you for asking.”
He looked at me and he didn’t need to say the words. I could hear them anyway. I didn’t look like I was doing okay. I didn’t feel like it either.
His eyes glazed over and he looked passed me at a memory that transported him to a different world. I guessed that in a place as colorless and drab as this, he had to escape to a world he’d created himself. He’d gotten good at it. I know I had, and my prison wasn’t even something tangible.
“I never meant to do any of it,” he said so softly I could barely make out the words. But what he said wasn’t lost on me.
“Bit late for that now…”
“I miss her.” He rubbed his eyes like he was wiping away tears, but when he looked at me there was no trace of crying. There was no question about where Aspen had gotten that skill. I wondered who she was. The mother I lost or the sister I was fighting to keep. He’d lost both even when it wasn’t a straight kill the second time round. Goose bumps stretched over my body like a duvet, stuffed with the memories of times past and loved ones lost, rather than the feather of geese.
“Will you ask Aspen to come see me?” he asked.
“You’re the last person on this earth she wants to see, dad. Besides, the jailhouse isn’t exactly wheelchair friendly.” He flinched at my remark. I wondered how much he refused to acknowledge.
“I…” his face was a blank mask, his lips moving without a sound. It was enough quiet space for me to spill my own bitterness into the silence.
“You remember that, don’t you? Why you’re here? Mom’s dead, and Aspen is crippled for the rest of her life. And I’m left behind fixing every mistake you made because you weren’t enough of a man to do it yourself.”
My dad looked down at his hand on the plastic table in front of him. He picked at his forefinger nail with his thumb. He hummed a wilting tune, and I wondered for a moment if he was sane at all. Maybe it would have been easier to accept if he’d been declared clinically insane. If a crazy had made those decisions I could forgive them somehow – a lapse in judgment, a lapse in who my father really was – but the fact was that none of that was what had happened. During the court case two psychologists had visited with him and both had declared him more sane than most of the people that walked the streets. If anything, the insanity was creeping in now, with the absence of the real world to keep him in check.
“Why are you here?” he suddenly asked, looking at me, and it was the sharpest I’d seen his eyes in years. I looked at him for a long time before I answered him.
“I don’t know. I never really know why I end up coming to see you.” No matter how many kills I made, I knew that the man I really wanted dead was still here. Maybe one day I could lay down my guns, but there were too many vampires out there, too many people that could still be killed. Too many Aspens in this world, and not enough Adeles.
“Maybe it’s because every time you walk out of those doors I hope that I can see a different person. Someone who hadn’t done all those things. But every time it’s just you coming through that door.”
“Just me,” he echoed.
I put down the phone and stood up. I was running late for work. I shouldn’t have come in the first place. I never knew why I ended up here of all places. I never knew why I kept running back to the one man I truly hated, in the most raw sense of the word. It was his face I saw every time a forced my stake into a vampire heart, or pulled a trigger. It was his blood I saw splattered on the walls behind the victims, on my hands after a long night. In my nightmares.
I looked over my shoulder. An officer was already leading him away from the booth, but his eyes locked with mine and his lips were moving. ‘I love you’ he mouthed.
I turned my back and kept walking.
In the parking lot I sat on my bike. The last fingers of sunshine dragged across the horizon, leaving stretched shadows behind like scars. I felt ripped apart, like there was a gaping hole in my chest and everything I breathed in just escaped through it again. I gasped for air, fighting down the lump that rose in my throat.
“Are you alright?” I heard a voice behind me. I swallowed my emotions and turned around. My hand was already on the knife on my thigh.
Connor stood half behind me, and he looked concerned. Something inside me jumped and I tried to place what I was feeling. I looked toward the horizon again, and noticed the last light was gone. What remained now was just an afterthought.
“You’re out early,” I said, not answering his question. “It’s a big risk for a pure bred to be out this close to sunset.”
“A pure bred?”
I bit my tongue. By mentioning pure bred I was suggesting that there was a breed that wasn’t pure. I shook my head.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I guess I could ask you the same thing.”
“You avoid all my questions,” he pointed out. “I have unfinished business I need to tie up.” He sighed and he looked so sad for a moment that I wondered if it was my job to do something about it. Was someone going to take care of mine? We all had to deal with our own troubles. The emotion cleared as quickly as it had arrived, and his face was carefully expressionless. “When you join the dark side you don’t realize how many ends you can’t seem to tie up. Even if none of it was your choice in the first place.”
“As opposed to the darkness you created in you past life?” I asked. Connor blanched, if that was possible for a vampire whose skin was already too pale.
“So you’ve heard,” he said.
“Anyone who reads papers knows.”
“Except you didn’t read papers. It was like talking to a long lost friend when I realized you didn’t know. You’re only hunting me as a job aren’t you?”
I shrugged. Admitting to that made it sound worse than it was, in my opinion. I didn’t need to be classified in the same group as him.
“I’m guessing you have interest in there,” he said, gesturing his head toward the building. “Vampire?”
I stilled. “How did you guess?”
“The entrance to the human facility is on the other side.” He smiled a brilliant smile that flashed long white teeth. He would still learn to hide those in public. “I didn’t peg you for the vampire-loving type. What with you trying to stake me and all.”
“I’m not,” I said flatly. Speaking of staking, for someone who knew for a fact I’d intended to kill him he was being very casual around me.
“So, are all those stories true?” I wanted to stop myself, but I had to ask. It was about the vampires. I told myself that it was about them, about their lives. I didn’t want to admit to myself that it was also about Connor. That I didn’t want to be disappointed in him.
“Would it make a difference to you if it were? Weren’t you going to kill me anyway?”
I looked down at my hands. I didn’t know the answer to that question, and that pissed me off.
“You don’t seem too worried about it,” I said instead. “The fact that the reason you know me at all is because I was about to kill you.”
“But you didn’t.”
He shrugged and jammed his hands into his pockets. He wore civilian clothes, and if it weren’t for the small telltale signs
and the obvious fangs, I would say he could pass for human. His ability to disguise himself was amusing. I hadn’t met a vampire that could do that. For that matter I haven’t really given any of them a chance.
“I don’t know, maybe I like you,” he said and his words knocked whatever I was thinking out of my head.
“You go for the hard-asses, do you? Handsome man like you? What would Jennifer say?”
His face turned to stone, his lips set in a straight line. “She’s not really the kind of person that fits into this world,” he said.
“Are you talking about the trafficking world, or the vampire one?”
He looked at me for a long time. When he finally spoke it wasn’t to answer my question. We were playing the same game.
He looked down at his shoes. “In another life... Sometimes it takes nearly dying to realize how much time you were wasting on the wrong stuff, and how many people you dedicated yourself to for the wrong reasons.”
I groaned. “I don’t do sagas,” I said. I hated it when people, or vampires in this case, got all emotional on me. It was just something I didn’t do. Emotion was for weaklings. I’d worked hard to push mine far enough away to believe it didn’t exist. I really would have appreciated it if others could do the same.
Connor chuckled. “I want to see you again.”
“See me again?” I echoed because I couldn’t remember any of our meeting where I hadn’t tried to kill him, so it seemed strange. Maybe he wanted a challenge.
“Yeah. Saturday.”
“In the day?”
He shrugged again. “Nighttime would suit me better.” Obviously, I was being stupid. He looked toward the horizon, and then toward jail. “I have to get going,” he said. “One of my friends was locked up for trafficking. Imagine that.”
“Won’t they be looking out for you?”
“It’s hard to find someone when they’re not what you expect.”
I smiled despite myself. “I’ll see you after sunset on Saturday. You have some explaining to do if I want to take my job seriously.”
“That sounds a lot like a compromise to me. I didn’t think you did that often.”
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