Connor didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to fight. His eyes were on me, and they were so soft I felt like I was going to break open and everything that was trapped inside was going to fall out. The atmosphere around us changed, became thick again. Thick and warm and… safe. I hadn’t felt like this since I was a little girl.
“Don’t do this,” Connor said softly, finally talking. The atmosphere wrapped us in a cocoon, and I was suddenly aware how close our bodies were together, how gentle his eyes were with the lack of fear.
I opened my hand and the stake clattered to the floor. Slowly I eased off with my arm, and then buried my face in my hands. Connor still didn’t move away from me, his warmth stayed exactly where it was. Instead he lifted his hands, both of them, and cupped my cheeks. He moved slowly, like I was a scared animal that he didn’t want to startle. His face inched closer to mine, and the next thing I knew his lips came down on mine, and he kissed me.
Electricity shot through my body and my skin everywhere tingled with the sensation. The tips of his fangs were on my bottom lip, his mouth covered mine, and he reduced me to a melting mess. I wasn’t a vampire hunter, who wore leather and carried guns and killed for a living. I was the damsel in distress that had been running from my hell all my life, and inwardly I was begging Connor to save me.
His kissing became urgent, his arm wrapping around my body. The gun at my back bit into my skin and the one under my jacket pushed into my ribs. I stopped Connor and pulled them both out, laying them on the counter. He raised his eyebrows.
“I see you brought back up. In case the stake didn’t work?”
“Standard issue vampire-hunter kit,” I said. He didn’t let me keep talking. His pulled me harshly into his body and kissed me, hard. We tumbled through the house, knocking things off and banging doors until we finally made it to his bedroom. We collapsed on the bed, his body on mine, and I could feel his muscles ripple under his skin, feel his body hard and able, even though he never used it against me to save himself. He was only using it now, to save me.
He undressed me, stripping me of my holsters and sheaths until I was naked. In the almost-black room I could feel his eyes on me, tracing every inch of my body. I knew he had night vision that was better than mine and he saw me perfectly. I could smell his arousal, his lust for me in the room around us. It wrapped around me like a cloak and my body responded to him.
He lowered himself onto me, and everything was forgotten. He managed to clear my mind and work my body into a state of ecstasy, making me forget where my body ended and his began. And afterward, when everything was over and I lay in the crook of his arm, really naked without anything to define me, listening to the drum of his heart through his chest, running my forefinger over the tips of his fangs, I fell asleep. For the first time in sixteen years I didn’t have a gun under my pillow.
Chapter 13
I woke up to darkness. The room around me was suffocating with it, and where the window should have been was only a vague shape of black. I sat up and looked around. Everything was different.
A movement next to me startled me, until I realized it was Connor. I wasn’t in my home, I was in his. And I was in his bed, with him. Naked. I tried to orientate myself. It was Sunday, sometime, but the darkness in the house made it hard to tell what time it was. I didn’t know how long I’d slept.
I slipped from underneath the covers and found my clothes on the floor, half-tangled with my holsters which were empty. I felt vulnerable without my guns. I padded to the kitchen and found them on the counter, my stake on the floor near the wall. When I found my phone, also on the floor, it was dead.
I put the guns back into their holsters, and flipped on the kitchen light. The darkness was chewing at me and I didn’t want more of it. I wanted the shutters to open. I wanted to get out of the house, but I couldn’t do any of it. I didn’t know where or how. I’d spent a lot of my adult life breaking into vampire homes. I hadn’t spent a lot of times breaking out of them.
Aspen would be worried about me. My stomach turned and an iron fist of anxiety clamped down on it when I thought about her. I would lose her if I didn’t kill Connor. Why the hell hadn’t I killed him? Instead I’d gone and slept with him.
Great move, Adele. Great move.
Dammit.
There weren’t a lot of options. The only way was to get rid of Connor. No matter what it did to me. Because losing Aspen would do worse. There was no pain that would compare to losing her. These were facts, and it didn’t matter how things were.
Connor appeared behind me before I managed to smell him or feel him. He’d crept up on me noiselessly. I spun around and pulled out my Smith & Wesson, pointing it at his head. He froze in his tracks, slowly lifting his hands.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
He rolled his eyes and dropped his hands. I was getting tired of him not feeling threatened by me. I had a gun this time. I could keep far enough away from his so that his body, his eyes, everything that made him Connor, wouldn’t distract me.
“Are we back to that again?” he asked. “Dammit Adele, I thought we’d passed that. We just slept together, for god’s sake.”
I shook my head, forcing emotions down that threatened to bubble up. I could still feel his body against mine, the imprint of him between my legs. I ignored it.
“She’ll die,” I said, my voice so soft it didn’t sound threatening at all. “Your master vampires, they’re going to kill her if I don’t kill you.” Tears ran over my cheeks and the anger that came with it licked through my body like a wet tongue. “I can’t lose her. Don’t you see? There’s no other way out of this.”
He took a step closer to me. “Will you just let me—“
I didn’t give him a chance. I fired the gun. I hadn’t intended to hit him. The gun bit a hole into the concrete wall behind him, big and ugly and raw. He ducked and then turned to look at the hole.
“What the hell, Adele?” he exclaimed. “This isn’t you.”
“Oh no, that’s where you’re wrong,” I said and now my voice sounded a lot more like my own. “This is exactly me. This is what I do, Connor. You can’t love someone like me because I kill people like you. I kill vampires.”
“Will you just calm down and we can talk about this? Maybe we can figure this out. I know them, I know what they can do. And I know what they can’t.”
“I know what they can do, too,” I said, not taking my gun off him. He moved slowly toward the table that stood in the corner, and sat down on the chair. “They can kill Aspen.”
He sighed. “I don’t even know who that is. I don’t know anything about you, and every time I think I’ve figured something out you pull the rug from underneath me.”
I took a deep, shaky breath. Could I tell him? Could I trust him? I should just kill him. I knew it. But he was so casual, and leaning on his knees with his elbows the way he did now just made him look tired, even though he’d just woken up. I dropped my gun, letting it hang by my side, but my finger was still ready to slip onto the trigger. I wasn’t going to let down my guard with him again. Weird things happened when I did.
“She’s my sister,” I said. “She’s in a wheelchair, she can’t fend for herself. And she’s like me.”
“Like you? Wild and unpredictable? Good with guns? Beautiful?”
That last comment threw me off-balance and I whipped the gun back up, pointing it at his face. I bit my bottom lip.
“Easy, easy there,” Connor said, pulling his hands back up, “It was just a compliment. I was trying to keep things light. I won’t mean it if you don’t want me to.”
A tremble ran up my arm from where my finger was on the trigger, and shook through the rest of my body.
“A half-breed,” I whispered. Someone ought to know. If I died, they would know. And if he died my secret would die with him. What did I have to lose? It was a question I’d been asking myself for a long time, and I still didn’
t have an answer.
Connor looked like the sun had suddenly come up for him. Maybe he was thinking about the times I’d nearly managed to kill him, the way I moved but my lack of fangs.
“I’ve heard of half-breeds before,” he said. “I just didn’t know they were real. How can you kill vampires if you’re half-vampire yourself?”
Wasn’t that the question to ask?
“Because vampires are what put Aspen in a wheelchair, and killed my mother.”
“And your father?”
“He was the vampire that did it.”
He looked at me, and I could see him thinking about it. He put all the pieces together, the jail, me, my job. And then he nodded slowly.
“Tell me about Aspen,” he said softly. I sighed and walked toward the table where he sat, sitting down opposite him. I put the gun down on the table, ready to grab, but the barrel didn’t face him.
“She’s like Christmas morning,” I said. “The kind of person everyone wished they knew just by looking at her. She’s thin and frail like a wisp, but she’s fought through one of the hardest battles I know. People think she’s weak, but she’s stronger than I am.”
“You’re pretty strong, if you can handle all of this,” he said, nodding toward the gun.
“She deals with everything I do, without killing anyone for it. She’s a good person.”
“Hey,” Connor said and put his hand on mine. I flinched but I didn’t pull it away. “You’re not a bad person.”
I snorted. “Now you’re just trying to be nice,” I said. “I kill vampires, Connor. Even though I believe they have feelings and lives and loved ones. Just because the law doesn’t have a fit when some disappear the way it does with humans, does not make me a good person for doing it.”
Conner sat back in his chair, taking his hand and his warmth with him, and I felt his absence acutely.
“Well, maybe you should just fix it, then,” he said. “It’s not too late to change.”
“You should know,” I said. He grinned half-heartedly and looked down at the gun that lay between us.
“You know, if I were human they would have killed me. When I found out about the trafficking I wanted to put a stop to it, but nothing is that easy.”
“Police?” I asked.
“No… they would arrest me. All the paperwork is in my name. I didn’t think I’d even survive a trial. My company definitely wouldn’t, and I wanted to leave a legacy behind. Something my children could take over one day. But now… I don’t think that’s going to happen, either.”
“What, your girlfriend not the vampire loving type?” I said and smiled. Jennifer was much too perfect for something like that. Connor’s smile vanished when I mentioned her name.
“Not exactly. She wouldn’t have me now. Besides I didn’t really think she was in it for the love, anyway.”
“No, rather for your money, right? Why else would she keep all that a secret?”
Connor’s head shot up and his eyes were a cold kind of blue. “What did you say?”
I suddenly realized I maybe shouldn’t have said something. Connor looked so hurt I wanted to kick myself. And that was saying something considering I’d been willing to kill him eight out of ten times.
“But you slept with me, so you’re not really in a good place to beg for her mercy right now,” I said lightly, trying to change the topic.
“She kept what secret?” Connor asked, narrowing his eyes at me. He was like a dog that had bitten into something and wouldn’t let go now.
“I don’t think…” I started but his face stopped me. Anger and hatred poured out of him in waves that smelled rotten. I wondered for a second if this was what I looked like to other people. Suddenly his hand scooped up the gun so fast I couldn’t react quickly enough, and before I knew it he was pointing it at my head.
One thing I suddenly realized was that the business end of my gun was not the end I wanted to be on.
“Now, don’t do anything rash,” I said calmly. Connor had stood up and I pushed myself up too, moving slowly so he wouldn’t do anything stupid. The gun burned me where it pointed at my skin. Right at my heart. Something told me Connor had worked with fire arms before.
“You do this all the time, don’t you?” Connor said. “I kind of see the appeal.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said, still keeping my voice calm. “This is just a misunderstanding. You knew Jennifer sent me. I was just on the wrong tangent.” I would say anything to him until I was on the other side of that gun.
“Tell me what you know,” he said.
“I don’t know anything—“I started but his finger curled around the trigger and I knew I was running out of time.
“I found out she knew more about the trafficking than she let on, but other than that I don’t know anything. I went to confront her for lying to me after I found your article, and I left when I couldn’t stand being around her anymore.”
“She knew about it? Why did she keep it quiet from me?”
“Because she said…” I swallowed hard. I hated being the one that ruined the image of a loved one. I knew what that did to someone. “She said it was because she needed you to marry her. She couldn’t go back to the hole her ex had left her in.”
His face fell and his attention wasn’t on me for two seconds. If I moved now maybe I could get the gun away from him and swing it all around again so that I was in charge. But his eyes slid back to me. “Her ex. It always comes back down to that. I’m so sick of hearing how I compare, how her life is exponentially better because of me when at the end of the day I know it’s just about money.”
I groaned inwardly. I didn’t like having a gun on me. I didn’t like emotionally unstable people. I didn’t like monologues and I didn’t like it when someone made their problems mine.
“Look, just put the gun down, okay? Your drama is between you two. All I was doing was finishing a job.”
“Who’s job, hers or the masters’?” he asked.
I didn’t think about it. I didn’t take the time. I’d been distracting him with conversation, and now that he was in a puddle of confusion I made my move. I was in his face before he knew it, and I snatched the gun out of his hand. I pressed it against his chest, and squeezed the trigger. The clap of the bullet was loud and tiles splintered against the wall behind Connor. And he was gone.
A thick black mist hung in the air and I sank into a squat to get away from it, but Connor had dematerialized faster than my finger had been on the trigger.
Where had he gone to in the middle of the day? It didn’t matter. He was still alive, which meant I had to get to Aspen.
I found the electrical box and flung it open. I didn’t know anything about fuses and switches, so I took my blade and cut through the whole lot of wires in front of me. The shutters slid open and all the lights went out. I walked out the front door into bright sunlight, and got on my bike.
It took me all of five minutes to get to Aspen’s neighborhood and knock on the door. When Zelda opened she blinked at me, surprised.
“Oh, Adele. It’s you. We weren’t expecting you,” she said, glancing over my shoulder.
“Who were you expecting?”
“Aspen is expecting a Mr. Joel.”
Joel was coming by? I pushed passed Zelda and walked into the house. Aspen was in the dining room at a table, setting out a tray with mugs for coffee.
“Adele! Where have you been? I tried calling but I only got voicemail and I know you never check those.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve been busy. Are you alright?” I walked to the wall and plugged my phone in to charge.
“I’m fine,” she said, smiling at me. “Joel’s coming over.”
“Why?”
“He contacted me yesterday and asked if he could set up the cameras you asked for.”
The cameras I’d asked for? I kept the questions off my face. He was a hell of a friend.
“I’m so glad he’s coming,” I said and the relief was co
mplete when it washed through me. It was a way I could keep her safe until I found Connor. I had no idea what had just happened between us, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t just going to show up any time soon after that.
“What’s wrong?” Aspen asked. I didn’t know what my face showed, but I cleared it.
“Nothing,” I said. “When is he coming?”
“Any minute. Zelda thought it was him when the doorbell rang.”
I sat down and we waited together after I borrowed a charger and plugged in my phone.
“How’s your case coming along?” Aspen asked.
“My case?” I had to make a point of keep track of my lies with her, I told myself.
“The one where you were looking for the guy that was kidnapped.”
“Oh.” That one. The one where that guy and I had slept together and now wanted to kill each other. “He’s a vampire, after all. A lot of people are after him.”
“I’m sorry,” Aspen said, reaching over and putting her hand on mine.
“It’s okay. He’s different than the rest. I hope for his sake they find him, because I don’t want to.”
Aspen didn’t answer and when I looked up at her she was smiling.
“What?”
“You smell like frustration,” she said. “Frustration and sex.”
“I do not!” I cried out. “You’re being inappropriate.”
“You slept with someone! You slept with someone and now you’re angry. You like him, don’t you? Only men make you this angry.”
“I don’t like anyone. In fact, there are some people I hate all the more now.”
Aspen smiled, dropping the topic, but she gave me a knowing look. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t like anyone. Besides, if I liked Connor I wouldn’t have nearly blown a hole in his chest, would I have? Aspen was being absurd.
We talked about other things. I asked about her week. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in a while. The time ticked by, and after an hour had passed I frowned.
“He’s running very late,” I said. Joel was never late.
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