Relinquished Hood (Red Hood Chronicles Book 2)

by Kendrai Meeks

  “As in, a female slayer?” I asked, my stomach already broiling from the direction this was going, remembering how Tobias had foreseen this very thing.

  He nodded. “Turns out Inga wasn’t only keeping me here to keep me safe. I’m an investment to her. Slayer blood is... Ach, how do I say it? You remember when I told you that vampires aren’t actually immortal?”

  “Yeah, you said they die after about five hundred years.”

  “Unless they don’t,” he said. “Slayer blood is like a fountain of youth for a vamp. It can heal them, even if they’re on the edge of death. But more than that, it can keep them alive far beyond their natural – or, um, supernatural lifespan. How long, I don’t know. Maybe forever. But I do know as time goes on, as they get further and further from five hundred, they need greater supplies of blood to sustain themselves. You see, Geri. That’s what really happened to the slayers. We didn’t just go extinct. The Ravens killed most of us, but kept some of us alive to breed, to keep as cattle. And now, to fight fire with fire, that’s what Inga’s going to do. As soon as she has a viable female slayer, rendered by genetic therapy, then I’m her stud. Literally. She’s going to use me to create her own herd.”

  “But why? I don’t understand what her motivation would be.”

  “To undermine the Ravens racket,” Caleb said. “Dracula left his entire fortune to Inga. It’s how she pays for all this.” He held out his hands, indicating the posh spread around us. “The Ravens draw enough blood from the slayers they have to sell at a high price to vamps running out of time. It’s funny, right? You’d think 500 years would be long enough for anyone. Just goes to show you, some people are never satisfied. Geri? What’s wrong? You’ve gone as white as a sheet.”

  Why had my mother feared the Ravens would find me? Why had Inga Rosenthorn been open to me coming into her world? Why did Igor Karmarov say I was different in a way he understood, but refused to tell me? Because knowledge was a dangerous thing. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. But what they knew could kill me.

  “Caleb, I think I’m a slayer.”

  A blank stare turned into a gleeful smile as he laughed. “Good one.”

  “No, I mean it. I was attacked by a vampire after he’d been scorched not too long ago. As soon as he drank my blood, he popped up like a freaking daisy on the first day of spring, completely healed.”

  As soon as he understood I wasn’t joking, the Devil hired him as an advocate. “But you’re a hood. You sense wolves and dance around fires on full moons, right?”

  With that question, the pain was back. “Not anymore, I’m not.”

  Caleb looked like he had just reminded me that my puppy had died. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It’s just... It’s impossible, right? There’s no way you could be a slayer.”

  “No, I suppose not.” My shoulders drooped. “But I am still a biology student, and for some stupid reason, I thought if I was, then maybe this trying-to-engineer-a-female-slayer problem would be solved. Maybe I could...”

  ...have a purpose again.

  ...be special again.

  ...not be alone, like you are.

  The words died in my throat, but Caleb, the consummate playboy, picked up the threads.

  “Geri Kline, are you saying you’re into me?”

  “I swear to god, Caleb, if I say yes, and your next answer is ‘but not as much as I’d like to get into you,’ wink, wink, I will kill you – even if that’s tantamount to slaying a bald eagle.”

  But the slayer wasn’t laughing. Instead, he was looking at me – looking at me – with an intensity I hadn’t sensed for the better part of a year. Jess and I fooled around a bit, but it had never gotten to an emotional level. He looked at me like Cody used to, like he wanted to eat me.

  Caleb leaned in, his lips hovering over mine. “I’ve wanted to do this since the first time I saw you.”

  I swallowed my words, hoping my nerves would copy. “I... I haven’t... I don’t...”

  The moment his lips touched mine, I knew anything I said on the contrary would be a lie. All too soon, it was over, and the cool air fell over my face. I opened my eyes to see him on his feet, holding out his hand.

  “Let me distract you for a while.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I was going to kill that alarm clock. I just had to find it first.

  “Caleb!”

  The slayer gave up a dull grunt when I poked him in the side. How could this man move so fast on his feet, and yet, be completely unresponsive in his sleep? Any vampire able to keep his eyes open during the daylight hours could sneak up on him while leading a marching band.

  “Caleb! Where in the hell is your alarm clock?”

  His attempt at speech came out as a single, yawned frankenword. “Idonthaveanalarmclaa....”

  The trill tones repeated, and I realized that the sound wasn’t a clock at all. It was my cell phone, which if I remembered right, was in my pants pocket on the floor.

  The slayer rolled over as I pushed his arm off of me and tumbled out of bed. I grabbed my clothes and waddled out of the room. Tobias’s number lit the screen, and I noticed that a series of missed calls and unread text messages preceded it.

  I shut the door of Caleb’s bedroom behind me and began to redress myself while balancing the cell on my shoulder like a boss. “Hello?”

  The wolf huffed out. “Oh my god, you’re alive.”

  “Alive? Of course I’m alive.”

  “You didn’t come home from work, and then I called Igor and he said you’d left the same time he did, and... Where are you? Are you hurt? Are you trapped? Whatever it is, I’ll come get you.”

  “I’m...” Blind emotions twisted my insides. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep my relationship with Caleb secret. It’s just that I didn’t think it was any of his business. “I’m still at WWL, actually.”

  “Since this morning?” The relief in his tone gave way to wariness. “Doing what?”

  I balanced my forehead on the fingers of my free hand. “Things.”

  “Like, the sort of things that would help us figure out why my mate was kidnapped and my brother, murdered?”

  The man really knew how to ratchet up the guilt. “Not so much.”

  “Oh, see, because I thought that might be it, being as that was supposedly the whole reason you were there.”

  “Tobias, I...”

  “Don’t.” He cut me off with growled words. “Unless your next words are ‘I actually did find something out’ or ‘I’m about to go look around for clues’ then I don’t want to hear it.”

  My hackles went up, my nails digging so hard into the heel of my hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked down and saw blood.

  “Look, I’m the one who’s been coming here for the last two months, sticking my neck out, putting my own life on the line, to snoop around. I even tried to take my rites for you. And you know how that ended: my mother relinquished my birthright. Now I have no hood, no clue, and no more interest in your monopolizing my guilt. I have my own uses for it, okay? So you can just back off.”

  “Back off? I’ve been here since June, WALKING DOGS JUST TO GET THROUGH THE DAY. I’m a pack animal, isolated, but have I gone out trying to socialize? Have I tried adjusting to the city? Do I have ANY OTHER PURPOSE than to protect you and hope you just do what you god damned promised me you were going to do? How much further back do you want me? What, should I take my wolf twenty-four hours a day so you can keep me on a leash and check me into to doggy daycare while you’re at work?”

  “I’m not trying to emasculate you, but we both need to come to terms with the fact that I failed. I don’t even have my innate power anymore. I’m sorry, Tobias, but if there is an answer here, or even a clue about what they were doing to your mate and your brother, I don’t have a way of finding it.”

  His growl ripped across the phone. “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck rose. “What do you mean?”

&nb
sp; “Just what it sounds like.” In the background, a door slammed shut. “If you think you failed, what choice does that leave me? Let’s see if having a werewolf show up in their lobby at WWL shakes some fruit from the tree. Your boyfriend had been trying to find me, after all. The ones who killed Kara and Nick must want me for something.”

  “No, Tobias, you can’t. They’ll— Oh, my god!”

  As the call ended, every nerve in my body came alive as Caleb laid a hand on my shoulder from behind. Before I could rationalize my actions, I had leapt to my feet and had him on the floor, his hands pinned over his head, my legs straddling his waist. He let me, of course. As fast as he could move, and as slow as the human version of myself was, there was no way it was otherwise.

  His eyes took on a sultry sizzle. “Huey Geri is aggressive. I like it.”

  My body fought my heart on a course of action. The body wanted the slayer beneath me, but for all the wrong reasons. He would distract me from the pain brewing in my heart, remembering that a werewolf with nothing to lose was on his way to this building, intending to do something that would surely get him killed.

  “I guess you’re still a night person.” Caleb loosened his hands from my grip and moved them to my hips.

  “I didn’t say no this morning because of the time of day.”

  “You didn’t say no. As I recall, your response was ‘not yet.’ That not yet gave me a lot of hope.”

  My sense of determination felt like a marble statue on a pillar of sand. “Caleb, stop...”

  “Are you sure?” He reached up and landed a hand on the back of my neck, pulling my mouth towards his.

  I let a ghost of a kiss pass before taking back control. “Something’s come up.”

  “I know you’ve never done this before, but that’s what it’s supposed to do.”

  “No, Caleb, I don’t mean your... Look, I have to go.”

  Caleb closed his eyes, exhaling his frustration as I crawled off of him. His libido came into check as he wove his fingers behind his head, looking like a cool-as-ice kid from an anime. “Anything I can help with?”

  “Not unless you want to talk a crazy werewolf out of rampaging his way into the WWL building.”

  His cool lost some chill. “A werewolf in Chicago? And he’s coming here? Why?”

  I offered him a hand off the floor. “Because he’s convinced that the vamps here know something about the reason his mate died. And, because I’m relinquished, I’m powerless to stop him.”

  “Relinquished? You mean, that ‘de-hooding’ thing? So, you can’t do anything special? I thought you were just being dramatic this morning.”

  He didn’t mean that to hurt. Ignore the pain. “This hasn’t happened to anyone else in my lifetime; I’m not sure the full effect. I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something, even if I am a nobody now.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “You think you’re a nobody just because you’re not a hood anymore?”

  “What I mean is, I’m on my own. I’m going to stop this, but the consequences? They’ll be entirely on me. I can’t ask you to get involved. You’re too valuable.”

  My phone in pocket, I walked to the door and slid my shoes on where I’d thrown them the morning before. Suddenly, I jerked back, tugged by the belt loops on my jeans. The slayer threw me back against the hall of his entryway, forcing air whooshing from my lungs. The intensity in his eyes sent my heart racing. Either he was going to kiss me hard, or kill me – possibly with the same act. My mouth had no sooner opened to ask what the hell he was doing then his hand came down over it, silencing me. His eyes rolled to the left as his head jerked. The heat within me cooled when I heard the knock, and froze when I heard the voice that came over the security call-in speaker.

  “I know you’ve got one of your love bunnies in there, Caleb. Don’t worry, I’ll enthrall her. She won’t remember anything.”

  The next thing I knew, I was inside a bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, as Caleb reached inside the shower stall to wench on the water.

  “Don’t talk. Vampires can’t smell for shit, but they can hear a mouse sigh across a football field,” he said without any explanation. “I’ll get rid of her as soon as I can. Do not come out of this bathroom until I come and get you, okay?”

  Ignoring his directions, I whispered as quietly as possible. If vampires could really hear that well, I was pretty sure a slayer would have the same gift to some degree. “She would have heard me talking already if that’s true.”

  Caleb made short work of drying his hands on a towel by the sink. “All these executive units are more or less soundproofed, or the vampires they’re meant for would never get any rest. She must have opened up the call button and heard your heart beat. Luckily, she didn’t hear your voice, or she’d have busted the door down.”

  “Inga already knows we met. I’m pretty sure she thinks we already slept together.”

  What I thought would be a bombshell didn’t make the impression of a raindrop in Lake Michigan. “She specifically told me not to sleep with you. Why she thinks she can make those kinds of decisions for me is crazy. I’ll explain more later. Just, please, stay here and don’t say a word.”

  “But, Tobias—”

  He leaned in and pecked a kiss on my lips. “Stay.”

  And then with his crazy ability to move like lightning, Caleb was gone.

  I put my ear to the door, straining to hear. If it had been a week ago, no problem. Without even my innate abilities, I only got every third or fourth word, mottled by the door and the steady drum of the shower hitting an empty stall. If vamps could hear so well, would Inga think it weird that the water obviously hit only the shower stall floor and not anything else? I grabbed a set of towels rolled up in a basket and threw them under the spray, altering the acoustic profile.

  Every moment that ticked by added weight to my shoulders. With each breath, Tobias came closer and closer to doing something stupid. Like others of her kind, Inga probably rose for the night about a half hour before sunset. That meant I had less than that to find a way out of this bathroom and sidetrack the werewolf. Yes, he could change at will anytime he wanted, but a werewolf could only grasp the height of his power after sunset. As irrational an action as Tobias was about to take, I prayed he’d stall long enough for that advantage alone.

  With a shaky hand, I reached for the handle. If I snuck out of Caleb’s apartment unseen, would there be any reason for Inga to think I was anything more than one of Caleb’s random hookups?

  No oracle or imagination in the world could have prepared me. From a half inch sliver, the shocking view came into focus: at the end of the entryway, Caleb stood, his back against a wall, and Inga Rosenthorn, pinning his arms over his head as she sucked eagerly at his neck.

  Instinct overrode rational thought. The door almost came off its hinges, I threw it back so hard. In the time that passed from my discovery until I was attempting to pull the vampire off my – Friend? Boyfriend? Lover? – Caleb had one moment to fix me with wide, pleading eyes, fearing that my life was about to end.

  For a moment, I thought it did. As my vision blurred and my body slammed to the floor, I couldn’t feel my arms, my legs, my back. Inga had me at her mercy as the hallway light behind her formed a halo around her head. Her long, elegant fingers curled around my windpipe, cutting off my airway.

  “You!” the vampire gurgled through the blood still sliding down her throat. From the right corner of her mouth, one crimson dot drew a line down, tempting gravity on the curl of her chin. “Bad timing, Miss Kline. Your mother has disowned you. I could take your life this moment if I wanted, no repercussions.”

  Desperation corralled thoughts running through my mind into shoddy pens in danger of being trampled. Was this it? Was I going to die? Would my mother regret disowning me when she found out? Would Amy mourn me? Would Cody’s pack rally to avenge me? Would Tobias ever find out the truth? Would he wise up and call off his kamikaze mission, or would my death be th
e first of others tonight?

  Inga snarled. With all the strength it took to flinch she could crush my windpipe. That, or slam my head backwards, crushing my skull. So why didn’t she? Her teeth clamped, she hissed, winced, fighting pain. But pain from what?

  Then, I saw it.

  The lines at the corners of her eyes softening. The skin of her neck becoming supple. The creases around her mouth filling in. Inga never looked old to my eyes; if forced to venture a guess, I’d have said she was in her late thirties when turned. But that all changed in a heartbeat, as before my very confused eyes, the years slicked from her face, leaving her looking no more along in life that I was.

  “Inga!”

  The hallway blazed bright. When Inga dropped me and moved aside, turning toward Caleb, I saw why. On the balls of his hands danced two solaria, poised and ready to burn her to ash. The look on his face threatened to redefine the term “cocky.” He bounced the orb in his right hand like it was a baseball.

  “Your call, sweetheart. It would be a shame for you to come out of here all crispy when I probably just gave you enough life to keep you going for a few more months.”

  What?

  “You!” My back felt like it’d been whacked with a crowbar, but I managed to sit up. Inga glared at me like a bug that had crawled out from under the refrigerator. “He’s keeping you alive. You’re... You’re keeping him prisoner so he can keep you alive.”

  The math added up. I’d never been a history nut, but I did remember enough about Dracula to know the Vlad the Impaler had lived about five hundred years ago. If he’d died fifty years ago, like Caleb had said, it stood to reason that any of his children might be reaching the end of their unnatural lives as well.