The Vampire's Rebirth (Fatal Allure Book 11)

by Martha Woods

  I was trying to think of ways that this could be a trap, and there were many, but one thought was overriding all of those thoughts no matter how many popped into my head.

  What if?

  What if this was really all on the level, if he really was here to seek help for his people when we’d sworn that we would do it for anyone who desired to make things better? What if there was a whole convoy of innocent people approaching our city just looking for some hope in such a trying time, what if? Would I really be willing to potentially lose all of that on the mere chance that this was a trap, that he was a dishonest spy and that he was merely trying to fool us into lowering our guard?

  No, no I wasn’t prepared to do that. I made an oath to always try to save innocent life, even if it meant that the bad guys occasionally got away once in a while. Protecting life would always come before taking it for me, that’s how I was going to hold onto my humanity, that’s how I will still be able to look at myself in the mirror and see myself looking back at me, not some monster that I created from one impulsive decision too many.

  “Alright,” I said, “If you think that he’s trustworthy, or at least not immediately dangerous I guess I should see what he wants right?”

  Looking at Vincent, I couldn’t quite tell what he was thinking. “Vincent, are you alright?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I was just trying to figure out what kind of danger could compel a man to propel himself across god knows how many states just to make sure that a city is everything that it’s advertised to be. A man who can appear and disappear seemingly without a trace should be able to handle almost anything, so what has him so scared that he won’t even face it head on?”

  “For all we know he’s the only one that can fight,” Damon suggested, “Hell, we don’t even know for sure that he can fight, we’re just assuming that he can because he could move quietly. Mice move quietly, doesn’t make them warriors for it.”

  “That’s a fair point. Still, I think we should be careful on how we approach him, we have no idea if he has any tricks up his sleeve. I know you want to assume the best…”

  “I want to assume the best in people, that doesn’t mean I’m just going to trust that everything is going to work out fine.” I slid the documents closed and deposited them neatly back onto the pile. “I’m kind of an idealist now, but that doesn’t mean that I just turned stupid overnight.”

  “True enough, true enough.” Helping Damon to his feet, Vincent turned back to me and held his arm out. “Lead the way.”

  * * *

  If there was one benefit to the constant stream of paranormals coming in and out of the bar scene without fear now, it was that the usual hangouts had to upgrade their facilities and adopt something approaching service if they wanted to really appeal to people now. Back when you could count on werewolves or hunters using your bar specifically because they had nowhere else to drink you could cut a few corners, not bother learning how to serve people that were different than the ones that you’d been serving for the last ten years straight, but all of that had changed.

  Now hunters were bringing werewolves with them on their bar crawls, witches were inviting vampires out for a night on the town, the usual hangouts had become flush with clients that no one involved had even seen in a long time, much less made a drink for. At least two of the bars that had been here shut down, evidently once some of their more… unsavory opinions became known to the now more tolerant hunters, who had promptly left once it became apparent that their friends were no longer welcome inside. With their usual crowd deserting them in droves, they didn’t make it more than a month before they were forced to close their doors, and even the less accepting bar owners were forced to acknowledge that the times were indeed changing.

  One semi-comforting thing though was that the bar that we were going to just so happened to be Damon’s old haunt, still filled with many of the same hunters that had been mainstays before, they were just accepting paranormal clients now. This bar, for lack of a better term, is a complete piece of shit in every sense of the word, but it’s… nice to see that nothing about it has changed except some of the night crowd, some paranormals like dive bars too, there’s nothing wrong with that.

  This bar, with its ash on the floor and its jar of pickled eggs on the counter, was a dive in the most stereotypical of ways, and just coming here to have a drink after a long day was enough sometimes to make me feel like I was in my own little private movie, that I was the long suffering sidekick, or maybe the hardened private investigator chasing a lead and a woman before finding out they were one and the same. The reality was that I was just drinking some ten-dollar whiskey from a cloudy glass that had barely been washed, but there were worse ways to spend your night.

  The point of our being here looked to be sat in the corner nursing a full glass of something cheap, his head propped up by his hand and his aura just abysmally cloudy. He’d definitely been in the city for a while if he was already drinking alone, it wasn’t exactly the place that you came if you had a travel companion or two.

  We had some nice museums though, art and history. Culture is very important.

  “Hey there,” I said, keeping my guard up just in case this turned out to be a trap all along. I know that I have Damon and Vincent along with me, they would be more than capable of taking care of any problem all on their own, but I wasn’t going to let them take care of all the dirty work, I still had my pride after all.

  He snapped his eyes up, wiping his arm across his eyes and shaking his head to clear the fog that had no doubt started to form in his mind, especially if he’d been drinking this entire time. “Sorry, I’m sorry!” He said hurriedly, shooting to his feet and bowing sloppily, “I didn’t know if you’d be here so quickly, I might have had one too many…”

  “It’s fine, don’t worry,” I assured him, directing him to sit again, “We’ve all had one too many sometimes, why don’t you have some water to sober up?”

  “Yeah, yeah…” He nodded along, draining the rest of his glass and reaching into the bag next to him. The part of me that would always think like a cop kept my focus on his hands and my grip on the knife in my pocket, but when he pulled out a bundle of papers I forced myself to relax. Not everyone was going to be a threat, that was the old Amy getting in the way. We were mending bridges here, and the foundation was going to be solid, not lined with bones. “I wanted to come here to make sure that the city was safe for the rest of my people… you are the ones who put out the word about that right?”

  “Last I remember we were the only ones trying to do that,” I said, “Unless there’s been a resurgence of tolerance across the country that I missed?”

  “Yeah, big chance of that,” He laughed, slapping his cheek and raising his hand for another drink, “Sorry, my name’s Anthony, I’m the representative that they chose to come and… well, represent, but I’m not in charge or anything. Good thing I suppose, they need all the proper help they can get right now.”

  Damon perked his head up, brows together in conclusion. “Wait, you told me that you were the man in charge!”

  “I… kind of thought that you wouldn’t care otherwise,” He said, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, “Sorry about that.”

  “What’s happening Anthony? Why are you and your people so desperate to come here, and why are bodies dropping all the way? You’ve got to understand that’s not exactly a good sign, right?”

  “Yeah, but that can’t really be helped,” He sighed, “We’ve been hunted for a while now, we could deal with it at home before but over the last few months… I don’t know, it’s like they’ve mobilized or something, we can’t fight back the same way that we could before, they’re just too strong.”

  “How many of you are there? If they’ve managed to chase away a hundred of you…”

  “No, we don’t have nearly that many people with us. I’d say that right now we’ve got about… maybe fifty people total? We’ve got more scattered around the country, relatives
and stuff, but we’re not organized or anything like that.”

  “So why come here?” Vincent asked, “Why not send out word to the rest of your people and meet up with them? Why go through all the trouble and risk of involving us?”

  “When I say scattered I mean scattered, we’d have to go even more out of the way to find even half of them, and even then I don’t actually know if it would do any good.” Running a hand through his hair and taking a sip of his new drink, he shook his head. “Not that some of us didn’t want to try, the brothers wanted to go right over to Georgia and find some of the ones that split off from us a few years ago, but with the kind of people that we’ve got coming after us right now… not even they’re that foolhardy, some things are more important than pride.”

  “Most things, in my experience.” Damon pulled out a seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes searching for any sign of deception. Finding out that Anthony wasn’t actually the one in charge must have done a number on his trust, and with how much keener his senses had gotten in recent weeks I couldn’t blame him for needing to check again. “Who’re the brothers? Are they the ones really in charge?”

  “Right now they are yeah, someone had to step up after our last leader died in a fight, without them we wouldn’t have made it more than two days before they cut us down.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to sound like I’m ungrateful for their leadership, they’re the entire reason we’re still alive to come to you for help, but people need rest and they need to not have to worry about a fight for a day. They’re fantastic warriors, but they forget too easily that some of us aren’t too.”

  “Ah, fight junkies,” Vincent sighed, “That’s going to be annoying, but it’s hardly the first time I’ll have dealt with it. Are they open to doing what we say when we tell them to do it?”

  Anthony laughed, “They’ll probably bitch and moan the entire time, but yeah, they’re not so proud to refuse your help just because you want them to keep their hands to themselves for a little while. Trust me, a few days to get used to everything and you’ll forget that you ever had any troubles with them to begin with.”

  “I don’t even know what the troubles are now,” I said, “I don’t even know anything about you, not even what kind of paranormal you are. Before we even think about saying yes to giving this help, I need to know fully just what and who we’re going to be getting involved with, until then everything else is on hold.”

  I didn’t like not offering to help right away, god knows that he looked every bit the desperate soul needing it, but I can’t just risk everyone else’s lives without knowing what the fight is even going to be. Even Joseph wouldn’t appreciate that, and I’m almost certain that he could give these two brothers a run for their money when it came to blood lust, he would just want to know when the fight was going to be.

  “Alright,” He said, nodding along, “Just tell me what you want to know.”

  “I want to know who you were running from, and I want to know where you came from. Let’s start from there.”

  Taking another gulp of his drink, he reached back into the bag and pulled out a small pouch, emptying the contents on the tabletop and taking a deep breath. “We’re a clan of shifters that have been in the area… going on two hundred years now. Obviously I haven’t been, I’m not that old even with the… weird way that shifters age, but some of the elders are nearing triple digits themselves.”

  “What kind of shifters?” Damon asked, “Wolf? Cat?”

  “Bear,” He replied, pulling out a necklace with a tooth gleaming prominently in the light, “Proud of it too.”

  “Bear? No shit?” Damon widened his eyes briefly, leaning forward slightly and checking the tooth. “Wow, haven’t seen one of you in… going on ten years now. You’re rarer than the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “We don’t really like to announce our presence that much, kind of attracts bad attention from hunters and rival clans. Up until recently there was more of a shoot first ask questions later instinct regarding us.”

  “And that’s eased up?”

  “Yeah, but only because we left. Hunters around where we were didn’t really get the memo that we’re all trying to get along now, they were basically shooting at us all the way out of town.”

  “So it’s hunters you’re running from?” I asked, “Just your average, garden variety hunters? They’re not that threatening are they?”

  Damon snorted, “Thanks Amy.”

  “Mm-mm…” Anthony shook his head. “They didn’t help, but they weren’t the thing that we were running from. We’ve buried tons of hunters before, a fight with them isn’t exactly a new threat to us, what we were running from was something much different.”

  Flipping through file after file, he inspected a photograph closely before passing it across to me. “This man used to be a local hunter, the regular kind before he became the paranormal kind, then after a few years of terrorizing us he just kind of… dropped off the map.”

  “What’s with the ominous black and white photo?” I asked, flapping it in my grip, “It looks like you were putting a hit out on this guy.”

  “We kind of were, but only internally. He was a menace to us, buried more of us than I want to think about, but after he disappeared we figured that someone had finally gotten lucky and taken care of the problem for us.” He sighed, “How wrong we were…”

  “I’m guessing it was too early to celebrate his death?”

  “We thought he was dead for ten years, he just up and vanished one day with every shifter in the state out for his blood, the only reasonable assumption was that one of them had snagged him. We should have known otherwise when no one claimed responsibility but… what can I say, we were just glad to have him gone.” Passing another photo towards me, his expression grew far sourer. “Then three weeks ago someone took this.”

  “What…” I stopped myself, the photo that he’d just handed me was… strange, to say the least. The previous photo had him standing tall, clean shaven, buzz cut, in the midst of his fellow hunters. He looked so strong and proud that he could have been used as a propaganda poster for all I knew, he cut a very intimidating silhouette.

  This next photo though… it took me a few moments to work out that I was even looking at the same person to begin with, the difference that time had made was astounding. Gone were the chiseled and meticulous good looks of your clean soldier, replaced with the worn lines and scruffy beard of a survivor. The tactical gear that he’d been wearing previous was now gone in place of survivalist clothes that looked to be just as old and worn as he was, a bow now sheathed on his shoulder where a rifle had been previous. He looked like he’d gone full Rambo in his ten years of silence, and yet even that wasn’t the starkest change from the photo previous.

  No, that honor belonged to the company that he was now keeping, standing proudly alongside him like they had been comrades since the day they were born, no one in front of the other just… equal. Whereas before that had been expected, hunters were usually very loyal to the point of dying for one another, what I hadn’t expected when I’d picked up the photo was to see what were clearly other shifters replacing what had once been hunters, all of them in the mid stages of transformation and ready to hunt whatever it was that they were there to hunt. Given the context of what we were talking about and the fact that they’d been chased damn near across three states, it was pretty obvious what was being hunted.

  “But… how? He was a hunter right, you’re sure about that?”

  “As sure as anything, saw him with the other hunters, saw them taking oaths together, the whole business. The other hunters even picked up the pace when he went missing, they cared enough about him to try and kill all of us for maybe killing him, but that just means that he didn’t tell them either. What made him leave and do… whatever this is, I have no idea.”

  “This all sounds a little… unbelievable honestly,” I said, turning around to regard Damon, “Right? Maybe now it would make sense bu
t… ten years ago do you think any hunters would have even thought about joining up with a bunch of paranormals, especially ones that they’d been killing only recently?”

  “There’s been a couple over the decades, but none that really made much of an impact or lasted very long. They’d mainly lost their minds and forgotten who their friends were, more often than not they ended up being killed by the very paranormals that they’d joined up with.” He looked over my shoulder, looking closely at the photo and frowning. “Now this guy… he doesn’t look crazy to me. Worn down and older definitely, but you can tell that he knows exactly what he’s doing and why. That’s not a good sign if this is all on the level.”

  “He’s even more dangerous than when we last saw him,” Anthony said, “We thought that he was bad when he had hunters backing him up, but now that he has a whole clan of shifters backing his every move he’s like a monster. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What’s the deal with these shifters?” I asked, “Sounds like all of you were pretty adamant about killing him, even rival clans, what would make one of you overlook everything that had happened?”

  “These shifters haven’t been around for a very long time, a group of our clans got together and forced them out because they were too… well, I know that it’s pretty well known that we don’t like being called animals, but there’s no other way to describe them. They would raid the local towns, snatch children from their beds, attract all kinds of attention and end up getting a few of us killed every few months, they were nightmares.”

  “Forced them out? How’d that go down?”

  “I was only a kid when it happened, but I remember it being bloody. We lost a lot of people over the months that it lasted, but finally one of us managed to kill their elder and send them packing. After that the little truce that some of our rivals started fighting again, and then eventually we all did, but nowhere near as bad as that whole shitshow was.”