Day Reaper

by Melody Johnson

  “There’s something else you don’t know.” Dominic reached for my knee again, his thumb stroking gently, and I knew that whatever he was about to say would cut deeper than anything else he’d told me so far.

  “What more could there possibly be?” I asked, warily.

  “Jillian is in power, Cassidy. What has she always wanted? What was her ultimate goal?”

  I blinked. “To take control of the coven and rise to Master vampire of New York City.”

  Dominic shook his head. “No, that was just the means necessary to get what she really wanted. Had I given her what she wanted when I was Master, she never would have betrayed me.”

  I gaped as realization dawned. “She was sick of living in secrecy. She wanted humans to know about the existence of vampires.”

  Dominic nodded deeply. “It’s why the Day Reapers attacked, but Jillian was victorious. The Day Reapers are no longer in power to enforce our most sacred law, and Jillian has revealed our existence, and that of the Damned, to the world.”

  “And I’m sure she didn’t hold a press conference for her big reveal,” I said testily.

  Dominic snorted. “Press conference or no, there were cameras and the footage went viral. The hunt, the blood, the destruction and massacre—all of it just a click, a like, and a share away.”

  “What do you know about social media?”

  “I know that the undeniable evidence you sought to prove that vampires existed beyond a shadow of a doubt wasn’t found in a laboratory. The public saw the Damned and their slaughter online, and that was all they needed in order to believe.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “What the hell is Jillian’s endgame in all this?” I raised my hand against Dominic’s opening mouth. “I know, I know; she wanted freedom from your secret existence, but what about afterward? What’s the point of freedom if we’re living in the middle of World War III?”

  Dominic shook his head sadly. “I am no longer in a position to know her mind. Even when I thought I did, I obviously didn’t know her well enough.”

  I grunted my agreement. “Fine. It doesn’t signify anyway; we need to focus on our endgame. Does the government realize this is homegrown or are they pointing the finger at terrorists?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what’s the press coverage? Are they planning a counterattack? Will they be sending in troops or just bomb the problem away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do Greta and Rowens have to say?” I asked. “Surely they know.”

  Dominic just stared at me.

  “You haven’t talked to Greta and Rowens,” I said, deadpan.

  “I couldn’t leave you.”

  I flung my arm out at our ragtag little coven. “What about them?” I turned to face Ronnie, Keagan, Jeremy, Logan, and Theresa, eyeing them each in turn, but no one could meet my eyes, not even Keagan. “Not one of you could leave me? We have friends on the inside, people who might know what we’re up against, and you didn’t ask? The United States’ military might be minutes away from nuking this entire island, and all you can say is I don’t know?”

  Silence.

  Pain sliced through my palms, and I realized that I’d fisted my hands. I was impaling myself on my talons again. Shit.

  Dominic’s hand was suddenly heavy on my shoulder, but the movement of his thumb against my neck was a feather’s flutter. “Greta and Rowens are your friends, not theirs, and barely mine. They only tolerated me and my expertise because of you. Considering who you are now, you must consider the possibility that they may not be your friends anymore either.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t they—”

  Dominic’s hand left my shoulder to cup my cheek. “You are a vampire, and vampires are not their friends.”

  I shook my head, dislodging his touch. “A vampire is what I am. Who I am is Cassidy DiRocco, and not even you can change that.”

  Dominic let his hand drop, but his lips curled in a lopsided grin. “Nor would I want to.”

  “What about Nathan?” I asked. “In the last seven days, you must have at the very least talked to Nathan.”

  Silence. Damning silence.

  “Damn it, you didn’t even tell him I was okay? That I survived?”

  “Your brother is still with Greta,” Dominic said, a miserable mockery of his previous smile from a moment before twisting his scarred lips. “I couldn’t talk to him without risking a confrontation with her.”

  “You could have called him,” I said, and then I froze. “Could you have called him? Are cell phone towers still working?”

  Dominic stared at me strangely for a moment. “The Damned have been hunting in Brooklyn for seven days, not seven years. Cell phones work. Wi-Fi works. Electricity works… well, it works in neighborhoods where the power lines are underground. The Damned did knock down a few power poles and a transformer.”

  I blinked, regrouping. “Great. Then you could have called Nathan.”

  Dominic hesitated for a moment, and I could tell he was hedging the truth when he said, “He didn’t answer the phone.”

  “Whatever,” I grumbled. “I’ll tell him I’m alive myself when I talk to Greta.”

  “I don’t know if leaving the confines of this bunker is a good idea,” Theresa interjected, her voice quiet and steady and as raspy in death as it ever was in life. She wrung her hands. “The city isn’t the same as you remember it. Nothing is.”

  I nodded. “All the more reason to leave. I’ve got to see for myself what we’re facing.”

  Jeremy snorted. “So you can look upon the wreckage and see how far we’ve fallen. So you can see with your own eyes how badly we failed?”

  I unclenched my hands, carefully unsheathing my claws from my palms. “This isn’t about failure or blame. I need to see the city and what’s left of it for myself, so I can see how fiercely we need to fight to get it back.”

  Chapter 4

  Travelling from Dominic’s underground safe house near the far side of Prospect Park in Brooklyn to Kings County Hospital Center should have been a fifteen-minute taxi ride, sans traffic—but even then, twenty tops, assuming, of course, there were taxis to hail and traffic to contend with. There weren’t. Cars sat gridlocked in the streets, but they didn’t move when the lights turned green. Drivers didn’t honk their horn, scream obscenities, or flip the bird when the cars in front of them remained motionless. There weren’t any drivers. The sidewalks were deserted, too, except for the scattering of purses, pumps, and briefcases that people had left behind in their haste to run. Their lives had been more important to them than their belongings, but they hadn’t escaped with either.

  Bodies littered the streets and sidewalk. Some still had their hearts intact. Some had a crater in their chest cavity where their heart had been, and some didn’t even have anything resembling a chest, just blood and the spill of internal organs. As reluctant as I’d been to choke down the additional three glasses of blood that Dominic had forced down my throat before I showered and travelled to meet with Greta, I was unaccountably grateful for his foresight and insistence. I grieved for my city and her lost lives, but that didn’t prevent me from salivating over the smell.

  I remembered having a similar reaction when Jillian had leached onto my mind; I’d felt her physical reaction to the sight and smell of blood as my own. Her cravings had been horrifying and undeniable, and now they were my cravings. Thanks to Dominic, however, as delicious as that blood would have smelled, I wasn’t hungry. These were dead humans; their blood smelled stale and unappetizing, and I could move through the streets without diving headfirst into the gore.

  As inconvenient as not having public transportation might have been, walking through the unmoving traffic and around bodies and debris wasn’t really what made an hour walk stretch into three. Had I left by day, I could have tra
veled much faster under the protection of the sun where not even Jillian and her army of the Damned could touch me, but that would have meant not only facing my final transformation into a Day Reaper, which I wasn’t wholly ready to confront—I was just barely holding it together as a regular vampire—but also traveling alone, which was equally unacceptable. If I barely recognized my new self, how could I expect anyone else to see the creature I’d become and accept it? I wasn’t ready to confront Greta and Meredith and Rowens and Nathan as a vampire on my best day; although this was decidedly not that day, I suspected that that day wouldn’t dawn anytime soon, and if the state of the city was any indication, we didn’t have the luxury to wait.

  With that logic in mind, we’d only waited until the sun had set before leaving the safe house, and even then, we’d slunk shadow to shadow, human-slow to avoid detection. Jillian hadn’t attacked Dominic’s safe house, perhaps because the rooms were well hidden, but maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t found us because she wasn’t looking. After slitting my throat and gaining the coven’s favor, she might think us well and truly dead, and far be it for us to correct her. So instead of tapping into my new abilities and strength, the only vampire super-skills I employed throughout our three-hour, ten-block nocturnal journey downtown were patience and stealth, which in and of themselves really were super-skills. What I’d thought was Dominic’s ability to materialize from the shadows was simply the ability to move really fast from shadow to shadow and remain stone-still within their concealing darkness. Such an ability didn’t seem particularly impressive, not compared to magically materializing from thin air, until a group of Damned converged on a café a half block ahead of us.

  There were five of them. Three rained from the sky like missiles, breaking through the roof of the café headfirst. The other two landed on either side of the building and waited. Dominic and I waited, too, unmoving, unblinking, and unseen in the shadows of the alley across the street. A scream pierced the silence, punctuated by a round of gunfire, both of which abruptly stopped before their echoes had even really begun. Another minute passed in silence.

  The whining scrape of plastic on plastic shifted the air. If not for my enhanced hearing, the night would have remained silent, but I wasn’t the only one with superhuman hearing who could detect the second-floor window of the café open. A young girl slipped through the crack. I wasn’t the only one who could hear the accelerated beats of her heart. I wasn’t the only one who could taste the brown sugar, vanilla scent of her shampoo, or smell the cloying, burned-hair scent of her grief and fear.

  I stepped forward, unsure exactly what I was about to do but needing to do something. Dominic wrapped his hands around my waist and yanked me back into shadow. I opened my mouth to argue—we could help this girl and still make our meeting with Greta. Someone needed to do something—and in those two seconds, one to open my mouth and the second to inhale in preparation to speak, one of the Damned waiting on the street jumped up onto the window ledge, punched its clawed fist into that little girl’s chest, and ripped out her heart. She didn’t even scream.

  The creature tipped its head back, upending the heart whole into its mouth, and the little girl tumbled from the roof like a limp doll, landing with a hard crunch on the pavement. I wasn’t the only one who heard her skull crack against the sidewalk on impact. I wasn’t the only one who choked on the release of her bowels or felt the shudder of her last breath after she’d already been butchered and fallen, but I was the only one who cared.

  I glared back over my shoulder at Dominic, sickened and needing a target.

  Dominic wouldn’t meet my gaze. Instead, he pulled my body flush against his with one hand around my waist and cupped his other hand around my ear. I felt the movement of his lips against my cheek as he whispered, “They haven’t noticed us yet because they’re distracted by the hunt, but once they finish, they’ll hear your outrage like the police siren it is. We must remain under the radar. Calm yourself. Anchor your emotions.”

  I don’t know how, I thought, but then, Dominic knew that and continued without me having to admit my ignorance.

  “Focus on the brush of my breath against your ear, and when you start to feel desire, focus on the thought of me not speaking to your brother, and when you start to feel anger, focus on being reunited with Greta and Meredith, and when you start to feel nervous—”

  I squeezed his arm where my hand was resting on his bicep, understanding the gist of it. Learning how to hone my vampire senses would be more enlightening than I’d imagined with Dominic as my teacher. All the times that I couldn’t quite discern Dominic’s kaleidoscope emotions, all the times I’d thought him conflicted or cold—maybe he’d just been hiding one, strong, very unconflicted emotion.

  I rotated my emotional kaleidoscope as Dominic instructed while the Damned dismembered the girl and thrashed her body to shreds right there on the sidewalk. Presumably, the three Damned butchered whoever remained inside the café, too, but there were no more screams, there was no more gunfire, and no one else attempted an escape. Five years passed in the span of five minutes while I held my silence and felt everything it was possible to feel about life except for the outrageous tragedy in front of me. Eventually, there were no more beating hearts for the Damned to eat, no more flesh on which to beat out their rage, and Dominic’s emotional kaleidoscope worked. They didn’t sense our presence and moved on.

  I again opened my mouth and inhaled to speak, but this time, Dominic spoke before I could voice my complaint. “If you had interfered with their hunt, we would have lost all advantage of Jillian believing us dead,” he said, his voice infuriatingly calm, like a parent lecturing a small child on why they couldn’t have dessert before dinner.

  “How could you stand by and watch that thing eat her heart and do nothing? She was just a little girl!” I kept my voice to a whisper, not wanting to attract the attention of the Damned, because Dominic was right. If the Damned discovered us it would blow our advantage, but just because Dominic was right didn’t mean it felt right.

  “What I want to do and what I must do are two separate things. Of course I wanted to prevent the Damned from killing a child, but I must protect our anonymity. If Jillian were to discover us now, we may very well lead her directly to Greta, Rowens, Meredith, Dr. Chunn, and Nathan, whose anonymity is their only protection.”

  I shook my head. “We are their protection. Who was there to protect her?” I said, gesturing at what remained of the girl’s tiny, broken body.

  “There are dozens, if not hundreds of little girls in this city needing protection. Are you willing to protect that one only to forsake all the rest?” Dominic said, his voice so calm and reasonable, I could have happily strangled him. “One life is not worth losing the entire city.”

  “Really? Not one life?” I asked, spreading my arms out like a target. We were in this mess because he’d willingly risked losing the entire city, his entire coven, his own life to save one life: mine.

  His expression darkened. “That’s different, and you know it.”

  “I fail to see how—”

  “One stranger is not worth losing the entire city. One loved one is worth everything.” Dominic sandwiched my face in his palms, his voice no longer quite so calm and collected. “You are worth everything.”

  I wanted to continue arguing my point—that little girl, although a stranger, was worth just as much as any other life—but I couldn’t, not after he’d just qualified me as a “loved one,” not while his hands cupped my face and his eyes bore into mine with the intensity, heat, and destructive power of an incinerator. My words turned to ash before ever leaving my mouth because I felt the same way about him—he was worth everything—and I couldn’t in truth say otherwise.

  I pulled away from Dominic and continued walking shadow to shadow down the block, avoiding the hard truth in his eyes and displayed in broken, bloody detail on the sidewalk across the street.

&
nbsp; Chapter 5

  Kings County Hospital Center’s visiting and office hours were long over, but gaining entrance wouldn’t be an issue. The entire hospital was deserted; not just closed for the night, but completely forsaken. It wasn’t just the vacant halls and empty rooms that gave the building that hollow feeling, although they certainly contributed to it. Like the stranded cars lining New York Avenue and the forgotten shoes, briefcases, and purses scattered across the sidewalk, the hallways, rooms, and office areas had been dropped mid-use and abandoned.

  Clipboards and paperwork remained on the front desk and welcome stations, discarded and unfiled. Gurneys filled the hallways, some with rumpled sheets, some still soiled, and a few spattered with blood. Food hadn’t been packed away in the cafeteria. Gravy and marinara sauce had congealed in their silver tubs, uncooked chicken and beef patties had attracted the attention of flies at the grill station, and trays, plastic ware, and half-eaten meals littered the tables. Chairs were pushed back or overturned; people had obviously fled the cafeteria mid-meal, and I could only imagine the kind of panic that would cause people to leave their personal belongings behind—evidence of the same panic we’d seen in the street.

  Unlike the street, however, the hallways of the hospital were not littered with mutilated bodies. The people who had been here either were hiding, had survived the attack, or more likely, had fled like the young girl futilely attempting to escape from the Damned. I replayed the horror of that memory over in my mind one last time before letting it go. As much as it pained me to admit it, as much as it always pained me, the evidence here and on the street proved that Dominic was right. That girl’s death was a tragedy, but it was only one of a thousand tragedies. We couldn’t save the one if we wanted to save the next thousand.