Hidden in the Night

by Fall, Carly

  The door opened, and a medium-sized male walked in. He stood just under six feet and was thin. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. He was dressed in jeans, had on a pair of black Reeboks and a Yale sweatshirt. His looks were terribly unremarkable. He smiled at her, revealing his fangs.

  "G'day, Holly," he said in thick Australian accent.

  Holly didn't say anything.

  "You're a silent one, aren't ya?" he said as he came closer to her. "Let's get this straight right now, love. I don't give a shit about conversating with you, okay? But our good friend Victor has hired me and another bloke to get you knocked up. You'll meet him later."

  He smiled again, and ran his eyes over her body. "You're a little thing. I usually prefer my females with a little meat on their bones, but a job is a job, and I think I can get it up and do you."

  Holly felt her knees start to shake, and she was afraid she would collapse to the floor again. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, willing herself to be strong. It was pretty simple; she would not be taken without a fight.

  When she opened her eyes, the male was standing just a couple of feet in front of her, fishing through his pants for some keys.

  "You're a lot cuter than that one next door I have to fuck," he said.

  Holly felt her stomach roll. Unless they had somehow gotten to another female vampire, it had to be Myla he referred to. And that really made her mad. Myla was sweet and warm. She had always called Holly her little pit bull because Holly had a way of inserting herself between Myla and the rest of the world. Holly could take what the world dished out; Myla shrank from it. Holly had been her protector.

  As he came toward her with the keys, Holly decided that one of two things was going to happen: she would get her and Myla out of there, or she would die trying. She watched as he unlocked her arms. She brought them down to her sides and willed them to stop tingling. As the male turned around, Holly launched herself at his back, wrapping her legs around his waist and grabbed his hair. She felt her fangs punch through her gums, and she pulled an Aiden and bit the male in the neck. He screamed, and began spinning around, clawing at his back to get her off. He finally slammed her into the wall, knocking her breath out of her lungs, but she held on. He did it again, and Holly couldn't take it. She let go and fell to the floor, blood running down her face. She was literally seeing stars.

  "You bitch!" he exploded as he slapped her across the face. Holly felt her own blood mix with the taste of his.

  She willed herself to stand up. Her head spun, and her face hurt, but she wasn't done yet. She steadied herself against the wall, measuring the male in front of her. He was feeling the tear in his neck, looking at how much blood he was losing. Holly noted it wasn't nearly enough to do any serious damage.

  He stepped toward her again, raising his fist to hit her again. She brought up her foot and connected solidly with his groin.

  As he doubled over, she ran for the door. She yanked on the knob, and it wouldn't budge. She felt her panic escalate when she heard the footsteps behind her on the tile. She turned to face him, sending her fist out into his face. His head snapped back, but he recovered quickly. With a hiss, he smacked her again, this time much harder, sending her to the floor. She brought her hand up to the side of her face and winced from the pain. As she lay on the floor, black Reeboks came into view. She watched as one came toward her, landing on her stomach.

  She heaved and turned on her side, the air in her body gone. He lifted her to her feet by her hair, and Holly met his eyes. "I would love nothing more than to kill you right now," the male hissed at her.

  "Do it then, asshole," Holly said through her gasps. The male's eyes widened in surprise, and then he smiled.

  "No, love, not yet." He hauled back and his fist connected with her face again. She felt nausea rise from her gut.

  "Peter!" the male yelled. "Get the needles. This little one needs some sedation!"

  Sedation. If they sedated her, she didn't have a chance. She felt tears sting her eyes.

  When the second male came in, they held her down on the ground. She got in another groin shot, a claw to his face, but then the needle pierced her skin. Almost immediately, she felt herself slipping into oblivion, and defeat rolled over her.

  Chapter 29

  Natalie had laid down for sleep she didn't need a few hours ago. She had always enjoyed a good afternoon nap every now and then on Earth, and that hadn't changed since she landed her spot in Heaven.

  However, this afternoon, her blissful nap had been interrupted.

  She woke with stark, cold fear flowing through her.

  She looked around her apartment, and knew that there wasn't anything to fear here. She was in Heaven, for God sakes.

  She flew to the living room and found the remote. She dreaded to push the ON button, but she couldn't stand not knowing what was causing the fear.

  The picture was grainier than before, but she could make out Aiden. He was in a car. The worry on his face made her want to scream.

  He was scared silent.

  She studied the hard lines of his face. Yes, worry and fear lined it, but she could tell there was also determination. The determination was almost as frightening to her as the fear and worry.

  Whatever was going on, he looked like he would kill to resolve it.

  “Oh, Aiden,” she said, and turned off the T.V. She curled up on the couch, unable to watch what would happen next.

  Chapter 30

  On the ride back from Walmart, Aiden felt relief. They had found the phone.

  He also felt a little bad, because he was certain that he had scared the shit out of a kid in the back room.

  When he went through the flaps of the double doors, Aiden immediately spotted the pallet of dog food. He also eyed the Walmart worker who was trying to escape through the back door, his face white with fear. He couldn't have been more that eighteen or nineteen.

  “Stay where you are, son,” Thaddeus had said to the kid. And he had.

  The kid had watched in fascination as Aiden dumped the dog food off the pallet, sending little brown pellets all over the floor. Then the kid got angry.

  “I'm going to have to clean that up, asshole,” he had said.

  Aiden ignored him, and tossed the pallet. There was the phone. Relief flooded through him.

  As he looked at the mess he made, he felt a little bad for the kid.

  “Don't worry,” Thaddeus had said, “we'll get some others in here to help you clean it up.”

  The kid had rolled his eyes, but Aiden and Thaddeus had cornered a couple other Walmart workers on their way out, put them in a light trance, and sent them back to clean up Aiden's mess.

  They broke a lot of roadway laws as they headed back to Thaddeus's house. Speeding, running red lights, illegal lane changes . . . but they were in a hurry to get back to the house and see what Cy could do with the phone. The readout on the dashboard read 9:00 p.m. If Cy could make the inspection of the phone and the traces of the numbers in there quickly, they could be back on the road, and hopefully on the trail of Holly in a couple of hours.

  Cy met them at the elevator and took the phone. As he walked back to Central Control, he began pushing buttons on the phone, mumbling to himself. Aiden and Thaddeus were on his heels.

  Cy sat down in front of his bank of computers and began typing on the one to the far right. The screen flashed quickly. Aiden was unable to follow what Cy was doing, but it didn't matter. As long as Cy could follow what Cy was doing, that's what counted.

  "I can't believe it's this easy," Cy said quietly. He looked at the screen of the phone and then at the computer. "Unbelievable," he said under his breath.

  "What?" Aiden asked in a hard tone.

  Cy held up the phone. "The last number from the received call log belongs to this house," he said, tapping the computer screen. Aiden looked at the address and memorized it.

  "Are you certain?" Thaddeus asked, leaning over Cy's shoulder.

  "Of course I'm certain
," Cy said in a haughty voice. When Cy was questioned or got emotional, his German accent became a little thicker. Aiden wondered if the male realized that, and he also wondered why Thaddeus seemed to always forget that Cy hadn't been wrong about anything. Ever. "It's the fucking landline."

  "Let's get a visual," Thaddeus said. A couple of keystrokes later, and Google Maps was up, and they were looking at an aerial view of the neighborhood. A couple more keyboard taps, and they were looking at the roof of the house.

  "Let's do this," Thaddeus said. "Cy, we're going to need you there, too. You remember how to use a gun?"

  The three began walking out of Central Control, heading for Thaddeus's room and his huge gun safe.

  "Oh please," Cy said. "It's like riding a bike."

  There was a beat of silence.

  "All right, my man, if you say so."

  Chapter 31

  Aiden rode shotgun in the Range Rover on the way to the house. Thaddeus drove, Cy lounged in the back seat.

  As they sped through the night, Aiden took out his Glock and checked it over again. He felt so icy calm inside that he was almost scaring himself. Usually before a mission there may have been a little butterfly or two, or maybe a little excitement, but there was nothing but an unending supply of rage to fuel him.

  If Holly had been hurt . . . Jesus, he couldn’t think about it. The thought of that scared the living shit out of him, and there was no room for fear in this party. He needed to remain focused. He closed his eyes and thought about the psychological benefits of gutting whoever took Holly, or just shooting them. The knifing would be much more satisfying, he thought. Much more personal. His thoughts took another turn, and he recalled the deaths he had been responsible for.

  There had been a time in his twenties where he had hunted humans. Not just any human, but there was a special criteria he followed. It didn't have many benchmarks, but it did offer some type of parameter for him to follow. The human was almost always male, although he had offed a few females who fit in his paradigm. The human had to be a verified asshole. Aiden would search them out, going to bars or traveling the countryside, looking for those who picked on others, who just simply were not nice people. The second criterion was that the human had to hurt other humans.

  Aiden felt he was doing the human race a favor with the trash he eliminated. He got rid of wife beaters, child molesters, and had even taken care of a few serial killers. Doing this satisfied his desire to kill, but also did a service to the humans. Not that they would ever know or give him a big thank you hug. If they knew he was of the Vampire Nation, they would burn him at the stake.

  This killing went on for many years while he helped uphold the Behavior Doctrine of The Council. He didn't always agree with his kills while doing that, but if he wanted to keep breathing, it was a necessity. He felt good about the humans he killed because he believed in his heart that he was doing a good deed.

  Until that one time.

  He had read in the paper that a male had been arrested for setting fire to his house with his wife and four kids trapped inside. There were eyewitnesses who had spotted the man running away from the house as flames engulfed it. Aiden remembered thinking he had found his next victim, and plotted a way to get at the male while he was behind bars. He couldn't do any of that dematerializing stuff Thaddeus could pull off, but he would find a way.

  So, he got himself arrested on the shortest day of the year so he would have more time to get in and get out. He got cuffed by acting drunk and pissing in the street in front of a cop. He had watched a human do the exact thing one time, and it worked like a charm. A couple of insults thrown at the cop and five minutes later he was cuffed in the back of the cop car on his way to jail. He had been processed, then thrown into the drunk tank.

  He waited for a few hours until everything calmed down and he didn't see a guard for a while. He took out the keys he had lifted from one of guard's pants and slid out of his cell. He found the guy who had burned down his house with ease, asleep in his own cell. He used the keys to go into the cell and slit the man's throat as he slept on his thin little mattress. He relished in the personal aspects of the kill, of being so close to his victim. Cy was the sniper in the family—he did best from far away with a scope to separate him from his intended prey. Aiden loved the hand to hand, the intimacy of the close kill.

  After he did his deed, he then walked out of the jail, laying his hand on the forehead of the few guards, telling them that they would forget about him and erase any records of him. He walked out into the cool, dark night, confident he had done the right thing.

  But two days later he read in the paper that the man had been found dead in his jail cell. Then his twin brother had come clean out of guilt and took the blame for the deaths of the wife and kids. He had meant to kill his brother because he was in love with his brother's wife. He hadn't known the wife and kids would be home at that time of day.

  Aiden had felt a tidal wave of rage ripple through him. Guilt washed over him knowing he had killed the wrong person. It went against everything in the Behavior Doctrine, and then some. He vowed from then on that he would let the humans deal with their own trash and he would stay out of their world.

  But back to the scenario at hand.

  He hoped he got the chance to kill up close and personal. It would teach the lesson that you do not fuck around with him, especially by taking his woman.

  His woman. Yeah, Holly being taken had bulldozed the security walls around his heart and flattened them. Somehow, that little woman had wormed her way into his soul, and he knew that he loved her, although he couldn’t admit it until she was gone. He was such a wuss. What type of male couldn't admit his own feelings? Oh, ding ding ding, that would be you, asshole—the male who wanted to be certain that he didn’t have any feelings, especially for a female—because he was afraid. Afraid of what would happen if the same thing happened to Natalie. Well here you are, buddy, knee deep in the shit again.

  If she would have him . . . dammit. He didn't deserve her. But if she would have him . . . yeah, that would definitely make him happy. She was good and strong, and another tether to tamp down the anger within him. Between Robert and Holly, he may actually feel like a halfway normal male, and wouldn’t that be a new feeling.

  Aiden felt the car slow and opened his eyes. They were in an older neighborhood that hadn’t fallen prey to the hookers, drug dealers and their customers. The houses were all nicely kept, the lawns cut, and the streetlights were all intact. Nice neighborhood, and Aiden had to wonder if they had taken a wrong turn or something. He was expecting a run down, old forgotten neighborhood where a couple of gunshots wouldn’t have gotten anyone too excited. It had been hard to tell what type of neighborhood it was on Google, and he definitely wasn't expecting this. It spelled trouble. They would have to be quiet, get in and out with as little commotion as possible because they certainly didn’t need Reno’s finest involved in this situation.

  “There it is,” Cy said quietly, leaning up and pointing to a house on the left. “The red brick with the white trim.”

  The house was small, but it stood proud. The lawn had been browned by winter, and the rose bushes sat naked in front of the house. But it looked as if the house had been well taken care of with love and respect.

  “I’ll drive around a couple of times to get the lay of the neighborhood,” Thaddeus said in a quiet voice. It was as though they were worried that the people in the neighborhood would hear them if they talked in a normal voice, which was ridiculous.

  After the second swing around the block, they approached the house again.

  “I say we park out front on the street,” Thaddeus said. “We don’t know what shape Holly is going to be in, and we don’t know if we're going to find anyone else in there who needs our help.” Aiden felt a low growl rise from the very depths of his soul. It was a vow of death for those who took Holly, and he would deliver them to hell himself if they had hurt her.

  “So let’s do it quic
k. Pull up out front of the house, get in, get out. If we run into any resistance, try to keep it quiet. Use guns only if necessary. If we get lucky and Victor is here, I want that son of a bitch dead. Not wounded, but very, very dead."

  Aiden and Cy nodded in agreement.

  Thaddeus continued. "None of the people living around here are going to appreciate gunfire, and they’ll be doing the finger dance on 9-1-1 faster than grass through a goose.”

  With that, Thaddeus pulled up in front of the house, and Cy and Aiden were out the doors before Thaddeus had pulled the keys from the ignition. They walked calmly up to the house, Aiden making a motion to go around the back to enter.

  They went through the wooden gate, the only noise being the crunch of pebbles and dirt under their combat boots. They paused at the top of the back steps to listen. Aiden withdrew his knife from the sheath at his back, opened the screen door slowly and put his ear to the door. He heard nothing. A spark of dread lit off in his gut. What if Holly wasn’t here? He closed his eyes and focused—he couldn’t get caught up in the "what ifs" right now.

  He turned the knob on the door, surprised to find it opened. Stepping into the kitchen area, he moved aside to let his brothers in. They stood silent, waiting to see if their entrance had been detected.

  When there weren’t any shotgun blasts or yells, he figured they were good. He looked to his right and saw the small kitchen. Thaddeus opened the fridge and peeked in. Aiden saw that it was fully stocked with food. To his left, there was a small dining area with two plates still on the table. Aiden felt the food. It was cold, but it had recently been consumed. It looked as though someone had just finished the meal and went . . . where?

  Aiden began moving through the living room filled with antique wooden furniture and nice oriental rugs. If he liked old fancy stuff, he would have totally dug this room. He felt Cy behind him, and looked over his shoulder to see Thaddeus making his way down the hallway toward the bedrooms. As Aiden rounded the corner, a shaft of light appeared from a door that wasn’t quite closed. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at Cy.