by Melody Raven
This time, her crazy post wasn’t quite so crazy. This time, she posted a simple question. I found a young vampire girl. What do I do with her?
The sun was just about to fully set and Dante was ready to go. He would’ve left on his own earlier, but Tela had insisted that she come with him. And if Tela was joining him, that meant John was coming as well. And because Vopura were not allowed to go anywhere without direct supervision, one of the vampire guards, Talon, was also coming with. On one hand, Dante didn’t want help. They would slow him down and get in his way. But he wasn’t stupid. If he wanted to find his daughter, he knew the more hands the better.
It’d been four days since he’d seen Cora. Two days since the siege, and two days since they fought. He damn well better get a chance to apologize to her.
The door opened and he turned to see Talon behind him. “Are we ready to go?” asked Dante as he pulled on his long black trench coat. Long coats were always a good precaution in case he got caught in the sun.
“Yeah... about that. Something came up.”
Dante couldn’t hide the annoyed growl that escaped his throat. “Fine. Be busy. I have to go look for Cora.”
“You’re going to want to see this. We’ve been monitoring various sites online to look for mentions of vampires being involved in the siege, and there’s a post that we think has to do with Cora.”
Dante tensed. “What did it say? Is she all right?”
“You better come see this.”
Dante followed Talon down the maze of halls until he reached a small room filled with computers. Talon stayed back as he motioned for Dante to continue inside.
A vampire sat at the center, monitors surrounding him one-eighty as he inhaled one of those foul-smelling burning things that humans seemed to love so much.
Dante winced at the smell, but he wasn’t about to leave the room. “What do you know about my daughter?”
“Nice to meet you too, Dante. My name’s Stefan—so glad to help out.”
Dante reach forward, ripping the cigarette out of the man’s mouth and tossing it on the ground. “The sun is down, and every minute I’m not looking for her is on you. I don’t want pleasantries—I want information.”
Stefan rolled his eyes, seemingly not intimidated at all. “You’re lucky I’m here. And if you’d told me there was a kid missing earlier, I could’ve been tracking this a lot sooner.”
“Have there been many people in the internet talking about her?”
“On the internet. No one’s in the internet.”
“From what I understand, it’s not like a sheet of ice you can stand on. It’s not a road to walk on. Neither word makes more sense than the other.”
Stefan frowned. “I thought you all didn’t speak English.”
“We didn’t when we came here.”
“Wasn’t that like two months ago?”
“If you don’t give me some valuable information right now, I’ll show you all the things I’ve learned since I’ve gotten here, and most of them are violent.”
“Hey man, I just set up a search for you an hour ago. We’re lucky we got this hit.”
“Someone hit her?”
Stefan held up his arms. “Whoa there. That’s not what I meant. Okay, so about twenty minutes ago, Devon1019 posted this. Subject line: I found a young vampire girl. What do I do with her? The body reads: I found a vampire outside the house two hours ago. Possibly injured. What do I do?
“Injured?”
“I’m just telling you what I read.”
“And who is this Devon1019? Is he dangerous?”
“I’m trying to track him down, but there have been some... complications.”
“What the hell is the complication? He has my kid, we find him. Simple.”
“Hey, I have the most advanced servers on my side, and I’ve broken almost every firewall there is. But this guy isn’t an amateur. He’s cloaked. The IP address linked to the account bounced me around three different countries before the trail died off. He knows his way around a computer.”
“Then how do we find him?”
“I’m still working on a trace. But the quickest way is going to be if we actively engage him.”
“What does that mean?”
“Talk with him. I’m opening up a private chat now. I wanted to wait until you were here. You know, because I’m a nice guy.”
Funny. Nice might be the literal opposite of what he was feeling right now. But Stefan didn’t seem concerned with Dante’s mood. He was focused intently on the monitor in front of him.
“Okay, it shows he’s online.”
Dante clenched and unclenched his fists as he stood right behind Stefan. This stupid computer was between him and Cora. It was ridiculous. “Promise this man whatever he wants. Money, power. I’ll get it for him.”
Stefan snorted. “How the hell are you going to do that?”
“I don’t care.”
“All right, I initiated the chat,” said Stefan, his tone abruptly serious. “We’ll start with something simple.” Hello. Is the girl with you?
There was a brief pause until the notification came up on the bottom of the screen that indicated Devon1019 was typing. Dante leaned forward in anticipation and Stefan angled away. “Hey man, I know this is important, but you want to give me some breathing room?”
Dante grabbed the man’s chair and rolled him out of the way. “You don’t need to breathe,” he pointed out as he knelt in front of the computer.
Devon1019 had responded. Who’s this?
Dante’s first instinct was to scream that he was Cora’s father and demand her back, but he knew this might take some more tact. A concerned citizen.
I have her.
Dante let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It had to be Cora. It had to be. Where are you?
Who are you? repeated Devon1019.
“Keep them talking,” said Stefan. “We’re narrowing in on the location.”
I’m a concerned citizen, typed Dante. What do you want with the girl?
I want to get rid of her.
Then give her to me. What’s your address?
Immediately, he got a message that Devon1019 had left the chat. Dante angrily swiped at the keyboard, sending it shooting across the room and slamming into a monitor. “Where is he? Tell me you found him!”
Stefan sighed. “God, you’re touchy. Yeah. I got him. As a thanks, you could replace my shit.”
“Aleksander will cover it,” said Talon from where he’d been standing quietly in the back.
Stefan took out a cigarette and lit it up. “Damn right he will be,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “But yeah, I found our guy. You want the address, or do you want to keep grinding my gears?”
Alyssa wasn’t going to fall asleep. That’s what she told herself as she sat next to her unexpected charge with her laptop in front of her, but time would prove her a liar. She managed to get a few more items on her to-do list checked off before her eyes started to feel impossibly heavy.
She kept on shaking her head to keep herself awake but could feel herself losing the battle. It was only when she started to make stupid typos and almost posted the wrong prepared text to the wrong account that she gave in.
She’d been awake for over thirty hours, and she wasn’t the type to thrive on small amounts of sleep. She finally let her eyes drift shut.
There was rustling on the couch. She wasn’t sure whether it was a minute after she closed her eyes or an hour. Everything was foggy as she brought herself back into consciousness. Her hand went to her laptop first thing, making sure it was still on her lap as she sat up and looked to the couch. The girl wasn’t sleeping anymore. She was sitting up and staring right at Alyssa.
Suddenly Alyssa was totally awake. Carefully, she picked up the laptop and placed it on the coffee table in front of her armchair, never taking her eyes off the girl. “Hello,” she said tentatively.
The girl was quiet, just staring. Alyss
a pointed toward her chest. “Alyssa,” she said slowly and loudly, before pointing toward the girl and raising her brows expectantly.
The pause drew out so long Alyssa thought it was a lost cause. But sure enough, the girl spoke. “They call me Cora.”
Alyssa blinked a few times. “You speak English?”
“They wanted me to learn.” Her voice was high pitched. Almost squeaky. Just like any other kid.
She let out a deep sigh. This was good. She could talk to the girl at least now. And she had a name. “Is that your name?”
“Most of you can’t say my real name.”
Oh. This ten-year-old could apparently master an entire new language and Alyssa wasn’t even capable of learning a name.
“So.... Is there somebody I should call? Will your parents be worried about you or something?”
The girl looked down again, and Alyssa had a feeling she’d hit on a sore subject. “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about your parents. My mom hasn’t talked to me in years. She thinks I’m an unemployed loser. Granted, I’ve never given her any reason to think I am employed. Partly because most of the jobs I take are super-secret and partly because she wouldn’t believe me if I told her. Social manipulator isn’t exactly something she can brag about at the beauty shop.”
Alyssa wasn’t sure whether her rambling was helping to set the girl at ease or making her more uncomfortable. At this point, it was really a tossup. This girl should start playing poker considering how unexpressive she was. Was that a vampire thing, or traumatized child thing? “If you’re hurt, let me know. I would’ve given you first aid, but everything seemed to close up so quickly. According to myths and legends, vampires heal quickly, but I’ve never seen it in action before. It really is amazing.”
“My mom’s dead,” said Cora abruptly.
Alyssa’s brows rose. “Oh.” Well, that took a turn. “That’s terrible. I guess I shouldn’t have started trash talking mine. That’s a rude thing to do when someone is dealing with loss.”
“Why did you save me?”
Alyssa blinked a few times. It was a good question. The question she didn’t really know the answer to. “I don’t know. I’m not a good person. I do bad things for a living. I take money from bad people. I’m okay with that. But I suppose when I saw you, I wanted to do something good. It wasn’t really a choice. For once in my life, I knew I needed to step in. When I saw what those men were doing to you, it was wrong. And to be fair, I thought you were a dog.”
Cora cocked her head. “A dog?”
She shrugged. “You were under that blanket and it all happened so fast. But by then, I’d saved you. I was in for a penny, in for a pound.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Good. You’d make me even more uncomfortable if you knew everything about humans already. We need to have some mystique, right?”
“You’re odd,” said Cora finally.
“Yeah, well, you’re a vampire in my house. If either of us is odd, I think it’s you.”
The girl smiled and let out a little giggle. Except for her voice, this was the first childish thing she’d done. Alyssa let out a sigh of relief. Not everything had gone right today, but at least the girl was awake and she spoke English. Which was a hell of a lot better than where they’d been a few minutes ago. Of course, Alyssa still had no idea where to take her. Someone had contacted her quickly through the message boards, which was great except she didn’t actually trust anything anyone was going to say. So how could she agree to any meeting?
“So there’s no one I can call? Isn’t there anyone I should try to contact? A name. Maybe a friend or family member? Listen, you seem great and all, but I don’t know the first thing about you. I mean, not you specifically, but you in general. Vampires. I’m very unequipped to deal with all this.”
“You don’t need to contact anybody. I’m running away.”
Alyssa considered the girl for a moment, trying to figure out whether she was kidding. But no, this wasn’t a kidding kind of conversation. “Running away? Running away from what?”
“Mikel. I told my father I was done with him, and he wouldn’t listen. I’ve seen enough of your digital shows. You don’t treat women like prisoners. You don’t keep girls locked away. I told my father I wanted to live like that and he said no. So I left.”
Well hell. If Alyssa wasn’t in over her head before, she definitely was now. Besides, she was the poster child of running away to gain more independence. “In almost any other instance, I would be working on a women’s march protest sign with you. But you have to know how dangerous it is for you right now. Those guys trying to kill you weren’t alone. If anyone finds out what you are, they’re going to hate you at best, try to kill you at worst. And to be honest, I think if the military gets their hands on you, it will be even worse. They said they haven’t seen any other girls. Old or young. Is that right?”
Cora glanced down. “I don’t think I should tell you.”
“Hey, don’t tell me anything you don’t want to. Trust me, I’m not here because I want anything from you. I’m not with your dad. I’m not here with the military. I’m just some sucker of a third party who got tied up in this mess. But since I went through all the trouble of saving your life, I’m inclined to try to keep it safe. And I really think that you have to find your own people. If someone comes here, I don’t know that I’ll be able to—”
A knock on the door cut her off mid-sentence. Her head whipped toward the entryway, and in a flash, Cora was at the window, glancing out.
“Would you get away from there,” snapped Alyssa as she ran up to pull the girl back.
“Who is it?” asked Cora, not taking her eyes off the entryway.
“I don’t know,” whispered Alyssa. “But it’s past sunset, so I think be best if we just don’t—”
There was a loud pounding on the door. “Alyssa Sullivan!” called out a deep, masculine voice. “I’m Sergeant Tony Roberts. I was sent to do a debriefing by General Wesley.”
Alyssa frowned. Why would they be doing a debriefing her second day in? She would’ve expected Joshua to give her a heads-up, but the government wasn’t known for being open. Joshua might not know this was even happening. Maybe they decided to go a different direction than her social manipulation and were here to send her away?
Either way, she knew for certain that them showing up was not good news. She turned to Cora and pointed toward the stairs, mouthing the word go. The girl nodded, and in an instant she was gone. There was no sound on the stairs or creaking above her. Damn, she didn’t think she’d ever get used to that.
She took a deep breath. This was a government-owned safe house, and she was doing work for the government. It’s not surprising that they’d send someone here, she told herself. But the timing was undoubtedly suspicious. Maybe her phone call to Joshua worried them. She’d been worried the government would use her as a scapegoat if her social manipulation cover-up failed, but this was too early for that. One day was hardly the time to throw someone under the bus.
Alyssa forced herself to be calm. The military was full of predators. Just like vampires, they’d be able to smell fear and wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of it. When she had a game face on, she strode to the door and cracked it open, glancing at the two men in uniforms on the porch. “Can I help you?” They were army, and the one closest to her was wearing a sergeant uniform.
“Let us in,” demanded the sergeant. “It’s not safe past sundown.”
He definitely didn’t sound scared, but it was telling that even this military man who was very obviously strapped with at least two guns didn’t want to be out past dark.
But it also wasn’t unreasonable for a vampire to pretend to be in the army and ask for an invitation.
“I’ve been told inviting people in these days isn’t what a girl alone should really be doing. If you want to set up a meeting, make it tomorrow when there are plenty of UV rays around. I’m busy and I
have a very full night.”
The soldier closest to her, Patrick according to his uniform, didn’t look too happy with her logic, but she knew she was right, so she didn’t feel the need to defend herself.
“I appreciate the precaution, Ms. Sullivan, but this isn’t a request.” Sergeants Roberts and Patrick pushed past her and into the entryway. Alyssa could’ve put more force against the door, but she knew she couldn’t hold up in a physical fight against these two. She thought about the gun sitting uselessly in her car in the garage. Hell, even in a gunfight she wouldn’t stand much of a chance.
“I just stopped for provisions.” She took a few big steps back. “Do you want me to get you a water?” She didn’t want to offer them anything because the longer they stayed, the more chance of them finding Cora. But she wanted to try to appear as normal as possible.
But Roberts and Patrick didn’t seem interested in pleasantries. “Don’t play games with us. You know why we’re here.”
Alyssa’s jaw dropped and she abruptly closed it. “I.... Um. I really don’t know why you’re here.”
“Where’s the girl?”
Her mind raced through her options. Her first instinct was to lie and ask what girl, but that would be futile. If they were here, they obviously knew. She was going to guess the house had been wired with listening devices. Considering Cora had only just gotten here, it was the only way they could have arrived so quickly. “Okay. Fine. She’s gone.”
From the way Roberts looked at her, she knew he didn’t believe her. She held her hands up in front of her and made her eyes big, wide, and scared. “If I knew where she was, I would tell you! I promise! The girl was freaked out. She woke up crazy. I tried to have a calm discussion, but the second she heard you two at the door, she bolted.”
“And why didn’t you tell us this immediately?”
“She’s a vampire! I don’t know the right protocol for this. I saved her because she was small and innocent-looking. My first thought isn’t to sic guys with guns on her. It’s hard to save a ten-year-old-looking girl and feel like you’re harboring a fugitive. Besides, she just woke up. It’s not like she’s been living here for days. Now, if you want to try to find her, I’d start in the backyard and branch out, but there’s nothing else I can help you with.”