by Ruby Loren
“I was so hoping you’d say that. They’re nasty, blood-sucking scum. I wish someone would burn them all.” He said it so casually, January had to think over his words a couple of times.
Well, okay… she thought.
“Did they do something to you?” She asked and then hesitated. “Sorry, that’s a pretty personal question.”
James waved a hand at her. “No, it’s fine. I’ll tell you all about it… when you come out for that drink with me later.” His smile sparkled and the playful mood returned.
She grinned and looked away. “See you at seven? You’d better pick the place now, so I can spend all day looking for it,” she said and again wondered if she was saying too much about herself.
She thought James’ eyebrow may have lifted a fraction when she’d inadvertently revealed she didn’t have a conventional day job, but she might have just imagined it.
“Café de Flore, Boulevard Saint-Germain. See you later, pony girl,” he said with a grin.
January made herself echo it back, secretly wanting to kick him in the teeth for that remark. Wolves were all the same.
3
It was the night after her drinking date with James that she first laid eyes on Warren Duchamp.
What a total let down! Was her first thought.
January hid in the shadows by the side of the street. She watched whilst Warren knocked back drinks in a bar across the road with a pretty girl on either side of him. Even the vampires in Witchwood - the town near to her old home - had been more impressive than this specimen.
All James had spoken about during their ‘date’ was how awful vampires were and how a group of them had killed his family in cold blood. He’d said that he’d had his revenge and January could imagine exactly what he’d meant by that. After all, James was still walking the earth and she was willing to bet the murderous vampires weren’t. She’d had to resist the urge to inquire about his vamp-killing techniques. Asking something like that would be a dead giveaway.
Her lips curved up. Dead… Ha!
The only other topic James had covered, other than complaining about vampires and pack politics, was how rich he was. With his parents dead, he’d inherited everything and was now free to lead the life of his choosing. January had definitely felt a stab of jealously over that.
Then he’d told her he’d observed she was in a similar situation. She’d been surprised that he’d noticed, but probably her obvious lack of a day job and corresponding lack of panic had given that secret away.
James had then told her about the most exclusive and expensive attractions in Paris and had suggested that they should visit them all. January smiled a little, thinking back. Despite her recent cash injection, she didn’t think that was going to be her style. Her mind drifted and she decided that she would, however, splash out on something nice for herself - just as soon as this first job was over. Perhaps a nice, red convertible…
Her whole body was suddenly alert. Warren had stood up. He swayed towards the door of the bar and staggered out onto the street, clearly drunk.
That was a new piece of information. She hadn’t known that they could get drunk. She supposed it made some sort of sense. Their bodies were filled with human blood. Human blood carried alcohol just fine.
January wondered why anyone would want Warren dead. The only reason she could think of was that he was a liability to the ongoing secrecy of supers, due to his reckless behaviour. She snorted and then froze, remembering about vampires’ super hearing in the nick of time. Warren just kept on laughing and January slipped back into the shadows.
This was going to be so easy.
January looked at her reflection in the full length mirror and chewed her lip. She cursed, forgetting she was wearing lipstick, and was forced to run back to the bathroom and reapply it. After a few seconds, she decided that staring into the mirror wasn’t helping and marched out of the flat.
January shivered a little in the cold spring air, but shifters ran hot, so even the chill breeze wouldn’t freeze her to the bone. That was lucky, as she wasn’t wearing a lot of clothing.
She’d sprayed herself with enough perfume to mask her shifter scent (she hoped). January was planning to slip into the bar where Warren liked to hangout and blend in with the clientele. She would be just another tourist in Paris, out for a drink. Hopefully, she’d learn a few things about her target and the right way to finish the job would magically present itself. She almost bit her lip again but stopped just in time. She forced herself to think about how vampires had brutally murdered James’ family and found it helped her to focus. Vampires were the bad guys. Warren Duchamp deserved to die.
She slid into the brightly lit room, deliberately not making eye contact with anyone as she walked straight towards the bar. That was why she didn’t see the man before he grabbed her arm.
The scent of werewolf hit her hard and she looked up, straight into the sincere brown eyes of James Cray.
“What are you doing here? This is a…” She had been about to say ‘vampire bar’ but it was James who had told her what this place was. He knew where they were.
“Sorry January, I have quite the sense of humour,” he said, but his eyes remained sincere.
She wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t been telling her the truth on their date. She thought it was more likely that he was lying right now.
“Who is this?” A deep, accented voice said.
January realised with a jolt that she was looking straight into the eyes of the vampire she was supposed to kill. “January,” she said, again wondering if she should have thought up some cool fake name. It was too late now.
She held out a hand and then remembered that in the vamp killing book, it had said to never do that. To her surprise, Warren took it, his dark eyes never leaving hers. His lips curved upwards into a smile and January found that she was inadvertently admiring his dark, almost gothic beauty. She snapped out of it when she realised he reminded her of her family.
“It is a pleasure to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you,” he said, and January froze. He laughed, softly. “Nothing in this little corner of Paris escapes my notice. Anyway, you must by now realise that there is an accord between the shifters and vampires here?”
January nearly bit her cheek hard enough to make it bleed. Everything James had been saying, all of the hate he’d been spouting - it had been a test. She desperately thought back and couldn’t remember ever knowingly echoing his sentiments.
“As I told you earlier, January is very interested in you, too,” James casually dropped in and January wanted to strangle him.
Somehow, she kept her face still and even managed what she hoped was a coy smile. You lying rat!
The vampire raised one perfect, dark eyebrow. “You’re a horse, in your other form, yes?”
She nodded, thanking all of her lucky stars that she hadn’t been seen by the pack of wolf informers in the nature reserve. Warren smiled at her and she knew he would never even contemplate that she might be a threat. She was merely a curiosity.
“I… I just wanted to meet you. My cousin came to Paris and met you. She told me all about how interesting and different from the other vampires you are. I came here hoping to have the chance to see you. I just… didn’t know where to look,” she gushed, hoping that her assessment was right and that Warren mingled with so many people, he wouldn’t remember most of them.
A light frown creased his forehead and she knew he was trying to place her cousin. She reached out and lightly touched him on the arm, knowing it was another faux pas. The rule book had been thrown out of the window tonight.
“I am so happy to have met you, Mr Duchamp,” she said, adding all the implication she could into that sentence. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw James turn away with disgust written all over his face. Little do you know! She thought, careful to keep eye contact with the vampire.
“Stay. Stay here tonight,” he said.
January was surprised when gold threads lea
ked from his eyes and wrapped around her. She gently shook them away, but the vampire didn’t notice. Some instinct told her that what she’d seen was the vampire’s attempt at using his power of glamour on her. For some strange reason, it hadn’t worked.
He could never find that out.
She pasted an even brighter and more grateful smile on her face. “Absolutely!”
In the space of a single evening, she’d gone from spying from the shadows to being accepted into the vampire’s closest fold. She wondered if that was very smart, or very, very stupid.
4
One week later, January was starting to feel the effects of too many late nights. Warren had taken her number the first night they’d met and every night since, he’d asked her to come to the bar. Unfortunately, January couldn’t say no. More gold threads had wrapped around her when she’d spent time with him and she knew that he was trying to compel her to stick around… until he decided otherwise. She couldn’t let the cat out of the bag.
She blinked the sleep from her eyes and looked at her reflection in the mirror. She definitely wasn’t as spiffy as she had been a week ago. Despite subtly ditching as many drinks as she could, she still started every morning with a hangover. Far from deciding to favour her after her little fan girl act, January was starting to think that Warren was actually trying to kill her – just really, really slowly.
She pushed her hair back from her face and tried to apply her makeup so that she would look fresh and dewy. Unfortunately, it was a miracle that even makeup couldn’t achieve.
January shook her head. Warren Duchamp needed to die soon, or she wouldn’t be in any state to kill him.
January couldn’t help sighing at the sight of the lightening sky when she walked back out of the vampire bar the next morning.
She was in a living nightmare. Warren needed to be killed, or she’d face unknown, probably deadly, consequences. The thing was, he didn’t seem that evil or particularly deserving of being dead. So far, the only way January could justify it was that he’d lived several lifetimes when normal people only got one - and that just sounded ageist.
“You’ve got to block your morals. Turn them off.”
She spun round at sound of the voice. James walked out of the dingy alleyway by the side of the vampire bar. She wondered if he’d been waiting there for her all night.
“I’m… sorry?” She said, hoping she didn’t look too flustered. Then again, he had just jumped out at her from an alleyway.
James smirked. “You’re meant to be killing the vampire, but you can’t because you’re hung up on right and wrong, not money,” he said, his voice cold.
This James was a far cry from the man she’d gone on a date with. He’d let slip a hint of this side of him when she’d first met Warren, but now she was sure that what she was seeing was the real him.
“What are you talking about?” Her voice was flat.
No one knew about her mission apart from her employers.
James rolled his eyes. “Please. I know everything about you. You’re January Chevalier, some dumb shape-shifter. You’ve been paid to kill Warren Duchamp.” He raised an eyebrow at her, but she didn’t respond. How did you respond to something like that?
The silence stretched and James let out a loud sigh. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I know?” He prompted but January didn’t want to play games.
She narrowed her eyes and didn’t move a muscle.
James got bored of waiting. “I’m a bounty hunter, too. You didn’t really think you’d be dropped into the world of vampire hunting completely untested, did you? You’d be killed immediately.” James smiled and January oddly felt a small flutter of relief.
This was exactly what she’d been worrying about, wasn’t it? She had no clue about any of this.
“Actually, getting you killed immediately was exactly what I was hoping for. Unfortunately, that ridiculous vampire, Duchamp, bought your stupid little story about being an obsessed admirer.” James’ lip curled up in disgust. “But, if you want a job doing properly, the best way is to just do it yourself.” His words turned into a growl.
January froze in disbelief. She wasn’t sure she’d properly processed what James was saying. The sleepless nights had got to her.
“You’re going to kill me?” She asked, more surprised than scared.
It seemed like such a nuts question. No one had wanted to kill her when she’d been living her old life, back in Hailfield.
James rolled his eyes again. “Well, yeah. I don’t see why something as stupid as a pony gets to kill a head honcho vamp like Duchamp and get paid the kind of dollar you’re getting. Why don’t I get that? You’re not special. I’m a far better bounty hunter than you are and all I get are assistance missions and training the clueless - like you. With you out of the way, I’ll probably get the case,” he said, a grin stretching across his once handsome features. They were looking more lupine by the second, January noticed.
She bit her tongue. It was fortunate that her employers hadn’t told him everything about her. She suspected that they didn’t entirely trust James. Perhaps they had even assigned her case to him as a test. She frowned at the thought of being a pawn in a bigger game of chess that she hadn’t even known about.
“Anyway, while it’s nice to chat about these things, now it’s time for you to die,” James said, sounding just as casual as ever.
What a psycho! She thought and then remembered she was about to enter the same line of work as the ‘psycho’.
She watched, half-fascinated, as James’ face elongated and grew fur. The air around them tingled when he pulled in the energy required for the change.
January snapped out of it. There wasn’t much time.
Sighing about the loss of her new, pale blue satin cocktail dress, she changed.
January didn’t know how or why she managed to change faster than normal shifters did. She suspected that it was somehow tied in with the reason she could see the glamours and magical writing and, you know - was a unicorn.
The wolf’s mouth gaped open in surprise when he saw the long horn protruding from the forehead of the black horse that was now standing where the blonde girl had been a second earlier. That’s impossible! He thought at the same time the horn was thrusting forwards into his open mouth and out the back of his neck, severing his spinal cord and killing him instantly.
“Oh no… Oh no… Oh no!” January muttered over and over when she was back at her apartment.
She’d struck lucky and had found an old piece of carpet that someone had left by a dustbin a couple of streets away from where she’d left the wolf lying in a pool of blood. At least that had meant she hadn’t been arrested for indecent exposure while getting back to her apartment in the early hours of the morning. She didn’t like to think who might have seen her, but a naked girl was infinitely less memorable than a unicorn.
January lay back on her bed and shut her eyes.
She was in deep trouble.
Leaving a dead wolf next to a vampire bar - looking like someone had driven a stake through it - was not a smart move. There was also every chance that when the Parisian pack found out, they’d be able to smell her scent on James’ body. Sure, she could play that off as them spending time together, but she wasn’t exactly going to look like a shining beacon of innocence.
She sighed, half-wishing she’d never accepted this job and had never come to Paris. But you made your first kill! The voice in her head piped up and she realised she had. The worrying thing was that she felt nothing… absolutely nothing.
Her employers were right. She was perfect for this job.
5
The hammer never fell.
January spent the next few days waiting for Warren to tell her that he knew she’d killed James, or for the pack to break down her door, but it never happened. It was only on the third day that she heard a whisper about James at all. One of the wolves who liked to hang out at the vampire bar mentioned in passing that he hadn’t tu
rned up to a pack meeting, but that was it. January was fast figuring out that James wasn’t Mr Popular.
That still didn’t explain why no one was talking about the body.
By the end of the third day, January couldn’t wait any longer. She had to go back to the alley and see if James was still lying there. It seemed incredibly unlikely, as it wasn’t a particularly secret alley, but she had to know what had happened to him.
A chilling thought struck her.
What if he hadn’t really been dead? What if he’d got up and walked away, and that was why no one had found him? January shook the thought from her head. She’d felt something vital snap. No one but a vampire could walk away from what she’d done to James.
January tried her best to act casual when she walked past the alleyway where she’d last seen James, dead and bloody. Her eyes slid to the dingy passageway and she stopped walking.
There was nothing there, not even a stain from the blood that had pooled around the body.
Throwing caution to the wind, January walked towards the alley, intent on further investigation. Was she going crazy? Had she never confronted James and killed him?
“This is a surprise,” a familiar voice said right before hands grabbed her, yanking her arms behind her back.
She felt cold metal on her wrists when steel handcuffs were snapped shut. More chains bound her arms to her sides.
Warren Duchamp wasn’t taking any chances.
“What’s happening?” January asked, trying to look as clueless as she’d been the night she’d first met Warren.
The handsome vampire looked amused. “You killed my informer, James. For some reason, you staked him.” He frowned at her but then shrugged it off. “My guess is that you were coming for me. He tried to stop you, so you killed him.” Warren sighed. “Poor, faithful James.”
January choked. This vampire may be old, but he was certainly stupid if he thought James had been on his side.