“Fuck no,” the skateboarder said. “Do I look like a loser?”
Red shrugged. “You look like an undead Backstreet Boys reject.”
He dropped his board and charged.
She tossed the stake and forced her will onto the air, harnessing it to propel the stake toward the vampire. She couldn’t reliably make things fly, but she had almost mastered gliding. Her focus scattered as the urban coyotes yipped closer.
The stake embedded deep in the wrong side of the vampire’s chest.
“Effing A, lady!” The skateboarder stopped and hunched over, grabbing at the stake in his shoulder. “What are you? A mutant?”
Red shrugged. “That’s what I keep asking.” She tried to pull the stake back with her mind, but her energy fizzled and popped. She dodged the rocketing stake, and it hit the side of the Falcon. Jogging backwards, she glanced around in search of it, brushing her hair over her shoulder and out of her face.
“Whose marks are those?” The vampire turned paler, clashing with his orange neon. “Are you claimed? I don’t need the heat, man, not with another vamp and not with the Blood Alliance.”
“I’m not claimed.” Red bent to retrieve the fallen stake.
He wasn’t the first vampire to notice the old scars on her neck. Most vampires gave them a second glance, even though they were indistinct after laser scar treatment.
Red banged on the van door, wondering where the hell Vic was. She shook her hand, willing magic out of it, but it was as reliable as a stray cat. Not even a spark. Her energy was exhausted after making the stake fly.
“Cool beans.” The skateboarder hissed and revealed his fangs. “Let’s see what you taste like, weirdo.”
Red raised the stake, but it was too late.
The vampire slammed her against the van. “I don’t think the catch and release rule from the supreme bitch applies to whatever the hell you are.”
Red kneed him between the legs.
The skateboarder stumbled back with a yell and grabbed his crotch. A ding from the convenience store door drew his attention. “Shit, now I have to take him out too. Fuck, my sire is going to be pissed. Gonna yell at me in European.” He rushed Red.
Red had the stake ready to jam it through his heart as he collided with her. The air knocked from her, she managed to huff out, “Daddy issues?”
The skateboarder stilled and staggered to the side. His pale face decayed rapidly, blond hair falling to dust, leaving greasy bones to fall in a heap. The skateboarder couldn’t have been that old in death.
When a vampire was staked, the magic preserving them seemed to snap, leaving the body decaying rapidly as if to make up for lost time. The oldest ones barely left dust. Sunrise would take care of whatever was left, leaving burning bones to greet the dawn.
Red looked over at the convenience store to see the sign turn over from open to closed. She could imagine that a night clerk at a convenience store saw enough weirdness to teach him to mind his business. Most humans didn’t know what bumped in the night, but some people couldn’t avoid it.
She was one of them.
The van’s side door slid open.
Under the hanging Tibetan prayer flags and Christmas lights in the blanket-strewn back of the van, Vic popped his head out. Giant headphones hung on his neck. His laptop blared at top volume behind him on a beanbag. The supernatural world knew him as a hunter, one of the few who were brave enough to go after werewolves. He had a badass reputation, but she was one of the few who knew he was a TV junkie. “What did I miss?”
“Oh, you know, nothing much, just fighting for my life against an undead Tony Hawk wannabe. Discovered I know basic Spanish.” Red rolled her eyes. “Standard beer run.”
“Hablo español, eh?” Vic asked, then quickly added, “Hangug-eseo malhal su issni?”
“Um…” Red cocked her head.
“Well, now we know you know Spanish but not Korean.”
They played a game out of trying to jog her memory. They’d learned that she knew how to stake a vampire, was good at math, and had enough magic to occasionally get her out of a pinch. Not her real name. Even after he read through a baby name book.
She brushed her red hair off her shoulder. For a guy who believed in nearly every conspiracy theory, he hadn’t been very imaginative with her nickname. It stuck anyway.
“Gonna have to explain that to Quinn.” Vic stepped out of the van and looked at the vampire’s bones before he spotted the bag with the six-pack of beer on the hood of the Falcon. Brushing his black mullet back, he nodded to Red. “IPA? Nice.” He cracked open a beer and pounded it before crushing the can against his head. “Thirsty Thursday, am I right?”
“It’s Wednesday.” Red pulled the stake from the vampire’s empty rib cage before she walked around to the driver’s side of the van. “Come on, didn’t you say your buddy was in Culver City? We still have an hour left on the road.”
“Don’t worry. Quinn’s a PI and a vampire—he’ll still be awake.” Vic grabbed the beer. Sliding the side door closed on his TV watching nest, he climbed into the passenger seat beside her. “All we have to worry about is if he got called to his other job.”
“Other job?” Red asked. Vic had told her a lot of stories, but made it sound more like Quinn skulked in alleys saving maidens rather than sat on a payroll.
“I never said he was a successful gumshoe.” Vic shrugged. “He moonlights as a sketch artist for the LAPD. Does a bit of this and that for the Supreme Master of the City when she calls on him, too.”
She knew a little bit about Vic’s two years at UCLA, where he ran from being a Bard and ended up spending more time with a souled vampire detective than in his computer science classes. He made it sound like he spent most of his time stoned and doing surveillance. Red could read between the lines. Vic’s friend wasn’t your usual souled vampire, or at least Vic thought he was more.
Quinn had called and asked for help. That was all the information Vic needed to get them on the road.
Red backed the van up, then gunned it ran over the bones on the way out of the parking lot to make it less recognizable. The vampire’s brittle remains shattered under the Falcon’s tires. Sunrise would burn the bones, but a complete skeleton didn’t take long to raise questions. From the back, the laptop’s blaring in the back of the van distracted her from her brewing question about Quinn. “What are you watching?”
“Period piece.”
Red looked over at Vic in his sleeveless denim vest and Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt. “Like Jane Austen?”
“No, it is about Victorian hookers, but tasteful. It's a BBC show.” Vic folded his arms. “I just started it.”
She smirked.
“What? I don’t just watch 9/11 documentaries or YouTube videos about the FBI. I have layers.”
“Uh huh.” Red said before she refocused on the puttering LA traffic. She navigated through the light traffic on the wide boulevard, following the signs for the 66 to get to the 10 based on her memory of the map she had read earlier. Vic was paranoid about Google and banished any GPS from the car. “Can you turn it off since you’re not watching it?”
The van jerked, and a warning icon blazed to life on the dashboard as a tire popped loudly. Turning into the vehicle’s slide, she put on her hazard lights.
“You okay?” Vic asked.
“Yeah, it’s just a tire. I bet it’s the front one.” She steered the Falcon over to the shoulder and turned right into a darkened strip mall, parking in front of a closed nail salon.
“We have a donut in the back.” Vic sighed and opened the door.
Unbuckling herself, Red rubbed her temples. She had driven most of the eight hours from Reno, each hour tempting herself with Vic’s promises of the amazing shower at his friend Quinn’s place. Culver City was still an hour away, and with a flat tire… That shower felt so out of reach.
Clever English banter boomed behind her from tinny laptop speakers.
Twisting in the van’s high seat, she cl
imbed into the back to turn off his show that Vic had left on. On her knees, she turned the laptop around to look for the off button when she noticed the screen.
Lounging in a boudoir, the woman lay in stockings and corset, her English accent coy as she flirted with a dark-haired man in a tuxedo.
Slapping the laptop closed, Red’s heart raced, and her ears rang. The adrenaline flatlined in her system.
Dragging air through her lungs, she slumped on a bean bag chair and put her head in her hands. Her chest ached. She leaned her head between her knees, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t know what it was about the scene, but it felt like a weight had landed on her shoulders. Trying to calm her breathing, she didn’t look up when the side door slid open.
“Hey, easy, Red,” Vic said as he crouched in front of her. “Keep your breathing steady. Through your nose. That’s it.”
He didn’t ask what she had seen or what it meant. It would have been like asking how she understood Spanish. She wouldn’t have an answer.
“I hate this. I can’t avoid triggers if I don’t know what they are.” Red choked the words out as she tried to calm her ragged breathing. “I can’t trust myself if any random thing could set me off.”
“Sure, you can trust yourself. You know who you are.”
Red glared at him.
“You don’t have the bio, but you know the essence. That’s enough. The rest is baggage.” Vic shrugged. He gestured to the makeshift bed of bean bag chairs in the back of the van. “Take a nap. I’ll get us back on the road.”
She rubbed her neck, feeling the nearly invisible fang marks on her skin, then laid down on the bean bag in the nest of blankets. Red might know that she hated cob salad or loved Harry Potter, but it wasn’t the same as knowing what formed her.
After over a year, she still knew as much as she did when she woke up in that hospital in Eugene. They had crisscrossed the West and met half the active hunters and few retired ones. None had recognized her. Even talking to a spirit or two hadn’t brought more than obscure riddles about her mother. A long-dead pilgrim told her she came from a long line of witches, but they hadn’t found a coven missing a member. Every clue was a dead end.
Her hands shook.
Red had long ago accepted that Vic was probably right. She was probably an inexperienced witch or hunter that tangoed with the wrong vampire who mesmerized her into forgetting. What she’d suffered didn’t keep her up at night. It was the question around what she loved. Who were her parents, how did she grow up, who were her high school friends, what was the story behind the black lyre tattooed on her left shoulder? Those were the questions that haunted her.
She needed something to take her mind off the anxiety washing over her. She grabbed a citronella candle from a plastic milk crate filled with supplies. Staring at it, she tried to visualize a blue flame erupting from the wick.
Magic came in many forms, from the ceremonial magic of exorcisms and blessings that even muggles could do, to harnessing the power of the elements. She had been trying to make a spark for months. If she thought air was difficult, fire was even more beyond her. Yet, Red still squinted at the squat white candle in the tin.
Light, damn you, light!
The scent of citronella made her nose twitch, and she couldn’t concentrate.
“Fuck.” She tossed the candle back into the box. Who was she fooling? She was as bad at magic as she was at remembering.
Red curled up on the multicolored bean bag, trying to breathe deep and push past the faceless ghosts to steal some sleep.
Chapter Two
October 24th, 2018, Night, Strip Mall in Rancho Cucamonga, LA County, California, USA
Snow sleeted against the window. She could hear the wind howling. Red shivered before she buried deeper into the blankets. She leaned her head against a strong, firm, bare chest. She looked up and smiled.
The dim light cast shadows over the face, always obscuring him from view except for the storm gray eyes staring back at her.
She ran her blind fingers over his high cheekbones, chilled as if carved from marble, to comb through his mussed hair. “Do you at least have a secret handshake?”
“Afraid not, kitten. We have a lot of inane rituals, but handshakes are not one of them.”
Red pouted. “Not going to lie, I’m a little disappointed.”
Chuckling, he rolled her under him, faster than she could process. Rising up on his palms, lean biceps tensed, he stared down at her.
Red ran her hand down his defined abs to the ridged V-shape of his hip. “What about—”
He kissed her, lips brushing softly as he ran his fingers through her hair. The kiss deepened, leaving her breathless. His hand cupped her breast, thumb circling her nipple. He pulled back, grinning, before peppering kisses down her neck. Cold lips started a fire on her skin, and she forgot all about what she was going to ask.
Red arched her back. She fell off the bean bag onto the floor of the Millennium Falcon, her foot kicking the tackle box tied to the van wall. She panted as she pushed herself up. Her body seemed to want to fall back into sleep to carry on where she had left off. Her imagination was already making her blush at the thought of Vic waking her from a sex dream.
After Vic had found her by Coyote Creek, Red had tried a shamanic ritual to help remember past lives and repressed memories. It had only given her disjointed, shadowy dreams. This wasn’t the first time she’d had a vivid dream of the mystery man, but it was the first time she’d heard his voice.
Sex dreams—amazing sex dreams, if she were honest—weren’t the only time that the mystery man made a cameo in her subconscious. She had dreams of watching him prowling behind slabs of granite, ashes under his boots, yet she knew he would protect her. His face had always been obscured. She tried to hold on to image of his chiseled features, his soft black hair, and the look in those gray eyes… The image faded, and she couldn’t keep it. She never could hold onto the dreams.
She could only capture flickers, not of memories, but images that rarely made sense in her dreams. Times and places that she hadn’t been and couldn’t possibly have been—moonlit pyramids, crumbling towers, locomotives puffing dense black smoke. Also, places so mundane she could have seen them anywhere—a classroom, a cemetery, and a red diner booth.
Red got up, adjusting her jeans and black tank top before opening the Falcon and stepping outside. She looked at Vic, hunched over the van’s front tire.
“I almost have it,” Vic said. “I texted Quinn, so he knows we’re running late. He’s not much of a talker, but he gets livelier after dark.”
Red leaned against the van. “Most vampires do.”
“Can you be cool around him? It can’t be easy to be around vamps, even knowing that he has a soul.” He shrugged. “Considering.”
“I’ll be cool.”
“You weren’t cool with them in OKC.” Vic straightened on his knees and crossed his arms.
Red sighed and sat down in the open side door of the van. “You know I chilled out after working with Souled Sal in Oklahoma. I don’t have the best history with vampires, but I know the difference between the good guys and the bad ones.”
“You sure?” Vic raised his eyebrow. “A vampire might have been the one to erase your memories, and it's chill to be around them?” He shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Werewolves killed my family, and it doesn’t matter who they are, I can’t be around one of them without thinking about it. You’ve had a hard few weeks. How are you gonna react when you’re sitting across from a vampire?”
“If you tell me they’re hunters, that’s enough. We all come to this life differently. I’m not going to get all PTSD on your friend. You know I don’t crack in a fight. It’s just when it gets quiet.”
“All I’m saying is don’t stake Quinn. I was once his intern.”
The chop of a motorcycle sounded in front of them, getting closer. A headlight blinded her before the bike came to a stop. Red looked away.
“Thanks f
or the blinding light. I didn’t need to see what I’m doing,” Vic muttered.
“You should be thanking me, mate,” the English voice said as the rider popped out his kickstand and killed his lights. The streetlight reflected off the safety pins and patches of old punk bands on his leather jacket. “Quinn owes me for driving to the far side of Rancho Cucamonga.”
Red put her hand to her mouth as her ears perked up at the voice. She peeked out at him from the open van door.
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