Twilight Guardians

by Maggie Shayne

Killian yanked the dart from his shoulder and threw it, then dragged himself to his feet behind some shrubbery and watched Charlie running off with the soldier. Others were coming his way, though, dart guns pointed, and he was weakening by the minute.

  One burst of speed was all he could manage. He poured it on fast and hard, and he knew that to their human eyes, it would’ve looked as if he’d vanished, when in fact, all he’d managed to do was race into the parking lot and fall to his knees between two cars. He didn’t have enough strength left in him to pull it off again. He didn’t even know if he could walk very far. Whatever had been in that dart was going to put him down for the count soon. Maybe even kill him.

  Charlie was put into a van. The door closed on her, and the vehicle sped away. He watched it go, and his heart bled. She was with the enemy now. They had her, and God only knew what they’d do with her.

  Then a pickup truck pulled to a quiet stop in front of him, the passenger door opened, and Charlie’s grandmother whisper-shouted at him, “Get in, fast, or they’re going to have you, too. And you, they’ll kill. Move it, vampire.”

  He didn’t see that he had a choice. The goon squad was still searching the grounds around the hospital. They were not even looking his way at the moment. He got upright, stumbled forward, and gripping the open door, pulled himself into the truck.

  “Shut the door nice and easy,” she said, “Don’t make any noise, and stay low.” She was pulling away while he obeyed. She didn’t floor it, didn’t spin her tires or leave rubber on the paved parking lot, just rolled slowly to the exit, then eased onto the street and into traffic. As she drove, she pulled a cell phone from her pocket and fired off a text. He didn’t know what it said or who it went to, and hoped to God she wasn’t informing some vampire-execution-squad that she had captured a live one.

  Killian sat up enough to look behind them.

  “They didn’t follow,” Roxy said, dropping the phone back into her pocket.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Me? I can’t. You can, though. Open that preternatural brain of yours and feel for them.”

  Embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of that himself, he closed his eyes, opened his mind and sifted through the chaos in search of their pursuers. But he didn’t find them. “I’m not picking up on anything.”

  “We’ll have to drive around aimlessly for a few hours to make sure, then. They’ve probably been taught how to block.”

  “How to block?”

  “God, you are a young one, aren’t you? What’s your name, kid?”

  “Killian.”

  “And you’ve been undead for how long now? Ten years?”

  “Almost thirty.”

  She smiled. “Gotta love an eighties model.”

  Self-consciously, he pushed a hand through his thick hair, shoving it back from his head.

  “Humans can shield their thoughts from your kind. Vamps can shield them from each other. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Who made you?” she asked. “Where do you come from?”

  “I didn’t get her name,” he said, remembering the night vividly. He’d been riding his Harley, and she’d pounced on him at about 60 miles an hour. Just leaped on him from out of nowhere, taking him off the bike and onto the shoulder of the road. He’d skidded several yards with her clinging to him, already latched onto his neck, crazed, draining him.

  He’d thought he was dying when she pulled away, wiped her mouth with her forearm and blinked down at him. Big black eyes, dark brown hair, long bangs that hid her eyebrows. A walking anime vampiress.

  “Don’t die. I didn’t know you were Chosen!” she’d said.

  But then he had died. Or he thought he had. He’d been gone, for sure. Into something. Darkness. Nothingness. But when he’d awakened again, she’d been feeding him from her own wrist. She pulled away, wrapped her wrist in a bandana so tightly he thought she’d lose the hand, and then just walked off, saying, “Find shelter before you pass out. If the sun hits you, you’ll burn alive.”

  And she was gone.

  He told Roxy none of this. Just remembered as she drove, and finally said, “I used to live with a few others in L.A. where no one thought much of our nocturnal tendencies.”

  “Smart to join with a group. Where are they now?”

  “Dead.” He kept his eyes straight forward. “Three years ago, humans torched our building while we slept. I woke up in a drainage ditch. No idea how I got there. The building was gone, not a survivor in sight.”

  “Doesn’t mean there weren’t any,” she said. “You give me their names when we get back to my place. I’ll add them to the list.”

  That drew his gaze her way. Up close, he saw a lot of Charlie in her. She was a beautiful woman, older, but there was no evidence on her face of how old. And yet, she was also one of The Chosen. And he knew they tended to die young. “What list?” he asked.

  “The list of those of your kind who are still missing and unaccounted for since the Vampire Armageddon.” She shrugged. “I’ve been calling it Varmageddon, but it hasn’t really caught on. Too soon, I guess.”

  She’d turned the truck onto the highway and was heading west, toward her cabin in the woods.

  “We shouldn’t be going this way. We should be going after Charlie.”

  She stomped the brakes and pulled the truck onto the shoulder. It came to an abrupt stop in a cloud of dust. “Can you sense where they took her?”

  “No. No, I haven’t been able to feel her since they closed the van’s door.”

  She nodded, didn’t look surprised. “Then we go back to my place. We gather some intel, we make a plan, and we call in some reinforcements.”

  He looked at her with his brows raised. “Reinforcements?”

  “Vampires. I know a lot of vampires, Killian.”

  He stared at her, sure she was playing some kind of cruel joke. “There are others? There are others still alive?”

  She nodded. “Lots of them. Did you think you were the last?”

  Everything in him seemed to come to singing life at those words. “Up until the murders of those seven people in Portland, and the vampires that were killed as a result of it, I thought I was the only one left.”

  “The murder of the Portland Seven wasn’t what it seemed. And I suspect the gang of vamps they killed for it never even existed. It was all faked by DPI to convince The Chosen they needed government protection.”

  He frowned. “DPI? What’s–”

  “Your former gang, they were all your age or younger, weren’t they?”

  He nodded.

  “So you don’t know diddly squat about what you are, or the history of your kind. Do you?”

  “I know enough to get by.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” She lowered her head, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Did you give Charlie your blood? Did she drink from you?”

  He nodded. “It was the only way to save her life. She was so close to death. I could feel it.” He looked out the truck’s window at the towns behind them, the rural terrain and forests unrolling in front of them. She was back there, somewhere, and he had to get to her. “I don’t understand why I’m so drawn to her, so in tune. I’ve been around others of The Chosen before. And you, now. But it’s never been that...powerful.”

  She didn’t reply, just kept glancing at him with wide, knowing eyes.

  “You know why, don’t you? Tell me.”

  She lowered her head. “For every vampire, the natural bond with The Chosen is super-charged with one particular person. There’s a powerful link. No one ever told you this?”

  “No. I didn’t know.”

  “So then you probably also don’t know that sharing blood empowers any bond still further. It’ll be ten times more intense than before, Killian. But it will also help you to track her.”

  “It will?”

  “Yes, it will.” She looked at the sky, sighed. “It’s going to be dawn soon. Can you drive, Killia
n?”

  “Of course I can drive.”

  “Then take over. I need to make some calls and then ditch this phone. You can spend the night in my safe room. No harm will come to you there. They don’t know where I live.”

  “Unless Charlie tells them,” he said softly. “What if they torture her?”

  “Easy, fella. Your eyes are glowing.” She got out and came around to his side. He slid over behind the wheel and pulled the truck into motion.

  “We should turn around,” he said. “We should go after her now.”

  “We need to get to my computers so I can find the nearest DPI owned properties. That’ll give us a clue where to begin searching. We have two hours until daylight. That’s not enough time for you to do any good. And if you roast, you’ll never find her. Trust me, okay? I’ve been around the block a few times.”

  He narrowed his eyes on her, then focused on the road again while she dialed her phone, and waited. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Roxy,” she said. “I’m the oldest living Chosen. And I’m on your side.”

  The van stopped at a tall gate that slid open slowly. Lieutenant Townsend was watching her face as she looked through the windshield at what seemed to be a military base. There was no sign giving its name, though, and it was in the middle of a forest, along a rutted path they’d been following through the towering trees for almost two hours.

  “We call it the Area Fifty-One of the Pacific Northwest,” he said after a second. “It’s really called Fort Rogers. It’s a top secret facility. Very few people even know it exists. You will be safe here.”

  She nodded. “We should get my grandmother, then. She’s in danger, too.”

  “She’s one of The Chosen?” he asked.

  Charlie lowered her eyes. No matter how looney she was, her grandmother did not want the government to be aware of her blood type. She didn’t think she should blow that. “No, of course not,” she said softly. “She’d be dead by now if she was.

  “What’s your grandmother’s name, Charlie?”

  “Charlotte,” she lied. “Same as mine. But...the whole grandmother thing is more an honorary title. My actual grandmothers are both dead.”

  “I see.”

  He didn’t, but she didn’t know this guy. She wasn’t going to go spilling her grandmother’s secrets to him.

  Then again, Lieutenant Townsend had just saved her from a vampire attack.

  She couldn’t believe that was what Killian was. A vampire. He hadn’t been drawn to her, or attracted to her, or turned on by kissing her, or falling head over heels in love with her, no matter how true and real those things had felt. He’d been stalking her and planning to make her his next meal. He’d played some kind of mind trick on her to make her feel the things she’d felt–still felt–for him. Fucking bastard, trying to bite her when she was already all but dead.

  Images, hazy and broken like pieces of colored glass from a shattered mosaic, flipped in and out of her mind. Killian, leaning over her hospital bed, whispering something. Opening her eyes and looking up to see him, and realizing that he was carrying her away, through the night.

  She remembered her grandmother shouting at him to stop.

  She remembered him jerking and dropping to his knees, staring after her as she ran away with this Lieutenant Lucas Townsend.

  She remembered wondering if Killian was dying and worrying about him.

  She’d barely known him. Why did it feel so much like someone she’d trusted forever had just stabbed her in the back?

  It made no sense.

  “Charlie?”

  The van had stopped in front of a long metal building. Green metal siding. Gray metal doors and roof. It didn’t have windows that she could see. There were other buildings along the solid dirt road, all very similar. The lieutenant took her hand. “Hey, Charlie, you there?” he asked

  “I’m here. I need to let my mother know I’m all right.”

  “We’ve already taken care of that. She asked us to keep you here until we’ve caught that rogue vampire that tried to kill you earlier.”

  “I don’t think–” she cut herself off.

  “Go on,” Lieutenant Townsend said. “You can tell me anything. You don’t think what?”

  She blinked and looked him in the eyes. They were warm and completely sympathetic. “I don’t think he was trying to kill me.”

  His sad eyes grew sadder. “I know they can seem...almost human. But Charlie, there’s only one thing a vampire ever wants from a person like you or me, and that’s a meal.” She frowned at him, and he said, “Everyone here has the antigen, too. Well, with the exception of a few staffers. You’re safe here.”

  She looked around. The camp was quiet, dark. “What is this? Some kind of BD internment camp?” she asked.

  “Not internment. Training. You’re not like everyone else with the antigen, Charlie. You’re stronger than most. You have a unique and powerful healing ability. The scrapes and bruises you sustained in that car accident are already healing. You’re smarter than most, too. You’re a rare and special individual. That’s why you’re here. You can help us.”

  “Help you do what?”

  He smiled. “Protect others like you. People like your grandmother, Roxanne O’Malley.

  She looked at him with a gasp.

  “Yeah, we know who she is.”

  “Then why did you ask me?”

  “To see if you’d lie.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. You’re protecting her. That’s admirable. I’m going to help you learn how to protect her even better. Okay?”

  She swallowed hard, feeling suspicious of this guy, and this camp, and whatever the hell was happening here. “How long do I have to stay?”

  “Only as long as you want to.” He looked behind them. “I just hope you won’t leave quite yet. That bastard won’t give up easily. He’s probably lurking outside your mother’s apartment or your grandmother’s place, just waiting for another shot at draining every ounce of blood from your body and leaving you dead where you fall.”

  She shivered and followed his gaze, but of course saw nothing through the tinted glass. “I’ll stay for tonight,” she said.

  “Good.” His smile was as white as any she’d seen. “Come on, I’ll show you to your bunk.”

  “We’re here,” Roxy said.

  Killian heard her, vaguely, as if from a great distance, told himself to open his eyes, but had a hell of a time doing it. “Wake up, Killian. It’s still nighttime. Not time for you to sleep just yet. And I’m gonna need your help, so let’s go. Shake it off.”

  Nighttime? Then why was he so....?

  He forced his eyes open, lifted his head, looked around him. He was still in the pickup truck, outside Roxy’s little log cabin in the woods. He’d driven for a few miles while she’d made her calls, but then Roxy insisted they switch places again. Once they did, he’d slept all the way back from Pendleton. At night.

  “It’s the drug,” Roxy explained. “They have this tranquilizer that works on vamps. It was developed in the nineties by DPI.”

  “DPI?” Right, she’d mentioned them. The Division of Paranormal something or other. Idiots maybe.

  She was already out of the truck, hurrying around to his side, opening his door. “I usually park farther away and hike in, but special times call for special measures, or whatever that saying is.”

  He gave his head a shake. “Tell me more about this...DPI.”

  “They used to be a secret sub-division of the CIA. They’re not so secret anymore. They’re the government’s top players in the games of vampire misinformation, fear mongering, and eventual extermination. If they have their way, they’ll wipe your kind out of existence. There are, however, some of us mortals who intend to see to it that they don’t. I’m one of those. Now get out of the truck and come on inside so I can fix you up.”

  He wanted to ask a dozen questions. How she knew so much, why she would take the side of his kind against her own
, when they were going to start searching for Charlie–that was topmost on his mind.

  He slid to the ground, wobbled a little. Roxy grabbed his arm and steadied him to the front door and then through it into a living room full of plants and birds in cages. The entire place smelled of Charlie. It made him ache for her. Then the giant white owl in the man-sized cage stared at him and ruffled her feathers all up in alarm.

  Animals knew a predator when they met one. He tried to send her his harm-free intent with the power of his mind, and thought he might have succeeded when her feathers settled again and her head bobbed up and down.

  “That’s Olive,” Roxy said.

  “I know. She just told me.”

  “A bit of animal communication? Nice talent, Killian.”

  The sofa was where he thought he was headed, because he needed to get off his feet, but Roxy tugged him past it. “This way. Fortunately, there’s an antidote for the drug they shot into you. Even more fortunately, I have some on hand. So buck up, you’ll be yourself again in no time.”

  She had an antidote for a drug that worked on vampires? Who the hell was she?

  He followed her through a door and down into her basement. There was a long table against one wall with three computers on it. There were weapons all over the walls, ancient ones as well as modern, and there were books, a hundred of them at least, some of them apparently very old. On the table was a small mountain of cell phones.

  Off to one side there was a separate room with its door standing open.

  “That’s the safe room,” Roxy said when she saw him looking. “It’s where you’ll sleep. You can lock it from inside. No one can get in once you do, and there’s a tunnel to the outside if you need to make a quick getaway.” She frowned. “Used to be a cherry ‘68 Mustang at the other end. But my stubborn granddaughter made short work of that.”

  Killian followed along, peering into the safe room where there were shelves of weapons, crates of supplies and a couple of cots. Behind him, Roxy was tapping a message into a cell phone. He frowned. “Who are you texting?”

  “Reinforcements. Don’t you worry about it. Come here, sit down.” She tossed the phone aside and pulled a rolling chair away from the bank of computers. “Roll up your sleeve for me.”

  He obeyed, watching the woman open a tiny refrigerator, and he glimpsed clear plastic bags inside it that made his body tense and his eyes heat. “Is that blood?”

  She was drawing fluid into a syringe from a vial. “That it is, my friend. Human, even. I try to keep a little on hand in case of emergencies.” She replaced the vial in the fridge. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to slip a few pints into a large purse when you show up at a blood drive. They think you’re there to make a deposit. No one’s expecting you to make a withdrawal instead. I’m a frequent donor.” She took a bag from the fridge and tossed it to him. Killian caught the blood in his hands, feeling the hunger come to life inside in a way it had rarely done. Human blood. God, how long had it been?

  “You can warm it in the microwave if you want,” she said, holding up the syringe and snapping a finger against it to remove the air bubbles. She glanced his way. Saw the empty bag in his hand and probably the red glow in his eyes as well. He’d bitten through the plastic and downed the pint in about two seconds. “Well, I guess you must’ve needed that. Now give me your arm.”

  He took off his denim jacket and then his T-shirt, turning a shoulder her way.

  “My goodness, aren’t we ripped?” She swabbed him with an alcohol wipe, which was completely unnecessary, then injected him. The needle prick hurt like a knife wound would’ve hurt, him being a vampire and super sensitized, but he clenched his jaw and bore it well, he thought, then put his shirt back on when it was over.

  “I don’t think we can safely stay here,” he said. “What if they make Charlie tell them where you live?”

  “We’re moving at sunset. You need to sleep and heal. Let that blood and the day sleep do its work today. I’ll pack what we need and do some recon. I have other places. We’ll be out of here by sundown.” She pawed through the pile of cell phones, chose one and dialed it, clicking the speaker button so he could hear both sides of the call. “Charlotte’s mother,” she said. There was ringing, and then a woman’s voice answered.

  “If your phone is being monitored, hang up now.”

  “It’s not...that I know of anyway. What the hell happened to my daughter, Roxy? What have you done with her now?”

  Roxy rolled her eyes, probably at the woman’s use of her name on what might be a monitored call. “You saw what happened, same as me. That government goon squad took her, which is exactly what I was afraid would happen.”

  “No. They tried to take her, but then that vampire came back and got her away from them.”

  “Oh did he now?” Roxy met Killian’s eyes, her own a little angry, but not at him.

  “They came over here a few hours ago, the same damn commandant that’s been on the news every day since the Portland Seven. Crowe. He’s got eyes like one. He was asking if I’d heard from her, said the vampire ambushed the SUV on the way to some safe house where they were planning to hide her. He got her, took her away with him. They said I’d probably never...” her voice broke. “...never see her again.”

  “Well that’s complete–” Roxy stopped herself as an odd mechanical hum came and went through the line. Killian saw her eyes widen, and then she went on. “That’s completely tragic. I’m devastated. But don’t give up hope, Trish. Not until we know for sure.”

  “I’ll never give up hope, Roxy. But you...you can help. You know these–”

  “You know I’ll do all I can,” she said. “I’ll call you soon. Goodbye Trish.” And she hung up, shook her head, and said, “God that woman is too dumb to live. Calling me by my name, and she was just about to mention how well I know the Undead on a tapped line. That a girl as intelligent as Charlotte managed to emerge from that gene pool is beyond me.”

  “Maybe she got more from her father’s side of the family,” Killian said. He was more than halfway to admiring this woman. But he still didn’t trust her. Not entirely. “Why are you helping me, Roxy?”

  She took the empty plastic bag from him, crossed the basement to the furnace, opened a burner door and tossed it inside. “I’ve got a whole list of reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  She shrugged. “Mainly, because I’m going to need help getting my granddaughter back from the government. Preternatural help. And right now, you’re the only vampire close enough at hand.”

  “Ah.”

  “And because I’ve been a friend to your kind for more than twenty years. And because in this world of grays, there are still such plain and simple things as black and white. Right and wrong. And what’s been done to the Undead and what I suspect is now being done to The Chosen is just simply wrong. I’ve never been very good at tolerating wrong.”

  “So you’re an ally.”

  “I’m a blood-relative, Killian.”

  He nodded.

  “And there’s one more reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You are Charlotte’s destiny. Part of it, anyway. I have reason to believe there’s a lot more. But you and she...you’re bound. Fated. You might not know it yet, and neither does she, but I know it.”

  The words rocked him. He had been alone for so long that the idea of being anyone’s destiny was alien to him. But he felt the validity of those words right to the core of him. They resonated with the unmistakable vibration of truth. He was bound to Charlie from before he’d even met her, and he didn’t think it was because she was one of The Chosen, or even because she was the one with whom he had the most powerful link. It was because they were two parts of the same soul, torn apart during some previous incarnation and seeking each other ever since. That’s what it felt like. She was a part of him. The part he’d been missing.

  Killian felt the pull of the sunrise tugging him toward slumber. His eyelids w
ere heavy, drooping.

  “Come on, before you fall asleep where you are, and I’m forced to lug your carcass into the safe room.” Roxy went in before him, and he followed, watching as she unzipped a plastic storage bag and pulled a blanket and pillow from it. She put them on the nearest cot, then went to the shelf unit on the back wall and pulled it open to show him the tunnel she’d mentioned. She closed it again. “I’ll go check the other side, make sure the exit is still camouflaged. You’re safe here for the day, Killian. Rest. You need it.”

  “Thank you, Roxy. I want you to know that I’ll do everything in my power to help you get Charlie back.”

  “I know you will,” she said, and then she left and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter Eight