Vampire's Shade 1 (Vampire's Shade Collection)

by Vivienne Neas

  Chapter 3

  A hammering on my door pulled me out of my sleep cycle before my alarm could wake me up. I stared at the hazy numbers on the digital clock next to my bed. I’d only slept about three hours. Whoever was out there had better have a bloody good reason for waking me up.

  I grabbed the Glock from under my pillow and walked to the front door. I pushed my eye against the peephole. A woman with a short red bob, wearing a power-dressing suit, was standing on the other side of my door. She must have been lost.

  I tucked the gun into the back of my shorts’ waistband and pulled open the door.

  The woman looked me up and down and blinked. Her eyes were emerald green, and her cheeks were dusted with freckles. The black and red dress suit made her look businesslike and much too classy to be in this neighborhood.

  “I’m sorry. I think I have the wrong apartment,” she said, looking down at a piece of paper and then up above my door where the metal number was screwed on.

  “Who are you looking for?” There weren’t a lot of characters in my apartment building she could want to see—I could tell her that much.

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. There was no Mr. Griffin in my life.

  “I’m Adele Griffin,” I said. “No Mister here. Who sent you?”

  The woman looked unsure. “Ruben Cross sent me over here. He said he had an employee who could help me out.”

  “I work for Ruben,” I said, and stepped aside, making space for her to come in. If Ruben had sent her to me it was business, and it was serious.

  She hesitated before she stepped into the apartment. I gestured toward the kitchen.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked when we got there. I opened the fridge and scanned the contents. I had to run to the store.

  “Just water, thank you,” she said, and sat down in the booth against the wall.

  I shrugged and poured us each a glass. The sun was low enough for the light to fall into my kitchen window. I wasn’t usually up at this time of the morning, and it made me crabby.

  “You’re a woman,” she said.

  Thank you, Ms. Obvious.

  “What do you need done?”

  “I’m sorry. Ruben just didn’t mention you were a woman. I expected a man.”

  “I can do a job as well as any man can,” I said smoothly. If she was going to sit here and make this a sexist thing, I wasn’t going to take the job, no matter who she wanted me to get rid of.

  She took a sip of water. “I didn’t mean that as an insult,” she said. “Now that I think about it, maybe it’s better that you are a woman. We look at things differently, don’t we?”

  “We certainly do,” I said, sarcasm bleeding through my words. I wasn’t going to be categorized. But if she picked up on it, she didn’t react. “Who is it you want me to take care of?”

  She fiddled with the glass, turning it around and around on the plastic tabletop with an irritating rhythm. I placed my hand on the glass and gripped it firmly so she couldn’t turn it. She looked up at me, and I couldn’t interpret the expression on her face.

  I forced politeness. “Look, this isn’t a good time for me. I’m off-duty, and these kinds of meetings usually happen at the office. If you want me to hit someone, tell me the details so I can get back to bed.”

  “Hit someone?” she asked, looking confused.

  The ignorance of some people irritated me. You didn’t knock on the door of a vampire slayer and wonder what they meant when they talked about taking care of someone.

  “You’re here for me to go after someone,” I said, my voice snappy.

  She nodded. “My fiancé.”

  I frowned and studied her for a second. She was very human. Her skin was light, but too tanned for any kind of vampire, purebred or half. Vampires and humans didn’t mix as a rule. The few who did kept it secret, and human-vampire couples chose to stay hidden so they wouldn’t be the subject of public ridicule.

  Miss Priss didn’t look like the vampire type.

  “I don’t kill humans,” I said flatly.

  Her eyes widened. “Kill? I don’t want you to kill anyone. I went to Ruben Cross because a colleague of mine mentioned that he deals with supernatural creatures. Connor…” Her eyes shimmered, and I prayed she wouldn’t cry. “Connor was kidnapped, and I have reason to believe vampires did it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Either Ruben had a twisted sense of humor, sending a rescue mission my way, or he had misunderstood this woman’s idea of what his company did. I banked on the former.

  “Listen, Ms.…”

  “Jennifer. Jennifer Lawson.”

  The name sounded familiar. “Jennifer. I don’t do search-and-rescues. If you have a problem with a vampire, I can hook you up. But I don’t go after their victims until they’ve turned.”

  “Turned? Is… is that something they’ll do to him?”

  “If the motivation’s right,” I said. “How long has he been missing?”

  “About five days,” she said. “No one has seen or heard from him, and it’s unlike him to disappear without letting me know. They didn’t leave a ransom note or anything, but he has a lot he can offer, and a lot of people know about it.”

  “Vampires don’t generally go after money,” I said. “They recruit for power, mostly. Or secrets. You’ll be surprised how much more secrets are worth.”

  “Secrets…” Jennifer said.

  I had a feeling she was talking to herself more than to me. I waited in silence for her to speak again.

  “Please, can you just see if you can find him? Even if he ends up being…” She swallowed hard. “Dead.”

  “Listen, vampires don’t kill unless they have a really good reason. That’s why they’re allowed into society now. And if they did to him what they usually do, he’ll probably wish he was dead instead anyway. It’s not legal for them to turn someone against their will. There are laws about these things, although I can’t say they’re set in stone yet. There are a lot of loopholes when it comes to vampires. I’m very sorry for your loss, but these things happen, and unfortunately there’s not a lot I can do about it. Not until he pops up on my radar as a vampire and I have an order to take him out.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks, and I groaned inwardly. She clipped open her black handbag and rummaged around in it until she pulled out a tissue. She ran it underneath her eyes so her makeup wouldn’t smudge.

  “I’ll pay you whatever you like,” she said. “I just need to get him back. Or at least know what happened to him if I don’t.”

  “And if it turns out he’s a vampire? Because it’s more than likely that’s what’s happened to him.”

  She shuddered.

  There were cases where humans married vampires and had families with them. I was living proof of that. But it didn’t look to me like Jennifer was the type who would get it on with a vampire – it took a bit more of an open mind than she seemed to have– but people often surprised me.

  “I don’t suppose there are ways to save them?” she asked.

  “Save?”

  If she thought that being a vampire was some sort of curse you could save someone from, she had another think coming. But it wasn’t my style to defend vampires, considering that I hunted them, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do about it,” I said instead. “Once he’s a vampire, there’s no going back.”

  “It’s his soul, isn’t it?” she said in a whisper. “It’s lost now.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. The idea that vampires were the undead and had no soul was a common misconception. I blamed literature. There were so many stories claiming things about vampires that weren’t really true. But because the stories got a few things right, like sunlight and fangs, people tended to accept the rest of it as fact too.

  “Vampires aren’t undead, Jennifer,” I said, trying to explain. “They’re living, just like you and me.”

 
“Then, what happens when they’re turned?” she asked.

  “It’s more like a mutation. A virus that alters them. Permanently. They need different things to survive, like darkness and blood, and their bodies change because of that. Think more along the lines of a different set of hormones kicking in. Blood loss is what turns them.”

  The fact that it messed with their moral structures too was something no one had been able to explain, at least not yet. In my book, that was what set them apart from humans. Something happened to them, their humanity got taken away, and an unfeeling monster remained — willing to kill, willing to sacrifice.

  Maybe that was the bit that made humans think of them as “undead.” The bit where they were heartless was translated into their literally not having a heart. But the fact was, vampires were alive, unless I got my hands on them.

  Jennifer started sniveling again, and I felt the onset of a black mood. Give me lack of sleep and a crying woman, and I’m ready for my next kill.

  “Will you help me?” she asked. “You’re the last person I can turn to. No one in my world really believes in the underworld. The whole thing is a bit bizarre for most people.”

  I kept quiet. In my experience, the longer I didn’t say anything, the more the other person filled up the empty space with their own words.

  “Do you follow the news, Ms. Griffin?” she asked.

  I shook my head. She nodded hers.

  “There’s been some trouble with his company lately. A lot of ugly things came out that were painted the wrong way. I think it’s all an inside job to pin it on Connor.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “He stands for vampires and their rights. A lot of people are angry about it.”

  “But you’re saying vampires did it. That doesn’t make sense.”

  She shrugged, and it looked like she was searching for words. She kept her gaze on her hands, fiddling with the tissue she’d used for her tears.

  “He just employed the wrong people,” she finally said. “He didn’t do anything to deserve this. Oh, god, what if they do end up just killing him?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back in my seat, feeling the Glock bite into my back. I didn’t do pity cases, but this guy was a human. Well, he had been before he was taken. If he still was human, it was my duty at least to try to protect him. But I had other things on my plate. I had to deal with so much already, and handling a kidnapping wasn’t really in my job description.

  “Do you mind if I ask what your motivation is?” I said. I didn’t like taking on jobs that didn’t fit into my division.

  “Didn’t I just explain my motivation?” she asked. She looked confused, like I’d said something foreign. “How much of a reason do you need to get your loved one back? Connor and I are engaged. He’s so much a part of my life, I can’t imagine my life without him. Haven’t you ever loved someone so much that it felt like you were bleeding to death when something happened to them? Like half of you doesn’t work right anymore?”

  I thought of Aspen. Maybe. But she didn’t talk about that kind of love.

  “I’m not going to go on a wild goose chase if I don’t know what I’m doing this for. Is he in trouble himself, or is it his company?”

  She opened her mouth and moved it without words coming out, then closed it again and shook her head.

  “It’s all on the company,” she said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She began to study her perfectly manicured nails. I wondered where people got time for things like that. Between surviving and training to survive, I didn’t have time to bother with my looks.

  She opened her mouth, but hesitated before she spoke.

  “I love him,” she said quietly. “Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  I supposed it was. I loved Aspen, and she was the drive for all of this, for everything I was doing. But I didn’t understand how men and women could love each other enough for something like that. All I knew about love was the fact that it could kill you. Literally.

  Had Ruben sent Jennifer to me because he knew the moral side of her situation would get to me? Was it about the money? Or did he really think she had a job for me? She’s been pretty straightforward about what she wanted. I doubted Ruben had misunderstood. He was obtuse, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Look, let me think about this,” I said. “I’ll give you an answer by tomorrow.”

  I wanted to turn it down. I wanted to stay away from this mess. Love stories didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t want to have to deal with sniveling women who’d lost their boyfriends. Life was tough all over. If I sat here mourning about everything I’d lost, I wouldn’t ever get out of the house.

  But something was drawing me to this like a magnet. The pull fascinated me as much as it bugged me.

  Jennifer nodded. She looked disappointed, but she didn’t say so.

  The truth was that I just didn’t know. My loyalty lay with humans, but I didn’t generally get involved with people unless it involved killing. And I didn’t get involved with vampires unless there was a Wanted sign on their backs. If I could choose, they’d all have one, but again it wasn’t my thing to kill anyone who hadn’t done something to deserve it.

  Jennifer opened her handbag again and pulled out a business card, which she slid across the table.

  “This is where you can reach me,” she said.

  I turned the card and looked it over. She was a marketing consultant at the big shot firm whose headquarters was the glass building in the heart of the CBD. The Palace, they called it. Chances were, Jennifer’s boyfriend was a big shot too.

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “Connor O’Neill,” she said.

  Definitely a big shot. I’d heard of him; his name was in the news every now and then, but for what, I didn’t know. I only listened to the news to hear whether there were any bulletins on vampire killing that would cue me to lay low.

  Jennifer stood up. I let her walk to the door first. I made a point of never having someone at my back, even if they were small and harmless, like Jennifer. Sometimes it was the small, harmless-looking ones who did the most damage.

  Besides, I didn’t want to give her a look at the gun I had on me. She wouldn’t have been able to miss that lump of black matte metal underneath my white tank.

  “Thank you,” she said as she stepped through the door.

  “I’ll call you,” I promised. “Are you going to be all right getting out of here? It’s not the best neighborhood.”

  “I have a car waiting on the street,” she said, and turned away.

  A car. Waiting. Imagine that.

  I closed the door, walked back to my bedroom, and got back into bed. I returned my Glock to its place under my pillow and pulled the sheets over me.

  I closed my eyes, but my mind was awake now, and whirring. The vampire in the alley came back to me, its accusing eyes staring at me.

  I felt like a lowlife, betraying them. But then again, which species was at fault when I lost my mother and nearly Aspen, too? My circumstances had created me, and a killing vampire had made me a vampire killer. I wasn’t going to apologize for taking care of Aspen.

  I buried my face in the pillow and forced my mind to be blank until I finally fell asleep again.