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

by Vivienne Neas

  Chapter 4

  The office lights at Cross Ledger Accounting were on but the lobby lights were off, making it look like the offices were closed but a handful of people were putting in some overtime.

  I walked through to the office Sonya used after the sun had set. Sonya was a vampire. With her mouse-brown hair and dull yellow eyes, her pale skin made her look even more washed out. She was impossibly thin and tall, with long fingers. Ruben employed her because it meant he could take vampire business too, if it came down to that. Money was the driving force behind his choices. Vampires often had a lot more money because they stuck around long enough to make fortunes. Immortality was a blessing, at least in that way.

  I put my helmet on Sonya’s desk. She glanced up at me, irritated. Her lips lifted in a snarl that threatened to roll back over her long fangs, but she controlled herself. She knew well enough what I could do.

  “Ruben wants to see you before you head out,” she said, handing me a stack of papers.

  We were careful not to touch each other during the exchange. Her skin on mine felt like it would burn me. I was sure she felt the same about me.

  The papers had photos of driver’s licenses or black and white scans pulled off servers somewhere. “Who’s this one?” I asked. There was no photo, only a social security number.

  “That’s the one Ruben wants to see you about,” Sonya said, not looking up at me. “He’s in his office.”

  Where else would he be?

  I took the stack of papers and walked into Ruben’s office. He was scribbling something down on a piece of paper.

  “Since when do you send clients to my apartment?” I asked. I didn’t sit down, and in my leathers and lace-ups, I was intimidating. Ruben knew I carried firepower, and I didn’t know if he was sure I wouldn’t use it.

  “Look, she wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept going on about needing to find some vampire, and you’re the best person for that kind of thing. Besides, she was going to pay big bucks. I wasn’t going to pass her up.”

  “No, you were going to pass her on. She wants a rescue mission. I don’t do charity cases.”

  Ruben looked up at me. “She said she’d pay,” he repeated.

  “I didn’t mean money. I meant letting people live. It’s not my department.”

  Ruben chuckled and dropped his pen. “Look, you do what you want with that case, but make it look like you did what you could so I can get some money out of this. I don’t hire you for my health.”

  I grunted and sat down on a chair opposite him. “What about this other one? Sonya was cheerful about it.”

  Sonya was never cheerful about anything. I supposed working for people who slayed her kind after hours was tough for her to handle. And Ruben paid her next to nothing. On the other hand, maybe she had a reason to hate vampires as much as I did.

  “Someone from the Hills wants this one taken out. Another big contract – he’s a big shot around town who did something to piss off the wrong people. I want you all out on this one. It’s a kill, so it’s right up your alley.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I lifted up the paper with the details. “You didn’t give me much to work with. I don’t even have a name or an address.”

  Ruben shrugged. “That’s what they gave me. They’re not too keen on any of this information getting out, so they’re trying to limit the amount of information that changes hands around here. I get the feeling they’re after him for something bigger than the usual I-hate-vampires stuff. You’ve done this before. Don’t tell me you’re getting picky. Picky is above your pay grade.”

  I rolled my eyes and got up. I was itching to get my hands on a vampire or two. I was in a terrible mood, and the only way to fix that was to take out a menace.

  “Don’t cut it so close. I want to leave the office earlier tonight.”

  “If I believed you had what it takes to set foot out in the dark, I’d believe you,” I called over my shoulder.

  Ruben could suck it. I did what I wanted. He wasn’t going to fire me. Carl was a joke; without me, Ruben would lose all his money. There weren’t a lot of people out there jumping to take my place.

  Sonya shook her head when I walked out. I took my helmet off her desk and stepped out into the night.

  The air was crisp with the first hints of autumn. There were no clouds, and the sky was filled with pinpricks of light. I opened the throttle on my bike and drove to the first address on the list. A driver’s license was a big help – I found a lot of houses that way – but the vampires were rarely home.

  I stopped in front of a red brick house with a well-maintained lawn. The night smelled like jasmine as I walked up to the front door. Vampires liked to choose night-scented flowers, not because they liked them, but because every animal knows the importance of scents and covering them up.

  The porch light was on, but everything else was off.

  I walked around to the back of the house. I kept my eyes open for trouble, and my nose was working overtime. There was no vampire on the premises at the moment. The smell of cheap cologne was hanging in the air near the bedroom window, telling me the vampire had been here earlier and had tried to cover his scent with a different smell. They tended to do that. Vampires could sniff each other out, and cologne helped. But it wasn’t enough.

  It was never enough.

  I worked my blade under one of the windows and slid it up. It was a good neighborhood, and the windows weren’t sticky like some of the ones I worked with. It also helped that there were no burglar bars. Those could really make breaking and entering a bitch.

  Inside the house, I walked around. The furniture was cheap but nice, and was organized like whoever lived here enjoyed being here. I guessed that this had been the house the vamp had lived in before he’d turned. Vampires often chose a new place to live in after they’d turned, because they had cut ties with their old life – or they changed the interior of their existing homes. They slept during the day, and at night they wanted to get out. The night air made vampire skins itch if they were cooped up for too long.

  Houses became nothing more than a safe haven for sleep. Furniture and décor didn’t matter.

  The en-suite bathroom was the room where the fragrance hung thickest in the air. It tickled my nose and I crinkled it, trying to breathe around the smell.

  In the bedroom I found what I was looking for: a scent that wasn’t altered. The bed was full of it. The myth that vampires slept in coffins was absolutely ridiculous; vampires liked comfort as much as the next person.

  The curtains in this room were thick and black, with roll-up blinds behind them. When I looked carefully at the walls around the window, I saw that shutters had been installed that came down in the daytime to keep out the light. That seemed a little like overkill, but whatever. Better safe than sorry.

  “Well, let’s see if we can find you,” I said, and took a deep breath, filling my nose with the scent. It smelled like earth and mulch, and something that reminded me of baby powder.

  The house had little else to offer. There were no photos or personal mementos that I could see. This vampire had fallen into the habit of distancing itself from life a little, after all.

  Finding the vampire after I left the house was easy. Now that I had the scent, it was just a matter of tracking it. The vampire had left over the back wall, not through the front yard. Clever.

  I found the scent on the other side of the wall and followed it through two neighboring gardens. I stuck to the shadows so I wouldn’t be seen. Unless there were dogs around, it was easy to hide myself.

  Some animals loved vampires; they seemed to be drawn to the lack of humanity in the vampires’ nature. Other animals hated them. With me, it could swing either way. Animals hated or loved me, depending on how much of myself I showed to them, and which side they preferred. I hated that it was a gamble and I could never be sure, but I had enough going for me that I couldn’t complain about a few setbacks. After all, everyon
e had flaws.

  The vampire was a young one. It didn’t cover itself up the way it should have, and I found it two blocks away. It was hunched in a corner, eyes half-closed with the satiated high of the feed. If you’ve ever seen a snake with an animal halfway down its throat, you’ll get the idea. There’s a moment for every predator where it’s helpless. For a vampire, it was the moment just after a feed, when its energy levels hadn’t kicked up just yet, and it was lulled into a passive state for a few minutes.

  I’d caught it at the perfect moment. I waited until it had snapped back to reality so that it would have a fighting chance, but even then the vampire wasn’t as quick as it should have been. It was clumsy and helpless, and it didn’t take long before the job was done. I didn’t even get my leathers dirty.

  I walked away, unsatisfied and more frustrated than when I’d started.

  I had a handful of vampires still to find before I could call it a night, but I needed a challenge. If it wasn’t a good fight, if I didn’t have to fight for my life, it wasn’t worth the trouble. Nothing made me feel as alive as being so close to death I could smell the rot on its breath.

  I was going to find the faceless vampire that Ruben wanted me to hunt down. That would be a challenge, and I had all night to do it.

  When I got to my bike, my phone rang.

  “Are you knee-deep in blood yet, or can you come in?” It was Joel. “Your ammunition arrived, and I have another gun here that’s looking for an owner who will actually fire it.”

  “It’s a slow night. I’ve got time. I need you for a couple of things, anyway. I’ll be there in ten.”

  I pulled my helmet on and goosed the throttle, spraying gravel like waves on both sides of the bike until I was on the street. I got to Joel in less than ten minutes. When I pulled into the drive, the garage door was already open for me. I rolled my bike inside, and the automatic doors slowly rolled shut.

  “You’re going to get caught if you keep drawing attention to yourself like that,” Joel said.

  “What, you don’t think I can talk my way out of it?” I pouted and made my eyes big, and he laughed and hugged me.

  His dark brown hair was long and curled where it brushed his shoulders and jawline. He wore glasses with black frames that made his eyes stand out, and he always had a three-day stubble. Tonight he was wearing sweatpants and a matching jacket with holes cut in the sleeves for his thumbs, but I’d seen him in a variety of outfits ranging from hobo to classy. Joel was weird, but there was no question about who he was, and his loyalty was complete. He would never rat me out.

  “Come on through,” he said.

  We walked through a narrow door at the back of the garage. It led into a small room with a narrow strip of small windows near the ceiling. Servants’ quarters, once upon a time. A dark opening took up most of the floor space: a concrete staircase leading down into the earth. The trap door that normally covered it was leaning up against the wall. There were houses in Westham that still had war bunkers and the like. Joel had been lucky enough to snatch one of the last ones on the market.

  Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling every couple of feet, throwing circles of light on several workbenches. The low hum of the lights filled the air, and classical music was streaming from a radio somewhere.

  He opened a safe and stacked boxes of ammo on the table in front of me. The boxes all had polystyrene packaging in them, holding rows of bullets. Five by ten. Joel packed them out according to their labels.

  “Smith and Wesson 500s, Gen4 Glock 23, 9mm Beretta, SIG Sauer P226.”

  I nodded as he named them. He knew what I carried.

  Joel Garber was the only person in the county who could organize silver bullets. The way I saw it, every police officer needed to carry at least one silver cartridge, not just the vampire-prison guards, but vampires hadn’t made that kind of name for themselves yet.

  “You’re a star,” I said as I started taking out the cartridges I had on me so I could fill them. The rest I would put in the storage compartment on my bike. I always felt better when I had a fresh set of ammo.

  “Should last you a while,” Joel said.

  “I hope so.”

  Joel walked to a narrow locker in the corner and opened it. He took out a gun and walked back to me.

  I whistled, as I took it from him. It was an AR-15 carbine. The black metal was cold under my fingers.

  “This one’s semi-automatic. Air-cooled. Light enough for you to throw around when you need to.” He produced a scope. “And it has extras.”

  I smiled, looking the gun over, holding it up against my shoulder to try it on for size. Joel was right: it was light.

  “Not your usual inconspicuous deal, but I thought you could appreciate it.”

  “This is why I love coming to you,” I said, grinning as Joel pushed a box of ammo across the table toward me. “And you got me silver for it,” I exclaimed.

  Joel grinned. “What else do you need done?” He leaned back against the desk and folded his arms.

  “I need you to check out a social security number for me. It’s all I have to go by.”

  Joel shook his head, but he walked to his computer and sat down.

  It was always on. He ran a hell of a system. I didn’t know much about those things, but Joel was a real techie. Sometimes I wondered what he was doing in a hole in Westham, helping a fly-by-night vampire hunter like me.

  “Don’t you have better things to do with your time?” I asked.

  He held out his hand, and I gave him the paper with the details on it. He kept his eyes on the screen while his fingers flew over the keyboard in a blur.

  “Then who are you going to run to for this kind of information? There are some ugly characters in town.”

  I snorted. “I think I count as one of them,” I said.

  “You’re not so bad,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve seen worse. You don’t see the kinds of guys who walk through my door.”

  “If they don’t have fangs, they’re not really on my radar,” I agreed.

  “Here we are,” Joel said, and the computer beeped.

  I walked around the desk and bent down. My face hovered over Joel’s shoulder. He smelled musky, like he’d sprayed on deodorant, but not recently.

  “There’s no name,” I said. It was only an address. 442 Caldwell Street. It was definitely in Westham Hills.

  “I know. His details are blocked with all sorts of firewalls and security systems. This was all I could get.”

  “I thought you were good at this,” I teased.

  He turned and looked at me. His face was open and his eyes were serious. He was offended. “I can do it, but it’s going to take me a while. You don’t look like you want to wait a day or two.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll figure it out.”

  Joel nodded and got up. “Look, I’ll keep running it for you and let you know if I find anything else. Until then, you’re going to have to use address only. It’s more than you started off with, though.”

  I climbed the stairs back up to the garage, carrying my load, with Joel a couple of steps behind me. I packed my ammunition into the compartment under the seat of my bike and swung my leg over. The carbine was on my back with a strap. There was nowhere else I could put it with the compartment full, but maybe I’d get the chance to use it tonight.

  I was about to pull on my helmet when Joel put his hand on my arm.

  “Be careful out there,” he said.

  “I have at least two hundred shots on me, and a helluva gun. Don’t worry about it.”

  “People don’t usually have that kind of protection unless it’s serious. He doesn’t want to be found, and you’re going to push his buttons by doing the exact opposite. Don’t get dead.”

  “I won’t,” I said, smiling at Joel.

  I wasn’t going to tell him that if that happened, I didn’t know that I’d be too upset about it. They couldn’t turn me, with my already-vampire mix of
blood. The only way for me to go was out for good, and sometimes I wondered if that would really be a bad thing. Still, his concern was endearing.

  I pulled my helmet on and waited for the garage door to roll up. Then I pulled out into the night, my bike the only sound for miles around.

  I opened the throttle and raced down the street. I followed the main road until I had to take a left that eventually wound up the hill. It became darker, the halos around the lights drowned by the canopy of leaves that stretched over the road and around the lights. My bike’s headlight cut a shaft of light into the inky black, and the darkness folded closed behind me again like a curtain.

  I found Caldwell Street easily. It was close to the top of the hill. The road was framed by high walls with electric fencing on top and cast iron gates with intricate curls to keep everyone out that didn’t belong. Through the gates I spied mansions, lit up by green garden lighting and chandelier porch lights, making the rest of Westham look like someone’s leftovers.

  Number 442 had a mustard-colored nine-foot wall all around it, topped off with electric fencing. The gate was big and black, mostly solid, so I couldn’t see much through it save for the paving on the other side. The spikes on top were a warning.

  Despite all my skills and my breaking-and-entering expertise, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get into this one. I sat back on my bike in the dark shadows of a huge poplar tree, and listened.

  The whole neighborhood was alive. I could feel people everywhere. They felt like the warm puffs of air that cloud around your face in winter. Smells traveled to me on the wind, sweet and spicy, a mix of people and the lifeblood pumping through their veins.

  There was no way I was going to find a trace of this vampire by sitting out on the road. Either I had to come up with another plan, or I had to wait a day or two for Joel to get back to me.

  I hated waiting. I had a furnace raging inside of me that only managed to settle after a kill.

  I leaned forward, about to turn the key to kick the engine back into life, when a dark shadow blurred in the corner of my eye. I reacted too late; the sight reached my brain too slowly. Something hard cracked against the right side of my jaw, and I crashed to the ground next to my bike.

  White spots danced in front of my eyes, and for a moment I couldn’t figure out which way was up. The world spun around me and my stomach flipped, ready to heave.

  I had to be fight-ready – I was sure there would be a follow-up – but with my head spinning, I wasn’t worth much. I reached for the carbine on my back and pointed it deftly in front of me as I pushed myself up. Joel would be happy to hear it had been fired on its first night on the job.

  I heard a snicker to my left, and I swung the gun in that direction, but I couldn’t see anything.

  My mind recovered, and I was up on my feet with a swift jump. The air smelled stale, laced with a flowery scent I couldn’t place – it tried to be natural, but it wasn’t. I pulled the trigger, and the first bullets left the barrel with a whoosh and a clap, but whatever was out there had moved. I could feel a shift in the atmosphere. If it was faster than my bullets, I was in trouble. If I was too concussed to shoot straight, I was in trouble too, but I could forgive myself for that.

  “You’re not nearly what I thought you’d be.” A silky voice traveled to me on the breeze. It surrounded me and caressed my skin. A woman’s voice. An icy finger traced a shiver down my spine.

  She stepped into a pool of moonlight that broke through the leaves. She was dressed in tight black clothes – it looked like I wasn’t the only one who had dressed to suit the night – and she had white hair that was pulled back tightly against her head. She kept her head dipped so her face was masked with shadows. Where her eyes should have been, there were only pools of black.

  “Who are you?” I asked. I didn’t usually ask my opponents that, but then again, they’d never been the ones to hunt me.

  “Your worst nightmare,” she said. The cliché was lost in the venom in her voice.

  We circled each other in a crouched stance, both ready to attack. I still had the gun pointed in her direction. One pull of the trigger and she would have a hole in her chest, whether she was human or not. I had my mind back in the game, so she wouldn’t be able to outrun the bullets again.

  But I was intrigued by this woman, who managed to seem like a copy of me, and the exact opposite, all at once.

  “What do you want?” I asked. The million-dollar question.

  “How long did you think you could get away with it? How long did you think it was going to take for people to find out what you really are?”

  The blood drained from my face and I suddenly felt cold, despite my leather jacket. I’d hoped the answer to that question would be “never”. There was a reason I worked in the dead hours of the night.

  I opened my mouth to ask a question, but she launched herself at me. She took me by surprise again. Twice in one night – I was getting sloppy. In the process, she knocked my gun out of my hand, and it clattered into the darkness beyond my reach. There was no time for me to reach for another gun. She was on top of me, and she didn’t fight like a girl.

  It got dirty fast, and I silently thanked Sensei for training me the way he had. Her fists were like jackhammers, with a strength that equaled my own. I wondered if she was human, or some other sort of creature – a half-breed like me, or maybe something else that was mythical. Vampires were the only creatures acknowledged by the government, but there were others, too.

  We rolled around in the dirt. She got more hits in than I did, and besides it hurting, it made me angry.

  I reached down and pulled my silver knife from its thigh sheath. I lunged at her, but she was faster than I’d thought and I only nicked her skin. Still, she let out a piercing scream and let me go, scrambling away.

  “Bitch,” she hissed. “You’d better watch your back. This isn’t over.”

  She melted into the shadows, and seconds later she was gone.

  If she’d reacted to the silver that badly, she was definitely not human. Or a half-breed vampire.

  I groaned and lay back on the ground. My face throbbed and ached. I touched my nose carefully, and my fingers came away with blood on them, black in the moonlight.

  I managed to get myself back into downtown Westham, where the streetlights were welcome and the roads were familiar. I knew nothing could get to me there.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Ruben asked when I walked into the office. He checked his watch. “You’re early.”

  “I think I’m gonna call it a night,” I said as I dropped the ID of the one vampire I’d gotten on his desk.

  Ruben raised his eyebrows.

  “Before you say it,” I said when I saw a complaint forming on his tongue. “If you want to send me out there to do your dirty work, you’d better believe I’m going to take some time off to recover. Every other job has sick leave.”

  “And other jobs pay taxes,” he said.

  “I’m going home. I’ll call you,” I told him, then I walked out.

  Sonya didn’t say anything. She just stared. I bet she was damn happy about her safe little desk job.

  I made my way home more slowly than usual. I didn’t want to run into a pole because my coordination was off. I was dizzy and nauseated, and the movement around me made it worse. I was sure I had a concussion. I considered myself lucky I didn’t have a broken nose. Small blessings.

  Somehow, I made it home and into the shower. The water stung on my face. I had a split lip, and I would have a black eye and a swollen jaw for a day or two. Thank goodness for supernatural healing abilities.

  When I looked in the mirror, my colorful face complimented the scar down my neck for a change, and it blended rather than standing out. I shook my head at myself, then stopped. My brain felt like it was loose in my head.

  I had the presence of mind to check my Glock before I put my head on the pillow. Then I let myself sink into a deep slumber.