Chapter 9
I left the mall feeling frustrated and tired, and that made me grumpy. I tore down the road, speeding tickets be damned. My head was spinning with information, and my fingers were itching for some action. I hadn’t slept yet, but I needed to get this poison out of my system.
I hated being the one who wasn’t on top of things. I hated being on the bottom rung of the ladder. This woman, whoever she was, was messing with my people. And with me.
On top of that – Connor and vampire trafficking? I had no loyalty to vampires; I was a killer, for crying out loud. But trafficking? That just seemed wrong. The whole idea of a life that stretched to infinity, all of it filled with torture, made me feel uncomfortable.
I shook my head, my view of the road shaking. I had to get my mind straight. But I couldn’t pick and choose. I couldn’t hate vampires and protect them at the same time.
But what did I feel, then? Why did this news upset me so much? It felt like a stake lodged under my ribs, and it moved around painfully every time I moved, every time I breathed. This was why I had to kill Connor. This was why it had been such a mistake that I’d let him go.
I thought suddenly of Jennifer. How much did she know about the trafficking? How much was she involved in? Giving the police a story was one thing. I was starting to wonder about her motivation for finding Connor, and I was pissed that she’d lied to me. Was it to give him up? Or was it to save him, and thus save herself?
By the time I got home, the only thing I allowed to keep rolling around in my mind was the fact that my people were being messed with – and someone had to pay for that.
I fell into bed, but not before I had reloaded the Glock under my pillow and slid the Smith & Wesson under my bed instead of returning it to my gun safe.
Nervous, much?
The fact was, if I woke up with a blonde bitch hovering over my face, I wanted to end her with the least amount of effort. I was done playing games. I had never been one to toe the line. I just stepped over the damn thing and started shooting.
I woke up to three messages on my phone and a handful of missed calls from private numbers. None of them were from Aspen, and that was enough for me to relax.
Ruben had tried to get hold of me. I dialed his cell.
“Anxious to see me?” I asked when he picked up on the first ring.
“I want to make sure you’re getting your ass in here the moment the sun goes down and taking care of business. I want this finished.”
“You sound like someone’s chewing your ass.”
He took a deep breath. I knew it was to calm down before he broke something on his end of the line. “You have no idea what’s at stake here.”
“A lot of cash?”
He chuckled without emotion. “If it were only that easy. Your life is simple enough – you pull a trigger, and you troubles are over. My troubles live long enough to come back and bite me.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up.
My life was easy, was it? Because I could just shoot my troubles and go to bed without a headache?
If only it were that simple. The problem with killing was that it really did come back to haunt you, no matter how justified it was. And there had been plenty of reasons for me to pick up a gun in the first place. But it was safer to let Ruben believe that his life was difficult, cocooned in the safety of his office, while I got blood on my hands. There were some offenses that couldn’t be repaid in any other way.
I got dressed in my leathers and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked as deadly as my father, with my dark hair and haunted eyes. I curled my lips back to confirm that I was only looking at myself. No fangs. No threat.
I shuddered and shrugged into my holsters. The guns against my body were a kind of security. They were something I understood, something solid. A gun was something I could trust. It didn’t pretend that it loved me when all it could really offer was death.
I looked at the clock. It was still early, even though the sun was casting a fiery glow through my window. I walked out the door anyway and got on my bike. I switched it on and let it idle for a minute, then twisted the throttle and pulled out into the street, with the intention of driving around until it was time to head to the office.
Instead, I ended up in front of Westham Penitentiary. The big grey building was low and squat, like it had sunk in on itself. It was divided into two sides, one half reinforced with metal rebar inside the walls and no windows, and the guards had silver bullets. The visitor lines shifted from the human building during the day to the vampire building at night.
The realization of where my body had taken me when my mind was occupied swirled like nausea in my stomach.
I walked inside and went through the usual motions, filling out the forms and producing my ID. Eventually I was sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair with thick glass in front of me. I shivered, and my chest felt like lead. Suddenly I wanted to run, but just as I began to get up, he walked through the door.
My father.
He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and his formerly black hair was almost completely grey now. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. But it was what was underneath the hair and clothes that scared me. My father looked like he had doubled in age. His face sagged and his cheeks were sunken in; his blue irises were so pale that it was difficult to tell what color they had once been. And at the same time, the face that stared back at me was still the face of the father I’d grown up with.
He picked up the phone attached to the partition and held it against his ear. I did the same. The receiver was cold and heavy against my cheek.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” he said.
“I didn’t expect to come.”
A silence hung between us, filled with everything we couldn’t say.
“How’s Aspen?”
“She’s doing all right,” I answered stiffly. No thanks to you, I added silently. “I’m doing well too. Thank you for asking.”
He didn’t need to say the words. I could hear them anyway. I didn’t look like I was doing okay. I didn’t feel like it, either.
His eyes glazed over, and he seemed to look past me at a memory that transported him to a different world. I guessed that in a place as colorless and drab as this, he had to escape to a world he’d created himself. He’d gotten good at it. I know I had, and my prison wasn’t even something tangible.
“I never meant to do any of it,” he said so softly I could barely make out the words. But what he said wasn’t lost on me.
“It’s a bit late for that now.”
“I miss her.”
He rubbed his eyes like he was wiping away tears, but when he looked at me I saw no trace of tears. There was no question about where Aspen had gotten that skill.
I wondered who she was. The mother I’d lost, or the sister I was fighting to keep? He’d lost both of them, even though it hadn’t been a straight kill the second time around. Goose bumps spread over my body like a duvet, stuffed with memories of times past and loved ones lost, rather than the feathers of geese.
“Will you ask Aspen to come see me?” he asked.
“You’re the last person on this earth she wants to see, Dad. Besides, the jailhouse isn’t exactly wheelchair friendly.”
He flinched at my remark. I wondered how much he was refusing to acknowledge.
“I…” His face was a blank mask, his lips moving without producing a sound.
It was enough quiet space for me to spill my own bitterness into the silence.
“You remember that, don’t you? Why you’re here? Mom’s dead, and Aspen is crippled for the rest of her life. And I’m left behind, fixing every mistake you made because you weren’t enough of a man to do it yourself.”
My dad looked down at his hand, lying on the plastic table in front of him. He picked at his forefinger nail with his thumb and began to hum a little, and I wondered for a moment if he was sane at all. Maybe all
of this would have been easier to accept if he’d been declared clinically insane. If a crazy person had made those decisions, I could forgive them somehow – a lapse in judgment, a lapse in who my father really was – but two psychologists had visited with my father, and both had declared him more sane than most of the people who were walking the streets. If anything, insanity was just beginning to creep in now, without the presence of the real world to keep him in check.
“Why are you here?” he suddenly asked, looking at me, and it was the sharpest I’d seen his eyes in years.
I looked at him for a long time before I answered him. “I don’t know. I never really know why I end up coming to see you.”
No matter how many kills I made, I knew that the man I really wanted dead was still here. Maybe one day I could lay down my guns, but there were too many vampires out there, too many people who could still be killed. Too many Aspens in this world, and not enough Adeles.
“Maybe it’s because every time you walk in here, I hope that I’ll see a different person. Someone who hasn’t done all those things. But every time it’s just you coming through that door.”
“Just me,” he said.
I put down the phone and stood up. I was running late for work. I shouldn’t have come in the first place. I never knew why I kept running back to the one man I truly hated, in the most raw sense of the word. It was his face I saw every time I forced my stake into a vampire’s heart, or pulled a trigger. It was his blood I saw splattered on the walls behind the victims, on my hands after a long night. In my nightmares.
I looked over my shoulder. A guard was already leading him away from the booth, but my father’s eyes locked with mine, and his lips were moving. “I love you,” he mouthed.
I turned my back and kept walking.
In the parking lot, I sat on my bike. The last fingers of sunlight were lying across the horizon, leaving stretched shadows behind them like scars.
I felt ripped apart, like there was a gaping hole in my chest and every breath I took escaped through it again. I gasped for air, fighting down the lump that was rising in my throat.
“Are you all right?” a voice said from behind me.
I swallowed my emotions and turned around. My hand was already on the knife on my thigh.
Connor was standing half behind me, and he looked concerned. Something inside me jumped, and I tried to place what I was feeling. I looked toward the horizon again and noticed that the last light was gone. What remained now was just an afterthought.
“You’re out early,” I said, not answering his question. “It’s a big risk for a purebred to be out this close to sunset.”
“A purebred?”
I bit my tongue. I was suggesting that there was a breed that wasn’t pure. I shook my head.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I guess I could ask you the same thing.”
“You avoid all my questions,” he pointed out. “I have unfinished business I need to tie up.”
He sighed, and he looked so sad for a moment that I wondered if it was my job to do something about it. Was someone going to take care of my unfinished business? We all had to deal with our own troubles.
Then the emotion cleared as quickly as it had arrived, and his face was carefully expressionless. “When you join the dark side, you don’t realize how many ends you can’t seem to tie up. Even if none of it was your choice in the first place.”
“As opposed to the darkness you created in you past life?” I asked.
Connor blanched, if that was possible for a vampire whose skin was already too pale. “So you’ve heard,” he said.
“Anyone who reads the paper knows.”
“Except you didn’t read the papers. It was like talking to a long-lost friend when I realized you didn’t know. You’re only hunting me as a job, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. Admitting to that made it sound worse than it was. I didn’t need to be classified in the same group as him.
“I’m guessing you have an interest in there,” he said, tipping his head toward the building. “Vampire?”
I stilled. “How did you guess?”
“The entrance to the human facility is on the other side.” He smiled a brilliant smile that flashed long white teeth. He would have to learn to hide those in public. “I didn’t peg you for the vampire-loving type. What with you trying to stake me and all.”
“I’m not,” I said flatly.
Speaking of staking, for someone who knew for a fact that I’d intended to kill him, he was being very casual around me.
“So, are all those stories true?” I wanted to stop myself, but I had to ask. It was about the vampires. About them, about their lives. I didn’t want to admit that it was also about Connor. That I didn’t want to be disappointed in him.
“Would it make a difference to you if it were? Weren’t you going to kill me anyway?”
I looked down at my hands. I didn’t know the answer to that question, and that pissed me off.
“You don’t seem too worried about it,” I said instead. “The fact that the reason you know me at all is because I was about to kill you.”
“But you didn’t.”
He shrugged and jammed his hands into his pockets. He was wearing civilian clothes, and if it weren’t for the small telltale signs and the obvious fangs, I would say he could pass for human. His ability to disguise himself was amusing. I hadn’t met a vampire before who could do that. Though I hadn’t really given any of them a chance.
“I don’t know. Maybe I like you,” he said, and his words knocked whatever I was thinking out of my head.
“You go for the hard-asses, do you? A handsome guy like you? What would Jennifer say?”
His face turned to stone, his lips set in a straight line. “She’s not really the kind of person who fits into this world,” he said.
“Are you talking about the trafficking world, or the vampire one?”
He looked at me for a long time. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t to answer my question. We were playing the same game.
He looked down at his shoes. “In another life... Sometimes it takes nearly dying to realize how much time you were wasting on the wrong stuff, and how many people you dedicated yourself to for the wrong reasons.”
I groaned. “I don’t do sagas,” I said.
I hated it when people, or vampires in this case, got all emotional on me. Emotion was for weaklings. I’d worked hard to push mine far enough away to believe they didn’t exist. I really would have appreciated it if others could do the same.
Connor chuckled. “I want to see you again.”
“See me again?” I echoed, because I couldn’t remember any of our meetings where I hadn’t tried to kill him, so it seemed strange. Maybe he wanted a challenge.
“Yeah. Saturday.”
“During the day?”
He shrugged again. “Nighttime would suit me better.” He looked toward the horizon, and then toward the jail. “I have to get going,” he said. “One of my friends was locked up for trafficking. Imagine that.”
“Won’t they be looking for you?”
“It’s hard to find someone when they’re not what you expect.”
I smiled despite myself. “I’ll see you after sunset on Saturday. You have some explaining to do if I want to take my job seriously.”
“That sounds a lot like a compromise to me. I didn’t think you did that often.”
“Never,” I agreed.
“Promise to leave the stake behind?”
I nodded, noting that he hadn’t said anything about knives and guns.
Connor had started to fade, see-through, when he spoke again. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t do it. Some people I hired did. When I found out, I had to save myself. You can fill in the blanks for yourself.”
Then he dematerialized, and I was left alone again, cursing myself for being an idiot. For feeling the emptiness he’d left behind.
It was okay, I reassured myself. I needed to know who was after him and why. That was why I’d agreed to meet him. When I drove toward the office I kept repeating that to myself, like a mantra.
Maybe if I did it often enough, I would start believing it.
Vampire's Shade 1 (Vampire's Shade Collection) Page 9