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

Chapter 1I backed the vampire into an alley, my knife out with the sharp end low and threatening. The silver gleamed in the almost-darkness of the alley, a reminder to me and my victim that it had silver in it. A black chain was looped over my shoulder, weighing me down, but I trained like this. I could deal. I was just trying to scare the vampire with my knife. The short silver blade wasn’t good for a kill, not for a vampire. It would do in a pinch, the silver burned their flesh – not enough but a little – and I could work it over if I wanted to, but I would get my hands dirty, and I preferred to stake them. Or blow their heads off. I had yet to see a vampire that could bounce back from that one. The vampire tried to dodge me and escape, but I had the upper hand. I knew about the vampire’s speed. It had underestimated mine. I was in front of it before it reached me. It skidded to halt, gaping at me. In a life-and-death fight there wasn’t a lot of time for questions. You got to choose – answers or life. The vampire had made the wrong choice. I let the chain slip off my shoulder and swung it around, sheathing the knife with my free hand. I flicked the chain at the vampire. It twisted around its wrist and the clip snapped shut around itself. This baby was going nowhere. Blue and red lights suddenly danced on the street at the alley entrance, and we both froze. The battle between us was one thing, but neither of us wanted the police involved. I didn’t, because my work had a lot of moral pitfalls. The vampire didn’t because in a case where a vampire man and human woman were in an alley together, chances were the police would take the human’s side. Besides that there was also the small technicality that I wasn’t exactly human, and I supposedly didn’t exist. When the car had driven past and the silence of night fell around us again, I looked at my victim and smiled. I stepped closer to the vampire, looping the chain as I came closer until my body was almost right up against the vampire’s. It squirmed and tried to fight, but it had been a long run to get here, and I was fitter. The vampire squeezed its eyes shut and I felt a hum emanating from it. The vamp faded so I could see the brick wall right through its chest, but the metal I’d wrapped around its wrist stopped it from dematerializing completely, and when it stopped trying to, the humming stopped, too. I was going to win this one, and it knew. I flipped my hair over my shoulder to get it out of the way. In the tussle I’d lost the hairband that kept the black mass of hair out of my face. I killed for a living, and my biggest stumbling block was keeping my long hair out of the way. Beauty was a b***h. I wasn’t going to cut it. It hung halfway down my back, thick and healthy. I may not have been your standard home-maker kind of woman, but my looks were just as deadly as my skill. And I had a lot of skill. I wrapped the chain around the other wrist, too, and tightened it, pulling its hands up with one hand. With the other I placed a silver stake under the vampire’s ribs, and wrapped my fingers tightly around the smooth finish, fingering the pattern I’d carved out around its edge. I carried a lot of heat, I had a gun in the holster under my jacket and another tucked into my waistband at the small of my back. But guns didn’t work on vampires. The fast-healing action was a pain in the ass when it came to self-defense or hit-jobs. The vampire’s eyes were wild, wide, rolling around in their sockets. The split-second before death was never pretty. A thick black mist surrounded us, choking me, making it hard to breathe. I gritted my teeth and ignored it. It was almost like poison, a last attempt at life, like an octopus’s ink, but I was immune. Never underestimate your enemies. Aspen’s eyes flashed in front of me, dull and lifeless. Her body bent at an impossible angle. The room with the furniture upside down and out of place like a nightmare version of our home. Bloody fangs dripping menace. A fire inside me threatened to consume me and I leaned against the stake, pushing into flesh, forcing my way into the vampire’s heart. Killing the memories. The vampire focused on me, questioning, eyes draining of life already, and a flicker of recognition passed across its face. Fast reflexes, stronger than human women, immune to the mist. It knew what I was. The pain of betrayal was the last emotion before its face went slack, its eyes rolled back, and the body slumped forward. Yeah, this one was going to haunt me. Great start to my week. I swallowed and gasped for air. The thick stench clung to my clothes even after the mist had gone and I couldn’t shake the feeling of darkness and death clawing at my ankles. I shuddered. Guilt was about as ugly as death itself. I pushed the dead vampire off me, letting the body crumple to the ground. I wiped the stake clean on my black leather pants, and zipped my jacket up half-way to conceal the gun. The silver line of dawn was on the horizon, bleeding into the inky night air, announcing Tuesday morning. The rising sun would take care of everything else, the blood, the body. The darkness I just couldn’t seem to get away from. I turned and walked away, but stopped before I turned out of the alley. I bit my cheek, and turned back. I had to frisk the damn thing. This part I hated the most. Nothing as bad as playing with the dead when you were the reason they were dead in the first place. I ignored the seed of guilt that throbbed deep down. I tried to shake the image of the vampire’s face when it realized what I was. I may have been a half-breed, at least fifty percent one of them, but genetics was as far as it went. My loyalty lay with humans. My phone chirped in my pocket and I answered it, clamping it against my shoulder with my cheek. Small miracle I hadn’t lost it in the fight. That wouldn’t have been the first time. Hi-tech was worth nothing if it fell out of my pocket. “Are you coming in before dawn?” Ruben’s voice was clipped. “I’m on my way to the office now.” “Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you Adele?” “I don’t tell you how to do your job, Ruben. Let me do mine.” My boss was a hard-ass i***t that believed he knew everything there was to know about night-creatures, even though he never set foot outside his office until sunrise. He knew what the dangers were, and he wasn’t going to take the fall. He trusted everyone about the same amount, which was not at all. I liked him best when he was riled up and it was my fault. “Just get in here to do the paper-work. I don’t want any mistakes. That damn Clemens woman was here again tonight, and I don’t want a story about you in the news.” “Since when do journalists do nighttime visits?” “Since you don’t have the day shift. I don’t want to start my week like this, Adele.” Like it was my fault. Ruben hung up the phone and I shuddered in the silence it left behind. There weren’t a lot of people that believed in half-breeds, and those that did wished us dead. I shook off the feeling of foreboding that had come with the phone call, and headed downtown. I was a vampire slayer for a living. I was good at what I did and Ruben paid me well for it. It was quick work even though it wasn’t always easy. And it wasn’t just the physical side that provided a problem. But every job had its emotional downside. Some people needed TV-time to wind down after the daily grind. I probably needed therapy. I worked for a thickset man in a dirty world. Ruben Cross was about as human as he came, but his scent disgusted me. I could smell his blood and it was laced with alcohol most of the time. He was dead set against vampires, because of religion as much as racism. On the outside his company looked like a standard accounting firm. His after-hour advertising happened among chosen individuals, a private affair among people that heard of us by word-of-mouth in whispers around corners and only a few knew about what we did when night fell. We weren’t exactly on the radar, and I liked it that way. My entire existence was under the radar. The unlicensed killing meant I never had to own up to anything, and we didn’t speak of a job once it was done. Vampires didn’t quite fall under any constitution yet. They were seen as part of society now, but those that didn’t fear them shunned them, and everyone had a healthy dose of discrimination. Human rights got a little blurry when they weren’t human, but the fewer questions asked, the better. Vampires had a strange hierarchy, and the ones we ended up taking out were the mundane vampires, the young ones, the ones that didn’t mean anything in the vampire world. The jobs were usually ordered by humans. The vampires that meant something, the powerful ones at the top of their own food chain, those we left alone. They never had quarrels with humans and we never ran into real killers. Still, when a cop found a body in the street, supernatural creature or not, it was going to attract attention. The common consensus was that humans and vampires couldn’t breed. Half-breeds were rumors, and as far as most people were concerned Aspen and I couldn’t even exist. Ruben knew what I was, but he kept me on because as a half-breed I had the uncanny ability to pull off looking completely human. I also had vampire characteristics which gave me an advantage above the human slayers. It upped my chances of tricking the beasts and getting them down before it turned into a moral issue. Betraying our own was a big deal, but I had a hatred for vampires that almost equaled Ruben’s own. Why did I hate them? He had his reasons, I had mine. I had a strict don’t ask don’t tell policy. So far, it’s worked for me. When I stepped into the lobby of the office building where Ruben holed up, Carl was just coming down the stairs. He was a lot of man, muscle that made his shirt stretch tight over his arms and thighs that threatened to pop out of his pants. Muscles were no good when they were only for show. If it came down to a life or death fight I could have taken him easy. Muscle is worth nothing against a gun. “Oh, you’re here too,” he said. We didn’t often rub shoulders, not since he’d taken me out on his first kill so I could learn the ropes. He was always sarcastic about my job, something a woman wouldn’t be able to do. But we both knew it was about the fact that within in a week I’d been better at his job than he was. When I looked at him closely I saw the toll the last couple of years had taken on him. He had new wrinkles, he didn’t look like the young, strapping lad that had taken me under his wing anymore. He looked worn. I wondered if the same counted for me. It was hard to stay in this kind of line and look fresh at the end of the day. “Just doing the final rounds, Carl,” I said. “I don’t feel like getting into a brawl tonight.” “You’re in the wrong line for that,” he pointed out. I shrugged. Carl was just a human. I didn’t know how he managed to do his job – the first night I’d seen him he’d been quick and that had been his only asset. Still, Ruben kept him on so maybe he had something going for him. Maybe he charmed them to death. With his chiseled jaw and jet black hair he could get any woman to look twice. Maybe his icy eyes did the trick to hypnotize the vampires into believing they shouldn’t run. I passed him and he tipped his shoulder so it knocked me in the arm. In a world where we’re vampire slayers there are no courtesies for women. I jabbed my elbow back faster than he could blink and caught him in the kidney. He made a strangled sound. “You better watch your back, Adele. Sometimes humans can hold grudges too.” “If you’re talking about yourself I’m not exactly going to lose sleep over it. But thanks for the warning.”