Blinding Light (The Bloodmarked Trilogy Book 2) (19 page)

I, on the other hand, seethed quietly in the back, and they eventually stopped trying to engage me in conversation, sensing my ever-growing hunger. I was ravenous and had no desire to rehash my epic fail. Their heartbeats pounded through my skull, and my instincts screamed EAT, KILL, FEED!

“Stop the car!” I shouted. “I’ll run from here.”

Everyone grew quiet, and when Wade pulled onto the shoulder, Brody quickly opened the door and made room for me to pass.

We were a mile past the old salvage yard, so it would take no time at all to get to the mansion from here. My feet hit the ground and I was out of sight.

Bursting through the door to the mansion, I raced toward the kitchen while trying to ignore all the warm bodies and beating hearts in my general vicinity. Crashing through the swinging doors, several shrieks greeted my arrival, followed by the sounds of feet shuffling out of the way. The kitchen staff scurried behind islands and dry food shelving racks to avoid my notice, but their heartbeats rang out so loudly, there was no place in this mansion where they could hide from my hunger. If I were more desperate, that is.

With a fully stocked cooler in front of me, they were safe from the demon. One heartbeat, however, stood out from the rest, because it was the only one not about to burst. I felt Chef Eric’s patient eyes on my back as I stood in the doorway to the walk-in, draining one bag after another, not even bothering with the thermos.

Once my thirst was adequately quenched, I turned toward him, closing the fridge door behind me. He stood leaning against a counter with his arms crossed over his chest, nearly ten feet from me.

“Rough night, Little Hunter?” he finally spoke, his tone clearly amused.

What was up with that nickname?

“You could say that,” I responded. Curiosity burned, itching for an escape. “So why is it that you seem to be the only one here who isn’t afraid of me on some level?” I asked.

Humor faded from his eyes replaced by earnest admiration. “Because I know you won’t kill anyone. You save people. You don’t hurt them,” he answered.

But I do. I have hurt people. “For someone I’ve only really ever spoken to in passing, you’re awfully trusting. How can you be so confident in someone you just met a month ago?”

“Who said we just met?”

Wait, what?

He paused to allow me time to prepare for what might be shocking news. “I’m originally from St. Louis, Lucy.”

So if he was from St. Louis and is here now, he obviously would have had some kind of run in with them there, which meant…

“Did I…?” I couldn’t form the words past the lump in my throat, but he nodded encouragingly before saving me the trouble of picking my jaw up off the tile.

“Yes. You did. You saved my life years ago. You probably don’t remember my face among all the others you must have helped since then,” he added, again highlighting a savior status of which I was unworthy.

“It was when you must have been fifteen or sixteen. I had just finished my eighth or ninth round at my local tavern and had stumbled outside to find my way home when I had my first introduction to those damned black-eyed sons of bitches. When I experienced its strength and speed first hand, even through my drunken stupor, I knew I wasn’t going to make it home that night. But then, the darndest thing happened. My sorry ass was saved by some little punk kid with more weight in attitude than muscle.”

Pieces of a memory were becoming clearer. A nearly passed out man hung limply in a vamp’s arms. I remembered thinking he was a goner no matter what, but at the time, I couldn’t stop myself from engaging one of those bastards.

“Lucy, a lot of people are here because they lost something to the vampires. Well, I didn’t. My wife left me and took our son because of my mistakes. I’m here because I gained something from a vampire. You saved my life, Lucy. You changed my entire perspective and gave me a purpose. I remember what you said to me that night to this day,” he said, a chuckle breaking free.

“Maybe if you don’t make yourself such an easy target, you might have a shot at surviving,” I said, repeating my words along with the memory of me saying them that night.

He released a full on belly laugh. “You left out the part where you looked me up and down and said it was doubtful I’d make it through the night.”

“Well, you didn’t look so good. And after you turned away from me to hurl all over the side of the building, I didn’t think you were even listening to me.”

“Oh, I heard you, Little Hunter. I remember being so overwhelmed by hope that there might be a second chance out there waiting for me. And honestly, I thought it was pretty badass that a little girl was taking on these scary monsters so fearlessly. It was inspiring.

“Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but I wanted in on the action. I threw myself into researching vampires to see if anyone else had similar experiences. I was talking to anyone who would listen and searching forums all day. That’s how Helen found me.” He rubbed a hand over his stubble before crossing his arms and leaning against the counter.

“After meeting with her, I knew I wanted to be a part of the Keepers. I quickly realized my age and health wouldn’t allow my vigilante dreams to come to fruition, but there were other ways to be involved. I was part of the research team for a few years but recently retired into the kitchen. I’m happy with whatever role I can play, as long as I can be proactive.”

“Wow, I never knew.” I wanted to say more, but what could I say?

“Lucy, you saved me, and inadvertently gave me a another chance at life without knowing. Think of all the other lives out there you’ve bettered or saved. I know you think you’re not gifted, but any gift you abuse can turn into a curse. Any fool with power can let it corrupt him… or her, but you don’t let it. You don’t revel in it, and I know you won’t let it curse you.”

“You’re giving me way too much credit. I’ve done bad things,” I whispered, suddenly interested in the watery tracks left behind by the snow caught in the tread of my boots.

“Lucy, the kind of power, like the kind bestowed upon you, shouldn’t come naturally. No one would have instantaneous control over it. What’s being asked of you is like giving a penguin larger wings capable of flight and expecting it to migrate across two continents without any problems.”

Huh?

Sensing my skepticism, he continued, “It’s okay to make mistakes. You’re not a killer, Lucy. No matter how much you struggle for restraint, deep down, your instincts will protect those around you. Have faith.”

He grew silent, and I struggled to find a response. It was strange having such a deep conversation with a man I’ve only exchanged casual pleasantries with.

Maybe I was expecting too much from myself, but what other choice did I have? I needed to prepare for the worst.

But what I really needed now, after such an embarrassing display of said gift, was a good night’s sleep. Forget the vault.

Spinning to leave, I bolted toward the exit, which was now a crooked mess of mangled wood and a door hanging off its hinges. Oops.

“Hey, Little Hunter!” Chef called.

I turned to him. “Yeah?”

“Try not to make yourself such an easy target,” he said, smiling. He gestured toward the hole in the front of my shirt.

I glanced down to see crusted blood around the edges of ripped fabric. Yeah. Sleep was exactly what I needed. Like a whole week’s worth of it.

The thumping of heavy bass music downstairs woke me the following night. Soft moonlight drifted in through the French doors that led out to the Juliet balcony. Gusts of wind hammered against the doors. It was snowing again. Go figure.

Rolling out of my luxuriously fabulous bed, I pulled on some jeans and a fresh, hole-free red thermal. I slipped into my boots and left in search of some sweet craving relief.

After sharing a brief nod of acknowledgement with Chef, I pilfered my thermos and headed out. It appeared that after our odd bonding moment last night, or this morning, we were back to our usual casual acquaintance. Great news for me, an emotionally challenged individual.

On my way to the vault room, I passed the source of celebratory merriment. The game room was filled with bodies, and I flashed by the open doorway to avoid being seen. Putting my power on a tight leash trumped my desire to flip a plastic cup.

As I passed, high-pitched voices blared like sirens above the general raucous.

“I mean, what a freak! She practically stood there and watched me get attacked. I think she might secretly be working against us. You guys, she was seriously deranged or something. I had to save her ass. She was so pathetic. She couldn’t even hold off one new vampire. I thought she was supposed to be this awesome fighter or something. So sad.” Allison continued regaling her followers with her heroics.

“You should have just left her there to defend herself,” Carrie piped in.

“Yeah,” parroted the other crony whose name I always forgot. Maggie… Monica… Margaret? Something like that.

“Well, someone has to be the bigger person,” replied Allison.

Says the girl talking shit behind the other person’s back. I snorted when I tried holding in my laugh. I really needed to let off some steam. With my fists.

Circling the vault, I thought of last night. My memories of losing Holly and letting Shane win had trapped me in my own skin. Besides the last assassin I encountered, he was the only vampire that has ever escaped me. He was the one behind all the torment. The silent partner he mentioned may have been orchestrating the whole thing, and I would find him or her one day, but it was Shane’s face I attached to all the senseless murders meant to teach me a lesson.

What if I wasn’t good enough to defeat him? Or his partner? Or the First? I needed to bring my A game, but at the moment, I was a C average at best. As if sensing my woes, Helen strolled into the room to rub salt in the wounds.

“Lucy, I heard what happened last night. How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Just dandy. All healed,” I replied, knowing she wasn’t referring to my physical status.

“That’s good to hear. So what really happened with you?”

“You mean did I suffer some sort of vampire mental breakdown?” I retorted.

Something about the way she talked to me was more analytical than concerned. It was like I was sitting in a doctor’s office being diagnosed, even though I have never seen the inside of a real doctor’s office before.

“Forgive me, Lucille. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what happened.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m dealing with it. It won’t happen again.”

“I am worried. You should be, too, because next time you might not get so lucky.”

“Yes, that’s very helpful. Thank you for the reminder there are lives on the line. I hadn’t fully comprehended the gravity of the situation until you mentioned it. No pressure or anything.”

“There’s no room for hostility either, Lucille,” she chastised.

“Then I suppose we both can’t fit in this room, can we?” I challenged.

I had enough on my mind to work through without her echoing my own fears back to me. It was in no way productive for her to be here. And now, the kitchen called to me like a homing beacon. Another trip to the walk-in cooler was exactly what the doctor ordered.

When she noticed the severity in my gaze, she backed off and left me to wallow in my shortcomings. As much as I wanted to believe Chef’s penguin analogy, I heard too many other voices in my head reminding me of those failures.

Shane’s voice always resonated the loudest, recounting how he broke me down. Allison’s words, sad and pathetic, were on a constant loop, and the clincher was Helen’s subtle reminders that I wasn’t performing well enough.

There was a time in my life when I may have saved a few lives, but I was a different person now. I wasn’t sure if I had a soul or not. If by some miracle I did, it was a broken soul at best.

It would seem my animosity toward vampires has been replaced with fear. The stubborn confidence I once had was constantly bombarded by self-doubt. The fire that once fueled my fight was now flickering in and out. The only thing keeping me going these days was urgency. That, and a little bit of secondhand faith.

To save the world or to let it burn. How do I keep it spinning on its axis without causing a cataclysmic disaster? That was the question plaguing my every decision. There were some who believed, without a doubt, that I could accomplish such a feat, and there were others who didn’t necessarily believe I could do it but needed me to.

The tangled mess of thoughts and concerns bounced around in my head like Sonic the Hedgehog, and I began hammering away at the vault, merely inflicting the same amount of damage as a five-minute hailstorm. It lasted for hours. Each time I thought I had control over my thoughts, I’d throw a fist only to have it met with an equal amount of resistance as the punch before it.

Well into the early morning hours, long after the party died down, mediocrity wore me down, and I ceased my miniscule progress in favor of exploring the hidden parts of the mansion. Slipping through the secret passageway in my bedroom, I wound down the spiral stairwell and through the painted hallways of the basement until I came to the older part of the lower level.

The weapons room distracted me for an hour, or three. Impossible to resist, I played with each familiar weapon and a few unfamiliar ones, recalling my lessons with Wade. The techniques came easily to me, like walking and tying my shoes, but the power behind the moves still waned. Abandoning my dreams of being a wicked awesome Spartan warrior, I closed the heavy door behind me and crept further into the dark hallway.

Cracked and warped wood paneling covered half the walls. The thick moisture became more evident as I neared the end of the hall. The dank smell settled around me, offensive and pungent. From that point on, I held my breath.

At the t-intersection, I turned left. A small alcove at the end of the corridor grabbed my attention, and I discovered another room, equally as large as the previous, but this one turned out to be another office. A large ornate desk sat in the center of the room, flanked by several bookshelves much like the office upstairs.

To the left of the desk, a wood-burning stove sat along the wall next to a sizeable stack of firewood. Most of it appeared damp and rotted, which made me wonder when the last time he was down here might have been.

I gazed around the room as my fingertips collected dust, gliding over the smooth mahogany surface of the desk, but something in my peripheral vision stopped me in my tracks. In the middle of the desk was a picture, not framed, but lying flat on top of an old newspaper.

The girl in the photograph must have been only fifteen, but she wore the most desolate and wary expression on her face I had ever seen. She looked like someone who just realized her life and her future were no longer hers. At such a young age, everything had been ripped away from her. Little did she know, she had so much more to lose.

I remembered that night. It wasn’t my first kill, but it was the first time I really saw my life for what it was, or what it would become. I witnessed the divide between the human world and myself.

At first, I killed vampires because I could, and my anger had found direction, but I never considered what that really meant for me. Until that night.

The memory cycled through my mind. It was late, and I had only made one kill. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what he looked like or what he wore, but I remembered his rough voice. His threat. His words almost broke me.

He said, “Do you think your actions won’t bare consequences? Do you think you’re the hunter? The more you fight, the more you will lose. You can’t hide from this. We see you. You belong to the shadows now, sister.”

He delivered the foreboding words so low they seized me. I never could outrun the ominous anguish they rendered deep inside my soul. It still resonated to this day.

After staking him, I watched from afar as humans engaged in normal activities and instantly became aware that my life had just been flipped inside out.

The girl in the picture stood in the middle of an alley, held up by the brick wall behind her, realizing her world was crumbling around her. She appeared stricken, a bit ashen, but underneath it all, she was angry. For everything she sacrificed. For the cursed life she knew she had no choice but to accept.

Those words should have broken her. They fueled her instead.

I wondered what my picture would look like in this very moment. What if the fire really had flickered out? What if I have reached my breaking point? He was right. The more I fought, the more I lost.

God. I was getting really good at depressing myself lately. I had to get out of here. Thinking about the hows and whys of Gavin having this image definitely did not help matters either. That was a stone better left unturned. For now.

It was kind of sweet though. In a creepy sort of way. Always the stalker. My lips curved up.

No! Bad Lucy.

I left the room in a rush, so quickly I wound up passing my right turn and found myself in a part of the hall covered completely in rough cut stone. Old and disintegrating mortar held the stone together, and I tracked it straight until it forked. I followed the right fork as it twisted and turned for miles.

How had I not discovered an underground tunnel system right underneath me until now? Did anyone else in the house know about it? The original lock on the door to these hallways made me think Gavin kept this whole area a secret. From Helen too?

The walls grew colder under my fingertips and water leaked through pores in the stone as the tunnel descended farther. When I came to another fork, my instincts guided me toward a path that eventually produced a rung ladder.

I eyed the metal grate above and didn’t hesitate before busting through the chain lock. Crouching low, I stood in a darker, cramped tunnel that made me thankful I had the ability to hold my breath indefinitely.

I ascended to a ledge above the snowmelt drainage part of the town’s sewer system. The water ran below the ledge, and I slouched down close to the curved wall to keep my balance. I spied light about fifty feet down the pipe and headed toward it. I popped out on the outskirts of town, and a slow smile split my face.

Okay, that was made of awesome. I lived in a house with secret doorways and underground tunnels.

The sunlight was too nice to waste, and I decided to stop at my new reclusive hideout before returning to the mansion. This time, I didn’t wind up on my ass covered in snow, but I did clear a small path across the frozen lake for a little sliding. I added finding some ice skates to my to do list. Surely Gavin had at least one pair in that giant home of his. The sun sank lower, and I made a mental note to search the house.

The peaceful bubble I managed to create this afternoon immediately burst on my jaunt back to the mansion. Darkness snuffed out the remaining daylight, and all those troubles I avoided for the past few hours trickled slowly back into my mind in the form of paranoia.

The crunching of snow sounded about twenty yards to my right, and I jerked my head in the direction of the noise. Those tormenting words reverberated ferociously through my mind to haunt me all these years later. Was I the hunter?

Rabidly scanning the area, I waited for any other indication of an ambush. It was quiet and still. Too quiet. Something was out there. I spun in wild, frantic circles, playing the role of a frenetic mental patient off her meds brilliantly. Every flap of a leaf or sway of a branch spooked me. My muscles seized in preparation for an attack. The tiniest breeze became the cold breath of death on the back of my neck. I backed cautiously toward the path to the house before turning and making an all-out sprint for it.

I sensed, rather than heard, another presence gaining on me. Was it my own fears catching up to me or was it real? At this point, it really didn’t matter. My heart beat madly against my ribcage. I reached my top speeds before the weight of my watch triggered my survival response.

The panic button!

I reached for it and looked up to see the mansion looming ahead. I pressed it and drew out a long, relieved breath when the response was immediate. At least twenty UV spotlights illuminated the forest, casting long shadows across the snow. When I made it to the edge of the woods, I turned and expected the bogeyman to be right behind me, seething behind a tree from his failed attempt.

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

Get a grip, Luce.

Before approaching the back door that led to the dining room, I mentally shook myself to loosen the nerves. When I walked in, all eyes were on me. People froze with their forks halfway to their mouths.