Marked: a Vampire Romance (4 page)

Facebook wasn’t quite a bust, but it was close. Marigold had posted a dozen or so photos over the past six years, most of them with family. She’d graduated from high school seven years previously in a town in Nebraska.

She was single.

It was irrelevant to his search, of course, but the news pleased him. Adam could feel the connection between them. One taste of her blood, one dream—that was all it took for a tiny space inside his battered soul to open up. He just needed to figure out what it meant. Was she his salvation? Or his destruction?

Adam shook his head. He was a fool.

After giving up on finding any more information on social media, Adam turned to a different source: BloodNet. Some unknown vampire had started it as a joke back in the ‘90s, but it had grown into a small community of the undead who weren’t afraid of their computers.

Adam bypassed the message boards he usually trawled—book and movie recommendations and a thread called “Modern World #FAILS”—and chose a sub forum called “Safety and Security: Staying UnAlive.” Most threads there were tips for newbies on how to stay out of the sun and proper feeding schedules. But five pages in there was a thread called “Keep Away from the Joneses!” which caught Adam’s eye.

Marigold Jones. Joneses.

Sounded like just the thing he was looking for.

The original post was from a man named Kyle who lived somewhere in the western U.S. He’d run into a woman armed to her teeth with the knowledge of how to fight vampires. She was able to injure him, but when he got the upper hand, she threw down a flash grenade and was gone before he regained his senses.

Others joined in after that poster, sharing stories going back centuries about meeting similar women and, on rare occasions, men. The women always seemed to have some sort of sixth sense when it came to hunting the undead, and some of the members of the board shared stories of friends they’d lost to the huntresses.

Over the years Adam had run into his fair share of hunters and huntresses, but he’d never had a hint that they could all belong to the same family. Though it was likely that the Joneses were not the only ones who hunted.

He continued reading.

More posts said that they went by many names and were present on every inhabited continent. In North America, they were the Joneses, a family of vampire hunters almost preternaturally good at their job.

After two pages of similar stories, the original poster came back. He posted a photo of his torso with the caption:
???!
. There was a mark on his side, dark, lines arcing out like lightning bolts.

Adam looked down at his own wrist. The markings weren’t identical, but there was an alarming similarity. The vampires of the board posted rampant speculation that went on for pages. But Kyle didn’t reply. The topic fizzled out after a dozen more posts, and the thread hadn’t been updated in more than a year.

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Adam navigated to the In Memoriam board. On September 6, 2011, the moderator posted that Kyle had disappeared, presumed dead.

Adam set his tablet down on the table and traced his wrist. This was bad.

It was worse than she thought.

Gold had retreated to the basement where they kept the family journals and research material. The leather bound books dated back centuries, before the first Jones woman crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a ship full of zombies.

The first recorded sighting of Luther in the states was in 1826. He’d taken up with a band of thieves roaming Appalachia. From 1826 to 1829, her ancestor Hester Jones charted at least 46 murders. All vampiric, all suspected to have been committed by Adam Luther.

He’d had a taste for the innocent, seducing young women, taking them from their homes, gallivanting for months or years, and then draining them dry when he’d had his fun. But most of his kills had been middle aged men, usually laborers, but with no other traits to connect them.

The trail of bodies went cold during the Civil War. There was no way to trace vampires among that much carnage. Wars were violent buffets to the undead, summoning ghouls, zombies, and vampires alike. An easy meal if you could avoid the bullets.

After the war, he was spotted again in Florida, a strange place for someone—
something
—that couldn’t go out into the sun. He travelled from place to place, staying for a year in one town in Missouri, for three in Colorado, and everywhere, the bodies piled up.

But there was something strange.

Each time the pattern changed. Her ancestor Hester said he preferred pretty girls. Constance, Hester’s granddaughter, recorded that he attacked young men in their prime, all blond and strapping. Emmeline—another ancestor—noted that he would take advantage of aged women, killing them and stealing everything he could.

From place to place the MO changed, almost like each sighting of Adam Luther was actually a different vampire.

He disappeared completely in 1966. Gold flipped through the rest of the journals and double checked on their computer database, but there was nothing recorded about him after the ‘60s. He was gone. Just living in suburbia and working at a bookshop.

The bookstore!

If he wasn’t in her records, he might be in the town’s. She racked her brain, trying to remember the name of the bookshop. It was something stupid and alliterative. Lovely Lit? Beyond Books? Lit Love?

Lot’s o’ Lit—that was it.

Gold pulled up the website and smiled. The owner was listed as Andrew Luthman, though there was no picture. According to the short “About Us” section, he’d purchased the store twelve years ago and had owned it ever since.

As disturbing as the thought that Adam Luther, notorious vampire, had lived in the same town as her for years was, Gold was relieved. She had a name, and with a name came records. All she had to do was call up some friends at city hall and maybe she’d be lucky enough to hit the jackpot.

She reached for her cell phone before she remembered that she’d dropped it last night. Biting back a curse and making a mental note to drop by the store, she picked up the landline on the table and dialed her mom’s friend Mrs. Cortez, who worked for the city planner.

After leaving a message on Mrs. Cortez’s voicemail, she leaned back in her chair and relaxed her shoulders. That lasted all of two minutes until Lily was screaming, “Sis! You need to see this!”

It didn’t sound like anyone was bleeding, so Gold didn’t run. But she took the stairs two at a time just in case.

When she got upstairs, Lily waved around a newspaper, practically jumping from foot to foot. “I found something!”

“We found something,” Charlie corrected. He wasn’t as excited as her sister, and he was showing it by sitting on the couch with his arms crossed.

“Just show me,” Gold said, not willing to play referee.

Lily handed over the newspaper, pointing to an article halfway down the page. “Her name was Hannah Barrons and I’m pretty sure she was killed by a vampire.”

There was only so much he could learn from rumors on a secret internet forum. After an hour of hunting for anything more substantial than Kyle’s story and disappearance, Adam gave up and turned to the stacks of the Chicago Tribune piling up in his living room. He normally kept a few months’ worth of papers by grace of the fact that he was too lazy to throw them out with any frequency.

Okano had told him about Hannah Barrons, but that didn’t mean that she was his first victim in Chicago.

He found a copy of the same paper that Okano had given him. It was dated two weeks ago, but he recognized the image on the cover. He flipped to the correct page and read the article about Barrons’ death again. Her roommate had reported her missing more than a week before she showed up on the beach.

There was a follow up to the original story two days later. The police report stated that she’d been alive for a few days and had been in the water for less than twelve hours. Speculation turned from an accident to foul play. Barrons’ family was pleading for any information that would lead to an arrest of the perpetrator.

Then Adam started to look backward. It was slow, incredibly depressing work. Death—
murder
—was no stranger to the Windy City, but the crimes he was looking for were not so common. He flipped through the newspapers quickly, eyes lighting over possible victims. After scanning back six months, he only found two more young women whose stories were similar to that of Hannah Barrons. Disappeared and then found mutilated, washed up from the Lake, about a week later.

Each of the disappearances had happened over the last three months. And he would never have known about them if Okano hadn’t told him. Adam picked up one of the papers from after Barrons’ was found just to make sure that there were no other murders.

Then he cursed.

On page 6, a headline read: ROOMMATE OF SLAIN GIRL DISAPPEARS.

Wendy Choi had disappeared from her dorm room a week previously, Adam read. When the police came to question her, she wasn’t there. Further investigation revealed that she hadn’t been seen by fellow students in a day or two and her parents and friends didn’t know where she was.

That was nearly a week ago. If Okano had her, her hours were numbered. But Adam doubted that she was dead yet. Rather, he hoped that she was alive.

Adam’s mind raced as he thought through exactly what Okano could be doing to her. He’d spent so many hours reading through his papers that it was just after sunset. Okano could be planning to kill her tonight, and there wasn’t anything that Adam could do to stop it.

No, that wasn’t quite correct. There was one thing.

Okano had invited Adam into his little game, not realizing that Adam wasn’t up for it anymore. Even when they’d torn up Europe after the war, Adam had lost the taste for violence that Okano seemed to revel in. It had been a long, slow road for Adam to grow a sense of right and wrong, but almost as soon as he’d turned Okano, Adam had known that it was a mistake.

He couldn’t fix that one right now, but he could begin by saving one of Okano’s victims.

Though to do so, he’d need to talk to his old friend.

Adam looked around for the business card that Okano had left for him, but he realized that it was still sitting on his desk in the back room of the bookstore. If he went back there, Marigold Jones was sure to be waiting for him.

A keen bite of anticipation hit him. She was a dangerous woman, one he should avoid at all costs. But if her kiss in real life was anything like that dream, it would almost be worth it to die in her arms. He knew that he should say no to this damned temptation, but he didn’t know how.

Lord in heaven, give him another day to get to know her and he’d be composing sonnets.

At the moment, he only had one question: was she dangerous enough? Okano had survived for decades - nearly a century - on his wits and his violence. He’d never hesitated to take a life, and he wouldn’t pause to spare a pretty girl.

Marigold Jones was more than a pretty girl, and she’d come armed for bear. He didn’t know her, but he knew
that
down to his core. And if it came down to slaying a vampire or saving a human, she’d save the person every time. He had no logical way to be sure of that, but it felt so true that he couldn’t budge the belief from his mind.

Now all he had to do was find out where the man who’d soon want to kill him was keeping his victims so that Adam could lead the woman that wanted to kill
him
there. Nothing too dangerous about that.

Adam got ready and left his house, arriving at the bookshop just after eight. It was still a little light out, but the waning light of the sun was weak enough that it was only an unpleasant pressure against his skin. If he stayed out long enough, he might bruise, but he wouldn’t get the horrible scars and burns that would come from morning or midday light.

One of his employees, James, was cleaning up for the night when Adam walked in. “I thought you weren’t coming in,” the college student said.

Adam smiled, “I’m not here, just ignore me.” This was one of those moments where it would have been nice to have the fabled psychic vampire powers, but it wasn’t so. However, James took it as a joke and didn’t bother Adam as he walked through the narrow shelves to the back room.

He picked up the card and was out in a flash, practically running toward Highdale Park. He had company.

If it hadn’t been for centuries of paying attention to his surroundings, he wouldn’t have heard Marigold. She walked lightly, but he was moving too fast for her to be silent. He also had nearly a block ahead of her.

He crossed into the park and pulled out his cell phone while waiting for Marigold to catch up. He only hoped that she didn’t attack before she heard everything he had to say.

The phone rang three times before Okano bothered to pick up and greet him.

"I'm up for a bit of sport,” Adam said, cutting right to the chase.

Okano gave one of his deep throated laughs, pure pleasure at the thought of a game with an old friend. "I knew you had it in you, old man!"

"Let's keep this private,” Adam cautioned, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice. “I haven't shared a woman in years, but I remember the good old days." It hadn’t really been about death then, but blood and the feed were the closest thing to sex that a vampire could have. They’d even called the girls their lovers, but it hadn’t been enough for Okano.

Adam had tried to pretend that it didn’t bother him. But it was the issue that had eventually led to them parting ways after the war.

Okano didn’t seem to remember that part. Or he was so eager for a companion to share in his debauchery that he didn’t care about it. "I've got just the thing. It will ease you back into it." He gave Adam an address for a building in Jasperton.

"I thought you said you were in Chicago." Keeping the anger out of his voice was difficult, but after three centuries lying was second-nature. The persona of the old Adam Luther fit like a noose, but he’d wear it for long enough to get this done.

"That's where I live, my friend. I like to dine out." He didn’t apologize, he probably didn’t think he needed to.

Adam hung up the phone after they agreed on a time. If he talked for too long, he might let something slip. That was another trick of the accomplished liar: keep it short and let others sort out the details.

Wariness assailed Adam, nipping at his feet, trying to topple him. If he failed in this mission, Wendy Choi was a dead woman. There would be no second chance to retrieve her. Once Okano knew that his torture-den was compromised, he’d move quickly to destroy any trace that he’d ever been there.

And then he would come for Adam.

This was atonement—not total and never complete—for the sins of his past, for bringing Okano into this world. In some way, it was Adam’s fault that Wendy Choi was in danger in the first place, so it was his duty to protect her. Even if it killed her quicker.

It was almost time to go. But first, Adam spoke out into the darkness where he knew that Marigold was listening. "I know you have no reason to trust me, Huntress. But if you want to save an innocent life, come with me."