Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The insanely hot fictional vampire had spoken her name. The episode ended.
No, no, no, no. It can’t be over.
Gemma clicked back to the home screen. The next episode must happen now.
There was no next episode available.
“Where is it? Come on. Work!” She jabbed the play icon on her computer.
One episode appeared on the main menu—the one she’d just watched.
There’d been four episodes on this DVD before she played the first.
She mashed the TV remote on and off. No more episodes appeared. She clicked everything possible on her computer, which she’d hooked up to the TV in order to play the DVD. Ejecting the disc and putting it back in didn’t make more episodes appear.
“What’s happening?” She manually took out the disc, wiped the back with her shirt as if the cloth had magical cleaning powers, and put it back into the player.
Still only one episode remained as an option to play.
She pressed play to re-watch episode one.
Her phone buzzed on the side table. She glanced over at it but didn’t pick it up. No reason to risk it being the surgical resident jerk. He often texted her after hours asking her if she’d changed her mind about going on a date.
It buzzed again. Ugh.
The first message was from the resident.
I’m sorry I got angry today. Call me. Let’s talk about the sexual tension between us.
Seriously? His ego knew no bounds.
She would report him for sexual harassment on Monday.
The second message was work. The sweet seventy-six-year-old man who’d been in a car accident was asking for her.
The man had confided to her that his family consisted of an estranged son who lived in Kentucky.
There wasn’t anyone in the San Francisco area to pick him up at the hospital or help him cope with daily life while healing from a broken leg and hand.
She’d arranged to have him stay overnight for monitoring so he wouldn’t be alone tonight.
With a click on her computer, she paused the replay to call the hospital and asked to be put through to his bedside phone. When he answered she said, “Hi, Charles. It’s Gemma, the nurse who helped you earlier. I’m not on shift any more but wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
“Will you be my nurse tomorrow?”
“I actually …” She wasn’t scheduled to work.
“I’ll come by to check on you. We’ll see if we can get you home and organize you some help.
Remember, I promised to show you how to shop for groceries online to have them delivered?
” Her supervisor was going to kill her. She’d promised she wouldn’t get involved this much in helping a patient again.
Last time she ended up doing an all-nighter to stay with a patient post-surgery who had no other family, she was dead on her feet for her shift the next day.
After she ended the call, she texted Val:
Need to talk to you about the episode of the show. NOW.
Waiting for a reply, she busied herself putting away clean dishes from the dishwasher.
She picked up her phone and dropped it back on the counter in frustration. Val wasn’t good at checking messages, but she needed her to reply now.
Impatient, she tried calling, but it sent her straight to voicemail. “Call me, Val. I have to talk with you about the DVD. It’s not working right. That thing you said about magic… well, I’m starting to believe.”
She flopped back on her sofa and stared at the one-episode option on the home screen. Finally, she clicked to start it again.
During the entire episode she barely breathed or moved, waiting to see if he would notice her again.
He did—in the exact same spot, and in the exact same way, as last time.
She tried speaking to him again, but he didn’t react to her new words.
Instead, he stuck to the script of the first viewing.
It played like a rerun of a recorded live event.
The second watch confirmed he’d definitely stared into the camera and addressed her. Her! She would swear he’d whispered her name, too, even if on the rewatch it sounded garbled and could be argued to be a curse word or something else.
Maybe it’d all been in her head, even though it seemed real. Val’s spell might still be messing with her.
Did he meet Petra in the garden? What happened next?
Only watch one episode a day.
She twisted her throw pillow to the point she worried it’d bust a seam. The image of Skarde right after he’d said her name sat frozen on the disc’s home screen.
One more time. She’d watch the episode once more.
* * *
Skarde Blackmann was real.
And in pain.
He knew better than to trust a witch. Petra’s blade had been poisoned, which burned with every jostle of his horse.
By some miracle he hadn’t destroyed her on the spot.
The Hunters had made him vow not to kill her until they’d retrieved all the demon crystals she’d collected.
They worried she kept them somewhere warded.
If she was dead, she couldn’t use the crystals. The Hunters didn’t see that as a valid option. They argued someone else might get to them.
He hissed in pain when his horse stumbled on the rain-drenched rocky path.
Daytime sleep would purge the toxin and heal the wound, but it couldn’t happen until he found safety. Several hours remained until he arrived home. About that much time remained until daylight. The toxic rays of the sun would burn him to a crisp. A nasty death.
He dismounted and walked the tired horse up the steepest part of the winding passage over the mountain.
His horse could’ve carried him the whole way, but the loyal beast had trudged this same journey up and down two mountains three times in the past two weeks.
The last half mile up the second mountain was the worst—narrow and now slick from icy rain.
He picked at bits of ice in the horse’s mane. “We’ll get you warm when we get home.”
Every time he decided to never do another favor for the three annoyances—Craig, Lees, and Mallory—riding ahead of him or to never take on a new, low paying mission to kill a half insane magical creature tormenting humans, fate bit him in the ass and forced him to act.
Walking instead of riding let the three humans pull ahead.
They were idealistic, sometimes honorable, thrill seekers who, like him, realized there was a decent paycheck in hunting that which scared normal people.
They sucked at fighting non-humans, which is where he came in.
Too often, he rescued them, not that it reflected in his cut of the payout.
Hours ago, he’d stopped listening to their analysis of the ball—how each handled their tasks and what new information they’d gleaned.
Little clues about the crystals didn’t matter from his perspective.
All they needed to know was Petra had at least one crystal, maybe two of the three.
She planned to use them to summon an army of demons.
Petra thought herself unstoppable, but he’d dealt with plenty of narcissistic, power-hungry witches in the past. He should’ve tried mind persuasion on her to get her to give him the crystals.
He’d never jump in bed with her to get them.
Disgusting. Witches and vampires had been mortal enemies since the inception of their species.
He’d kept to himself what he kept to himself was what the mirror sorceress said.
Petra working with VanFliet made no sense.
Centuries ago, Skarde, VanFliet, and Skarde’s two brothers had served in the same militia unit until captured by a vampire and turned.
VanFliet despised witches to the point he had hunted them for decades until he grew bored.
Why would he join forces with one? It was improbable, but Skarde wasn’t stupid enough to discount it.
Still, he remained skeptical of the woman with a soothing voice and a chest straight out of his fantasies who had called to him through a mirror.
When he first saw her, he thought he hallucinated her, but then she spilled her drink down her shirt. Hallucinations would never do something so daft. Gemma had seemed as shocked as he that they could communicate.
This reeked of witch or mage magic. Both usually tried to kill him. Whenever he let his guard down around those types of magical creature, it bit him in the ass. Like Petra jabbing him in the side with a fucking poisoned blade.
Gemma. A perfect name for one so stunning, with her long dark hair, creamy skin made imperfect by many freckles, and generous lips. Although her bone structure suggested aristocratic blood, she lacked the despotic arrogance of most highborn humans he’d met.
“I haven’t been watching long, but I’m Team Skarde. I swear. You need that wound looked at. If I were there, I’d help you.”
Team Skarde? No one opted onto his “team.” Yet she seemed to care that he’d been injured—and that in and of itself was more concern than most humans directed toward his kind, even the Hunters. He didn’t need it. The wound might burn, but it was temporary.
Her compassion had to be well crafted bullshit. She was nothing more than another female trying to draw him into her web to use him.
The horse stopped with its head raised and ears back.
A raven called out.
VanFliet.
He dropped his chin and cursed. He didn’t need this delay in getting home.
The flighty horse might decide to run off if a fight ensued. He pulled the horse’s head close with the reins and whispered, “Extra dinner if you don’t ditch me. We’ll have to fly down this mountain after this to make it before daylight.”
Not that this impulsive beast could understand him.
Above him at a cliff’s edge, a shadowy figure dressed in dark clothes meant to blend with the night flapped his distinctive split leg coat to show off his long sword.
A shroud of slithery creatures moved around VanFliet’s body.
This vampire was a veteran of countless bloody fights, but these days VanFliet liked to play general from a distance.