Chapter 1
The perfect rows of pecan trees whizzed by as I pursued the vampire while another one chased after me.
The vampire ahead of me made the mistake of dodging in and out between sturdy trunks, while I stuck true to my straight, determined line.
I caught up with him, and his red eyes flashed with surprise as he nearly crashed into me in his latest sharp turn around a tree.
He was too close for me to get a clean jab with my stake, and so I settled on a left-handed punch that sent him onto his back, skidding a foot or two across the patchy grass.
“Hell yeah, Fallon, just like I showed you!” The other vampire had caught up, but I didn’t let his little cheerleader routine distract me.
My steps were determined as I placed one foot on either side of the scrambling young vampire.
I halted his escape attempt and flipped him around onto his back, then drove my stake right into his heart.
I stepped back and panted. I still had the bad habit of holding my breath at the end, when my body seized with the tension of aiming my stake.
My friend Peter Fenton cheered for me again, and now I could enjoy the praise.
I laughed and leaned my back against the nearest tree.
“That was two this week. God, watching you run like that…” Fenton stopped himself when I gave him a look. His gap-toothed, fanged smile was far from innocent when he corrected course. “Very inspiring display of athleticism.”
“You know, even if the words themselves are innocent, when you use that tone, it’s still coming across as sexual.”
He groaned. “You’re just nitpicking now. Hearing what you want to hear, I bet.”
I nudged the tip of my boot against the gray corpse, and it flaked apart until it was no longer shaped like a body. I crouched and brushed aside what was once a skull, uncovering a pair of fangs, the only solid piece of a staked vampire that was left behind. I tucked them into the pouch on my hip.
“Hear about any other vamps?” I asked, brushing my hands together to remove as much ash as I could. The fine powder stuck between the tiny crevasses of my fingerprints, and I’d need a good scrub with soap and hot water to get completely clean.
“There was this one asshole who punched me in the face at a bar. Wanna take him out?” Fenton rubbed at his jaw, though with his vampiric healing, it was long-since healed.
“Why’d he punch you?”
“I…” He grinned as he stumbled over his answer to make it Fallon-friendly. “You know how vampires are. Territorial.”
“Meaning?”
He fought against his own mouth, but he couldn’t stop the words from pouring out.
“He had this idea that just because he’d gotten his fangs in this human girl last week, it meant she was his forever.
Like it’s a wedding ring or something. I wasn’t even going to bite her!
I was just flirting with the lady. We were just talking.
Well, the guy sucker punched me straight out of my barstool.
Took off with his woman before I could get to my feet. Bastard.”
I leveled him with a skeptical look, but I didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
I very much didn’t want to know what Fenton got up to on his own time.
It was too nice a night in the cool orchard to ruin it with unsavory knowledge.
“Well, I’m kind of on his side, so I’ll let him off the hook for now.
” I ignored his scoff and looked at the time.
“Want a ride home? I have to get back to the ranch so I can at least attempt to get a good night’s sleep. I have work tomorrow.”
“Work? I thought you were quitting.”
Even just referencing that new reality sent my head spinning. I started the walk back to my car. “I put my two-week notice in today. Everyone was shocked, of course. Jasmin drove me crazy the rest of the day, begging me not to go. Two weeks of that is going to be something.”
Fenton made an unimpressed sound but walked in step with me. He flashed his fangs. “Would you like me to kill her?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
He took an uncomfortably long time to answer. “Yes?”
“Is that how you solve all your problems? Killing people?” I straddled the line between humorous and worried.
Fenton had killed a man who was attacking me, but as close as we’d gotten since then, there were still dark patches of his new life I didn’t know much about, likely out of self-preservation.
“Just the annoying ones. I’ll stop if you like.” Fenton was still so charming that I couldn’t tell how serious he was.
“Stop joking about it or stop doing it?”
“I’ll stop doing it. The only way I’d stop joking about it would be if you tied me up and taped my mouth closed. Which I’d be happy to arrange as well.”
“Fenton. I’m not sure I want to know any of this. You’re practically asking me to stake you.” We’d run a mile or two in pursuit of the newborn vampire, and it would be a long walk back with his darker tendencies poking at my conscience.
For some time we only walked, but quiet never suited Fenton. “Have you told your lump of boring yet?”
I ignored his question for a growing list of reasons.
His jealous nicknames for Virgil Miller had long ago gotten old, and he’d asked the same question every time he’d seen me, relishing each time the answer was the same.
Fenton had some twisted romantic idea for why I hadn’t told Virgil yet that I’d be going back to the Hunter Land to seek out Mary the Mother’s Blessing, but the reality of the situation was far more mundane.
Virgil had enough worries and responsibilities in his life, and I wasn’t going to worry him until my plans were actually concrete, like they were now.
Fenton slid into my car, and one of those all-too-common moments of clarity hit me before I could get in.
All my life, vampires were the enemy. They were evil, blood-hungry creatures that would do anything to tear out any throat they could get their fangs into.
Often, that was the truth, like tonight’s recently reborn vampire who had attacked a young couple who’d been taking a night walk through the pecan trees.
But then there was Peter Fenton, who moved through my life like he was my closest friend again.
There was Virgil, too, my boyfriend. Sometimes, those two truths brushed against one another and zapped a line in my brain.
All I could do in the end was keep moving.
Maybe returning to my home and speaking with my mothers on the subject would bring me clarity.
“Back home?” I asked Fenton once we were approaching town again, and once his usual easy conversation lulled enough so I could speak.
He let out a long groan while he considered the path of his night to come. Most nights, he asked to be dropped off downtown, near the dark alleys where vampires congregated. Tonight, though, he looked at me with doughy eyes. “Home.”
I turned onto Ogden Street and drove past the pizza place, put in the gate code to his apartment complex, and parked in the same spot I always did.
“Wanna come up?” he asked with that charming smile.
I chewed on my bottom lip as I thought through how to approach an unspoken goal.
I’d been practicing this conversation for weeks, and though I’d had endless opportunities to broach the subject, I’d continuously come up short.
Maybe the way he was looking at me tonight made it feel like the right time.
“How much do you know about the night Derrick was killed?” I cringed just the same way he did at the utterly indelicate way it came out. No buildup at all.
“Why do you ask?” Already, Fenton was annoyed at me.
“I faced him. Lazaro Reyes. Your…brother.” Or at least that was what Fenton called him.
“Yeah,” Fenton answered like it was obvious. I’d told him all about that night after it had happened, but I’d only gone into the blow-by-blow. Fenton had been uncharacteristically uncurious about it all, anyway.
“I don’t think he did it. He didn’t murder Derrick.” I was beginning to understand why I’d avoided this conversation so long. Even with Fenton, who I’d always been able to talk to about anything, it was uncomfortable.
“That’s who you were looking for, though. L.S. Reyes.”
“Do you know who else was with him that night? I know there were at least three vampires.” Derrick’s autopsy indicated at least two different fang prints spread across his body, maybe three.
“Fallon.” That grave look was a rare sight. “You went after Lazaro. You could have died doing it. I still can’t understand how you’re both alive, but you especially. I’m not going to send you towards other vampires that might kill you this time.”
“So you do know their names?” He was silent. “What if I promise to only go after them if I’m stronger? If I get my Hunter powers.” I was uncomfortably close to begging.
He shook his head, and he wasn’t even looking at me anymore.
“Fenton.”
“No, Fallon. I know that’s something you’re not used to hearing from me. But no. No, no, no. Have a good one.”
Fenton got out of my car and slammed the door a little too hard. He froze outside for just one step, then continued on, moving faster than a human on his way up the stairs to his second-floor apartment.
That was the first time since becoming a vampire that Fenton had denied me anything. There was a line after all. Crossing it left me more disappointed than I’d ever expected.
“That went well,” I muttered to myself with a weak laugh as I drove away from his apartment and headed back home to Hope Ranch.
* * *
I tipped over the pair of fangs from my palm into the plastic container hidden in my sock drawer.
I had already surpassed the goal I’d set for myself a few months earlier of bagging twenty vampires to prove to my mother I was ready to complete the trials and receive my Blessing.
The vampire I’d hunted with Fenton in the pecan orchard had been the twenty-fifth pair of fangs, and the one I’d gotten on my own last night was number twenty-six.
“You were out late.” My younger sister Lily pushed my bedroom door open all the way.
She leaned against the door frame, crossing one leg in front of the other.
She’d changed so much since she’d arrived on the doorstep nearly half a year earlier.
There was a clear influence from Amanda, and now Lily’s wardrobe also consisted mostly of black, and the two of them often spent their evenings giggling in the bathroom, trying new and merciless things with their hair and doing each other’s makeup while music blared.
“Vamp gave me a hard time. He was a lover boy.” I spared Lily the details of the vampire stalking his poor friend, making the girl’s life a living nightmare for the past week.
I’d gotten the details from Virgil and took care of the vamp myself.
He’d been digging through the woman’s garbage can when I’d confronted him, and he’d been coward enough to run from me.
I’d had to double back once I’d staked him so I could put his sick collection back in the trash can to spare the woman those creepy images.
It almost didn’t feel real any longer in the light of day with my sister chatting casually in my room.
“Are you ready for your big test today?”
Lily lifted her shoulder in a bored shrug. “I’m not worried. Amanda’s taking me.”
“Oh. You’re sure?” I’d already made plans with Lily to drop her off to take the test for her GED.
“She’s gonna show me around the university, too. She says there’s a parking lot that’ll be good for my first driving lesson.” Lily’s grin was on the concerning side of huge.
“Amanda’s giving you a driving lesson? She’s only been driving for a year.
” I hadn’t expected to sound so hurt. I was supposed to teach Lily how to drive.
Of course, with the workload I’d been juggling these days — my full-time job at the blood lab, food deliveries some nights after work, then hunting vampires most other nights — it was no wonder I hadn’t been able to make the time.
She probably thought I was blowing her off.
“We’ll be careful,” Lily said in that perfectly bored teenage tone. “What’s that look for?”
“I’m just glad you two are getting along.
” It was so much more than that, though I couldn’t put words to the feeling that clamped inside my chest. Lily studied me like she was waiting to get in trouble, and I feared I’d exposed too much, so I shooed her out of my room.
“You’re going to be late for your test. Eat some breakfast before you go! ”
“Alright, alright,” Lily said, then stomped downstairs. When the sound faded, I shook my small tub of fangs again before hiding them away.
After four steady, uneventful years of living in the aftermath of my boyfriend’s death, everything was now changing so fast it was hard to keep up.