Creatures ok anthology, p.63
Creatures of the Dark Anthology, page 63
He snorted, resting his head against the fence. “Why do you care about such details?”
“Answer the damn question and you can walk away. If not, I’ll finish your off here and leave your head on the doorstep of your partner as a reminder of how big of an idiot you were for ditching her.”
The hunter glowered at Maya. His grey eyes reflected his desire to cut off her head. Well, he would get nowhere. She was faster, smarter, and knew exactly how the hunters fought and operated. Being an ex-hunter helped.
“Fine!” He spat out. “Six or seven seasoned hunters left with him. They didn’t like Sean Quinn enough to submit to his leadership or something. Those losers chose to go with Ben, wherever that was. Now can I go?”
Maya waved her hand in dismissal and watched him use the fence behind his back to get up. He staggered away from her, wobbling from side to side and clutching his chest. She may have broken a couple of his ribs in her rash need to get information fast.
Letting out a prolonged sigh, she looked up at the overcast sky. The weather in London was terrible. It rained more than it did when she was in Germany. She missed her old home, her hunter friends, and Ben.
“Where on earth did you go, Ben?” she asked no one in particular.
Unsurprisingly, no response came. She turned on her heel and sauntered in the opposite direction of the wounded hunter. He would inform the others of a vampire roaming the streets, looking for Ben. It would draw out more of the old Tarantula Clan members, giving her more opportunities to question them.
*****
She was reaching the second week of being in the Human Realm and in her vampire vessel. It was hard to think without eating souls. Her eyes kept focusing on the glowing light orb inside each mortal that walked past the café she was in. Her stomach rumbled. Her vampire side also needed to feed. She was getting sick and tired of feeding on mortal blood. Since she hadn’t mastered the vampire ability to influence people and their memories, she was stuck with punching their lights out and then taking her fill. She was beginning to see reports of her strange assaults in the newspapers. After taking their blood, she felt bad for knocking them out. So she didn’t bother stealing their money or jewellery to make her attack look like a mugging. People in London thought she was some angry woman with severe mental issues. They aren’t far off.
She left some money on the table next to her half-finished coffee. As much as she wanted to see Helena and make sure her friend was okay, Maya couldn’t drag her into another demonic mess. She had to deal with Tanatos problem and soon. The longer she spent wasting time looking for clues, the less chance she had of taking him down for good.
Her stomach announced its hunger with another squeeze, and she ran her hand through her wavy blonde hair. She had no choice but to feed again. Getting up from her seat made her lightheaded. She swayed on the spot, clutching the edges of the table for support.
“Miss, are you okay?” the waiter asked.
Maya nodded and managed a small smile. Damn, his soul looks delicious. Shaking her terrible thoughts out of her head, she ran out of the café. She scanned the crowd that had gathered on a Friday night to party at different nightclubs and spied a group of handsome vampires who were chatting to two human girls.
She pretended to get in line for the nightclub while listening to their conversation that involved going back to the guys’ place for some fun. The girls seemed enthralled by the vampire influence. Their movements were sluggish and they spoke as if they were learning English from beginning.
The vampires draped their arms over the girls’ shoulders, pulling them into the darkness of the nearby alleyway.
Maya ground her teeth together. Without a Vampire Council to control these idiots, they had a free roam of Europe. Her eyes widened with worry. If not controlled, the new vampires would cause havoc by bringing too much attention to their species. It would be an all-out war if humans realised that they were no longer the most dominant and powerful species on the planet.
She used her heightened hearing to gauge how far they had retreated into the alley. The girls’ heels kept clicking, which meant that they hadn’t become a meal yet. Maya turned into the same alleyway, throwing caution to the wind. She couldn’t let them kill the girls. They were young and stupid, not knowing what they were entangling themselves with.
The first vampire pressed one of the girls against the wall. He kissed her neck, and Maya’s own fangs came out when he bit into her skin.
“What are you doing here, Amanda?” the second vampire asked her. His short brown hair and young features made him look a bit like that main actor from Twilight. “We thought you died at the Council building.”
Maya raked through her vessels memories that she had stashed away once she consumed her soul. “I should be asking you that…” James? Jason? Justin? Shit, I don’t have enough energy to search for the right memory.
His blonde friend, though not as handsome as the other vamp, pulled back from the girl’s neck. “What’s up with those red eyes? Are you reaching a descent or something?”
“Or something,” she mumbled and got closer to them. “Were you going to kill the humans?”
“What? You want in on the game?” the blonde guy asked. “The Council hounds are running around killing possessed vampires. They’re too busy trying to control the mess the Council made to care for what we do.”
“Oh, you like to live on the wild side?” Maya inquired, running her finger down his face. “Is that reason enough to kill these girls?”
His expression hardened. “What the hell, Amanda? If you aren’t going to join in, then go fuck yourself.”
Maya smirked. “You know, I would, but that means leaving you two alone with these innocent mortals.” She punched her way through to his ribcage and ripped his heart out of his chest. “I can’t let you harm them.”
The girl who was under his influence blinked a few times. Her eyes diverted to Maya’s bloodied hand and the shrivelling organ in her grasp. She screamed like a banshee.
Cringing, Maya pulled the girl close and hit the back of her neck to knock her out. It worked. She sagged against Maya’s body almost instantly.
The distraction was a mistake on her part. The second vampire had a silver knife pressed to the girl’s neck. “What happened to you, Amanda? Why did you kill him?”
“I’m not Amanda.” Maya spoke each word with care and lowered the girl to the ground, so she wouldn’t become a hindrance later. “I’m a demon. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
The vampire staggered backwards, pulling the second human girl with him. His control on her was slipping. The girl began moving her head around to assess the situation. Before she could scream, he sliced her throat. She grasped her neck and fell, suffocating on her own blood.
Maya’s red eyes flared with anger. “Now why did you have to go and do that?”
“Why does a demon care? You guys eat souls for fun!” he snarled at her.
“I consume them out of necessity!”
Maya was about to lunge at him when she felt a prick on her shoulder blade. As she reached to check what it was, the vampire’s head exploded. She ducked and took cover behind the nearby bins. Momentarily, her vision started to blur. Slight burning in her veins alerted her to the fact that someone had shot her with a liquid silver dart. She jerked the dart out of her shoulder blade. It was too late. The silver was spreading through her system, and she was too weak to fight it. Her body swayed one last time and she collapsed.
4
OLD PARTNERS
BEN
NEWS THAT A BLONDE FEMALE vampire was searching for him reached Ben when he was ready to leave England for Germany with the remainder of the Black Mamba Clan. He ordered Freda and Reynard to take Otto and Wagner to their old base in Munich while Burnell Richter stayed behind to collect intel on the vampires’ and the Tarantula Clan’s movements. After the old European Vampire Council collapsed, the news spread fast throughout England. To the hunters, vampires were easy pickings. That was until they came across something much worse—the feral vampires that didn’t react to being shot in the heart or the head. Those creatures were in the dozens, scattered around London and spreading wider like cockroaches.
Ben was planning to leave the clean-up to the Irish Tarantula Clan. They did steal most of his clan members, getting them to flip sides after Ben’s ritualistic marriage to the future leader of their clan failed. He didn’t want to marry Laura, not after he helped kill her parents. At that time, he didn’t know who they were. But that was merely an excuse. In truth, his heart belonged to someone else. A girl he could no longer see or have within touching distance. He had promised himself to wait until Maya was older to open up to her about his feelings. He was worried that she would find him disgusting. After all, he had been her partner since she was sixteen, and he was seven years older than her. She must have thought of him as an older brother who had put her through gruelling training regimes to keep her senses sharp and ready for a fight at a moment’s notice.
Was I too harsh? Should I have acted sooner?
He ran his hand over his face. There was nothing he could do now that she was a demon and was tied to another realm. He had contemplated on many occasions leaving behind everything he had left in the Human Realm and taking his chances in the Demon Realm. But, he wouldn’t even know where to begin searching for her, and the odds of his survival there were close to zero. He was left with one option: help Helena however he could and leave England for good. There was nothing else left here other than painful reminders of Maya.
Sitting on a rooftop with a sniper rifle pointed at a vampire’s head, he indicated for Burnell to fire the silver tranquiliser dart they had prepared in case they wanted to capture one of them alive for questioning.
Burnell nodded and fired off a round, hitting the blonde female vampire in the shoulder blade.
Ben peered through the scope of his sniper rifle. He focused on the male vampire who had just killed an innocent human girl in cold blood. Pulling the trigger, he enjoyed the show as the back of the vampire’s skull burst open from the high calibre fragmentation bullet Ben had used.
The vampire woman immediately took cover behind the nearby bins. Ben signalled for Burnell to go downstairs and collect her. She wouldn’t be able to stay awake for long with such a large amount of silver in her bloodstream. Once his second in command was on the street below and striding towards the alleyway, Ben kept peering through the scope of his sniper rifle, prepared to shoot her if she put up a fight. Thankfully, no one noticed the commotion as the nightclub nearby was blaring music to the point where the people outside had to shout to hear one another.
Burnell gave Ben an okay and secured the blonde with silver restrains.
Ben disassembled the sniper rifle and the tranquiliser gun, putting them in their cases. He stashed both cases into a large black bag, slipping the straps over his shoulder as he headed to their Jeep downstairs. He dropped the weapons in the boot of his car and drove to the nearby street where Burnell could dump the vampire onto the back seats while he cleaned up the scene.
It was best to avoid leaving dead vampires on site. If the rest of humanity knew what was hiding in the shadows of the night and in plain sight, they would panic. Hunters like him were bred and trained from birth to kill those blood-suckers. Yet, after getting to know Helena and her strange circle of friends, the beliefs he had held for over twenty-eight years were beginning to crumble. Burnell, on the other hand, didn’t have the same problem. He remained true to his original training, eager to kill anything that wasn’t human. Ben still couldn’t fathom why the lone wolf of the Black Mamba Clan decided to come with him instead of siding with the Tarantula Clan’s leader who had the same ideals.
Twenty-five minutes later, Burnell climbed into the passenger’s seat, smirking at Ben. After his military career had ended with a dishonourable discharge for mistakenly killing a bunch of civilians, he was lost and angry. Ben’s foster parents found Burnell and got him to join their hunter clan where he had more than enough targets to kill without any repercussions. No one would miss someone who was supposed to be dead.
“I dropped off the surviving girl around the corner where someone will find her soon and disposed of the vampire remains.” Burnell turned in his seat, eyeing the vampire who lay across the back seats. “She’s cute. Too bad she’s dead.”
“Let’s get back to our safe house. We will question her there to see why she was looking for me,” Ben told him, driving away.
*****
MAYA
Everything in her body burned as if she had acid cycling through her veins. This was the first time she got to experience what silver felt like for vampires. And it wasn’t pleasant.
She peeled open her heavy eyelids, seeing a room with a chipped ceiling. There were no windows. Judging by the lack of traffic sounds in the vicinity, she guessed that she was outside the city, maybe in the countryside somewhere. There was no way to tell whether it was day or night, either.
Turning her head, she noticed that she was tied to a metal bedframe. Her arms and legs were secured to the bedposts. If her vessel wasn’t undead, she’d be freezing her ass off. The hunters who had captured her had taken everything off but her underwear.
How kind of them…
She was tired, hungry for blood, weak from the silver in her system, and starving for a soul to consume. Tugging on the restraints, she knew they were tied by someone experienced. They left no room for manoeuvring, not even a millimetre.
Damn.
Whatever they wanted from her, she couldn’t stick around for long. She needed to find Ben. Her eyes watered at the thought that she might never see him again. If she died here, it would be almost impossible to get out of the Demon Realm a second time. Baal would put her under constant watch or imprison her for running away from her duties. Not like Maya cared about them. She wanted to be free and hunt the monsters that killed humans for pleasure.
The door opened, and her lips parted. Her luck was better than she had hoped.
“Ben!” she squealed.
He stilled in the doorway, eyeing her with suspicion. He remained the same: taught muscle with a handsome face wrapped in black jeans and a black T-shirt. He let his ebony hair get longer, and he had it tied into a ponytail.
“How do you know me, vampire?”
Maya rolled her eyes. She had forgotten for a second that he couldn’t possibly recognise her in her new form. “It’s me, Maya. Your dead slash demon partner. I possessed a body when the Demon Gate was pried open by Eliza and the rest of the Vampire Council.”
He didn’t move or seem like he believed her.
Pursing her lips together, she contemplated on what to say that could prove to him who she was. “Do you want to talk about your scars again like the time you had Helena in that church cellar with the rats? I still think you went overboard with that. Avenging my death?” She snorted. “That’s not like you.”
Ben staggered towards her, his brown eyes softening. “How? Why? Wait—” He sat on the edge of the bed, making the springs strain under their combined weight. “How is this possible?”
“Do you want the long or short explanation? Because if it’s the long one, I may need my arms and legs back, partner. Not having a pulse doesn’t mean I enjoy being spread eagle.” She tried moving her left arm for effect. The silver chains around her wrist singed her skin, and she hissed.
He reached to undo the restraints and paused a second later. “Why were you looking for me? And your eyes…”
She sighed. “I guess I won’t get out of these until you conduct your inquisition. Just great!”
“I have to be cautious. There were a lot of vampires who got possessed at that cemetery. You could be just another demon trying to get into my head.”
“One, demons can’t read minds. And two, I know exactly what happened at that cemetery. I was there! We can’t be wasting any more time bickering if it’s me or not, Ben. There is an Archdemon on the loose in London, and we have to find and kill him.”
His eyes met hers, and he gazed at them for a long moment. He seemed confused by what he saw. She knew that the body she possessed was gorgeous, regardless if her irises were the colour of a stop light. When picking a vessel, she tried her best to go for an attractive vampire. Plus, this body had bigger breasts than she could ever get in her original human form without plastic surgery. It pleased her knowing that he struggled not to take a peek at her cleavage. Though, if he was the one to undress her, he would have had an eyeful.
He nodded and undid the restraints. Once he was finished, he helped her sit up, and Maya covered her mouth. Her fangs had come out. He smelled delicious.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, assessing her face.
“I’m hungry…” she muttered.
Ben blanched. “You feed on human blood?”
His reaction made her chest hurt. If he was repulsed by her drinking blood, how would he react to the news that she needed to eat a soul, too? “I’m sorry. This vessel needs sustenance.”
“I’ll find some for you,” he said and started for the door.
Maya shot up, making her head spin, and caught his wrist before he could leave her alone. “No. I’ll do it myself.”
She couldn’t let him think of her as one of those disgusting creatures that he had been hunting his whole life. Her gaze lowered to the ground in shame. Maybe seeking him out was a bad idea. When Ben thought of her as a demon he would never see again, he probably felt relieved that he wouldn’t have to kill her. Now that she was in front of him in a form of a vampire, he would have to end her life. She was an abomination in his eyes, a disease.
Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she started to cry. She let him go, hoping that he wouldn’t notice her weak moment.
Her eyes widened when he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into a hug. He buried his face in her neck as he massaged her back in soothing circles. “You’ve been through a lot, Maya. I’m here for you. I’m always here.”
