I stood in the shadows and watched the dead man.
The night was bitterly cold, and rain fell in a heavy, constant stream. Water sluiced down the vampire's long causeway of a nose, leaping to the square thrust of his jaw before joining the mad rush down the front of his yellow raincoat. The puddle around his bare feet had reached his ankles and was slowly beginning to creep up his hairy legs.
Like most of the newly risen, he was little more than flesh stretched tautly over bone. But his skin possessed a translucent quality that suggested he wasn't feeding enough, and his pale eyes were sunken. Haunted.
Which in itself wasn't really surprising. Thanks to the willingness of both Hollywood and literature to romanticize vampirism, far too many humans seemed to think that by becoming a vampire they'd instantly gain all the power, sex, and wealth they could ever want. It wasn't until after the change that they began to realize that being undead wasn't the fun time often depicted. That wealth, sex, and popularity might come, but only if they survived the horrendous first few years, when a vampire was all instinct and blood need. And of course, if they did survive, they then learned that endless loneliness, never feeling the full warmth of the sun again, never being able to savior the taste of food, and being feared or ostracized by a good percentage of the population was also part of the equation.
Yeah, there were laws in place to stop discrimination against vampires and other non-humans, but the laws were only a recent development. And while there might now be vampire groupies, they were also a recent phenomenon and only a small portion of the population. Hatred and fear of vamps had been around for centuries, and I had no doubt it would take centuries for it to abate. If it ever did.
And the bloody rampages of vamps like the one ahead wasn't helping the cause any.
But then, it was highly unlikely that this particular master of the night was working alone. He couldn't be—he was far too new, and the kidnaps to date were all performed during the day. One of the few myths that held true for vamps was the fact that the sun crisped the newly turned. Besides, the subsequent executions had been too well planned, and the newly turned were never that meticulous. When presented with the opportunity for a feed, they fed, and often rather messily. That there was no mess other than what is usually seen when a body is sliced open neck to knee with a knife reinforced the fact someone older and stronger was working with him. It was my job as a guardian to find out who that someone was, and this vampire was our only real lead.
Of course, guardians gathered information by any means necessary, and I was just glad I hadn't been ordered to fuck this particular subject to get the information we needed. I might be part werewolf, I might be as free and easy as any other wolf when it came to sex, but I did have some standards. Vampires who would rather feed than do the wild thing weren't high on my to-do list.
Especially when they smelled like something a cat had chucked up. Luckily, the rain and the chill had all but erased his 'fresh from the grave' scent. I don't think my stomach could have handled his odor two nights in a row.
I leaned a shoulder against the concrete wall lining one side of the small alley way I was hiding in. The wall, which was part of the massive factory complex that dominated a good part of the old West Footscray area, protected me from the worst of the wind, but it didn't do a whole lot against the goddamn rain.
If the vamp felt any discomfort about standing in a pothole in the middle of a storm-drenched night, he certainly wasn't showing it. But then, the dead rarely cared about such things.
I might have vampire blood running through my veins, but I wasn't dead and I hated it.
Winter in Melbourne was never a joy, but this year we'd had so much rain I was beginning to forget what sunshine looked like. Most wolves were immune to the cold, but I was a half breed and obviously lacked that particular gene. My feet were icy and I was beginning to lose feeling in several toes. And this despite the fact I was wearing two pairs of thick woolen socks underneath my rubber-heeled shoes. Which were not waterproof, no matter what the makers claimed.
I should have worn stilettos. My feet would have been no worse off, and I would have felt more at home. And hey, if he happened to spot me, I could have pretended to be nothing more than a bedraggled, desperate hooker. But Jack—my boss, and the vamp who ran the whole guardian division at the Directorate of Other Races—kept insisting high heels and my job just didn't go together.
Personally, I think he was a little afraid of my shoes. Not so much because of the color—which, admittedly, was often outrageous—but because of the nifty wooden heels. Wood and vamps were never an easy mix.
I flicked up the collar of my leather jacket and tried to ignore the fat drops of water dribbling down my spine. What I really needed—more than decent looking shoes—was a hot bath, a seriously large cup of coffee, and a thick steak sandwich. Preferably with lashings of onions and ketchup, but skip the tomato and green shit, please. God, my mouth was salivating just thinking about it. Of course, given we were in the middle of this ghost town of factories, none of those things were likely to appear in my immediate future.
I thrust wet hair out of my eyes, and wished, for the umpteenth time that night, that he would just get on with it. Whatever it was.
Following him might be part of my job as a guardian, but that didn't mean I had to be happy about it. I'd never had much choice about joining the guardian ranks, thanks to the experimental drugs several lunatics had forced into my system and the psychic talents that were developing as a result. It was either stay with the Directorate as a guardian so my growing abilities could be monitored and harnessed, or be shipped off to the military with the other unfortunates who had received similar doses of the ARC 1-23 drug. I might not have wanted to be a guardian, but I sure as hell didn't want to be sent to the military. Give me the devil I know any day.
I shifted weight from one foot to the other again. What the hell was this piece of dead meat waiting for? He couldn't have sensed me—I was far enough away that he wouldn't hear the beat of my heart or the rush of blood through my veins. He hadn't looked over his shoulder at any time, so he couldn't have spotted me with the infrared of his vampire vision, and blood suckers generally didn't have a very keen olfactory sense.
So why stand in a puddle in the middle of this abandoned factory complex looking like a little lost soul?
Not that I thought this particular vamp had a soul. He couldn't, not after the things he and his partner had done to their last four victims.
The vampire suddenly stepped out of the puddle and began walking down the slight incline, his bare feet slapping noisily against the broken road. The shadows and the night hovered all around him, but he didn't bother cloaking his form. Given the whiteness of his hairy legs and the brightness of his yellow raincoat, that was strange. Though we were in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he figured he was safe.
I stepped out of the alleyway. The wind hit full force, pushing me sideways for several steps before I regained my balance. I padded across the road and stopped in the shadows again. The rain beat a tattoo against my back and the water seeping through my coat became a river, making me feel colder than I'd ever dreamed possible.
Forget the coffee and the sandwich. What I wanted more than anything right now was to get warm.
I pressed the small comlink button that had been inserted into my earlobe just over four months ago. It doubled as a two-way communicator and a tracker, and Jack had not only insisted that I keep it but that all Guardians were to have them from now on. He wanted to be able to find his people at all times, even when not on duty.
Which smacked of 'big-brother' syndrome to me even if I could understand his reasoning. Guardians didn't grow on trees—finding vamps with just the right mix of killing instinct and moral sensibilities was difficult, which was why guardian numbers at the Directorate still hadn't fully recovered from the eleven we'd lost ten months ago.
One of those eleven had been a friend of mine, and on my worst nights I still dreamed of her death, even though the only thing I'd ever witnessed was the bloody patch of sand that had contained her DNA. Like most of the other Guardians who had gone missing, her remains had never been found.
Of course, the tracking measures had not only come too late for those eleven, but for one other—Gautier. Not that he was dead, however much I might wish otherwise. Four months ago he'd been the Directorate's top Guardian. Now he was rogue and on top of the Directorate's hit list. So far he'd escaped every search, every trap. Meaning he was still out there, waiting and watching and plotting his revenge.
On me.
Goose bumps traveled down my spine and, just for a second, I'd swear his dead scent teased my nostrils.
