“Why!” Aiden shouted at the heaven above, dropping to his knees to hold the pale, lifeless body of his sister Anna. She was bloodless, drained dry by the monster that had killed hundreds in their village, that he and his brothers had been hunting.
“Well, hello, my little pretties.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a woman with long raven hair, and extended fangs, appeared, blood dripping from her mouth. She wiped it. “I’m ready for desert and you three will be lovely.”
Aiden pushed to his feet, drawing a long blade from the tan animal skin pants he wore. “Come and get me!”
“Come and get us,” Troy shouted, stepping to Aiden’s side, knife drawn.
“Run,” his older brother Evan shouted. “Run now!” He lunged to the front of Aiden and Troy, shouting, “Come and get me witch!”
“No!” Aiden shouted, knowing his brother had just ensured his death, knowing one man against this monster could not survive an attack. But it was too late. Evan fell at Aiden and Troy’s feet, his throat ripped open.
Aiden charged at the monster, aware that Troy was by him, that Troy’s blade sliced at her as his did. She moved too fast though, and was behind them in seconds. Pain sliced through his neck, his shoulder and everything went blank. Time faded away into shadows, into screams for his family. Something coppery touched his lips and a sudden hunger ravished him. Desperately he drank of the substance. Slowly, he became aware of the impossible, of Evan leaning over him, of his mouth on his brother’s arm. He was drinking…blood. Aiden scrambled away from the mirage, the trickery that must be that of the monster, to see Evan standing well and strong, alive.
“Evan?”
“Yes,” his brother said. “It’s me.”
Wildly, his gaze searched the area in front of their family cabin, finding the dead bodies of his family and a leather clad blonde man leaned over Troy, dripping blood into his mouth.
“The monster is dead.”
Troy came awake suddenly, shouting and scrambling backwards as well. The blonde man stood up, moving to stand beside Evan. “What Evan means is that the vampire is dead. I killed it and I can teach you how to hunt and kill others like it.”
Kelly came back to her own mind for a mere instant before an onslaught of images overtook her. The brothers fighting together, side by side, driven to save lives, to kill monsters. And then…then there was Aiden running towards Troy in a dark alley, desperate to get to his brother before the wolf did. The wolf. Oh God, a werewolf. Suddenly she was standing over Aiden where he knelt on the ground, holding Troy, feeding his brother his own blood. The pain, the anger, the fury, of the day he’d lost his parents and sister, blasting into Aiden, and bleeding into her. Bleeding like Troy’s throat.
Kelly blinked the room into focus, gasping. She sat up, realizing that she was somehow on the ripped couch, with Aiden beside her. She stared at him, searched his face, thinking of the pain in him when he’d held his sister’s body, the fear when he’d known Evan would be killed.
“I…I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I just saw. I mean…I do, but Aiden-”
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. His hand was on her legs, where they were draped across his lap, and though he touched her, she could feel him withdrawing from her as he spoke. “Feeding memories to someone isn’t an exact science. I didn’t mean for you to see Troy’s attack. It’s clearly front and center in my mind right now after what happened to him tonight.”
“Memories,” she repeated. “You fed me your memories?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“What…are you?”
“A Warden,” he said without emotion, without hesitation, but she could feel the waves of tension rolling off of him. “The law of our kind.”
“Your kind,” she said, because she couldn’t bring herself to voice the word ‘vampire’.
“Yes,” he said. “My kind. Vampire, Kelly.” There it was. He’d said the impossible, said what her mind rejected despite what she’d seen—no—what she’d felt, what she’d relived with Aiden.
He lifted her legs and tried to scoot away from her and get up.
“No,” she said, grabbing his bare arm. He was still gloriously shirtless, his jeans unbuttoned, and all the confusion and fear over this night didn’t change how masculine and perfect she found him. That had to mean something, had to be a part of her that still saw him, as Aiden, her lover, her protector.
“Kelly-”
“Don’t tell me to let you go.” She dropped her legs to the floor, so she could follow him if necessary. “I just need to understand all of this, Aiden. How can you be what you say you are? How is that possible?”
He turned to her more fully, his eyes, too black and unnatural, she realized now, found hers. “The laws of my race dictate that no human be left with a memory of our existence. I’ll tell you what you want to know, because it’s the best way to protect you. But when this is over, I will erase your memories, Kelly. To do otherwise, is punishable by death—yours and mine.”
She drew a sharp breath, but she wasn’t sure she could even process the implications of what he was saying. Not until she understood more of what was happening, of what he was.
“Okay,” she said. “So you’ll erase my memories, just like you gave me yours. Agreed. So now you’ll answer my questions?”
He hesitated and then gave a short nod.
“You eat real food. And today you were with me during the daytime, when there was sunlight.”
“I’m a vampire,” he said flatly. “Not a myth or a movie. I don’t burst into flames in sunlight and blood is a necessity on a limited basis. It becomes a drug, a high, that is not so unlike human drugs. It turns the abusers into the monsters I hunt down and kill.”
“And exactly how does one become a vampire?” she asked, because thinking of the science, the questions, seeking answers, was all that was keeping her sane right now.
He studied her a long moment, then, “I’d spare you the details but considering your career choice, I’m going to assume you can handle it. A human must be drained dry of their own blood and then fed that of a vampire. Other than that—where did we come from? I don’t know. No one knows our true origins.”
She inhaled and let it out, still seeking answers, and mentally seeking the cold dark place in her mind that allowed her to separate herself from the horrors of her work. “And the animal—the wolf—that attacked Troy? Where does it, or they, come from?”
“A werewolf can be born, as most are, a race of their own, not so unlike humans. Or a wolf can be created by a virus that infects a human. The virus creates a monster, a creature that lives to kill. That is what Andres is. A wolf that was once human.”
Her chest went icy. “So you think this Andres killed those women?”
“There is no tidy death when a wolf attacks you, so no. I don’t think he killed them, but Troy has informants that say Andres is the creator of the drug that’s indirectly responsible for the deaths. We believe it’s a combination of his blood and that of a vampire. And Andres, like the wolf that attacked Troy, is a new breed of wolf, not fully understood. We don’t know exactly what he is and we have no blood samples available. Troy’s informant tells us that the result of the two blood types is an extreme aphrodisiac, and by extreme, I mean without pleasure there is pain. Horrible, intolerable pain. The vamps dose the human, and then Gangbang her.”