Hunting My Vampire (Immortal Vampire #3)

Chapter Five

Kaya

I opened my front door and thought a bush had fallen down on the porch. Or some kind of flowering tree. Then I saw the roses and the vases and realized these had been placed here on purpose.

“What the fuck?” I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I have never been the kind of girl who liked flowers and candy, and ten thousand messages a day.

I stared at the multitude of flowers. There was no card, but I knew who had sent them.

There was only one person who would have gone for such overkill on a simple call-the-next-day message.

I was totally disgusted.

If he thought this kind of cheap trick would work on me then he clearly didn’t know me at all.

“Oh, someone has an admirer!”

It was my neighbor, Mabel, coming up to admire the flowers.

“Please!” I snorted, looking away to hide my discomfort. “This is some mistake. I’ll ask the hospital to send someone over to collect these, maybe hand them out to patients.”

“It’s no mistake, dear,” Mabel said, telling me she’d seen a man outside my house last night. She crinkled her nose, “I think he was one of those,” she said, with an emphasis on the last word.

I knew what she meant.

The War had ended not that long ago and many of the older generation, especially, remembered that terrible time when vampires were at war with human beings and the other creatures on the planet. We were close to losing when a large part of the vampire population was destroyed by a huge bomb. The remaining families had to swear off drinking human blood and sign an agreement to agree to universal laws of respect and courteous behavior that did not include killing for food.

I couldn’t believe that I had slept with him. How could I have been that weak?

I was extremely disappointed in myself.

He was handsome and he had turned on the charm, sure, but I was stronger than that, surely! Had my mind really become this feeble? I couldn’t believe it.

Princess was staying with her grandmother, Tina, and I drove over to their house down the street. The place was almost as familiar to me as my own house. I had spent a few years there, after Aunt Stephanie died, before I went off to military training. That was how Pearl and I became friends, she was like a sister to me.

As soon as I came into the house, I got the smell of coffee and fried eggs. This was what a home smelled like.

“Hey guys,” I said, finding Princess and Grandma Tina sitting at the kitchen table. There were pancakes, waffles and strips of bacon on a plate. I grabbed one of these and sat down at the table.

“Ready for school?”

Princess stuffed the last of the toast in her face and ran off to get her school bag.

“I thought I’d go visit Pearl today,” I said. “You need me to take anything to her?”

Pearl had been in rehab for over two months. She was currently at a kind of step-down facility where she was allowed visitors. She would soon be released and come back home.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got some cookies for her,” Grandma Tina got up with difficulty, on account of her arthritis. This was why she couldn’t look after Princess full-time and I’d offered to help out.

“Don’t you need to work today?” Grandma Tina called out to me over her shoulder.

“The shop is quiet, Roberto can handle it for a few hours,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Tina chuckled. Roberto could barely handle a tooth brush, never mind the shop.

“He has to learn sometime,” I said with a shrug.

I took a bag with cookies, some clothes and books and then dropped Princess off at school. Afterward, I made sure that Roberto was coming in so that I could switch my phone off for the day. I didn’t want to get any calls from Jack.

I knew he’d call at some point to ask me if I’d gotten the roses. He’d probably go round to the shop to see if I was there too.

I wanted him to get the message quickly. The other night was a mistake. It was not going to happen again.

I was not in the business of sleeping with vampires. I was going to write off that one incidence as a sign that my head was still not completely healed. It was a momentary lapse of reason.

Vampires were vile creatures and I distrusted them. I also suspected that a vampire was behind the attack on my family when I was a little girl. Both my parents and my brother were killed, and I had been left for dead. I had survived the massacre but I remembered very little apart from the sound of beating wings and screaming.

It was not long after the end of the Wars, during which my father had taken us into the wilderness where he thought he could protect us better. He had been wrong about that.

I could be wrong too. Nobody was always right.

That was okay too. Mistakes happened.

I was not as hard on myself as I used to be. People made mistakes, but you learned from them.

As I drove to the rehab center, I started to feel better about myself. I was going to be able to move on from this.

Especially as I knew about Jack Beaufort and his family. His father had built a huge empire of resorts that extended all over the country and also overseas. It was wealth that had been accrued over hundreds of years and much of it was wrapped up in tales of murder and stolen land. Many fingers had been pointed towards the Beaufort family over the years.

But Jack Beaufort in particular, was a bad one. He had been the last assignment on my list and I was finalizing my plan when someone put a stop to it. I was doing the research on how best to do it, driving around the castle area where he lived. This was where I had the car accident that had almost killed me. It put an end to my career as an assassin but I remembered enough of the brief about him. Jack had been accused of killing the head of a consortium in the Caribbean to weaken the competition and ensure Topaz Resorts could take over the properties they had an eye on. Witnesses had seen his henchmen on the scene where the businessman was murdered and in a court of law, one of the henchmen, who’d later been found dead, confessed that Jack Beaufort had told him to kill the target.

There might have been good vampires but he was not one of them. No matter how much he had sweet-talked me the night before, I had to accept that I had allowed my guard to slip. The only way I could live with this was if I never allowed it to happen again.

I turned off to the Still Waters Rehab Centre near White Mountain and parked outside the log cabin building, gathering Pearl’s gifts from her mother. There were people about, talking in groups and laughing. It was a peaceful place and I had seen Pearl do well here. I went looking for her in her room and was told she was outside with the horses. I walked to the paddocks where Pearl was stroking a beautiful mare.

She smiled when she saw me walking towards her

“Kaya! I didn’t know you were coming!”

She gave me a warm hug, holding on tightly. I felt myself absorb the love of the embrace, felt myself relax for a bit.

“I brought some cookies and a few things from home,” I said, leaning against the wooden post and gazing out over the field.

“Choc chip?” she asked, eyes gleaming. “I’m getting a bit tired of the spinach smoothies here.”

“I can imagine,” I chuckled, thinking of Tina’s bacon.

“Ready to come home?”

She lifted her eyebrows. “I better be, right? Can’t stay here forever…”

Pearl sounded wistful and I knew why. She missed her daughter, of course, but coming back to her old life with all of its temptations was always a challenge. This was her third stint in rehab. She always left with the best intentions not to relapse but at some point, she lost the battle again. She was fighting her own demons and when the stresses of life got too much, she was unable to manage them.

“This time will be different,” I assured her, “You’re looking so much better.”

She was too. She’d picked up weight and her eyes had the old sparkle again that I remembered from before.

She smiled at me. “What’s new in your life, I can tell there is something you’re dying to tell me.”

Of course there was.

I didn’t know where to begin.

“Just spit it out,” she said, punching my arm playfully.

I didn’t know how to tell her.

“Is it a man?” she teased me. “It is, isn’t it!”

“Well, not strictly speaking,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “Not in the living, human sense.”

Her eyes widened. “A vampire!”

There was a reason why I picked Pearl to confide in. She wasn’t easily shocked and had a pretty wild past. She’d run away from home as a teenager, before I had come to stay with her family. She’d wound up in a club where she had done pole dancing for money. Eventually, she’d come home and made up with her parents but every so often she’d disappear, go on benders with men she’d met at the pub downtown. I didn’t approve of her lifestyle but I knew better than to criticize. My own life was no fairy tale and I’d had my share of monsters. We all dealt with life in our way, some of us were better at it than others.

“I shouldn’t have done it. But I was so attracted to him,” I admitted.

“How was it?” Pearl’s eyes sparkled. “I bet you it was fantastic! They can be wild in bed!”

“Well, yeah… but…”

“What?” Pearl wanted to know. “No-one is saying marry the guy, just have some fun! You deserve it!”

I shook my head.

Pearl insisted. “You are so closed up, so guarded, Kaya. You need to trust people. Or vampires. Whatever. You’re too young to act this old.”

“That’s harsh,” I said, a bit stung. “My head is only just feeling back to normal.”

“You’re fine,” said Pearl firmly. “But you got burnt. Shit, I know all about that but I have to try to be a normal human being for Princess, as do you. We depend on you.”

I smiled at that. I had come to depend on them too.

But if I was going to learn to trust others again, I had to start with someone who was less dangerous, less of a risk.

But who?

I didn’t like most of the people I knew, and most men annoyed me with their silly pick-up lines and dumb jokes.

Jack Beaufort was the first man to spark my interest in a long time and he wasn’t even a man.

I didn’t know what that said about me.