Hunting My Vampire (Immortal Vampire #3)

Chapter 9

Kaya

Princess didn’t like me going away. She tried not to say anything but I saw how she hung her head and stuck out her lip. I felt sorry for the kid but this was something I needed to do. I couldn’t tell her that I’d had this rage all my life, never knowing what to do with it. Becoming an assassin had been the perfect outlet for this anger but it was never enough. Others had commented on it, how I zoned in on targets, how focused I became on total annihilation. I knew no mercy. Each time, I was avenging my family, the deaths of my father, mother and brother.

What if it hadn’t been a vampire?

Jack’s questions had opened a snake pit of questions in my mind. Things I had started wondering about too. My father was no coward and he had been heavily armed. Why attack all of us together?

Princess asked me, “Are you going with him?”

I nodded. I didn’t have to ask who she was referring to.

“He knows someone, a medicine man, from one of the tribes down South. He may be able to help me with some of the things that have happened to me.”

I didn’t want to tell Princess too much. She knew that I didn’t have parents and that I’d been in an accident but she didn’t know the nature of my childhood or about the close shaves I’d had with death. I wasn’t exactly going around sharing those stories with people. However, she did know about the bad dreams I sometimes had at night. She had often come to wake me up, worried about my screaming.

“You should be careful,” Granny Tina warned me when I told her about my plan. “You may not like the answers you are seeking.”

I looked at her. “Well, I sure don’t like having all these questions either. Strange things have been happening all my life to me. Weird dreams that feel like they mean something, but I don’t know what.”

Pearl’s mother shook her head and muttered to herself.

“I see white crows sometimes,” I suddenly said, just to see her reaction. “Do you think that means something?”

Tina sighed and muttered more but wouldn’t say anything else.

“What if you don’t come back?” Princess whined.

“I will come back, I promise,” I said.

I gave her a hug and felt her arms tighten around my back.

I realized that I felt hopeful, that I was looking forward to this trip with anticipation.

Jack came to pick me up at my place soon after dark. He drove us to a private air strip where we took his company plane and flew across the desert to a remote location I had never heard of. I had never seen such luxury as on the plane, it made me uncomfortable. There was a hostess offering me drinks and food, but I kept saying no. I couldn’t think of food at this time. I was feeling nauseous, surrounded by all this wealth and then flying away somewhere strange with someone I didn’t really know.

Jack was watching me intently but said little.

I could tell he was intrigued by the fact that I had been tracking him before, planning on killing him. I bet he was thinking about how I would have confronted him and what would’ve happened then. I had to admit, it felt like too much of a coincidence. There was something between us, but I didn’t yet know what.

At least, he was giving me my space for now.

I was grateful that he wasn’t much of a talker. I’d never been one for small talk.

I wanted to get into the mental framework for what lay ahead. I knew I had some Native American blood in me and I wondered if that would help me, if a part of me would recognize the ritual or ceremony or something. I knew so little about it though.

My mother had been Native American but had left that part of her behind when she married my father. For some reason, he had decided to move the family into the wilderness, where we lived like survivalists. He trapped and poached, and my mother made clothes for us from animal skins. My brother Danny was three years younger than me and I remember loving him dearly.

Then it all came to an end. One night of unimaginable violence, screaming and blood. It was all mixed up in my head, a horrible nightmare of which I had relived parts many times in my life. But as far as I could say anything about that night, it was one attacker and he’d seemed intent on killing all of us. I was found a few days after the attack by the sheriff out looking for suspects in another crime. I was curled up around my little brother, covered in blood. He thought I was dead too, until he saw me moving. He took me back to his home, looked after me and once he saw how wild I was, decided it would be better to keep me away from the town. I ran from people and seemed overly sensitive to noise. A few unfortunate incidents in town had led him to believe I would not fit in easily in society. He was right. Even though I learned to be better, I never liked people much. Eventually I trained as an assassin, a job I was ideally suited for. I had no fear of blood and no problem with inflicting violence. I wouldn’t have admitted to it, but I enjoyed it. I had a lot of fury to vent.

The plane landed in the middle of the night. I had fallen asleep and was a bit disorientated. A car was waiting for us on the tarmac but the driver got out and Jack told me he would be driving. I was relieved that it was just the two of us again. All these extra people waiting on us was odd. Jack punched the co-ordinates into a sat-nav and we drove off into the night.

Anticipation was beginning to build in me. I didn’t know what to expect but this felt right, like what I should be doing in my life. For years, I had told myself that I didn’t need answers, that things had happened to me that were beyond my control and that I should learn to accept it. But things kept happening and I was beginning to think there might be a reason for it.

After about two hours, there was a turn-off into the mountains and the road became rocky. He slowed down to navigate the terrain better.

We didn’t talk much but I was grateful when the car came to a halt.

“Let’s wait for some light,” he said. “So we can see where we’re going.”

This was for my benefit, I realized. He could see well enough in the dark.

I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, he was standing outside the car, talking to an old man wrapped in blankets.

I got out of the car, and he introduced us.

“This is Kaya. Kaya, this is A’rr’a.”

He held out a hand and smiled a toothless grin. I took his hand and was surprised at the firm grip.

“Come, come,” he said, taking us to a small shack at the bottom of the mountain. There was a fire and some rocks to sit on.

I sat down but Jack remained standing.

“I’m going to leave you here with A’rr’a,” he said. “You will be perfectly safe, I assure you. A few days and I’ll be back.”

“But…” I started to protest.

“This is your journey. You must go it alone. Besides, the sun here is too harsh, I need to find some shelter.”

He came up to me to say goodbye and there was an awkward moment where he kissed my cheek, his lips lingering a moment longer than was strictly necessary. There was the wonderful smell of him, of cinnamon, coffee and powdered sugar, and then he was gone.

The old man brought me a tin cup with a bitter kind of tea.

“Drink, drink,” he said, nodding at me with a smile.

I drank it, grimacing all the way.

But oddly enough, I didn’t feel scared. It felt like I belonged here, like I needed to be here.

It was cold outside, and he brought me a blanket.

He came to sit next to me at the fire.

“I’ve been seeing white crows,” I said. “Does that mean anything?”

He nodded.

“Very good sign, very auspicious.” But he didn’t say anything else.

“Take you long time to come here,” he said. It felt like an admonishment.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

He laughed. “You know! You know!” he wagged his finger at me, like I was a naughty child.

“No,” I said softly again, “I didn’t. My head…” I shook my head, unable to put my thoughts into words.

He leaned forward and put one of his hands to the side of my face, just off the top of my head.

“Here,” he said. His hand was hot, it almost felt like he was burning me.

I knew I had a scar there but I couldn’t remember if it was from the night of the accident or the attack in my childhood.

“And here,” he got up and put his other hand over my eyes.

Immediately, I had a sensation of icy cold, like cold water washing through me. It was a very strange feeling.

The old man removed his hands and muttered to himself. It sounded a lot like what Pearl’s mother had been mumbling to herself. Or was I imagining this? Was I hallucinating? Probably.

I felt myself slipping away into darkness, into a kind of dream world. I was vaguely aware of being led to a bed next to the fire. It was made up of blankets and furs and was incredibly soft. It reminded me of the bed that I had slept in as a child. I nestled into it, feeling completely safe and protected.

What came after that was hard to describe later on. Visions or dreams came to me. I was in some of them and, in others, I could see my family. I saw my mother and my father as they had been. I saw my brother as he died. I saw the creature that had attacked us. It looked like a bear but it wasn’t a bear.

I also saw the crows, watching us in the trees.

They were white and their eyes were friendly. They were on my side, yet they did not intervene.

Then there was the accident. I saw myself driving along the intersection where there was another crow sitting on a pole by the side of the road. A dark shape came towards me to push me off the road but a bolt of lightning struck the car, which spun back into the road, hitting a barrier.

This was what I remembered when I woke up. These were the images that filled my head.

I had no idea how long I had been unconscious but there was a sense of it being a long time.

The old man came to check on me.

“You okay?” he asked me, helping me to sit next to the fire again. He brought me some bread to eat and tea to drink.

I told him what I remembered, a jumbled mess of confusing images.

“Now is time for catching fish,” he said, encouraging me. “Soon, will stop. You must catch as many fish as possible.”

He nodded and in the middle of telling a story, he suddenly held up his hand.

“No, not right.”

I was talking about the night my family was attacked. I was trying to describe the attacker.

“This about you,” he said, his eyes suddenly very clear. “Only you, not them.”

His words sort of made sense but I could not quite grasp it.

“And the accident?”

“Not your time,” he said, shaking his head.

“That was… why the crow was there?”

He nodded his head.

“Your work, not done.”

My work? What was he talking about?

She doesn’t seem to get many answers from the old man.

When the sun slipped behind the mountains, Jack appeared and took me home.