Blood Hunt (62 page)

The motion spins her to the right, which allows her to note that the third and final vampire has decided – laughably late – that his best option is to stand and fight. He is charging her, but he is so slow. She almost takes a moment to smile at this comical attempt, but there is work to be done, so instead she drops to her knees. The outstretched arms pass harmlessly above her head, and she catches him in mid-stride, driving the left blade up and into the vampire’s crotch, burying all eighteen inches of it in a near-vertical thrust.

The force of this attack combines with the vampire’s momentum and causes him to flip forward. She takes the opportunity to drive the other blade into his skull and end his miserable existence. The body thuds to the ground as she stands.

It has been only moments, but all three vampires are dead. She waits in the center of the room, soaked in blood, eyes closed. She is not even breathing hard, has not worked up a sweat. Her heart is barely beating any faster than it was before the killing started. The only thing that has changed is her hate; it has gone to where it goes to grow again, and she has been left hollow, shaking with relief and the pure joy of killing.

Eyes still closed, she allows herself a small smile.

“Good,” her master says. “That’s very good.”

* * *

To Be Concluded in Book 3: The Children of the Sun

Keep Reading for a Sneak Preview!

Author’s Note

I started writing this book with the same words on which it still opens, “Tori Perrault shifted position,” and since then many things have changed, but those have stayed the same.

That was sometime in the summer of 2004, and Blood Hunt’s predecessor, The Blood That Bonds, was just a manuscript that had been through a couple of drafts and a copy-edit, and had been read by perhaps a dozen people scattered across the country. I would end up working on the first draft of Blood Hunt – a much longer and more ambitious book – for two years, off and on, before leaving it aside, still waiting for an ending, in late 2006. Both books sat on my hard drive untouched for another two and a half years.

When I published The Blood That Bonds as a free eBook in October of 2009, I was hoping to do a thousand downloads. That, I told myself, would definitely be something to consider a success. When I hit that milestone, a couple of months in, my wife and I went out to dinner and celebrated with champagne. No bullshit.

It’s been almost two years since then, and The Blood That Bonds has been downloaded more than 150,000 times that I can be sure of (there are many distributors who don’t provide me with any numbers). That’s astonishing! It’s astonishing, and gratifying, and exciting, especially when you consider how well-reviewed the book is on its various websites. People seem to enjoy my writing, and they like this girl, Two, that I’ve introduced to them.

They wanted more of her story, and they were quite vocal about that fact. I realized it was time to get off my ass and finish Blood Hunt.

Well, then. Here we are. Three drafts and two copy-edits later, and I’m sitting in my office just a little more than a month from the book’s scheduled release date, typing this note into the document that will eventually become the official eBook. By the time you read these words, you will have downloaded Blood Hunt and (hopefully) read it to the end. You’ll know all about Naomi and Stephen, Ashayt, Theroen …

But me? I have no idea how this book is going to do. The Blood That Bonds was free. Blood Hunt is not. The Blood That Bonds was short. Blood Hunt is not. The Blood That Bonds was basically a love story that ended unfortunately. Blood Hunt is … something else. Will people like it? Will they demand the third volume as they demanded this one? I don’t know. I hope so, but all I can do is put it out there and then wait.

Thank you for downloading this book. If you paid for it, thank you even more. If you didn’t, well, I hope at least if you’ve read this far, you liked it enough to consider buying a copy, or a copy of the final installment.

The Children of the Sun is already in progress. I haven’t finished the first draft yet, but I know much of what’s in store for Two and her friends. Not everything … these books have a habit of writing themselves, and “little” things like Theroen dying were unplanned. It just happened. I don’t know who will survive to the end of the final book, or what shape they’ll be in.

All I know for sure is: The Children are coming, and when they arrive, things are going to get ugly. I’m excited to find out how it ends.

Hope you are too!

-Christopher Buecheler

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About the Author

Christopher Buecheler is a professional web designer / developer, a published author, an award-winning amateur mixologist, a brewer of beer, a player of the guitar and drums, and an NBA enthusiast.

He lives a semi-nomadic existence with his wonderful French wife and their two cats, Carbomb and Baron Salvatore H. Lynx II. Currently they reside in Providence, Rhode Island.

You can visit him at
http://www.cwbuecheler.com

The Children of the Sun
Sneak Peak

The man’s name was Matthias Vanden. He was an Eresh vampire, more than six hundred years old, and he had come to America for a few years at the request of his two fledglings, both of whom had visited the country often and thought he would enjoy it. Thus far they had been right. The three of them were staying in a luxurious apartment that took up the entire top floor of its building and offered views of Lake Michigan, the Sears Tower, and several other Chicago landmarks. They had been in the city for six months and had not yet tired of it. When and if they did, he thought, perhaps they would try Los Angeles or New York.

The two younger vampires, both Dutch, both in the middle of their second century, were in the living room now, entertaining two women and a man. The humans had become frequent guests, happy to provide their blood to the vampires in exchange for the ecstasies that came with being bitten. Matthias wasn’t worried by this; at the end, the humans would remember little of their time with the vampires except that it had been extremely enjoyable.

He sighed, filled with the pleasurable melancholy that came with reminiscence. He no longer needed the blood in such volumes, no longer yearned for it with the passion of an insatiable lover. The centuries had left him able to subsist for weeks on but a few drops, and he rarely interacted with humans. Still, though, he could recall how it had been, the blood pouring forth in hot torrents as he drank and drank, fighting against the swoon that had threatened always to envelope him. He envied his young fledglings this experience, even while he appreciated his freedom from the need to drink every night.

He was reclining now on the gigantic bed in the apartment’s master bedroom, watching the television with the volume turned off and the closed captioning on, aware of but not really listening to the music from the other room. He and his fledglings had spent the early evening walking along Navy Pier, enjoying the throngs of people around them. Then there had been the bar. A curious place in a mostly commercial downtown area, it had specialized in martinis and played lesbian pornography on its many screens. Matthias could remember a time, not so very long ago, when the bar would have been burnt to the ground for such heresies. He had found it deliciously scandalous, and his fledglings, more comfortable in this modern age, had in turn found his reaction highly amusing.

Matthias leaned back on the bed, grinning, remembering their laughter. He looked up through the skylights, where he could see a thin crescent of moon and a few bright stars. He could also see the lights of a nearby office building and a flashing red beacon that he thought was meant to warn airplanes and helicopters of a radio tower. He could see something else, too, something that he did not immediately recognize. It seemed to be getting closer, however, and in a moment more Matthias realized that he was looking at a human form, plummeting down from a great height and angled directly at the glass windows above him.

Matthias leapt from his bed as the body fell through the skylight, and even as he was thinking that this must be some sort of suicide attempt, he realized that the body was not crashing to the floor in a jumble but rather landing on its feet, absorbing the impact with its knees, and springing forward. He saw long blonde hair streaming out behind it and there was a bright flash of metal. Matthias heard a woman’s snarling cry as the figure grabbed him by the neck and threw him up against the wall, pressing the tip of a blade to the soft spot below his chin.

“Move an inch and I will cut your head from your body,” the woman told him, and Matthias looked at her in surprised awe. He knew few people who could have performed that landing and the follow-up leap forward, and all of those were vampires. This woman was not a vampire, though he did not know if she was exactly human, either. She was certainly a trained professional of some sort, dressed head to toe in black combat gear.

How very remarkable,
he thought to himself, but he said nothing, afraid that if he moved then the blade she held to his throat would pierce into him and let his blood out all over the exquisite Oriental rug upon which he stood.

There were crashing noises now from the living room and a woman’s screaming that was cut short by a loud thud. Someone – Matthias thought it was the human male – voiced a protest at this, but his cry was choked off midway through. In another few moments, there was a knock at the door.

“Enter,” said the woman who was holding him against the wall, and Matthias watched with a kind of horrified curiosity as the door opened and a young, dark-skinned woman stepped in. She too was clothed in black. Rather than blades, she carried in her hand a silenced pistol and at her side, hanging like fruit, were two oblong, textured objects that Matthias thought were hand grenades.

“We’ve got the other two bats contained, and the humans have learned to shut up and mind their manners,” the black girl said, and the blonde nodded.

“Good.”

“You want us to bring them in here?”

“No. I’ll take him out. Go make sure they don’t get any stupid ideas.”

The black girl turned on her heel without another word and strode back into the living room. The blonde turned to Matthias, and he saw that her eyes were a clear and brilliant blue.

“We’re going to walk into the living room,” she told him. “You first, me behind you. If you try to run, or attack, or do anything else that upsets me, I will put this blade right between your shoulders. It will come out just above your collarbone, it will leave you alive, and it will be excruciatingly painful, especially when I start twisting it. Are we clear on this?”

“Yes,” Matthias said, still mindful of the metal point pressed into the flesh under his chin.

“You’re an old Eresh, so you must be fairly fast. Do I need to tell you that I’m faster?”

“No.” Matthias had seen her move after she came crashing through the skylight. He knew very well how fast she was.

“Good,” the woman said. She took the blade away from his skin and held it unsheathed at her side. “Go.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Matthias asked her.

“If you don’t start walking, yes. If you do exactly what you’re told and stop asking stupid questions, you might get through this.”

“Please,” he said. “I don’t … kill me if you must, but leave my children. They’ve hurt no one.”

The woman gave him a disgusted, mocking laugh, and she pointed toward the bedroom door. “Get moving.”

Matthias did as he was told, moving slowly and deliberately so that this woman holding him hostage would know that he did not intend to fight. Matthias had never been much for fighting; that sort of thing was best left to the Ay’Araf. He was Eresh and not a warrior, though he thought he might soon be put in a place where there would be no other alternative.

His fledglings were sitting on the living room’s large sofa, flanked by two black-clothed human men. Adrianus, the younger of the two vampires, looked disgusted and angry. Mikel, older by twenty years and more even-tempered than his brother, seemed to be in control of his emotions. He was looking at one of the human women. She was lying on the floor, a trickle of blood running from her nose to the carpet. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her bare breasts were not rising and falling in the way that they should have been – they were still, and Matthias knew she was dead.

The other two humans were each being held with their hands behind their backs by a member of whatever strike force this might be. Both were still fully clothed, though the man’s shirt was unbuttoned. He had a black eye and livid red marks around his neck, just below the edges of his long, dark hair. The girl next to him, a tall woman with a large mass of tightly curled red hair pulled back in a ponytail, was weeping quietly but seemed unharmed.

The black girl who had come into the bedroom was standing at the far end of the apartment, looking out at the city. She glanced over her shoulder as they came into the room, watching Matthias’s slow progression forward, and then resumed looking out the window.

“What a lovely scene,” The blonde girl commented from behind him, and Matthias could hear the sarcasm in her voice. He came to a stop in the middle of the room, and she didn’t seem to object to this.

“Girl wouldn’t shut up,” said a tall, burly man with brown, crew-cut hair.