The Vampire Hunter's Daughter The Complete Collection (30 page)

“I am not sorry for what is about to happen,
Chloe,” Trevor shook his head, “since you insist on having it your
way.”

Then he shot at me.

Time seemed suspended. I literally saw the
bullet leave the barrel. I side-stepped in front of Christina and
let the bullet pass. There was no time to think or try to watch
every bullet, but it suddenly occurred to me that I was the only
one he wanted alive, and I knew it was up to me to protect the
others.

“Get behind me,” I ordered them.

“Are you crazy?” Gavin exclaimed. “You’ll
die.”

“No, he wants me alive.” Yeah, so the worst
that could happen was that I would be shot and not die.

Yay.

“Just do it,” Christina yelled out from
behind me. “She’s right.”

Trevor advanced and fired a shot that whizzed
by Gavin’s head. Quickly, Gavin fell behind me, but Drew still
refused. I shook my head. I should have known he would never stand
behind me.

I pushed the fire up and out. The result was
probably beautiful from a distance. Droplets of fire rained down
onto us like the falling tracers on the Fourth of July.

“Get back!” I screamed, meaning both Drew as
well as Trevor.

“I am certain Alice escaped with you.” Trevor
spread his hands. “Tell me where she is.”

He scanned the sides of the road and turned
his attention back to us. No one answered him.

“I will allow you one last chance to come
with me willingly, Chloe. It will spare your friends if you
do.”

“Tell him where to stick it.” Christina
pushed me from behind.

Before I could say anything, we were rushed
by the vampires. I rushed forward too, blowing the fire out like
flame throwers and screaming from a place deep down inside where I
kept the rage of my mother’s death. Drew and Gavin stood on either
side of me. Gunshots filled the air while they shot at Constance
and Vincent. Christina stayed behind me. I wasn’t sure if her
strategy was to stay hidden or if something else was going on, but
it was okay. She was safe behind me.

That's when I felt it: the burning, ripping
flesh when a bullet tore into my calf.

“Oh, my god!” I screamed in pain and fell to
the ground.

My flames extinguished, and I lay there in
pain. It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. “I’ve been shot!
He shot me!” I screamed.

Behind me, Christina shot back at him while I
desperately reached for my gun. I knew I could hit him in the
heart. I never missed.

“Gavin’s hit!” I heard Drew yell.

“Damn it!” Christina hollered. “I’m out of
ammo.”

Finally, my hands wrapped around the handle
of the gun in my waistband. God, my leg hurt. I aimed at Trevor,
ready to take the shot, but before I could pull the trigger, a loud
blast rocked the air, sounding above all the other gunshots, and
Trevor crumpled to the ground.

Suddenly, the atmosphere was static. Silence
interrupted the chaos, and every single person looked to see where
the shot had come from. There, behind the open door of the Jeep,
stood Alice with a shotgun still smoking in her hands. Her blank
blue eyes were wide with shock and fear. Her face was pale beneath
the dirt from the woods and Oscar’s blood. We watched as her
fingers released the shotgun, and it fell to the ground with an
anticlimactic clank. Tears slid from her eyes.

UV shotgun shells.

Everyone’s eyes were glued, unbelieving, on
Trevor’s body as it convulsed and a white light attempted to eat at
his body, but his aged vampire blood repelled it. I’m pretty sure,
had it been one of our bullets, he wouldn’t even have noticed, but
the shotgun shell held more UV than most ammo.

Vincent was the first to come back from the
pause. In a flash, he had Drew’s throat in his grasp. I shot him in
the head.

Drew, covered in vampire brains and blood,
kicked Vincent’s falling body with his boot.

“Ugh!” he cried out. He kicked and then shot
him twice in the heart. Just to be sure he was dead, Drew reached
back over his shoulder and produced a wooden stake that he rammed
through Vincent’s chest.

White light emanated from the holes in
Vincent as he eroded. The UV wove its way through his body, eating
it away. He must not have been nearly as old as Trevor.

I fell back onto the cement and wondered
where Gavin was shot, having completely forgotten about Constance
until Christina jumped over the top of me and slammed her body into
the hard surface of the female vampire. They both tumbled to the
ground.

I watched, weakly trying to get a bead on
Constance, but Christina kept getting in the way. Constance was
much stronger than Christina, so of course, she pinned her right
away. Christina growled at her like a pit bull. “Get off me, you
nasty whore!”

Instead of using her hands to force Constance
off of her, she reached downward toward her thigh and pulled out a
large, lethal-looking knife and slammed it into Constance’s side,
sliding it right between her ribs. Constance screamed and released
Christina to frantically swipe at the knife lodged in her.
Christina rolled away from the crazy vampire, grabbing her knife on
the way. I finally had a shot at Constance, and I took it, straight
to the heart.

Christina was on her feet already and bolted
toward the last vampire, who fought with Drew. Every time the
vampire made a grab or tried to hit him, Drew deflected it.
Christina took a flying leap at the vampire and landed on his back.
She planted her blade into the side of his body, in almost the same
spot on him where she’d stabbed Constance.

She was good with a knife.

Though my attention was focused on the scene
before me, oh, my god, the pain was awful.

“Drew!” I cried out, then rolled over and
tried to stand. I made it part of the way up but fell back down. I
didn’t even want to look at the wound. There was blood
everywhere.

“Chloe, come on. We have to go.” Christina
stalked over to me.

“I need my gun,” I said between clenched
teeth. “Oscar…”

Everything was fuzzy.

“Who the hell is Oscar?”

“In the woods.” I pointed. “Alice.”

“Oh, there’s another guy in the woods. She
knelt and wiped blood off of her knife using my jeans and then
sheathed it.

“Thanks a lot, you hooker,” I moaned through
the pain. “I need to go to the hospital.”

“Gavin needs to get there more than you,” she
said. “Now get your ass in the Jeep.”

Yeah, there was absolutely no reason why she
would want to help me. Just because we killed vampires together
didn’t mean we had to like each other. It just meant that we hated
someone else more than we hated each other. Even so, she went to
Trevor’s UV-scorched body to retrieve my gun for me.

I stared at Trevor for a moment as Christina
ran over to him and picked up my gun from the ground near his
hands. It was so quiet. His black clothes were stark against his
white skin, and they were scorched where the UV had tried to burn
him away.

Christina stood and held the gun in her left
hand, and then drew a knife from her sheath with her right. She
lifted the large knife high into the air above his heart. She drew
a deep breath, but I called out before she plunged it down.

“Don’t…” I don’t know what I was thinking. We
needed to be sure he was dead, or deader, since he was already
undead.

“Damn it, Chloe!” Her eyes moved back and
forth from Trevor to me, her knife still raised.

“I’m sorry…” I called back. “He was my
father.”

I heard her grumble while she lowered her
knife and slammed it into the sheath. She stomped over to where I
still lay on the ground and threw the gun down onto the pavement
next to me. “You and I are going to talk about this later. We
always make sure.”

I nodded and reached for my gun. When I
looked up at her, I couldn’t look her in the eyes; they were so
accusatory. I was a horrible vampire hunter, and the tears that
slid down my cheeks when I stared at Trevor’s body proved it.

But he was my father. It shouldn't have, but
it did make a difference.

Christina rushed back to the body and grasped
his feet with both hands so she could drag him out of the road
while I twisted around and tried to get up. I didn’t want to look
at her dragging his body, but I did. It's a damned good thing I
did, too.

Trevor’s hand twitched.

“Christina!” I called out. It was too late.
Trevor’s grotesquely burnt arm flew upward so fast he had
Christina’s throat in his grasp before she could move an inch. I
let out a blood-curdling yell while I watched her try to scream, or
even to just breathe..

“Drew, help!” I screamed and fumbled for my
gun. I had it engaged within seconds. I sat up and shot him in the
arm. The shot was enough to force his fingers let go, and after
releasing an animal growl, he curled back his lips and bared his
fangs, hissing at the inconvenience the gunshot wound had
caused.

Drew ran and threw himself on top of Trevor,
trying to pin him with his legs.

“Get the chains out of the Jeep!” he
shouted.

“What do we need chains for?” I called,
forgetting the pain amidst a rush of adrenaline and jumping up to
help him hold Trevor. I sat on his legs to avoid looking at his
monstrous face. That was not the face I’d come to know Trevor by…
it was hideous, inhuman.

“The chains are silver; they can help hold
vampires.”

“What? Like in True Blood! That stuff is
real?”

Just then, Trevor lurched forward, tumbling
us both to the ground. He stood and sped toward me, eyes bulging,
fangs bared. He didn’t even make it a few steps in my direction
before I saw a chain whip by my face and wrap around him.

Shocked, having totally expected to be eaten
by Daddy Dearest, I saw Christina behind him holding tightly onto
the chain. She had swung it lasso style at him and trapped him
beneath the cold silver links.

“What now?” I asked.

Trevor struggled against the chains.

“Free me at once!” he demanded.

Finally, it seemed Trevor, the refined
vampire, was back, displacing the monster he had woken as.

Drew helped Christina hold the chain while I
dropped to the ground and favored my leg. The pain came back, hard
and fast, and I was bleeding everywhere. Drew looked to the sky. I
hadn’t noticed, but it was brightening on the horizon; no sun yet,
though.

“We’re going to tie him to a tree,” Drew
stated.

“What?” I asked.

It was one thing to shoot or kill someone,
but it was an entirely different prospect to watch them slowly char
to death.

Christina let Drew have the chain, strode up
to Trevor, and got in his face. “Yeah," she said to Trevor, "we're
going to make sure you burn.” She drug out the last word, taunting
him.

In response, Trevor snarled, “You must free
me, this instant. If you manage to kill me, I swear an oath that
you will find death at the hands of my avengers.”

Christina flipped her ponytail off her
shoulder. “I’ll look forward to that. Now, let’s move.”

After a moment of discussion about which tree
would be best to use because of the direction of the rising sun,
Drew and Christina dragged Trevor to one of the trees close to the
edge of the road, an exposed and solitary tree that would
experience maximum sunlight when the sun finally rose.

Thank god this road was somewhat unused this
time of year. That would have been all we needed for a car to come
speeding along while I lay in the road bloody and shot, while my
friends chained a guy to a tree. Then I'd have to explain how that
guy was my father. Yeah, that would go over well.

I hadn't even noticed that the goon who had
guarded me back at Trevor's house apparently had disappeared with
the second car. Trevor's promise of his cohorts avenging his death
was likely true. I realized more was at stake here than simply
seeking revenge for my mother's death. The enormity of the
situation weighed heavily on me.

Trevor struggled against them the whole way
and more chains were added over the top to secure him to the tree.
The UV shotgun shell, the UV bullet in his arm, and the flames that
had scorched him had left him weak enough the silver chains were
likely to hold him easily, if I knew anything of my vampire
history, now that I knew it was all true.

For me, exhaustion and severe pain were
setting in. I found myself wondering about Gavin, Alice, and Oscar,
but I didn’t have the energy to get up and go see how they
were.

I fell back onto the cement and stared at the
sky while I listened to Trevor scream at Drew and Christina. The
opening in the tree line above the road was quite wide, and the sun
was rising. As the rays of sunlight drew closer, I closed my eyes.
I didn’t want to watch Trevor tortured. I felt the sun hit me
before it hit him. The warmth soothed my cold skin; it felt good. I
tried to mentally prepared myself for what I knew was about to
happen.

Minutes later, I heard screams from Trevor
while he begged to be released. Those screams turned to painful
wails, wretched, ear-piercing screams that could only have ended in
death. Even though I didn’t think I could bring myself to look,
some part of me knew I had to.

I turned my head and opened my eyes. I saw
Drew and Christina stood far from the writhing, flaming body that
Trevor had become. Through the flames, I could see his dark hair
had been singed off and his skin was melted like wax in some spots
and black and charred in others.

Ugh. I turned my head back the other way. His
suffering went on for only a few more seconds before it was finally
over and the world around us was mostly silent again. My mother's
death had been avenged. Trevor had finally gotten what he had
wanted so badly: to see a sunrise again.

Drew moved by my side, and he spoke softly.
“He’s gone Chloe. It’s time to go. I have to help Gavin now.”