Twilight Vendetta (2 page)

She started the boat’s motor and headed for shore, but angled north of where the commotion was happening, and made it far sooner than the speedboats, who’d been much farther out, and were crawling their way back in.

When she was close to shore, she cut the motor and glided into a mass of trees that hung out over the water, their long tendrils dangling in the froth and foam. There, she beached her boat, hitched the portable radio unit over her shoulder by its canvas strap, and put her headset back on again.

“What the hell is going on out there? Damage report, STAT!” The male voice was angry, or maybe afraid.

“Sorry, Commander.” This was not the same voice that had been on the radio before. This was a new one. “We have two men dead, two more injured. The prisoners have been tranquilized and bound.”

“Who told you to take vamp prisoners? Your orders are KOS.”

Kill on sight, Emma thought.

“The prisoners aren’t vampires, sir. They’re Offspring.”

There was a moment of silence, then, “You want to shout that from a megaphone in case anyone missed it? What part of classified do you not comprehend?”

“Sorry sir. We’re within sight now.”

“Get them here. Radio silence until you do. Starting now.”

There wasn’t another sound. Emma watched from the cover of the draping willow’s fronds as the three boats sped toward shore a few hundred yards south of where she was.
Offspring
. What the hell were
offspring
? Apparently, it was something that could be shot with a rifle, appear to be dead, and then come back to life powerfully enough to kill two armed, trained militia.

Quickly, she pulled her headset down around her neck so she would hear anyone approaching, and dragged her boat into a deep pile of brush, making sure it was completely hidden. Then she hurried nearer, composing a cover story in her head as she went. Out walking, heard shots, came to investigate. She lived nearby and was concerned.

Right, and what do I do when they ask to see my license to verify my address?

The goops’ voices came to her now. She was that close. She dropped down on all fours and crept closer still. A copse of brush and a few boulders were all that stood between her and the group of armed men. They were carrying their dead out of the boats now, and she strained her eyes to see in the darkness. A van backed up, taillights providing grim red illumination of the dead men. She wouldn’t have known they were men at all. They looked as if they’d...exploded. Their khaki fatigues were tattered, their faces and heads were blood and gore, and one guy was missing an arm.

The two mangled bodies were handed off to a man who was inside the van, while the wounded men were helped around to a waiting truck.

Then two more goops came, and they were carrying their prisoners.

Kids. They were kids. Teenagers, for God’s sake. The girl hung limply in the arms of her captor, her hands bound in front of her. She had a tangled mane of wet, brown hair, elfin features, a small, lithe frame. She wasn’t pale like a vampire. The boy was long and lanky, with shorter hair but just as wild, just as dark. He had the build of a boy, not yet a man. His shoulders, his arms and legs were still in that too lean, teenage phase.

Offspring
. They didn’t look like anything but a couple of innocent kids to her. And yet, if they had done that to the dead men, they were obviously more than that. A lot more.

Someone’s radio came to life, and she ducked instinctively at the noise, pulling her own headset back into place.

“No sign of the
Anemone
, Commander, sir. She just...vanished.”

“She has a habit of doing that, hasn’t she?”

As the man answered, Emma watched him, still bathed in the glow of vehicle lights. The commander was tall, muscular, with a face like a hound dog and the paintbrush lashes of a little child. She wouldn’t forget that face.

“Let’s call it a night,” he said. “Report to me for debrief as soon as you arrive.”

Arrive where?
Emma wondered, willing them to say.

“Yes, sir!”

The commander clipped his radio to his belt. He put one hand on the van’s open doors, and stared at the bodies inside. Then, with a disgusted shake of his head, he slammed the doors closed and banged three times on the side.

The van lurched into motion and the commander walked with a pronounced limp to a nearby truck and got in.

Soon they were all gone. And she sat there amid the boulders. The waves rushed in, tripping over each other all the way up the sandy shore, then hissing and bubbling back out again. The stars twinkled above. Not a cloud in the sky. It was like paradise. Like she hadn’t just seen the horrors she had.

She could almost have closed her eyes, gone to sleep, and then told herself it had all been just a bad dream come morning.

But Emma knew of worse things, things her father hadn’t told her until she was much older. Her mother used to spend her days in a building purchased by a group of vampires for that purpose. It was supposed to be their haven. Diana knew there was danger, even then, before most humans were aware that vampires existed outside of fiction. She wouldn’t spend her days in her home, because she had believed that doing so would put her family at risk. That warehouse had been burned to the ground by some hateful idiot who had known, and who had probably had believed a group of vampires to be asleep and helpless inside.

And maybe they’d been right. Maybe her mother died that day.

No, she did not.

By the time Oliver had gone to search for his bride, alarmed when she didn’t arrive for their usual family dinner just after sunset, all he’d found was a pile of smoldering rubble and ash. When vampires burned, they burned completely. She might have been in there. Or she might not.

Emma wondered now, whether the bastards she’d just witnessed shooting, drugging and abducting two kids were the same ones who had taken her mother from her. Men who feared and therefore destroyed anything they didn’t understand.

Emma had wanted to walk with vampires for reasons of her own. To live among them, to ask them directly for information on her mother, and to learn the truth about their lives in their own words, instead of sifting bits of truth from the mountains of bull written about them over the centuries. She would blog the experience at
www.ERFU.org
, and eventually write a book about it, telling the world the real story, because the world currently had it all wrong. Vampires and humans had been embroiled in an undeclared war ever since the existence of the Undead had become public knowledge.

Those were her reasons for searching for them tonight, for coming to this place where the
Anemone
had been sighted. Those reasons and one more. To warn them that the government knew where they were, if she could. But now, finding the vampires was more important than ever. She had to let them know that DPI goops had taken those two kids prisoner. They must have been together aboard that ship. They must have jumped overboard at the same time. She’d seen that torpedo-like wake speeding away from the scene of the attempted execution before the teens had revived. The vampires might not even know the kids were still alive. She had to find them and she had to tell them, no matter the risk. To do otherwise would feel immoral to Emma. It would feel like a betrayal of her mother.

She knew of only one way to make contact and hoped there was enough of the night left to make it happen.

So she stashed the radio and headset where she thought she would be able to find them again, away from the reach of the tides, and concealed under rocks and ferns. She was going to get wet–very wet–and she didn’t want to destroy her father’s equipment unnecessarily. She wrapped her cell phone in one of the plastic zipper bags she’d brought along, made sure of a tight seal, and shoved it into her jeans’ pocket. Then she walked back to her little boat, pushed it into the surf, and climbed inside, starting the motor and heading north, the same way that torpedo path had been going. She didn’t know how far away the vampires would be. She couldn’t begin to compete with their speed, even with a small outboard motor.

But she also knew they would come to her if she was in trouble. They had before. One vampire in particular had. Twice in her lifetime. She didn’t think they had a choice about it. She was BD positive, one of The Chosen, just as her mother had been before her. She had the rare Belladonna Antigen in her blood. Only The Chosen could become vampires, and every vampire had been one of The Chosen before the change. Vampires sensed these rare humans, and were compelled to watch over them, to protect them, to help them when they got into trouble. So to make contact with the vampires, Emma had to get herself into trouble.
Real
trouble. Life-threatening trouble. And if they were close enough, they would come.

And if they weren’t....

If they weren’t, she hoped her swimming muscles hadn’t gone to hell since her last triathlon, because she was going to need every one of them.

D
evlin slogged through the shallows and onto the shore of Regina Island, a fifteen square mile bit of land off the Oregon coast that had been fifty a few hundred years ago. It would be entirely submerged within a few hundred more, which was why it was no longer deemed worthy of mortal attention.

Their kind didn’t care about anything they couldn’t profit from. Oh, there were exceptions, but they were few. There had been handful of humans with him and the other vampires onboard the
Anemone
. Three of the four had seemed decent and trustworthy. He thought the worldwide average was far lower.

As he made his way up onto the island, water dripping from his soaking wet clothes, the three remaining members of his little vampire gang came running out to meet him, all asking questions at once.

“Where are Wolf and Sheena?”

“Did you find them?”

He held up a hand for silence and turned to look, and more importantly, to
feel
the energies around him as he shucked the backpack he’d been hauling since jumping ship. The sea wind moaned soft over the waves that lapped eagerly at the island’s shore. It smelled of seaweed and fish, and the air was salt-flavored. But there was no one around. He sensed no other presence near enough to be a threat.

Then he nodded, faced his small band with the grim news he knew he had to tell. There was no easy way to break it to them. “Wolf and Sheena are dead. Unlike us, they have to breathe air. When they surfaced, they were shot on sight.”

“No!” Tavia, who’d joined up with them in Romania where they’d spent the past months in hiding, clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the cry that seemed wrung from her.

Bellamy, the ginger cherub, dropped to his knees, his head down, choking on tears. Andrew pushed a hand through his blond hair, but held Devlin’s eyes.

“Dose bastards. Dey were just kids,” Tavia said. Her accent was always thicker when she was upset.

“Why did they come after us?” Bellamy whispered. “Why would they jump off the ship and try to follow us like that?”

“We’ll never know,” Devlin said. “We can’t even be sure their intent wasn’t to kill us.”

“No.” Tavia snapped her head up, flipping back her jet black, dripping wet hair as she did. “I do not belief it.”

She would argue with him if he said it was a full moon and she was standing beneath it, Devlin thought. She was like the kid sister he’d never had. His affection for her was real, and deep, but absolutely platonic. Devlin had no intention of any relationship ever being otherwise. Not that Tavia had ever shown that kind of interest in him.

“Remember, Tavia, the entire seventeen years they’ve been alive, that’s what they’ve been trained to do. They’ve been taught to hate us, and they were bred to kill us. We’ve only been with them a couple of weeks. Maybe not long enough to override all those years of programming.”

“He’s right,” Andrew said. “They were the eldest of the Offspring, the first batch DPI developed. Even with all the effort onboard that ship, they barely spoke to us. Not like the younger ones did.”

“But they were always watching us,” Devlin said. “Skulking around that ship like a pair of disembodied spirits, watching us and whispering to each other about God only knows what. We can’t know what they intended when they followed us into the ocean.”

“Dey were seventeen, Devlin. Dey wanted to get off de ship. To see de world beyond de ocean.” Tavia shook her head sadly. “Who can blame dem?”

He bit back further arguments. It wouldn’t do any good. “Like I said, we’ll never know.” When he lifted his gaze again, he looked past the three of them at the expanse of the island beyond. There was an abandoned lighthouse on this end facing out to sea, still standing tall, but in need of repair. There was a sandy beach, and there were woods. “We need to move inland. They’ll be searching the shorelines, possibly even the island if they recall its existence or spot it by chance. We need to know this island better than they do before that happens.”

Andrew took Bellamy’s arm and tugged him back up to his feet. “The lighthouse is in pretty good shape, but there’s not a basement or anything.”