Eden Hunter - The Complete Trilogy Page 2

  The knife had all the stopping power of a flyswatter against a full-grown alpha werewolf.

  Saliva dangled from his bared fangs. No trace of the man remained—only beast.

  Out of options, I pulled out the final proverbial rabbit remaining in my hat: the light show, as I liked to call it. The lantern sigil on my right wrist glowed as I called upon the only spell in my arsenal.

  “Last chance, asshole.” Light streamed from my wrist, forming a manic ball of fury around my fingers. The colors jumped from an apocalyptic orange to the greenish-blue of a mid-Pacific storm, then back again.

  I held the glowing ball of energy, expecting him to recoil in fear. But he didn’t move, despite being only twelve paces away.

  Instead, he laughed.

  The bastard knew it was all a trick—like a venomless snake adopting the markings of its far deadlier brethren. The light show made me look like a powerful sorceress, but it didn’t give me real fangs.

  The gambit almost always worked, though, because few knew about my sigil.

  In fact, no one knew—outside of my current employer and the ink master who had done the work four years ago.

  A tingle rushed over my skin like an electrical charge. Early termination. Points to the wolf for making a clever, double-edged pun: my employer was giving me the axe in literal fashion. So I had the who responsible.

  But I still lacked a why: why would Aldric try to kill his only Reaper?

  I’d been hitting deadlines by the skin of my teeth, but I was still delivering five souls a week.

  Just as agreed.

  I’d be sure to find out what the hell was going on, assuming I survived the next two minutes.

  I wasn’t much of a fighter, nor had I ever been, even in the past—you know, in those halcyon days when holding a weapon didn’t result in a horrible, festering blister burn only a talented apothecarial sorceress could heal.

  Fortunately, however, I also had a backup plan to Plans A and B.

  With a spine-tingling yell, I unleashed the Molotov of useless light at the wolf’s scarred face. He roared, shielding his blood-red eyes from the glowing ball as it zoomed past.

  I dropped to one knee, planting the Reaper’s Switch blade-up in the dark sand three steps away.

  The temporarily blinded wolf charged.

  A second later, his full weight came down—straight through my knife.

  Due to the light, his usually keen eyes had been unable to spot the blade in the dark sand.

  He unleashed a spine-cracking howl.

  Twelve feet away. One-yard gait.

  Simple math—like the odds in blackjack.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t factored inertia into the equation.

  His momentum carried his thick body straight into my legs, and we crashed into the frothing low tide.

  The wolf whimpered as he clawed at me. I dodged the half-speed blows and rolled further into the pleasantly cool water. Heart pounding like an unhinged freight train, I slowly rose and limped back to the wolf, who was pawing at the blade. The point glistened with blood, sticking out from the top of his foot like a flagpole claiming a summit.

  It had gone straight through the bottom.

  Not bad for a backup plan.

  “Silver and obsidian studded,” I said. “Cuts through anything. But Aldric probably mentioned that.”

  I pressed my wet sneaker against his wounded leg.

  The assassin’s eyes flashed a deep, feral red. He swiped again, but his reflexes were dulled by the silver. I avoided the wolf’s punch-drunk slashes as I reclaimed my Reaper’s Switch from his ruined foot. Blood streamed across the dark sand when I removed the knife.

  “Tell Aldric he’s made his point.” I wagged the blade at the alpha’s sharp snout in warning.

  I still wasn’t sure what point that was, exactly. But I was hoping the wolf would get the message and dutifully relay it to our mutual employer. I wasn’t a killer—and besides, I couldn’t kill him even if I had wanted to.

  Yet another rule courtesy of the rain goddess who had also barred me from properly arming myself. This entire goddamn island was overrun by annoying red tape, contracts, and rules.

  But I’d signed the contracts and made the agreements.

  Unfortunately, my new acquaintance didn’t care.

  And he was a fast son of a bitch without the silver in him.

  I was pinned to the shore before I could tell him to give up again. The Reaper’s Switch tumbled into the foaming tide.

  My elbows scraped over broken shells.

  Slobbery strands dripped from the wolf’s sharp snout as he snapped at my face.

  I bobbed left and he came up with a mouthful of sand. Taking the opening, I bashed my wrist into his nose. His lips curled in a manic snarl—more annoyed than hurt.

  His soul called to me, bloodlust consuming every aspect of his being. I’d learned how to read people when I was a teenager, but glimpsing into the soul was like seeing someone’s poker hand.

  And right now, I was seeing an intense desire for him to wear me as a hat.

  My fingers blindly searched for the blade.

  My pulse thumped out a staccato, off-kilter rhythm.

  The wolf stared at my jugular with those blood-red eyes.

  I snared the wet Reaper’s Switch between my index and middle fingers just as he reared back again. This time, however, he aimed lower.

  The fangs sliced through my shoulder.

  I yelped. His jaw tightened, driving his teeth deeper.

  But I clung to the Reaper’s Switch like a life preserver in a roiling sea.

  Then I plunged the glittering, blood-soaked blade right into his sinewy neck, shitty employers, goddesses, and unbreakable agreements be damned.

  His jaw released from my shoulder like I’d smashed a button. I yanked the Reaper’s Switch out from the mountain of dense fur and stabbed his neck again.

  And again, one last time.

  Then I pushed with all my strength, squirming from beneath the hairy body. My adversary rasped out a convulsing breath and then went still, snout down in the dark, damp sand.

  My shoulder throbbed from the bite. Nothing moved in the still night.

  Everything was about to change.

  And not for the better.

  3

  I stared at the alpha wolf’s body, half hoping he would start moving again.

  No such luck.

  He was indeed very dead.

  Breaking the no-kill rule would have serious consequences. You didn’t screw with the gods. Lucille would reclaim my sister’s life—or worse—for breaking our agreement. So, as the water lapped against my stiff, tired body, I figured there was only one way to avoid paying for my sins.

  Bury them.

  I’d been a con artist once. A master of the grift. And I’d have to conjure up all my dormant skills to make this illusion stick.

  To think, twenty minutes before, I’d been concerned about my soul quota.

  Now, that seemed as menial as any other nine-to-five deadline.

  My forearms quivered as I dragged the furry body into the ocean. The water lapped over my aching feet, soaking my sneakers as I worked. My fingers lingered on the corpse, which bobbed in the gentle surf. Finally, I took out my Reaper’s Switch and slid the blade in right above his heart, where every being’s soul resided.

  The wolf’s soul looked exactly like it had tasted: like the remnants of a terrible fire. I cradled the tiny chunk of matter in my palm, no larger than a pack of gum.

  That made one.

  Another week in paradise, another quota to fulfill.

  But I had a feeling this week was going to be just a little different.

  Because, for one thing, it looked like I no longer had a job.

  I waded back to shore, my jeans clinging to my thighs like crackly cellophane. A light wind picked up from the horizon, chilling my damp skin.

  Far up the beach, thunder clapped in the cloudless night. Maybe I was already screwed
. Deities had a way of knowing things before anyone else. I couldn’t keep a secret this big tucked away from a rain goddess for long.

  Bang.

  An uneasy shiver racked my wet body.

  That wasn’t thunder.

  That was gunfire.

  And it was coming from the direction of my villa. Right next to it, in fact.

  Another muzzle flash lit up the horizon, and then another.

  Which is when I heard a different noise.

  A scream—the kind of scream I’d have made as I was being chased if I’d had any breath to spare.

  Fear chilled my spine as the shots cascaded into the starry blackness. Aldric wasn’t done hunting me.

  My last remaining adrenaline reserves kicked in, and I sprinted toward the service road as the shooter emptied their gun into the otherwise silent night.

  4

  I ran through all the possible next moves as the wind streamed through my hair. The import bike’s 4-stroke engine growled as the speedometer raced past sixty. I leaned into a sharp turn, the road almost touching my soaked jeans. What had started as a sleepless night had quickly turned into a literal existential crisis. As in, if things progressed down the rabbit hole further, it wouldn’t be long before I ceased to exist.

  If I’d just been handed my pink slip, I’d have been thrilled. I liked harvesting souls for Aldric about as much as I liked poking needles through my eyes.

  But Aldric had tried to kill me instead.

  And then he’d sent backup to finish the job.

  Worst part was, I couldn’t just quit. We had a soul-binding agreement. And I’d held up my end of the deal every week for the last four years, hating each minute.

  Ultimately, every choice ran to one inevitable end: heading into the city to face him.

  Maybe my judgement was clouded by the werewolf’s bite—or maybe I was just pissed enough at Aldric to confront him.

  Regardless of motive, it was an insane plan. No plan at all, really, unless my goal was to die. I’d survived my clash with the werewolf assassin, but that was blind luck—like hitting on twenty in blackjack and being gifted an ace.

  Going toe-to-toe with a 2,400-year-old vampire? That wouldn’t end well.

  But I couldn’t return home, since my villa had suddenly become murder central. There was no place I could hide on Atheas if he wanted me dead. Aldric had discovered the island back in 552 A.D., which meant he owned it, ran it, and ruled it with an iron fist. And seeing as how my indentured contract lasted another three years—during which time I couldn’t leave the island’s borders—going on the lam elsewhere wasn’t viable.

  Fleeing wouldn’t have been an option anyway. Aldric had infinite time and resources to extract his pound of flesh. A vampire warlord who had helped Alaric the Visigoth sack Rome—and adopted a variant of his former master’s name in tribute—wasn’t someone you ran from.

  So, maybe I wasn’t crazy.

  Maybe I was thinking straight.

  One thing bothered me as the city lights approached: I still couldn’t understand why I was being terminated. I was his only Reaper. We were rare, and we sure as hell weren’t free. He’d paid a hefty price in souls and favors to have me revived me from the Elysian Fields, minted as a harvester of souls, and then finally returned to the land of the living.

  None of it added up.

  I eased off the throttle, allowing the bike to coast down a short hill as Black Sea Holdings’ headquarters came into view. You couldn’t miss it if you ventured into the city. It was a bland, corporate-looking structure, the kind all illegitimate crime lords dream of owning one day to launder their money and sponsor youth softball leagues. The glass and steel skyscraper stretched about thirty stories into the starry night. Barely noticeable in a place like Chicago, but here it dominated the skyline. All the lights were out, except for the massive penthouse office, which took up a third of the building’s height. It glowed like a beacon, urging me closer. Or maybe it was a warning flare, screaming at me to run like hell.

  Either way, I’d made up my mind.

  I’d just have to live—or die—with the consequences.

  I killed the bike’s engine and left it parked in the executive lot. My soaked sneakers squished on the smooth asphalt as I headed toward the immaculate sandstone sidewalk. I passed the logo-emblazoned stone sign sitting next to a flower bed. The clean logo was so nondescript—not even an image to go with the text—that it was impossible to tell what Black Sea Holdings did. Which was the point.

  Were they a shipping magnate?

  A law firm?

  Some sort of import-export operation?

  Even looking at their balance sheet wouldn’t have told you a damn thing.

  After all, there wasn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system with a “souls harvested” column. Not that my small role in the organization was what kept it from being fully transparent—I was merely a tiny, scythe-carrying cog in a sordid supernatural machine.

  The automatic glass doors slid open when I punched in my access code. Good to know I still worked here—or maybe Aldric hadn’t expected me to ever return. No need to waste time disabling a soon-to-be deprecated code.

  I dragged my aching body inside, footsteps echoing across the unlit, sparsely furnished lobby. My right shoulder throbbed from the werewolf bite. The wound was already seeping brackish slime through the torn black fabric. Foul fluid dripped all the way down to the crook of my elbow.

  I’d have to get the wound examined, and soon. Leave a werewolf bite go untreated for too long and the results got ugly. Well, it was already ugly, but I meant wake up without make-up after raiding the Jim Beam distillery level ugly. As I headed toward the glittering elevators, I made a mental note to visit Jack’s Apothecary Shack before amputation became a necessity.

  I called the penthouse elevator. It promptly dinged, inviting me in. A little voice—the one of reason, perhaps—whispered that I could still turn around, that everything could be forgotten.

  But then I thought about the gunshots near the villa, and that horrible scream, and I stepped inside, knowing that, if I didn’t face Aldric now, that would be me.

  Sooner, rather than later.

  Better to die bravely than live in fear, right? I’m sure some smart person wrote that down in a book for posterity, but as the elevator doors opened, I wanted to reach through time, shake them, and scream that they were full of shit.

  I stepped into a dimly lit hallway where everything gleamed. This was where the vampire worked, slept, and fed. The dueling scents of bleach and ammonia hung in the midnight quiet. My sneakers left behind little pools of water as I walked across the polished black granite, the soggy soles emitting squeaking echoes with each step in the cathedral-like hall. The ceiling stretched a hundred feet in the air, money being no object when intimidation was the name of the game. Much to my eternal chagrin, my knees wobbled as I braved the gauntlet. There was only one set of doors at the end of the hall, but Aldric made you sweat it out for a good two hundred feet.

  Two massive doors, crafted from petrified oak trees imported from the Eurasian Steppes, were embedded within a wall resembling a sheer, smooth cliff face. Black granite soared into a ceiling of glass that segued seamlessly into the starry night. A chestnut leather sofa, probably costing more than my villa, sat outside the office doors, matched with a conservative but elegant glass table. There was a single book on the table—Aldric’s favorite, impossible to forget—a first edition, ready for visitors to read.

  Despite being a classic, it had already made my never-in-an-infinite-lifetime reading list. Which, when you dealt with magical creatures, was a real possibility. The immortality thing—not reading The Lord of the Flies. Leave it to ancient vampires to shit all over the good classics. Why couldn’t he have picked the kind of crap that had made me drop out of high school, like The Scarlet Letter? Not even the try-hard study bees enjoyed that Puritan mess.

  I dug my Reaper’s Switch out and tightened my fingers around the
broken handle. A futile gesture if there ever was one, but it made me feel like I had a little chance—like when you buy a Powerball ticket and start dreaming of all the yachts you’re about to buy. Never gonna happen, but hope is a powerful drug.

  Slightly emboldened, I banged against the solid doors. No answer came, so I waited, feeling smaller and more inconsequential by the second. My pulse thumped in my ears, and the little voice in my head returned to whisper run, run, run.

  But I’d already crossed the Rubicon.

  A voice came from the office, its icy edge well-cultivated from years of pillaging.

  “Come in, Eden Hunter.”

  It’s said that people can’t get enough of hearing their own name. But that was the second time that night when hearing it had been a markedly unpleasant experience. The solid door opened on its own, controlled by an invisible mechanism. I slipped inside, finding myself in the same room I’d visited almost every Friday for the past four years.

  As always, Aldric’s office was utilitarian and spartan. Behind the desk, I could see his close-cropped black hair and the hint of a well-maintained beard. He’d been turned as a young man, so his appearance offered no hint of his true age—other than the titanic, room-enveloping presence of his long-lived soul. The effect was so overwhelming that I suspected everyone could sense it, even if they didn’t know exactly how to describe it. They might refer to it as an aura, or some brand of talismanic charisma.

  The vampire warlord often had his soul obscured by cloaking wards. Which suggested that he’d been expecting me, and was trying to drive home a point.

  He didn’t turn to greet me, but I could feel his hawkish green eyes studying my reflection in the immaculate window pane. I could also see my face wrought with fear, lips trembling, legs about to collapse in a damp heap. Guess I wasn’t ready to die again. Maybe I should’ve listened to that little whisper.

  Oh, well. Too damn late now.

  “If it isn’t my favorite Reaper.”