Eden Hunter - The Complete Trilogy Read online

“You’re like my third favorite vampire.”

  “Sit.”

  I looked at the chairs like they’d been plucked from a dumpster fire. “I’ll stand if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I should have selected a more pliable individual.” He snapped his fingers, which had no effect on me. I’d seen humans willing to throw themselves off high-rises after such a gesture. Training at Black Sea Holdings was…a little different, let’s say. “One of my few regrets.”

  “I believe the way you described me was a diamond in the rough.” Or something to that effect. My initiation into the supernatural world had been fraught with fear and confusion. Being suddenly revived from the dead will do that.

  “Sometimes diamonds are merely cubic zirconia.” Aldric sighed, his lean muscles tensing beneath his sharp suit. My heart beat faster. If he so chose, he could rip my throat out and feed it to me before I even realized his chair was empty. But he remained seated, albeit in restrained annoyance.

  “Is that why you tried to kill me?”

  He rubbed his bearded chin and ignored my question. “There is no going back, as the people of this country say. There is only forward.”

  “You sure we’re really a part of America?” Not that I needed to be correcting him, but I’d never considered Atheas an American territory. Maybe, after all these years, my mother’s pleas to “be proper” had finally rubbed off. That was almost more horrifying than the thought of my voice box lying in bloody tatters on the teak hardwood.

  “The FBI seems to believe they have jurisdiction in my territory.”

  Under normal circumstances, the FBI’s presence would have rated as interesting news. Given the situation, however, I was focused on more selfish concerns.

  Like whether I was going to walk out of here alive.

  And, if I did, what it was going to cost me.

  Aldric spun around slowly, the chair’s bearings creaking. His eyes reflected the passage of more than two thousand years, and even though I was immune to any of his vampiric tricks, they were still powerful enough to make me almost freeze in place. His entire body was as lean and sharp as a well-tempered blade, down to his high cheekbones and strong chin. It wasn’t the angularity that made him ugly. If I didn’t know better, I would share a whiskey with him. But once the curtain came up, blood dripped from all those sharp edges. Death clung to his skin like his perfectly-tailored custom suit, lurking in each perfectly pressed fold.

  “The FBI, huh?” I managed to say, having nothing clever prepared.

  “But truth be told, I could not care what the American government thinks at all.”

  That was a lie, and a bad one. Their presence ate at him. This was one of the last places on Earth ruled by a single man. An island kingdom with its vampire warlord—a place that, due to weather features and vagaries of science no one understood, was invisible from the air and impossible to find without the assistance of a knowledgeable navigator. Some might call that magic, others a strange quirk of chemistry and physics. But the reality remained the same, either way: no accurate maps to Atheas existed, and in a world smothered by satellites and selfies, it lay uncharted and left to its own devices some hundred miles south of Hawaii.

  But we were getting off track. I stepped toward his desk, and Aldric raised his hand.

  “What happened to your Reaper’s Switch?”

  I glanced at the broken handle, which I still clutched tightly. “You know what happened.”

  “Give it to me.” He held out a smooth hand, the perfect cuff of his collared shirt peeking out from his suit jacket. I hesitated and glared. “Or I can take it from you.”

  “You wouldn’t—” But it was out of my hands before I could finish my sentence. He propped his Italian loafers on his desk as he tossed the blade back and forth.

  “You should treat your gifts better.” He caught the knife with a final flourish and shot me an icy stare. “Otherwise, the gift-giver might get the wrong impression.”

  “Is that why you tried to kill me? Wrong impressions?”

  “Wake-up calls are mere warnings, Eden.” Aldric stroked his beard and kicked an open manila folder toward me with his heel. “Although, I must admit, the odds were not in your favor.”

  “Glad I could surprise you.”

  “You have never failed in that regard.”

  I squinted to examine the files. It looked like it had come from a CIA typewriter circa-1960—no doubt written by one of Moreland’s goons. Like all the best criminal masterminds, Aldric had a network of spies and informants running around the island that could challenge the best intelligence agencies.

  My stomach flopped when I got to the second paragraph.

  That soul shortage keeping me up late at night?

  Turns out I had a little Reaping rival on the island.

  “You said I was the only one.” I bit my lip, recalling some cryptic allusion to competition he’d made last year. At the time, I’d written it off as paranoia.

  “You can see how this development leaves my—is it, they say, hands bound?”

  “Close enough,” I said, not bothering to correct the idiom. “You still get your souls either way. What do you care?”

  “Because.” Aldric’s expensive shoes slid slowly off the desk—far more terrifying a gesture than putting a knife to my throat. “It means that a competitor is operating on my island.”

  Warlords didn’t do competitors. Souls were like gold—a currency valued for both their relative rarity and myriad of uses. Other than a medium of exchange, they could be used to create magical items, grant someone powers—like my lantern sigil—who otherwise had none, or create a host of other useful things. This was why Aldric had gone to such great lengths to acquire a Reaper of his own: I provided steady access to the most valuable commodity in the supernatural world.

  He’d enjoyed a monopoly over that sliver of the island’s supernatural economy. But if someone else had their very own Reaper, that meant his stranglehold on that particular black market revenue stream was in danger of deteriorating. No muy bueno. The massive penthouse office suddenly felt very claustrophobic indeed.

  I’d thought I was the only Reaper on the island.

  But, apparently, I was wrong.

  I finally stepped forward and flipped through the rest of the papers. Things didn’t get better. Judging from the estimated harvesting totals on the other documents, I now also ranked as the second-best Reaper on Atheas.

  Upon reaching the end, I found no photographs or information on my competition, other than the fact that she existed and was good at her job. Even her gender was merely conjecture.

  “Wouldn’t killing your own Reaper strengthen your competition?”

  “And yet, you survived.”

  “Two assassins are pretty tough odds to beat.”

  This got Aldric’s attention. His head cocked sharply, like a predator hearing something it didn’t like. “The wolf was the only one.”

  “Then explain why someone was firing off a six shooter in front of my house,” I said.

  “That individual was not doing my bidding.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  “What you believe changes nothing.” Aldric’s muscles relaxed as he leaned back in his executive chair. “You should be more concerned about how you might improve your professional performance going forward.”

  Ah. The real reason for my attempted early termination.

  Poor performance. Being second best just wouldn’t do.

  And, after all this, it sure sounded like I was going to have to make things up to him. Like it was my fault someone else had gone through the Reaper making song and dance, then set up shop in his backyard. I wasn’t security or enforcement; I just delivered the goods and went home.

  “This is bullshit,” I said in a soft voice.

  “Such is life, Eden.”

  I rubbed my soggy sneaker against the slick hardwood and waited for the words to come—the silver-tongued phrase that would free me from the proverbial noose tightening around my neck. But I could sense, from the way Aldric had chosen to impart his little lesson on performance—and how his green eyes now cut into me from across the heavy desk—that nothing I could say would change his mind.

  So I just said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “That’s simple, Eden.” Here, a normal person might’ve smiled—maliciously, perhaps, to establish their dominance, or with a sneer, to indicate that incompetence wouldn’t be tolerated. But Aldric didn’t need to resort to petty displays of power. His expression remained etched in stone: cold and unfeeling. “Seven souls a week.”

  I swallowed the urge to scream. Five had been hard enough. Creatures had to die for me to harvest their souls. Since I wasn’t a serial killer, that meant I had to keep on the flatlined pulse of every dead thing across this massive floating land mass.

  “Okay,” I finally said, seeing no other option.

  “And you must remove your competition.”

  “Remove as in what?” I asked.

  Aldric didn’t respond. Oh, Lucille would love that. Not one, but two murders. That would go over real smoothly.

  “You wouldn’t perhaps know who this other Reaper might be?” I tapped the closed file.

  “I trust you’ll be resourceful,” Aldric said, offering no additional cache of information. “After returning from the dead, such a task should be simple.”

  His opinion of simple and mine were apparently different. I waited in the vain hope that he would elaborate—maybe give me a lead beyond there’s someone who’s doing a better job at this than you and I do not approve. But I must’ve been wishing for too much, because he simply stared back in stony silence. After a moment, I turned to leave, and he cleared his throat.

  “Forgetting something?”

  “What?” I glanced back, just in time to see the open Reaper’s Switch hurtling through the air. I barely caught the handle before the blade would have cleaved off my ear. The smashed plastic was now wrapped in thick tape.

  “Duct tape is one of the few signs of progress in this modern world,” Aldric said, his icy expression not changing. “Don’t waste this gift, Eden.”

  I looked at the knife and then retracted the blade, swallowing hard. His “gift” wasn’t the slap-dash fix for the Reaper’s Switch.

  The vampire warlord meant my second chance, which, in my book, wasn’t really much of a second chance at all.

  5

  Well, wonderful.

  I had nearly been killed for being outperformed by a fellow Reaper who, until ten minutes ago, I hadn’t even known existed. That seemed unfair, but then again, fairness was for fifth graders. The real world was just relentless buckets of ice water. If you were lucky, whoever was hurling them in your face didn’t leave an ice pick at the bottom.

  Not wanting to go home, I went for a midnight ride to clear my head.

  Threats to my life aside, I now needed to deliver seven souls to Aldric come Friday.

  So I put in a late-night call to Edgar, the local funeral director.

  As luck would have it, he was awake and had something “impressive” in stock.

  I headed over to Atheas Acres Funeral Parlor and parked out front. The door was locked this late at night, but a quick jimmy from my switchblade and I was inside.

  I took in the faded furniture as I pushed into the casket showroom.

  I sensed Edgar before I saw him.

  His soul tasted bitter, like a vodka tonic made with too much lime and bottom-shelf liquor. I tried to shake the sensation from my tongue as I paced around the plain-carpeted showroom floor densely packed with gleaming caskets and obscenely priced urns.

  Low volume classical music flowed from small in-ceiling speakers to set an appropriately somber tone. The lack of windows made me feel like I was the one who had died. I brushed my fingers over an expensive casket allegedly crafted from mahogany. Furniture polish hovered around the coffin in thick, smog-like clouds. The rich wood was banded by a gold inlay, and its plush interior was a rich, royal shade of purple velvet. It was either destined for a king or a pimp. Depending on how snarky you wanted to get, you might ask, what’s the historical difference, Eden?

  To which I’d have a bulletproof answer ready: respectability. It might have been an illusion, but it forgave almost all misdeeds. The oldest of cons.

  I did a second lap around the funeral home’s showroom and sighed. Getting rid of the soul’s taste was futile, same as always. I’d have to wait for it to fade. Just one of the amazing perks of being a Reaper—a soul radar granting me involuntary free samples of everyone’s life story, ’til perpetuity.

  Some stories sucked worse than others. At least Edgar’s wasn’t as bad the werewolf assassin’s.

  Returning to the garish pimp-king casket, I touched the handles, which were also—what else—gold. But a quick scrape from my fingernail revealed that the precious metal was nothing but stainless steel coated in a couple layers of cheap spray paint. It made me wonder, when Mom went to bury Dad, whether the funeral director back in Chicago had ripped her off, too. I’d never gotten along with her—nor was I the type to get all sentimental about funeral theater—but for some reason the thought made me sad.

  “Must you always do this, Eden?”

  “Maybe if your fakes weren’t crap, I wouldn’t have to.” I turned toward Edgar’s reedy voice. The short, pudgy man was obscured by a marble table covered in sample flower arrangements. I hoped that, for a couple hundred bucks, you’d at least get real flowers to pair with your counterfeit coffin.

  These were the sort of people I did business with. I’d have claimed this was a new thing, but there comes a time in a girl’s life when she has to level with herself. A decade of criminality wasn’t indication of a passing phase, but a career choice.

  “Well, you’ve looked better,” Edgar said.

  “You haven’t,” I replied.

  Edgar coughed, a chronic condition from inhaling too much formaldehyde over the embalming table when he was younger. The funeral director shuffled forward, his cheap slacks and even cheaper dress shirt hanging loosely over his wide frame. He limped from the silver bullet fragment permanently lodged in his left leg. Too close to an artery to remove. Yes, apparently vampires could bleed to death—an ironic fate that Edgar wasn’t willing to tempt with risky surgery. A wispy attempt at facial hair crying out for a razor’s aid dotted his formless cheekbones. His skin was tanned an awful shade of orange-bronze to hide the fact that he was a vampire.

  A good, if somewhat uninspired, career choice for a bloodsucker: late hours, easy access to blood, and no casual visitors. Plus, if you were an enterprising fellow like Edgar, then a respectable, quiet business afforded ample cover for more lucrative side endeavors.

  The only evidence of his more sordid activities was an expensive, limited edition digital watch hiding in plain sight on his wrist, easily running into the six figures. He’d talked to me about it once—it was a piece of film memorabilia or something, hence the price—like I’d be impressed, but I’d almost died of boredom. Even when they were dead—or undead, I guess—guys still tried to run the same bogus game. Like a trinket slapped around his forearm would make me overlook the rest of the screaming red flags.

  The music shifted to Bach, which I took as my cue to hurry things up.

  “You mentioned something impressive on the phone.”

  “One quality soul for my favorite Reaper.” Edgar reached into his floppy slacks and handed me a prescription bottle.

  “What the fuck is this?” I held the amber plastic up to the soft light. The contents looked like a two-week-old pasta bowl that had been left uncovered in the fridge. More science experiment than something I could hand to Aldric.

  “Professional gambler.” Edgar’s beady eyes gauged my reaction. “I thought you’d appreciate that.”

  “I could give a shit.” The former owner’s morality, or lack thereof, wasn’t the problem—often, in fact, evil creatures had souls containing room-shaking power.

  Nope—the main problem was this soul wasn’t intact. Because, as I’d told Edgar repeatedly, harvesting souls without a Reaper’s Switch almost always resulted in an unusable mess. And that was if the wannabe Reaper managed to survive the extraction at all.

  “You need to stop using Reaper’s Willow.” I glared at the pudgy vampire. Here I was, out on a Sunday, trying to get a jump on my recently increased quota. And this idiot was wasting my time with his hobby experiments.

  A sigil—a crude tattoo facsimile of a Reaper’s Switch—glowed lightly on the back of Edgar’s right hand. Normally, if any creature other than a Reaper tried to harvest a soul, it resulted in unpleasant consequences. Escaping with scalding third-degree burns was a victory. The magic now coursing through his sigil allowed him to play Reaper without fear of losing his hand entirely.

  After a long standoff, I tossed the ruined soul back to Edgar. A sad look fell over his formless cheeks. Whether that was because I’d insulted his shoddy handiwork or because he’d just missed out on a thousand bucks was anyone’s guess.

  “I need to get going.” It was getting late, and I didn’t want to hang out in the overly perfumed funeral home any longer than necessary. The music alone was about to drive me insane.

  “There is one other thing, Reaper.” Edgar slipped the prescription bottle back into his slacks and unleashed a phlegmy cough. After the fit subsided, he mopped his lips with a handkerchief. “A big score.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. How could I resist, given the circumstances?

  “It’s off-site.”

  “I got that much,” I said. “Am I gonna have to play twenty questions for you to tell me the rest?”

  Edgar returned the blood-spackled handkerchief to his front shirt pocket and affixed his beady gaze to me. Normally, a vampire had some sway, able to persuade others with their eyes. I had little doubt that the funeral director used this to his advantage when shilling his counterfeit wares to grieving spouses. But, as a Reaper, I was immune.

  All I saw was a slimy, over-tanned, pudgy scammer. One who, regrettably, was an important ally. That didn’t mean I had to respect him, though, and I always made sure that I took that small sliver of freedom straight to heart.