Thanks to my reviewers. :) You guys are too nice.
CalliopeMused: Happy Graduation. I'm glad you had time to catch up on your reading. ;)
wolfseye1: Yeah, I definitely couldn't leave things sappy with Ian and Hollis. That's just not what they're relationship is like.
DarklightShadow: I was just reading around on fictionpress when I recognized your name. :) I'm glad you like my story as well.
Without further ado...
The shaking came harder. “Ian, wake up!”
“Five more minutes,” he grumbled to the voice.
“No. Wake up now.”
He opened his eyes tiredly and put his hand up to block out the morning sunlight that was filtering through the window. When he saw the girl leaning over him, haloed by the white light, his mind cleared instantly.
Hollis.
Wisps of her blond hair tickled his chest, like it had the night before, as she shook him again, apparently mistaking his captivation for grogginess. The girl might be brilliant, but she was truly clueless when it came to some things. She had no idea how hard he was fighting the urge to pull her down on top of him.
“Ian,” she said again.
“You’re talking to me now, princess?” he drawled, running his fingers through the mess of his hair. He tried to rub the last bit of sleep from his eyes. “I thought I’d be getting the silent treatment for at least a few days.”
“We don’t have time for this,” she said impatiently. “I think I found Jonas Carden.”
Ian sat up. “What? Where?”
Hollis didn’t answer as she blushed and he realized that she was trying not to look at his bare chest. It would probably be considerate of him to pull a shirt on, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved making her flustered—he had since the day that he’d met her. And if seeing him half-naked helped him break through some of her barriers, he’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.
She tore her eyes away. “I, uh, went through some of his older aliases and checked the passenger lists of the flights into New York from DC and I got a hit,” she explained, staring intently at the wall. “A Sean Jones. He checked into the Hudson Hotel two days ago.”
“Fantastic,” he exclaimed as he leapt out of bed. “I’ll go check it out. Just give me a few minutes.”
Ian felt her eyes on him as he grabbed some clothes and headed for the bathroom. He showered in record time, the adrenaline coursing through him. Finally, they had a lead and he didn’t want to let it slip through his hands.
“What are you doing to do?” Hollis asked him when he returned. She was still sitting on his bed and it surprised him a little. He’d expected her to retreat back behind the computer by then, using it as a shield between them.
“I’ll take the rental car down there, see what’s up. Did you get the room number?”
“He’s in room 914.”
“Great. I’ll ask around and see if anyone saw him come in with a female guest yesterday.”
“What if he did?”
Ian shrugged. “I’m thinking about just knocking on his door.”
“Wait! Are you crazy?” Hollis cried. “Carden is a skilled assassin.”
“Yeah,” he countered, “and so am I. Trust me. The last thing he’ll be expecting is for me to come out into the open like that.”
“What are you going to do after that? Invite him out for a drink?” she asked sarcastically.
“Maybe,” he replied. Ian sat down on the bed next to her and started to lace up his boots. Hollis slid back, failing to be subtle about it. He’d anticipated it, but it still stung. “It depends on what happens when he opens the door.”
“And you called me reckless. What if he kills you before you get a chance to say anything?”
Ian flashed Hollis a bright smile. “Why are you so concerned?” he asked her coyly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you actually care about what happens to me.”
“Just because I’m angry about last night doesn’t mean that I want you dead, Ian.”
“Ooh, such things you say.” He winked at her. “If you keep talking like that, I might not be able to leave here, princess.”
“Stop patronizing me.”
“Fine, as soon as you stop patronizing me. I know what I’m doing, Hollis. I’m trained for this. Why can’t you trust me?”
She opened her mouth, about to reply, but then she shut it again. Ian watched her, amazed. Her eyes looked wounded for a fleeting moment. Vulnerable. He had the feeling that he’d just stumbled upon a question that was too important to be answered now, as they bickered in their all-too-familiar way.
Ian stood up, towering over her as she remained sitting on the bed. “I’ll check in as soon as I can,” he promised softly. He wanted to touch her, kiss her, but he knew that it would just push her further away. So he smoothed her hair and gave her a peck on the top of her head. The scent of peaches wafting from her made him ache, but he forced himself to step away. “Don’t worry.”
He paused before he shut the door on his way out, hoping that she might call him back. When she didn’t, he pulled the door shut a little harder than necessary and headed for the elevator.
Circle Daybreak had spared too many expenses when it came to their rental car. Ian assumed that that was because they were in New York and most of the time it was far easier to take a cab, bus, or subway than it was to drive. Daybreak hadn’t really expected them to need the car. But unfortunately for Ian, he wanted to stay more mobile than public transportation would allow when he went down to the Hudson Hotel.
The door to the faded blue Nissan Sentra creaked loudly as he opened it. The car might have been decent when it was new, over ten years ago, but compared to modern cars, the Sentra was primitive. It had no power windows or locks, no right side mirror, and no antilock breaks. As he started the vehicle up, Ian also realized that the power steering didn’t work and neither the heat.
Great. This was the worst getaway car in the history of the world.
Well, at least it ran…for the most part. Ian pulled out onto the street and started to drive towards Manhattan.
But now she stood with her hand on the doorknob and he could practically see the gears in her head turning. Fight or flight? Well, she knew that she wouldn’t beat him in a fight. He was stronger and more experienced than she was. So that left…
Risa threw the door open and dashed down the hall. Carden was right behind her, but she managed to keep herself more than an arm’s length away. She ran past the elevator, towards the stairwell, and he knew that he’d be able to catch her in there, even if it meant jumping down several stories to cut her off.
But she flew past the stairwell door without slowing. At first he thought that Risa had simply missed it, but then he realized what his soulmate was doing. She withdrew a gun that he hadn’t known she’d been carrying from the back of her jeans and shot four times at the window at the end of the hall. Carden heard the muffled screams from behind the doors of the nearest rooms as Risa ran full tilt through the shattered glass. Without thinking, he followed her out the broken window.
It wasn’t until he burst, weightless, into the cold, early dawn air that Carden remembered that his hotel suite was nine stories off the ground. Risa, however, hadn’t forgotten. He saw her below him, flailing her legs as she tried to aim for the dumpster that sat behind the hotel. The loosely packed garbage would help to cushion the impact when she landed. Carden, unfortunately, had leapt too far out the window to reach it. He was going to land on the pavement and it was going to break his legs. Then he wouldn’t be able to catch up with Risa.
Fucking clever girl. Only she could make him proud and pissed off at the same time.
But then a car, an older, boxy model, drove up behind the hotel and slammed to a stop not far from where Carden expected he would land. He watched a dark-haired man hurry out of the vehicle, as if he were late for work, and Carden did his best to point his body in the direction of the car. It would be better to hit that than the pavement. And he took some consolation in knowing that, whatever happened to him, he’d be putting the shitty car out of its misery.
The second before he landed, he lifted his legs and took the brunt of the impact on his backside as the roof of the car crumpled under him. For a moment, Carden could only lie there on the bent and broken metal and clench his teeth against the pain ringing through his body. The blue sky spun above him.
Out of the corner of his eye, there was movement. He turned his head just in time to see Risa crawling out of the dumpster and hobbling towards the street. With a groan, he was up again, running down the hood of the car as he went after his soulmate.
He walked back through the door and his jaw dropped. There was no other car, no moronic kid. The crash had been the sound of someone landing on top of the Sentra, crushing part of the hood down into the backseat. From where he was standing, Ian couldn’t see much of the person’s body, but he knew that it was lying unnaturally still.
Venturing further out, he looked back up at the hotel. Several floors above him, there were a few people sticking their heads out of a large broken window as they pointed down at the body on the car. Carden had something to do with this, no question. But Ian didn’t know if the person had jumped or if he’d been pushed out that window. The voices of the humans rose above a murmur and Ian turned back to the car to see what was happening.
Jonas Carden was sitting upright on the dented hood. He looked pretty banged up, but certainly alive and utterly focused.
“Son of a bitch,” Ian whispered as he watched the vampire run off of the car and out towards the street, seemingly oblivious to the attention he’d drawn to himself.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he said to himself as he took off after Carden, following him down West 58th Street. The traffic on the sidewalk was irritatingly heavy as humans made their way to work. But Carden was forcefully pushing his way through them, inadvertently clearing a path that was easy for Ian to follow.
There was something wrong about it. It was like the other vampire didn’t even notice or care that Ian was behind him. Carden wasn’t running from him, Ian realized, he was running towards something.
As they turned onto 9th Avenue, Ian caught a glimpse of long, dark hair whipping up in the wind ahead of Carden. After watching her for two weeks, he recognized that hair immediately. It was Risa Sinclair.
What was going on with them? They knew each other eight years ago, but then they broke off all contact. Then Carden shows up at her apartment, knowing that she was being watched, and takes her to his hotel room downtown. And now she’s running from him?
It hit Ian at once, just as he watched Carden sprint ahead to catch up to Risa. The other vampire was so rashly preoccupied with reaching her that he didn’t even realize that he was being followed. That kind of desperation and reckless insanity could only be the result of one thing: the soulmate principle.
Carden was catching up with her. Only that arrogant ass would jump out a window nine stories off the ground and be lucky enough to land on a car that just happened to pull up. Sometimes it just didn’t seem fair, how everything always worked out for him.
What would he do to her if he caught her? His anger could be petrifying. She’d always been able to hold her own against him, until that last time—the night he’d changed her into a vampire against her will. She didn’t want to imagine what he’d do to her now.
Run, run, run.
Humans blocked her path, giving her dirty looks and cursing at her as she shouted at them to let her by. Why wouldn’t anyone get out of her way? Damn New Yorkers!
As Risa ran over a crack in the sidewalk, her battered ankle gave out and she pitched forward onto the ground. The rough cement scraped off her skin as she slid to a stop. The heel of a shoe stabbed into her back as she lay on the sidewalk, trying to get up again. A man stepped on her hand. A kid kicked her leg. What was wrong with these people?
Suddenly, she felt herself being hauled up off the sidewalk by the shoulder of her shirt. She looked into the smoldering eyes of her soulmate and she knew that it was over.
“Hey baby,” she said, trying to sound dignified in his grip. “Going for an early morning run too?”
Carden pulled her away from the edge of the sidewalk and slammed her into the mirrored glass window of the building next to them. “I swear to god, Risa,” he snarled. “Don’t push me, or I’ll kill you myself!”
“You already did,” she reminded him. “Remember?”
“Christ!
We just went over this last night!” He banged his fist against
the glass, creating a spider web of cracks. Risa was stunned that he
still had enough control over himself not to punch completely through
it. “Yes, I changed you. I’m sorry and I’m not sorry. I
wouldn’t let you kill yourself then and I’m damn well not going
to let you do it now.”
“Well, you supposedly loved me then,
what reason do you have to stop me now?” she challenged. She tried
to push him off of her, but it didn’t work. “Self-preservation?”
“You are so fucking dense, sweetheart.”
“And you’re so fucking ambiguous, Carden. And you know what? It doesn’t matter what your reasons are now. I have to be held accountable for what I’ve done.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean dying.”
“Daybreak has an assassin after me. You’ve always thought that Daybreak was just. In fact, I remember you saying that they were too lenient. You only disagree now because I’m your soulmate.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” He leaned in closer to her and Risa’s pulse fluttered, but she didn’t know if it was from desire or fear. “I am your soulmate. And I’m going to fight for you, whether you like it or not. I know that you didn’t kill any innocent person on purpose. And I know that it would be easier for you to die than to live with the mistakes that you’ve made. But that wouldn’t be justice. That would be cowardice.”
“I am not a coward,” she snapped.
He laughed shortly. “Please. You’ve been afraid your entire life, Risa. That’s why you started hunting in the first place.”
“I started for Cori,” she protested, “because I loved her.”
“You’re too chicken-shit to love anyone. I heard what you said before you tried to leave the hotel room. You said that you were getting yourself killed because you loved me. And that’s bullshit, sweetheart. If you love someone, then you have a responsibility to stay alive and well for them.”
Anger gave her the power to finally break his hold on her shoulders and shove him away. “I can’t believe that you, of all people, are talking to me about responsibility. You’ve never taken anything seriously in your entire life!”
“I’m taking this seriously, aren’t I? Do you think I’d rather be here than back in LA, celebrating my early retirement by getting completely smashed?”
“No one is stopping you!”
Her soulmate was about to advance upon her again, but a voice from behind him froze him in place. “Look, I hate to interrupt this lover’s quarrel, because it’s actually very fascinating, but could you two please give it a rest long enough for us to talk?”
Carden turned, shielding Risa with his body. But she could see the dark-haired vampire who’d approached them from over her soulmate’s shoulder.
“How did you find us?” Carden asked. His voice had a frightening edge to it.
“I followed you,” the vampire replied. “It wasn’t hard either. A guy in your position should really watch his back more carefully.”
“I’ll keep that in mind after I kill you.”
“I don’t think it needs to come to that,” the vampire said, walking towards them.
“Take one more step and I’ll have your head.”
“Hey!” Risa shouted from behind Carden. “Would someone please tell me what the hell is going on? Who’s the Orlando Bloom wannabe?”
The vampire smiled. “Ian McCafferty,” he replied. “The Daybreak assassin.”
It had only been an hour since Ian left. Not a long time at all, especially if you factor in the time it took to drive to the Hudson Hotel. There was nothing wrong. He was perfectly fine.
Well, Hollis was a perfect mess. Her endless rationalizations and reassurances did nothing to quell the anxiety that was turning her stomach. Why could the brain never help calm the heart? Well, it wasn’t really her heart. It was just another part of her brain that was making her uneasy. Just electrical pulses and neurotransmitters. Just epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol—hormones meant to keep her alive in times of danger. But they were killing her now. Why hadn’t evolution caught on to this yet?
She was losing it. Even her thoughts were pointless rambles. She needed to work some more and keep her mind occupied.
Hollis began to scan the police reports, looking for anything that sounded like Risa Sinclair’s work. They could never have too much evidence, especially since Hollis’s eyewitness account might be faulty.
Less than a minute passed before she checked the time again.
Come on! There was nothing to worry about. Ian was trained.
Reading through the police reports, she saw that five guys were arrested in a drug bust. Not was she was looking for…
But when Ian got back, she would have to face him. Again. She’d seen the expression on his face when he asked that horrible question, “Why can’t you trust me?” It looked like he’d just had an epiphany. Hollis knew that he wasn’t going to let it go.
Domestic disturbance. No…
And the disturbing thing was that she still wouldn’t have an answer for him. She did trust him. She just…didn’t believe him. That wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t.
Because, well, why would he still want her? He’d already gotten one night out of her and of course he wouldn’t regret it, as she did. He didn’t have as much to lose. Men could sleep around, screw their partners, and no one thought any less of them. That wasn’t true for women. So, it only made sense that she considered last night a mistake. Of course she thought that she was a huge idiot. Nice, smart girls didn’t do things like that. It was the hand she was dealt, it was the role she’d been given.
Arson…
“Maybe this is you, princess. Maybe the rest is just a façade…you need to learn to respect yourself, whoever that really is.” Those were the words that were haunting her. She heard him whispering them over and over again.
Assault…
She’d been wanton and bawdy and it had been terrifying and humiliating because it wasn’t who she was supposed to be.
Robbery…
But who decided that? Why was she supposed to be anything in particular? And why was she ashamed?
Suddenly her thoughts came to a screeching halt. Hollis leaned closer to the computer screen.
The bodies of a thirteen year-old girl and a nine year-old girl were found on the second floor of an abandoned townhouse. The causes of death had not yet been determined. They were killed approximately five days ago, but were found just yesterday after police responded to a call about a trespasser on the property. A witness described the trespasser as a white female between 15-19 years of age, 5’ 10”, slender build, waist-length brown hair.
Heart pounding, Hollis saw the address of the townhouse and knew that it was fairly close to the hotel, to Risa’s apartment. This was their girl.
She grabbed her cell phone and fumbled with the keys as she sent Ian a text message, telling him to call as soon as possible. Then she got to work on the details. She printed out directions to the townhouse as well as a satellite map. The house had been repossessed two years ago and had been empty ever since. There was no telling how many squatters may have broken in during that time.
Were the girls squatters? Was the killer? What did Risa Sinclair have to do with it? Hollis knew that the subject had killed countless people, but she’d never thought that Sinclair would murder two young girls. It just didn’t fit the profile.
She glanced at the clock again. Why hadn’t Ian checked in yet? She really wanted to talk to him about this.
Hollis stood up and stretched out her cramped legs. She was sick of being stuck in this hotel room with her own crazy thoughts. Grabbing the map and directions, she decided to take a walk by the property and just take a look at it while she waited for Ian to get back. Maybe she’d find another lead.
Part 8
Part 10
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