Twilight Vendetta Read online

  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.

  Chapter Two

  Devlin 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.”

  “There’s another house, out in those woods,” Devlin said, pointing. “It was once a mansion, but now it’s a falling down ruin. I think that will be our best bet. Let’s–”

  He stopped there, because he heard and felt the thing he most detested. Cries of distress from one of The Chosen. Cries he couldn’t ignore even if he wanted to.

  And he wanted to. More than anything, right then, he wanted to. Because he knew her. He’d been compelled to rescue her in the past. Repeatedly. He’d sensed her out there, on the water, after the shooting. She’d seemed uninvolved, innocent, but she’d been aware of him as he’d sped past her, after seeing the murders of the two kids.

  Dammit, it ate at him that he hadn’t been able to save them. Rhiannon had called out to him mentally, after he and the others had jumped ship to head to the island. She’d warned him that two of the Offspring had gone in after him. They’d been zig zagging the Anemone around the Pacific, letting vampires off at various locations. Some of the vamps had taken groups of the mutant children–kids they’d found in cages below decks–with them when they’d headed for shore. They thought they could raise them, give them a home, protect them from their DPI creators. Devlin had no such intention. His goal was to build a resistance and fight back against mankind. There was no room for kids in his plan.

  And now she was out there. Emma Benatar, the world’s most irritating BD. And she was in trouble. Of course she was in trouble. She was always getting into trouble with her death defying, thrill seeking ways.

  Tavia lunged toward the surf as Emma’s increasing panic filled their senses, but Devlin gripped her shoulders, held her back. “It would be the most clever way to lure us right into a DPI trap, don’t you think?”

  “I know it would,” she said. “But you can feel her as well as I can, Devlin. She’s not pretending. She’s in trouble. We must go to her. We have no choice.”

  “I have no choice. You, and you two,” he added, sending a look at Bellamy and Andrew, “are staying here.”

  Emma had steered the boat north at the top speed its motor could manage for a solid hour, hoping the vampires hadn’t gone too far away to sense her. Then she’d sat there, riding the waves up and down over and over, breat
hing the saltwater air, and working up her courage.

  Her mother had told her they would always come when she was in trouble. Always. And they had, dammit, they had.

  One, in particular. One, big, beautiful vampire. He’d saved her life twice.

  She prayed that one of this crew of fugitives would show the same kindness. She didn’t dare to hope he would be one of them. Oh, maybe one of them might know him, and she’d like that. She’d like that a lot. But that wasn’t the reason for this desperate act. She had to let them know about those two captured kids.

  She knew for a fact that one of the vampires had been close enough to see the teenagers shot. But he was long gone before he could have seen what happened afterward. The vampires probably believed those kids were dead. The Offspring. What the hell was that?

  She closed her eyes, opened them again, and decided there was no more time to waste. She was far enough from shore that swimming to safety would be next to impossible. There was no one around for as far as the eye could see.

  She picked up the axe she'd brought along for chopping firewood, in case she needed to spend the night outdoors, and raised it overhead. And then she hesitated. “What if they don’t come?” she asked softly.

  The wind picked up a little, lifting her hair, reminding her the water was going to be cold as hell.

  But she was twenty-seven. She’d been seventeen when she’d learned the full truth about her future, the fate that awaited those with the Belladonna Antigen. Her father had kept the truth from her for as long as he could. The truth about her mother’s haven, having been torched while she was, in all likelihood, sleeping inside. And the truth about her own nature. The antigen would cause a gradual weakening that hits most in their mid-thirties. It progresses until they just die in their sleep. Most BD’s, those individuals the vampires call The Chosen, don’t live to see forty.

  Emma had been living her life to the absolute hilt ever since. She thought of the two kids she’d seen taken prisoner. They had long lives ahead of them. She only had a dozen years, give or take. It wasn’t a hard decision.

  She swung the axe. The blade sank easily through the old wooden hull. It cracked and splintered, and water bubbled up around her feet. She wrenched the axe free and swung it again, opening a gaping hole and the sea rushed in faster.

  She’d told herself that she had to be scared, really scared, or the vampires wouldn’t come. The danger, and her fear, had to be real.

  And in a few more minutes, it was.

  The water rose fast, and the back of the little boat dipped deep, while the front suddenly bucked upward and threw her off like an unrideable bull. She hit the ocean, and the cold shock of it made her go rigid and sink like a rock.

  Loosen up. You have to live long enough for them get here, girl. Come on!

  Snapping herself out of her momentary panic, she paddled her way upward, and upward, and wondered where the hell the surface was. Her chest started to burn, then to spasm. And then she broke the surface, sucking in desperate gulps of air. A wave pounded her, driving her back down and she swallowed water.

  When she surfaced again, she was choking, gasping, and beginning to wonder what the hell she’d been thinking.

  Was this going to be her last grand adventure?

  Well, hell, she’d never intended to go out from the side effects of the antigen. Anything was preferable to that. But at the moment, she was thinking there were probably a whole lot of ways preferable to this.

  She struggled, she flailed, and then she heard something–a voice, inside her head. Hold on. I’m coming.

  It worked! Hallelujah, it worked! They were coming!

  Then the buzzing sound of a motor interrupted her gasping, choking celebration, and a spotlight started dancing around the water between her and shore. A boat was racing toward her from the beach. No!

  Humans. Dammit, she had to warn the vampire whose voice she’d heard just now, inside her mind.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me, but–”

  “I hear you just fine, Emma Louise.”

  He’d surfaced right beside her, his arms wrapped tight around her middle, holding her easily. His face was very close to hers, so close she could see the droplets beading along his jawline and trickling down the length of his nose.

  And then she met his eyes, and she knew him. She knew him even dripping wet in the dark. “You,” she whispered. Her heart sped up. He was holding her so close, her entire body was pressed against his. Everything in her wanted to touch, to explore, to feel him. Her hands splayed across his soaking wet shirt, a couple of fingers on the skin of his chest, where the top few buttons had come open. His arms around her were as powerful as she remembered. And his face—seeing his face again filled her with an emotion too big to name, or even to explore just then.

  “Yes, me,” he said it at length. For a few heartbeats, he’d been looking at her just the same way she’d been looking at him. She could almost believe he felt the same heady combination of relief and joy at seeing her again.

  A sound broke into her thoughts, or rather, the cessation of the sound. The approaching boat’s motor had been shut down, and now there were oars slicing through the water.

  “Someone’s coming,” she told him softly.

  “I know that. And they’re not DPI. Just a couple of fishermen. I’m only holding you up until they get close enough to save you.”

  “No. No, you have to take me with you.”

  His brows bent, thick and dark over eyes like melted chocolate. “Why would I want to do that?”

  Because it’s not my imagination, Emma thought, staring into those eyes and feeling as if she could drown in them more easily than in the sea. Because I’ve been telling myself it was, this whole love at first sight thing, just a teenager’s dramatic fantasy. But I still feel it, and I’m not a little girl anymore. That’s why.

  She closed her eyes, reminded herself that according to her lifetime of research, vampires could read human thoughts if they cared to try. So she cast around inside her brain and found the reason she’d had for taking such drastic measures before she’d seen him again and forgotten everything else. The kids. “They’re alive. The two teenagers, the boy and the girl who were shot in the water. They’re not dead. I know what it looked like. Even those goops thought they were dead, but they...revived or something. In the boat. They revived, and there were screams, and there was blood. They killed two of the guys who shot them, but then they were drugged or something and taken–”

  “Can you hear us?” someone shouted from the boat that was heading her way at an alarming pace.

  “We have to go,” Emma insisted. “I’ll tell you everything else later.”

  “Yes, you will. Are you all right for now, Emma?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. You saved me. Again.” She pushed her hair back with one hand, staring up at him. “Third time.”

  “Fourth,” he said. “You were too young to remember the first. You’re a very troublesome Chosen.” And then he let go, just like that, and vanished beneath the waves.

  “No! No, wait, don’t go.” She whisper-shouted her plea, because the humans intent on helping her were almost on top of her now. She turned in the water, searching for him. I still don’t even know your name.

  And then four hands, human hands, gripped her and hauled her out of the water and into a small motorboat. She had taken in water, was still choking on it, and was shivering with cold. But she’d forgotten all of that while her vampire had held her in his strong arms.

  She lay there, half draped over a padded seat, seething. It occurred to her that she might be in trouble, that they might be DPI posing as innocent fishermen to sweep the area for possible witnesses to the crimes their comrades had just committed. But no, if they’d been intending her harm, the vampire would have known. He wouldn’t have left her in their hands. And a quick inspection of their boat showed an open cooler full of beer cans, a tackle box overflowing with lures and tangled line, and a couple
of rods and reels. There were dried bits of once live bait clinging to some of the hooks. They were genuine fishermen, and they’d ruined everything. She’d been so close!

  Of all the vampires who could’ve come to her aid, it was him. Her vampire. The first time she’d seen him, the first time she remembered, at least, came rushing back to her as the meddling do-gooders wrapped her in one of their own jackets and turned their boat toward shore. One of them was asking her questions, but she couldn’t be bothered. She was back there, living it again.

  She’d been seventeen. In hindsight, she knew she’d been at the very beginning of her thrill-seeking lifestyle. She had no fear of death, almost felt she was taunting it, daring it to come and get her. She knew things other teens didn’t know back then. She knew about vampires. She knew about evil government plots to abduct and experiment on them, though she hadn’t yet been aware it was genocide they intended. She knew about the darkness of the human soul in ways no seventeen-year-old should. But she knew other things too. She knew about love at first sight, and that it was real, because her parents had lived it. And no one in the world had loved each other as powerfully and truly as her mom and dad.

  That night she had a freshly-minted driver’s license, and a dangerous boyfriend she was mainly dating because of the adrenaline rush she got while riding beside him in his souped up Mustang during the illegal midnight drag races he loved to take part in. Leo always won. The muscle car boys didn’t race for pink slips or anything, just cash. There was always a few hundred in the pot. For weeks she’d been begging him to let her drive, just once. And finally she’d got him to agree by promising they’d go all the way if she lost.