“This isn’t a negotiation. You kill humans… you pay the price.”
The axe was spinning through the air on its side before she’d even finished her sentence. It sliced through wind and then straight into the vampyre’s jugular. Blondie’s eyes popped wide, and she made a horrific choking, gurgling sound. Her legs gave out beneath her and the choking grew worse as blood poured out of her mouth.
Jae didn’t even flinch.
She strode towards the vamp, knelt down beside her and put pressure on either ends of the axe until it cut right through, crunching and squishing until it hit the muddy ground beneath her, her head completely detached from her undead body.
Silence.
Jae pulled at her axe and then wiped the axe blade clean on the girl’s cashmere jumper, using her own scarf to wipe the blood splatter off her face.
A quick glance at her watch. 5.20am.
The sun would rise in fifteen minutes burning the body to nothing. No one would ever know she had been there. It was funny that, she mused, standing up straight, turning away from the consequences of her soldiering, a vampyre could walk around in the day no problem. But once their undead bodies were really... well... dead... the sun did a clean-up job. Legend had it this began after Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, had a child, Asclepius, who pissed off Hades by bringing the dead back to life with his healing powers. Since the dead were Hades charge, he went to his brother, Zeus, who had Apollo’s kid killed. In revenge, Apollo killed the Cyclops, enraging Zeus, who caught up with him and threatened to send him to Tartarus. With a little sweet talking from Leto, Apollo’s mama, Zeus lessened his punishment, with the proviso that Apollo help him keep the deadly creatures a secret from humankind by cleaning up their bodies when they died. Apollo gave the job to the sun, and the rest is ancient history.
Jaeden sighed, her eyes settling back on the boy. She hated to leave him like that but she couldn’t be involved in any way. He would just have to be found by a human in the morning. It was a large, central cemetery. It wouldn’t be long. Not that, that made her feel any less like a monster for walking away.
Before she had begun this new life with Reuben she hadn’t known that much about other supernaturals. Pack Errante, being so small, was protective of their kids, and only a few of them really knew much about the world outside of the pack. Learning that for the past few centuries vampyre bodies had evolved because of the goddess Demeter’s little curse of fertility, and had begun to die by the time they reached three, four hundred years old, made her feel somewhat better that they weren’t overpopulating the world, and thus making the job of tracking down rogues even harder. But there were still the few out there whose bodies hadn’t been affected by evolution, and if the legends were true, a rare number who were second generation vampyres: the first to be born after Hades stole Persephone (Demeter’s daughter) and made her Queen of the Underworld, thus enraging Demeter enough to curse Hades’ vampyres with fertility. The ability to have children gradually changed their natures over time. They became less aggressive, more human. Well… in general. Jaeden shuddered at the thought. If there was still a vamp out there from that time, it was probably a feral killer with the survival skills of a god. She pushed the folklore meant to scare small vamps at a campfire out of her mind, and she wandered back to the basement loft she was living in with her head lowered, bumping into some late night revelers once in a while. The closer she grew to the apartment, however, the quieter the city streets became. The sun had risen, and soon those quiet streets would be buzzing with city slickers who had no idea they shared their world, their jobs, and sometimes even their homes, with supernatural beasties such as her. More importantly they had no idea a war was raging, and that if a certain young woman didn’t live up to her prophecy, that war might spill over into their lives.
There would be nothing left of them.
She sighed, entering the building’s dark entrance and quietly jumped down the stone stairwell at the back. She could hear voices coming from the end of this hallway and smiled softly as she approached the sliding steel door. Lily and Adam were fighting over the Wii again. She rapped on the door and it slid back within seconds. Gazing at her, with an annoying crease of concern between his eyebrows, Reuben stepped back to allow her entry.
“Where have you been? You missed all the action.”
Jae shrugged and nodded at the two vampyres playing computer games. Josh and Styx were sleeping in one of the back rooms. She wandered through the apartment, dropping her leather jacket here and her blades there. The axe she placed in safe keeping on a wall mount she had up in the bedroom she used to share with Lily. She could feel Reuben prowling at the back of her.
“Jae, what’s up?” His cool hands slid up her arms and massaged her shoulders.
She shrugged him off and sat on the bed, pulling her boots off as he glared at her from the doorway.
“Well?”
“I hunted a rogue by myself.”
He nodded, biting on his lip ring, a habit she noticed he had when he was thinking over something. “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
She knew where he was going with his line of thought and she was just too damn tired. So ignoring him, Jae pulled her t-shirt off and began rifling through her drawer for a clean one.
Reuben hissed, bringing her gaze snapping up to him. His eyes were narrowed on her as they looked her over. “Some people would call that teasing.”
Inwardly she flinched, outwardly it pissed her off. “Is that a warning I detect, Reuben?” she sneered, pulling on a clean shirt.
“Maybe.”
She blanched at the anger in his voice and sighed. “I’m sorry, OK. I just forget. Lykans are used to the whole undressing in front of each other thing.”
“I know. Just try to remember. I’m not made of stone.”
She flushed involuntarily, an awkward silence falling between them as they both remembered the night he had kissed her and been thoroughly rebuffed.
He cleared his throat and she sensed a now familiar discussion on the horizon. “Why the hunting solo?”
She was right. “I’m tired.”
“I want to talk to you about this. Hunting by yourself? You’ve been doing it since that night in here with Lily.”
Jae winced just thinking about it. “She could have been killed.”