Night Kissed (Chosen Vampire Slayer #1) - Mila Young Page 0,26

worked up to sleep or even shower. Every word that sleaze Orion had said stuck in my brain. I wanted to scrub at my skin until I could no longer feel the unnatural coolness of his fingers on my neck.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” I demanded out loud. Of course it was a rhetorical question, and unfortunately, his concept of self-lined up pretty well with his actual status. As clanmaster in Anchorage, his word was pretty much law, as far as the vamps in his clan were concerned. The master said to jump, they asked how high. No doubt he had a legion of henchmen at his beck and call. All he had to do was distribute my face to the troops, and I was doomed to have a very bad time.

It had to be a game to him, a muscle he flexed to try and make a fool out of me, and I hated him for it. I hated the way he so obviously viewed me as prey, and the way he had stared as if he was already entitled to the kill. The memory alone made me shudder.

But most of all, I hated my body’s reaction to his presence. Orion was not someone who should have held any appeal for me at all, and yet…some hidden magnetism drew me toward his clutches. I thought I’d done pretty well holding my own this last time, but the potential of the future scared me. What if my resolve weakened for an instant?

He’d gotten so damn close. If I closed my eyes, he might as well have been standing right beside me, his presence lingered so strongly. I’d never met a vamp like him, though I had certainly been warned about the old ones, the ones who seemed able to bend the human psyche to their will. Maybe Orion was used to hapless mortal women falling all over him in the blink of an eye.

Then there were his two accomplices. One with black wings, and the other with smoke wafting from the corners of his mouth and nose. Those two weren’t vampires, though what exactly they were, I wasn’t too sure yet. Demons? Why was Orion with them anyway and not with more of his own kind?

The next couple of days that followed our accidental rendezvous down by the inlet shore were full of me buckling down on my resolve to get to the bottom of the rash of violent crime Lian called me about. The desk in my room disappeared beneath pages of notes I compiled of my findings, complete with drawings, charts, and diagrams. I listed every conceivable reason I could think of as to why a vampire from Seattle might have been found dead so far from home.

Still, despite my best efforts to explore every angle, there were pieces missing. I just didn’t know enough about the way the region had developed in the years since I had last been local. I certainly didn’t remember such a robust supernatural presence. Then again, I had a lot of other things to think about.

But I did know someone who was more than happy to fill in the blanks. Lian’s huge, rambling house began to feel more and more like home again with each visit. We always ended up on the long, overstuffed sofa in the den, covered up by blankets, flames crackling in the fireplace. It was kind of strange to be sitting there all cozy, eating fresh baked goods and drinking from steaming mugs of coffee or hot chocolate while we discussed everything hiding in the city’s darkest shadows.

“I’m not sure when it started, exactly.” Lian sat cross-legged on the sofa, cradling her mug in her lap. She frowned, thinking. “A year ago, or maybe eighteen months. I was helping Dad with the books, and I started to notice all these new names on the payroll. I mean, like a dozen at a time. So I asked him about it and he told me there was an influx of transplants looking for work.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Transplants?”

“That’s what he called them. I guess I didn’t think too hard about it because it’s the kind of thing that happens a lot in Alaska, you know? People get wanderlust and they come up here thinking they can go off the grid or live in the wilderness or whatever. I’ve heard of whole families relocating here to get a fresh start.” She shrugged. “So yeah, it was a ton