I’m no longer content to be a hunter or a magician of the dark arts. Or even the offspring of a fallen angel. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this right. I will bethehunter.
History’s apex killer.
Chapter Eighteen
Mark
I kill the headlights and sit in the stillness, breath fogging the windshield.
The box rests in the passenger seat like a slumbering predator, which, for now, is exactly what it is. For a moment, I just sit and feel this ancient fossil of power and hunger, a femur from the greatest predator to ever walk the Earth. As it pulses in my mind, I lick the dried blood from my lips absently.
One guard dead. One bitten and partially eaten.
No one saw my face; no one could. I wasn’t wearing a human one, after all.
I grab the box and ease out of the car. My shirt absorbed some of the blood from the night’s activities, where it still crusts my forearms and face. My jeans are smeared with the stuff, too. I’ll burn them later. With luck, one guard will turn within a few hours.
Spreading my seed, so to speak.
Inside my house, the air is empty with silence. I move past the entryway, cross through the kitchen, and head down the narrow hallway toward the back rooms. Once in my work room, I set the box down on my desk, then double back to my living room and reach for the remote control; after all, I can smellher.
Yes, the female. God, my senses are crackling these days. Who knew raptors could sniff like a bloodhound?
My security system’s interface flickers onto the TV screen. I’ve been running it on a closed loop. I queue up the night’s footage, skimming through each room in fast-forward, scanning for the movement my phone app flagged earlier.
There. Living room: 1:03 AM.
I slow it down. First, a flicker in the space by the bookcases. A pulse of static electricity, then a small flash. Thenpop,aperson is standing there as if through magic. Literally appearing out of thin air. A little man, in fact. Not a man. A woman in disguise.
She moves cautiously, precisely. Her hand hovers next to my sacred book. Then she grabsit.
Thebook of books.Mybook. She clutches it like it’s burning her fingers, then vanishes again. Gone. I stare at the empty screen.
She was short. Athletic-looking. Dark-haired. Clearly calm under pressure.
I know that face, despite the stupid mustache. It was the woman who’d been here earlier, a week or so ago. The woman claiming to be some kind of private investigator. Samantha Moon, if I recall.
I blink, then chuckle softly to myself. It’s always the short, weird ones. Twenty minutes later, she reappears in my living room, where she returns my book. Next, I back out of the feed and pull up a browser window. It doesn’t take much effort to find her. I’ve already run a light trace; after all, she’d literally left me her calling card. She’s a legitimate PI, complete with a valid license, easy enough to look up. Office in Fullerton. Known for weird cases, according to her website and Yelp reviews.
Most importantly, she had no aura.
I learned to see them as a little boy, taught to me by my filthy grandfather who should have been rotting in jail but had the money to buy his freedom. He taught me to see the colors that surround everylivingbody. Some flicker. Some burn. Some pulse black.
Some havenothing at all.
Blank. Which meant, according to Grandfather, they were immortal, ofsomekind or another. A vampire, most likely. Something old, surely. Something locked out of heaven.
That makes all this so very interesting, though not yet dangerous.
And wow, she can appear and disappear. Teleportation, perhaps. A rare gift for her kind, if she was a vampire. Non-existent for any other shifter. I certainly couldn’t do that, and neither could my crazy family, though I’d certainly heard rumors that the rare vampire could.
Whoever she is, yes, she’s powerful, but she can’t stop me. Nothing can stop me!
Let the immortal PI try to open my family’s spellbook. It’s cursed six ways to Sunday. She’ll hear demonic screaming for weeks, and if she tries to use one of the spells, she’s in for a rude awakening; that is, if she even awakens; after all, onlymybloodline can unlock the power of the spells. The Nimrod Line. The Elizur family.
I run a hand along the surface of the T-Rex bone, where I’ve placed it on a silk cloth in the center of my desk. Its weight is almost too much for the desk top, which sags beneath it.
The spell requires only a segment of that which once ruled the Earth. This is more than a segment. Should be plenty to complete the spell.
