“I’ll take that as a no.”
“It’s not that we don’t want you in our clan.” Thaddeus sighed. “Turning humans into vampires is illegal.”
I reached up and grabbed my pendant, the opal settling perfectly into my palm. “If it’s illegal, why did you turn me?”
“In all honesty, I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want you to die for our mistake.”
My veins filled with ice. “Your mistake?”
“It’s our fault the abandoned made you wreck.” Thaddeus dragged his hand down his face.
My heart thumped against my ribcage hard, twice. The dark creature with sinister, yellow eyes flashed in my mind. It was fucking creepy. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Probably because of the adrenaline and the dying, but that thing was straight out of a horror movie.
“That’s what that thing was? An abandoned?”Its screech made my ears bleed.“What the hell is an abandoned?”
“Hell indeed,” Blaise mused, sending another creepy as fuck chill down my spine.
“They’re hellspawn,” Thaddeus spat. “Disgusting creatures that crawled up from the pits of Hell after being damned to an eternity of torture.”
I swallowed hard. “What the fuck was something like that doing in Emeraldsville, Alaska? Nothing happens here.”
“Nothing you’re aware of,” Kai told me. “It’s a hot spot for them because you have a gate to Hell.”
Gate to Hell?
Well, that explains all the weird shit. The creeps that frequent the gas stations, staring at my neck and trying to catch a whiff of my hair, were probably vampires, not just perverts. Plus, the bigfoot and alien sightings around town.
The media did name our town one of the most haunted places in the world.
A shiver wracked through me.Ew.
“That’s why we’re here,” Blaise said.
“When any kind of entity escapes from hell, corporeal or incorporeal, they take on a form of a dark shadow with claws and glowing eyes. The color of the glow depends on how powerful they were in life,” Thaddeus explained.
“They’re dubbed the abandoned, and they’re sentenced to obliteration,” Kai said.
“Yellow.” My voice cracked. “Its eyes were yellow. I saw them when I hit it. What does that mean?”
They shared a look before Blaise answered, “That was one of the lower level abandoned.”
I sunk back into the couch and took a minute to process the fucked up reality they were laying in front of me. Who knew all this shit was happening under our noses? Humans were oblivious to all of it.
Iwas clueless about all of it, and there was a gate to Hell in the town I grew up in.
“It was on the road because…”
“We were hunting it,” Thaddeus finished.
The cogs of my brain kicked into gear as I pieced the bits and pieces of information they’d given me together. “Your clan hunts these...abandoned and kill them. Like a job?”
“We obliterate them from existing on any plane. It’s more permanent than just death, and it’s our responsibility,” he said.
The air between the four of us seemed extra charged, buzzing with more unanswered questions, but I didn’t have enough stamina to formulate them.
“Obliterate?”
“I should start from the beginning.” Thaddeus propped his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward, letting out a ragged breath. “The supernaturals have laws just like humans do. Consider us enforcers of them. We have a hierarchy, and we answer to the Order of the Void.”
