Page 12 of No One’s Daughter

My fists slammed into my temples as the events of the night kept replaying in my head.

There was so much blood, and I… I could still taste the sweet coppery tang of it. Flashes of my own broken reflection haunted me.

It didn’t make sense, but there was no other way to explain it.

​Vampire.

​The mere notion of it was bizarre, yet I knew deep in my soul it was true.

Vampires were real and I was one.

CHAPTER FIVE

Davien

THE MOTORCYCLE ENGINE died beneath me with a low rumble as I pulled up at the edge of the cordoned lane, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the dense quiet of the trees. Marlette’s bike stood a short distance ahead, angled neatly off the path letting me know my partner had beaten me here.

The rain had started not long before my arrival, slicking the roads and muting the usual noise of them into something dull and distant. I had stopped where the narrow lane gave way to little more than a dirt track, the village a mile or so back the way I’d come—its scattered lights barely visible now through the skeletal line of the forest. At least there were no curious onlookers here. Just darkness, rain, and the faint suggestion of something wrong hanging in the air.

​I removed my helmet, letting the steady drizzle settle into my hair, dampening it in seconds. The scent reached me immediately.

​Human.

​Only, it was an already decomposing human.

​I sat there for a moment, listening.

​The forest should have been alive with something—wind through branches or the distant rustle of night prowlers. Instead, there was nothing but the soft patter of rain against leaves and only the odd low creak of branches shifting overhead.

​Too damn still.

​I stepped off my bike, boots sinking slightly into the wet ground, and moved onto the path. Mud clung to the edges of it, where it was recently disturbed. Human tracks, scattered and uneven, leading deeper in.

It had been almost six months.

Six months since we first caught wind of this creature. The first killing had taken place on the night of the Jupiter opposition and I had no doubt the two events were linked. Events like that rarely meant anything to humans, but those of us who had walked this earth long enough knew, knew that coincidence tended to not exist at all.

I was certain of it. I just lacked the proof, and that, more than anything, irritated me.

The Ninth did not deal in certainties without evidence, no matter how old—or experienced—you were. And I was both, yet it didn’t matter.

The first victim had been found off the west coast of Ireland. Which was strange in itself as Ireland wasn’t the type of place where rogue killings usually happened… or ever, actually, in my experience. The victim, a young human female, had been completely drained of every drop, no blood remained. And what's more, not a single drop had been spilled. Not a single goddamn drop. The absence of blood at these crime scenes had at first made us believe it was the work of a vampire. Other supernatural creatures—even the more evasive ones left behind a recognisable signature, typically a scent, making them easily tracked. And that little fact was the most unusual part in these crimes.

There was no scent.

None at all. Except that of the victim.

And that’s where the vampire theory had fallen short, because, even if we liked to think we were invisible in all ways, there was a certain scent associated with us too.

This was something else.

Some creature of darkness.

There had been twenty seven killings since then that we’d been made aware of. So far. The latest attack had been only the previous Sunday, where an entire party of wilderness expeditioners had been killed. Nine of them and not a single survivor. Six months of chasing our tails in circles with nothing to show for it.

And what made it worse was that these attacks had been ramping up, increasing in frequency with less of a cooling off period.

That’s what had brought me here to this miserable part of the country at this hour. Another fucking kill. Or two, I should say.