Cranberry Blood Read online

  “He’s a good laddie, so please, I know how difficult it is for you to trust. I am to blame for that, but Brendan is there to help, so try to be easy on him. He is mainly there because of me and Carter, his Alpha.”

  “Why, Gran? Why is he here?”

  “You will be looking at the screen wondering why I have sent him and the answer to the question is the one he has probably already given you. Brendan is there to guard you. Well, to help you. I know you are more than capable of looking after yourself, my dear, but—” She stared into the camera.

  A shiver ran down my spine, knowing she looked directly at me. She had already seen me, sitting here, watching her.

  “Things are about to change for the worst, pet. And they will strike while the iron is hot, while you are distracted.”

  “Distracted?”

  “I know you are grieving, my darling, but you must focus. You are more important to them than you realize, Heather. For years, they have watched you carefully; you became a threat only once we completed your training. Maybe it is my fault entirely. Maybe I shouldn’t have trained you. Maybe I....” Her attention slipped away from the camera.

  I had never seen my Gran like this. She had always been so sure of everything. She always knew what to do and what to say. She had been my rock for so long.

  “I had to do what I knew was best for you, my dear.” She looked back at the camera, exhaustion suddenly swimming in her eyes. “And, because of my choice, you became a subject of great interest to them. Your survival has been a great interest to them. You are rare, Heather. Strong. Unique. And, because of that, some will want to change you. Some will simply want you dead.”

  “Don’t I know it?”

  “And others...the others will want to use you.”

  “Use me?”

  “I can’t tell you any more than that. I want to. God, how I want to tell you, but if you know, you might change everything, Heather, and you can’t.” She shook her head. “No. I mean you must not.”

  “Must not what?”

  “It is vital that you do not change the path before you. I have told you, many times, that certain events must happen in a person’s life for a reason, always for a reason. The events that will unfold before you...they must happen, Heather. They have to. Oh, I have seen your future, my dear.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “I have seen...everything. You will see things, sense things—like you always have—but they will be hard to understand. You may not even realize what you are seeing until you are actually within that moment, that situation. But no matter what you do—and I know what you will do because I know you, I know how strong you are,” she smiled slightly. “You must walk this path. It will be difficult, but trust me. Trust yourself. You must stay on this path and face everything head on. I’m just so sorry that I’m not with you and that I can’t help you.”

  “Help me by telling me what you have seen—”

  “That is why I have asked Carter to send Brendan, because I know he is the only one who can help you.”

  “Why?” I knelt before the screen, my hands balled into fists. “Help with what, Gran?”

  Why won’t you tell me?

  She looked beyond the camera. “Brendan, come here, laddie, so she can see you. Otherwise, she won’t believe you are who you say you are.”

  “She seems like a pain in the arse.”

  Bastard, but he sure as hell sounds the same as the guy sitting in my kitchen.

  “Heather, this is Brendan Daniels.”

  The camera moved direction; Brendan’s face sharpened into focus as he nodded. His hair was a hell of a lot shorter and by God, I know Shifters age slowly, but thirteen years later, he didn’t look any older.

  The camera moved back to my Gran.

  “Try to be nice, for your own sake.”

  I will try.

  “I love you, Heather.”

  I placed my hand on the screen and traced the outline of her face with my fingertips.

  “So does your mother. She loves you so, so much. Goodbye, my wee pet.”

  She disappeared. The DVD stopped and the default menu filled the screen.

  I was eight when she recorded this message. Eight when my mother died. Eight when my Gran became my legal guardian. Eight when I started my training.

  “My hair was horrible at that length,” Brendan said.

  I looked up to see him in the archway, arms folded. “Well, mister watch-and-find-out, that didn’t answer anything.”

  “Of course it did. You wanted to know why I am here. Like your Gran said, I am here to help you.”

  “So I’ve heard, but I want to know what you will be helping me with.” I stood up and turned off the TV.

  “All I know is that you are apparently going to need my help.”

  “That’s it?”

  He nodded.

  “Then for someone who is supposed to help me, you are turnin’ out to be useless at it.” I brushed past him into the kitchen.

  “Matter of opinion, darlin’. I saved your arse, remember? I think that earns me a little credit.”

  I walked through the pantry door and knelt down on the floor. Fortunately, for him, saving my life had earned him not getting a sword shoved through his gut. The fact that he killed Carlson.... I didn’t like Brendan being here, but for killing Carlson, and for the sake of my grandmother’s last wishes, I wouldn’t argue. If he stayed, then he stayed, and I just had to live with it.

  But what the hell does he get out of all this? Surely, he has a life he needs to be getting on with, and a family he can bother?

  “What are you doing?” He appeared in the doorway.

  “For a spy, you’re pretty useless, as well.” I pressed down on a hidden latch. A faint click sounded and a panel rose. I moved the small wooden door out of the way and headed down the stepladder.

  Once my feet hit concrete, I turned to the small security panel and punched in the code. The locks rolled back with a clunk. I pushed open the door and stepped into the cold, dark room, then clapped my hands. White lights flickered and came on with a gentle buzz.

  I remembered the first time my Gran brought me down here. I was nineteen when we left my great uncle and aunt’s estate in Southern Ireland and moved here, back to my parents’ house. I didn’t know what I expected to see. Part of me hoped to find just a normal basement, filled with dusty antiques given as gifts to my mother and father. Antiques that they hated so much they had shoved them out of the way. And boxes. I thought I would see lots of boxes. That’s what belonged in basements: boxes and cobwebs. But my family had always been Vampire Slayers, so I wasn’t surprised to see that our basement held no cobwebs, only clean corners, shelves full of books, work stations, and gym equipment.

  “Well, this has to be one of the most depressing rooms I have ever seen,” Brendan commented from the open doorway.

  I turned and looked at him. “Are you going to start following me everywhere?”

  “I already have been, remember?” He smiled. “You disappeared through a hidden door. I was curious.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Well then, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a cat.” His smile widened, revealing a row of white teeth.

  The smell of dog finally clicked. “You’re a wolf, aren’t you?”

  His smile widened, but he didn’t answer; he just continued to look around the basement.

  “Perhaps a coyote Shifter? Or maybe a fox? Your natural aroma of dog gives you away.”

  “All those animals have completely different aromas. You think I smell like dog because you obviously have never smelled a wolf, coyote, or a fox before.”

  And why the hell would I want to smell any of them?

  “So which is it: A, B, or C?”

  “I don’t see why it’s important.”

  “It isn’t.”

  He gave me a toothy grin. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s the truth.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned away.

  “Killing
me still on the agenda, Tough Girl?”

  I walked over to the desk. “Yup, right here next to buy Brendan a leash.”

  “Glad to know you have a sense of humour.”

  “Who said I was joking?” I mumbled, knowing he would be able to hear me. I sat at the long desk and switched on one of the computers. My eyes wandered over the interior of the basement as I waited for the device to power up.

  I did agree with him on the lack of colour, though. The basement walls had always been decorated light grey, the floor, dark grey. The layout itself was simple. To the left of the door stood three lockers, then a shower cubicle; the gym equipment sat right in the centre of the room: treadmill, exercise bike, punch bags, the lot. To the right, a study area contained a wooden desk with two computers as well as books, and a four-in-one printer. To the right side of the desk, an old bookcase overflowed with ancient books. A dark grey metal fridge, and lastly, a massive mahogany trunk, filled the rest of the wall space. Hey presto, welcome to my evil lair.

  “Things are changing...some want to turn you. Most want you dead. Others will want to use you....”

  My Gran’s words floated around my mind.

  Killing or changing me were both understandable. Because of Carlton’s attack on my mother, I was an Infected, after all. And by Vampire law, when a person became infected by the Vampire virus, they had to be changed into a Vampire, or be killed. Not that any of the Vamps who had tried to change me over the years had succeeded in doing either one, but wanting me dead, I understood. I was, as my grandmother pointed out, unique, because unlike normal Infecteds, I was born with the infection instead of being bitten as a child or an adult.

  But how exactly would the Vampires try to use me?

  “So this is your fighting ring?” Brendan walked toward the equipment.

  “This is where I train.” I logged onto the computer.

  “For the entire six weeks I’ve been watching you, I kept wondering why you were walking into the pantry and not coming out for hours. I thought you had fallen down a rabbit hole at one point, but this actually makes a lot of sense.” He tapped the punch bag with his fist; it rocketed backward. He grabbed the bag, held it still, then stood with his back against it.

  “Believe me; I would gladly take a trip down a rabbit hole. Wonderland would be a nice vacation.”

  He looked over at me. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m seeing if my Gran left anything for me. Something I may have missed.”

  “Well, you still need to read this.” He threw the small, white envelope down on the desk.

  I had forgotten about that. “Can’t you just tell me? Save me the time.”

  “No, because I have no idea what is in the envelope. It’s for your eyes only, hence the seal.”

  I picked up the envelope, slit open the top, and pulled out a piece of folded paper. My Gran’s delicate writing marked the page.

  Heather. The Sphinx. Right, back corner. Small group. Luca Mancinelli. September 25th 2015. 11:30 p.m. It is your only chance.

  “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.” The paper fluttered to the desk and I fell back in the chair.

  Brendan picked it up and read it. “Hmm. Today is the twenty-fourth.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. “Of course it is.”

  “I take it from your expression this is bad news?”

  My stomach was already in knots; if anything could make me throw up right now...well, the piece of unbelievable news right there on that piece of paper would. “Luca Mancinelli is a messenger. A right-hand Vamp, I suppose you could say, and he does whatever and goes wherever his Mistress tells him.”

  Brendan sat on the edge of the desk, his expression blank.

  God, why didn’t my grandmother explain at least some of this to him?

  “My grandfather’s side of the family has been hunting a Vampire called Marko Pavel for a very, very long time. Luca is one of the Vampires we know, for sure, with a direct link to Marko. Now, the last time Luca was in England, my mother was seventeen years old, following a group of Vampires in the hope that they would lead her to Luca, but another Slayer attacked the group, and she never found him. If I find Luca, I can get him to tell me either Marko’s or his Mistress’ location, and since Luca is hardly ever in the United Kingdom, let alone London—”

  “You need to find him, and lucky for you—” he put the paper down in front of me, “—it looks like you will.”

  Fucking unbelievable. My Gran had seen Luca; she had seen him at the nightclub, The Sphinx, tomorrow night. Years, possibly, decades, my family had been trying to find him or any second generation Vampire, and he just happens to turn up now.

  “So, what’s so important about this Vampire Marko?”

  I stood up and walked in to the centre of the room. “Marko Pavel is the reason why every member of my family—on my mother’s father’s side, just to confuse you even more—since the fourteenth century, has been a Slayer. Marko was attacked by a Strigoii.”

  At the bookshelf, I pulled out an old Romanian folklore encyclopaedia. The book fell open to the page I wanted. I handed it to Brendan.

  “A Romanian Vampire?” He scanned the faded pages. “Strigoii usually have red hair, lips, and sometimes skin. Blue eyes, or well, eye since their left one seems to be shut. Oh, and if they’re not thirsty, they sometimes eat food or suck the energy out of their victims.” He looked at me. “Nice, but the mental picture doesn’t really match the Leeches I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with.”

  I held up my hands. “Hey, thousands of years, different beliefs and cultures, and if you open any book, you will find that there are a variety of species of Vampires. It was the fourteenth century and the Romanian culture was very superstitious.”

  “Yeah, they believed a person who dabbled in witchcraft or who might have been born with a caul would become a Strigoii.” His eyes widened as he continued down the page. “Apparently, if you died alone, you were buggered, as well.”

  “Every myth and folklore has some truth to it.” I shrugged. “The problem is that the stories filter down through the generations and remain as simple stories. Fact turns into fiction.”

  He glanced at me. “But we know differently.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “So, one of these so-called Romanian Vampires attacked our Marko?”

  “Attacked and turned him. A few days later, he went home and apparently drained the blood from his mother, sister, and twelve-year-old nephew. His father and brother-in-law swore revenge; they would kill Marko, and every other blood-drinker that walked the Earth.”

  “Only they didn’t.” He shut the book and handed it to me.

  “No. They didn’t.” The volume returned back on the shelf. “Which means the task has passed down from generation to generation. After six hundred years.... Marko is the oldest living Vampire we know of. He has outlived all before him—or we believe that to be the case—and with each decade, he gets stronger. Marko has become the embodiment of evil to me and my entire family.”

  “Damn. Sounds like something from one of those melodramatic comic books.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t a comic.”

  “Why did they all do it, though? Why didn’t they just say no?”

  “Could you?” I looked at him. “If you knew what evil walked out there, could you stop? Knowing that the people they kill would still be alive if you had done something?”

  I ran my index finger along the spines of the books before me. “Believe me; I used to ask my Gran that exact question. Marko killed his mother, sister, and nephew. He is a bastard for it, but it was no one else’s problem, no one else’s revenge. At least, it wasn’t until Marko started personally killing family members to stop them from hunting him; kill or be killed. Even Vampires want to survive. So vengeance became a war for my family, after that. Marko has killed so many members of my family, Brendan, generations and generations for over six hundred years; some of my family never lived past the age of two. Va
mpires killed my grandfather, my father’s entire family, and my father.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair and sighed. “So you kill this Marko, then what? Are you done?”

  I turned and pressed my hip against the bookcase. “I kill Marko, I put all the people he has turned to rest.”

  Chapter Three

  “What?” His eyebrows shot up. “Are you saying if you kill this Marko, then there will be no more Vampires?”

  Ha! I wish. God, it all sounds so easy when I talk about it.

  There would always be Vampires. The species dated back thousands of years and, as much as I wanted to believe that taking out one would clear the parasites from the face of the Earth, I knew better. We hunted Marko, the oldest Vampire my family knew of, the one who’d started this insane war with us. His death, and the death of everyone linked to him, was all that mattered. If I killed him, then all his Bloodlings—the idiots who had let him turn them—died, too, then their Bloodlings died, and so on. At least, I’d been told that would happen. But I knew there were many other Vamps, older ones, still feeding and killing; still in hiding. But they weren’t my problem.

  “More like, less Vampires. But as long as I kill Marko, I will have completed my purpose.”

  “Your purpose? Jesus, kid, you have a life—”

  I looked at the wall beside the desk where the familiar framed parchment hung; my family tree. “This is my life, Brendan. My Gran trained me to kill Vampires whilst constantly in search of Marko in the hope of finding him and killing him. Just like everyone before me. That was their life. This is what we do. We train. We hunt. We kill. We die.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”

  “Well, it is the one I have been dealt and the one I must live.”

  “What happens if you die before you find him?”

  “Then I have failed.”

  Failure was not an option. Not for me. I had only three other members of my family left that I knew of: my grandfather’s brother, Bernard, his wife, Catherine, and their daughter, Danielle. The one small difference being that, out of all of us, I was the only one not completely human. As much as I hated being an Infected, there were perks to having the Vampire infection: I was stronger, I healed quicker than a human, and my reflexes were miles better. As far as I was concerned, I had to be the one to finish this legacy, so they could be left to get on with their lives.