Authors: Helen Keeble
From Van’s weary expression, this was a question he got a lot. “It’s a family tradition.”
I shook my head. “Wow, and I thought my parents were evil.” According to the date on Van’s driver’s license, he was seventeen. Somehow he’d looked a lot older when he’d been trying to cut my head off. “Sooooo … you’re a vampire hunter, right? What’s up with that? I mean, what have we ever done to you?”
Van’s look suggested that I’d moved into the top spot on his personal list of Most Idiotic People I Have Met. “For a start, kidnapped and ra—” He stumbled on the word, breaking off for an instant. “That is, kidnapped and tortured my mother.”
That kind of stopped me dead. “Uh, okay,” I said, after a second. “I’m really sorry to hear that. But I didn’t do it
personally
, you know.”
Van really did have an astonishing variety of glares. This one clearly indicated that he was plotting at least three ways to kill me using nothing but the available kitchen utensils. “You’re all evil, bloodsucking monsters who slaughter and eat people.”
“I do not!” I protested hotly. My words were punctuated by the door banging open. “Hi, Ebon,” I said over my shoulder. “Tell this guy vampires don’t kill—”
“Who sent you?” Ebon crossed the room in one long stride, seizing hold of the front of the hunter’s T-shirt. He shook him, chair and all. “
Who sent you?!
Tell us or I’ll eat you myself!” At least, I think that’s what he said. The hillbilly Somerset accent was back, so thick that he sounded fresh off the farm.
“Ebon, relax!” I grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the hunter. I hadn’t expected Ebon to throw himself into the role of bad cop quite
this
enthusiastically. “And what’s with the voice?”
“You!” He turned his wild-eyed gaze on me, looking utterly freaked out. He must have charged down here as soon as he’d woken up; bits of twigs and grass still stuck
up out of his hair. “What in the name of all that’s holy are you?”
“Ooookay.” I steered him into a chair. I guessed he was entitled to a small meltdown, seeing as how he’d had his head cut off last night. “Let’s try to relax for a second. Take deep breaths. Uh, actually, I guess that won’t help, but you know what I mean.” I patted his shoulder reassuringly. “We’re all safe now. We got the vampire hunter nice and secure—”
“But he’s not supposed to
be
here!” Ebon wailed. “We weren’t expecting a real one!”
Could he have amnesia? “Those other two were pretty real, remember?”
“What other two?” Van said.
“Oh, don’t give me that,” I snapped over my shoulder. “And I know about your werecat friend. So don’t think they’ll be able to rescue you!”
The hunter had the most perfect “WTF?” expression I’d ever seen. “What friends? I don’t have any friends. The cat’s
your
friend.” He jerked his chin at Ebon.
“Huh? He’s not a cat, he’s a—” I swung round. Ebon had gone stark white. He stared up at me, face stricken.
GUILTY
practically flashed in neon above his head.
“… vampire?” I finished, lamely. “Ebon, what’s going on?”
“I—I
am
a vampire,” he said. His thick country accent clashed badly with his velvet frock coat. “But … I … I’m not quite who you think.”
“Ebenezer Lee,” Van supplied. He closed his eyes, evidently reciting by heart. “Born on a farm near Nether Stowey, 1842. Died in a fertilizer factory, Bristol, 1859. Bloodline: Mr. Tibbles, from Sekhmet.” He opened his eyes again and shrugged as best he could, bound as he was. “That’s as far back as we know.”
I stared at him, then at Ebon.
“Mr. Tibbles?”
Ebon’s hands twisted together. “I did say I wasn’t part of Hakon’s Bloodline.” He looked as though he could sink through the floor in mortification. “And that my sire was a beast. I wasn’t lying.”
Ebon’s form shimmered. All of him—including his clothes—came apart into a dense gray mist, which coiled down to re-form into a small and very dejected cat.
“It was you outside my window!” I recognized that spotted, sand-colored fur. I should have known; he was as long-limbed and gawky in this form as in his human one. His eyes were even the same pale shade of blue. “I chased you! Ebon, or Ebenezer, or whoever you are—you’d better start talking right
now
.”
“Mrow,” said the cat, ears drooping. Mist swirled,
and Ebon sat there once again, thankfully still fully clothed. “I only wanted to impress you.” He dropped his head. “Hakon said I had to seduce you, win you over to our side. He wasn’t happy about having to rely on me, but he didn’t have anyone more suitable near enough—there aren’t that many physically young vampires. It was my huge opportunity to show him I was worthy of a permanent place in his organization. I couldn’t risk ruining it. So I …” He swallowed, then said very fast, “I persuaded two of Hakon’s people to pretend to be vampire hunters so that I could rescue you from them.”
“Those guys were
vampires
?”
“I wondered what they were doing around here,” Van muttered.
Ebon held up his hands pleadingly. “I had to do something, Xanthe! How could I have presented my true self to you and have a hope of persuading you to accept my protection? You’d never have trusted this voice,” he savagely exaggerated his accent, “instead of Lilith’s. She’s the mistress of seduction! And I’m a Victorian farm boy who isn’t even a proper vampire.”
“So you lied to make yourself seem more romantic.”
He nodded, barely moving.
“You do realize that was really, really stupid, right?”
Every line of his body showed that he did.
I contemplated him in silence for a moment. “Ebenezer, huh?”
He winced. “It
used
to be a perfectly normal name.”
“Tell you what.” I stuck out my hand in his direction. “I’ll call you Ebon if you’ll call me Jane.”
Ebon looked at my proffered palm, then up at my face. Solemnly, he took my hand in his own. “Thank you.”
I tightened my grip for a moment, staring him in the eye. “That
is
the only thing you’ve been lying about … isn’t it?”
Ebon put his free hand over his heart, bowing slightly. “On the honor of my Bloodline, I swear.”
“Your sire,” Van said under his breath, “is a cat.”
“Don’t make me come over there and bite you,” I said to him. “I haven’t eaten anyone yet, but if you piss me off enough, I may start.”
“Liar.” Van’s impressive shoulders bunched, straining against the bindings. “You cannot hide your evil deeds from me, monster. You must have killed many innocents, but they will be avenged. I shall destroy you.”
“I’ve hardly killed anyone!” I paused. “Hang on. Ebon, that guy whose head I ripped off …?”
“Sven? He’s fine. Just a little, ah, aggrieved. Hakon
called him and his brother back before there could be any further … escalation.” Ebon sighed. “I’m going to have a lot of apologizing to do.”
“There, see?” I turned back to Van, hands on my hips. “I haven’t killed anyone.”
Van’s jaw clenched stubbornly. “I fought you. I saw your speed, your strength. You could only gain such power through gorging on blood.”
“You also saw her heal a heart wound,” Ebon said flatly. “Explain that.”
Van blanched. “I … must have missed?” He sounded more as if he desperately wanted it to be true than that he actually believed it.
“What?” I said, looking from one to the other. “Ebon, you stuck your head back on. That’s got to be harder than healing a mere staking.”
“The vampire digests the blood of the living not with its stomach, but with its heart.” Van could only have been reciting from a textbook. His school must have been
really
exciting. “It is the only part of the vampire’s body that is vital to its unnatural existence, and the only part that cannot be regenerated. Destroying the heart, by any means, thus returns the vampire to true death.” He had a slightly panicked expression, as though he’d
just opened his end-of-year exam and discovered that he’d studied the wrong topics. “You are a vampire. You must drink human blood. And you’re supposed to
die when I stake you
!” This last was nearly a wail.
I looked at Ebon for confirmation. He nodded mutely. “Well, I don’t,” I said firmly. “Look, isn’t it simple? This must all have something to do with Lilith.” And, I didn’t say, “Superluminal” … whoever the hell that was.
“Who?” Van said blankly.
“My sire,” I said to him. “Lilith.” I looked over at Ebon. “This whole heart thing could be another effect of that, right?”
“No,” Ebon said very firmly. He scrubbed his hands over his face, staring at me over them as if I’d suddenly turned into a werewolf. “You are an impossibility. If all this truly is Lilith’s doing, then we are in a dire situation indeed.”
“There isn’t a Lilith,” Van said, frowning. His green eyes flicked from side to side as if reading an invisible index. “Deceit will not protect you. I will find the truth.”
“Even your kind haven’t discovered all our secrets,” Ebon snapped at him. “And you should hope that you never do.” Van matched his glare.
“O-
kay
,” I said, stepping between them before the entire room filled up with testosterone. I turned to Van. “Look, now that you know I’m not some sort of monster, will you stop trying to kill me? I can’t have you lurking everywhere I go, and I really don’t want to have to keep you tied up. What do you say?”
He didn’t even take a second to consider it. “No.”
Before I could inform him how utterly unreasonable he was being, the door banged open. “Hiya!” Zack said brightly, barging in. “How’s the torture going?”
“Ever heard of knocking?” I scowled at him.
“Why, are you worried about corrupting my innocent soul with terrible scenes of agony?” He patted me affectionately on the arm. “That’s real sweet, Janie. Look, I brought pliers!”
Van leaned back as far as the bonds would let him, evidently far more worried by the enthusiastic twelve-year-old than by any of the vampires in the room. I didn’t blame him. Zack had scrounged quite a collection of replica Victorian medical equipment from eBay—“accessories,” he called them—and they made an intimidating display in the bandolier around his chest. The goggles and wipe-clean PVC trousers weren’t exactly reassuring, either.
“Don’t poke my prisoner,” I said, intercepting Zack as he brandished a corkscrew-shaped piece of metal at Van’s nose. “Unless he continues being difficult, of course.” I stared levelly at Van. “You want to tell us how you found us?”
Van appeared to contemplate his options for a moment. He sighed. “I got a phone call from my employer, informing me where you would be.”
“You mean you can get
paid
to be a vampire hunter?” Zack sounded as if a whole new career prospect had opened up before him.
“It would be difficult if we didn’t.”
“I knew it!” said Ebon. I noticed that he’d reverted back to his fake French accent now that Zack was present. “Tell us who sent you!”
Van shook his head. “We’re always hired anonymously. She only told me where to go and who to stake.” His lips compressed for an instant, then he nodded in the direction of his coat. “You can check the call record, if you want to find the number.”
I searched through his coat until I found the pocket labeled
PHONE
, which more accurately could have been labeled
BRICK
. “My God, Van, is this a phone or an offensive weapon?” I said, hefting the mobile.
“In an emergency, I could use it to crush a vampire’s skull.” As far as I could tell, he was perfectly serious. “Everything can be a weapon.”
Following Van’s instructions, I eventually found the list of recently received calls. Sure enough, there had been a string of them last night. “There’s two different numbers here,” I said, scrolling through the list. One of the callers seemed to have been trying to contact Van at least once an hour. “Wow, someone really wanted to talk to you. Is that one your employer?”
Van jerked his head up as though a thought had just struck him—then he hesitated, indecision breaking his impassive face. “No,” he said eventually. “The other one.”
“Uh-huh. And that wasn’t suspicious at all.” I rolled my eyes. “Let’s see who you don’t want us to know about, shall we—aw, no.” The display showed no signal available. “The station must still be down. Can’t make a call.”
Ebon’s eyes shifted from me to Zack. “Er …” He sighed, reaching into his jacket. “No more secrets,” he said apologetically, pulling out a small black box.
“What’s that?” Zack and I both asked at once.
“Mobile phone jammer,” Ebon muttered. He cast me a pleading look. “I really couldn’t risk Lilith contacting you.”
I held out my hand, and he dropped the jammer into it, a bit reluctantly. “Don’t think we’re not going to talk about this later,” I said to him as I thumbed it off. I hit
REDIAL
on Van’s phone, putting it into speakerphone mode so we could all hear.
It only took half a ring before the call was picked up on the other end, as though someone had been waiting poised by their own phone, ready to snatch it up. “Van! At last!” said a deep male voice, sounding incredibly relieved—then, with the sort of instant shift into anger that I’d heard from my own parents when they’d been worried sick about me: “Come home
now
.”