Sorry for the long wait, I got busy with college and all that fun. Chapters should be coming out at a more regular pace now.
A nest of vampires had moved into town.
The signs were obvious: scattered reports of travelers gone missing and "mutilated human corpses" showing up halfway across state. Two students going home for the weekend never showed up, and grief counselors wandered around campus for the rest of October. In all, seven people in the area fit the pattern, with a couple other unidentified mutilated corpses that Damon ruled as inconclusive.
Damon's mom had never seen a vampire, and the lore on them was varied. All she had written about them was the basics:
Rare. Nocturnal. Victims must ingest blood to become vampire. Superstrength. Kill by decapitation.
It wasn't much, but it was everything that Damon needed to know.
He spent three weeks in October combing the houses and warehouses at the edge of town during the day time, skipping a couple lectures and accidentally missing an in-class test. That would've earned him a tongue-lashing from his dad, if he knew. But he didn't, and Damon wanted to make sure it stayed that way.
Damon doubled down on his search of the nest and worked overtime at the pizza restaurant; if he saved enough money up he could rent a car for a couple weeks.
Emma's mark began to burn a week after Sam left.
She walked around the campus a couple times before her work-study began, covering her wrist in snow and taking leftover Percocet. Sam's doctor had warned against taking too many of them but Emma's Amazon body had an amazing metabolism and the pills barely made a dent.
She made her tail within five minutes.
Emma entered the library, greeted the two librarians and signed into her work-study. She dumped her bag in the staff room and grabbed a cart of books to reshelf.
The librarians left her alone in the archives, and she liked it that way. Once the sole male librarian had tried to find her, hadn't announced himself and was still unaware of how she'd almost jumped him behind the German Literature section.
She returned to the main reading room to grab her iPod. She swiped her ID to reenter the archive but she didn't hear the door click closed.
There it went.
She shelved the books alphabetically, first-edition textbooks and foreign language translations of classics. The archive was arranged like a maze, with paths cut off by bookshelves and long hallways connected by zig-zagging routes. The History sections were especially confusing. Emma loved it.
The burning of her wrist brand intensified.
Game time.
She ducked into the West African History stacks, which wrapped around the Middle Eastern History section and connected to it by a couple small holes in the shelves.
Amazons muted their footsteps by walking on the outside edges of their shoes, but if you listen closely you could hear the tell-tale padding of their sneakers; Emma had learned it three years ago, with the seventh Amazon she'd killed.
She turned into the Middle Eastern History section and crouched low behind a shelf with large books. The woman on the other side moved slowly around the hallway and inspected all of the shelves.
She withdrew two of her knives and prepared to throw them. She didn't like to get her hands bloody.
Her cellphone vibrated. Crap.
The books behind her blasted off the shelves.
Emma stood over two dead, mangled bodies lying on the floors of the archives. Her knives dripped a deceptively heavy stream of blood; she'd actually killed them with her hands. Their skulls and neck bones were crushed. She'd learned how to minimize blood spill.
The flash of regret faded quickly; Emma had lost her guilt over killing her sisters long ago.
The archive had a back exit to the dumpsters; she hotwired one of the librarians' cars again. Old Mrs. Booker never noticed a weird smell coming from her trunk, nor that her car freshener trees would randomly be replaced.
She dumped their bodies separately, about two counties over. She smashed in their faces and mutilated their arms so the burns wouldn't be recognized.
Mrs. Booker never noticed the miraculously full tanks of gas, either.
Damon found the house in early November. It was one of those perennially-for-sale buildings a couple towns over, in an old blue-collar neighborhood. It looked just like Damon's house back home. He'd finally saved up for a crappy rental motorcycle.
He'd come back on a Friday night, when his roommates were out drinking and wouldn't notice any bloodstains on his clothes at three in the morning.
Emma had left off monitoring Damon a few days after she'd picked his door's lock and slipped the knives under his pillow; she'd planned to keep an eye on him longer but her Amazon problem had taken priority.
She didn't think about him again until he sped past her on a bike on campus. He'd hidden his knives well but she could see them strapped to his leg, out in the open like an idiot would do.
He must've found the vampire nest. All he probably knew was that they'd be killed by decapitation. He was going to get himself killed.
She felt an odd kinship with the monsters, but Damon's death would only embolden them, and the last thing she wanted was hunters in her town.
Just great, she thought. Babysitting the baby hunter.
This was not how she wanted to spend her weekend.