Whiskey, Vamps, and Thieves (Southern Vampire Detective #1) Page 2

  Whatever that Veiler was, it was more powerful than anything Mercer had encountered in his over three hundred years.

  In the next blink, Darkness was gone.

  The night smelled of honeysuckle, blood, and cloves.

  Chapter 1

  Scarlett

  23 years later

  Like marching black ants, we filed through the door. Me at the lead, the officers at my back, all guns trained on the monster standing over the bed of the nearly deceased. Eleven years of following one false lead after another, after another, until finally, finally we got the son of a bitch.

  “Stand down, monster!” I hissed with my gun aimed unerringly at his chest.

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl, so that it felt as if we were trapped in a drop of eternity. My vampire senses were honed to a fine razor’s edge as it was, but it seemed as though I had all the time in the world to absorb the details of our final standoff.

  The Veiler I called the bogeyman stared at me with madness in his dead-eyed gaze. The skin he wore was a peeling, decaying thing.

  His metamorphosis was upon him. I grinned and wet my lips. For years I’d tracked the monster, vowing to myself that there’d be no more deaths, no more nightmares of a creature so monstrous he looked like a thing dragged from the deepest depths of Hell itself.

  I’d never gotten so close to him before, catching only quick glimpses before he’d vanish into the ether once again.

  He looked nothing like the woman he’d been five years ago. Then he’d had exotically browned skin the color of deepest umber, with milk-chocolate eyes and thick nut-brown hair.

  Today he was the color of a sun-ripened peach, with hair that was frosty silver at his temples and peppered throughout with what once must have been an alluring shade of spun gold and bronze. His eyes, which once had been blue, looked old, tired, and filled with red, bleeding veins.

  That new skin gave an impression of kindness and warmth, but I wasn’t fooled. The bogeyman could swap not only skins but also sexes. I had no idea whether he was actually a she; all I knew was, trying to get a bead on him had been nearly impossible for years. By the time I realized who he, she, or it actually was, he’d swapped out skins, and I’d had to start all over again from square one. Until today. Until Teresa—my favorite pink-haired Brownie—had pointed me in the direction of the hospital.

  “Get on your knees, bogeyman,” I said slowly, taking time to enunciate each word so that there was no doubt about the actions I wished him to take.

  The bogeyman flicked his glance back at the bed. Technically, I was pretty sure that “bogeyman” was not his real Veiler name, but that was how I thought of him— the monster hiding under the bed, the stuff of death and nightmares. I shuddered.

  And I knew that what I thought I was seeing was impossible. I knew there was no way that his eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. That his sadness weighed his shoulders down with such sorrow that even I felt crushed by it.

  It was impossible. Demons didn’t cry. Demons didn’t love.

  The bogeyman loved nothing. No one. He was a thief of the very worst sort. For him to survive, others had to die. To live on, he must kill. And yet I’d seen the girl lying on the bed, so close to death, with him before, when the bogeyman had been a woman, and it had held the hand of the child with such love and rapture glowing in her eyes.

  The last time I’d given the monster chase, she’d refused to drop the child’s hand. Refused to let her go.

  I’d thought then it was because the Veiler planned to steal her skin, to wear her. To become her.

  And yet...there the child was. Eleven years grown.

  Life support whooshed loudly in my ears. That thin chest expanded with a rush of air forced into her lungs. She was dying. But not by the hand of the thief.

  No, it was brain cancer that took her.

  All that time, the monster had guarded the girl.

  But before I allowed my heart to run away from me and imagine that there was something more to the bastard, all I had to remember was the twisted, deformed piles of gore, bile, and innards that had once been humans lying in its wake.

  Scores of dead followed the monster wherever he or she went.

  The bogeyman looked back at me. The men behind me were tense, the current of explosive danger so palpable I could taste it. One wrong move, one wrong flicker of an eyelash, and pandemonium would break loose.

  We were in a hospital. The dead and dying were all around us. We could not shoot. The police department couldn’t afford the heat. Vans were parked outside. News crews, who’d listened in on our private chatter, had realized we’d finally closed in on the serial killer known in the newspapers as the Skin Walker.

  I could hear choppers circling. One wrong move and it would all be plastered across live television. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

  The bogeyman’s thin, peeling lips twisted into a ghost of a smile, and it seemed he knew it too.

  That was when I noticed the window behind him. The way he’d positioned his body between it and us.

  Shit.

  I shook my head. “Don’t you even fucking think about it. Get on your knees, hands in the air.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and the voice sounded as dead and withered as him. “I don’t mean to be so evil. I’m so, so sorry.”

  But those words weren’t for me. He’d never once torn his eyes away from the fragile girl lying on the bed. The rhythm of her heart was slowing, the beeps in between taking longer and longer.

  The bogeyman swallowed hard. Then his eyes flashed to mine, and I knew again what I saw was impossible—the broken, hurt, and desperate gaze of a Veiler at the end of his rope.

  I blinked.

  “I’m not as bad as you think I am,” he said brokenly, as though pleading with me to understand.

  I felt the movement of the men behind me. They were ready to pounce. News crews or not, if I didn’t stop it, soon there could be bloodshed, a shoot-out with innocent lives lost.

  It couldn’t happen.

  The bogeyman backed up a step.

  I snarled. “Stand. The. Fuck. Down!” I barked the words that were mingled with both rage and fear.

  Fear that somehow I’d gotten things all wrong. Fear that I didn’t understand everything that was going on. Fear that there was so much more to everything than I knew.

  His fingers twitched, and I knew by the set of his jaw that he’d just made up his mind about something.

  Sometimes it came in handy that I no longer had a heart that beat unless I’d just drunk new blood. Without a beating heart, I suffered no surge of adrenaline. No sweaty palms or heavy breathing. I was cold as ice as I said, “I’ll end you, monster. Just effing dare me.”

  I pulled the hammer back on the revolver. The sound of it was like an explosion in the unnatural, near silence of the room.

  He blinked, not looking afraid so much as shattered. In so much pain that it was tangible. He swallowed hard, and his eyes sought and found the slight female whose heart hadn’t beat for the past thirty seconds.

  “Always,” he whispered, and I knew then it was all over. I’d waited too long, vacillating with my decision not to use deadly force, that I’d lost him again.

  The bogeyman shed his flesh, moving so fast even I had a hard time tracking his movements. He was mostly a blur of shadow and lights.

  The men behind me grunted, roaring and screaming that he was getting away. The scratchy glide of a finger sliding through the gun to the trigger was like a drumbeat in my ears.

  I made a decision. I twirled on my feet just as the glass behind me shattered and the bogeyman moved to make his escape. We were seventy feet up. A jump from there would kill any human. But not a Veiler.

  Even Veilers weren’t immune to feeling pain, though. That jump would break bones at the very least. Slow him down enough for us to get him.

  I rushed the captain of the SWAT team and batted the pistol out of his hand, snatching it from midair and growling at h
im with my eyes glowing a vibrant crimson. Violence always brought out the monster in me.

  “Not in here, Stevens,” I barked, then I turned my demonic gaze on the rest of them, ignoring the looks of hostility staring back. “We’ve got the perimeter circled, choppers in the sky. He won’t get far. Chase him down.”

  As the well-oiled machine they were, they turned as one and raced out the door and down the corridor. But I didn’t move.

  I stared at the girl on the bed. The monitor had flatlined. The human was gone. Why did I do it? Why did I freeze up?

  I’d had him in my sights. I was a good enough shot that I could have taken him out with no other loss of life. Feeling numb, I clenched my jaw as I walked up to the bed and ran my fingers up the cold flesh of her arm.

  The bogeyman had shown his humanity today, and I hadn’t known what to do about it. My nostrils flared as my chest began vibrating, the enormity of my actions beginning to fall upon me.

  I’d fucked up today. The men had looked at me with reproach because they knew it too.

  The bogeyman was a monster. And yet I’d let his humanity sway my convictions. I’d let him go. My fingers brushed against a soft blue jean fabric. The girl should have been in a hospital gown. She’d been admitted two weeks ago.

  And yet her hair looked nut-brown and supple, as though it’d been brushed frequently. Her skin, though thin and pale and bursting with vivid green veins, was clean and smelled freshly scrubbed.

  He’d been tending to her lovingly. With care and devotion. Why?

  I continued my idle trek up her shoulder toward my final destination, the delicate golden chain around her neck.

  Death left a calling card if one knew where to look for it. I was a vampire, but I was an empath too. Any moment that left a powerful impression on a soul could sometimes be etched into an item on or near their person.

  Morbid curiosity got the better of me.

  I should have been out there with my men, tracking the monster down. Not in here, not taking a reading off the dead. But the hospital was in chaos. Nurses and doctors aware of the manhunt weren’t tending to their patients as they should have been. They were milling the halls and gossiping, trying to spot the monster, hoping to see a shoot-out.

  Humans said they didn’t like death, but they did. They liked being able to tell the story, liked being able to say, “I was there. I saw it all.”

  And so no one came in here, no one came to turn off the blaring machines that indicated a soul had just been untethered from its earthly body.

  I had to know.

  Biting my bottom lip hard, I wrapped my fingers around the small Black Hills Gold locket. Immediately the impression hit me like a fist to the gut.

  Not fear. Not loathing. Not rage, pain, passion, or anger. Or even wrath.

  No, only one impression surrounded me—pure, unadulterated love. The type of love someone would search a lifetime for.

  I gasped, my hands shaking violently. They shook so hard that I dropped the gun to the bed and swallowed, my stomach churning and tossing violently from the vision that had revealed all I’d needed to know.

  The sudden crack and boom of several guns and the whir and whish of helicopter blades shook me from my daze. Blinking wildly, I looked around. Footsteps sounded loudly down the hall.

  Only then did I notice my eyes were leaking. Vampires didn’t cry. We leaked blood, and mine was tracking down both cheeks. Sniffing and with a throat clogged with even more tears, I did something I knew I shouldn’t have. I tore a strip of cloth off the girl’s sleeve.

  That same wave of love threatened to knock me flat on my ass. The scrap wasn’t long or big, but I fisted it tight in my palm.

  The door was tossed open, and it wasn’t doctors or nurses standing there but CSI come to gather crime scene evidence.

  Paul—a ruddy-cheeked man of thirty with a shock of vivid, naturally red hair—cocked his head as he looked at me.

  “Scarlett? What are you—” He sounded confused, and I flinched, because I shouldn’t have been in the room. I should have been out there, with the rest of the Silver Creek Police Department.

  Without saying another word, I rushed past him and out the door, ignoring all the curious glances. I’d screwed up, and I knew it. There was no coming back from that. My career was over.

  No doubt there’d be an investigation, and I’d likely be told that I couldn’t have known, couldn’t have seen what would happen, but I had. I had, and I’d chosen to allow it, anyway.

  I’d let the monster go.

  Tonight, I would turn in my badge. I couldn’t be a detective anymore. I’d been sensing that awful disquiet in my mind for some years, the feeling that I could no longer remain impartial to the law. To black and white with no deviations in between.

  I should have hung it up years ago, but I hadn’t. Because of my partner. Because of Carter.

  Carter would hate me. He’d despise me and call me a coward for what I was about to do, but I had to do it.

  I clutched the small prize tucked in my fist and ran.

  My life as a detective for the Silver Creek PD was over. And I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or not. All I knew was, I was never going to be the same again.

  Chapter 2

  Scarlett

  Present Day

  The wheels on the bus go round and round...

  The strains of the children’s song played through the night, the words eerie and breaking me out in gooseflesh when confronted by the grisly deaths before me. A silver SUV was flipped on its side, the passenger door ripped off its hinges. A woman was still strapped into her seat belt. Red, curly hair once must have fallen in soft waves around her slender shoulders, but right then it was matted with dried blood. Her pale skin was bluish and starkly veined as the last of her life’s blood leaked from the giant gaping wound in her chest.

  Her heart had been ripped out.

  The driver beside her, a male, probably in his late thirties, looked pretty much the same. But they weren’t the worst.

  In the backseat were two car seats with very tiny and forever silent passengers behind them.

  I swallowed hard.

  Around me, CSI marched like yellow-slickered ants, gathering up whatever crime scene evidence they could find. They’d had to set up portable light equipment at intervals to help them see. Since it was well past the witching hour, there was little out around those wooded roads at this time of night.

  I could see fine, and I could smell even better. So much blood had been spilled tonight that the scene was making it hard for me to stay put. But I’d been called here for a reason—because of what I could see when I touched a finger to something on or near the dead.

  I shuddered, staring at the cooling corpses as an awful sense of déjà vu swept over me. It’d been several years since I’d come out to a scene like this.

  Shoving my hands into my jean pockets, I turned when I heard the snap of a twig beneath a booted foot. It was Detective Carter, my once-human partner and today...something else.

  I glanced at his face. Carter had never forgiven me for what I did. For abandoning him as I had. He’d never say it, but I knew it was true. I’d hung up my badge three years ago, suffering a crisis of faith that I still hadn’t fully recovered from.

  I didn’t expect Carter to understand that. Hell, I didn’t even understand it myself half the time. All I knew was, I still wasn’t ready—if ever—to go back to the way things had been.

  But Carter and I had a history that ran deep, and I could never completely abandon him, either. He’d called, and I’d come.

  Though I’d hung up my badge with the Silver Creek PD, my Alpha had forced me to remain as acting sheriff on Shifter territory. I hadn’t wanted to accept the position, but considering I was beholden to the Alpha, I hadn’t exactly had a choice in the matter. So here I was, because like it or not, the deaths were on His land.

  The only good thing that came of it was that I no longer had to work inside the jurisdi
ction of human courts but rather in that of Veilers. I had more flexibility where I was today. Veiler law was a lot like the Wild West. There were no rules. No courts. No protocol. If it was bad, it died. I’d tracked the bogeyman for years, learning too much about him. Learning he was more than just bad. I’d grown a macabre attachment to the monster and, as a result, hadn’t been able to do my job.

  I could never forgive myself for that weakness of character. The less I knew about a monster, the better.

  “Scarlett.” Carter reached out and shook my hand. He was one of the few humans who didn’t flinch when he did so. His grip was strong and calloused. Working hands.

  Muscular and black, with expressive caramel-colored eyes, he was wearing his typical uniform of tailored charcoal-gray slacks, a button-down shirt, and a gun holster. He was as easy on the eyes as he was on the ears. He’d aged a little since our first meeting almost a quarter century ago. His hair was lightly dusted with silver on the sides, but like any good malt whiskey, he’d only gotten better with time.

  “You ready?” he asked with the slow, curling, molasses voice of a born and bred Kentuckian.

  “As I’ll ever be.” I shrugged.

  Nodding, he turned on his heel and led me toward the vehicle.

  “Most of the evidence has already been bagged, but we left a few pieces on the bodies we thought you’d get the best hit on.”

  Vampires had no fingerprints. Myth said we had no reflection; that was entirely untrue. What we had was skin so porcelain smooth that it was nearly rocklike with no pores and no prints. I could safely handle the evidence without compromising the integrity of their investigation.

  I wasn’t going near the babies if I didn’t have to. Just the sight of them made my fangs drop. Not with hunger but with raw, primal fury at the injustice that’d been done to them.

  I’d learned to control my need to feed decades ago. But I’d have been lying if I said the slaughter wasn’t affecting me a little. It was.

  Thankfully, a balmy breeze coming from the east helped scatter the scent.

  After I walked up to the woman, I reached for the cross pendant necklace and rested just the tip of my pinky across it. Instantly I got a hit.