Author's Preface
Richard scrambled over to Tom's still body. His heart sank instantly Tom's head rested at a sickening, misshapen angle.
Fucking hell.
Plunging his trembling hands into Tom's vest, Richard pulled out his official Emporium seal and the worn, creased photograph of his daughter, Ruby. He sat back on his heels for a long moment, letting the heavy, suffocating reality of his partner's death set in.
Then, tightening his jaw, he scooped up Tom's shotgun and moved toward the dark gap in the floor where Penny had disappeared earlier.
"Penny!" he shouted down into the gloom.
Nothing.
"Shit... Pen!"
"Here..." her voice finally rasped.
A moment later, a hand appeared over the stone ledge, followed by her torso as she hauled herself up out of the hole. Like him, she was caked in mud, dirt, drying blood, and gray vampire scum.
Richard immediately leveled the 12-gauge shotgun straight at her chest.
Penny froze in her tracks. "What the..."
"Were you bitten?" Richard rasped, his hand steady on the grip.
"No!"
"Prove it. Strip. Arms, legs, body, and neck. Now."
"I'm not show-"
CLACK-CLACK.
He racked the shotgun with a sharp, lethal metallic click. "Now."
Penny glared at him through the mud on her face, but didn't argue. She pulled up her sleeves to reveal her arms, pulled down her collar to show her neck, lifted her top to expose her torso, and unbuttoned her trousers to check her legs. Nothing. No punctures, no blackening veins.
He let out a low, heavy sigh, lowering the barrel slightly.
"Satisfied?" she spat, pulling her clothes back into place.
"For now."
"What do you mean 'for now'?" Penny snapped, her voice trembling with anger and adrenaline. "I just nearly got naked in a freezing graveyard!"
"We'll find out for sure in a few hours," Richard said grimly, looking down at the shotgun in his hands. "Takes time for the venom to settle into your bloodstream."
"Tom?" Penny asked, her voice cracking just before a sharp sob hit her as her eyes landed on his body.
She scrambled across the damp grass toward him. "No... what?"
"We were set up," Richard said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Either by our proxy, or someone else."
Penny wept quietly, her shoulders shaking violently as she stared down at Tom's broken form. "What do we... what do we do?"
Without a word, Richard reached into his tactical harness and produced a small incendiary grenade. He knelt beside Tom, carefully placed the device onto his fallen partner's chest, and pulled the pin.
Before Penny could process what was happening, Richard grabbed her by the arm and forcefully dragged her back behind a ruined stone archway.
An instant later, a loud, sharp BANG shattered the morning air, followed immediately by a roaring wall of heat as the thermite compound erupted. White-hot flame engulfed the center of the yard, consuming stone, soil, and flesh in a blinding flash.
Richard didn't look back. He kept a firm grip on Penny's arm, hauling her through the overgrown brush as they made their way back toward the Dodge.
"Get in. We need to go," Richard grunted, slapping the side of the van.
"Go? We can't just leave him!" Penny cried, her eyes wide with shock as smoke rolled over the priory walls.
"He's dead, Pen. His body is already unrecognizable," Richard said, grabbing the door handle and locking eyes with her. "It's a hard thing to do, but it's what we all do when a colleague falls. I will grant you the same fate, and I expect the same from you if either of us falls... Understand?"
Penny swallowed hard, wiping a streak of ash and tears from her cheek. "Yes."
"Good. Now get in," Richard said, scrambling into the driver's seat. "The fire's going to attract attention."
---
The drive was suffocatingly quiet. Neither of them spoke.
Penny sat holding the photograph of Tom's daughter, staring down at the faded image.
Richard glanced across at her.
"That was taken around six, maybe seven years ago. Before the cancer."
"The what?"
"The cancer. Ruby was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer."
"He never..."
"No, he wouldn't have." Richard kept his eyes on the road. "That was her last healthy photo."
"Were you there?"
"Yep. Every blood test, every radiotherapy appointment. Even read her bedtime stories."
"I knew you two were close, but..."
"I've known Tom since he was at school. Real ladies' man, he was." A faint, sad smile crossed Richard's face. "Joined the army together. Served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then I was his best man."
Penny looked across at her. "You were really that close?"
Richard let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"Closer than brothers, sometimes."
He kept his eyes on the road, the old Dodge rattling beneath them as the priory disappeared into the distance.
"I was there when Ruby got sick. Every blood test, every hospital appointment, every round of radiotherapy. When Tom couldn't get away from work, I'd take her myself. Sat beside her bed when she couldn't sleep. Read her stories when the medication made her too tired to do much else."
"You were like her dad."
"No, I was her godfather." Richard swallowed. "Tom asked me when she was born. Told me if anything ever happened to him, I was to look after her."
Penny lowered her eyes to the photograph.
"Did you?"
"Every chance I got."
The answer came so quickly that Penny looked up again.
Richard's jaw tightened.
"Ruby fought for years. More than anyone should have to. Tom and his wife spent every penny they had trying to keep her alive. Every treatment, every specialist they could find. Didn't matter what it cost. They just wanted their little girl back."
He paused, his hands tightening around the steering wheel.
"But cancer doesn't give a shit how much you love someone."
Penny stared at the photograph. The little girl in it was smiling, her face bright and healthy, with no hint of the suffering that lay ahead.
"What happened to his wife?"
Richard was silent for several seconds.
"After Ruby died, she couldn't cope."
Penny's fingers tightened around the edges of the photograph.
"She took her own life a few months later."
"Oh, God... How?"
"She... er... Hung herself from a door." He looked sideways at her, watched as the colour drained from her face, he placed a hand near the shotgun. His eyes briefly checking her skin for any sign of darkening veins. "Tom found her."
Richard's voice had gone flat. Not cold, exactly. More like he'd told the story so many times inside his own head that the words had worn smooth.
"He lost his daughter, then his wife. Two people he'd have happily died for, gone within months of each other." Richard shook his head. "I tried to keep him together. Stayed at his place for weeks. Made sure he ate, got some sleep, didn't spend every waking hour drinking himself into oblivion."
"Did it help?"
"Some days." He gave a humorless laugh. "Other days, not a fucking chance."
The van hit a pothole. Penny steadied the photograph against her knee.
"Then came the debt."
She looked at him. "What debt?"
"Drugs. Tom had started using them to sleep. Then to get through the day. Then because he couldn't function without them." Richard glanced at her briefly. "He'd never been an addict before. Didn't matter. The people supplying him weren't interested in why he needed them. They wanted their money."
"How much?"
"Enough to get him killed."
Richard said it without drama.
"He'd borrowed from the wrong people. They weren't the sort who accepted apologies or payment plans. They gave him a deadline, and when he couldn't pay, they made it clear what would happen."
"Why didn't he come to you?"
"Pride. Shame. Take your pick. Tom could face down a man with a rifle, but admitting he was drowning?" Richard shook his head. "That was harder for him."
"So how did you find out?"
"He turned up at my place one night with a split lip and two broken ribs. Told me he'd fallen down some stairs."
Penny stared at him.
"Some stairs?"
"That's what I said."
Despite herself, she almost smiled. It vanished just as quickly.
"What did you do?"
"I asked him how much he owed. He told me to mind my own business. We had an argument. A proper one. Then he finally told me the truth."
Richard's expression hardened as the memory returned.
"I was going to get him out of it. Sell what I could, borrow the rest, whatever it took. But before I could do anything, the people he owed decided they had another use for him."
He paused.
Penny slowly turned toward him.
"Wait. What use?"
"Vampire hunting" Richard said raising his eyebrow
"Wait.. what? Drugs and Vampires?"
"Yes... the Emporium. They knew vampires not only existed. They knew where to find them, how to avoid them, and who was willing to pay to have them killed." Richard shook his head. "Turned out there was a whole world operating beneath the one everyone else saw. People who'd built businesses around things most people thought were fairy tales."
"And they offered to clear his debt if he hunted them?"
"Something like that. The first job was supposed to be simple. A small nest, a handful of fledglings. We were given the equipment, a location, and enough information to get ourselves killed if any of it was wrong."
"Were you scared?"
"Shitting myself. I did tell you, I actually threw up on my first fledgling. Right down its fucking theoat, before I aliced it open... not pretty"
"Ew" That earned the smallest, most reluctant smile from Penny.
Richard returned it for half a second.
"Tom was worse. He tried to pretend he wasn't, which made it bloody obvious. We nearly got ourselves killed before sunrise. Came back battered, covered in vampire muck, and with just enough proof to satisfy the people who'd sent us." He sighed "thats when I went and bought this" he showed her his blood streaked CASIO digital watch "and a book on stargazing, positions of the sun that type of thing"
"And the debt?"
"Reduced. Not cleared."
Penny looked at him in disbelief. "They kept him... trapped?"
"They kept us both trapped, in the beginning. Every job paid a little more. Every debt payment brought another contract. Eventually, we had enough money to walk away."
"But you didn't."
Richard looked at the empty road ahead.
"No."
"Why?"
For a moment, he didn't answer.
"Because by then we'd seen what those things did to people. Families disappeared. Kids went missing. Bodies turned up drained of blood, and the police wrote it off as an animal attack or some lunatic with a knife." He tightened his grip on the wheel. "We knew what was out there. We knew how to kill it. Walking away didn't feel like an option anymore."
Penny glanced down at Ruby's photograph again.
"And now?"
"Now it's been five years."
"Five years hunting vampires."
"Five years of getting nearly bitten, stabbed, thrown through walls, shot at, and occasionally blown up." He glanced at her. "You missed the early years. We were fucking terrible."
She gave a small, broken laugh, then looked away before it could turn into something else.
"Did Tom ever get over it?"
Richard knew exactly what she meant. "No."
The answer sat between them.
"He learned to live with it. There's a difference." Richard's voice softened. "Some days he could laugh, take the piss out of me, flirt with anything that moved. You'd think he was fine. Then you'd catch him looking at Ruby's picture when he thought nobody was watching."
Penny looked at the photograph in her hands.
"Was this the one he carried?"
"Always."
She traced the worn edge with her thumb.
"He never told me any of this."
"He didn't want pity. And he didn't want people treating him like a broken man."
"He wasn't broken."
"No," Richard said quietly. "He wasn't."
The engine growled as Richard changed gear. Ahead, the first pale light of morning stretched across the road.
Penny held the photograph against her chest. "I'm sorry, Richard."
He didn't answer straight away. His eyes remained fixed on the road, but his hands had tightened around the wheel until his knuckles had gone white. "Me too, Pen. Me too."
For the first time since they'd left the priory, his voice faltered.
Then he cleared his throat, glanced at the rearview mirror, and pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator.
"We've got a long way to go."
Penny nodded, wiping her face with the back of her hand.
Neither of them spoke again.
Between them, Ruby's photograph lay on the seat, its creased edges catching the morning light.
Five years hunting monsters.
And somehow, they'd never managed to save the people they loved most.
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