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He was testing me.
Now I understood that up to this point I’d been playing in the shallow end. Splashing around in the kiddy pool. Tonight Sig was going to throw me into the ocean and see if I’d learned how to swim or if the current was going to swallow me whole.
I gulped.
“C-come in,” I stammered, kicking myself for how miserable I sounded.
Straightening my posture, I sat tall and fixed a cool, calculating expression on my face. Whatever I was about to do, I wanted to give the impression I knew how to handle it. I needed my best poker face.
The door swung open, and a young man stepped into the room. All the tension melted out of me because I recognized him and knew perfectly well he wasn’t a vampire. He was human, and he was so nervous the smell of it was wafting out to fill the chamber. I could handle this, since once upon a time it had been me standing where he stood now.
A thin smile fanned across my lips, and from the corner of my eye I could see Sig watching me rather than looking at our new guest.
The man was handsome in a beat-up way. His hair was dark enough to be called black and stuck out in every direction as if it were at odds with itself. He had a few days’ worth of stubble covering his cheeks except for a jagged white line on his right cheek where no hair grew to cover an old scar. His nose had once been broken and hadn’t healed properly.
His eyes were bright blue and focused on my forehead, but his jaw was clenched with the determination of a man who wouldn’t let his fear show.
I waited for him to greet us in the appropriate manner, as I’d been trained to do when I was the council’s designated bounty hunter. When he didn’t speak, I frowned and cleared my throat pointedly.
“Good evening, Tribunal Leader Secret,” he acknowledged with a terse nod before turning to Juan Carlos. “Good evening, Tribunal Leader Juan Carlos.” When he looked at Sig, some of the fierceness faded from him. Sig, my two-thousand-year-old Finnish vampire boss, had an unusual gift for putting others at ease and was using it in spades on our visitor. “Tribunal Leader Sig,” he said almost reverently.
“Welcome, Shane.” I nodded so he would know to direct his attention to me.
Shane Hewitt was the third bounty hunter we’d hired to fill the void left by my promotion. I’d tried to convince Sig—on multiple occasions—I should be allowed to continue my work hunting rogues, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I was a huge liability now, and he needed to keep me protected in order to stop anyone else from trying to take my place at his side on the Tribunal.
There was only one way to lose this job, and that was to die. The only way to get the job was to kill someone who had it. Career advancement hadn’t been my goal when I’d decapitated the vampire who’d formerly occupied this seat, but if sitting here meant I was still alive, I’d take it.
The downside was we’d had a lot of difficulty finding someone as adept at hunting rogues as I’d been. Since I was half-vampire myself, I had the benefit
of knowing how they operated. No full-blood vampires were willing to take a job killing their brethren, so that left humans.
And humans had a bad habit of shucking off the mortal coil when a rogue vampire refused to come quietly.
Shane Hewitt had lasted longer than any of the others, though his nose had been perfect when he’d started the job three months ago. Now he looked like a barroom brawler with a bad attitude. That bad attitude must have led him astray at some point, otherwise he wouldn’t be standing in front of us now.
I knew a thing or two about the pitfalls of a bad attitude.
“What brings you before us tonight?” I hoped I sounded pretentious enough. I was remembering everything Sig, Juan Carlos and the dearly departed Daria had ever said to me and amping the smarm up a few notches.
Shane blanched, and his shoes suddenly became the most interesting thing in the room, a sure sign we weren’t going to like what he had to tell us.
Twenty bucks says unsanctioned kill, I mused. Sig smirked and the timing gave me a chill.
“Spit it out,” I insisted, after the silence had gone beyond dramatic and into awkward. If Juan Carlos could have facepalmed inconspicuously, I think he would have.
Shane jolted like I’d woken him out of a deep sleep, then crammed his fists into the pockets of his leather jacket. It was still February, so the jacket must have been a statement to make him look tough since it was worn too thin to actually keep him warm.
“I was issued a warrant to kill a vampire who was posing as a tour operator in Times Square and picking off tourists.”
I knew all about his warrants. I was here when they were issued. He was stalling. I urged him on. “And?”
“Well, I was successful.” He gave me a sheepish smile, but when someone refuses to look you in the eyes when they smile at you, the result is a little unnerving.
There was also a lingering unspoken but at the end of his sentence. I placed one of my hands on each wooden arm of the throne, and the intricate engravings dug into my palms when I squeezed. The way I was glowering at him must have indicated my impatience, because he spoke again, this time more quickly.
“I killed the vamp in front of a crowd. The wardens got most of it under control, but a few people got away without being wiped.”
Wiped. That was a new one. I guess having your memory augmented by the thrall was similar to having it erased.
