Caught in Darkness (28 page)

Swallowing again, Veronica reached
out and lightly traced her fingertips over the writing on the headstone. “I’m
sorry, Dad…but, if this goes how I want it to, then…this is goodbye.”

“Funny,” a vaguely-familiar male
voice called from somewhere behind her, “I could almost say the same thing.”

Veronica started, her head snapping
up and to the side even as she very belatedly registered the faint prickling
sensation at the base of her skull. She was just so used to it now that she
hadn’t even realized she shouldn’t have been feeling it. And then her eyes
landed on a largely-hidden figure that was leaning against the side of a tall
tombstone between her and the path to safety.

“I’m sorry,” the vampire said, “Did
I startle you? I was under the impression you could sense me.”

She wasn’t sure who this vampire
was, but it wasn’t Richards. Richards’s voice was ingrained in her memory. But
this voice wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, either. Where have I heard it before? There
was only one way to find out. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“That’s sort of insulting,” the
vampire commented without moving away from the tombstone. “I mean, you have
seen me before. Still, I suppose this is the first time we’ve actually met.”

Veronica ran through her list of
vampires-she’d-seen-but-never-met and discovered that it was rather short. And
she knew exactly who she was dealing with now. Tobias Wilson, Richards’s
apparent right-hand. Her mouth went dry and she had to swallow to manage,
“Tobias, right? You still haven’t said what you want.”

“Very good,” Tobias replied
smoothly. He vanished from sight, then, before reappearing, leaning over the
back of her father’s headstone and asking, “By the way, did Daddy Slayer help
you find the answer you were looking for? I’d hate to have interrupted the
moment.”

Veronica threw herself backwards on
reflex when he appeared within arm’s reach. In her haste she accidentally
knocked her purse over, out of reach, and sent her flashlight rolling away. And
as she opened her mouth to question his taunting words something clicked in her
head. “Oh my god,” she mumbled, her eyes wide and locked on his. Dread was
pooling rapidly in the bottom of her stomach. “It was you.”

Tobias smirked faintly and replied,
“Probably. But, just to be safe, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“You,” she began again, her body
frozen in disbelief, “you’re the one who killed him. You killed my father.”

“Ah,” Tobias replied, “yeah, that
was me.” His expression darkened even as his grin broadened and he asked
conspiratorially, “Want to know a secret? I’m the one who killed his father,
too.” He paused, grin fading, and asked, “You did know that Ronnie here was
killed on the anniversary of his old man’s death, right?”

For a moment she remained frozen. Terror
had seeped into every single muscle in her body and she could barely breathe,
let alone react. She had wanted to help find her father’s killer, it was true. And
she’d been upset to learn that she wasn’t even likely to still be alive when he
was finally caught. But it had never occurred to her that he might come after
her. How was she supposed to deal with a vampire who’d been successfully
avoiding an entire society of angry vampires for a century?

This is the monster who murdered my
father.

In an instant anger replaced the
terror and she was lunging forward before she could think better of it,
screaming, “Murderer!” She threw herself at him with every ounce of strength
she possessed, curling one hand into a fist and throwing it forward, empowered
with sixteen years of grief.

Tobias laughed and danced
backwards, out of reach, watching her nearly upend herself over the short headstone.
“Better be careful, Veronica,” he taunted. “Gregory wants you in one piece.”

Veronica struggled to rush over the
headstone, too angry to be either embarrassed or rational. “I don’t care what
he wants,” she snapped as she finally found her feet. “You’re not leaving here
until I’m done with you!”

“Until you’re
done with me?”
Tobias
asked,
a note of amused
curiosity in his voice. “Do you really think there’s anything you can do? You
can’t even touch me unless I let you.”

“We’ll see about that!” Veronica
cried, running at him.

Tobias was chuckling, and he stood
still until she was swinging again. As soon as she was committed to her punch
he ducked beneath her arm and spun around her, grabbing her wrist and yanking
her arm behind her. “You’re kind of entertaining,” he offered as he shoved her
to her knees. “But I don’t really feel like playing anymore. You’ll be coming
with me now.”

“Get off!” Veronica cried,
struggling uselessly in his grasp. His fingers were digging into her wrist and
he was straddling her now, preventing her from spinning around in either
direction.

“Oh relax,” Tobias said, suddenly
sounding bored. “I’m hardly the one you need to be worried about; I don’t even
care about what happens to you. I’m just doing Gregory one last favor.”

“Last?” Veronica repeated, the
blood slowly draining from her ears and taking with it a lot of her irrational
anger.

“Last as in ‘last before I leave’,”
Tobias clarified. He reached around her, then, and effortlessly hauled her off
of the ground. She struggled again, kicking awkwardly and attempting to roll
out of his hold, but he ignored her efforts and flipped her over his shoulder. “Try
to hold still,” he called. “I’d rather deliver you with minimal bruising.”

“Let go,” Veronica said, grabbing
hold of his shirt in an attempt to knee him in the stomach. “Let me go!”

Tobias caught her incoming knee,
shoved it back and clamped her legs against his chest tightly. When her
movement was sufficiently locked he said, “In a minute.”

Veronica gasped, the air rushing
out of her lungs as he dashed forward. Everything that she should have been
able to see from her terrible vantage point barely even counted as a blur. It
was just dark and the air was whipping her face and her stomach was trying to
roll up and out of her mouth. There was no way this was going to end well.

Chapter Sixteen

Robert’s tip was good, for which
Seth was glad. Troy Wilson had definitely been spotted ducking into an old,
long-abandoned building on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately the man Robert
had in the area could only watch one of the two exits to the building at a
time; a detail Troy seemed to have been aware of.

“This is really starting to piss me
off,”
Jasen
growled as he and Seth stepped into the
dark, musty building. The floorboards creaked beneath his booted feet,
threatening to give way and likely take the rest of his patience down with him.

It wasn’t a sentiment Seth
disagreed with, so he said nothing.
Jasen
was already
starting for the back door, intending—he assumed—to try and run their prey down
on foot, when Seth’s eyes landed on a piece of yellow lined paper. It was
tucked beneath the edge of the rotted window
frame,
just enough to keep from being blown away too easily, and it didn’t appear
nearly old or dusty enough to have been there long. “Hold on,” he called as he
adjusted course and made his way to the paper.

Jasen
stopped walking and turned enough to keep Seth in his sights but stayed silent.

Up close it was obvious that paper
was, in fact, a recent addition to the décor. And something was written on it. Seth
tugged it free as he announced, “It’s addressed to me.”

“And?”
Jasen
pushed pointedly.

Seth’s eyes skimmed the rest of the
short note as a pit formed in his stomach. “It says: ‘I’ve got a message for
you, but I can’t leave it where just anyone can find it. Go out the back and
follow the bread crumbs’.” Somewhere in the back of his mind it occurred to
Seth that the handwriting on the note didn’t match the handwriting he’d found
in Troy’s apartment. It didn’t match Richards’s writing, either, and Seth had
to wonder if Tobias had written the note instead. Tobias was the only one he
hadn’t found a good writing sample for.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,”
Jasen
grumbled as Seth finished reading. “He left you a
note to tell you he had something to tell you? That’s fucking stupid.” He spun
on his heel as he spoke and resumed his path to the back door.

Seth sighed and tucked the note
into a pocket. Once again he found he agreed with
Jasen’s
point, and later he might stop to wonder what their recurring similarities said
about him. At the moment there was still a chance to track Troy.

“Hunter,”
Jasen
called from behind the building.

Dragging his focus back into place
Seth turned and strode forward as he asked, “What is it?”

Jasen
was
kneeling in the dirt, holding something off the ground with two fingers as he
turned a frown toward Seth. “Looks like you were right.”

Seth frowned and glanced at the
lightweight object
Jasen
was holding up for
inspection. It was a light blue piece of fabric that looked suspiciously like a
woman’s shirt. And it wasn’t just any woman’s shirt, either; it was Veronica’s.

****

It felt like forever before
Veronica found herself being casually tossed onto an old, lumpy sofa. Or,
rather, what she imagined forever would feel like if it had been crammed into
the space of an instant. She had no idea how long it had really taken to get
from the cemetery to the average-sized living room they were now in. It was
hard to keep track of time—or direction or location or really anything at all—when
the night-darkened city was passing, upside down and backwards, at inhuman
speeds beneath her eyes. Her head was still spinning, and she had to swallow
more than once to assure herself that she wasn’t about to revisit her dinner.

“It’s about damned time,” Richards’s
familiar growl declared, drawing her attention to the shadowed figure now
pushing off from the far wall.

Tobias shrugged as he slipped his
hands into his pockets. “Sorry,” he offered. “She wasn’t where we thought she’d
be. I had to find her.”

“Whatever,” Richards grunted. “I
sent your idiot brother to detour them. Go meet up with him if you want, or go
get laid; I don’t really care.”

“All right,” Tobias said with a
half-nod. He turned, flashing a brief, dark smirk at Veronica before continuing
toward the still-open door they had just come through.

Veronica was trapped in a confused,
frightened silence as she watched their exchange. Is he bipolar or something? That
was not the same vampire who had captured her. The vampire in the cemetery had
been arrogantly confident and openly controlling. He’d been proud of the
terrible things he’d done and the things he probably intended to do. He was
dominant in all senses of the word. But this Tobias was none of those things. Now
his body language was subdued, his head had been slightly bowed, and he was
acting as though he was completely inferior. Is this normal?

She wasn’t afforded the time to
wonder about it, as her attention was promptly yanked back to Richards when the
vampire wrapped his hand around her elbow.

“So we meet again,” he taunted with
a sneer. He was kneeling on the couch and leaning into her personal space,
daring her to challenge him.

Her heart shuddered in her chest
and she took a breath, but she shoved her fear as far back as possible. Now was
absolutely the wrong time to let him get to her. “Let go of me!” She emphasized
her demand by trying to yank her arm out of his grasp, but he was too close and
she didn’t have the leverage or the angle she needed. All she succeeded in doing
was half-twisting her elbow.

“Oh, I will,” Richards assured her.
“Just not yet.”

Narrowing her eyes at him, she
snapped, “What do you even want with me?”

He met her glare with his own as he
replied, “What do you think? I want you dead.”

“Why?” she challenged, stalling. “Because
I dared to be eating my lunch in a public place and I have ears? Because you
didn’t choose a better venue to discuss the crime you were planning? Or because
I had the audacity to defend myself the last time you tried to kill me?”

The hand around her elbow
tightened, becoming painfully uncomfortable, and he growled low in his throat. “Maybe
it’s because you have such a disrespectful attitude,” he hissed.

Okay, so maybe it’s possible that
being snippy in this situation was a bad idea. It was just so hard to keep
inside, considering his reasoning—if she was right—was so ridiculous. And then
there was the minor detail that she hated him even more than she feared him. “I
have a disrespectful attitude?” she repeated before she could stop herself. “I
didn’t do anything wrong! You’re the murderer here, you monster.”

His glare instantly transformed
into a dark smirk and he said, “You’re right. I am the killer here. It might be
good for you to remember that.”

She swallowed her next response as
a cold chill seared through her. He had a very good point. Why did I have to
drop my purse?

“Tell me,” Richards whispered. “Do
you miss your friend? Do you want me to tell you how she died?”

Suddenly the image of Mandy’s
mutilated body flashed through Veronica’s mind and anger settled over her for
the second time that night. “How dare you!” she exclaimed, shifting all of her
weight forward and throwing herself at him without thought. Her momentum and
his poor balance sent them tumbling to the floor even as her free hand curled
into a fist and pounded on his chest. Hot, angry tears were streaming down her
cheeks. “Don’t you dare talk about
her!
”

Richards grunted when her flailing
fist managed to connect with his throat and in the next instant he’d released her
elbow and flipped them over until he was above her, one knee pressing painfully
into her stomach and one hand wrapped around her throat. “Fucking bitch,” he
snarled, his voice a little more gravelly than before, “it’s your own fault
that she’s dead anyway, so shut up and hold still!”