Damned if I Do (3 page)

I turn on my heel and head down the alley towards the direction of my car.

Jude keeps pace with me while I try to ignore him. "Come on, Harker," he says, not even breathless despite the fact that I'm nearly running. "If you let in a little glamour, it will make you feel better."

"No, it wouldn't. That's crossing the line."

He pouts. "You're always so serious."

I have to be, don't I?

I suck in a deep breath. "What would make me feel better is if you would help out every once in a while. One of the vampires threw me into the wall and dislocated my shoulder." My cheek where the male vampire punched me and my right shoulder throb as a reminder.

"You had it under control."

So he’d been watching me.

"And I lost the lead."

"There will be more. We will find Anthony, I promise you." He stops, and the abruptness causes me to stop as well. Damn, he knows me too well. "Speaking of, how's the scar?" The playful tone is gone from his voice.

His gaze is on my left wrist, where I was bitten five months ago. Red, angry welts peek out from underneath my hoodie sleeve. The scar goes all the way up my arm to my shoulder, a testament to the war that’s raging inside my body as the vampire blood wreaks havoc.

When Anthony combined his blood with my Harker blood, he infected me with a virus that is gradually killing me. It’s not a surprise. Whenever my ancestors have been bitten and turned by vampires, they died a slow, agonizing death.

It’s one of the quirks of being a bit different than human, I guess.

I shove the sleeve down to hide the evidence of my demise. "It's fine."

Heat flushes my cheeks at my lie and I resume my near-jog. I can’t get away from him. He appears in front of me, blocking my way in the least threatening way possible, which at this point still feels too dominating. I set my jaw and cross my arms.

"It's
fine
," I insist. Yet, even now, I can't stop the shudder that goes down my spine.

He knows not to push it. That it has stressed me out. When he speaks next, it throws me off guard in a different way. "You look as though you've seen a ghost."

I laugh bitterly. "I might have."

"What do you mean?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It obviously does matter.”

I hate that he's picking up on my distress.

"Why are you so interested?"

"I'm just trying to help."

I feel my face redden, and I can barely contain my fury. "Then do me a favor and either help harder or don't help at all." I push past him. To my relief, my car is in sight, parallel parked in front of an apartment building.

"As you wish," he replies from behind me.

I turn back to make another retort to him, but he has disappeared like he always does. Always irritating. Always too prying.

That's my life with Jude. I'm sure he's gone to whatever house he shacks up in and is working on his next lead. This kind of conversation between us is nothing new, but tonight, I do wish that it ended differently. Since becoming infected, I've pushed away all that are dear to me, including Jude on some weird level. I can’t ignore the flutter in my stomach or the quickening of my pulse when he’s near, but it can never be. After all, he’s a vampire and I’m the Harker, two things that aren’t supposed to go well together.

I have to remember to keep my distance.

What's done is done though. I know that better than anyone. Edie Mina Harker was never meant to have a happy ending.

I open the door to my Lancer and turn the key in the ignition. The Clash greets me, keeping me company on my lonely trek back to Austin.

Jude

She probably thinks I’m an asshole. I don’t blame her, not really. Regardless of who I want to be, there’s no escaping what I am. I’m most certainly a vampire, no matter how much I want to be something else.

And vampire equates to asshole, any way you slice it.

All I’d been trying to do was to make her forget, even if momentarily, all the shit that she has on her shoulders. I can’t even imagine what she’s going through. Her face looked so tired and overwhelmed I wanted to offer her a bit of respite. A little glamour would have helped ease that pain. Then she storms away, telling me to fuck off. It’s kind of fun to push her buttons sometimes, but I know that I crossed the line with her tonight.

I only wanted to help.

Thing is, Edie Harker is fiercely independent. She may say that she wants my help, but she really doesn’t. I know that if I help out too much, she’ll become skittish like a terrified pup and run away. I don’t want that to happen. Not when I know I
can
help her behind the scenes. If she was ever really in danger, I would have stepped in. Being the Harker, she had everything under control, dislocated shoulder and all.

I have to remind myself that I can scare her off with glamouring her or reminding her too much that I’m the very thing she hunts. That boundary is now abundantly clear.

I’d heard of the Harkers long before I ever met Edie, which is relative in vampire terms. Fifty years is a short amount of time when you have an eternity as a measuring stick.

My first memory is waking up on a cot in a Chicago hospital one night in 1968, a John Doe with a horrible hit to the head that permanently marred my forehead. “Hey Jude” from the Beatles was playing on the loudspeaker, so I thought someone was speaking directly to me. Hence the name. I have no idea who or what I was before that. All I knew was that I had a feral hunger that I needed to address.

I escaped from the hospital and into the night, terrified of the overwhelming urges, terrified that I was going to kill someone. I did; my victim was a homeless man that was too drunk to tell me no before I started.

The thought of it still haunts my dreams.

After trying to reintegrate myself into society, I quickly learned about the Harkers. Every vampire uses them as a reason to not stray too far towards our instincts to kill. Or, in the case of more fearless vampires, the Harkers are used as a reason to not get caught killing humans.

I never had to worry about it. After that initial, terrifying night of waking up and killing a homeless man, I didn’t want to lose control like that again. Only willing hosts, blood bags, or animal blood. Not the best diet, but it’s sustainable, which is more than I deserve.

Self-loathing is a terrible thing. Good thing I don’t have a reflection, because I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror. Pain is the only currency that I understand. Days no longer matter.

That was, until I met her.

When one Harker dies, it ripples through the vampire community. I may not be the most active or popular member, but in fifty years, I’ve heard of six Harkers dying prematurely. The last one that died was significant, because the general consensus was that Anthony was behind the attack. That he’s planning something big.

I’ve never met the fucker, but I do know that Anthony is like a powerful mob boss. He operates in the darkest corners of the vampire community, an exclusive group within a sect of society that requires you to be undead. You don’t want to mess with him if you value your extended vampire life.

Well, I don’t value my life, so that’s not a problem.

You could say I was intrigued about why Anthony had decided to make a move now, out of all the times in the past. Hell, I even attended the late Harker’s funeral during the daytime, which is a risky move for a vampire. To this day, I still don’t know why I did it. Yet that’s where I met Edie for the first time.

It was raining, as if the sky itself was mourning the passing of another hunter. I stuck to the shadows, wearing a trench coat that shielded my skin from the sun. If you want to remain hidden from humans, it’s startlingly easy. They don’t look at you if you don’t think you’re significant. And I used a little glamour for those around me so they didn’t notice. It worked for the most part.

A man in black with a toddler was mourning over the freshly dug grave as they lowered the casket into the ground. The Harker’s husband and daughter maybe? Was the toddler the newest Harker?

I’d hoped not. That’s some fucked up shit. No one ever imagines that Harkers start out small, helpless. Like the rest of us.

Then I saw a fragile-looking young woman sitting on the muddy ground on the crest of a hill overlooking the procession. Her hair was dyed blue, and her vintage black dress was dirty from sitting on the ground without an umbrella. She was soaked to the bone. Her left wrist was bound in gauze all the way up to her elbow. Even from a distance, I could smell the infection in her blood.

She looked…desolate. Without direction. Without hope.

“You’re going to catch your death out here, Harker,” I said to her.

She whirled her head at my voice. She wasn’t just the Harker. She was…pretty. Beautiful even. She’d apparently been so deep inside her own thoughts she didn’t notice me coming up to her. She shook herself with a bitter laugh.

“Wow,” she said, her voice naturally raspy in a way that stirred my heart in ways I didn’t know it could. “I hadn’t expected to see a vampire today. Are you here to kill me too?”

The question stung a bit, but I suppose it was warranted after everything she’d been through.

“I’m here to say hi.”

“Hi?” she repeated sarcastically.

I grinned at her despite my reservations, despite the chasm between us. I am, after all, a vampire and she is the Harker. She didn’t really respond to my smile, instead looking as sad as when I first came up to her.

“Yes, hi. I’m Jude.”

“Jude,” she repeated, and my assumed name sounded wonderful inside her mouth. “I’m Edie. Uh…” Her eyes faded. “I’m the Harker, I guess.”

I’d have done anything to make her smile in that moment. I don’t know why I offered it, but it popped out before I could stop it. “It seems like you need some help.”

I could smell the infection on her, the bad reaction between her blood and whatever vampire blood was running through her system. It would corrupt her body until it was no longer hers. It was such a shame.

“
You
want to help
me
?” she asked. “Why?”

I cleared my throat, really wondering what I was getting into. “Because I can figure out how to get Anthony for you.”

My words made her scramble to her feet. “Anthony?” she demanded, a little color from anger blushing her cheeks. “You know Anthony? Where the fuck is he?” She was ready to march off right then and kill him, even in her weakened state.

Her face fell when I said, “I don’t know. But I promise I will help you in any way I can. And that I’ll help you stay alive as long as possible to do that.”

She looked at me suspiciously, as if wondering how I knew she was dying. Finally, the minutes ticked by, and she nodded. “All right. What do I have to lose?”

That was five months ago. And every lead I’ve been able to find has turned out to be a dead end. Thing is, no one wants to be the first to really talk about Anthony for fear of retaliation. These two vampires tonight had been seen with him a week ago in Houston, so he is close by. I gleaned that information from an obscure source. After these two vampires died, I’m sure that any other prospective source won’t divulge any more information.

Tonight, as I watch Edie’s car drive off from the parking lot to make the trek up to Austin, I curse under my breath. Why couldn’t one of the vampires tonight have coughed up at least a location or another name? Why does everything turn out to be a disappointment?

I take out my phone and send a text to some friends asking about any possible lead. I need answers, and need them quickly.

Edie’s getting worse, I can tell. The infection is spreading and she’s running on empty. She even looked like she had seen a ghost, and that frightened me. I’m surprised that she still works with me, though possibly she won’t anymore after the glamour debacle. For that, I am glad. Happy even. Because at some point, I realized a terrible thing.

I’m in love with a dying woman.

Who hates my kind.

Edie

While driving home, I make the mistake of checking my voicemail on the off-chance that anyone has actually called me.

In the past five months, I've pushed away everyone because of my impending death. I don't want them to get hurt. As a result, I've lost all of my friends, and my on-again-off-again relationship with my boyfriend Mike is forever marked as "off-again".

I forget how much it stings to hear remnants of my old life.

"Hey, Edie, this is Sam," my once-best friend's voice comes through the loudspeaker on my phone.

She sounds hesitant, like she expects me to reach through the phone and yell at her. After the last time we talked in person, no wonder. She's been the best friend that I've had since our first day at kindergarten. Now, even though I’ve tried pushing her away because I don’t want to hurt her when I die, she still tries keeping me in her circles. The last time we talked, I exploded and yelled at her to leave me alone. She tried calling me after that, tried stopping by, but I no longer answered her phone calls. They got more and more infrequent, until they eventually stopped.

The last time I heard from her was about two months ago.

Why am I listening to this tonight of all nights?

"I don't know what you're up to these days," Sam continues, her voice careful and emotionless, "but there's a party tomorrow at Jay's and if you aren't busy, maybe you could come along too. Or not," she adds. “I'm not pressuring you to do anything, I just thought it would be fun seeing you.”

The silence that follows feels empty, a cavernous feeling I have in my chest. My jaw is clenched so hard, the veins in my temples feel as if they might burst like a frozen water main. I want to hug my best friend and tell her everything. Tell her that she still means the world to me. She doesn’t know that I come from a long line of vampire hunters and that five months ago, I had to take up the mantle of being one. Maybe it would make sense to her. Maybe we could be friends again.

Maybe she’d run like hell was on her heels.

I squash the hope. I’ve been a bitch to her in an effort to protect her.

"Edie," Sam says after what feels like an eternity, "I hope you're doing well. And that you're happy. I really do. Call me if you're coming. Bye."

The voicemail ends and when I get the message to save or delete the message, I take a deep breath and hit delete  Rather than hear any more messages, I end the call. I cover my mouth with my hand to cover up my sobs.

It's okay. It's for the best.

It certainly doesn't feel that way.

I look at the phone for a brief, crazed second and wonder if I should call Mike, my ex-boyfriend, for some company tonight. He’d probably be up for it too. He’s not a bad guy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but at twenty-four, he is without direction in his life. We’re both headstrong and butted heads for those periods that we were dating.

I desperately want to feel something other than pain, even if it’s a fake kind of love. I won’t get many more chances before I die.

Jude’s face pops into my head, and for some reason, I blush. Why would he come into my thoughts now? Probably as a distraction, a reminder to not get tangled up with Mike again.

I press my lips into a fine line and toss the phone into the passenger seat. Mike will appreciate me not drumming up old feelings, even though he’ll never know it.

God, I’m pathetic.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost,
Jude had said. Boy, did he hit the mark in more ways than one. I’m remembering the ghosts of what I used to be.

Thing is, I never wanted to be
The
Harker. Sure, I've held a stake ever since I was old enough to not hurt myself with it. My mother had me trained in martial arts and weapons training for most of my life. But I was never meant to be the Harker. That was always supposed to be Meghan’s bag, who would pass it onto her daughter when she was old enough and strong enough, who’d pass it on to her daughter, and so on.

I was supposed to be the spare.

Yet, when Meghan died, I became the Harker, as the power and the sword is immediately passed onto the next-strongest in the family who will carry on her legacy. When I woke up two days after the attack, I found out that I was the next one. No one had to tell me that Meghan was dead. I knew because I simply
was
The Harker. And you can imagine my surprise when I summoned Glimmer for the first time, on accident.

We’ve now been whittled down to two descendants, my three-year-old niece and me. And I’m not going to be around much longer.

My options are to either find a cure, which isn’t going to happen, or I can kill the bastard that killed Meghan.

Of course, I choose revenge. I’m trying to find Anthony. Sure, I have some people doing research for me to find a cure, though I doubt anything will come out of it. I can die easier if I know Anthony isn’t a threat to my niece.

It's four in the morning by the time I finally pull into the driveway of my house on the north side of Austin. Technically, it's not my house, but Meghan's and my brother-in-law's place where I've been living since I was fifteen. With Meghan gone and Graeme raising their daughter by himself, I can't leave them alone.

I turn off the car and, despite the lateness of the hour, take another cigarette out and light it up while Trent Reznor continues to sing about every day being exactly the same. Graeme doesn't let me smoke in the house, yet with my nerves as frayed as they are, I have to have one last smoke before I head in for the night. I should've packed my stash in the car, but I hate driving across the state with it. Pot would really help to mellow me out right now.

A single light illuminates the living room windows of the two-story house. Despite protesting my begrudging choice in extracurricular activity, Graeme cares whether I make it home every time I go out on a hunt. After Meghan's death, he's become overly paranoid and protective, especially when it comes to Amelia. It isn't without good reason, but it's still a source of stress for me to deal with.

To be honest though, I'm actually glad he's awake. I feel like after my drive and what happened earlier, I could use contact with another human being, one who isn't a vampire or a ghost or my ex-boyfriend. Even though Graeme isn’t exactly my biggest fan.

Should I tell him that I saw Meghan's ghost
? I frown at the thought, wondering if I would want to hear something like that if I were him.

I decide not to. It would upset him. We’re already not on friendly terms, so I don’t want to rock the boat.

I stub the cigarette in the ashtray. My hands aren't shaking anymore, so that's at least one good sign. I paste a smile on my face and prepare to act like nothing happened. Because if I indicate otherwise, it's going to be another argument with him. He thinks I should see a doctor about my scary wound and my sickness and get on with my life and go back to school, but I know there's not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening.

I get out of the car and retrieve my duffle bag of weapons from the trunk. In it are several stakes, a few daggers and knives, a katana, a pistol, and a few hand grenades on a bandolier. A little overkill for the night, especially since I’m forever carrying Glimmer, but I learned a long time ago to always have an array of weapons stashed nearby just in case. I don't need to carry them with me, but I do need to have backup weapons in case I stumble onto something bigger.

Armed to the teeth, I still feel helpless when it comes to my brother-in-law. He and I don’t get along at all. If he hadn’t married Meghan, we’d have nothing to do with each other, so he definitely hates it when I add stress to his life by going on hunts.

I suck in a steadying breath and head inside.

Graeme's asleep in the recliner, looking as if he did so with a frown on his face. At thirty-three years old, he's already been through way too much, more than what normal humans go through. All because he married into my family and took my sister’s last name.

How many times has he fallen asleep on that chair waiting for my sister to come home? How long did he wait for us on Christmas Eve, the night she died?

Graeme used to be a bit better looking when he and Meghan first hooked up, yet he still has that boyish charm on his face, looking like an aged choir boy. He's put on a bit of weight recently, but I think that's from the stress of raising their daughter alone.

He opens his eyes, studying me with a fuzzy gaze. "Hey," he says. “Your face…”

I touch my swollen cheek. “I got a little too close to a vamp tonight. It’s no big deal.”

He looks like he wants to say something more, then his face crinkles into a disapproving scowl. "You smell like smoke again."

"I smoked in the car, not in the house, like you asked." I cross my arms and lean on the doorjamb. "You should be in bed."

It's like we're a married couple staying together for the kids when it's clearly not working out for us. There's a huge chasm between us, one that has been growing ever wider since Meghan's death. I’m sure on some level he blames me for her death.

"Amelia worries about you when you're out," he answers. He yawns and stretches in his recliner. "I told her I'd stay up and watch for you."

My heart melts at the mention of my niece. She was worried about me? Small wonder, considering everything. I remember lying awake at night, waiting for my mom to come home. And then one night, she didn't…just like Meghan.

I offer Graeme a sad, small smile in return.

His eyes must have fully adjusted because he grimaces at my appearance. "You're covered in blood again."

I didn't notice earlier, probably because I was so freaked out about seeing Meghan. It's not
that
bad; most of it blends in with my dark hoodie and jeans. If this is what he considers "covered in blood”, he'd be shocked at how much can be involved when you kill a lot of vampires.

"My shoulder was dislocated again," I say. Graeme rolls his eyes; this is not an uncommon occurrence.

"Did you set it?" he asks.

He’s the one who showed me how to do it, which has saved my ass on more than one occasion.

"Of course."

"There's Aleve in the kitchen."

I nod gratefully and walk over to the medicine cabinet in the kitchen. I pull out the bottle and pop two pills, chewing them thoughtfully and hoping the medication will hit my bloodstream faster. They say it's bad for your liver, but I'm not thinking long term at the moment and time is kind of important for me.

"How's the scar?" Graeme asks.

Reflexively, I cover it up with my hoodie sleeve as if he can see it.

"Same old, same old," I say in a strained, lighthearted tone. It's the answer I give him every time, because I don't want him to freak. "I think the infection might be slowing down."

I've never been a good liar and tonight is no exception. He doesn't question me about it though, for which I am thankful.

"Did anything happen?" Graeme asks.

"No."

Another lie. I don't want to talk to him about seeing Meghan. I don't want to divulge anything that could be used as a reason to put me in an insane asylum. I also don't want to hurt him anymore than he already is.

"I'm going to bed," I announce when the silence between us stretches too long.

"Do you have work tomorrow?"

"Yeah." I'm not looking forward to it, especially with how tired I'm feeling.

"Are you going to be able to make it?"

"I should."

My day job at the coffee shop isn't what you'd call a rewarding career. I used to be studying pre-law in college, but with everything that happened, I don't see a point in studying if I'm dying. For now, I need to help pay my bills and make as small of an impact on Graeme's checking account as possible.

I heft the duffle bag and walk up the stairs.

"Put away the weapons," Graeme calls up after me. "I don't want Amelia finding them in the morning."

"On my way there."

My black cat mewls plaintively at the top of the stairs and I give her an absent pat. She pins her ears back as if she's scrutinizing me up and down.

"Nice to see you too, Purl," I say.

Purl gives me a question in her look. I turn away, unable to even meet her stern gaze. I can take shit from my brother-in-law. I can't take it from my cat too.

I unlock the door to the spare bedroom, the one where we keep all of the Harker relics. Centuries of weapons, journals, and memorabilia are housed in here. Swords, guns, vials of holy water, creepy old documents, you name it. There's even a black leather, full-armored suit that I could wear on my hunts, although I never do. Meghan used to wear it for theatrics, and while she and I are a similar height and size, it feels like I'm wearing someone else's skin if I put it on.

I've been in here for so many hours, poring over journals and writings to see if there are any cures for my illness. I've carted off books to my Aunt Tessa Sedgewick, a distantly-related aunt of mine who lives in Barton Creek with her teenaged son Carl. Being a bit of a Harker historian, Aunt Tessa has a touch of supernatural power, but she’s best for researching and finding little nuggets among pages of information.