Solomon's Sieve (3 page)

“Vampire hunter,” he said as nonchalantly as if the answer had been insurance salesman.

She supposed he must have been attempting some sort of theatrical goth look. The style was outrageous, but those eyes were such a pale shade of blue, framed by midnight black hair and lashes, they drew her in, compelling her to look and preventing her from looking away. One could almost believe that he actually was a vampire hunter.

Gathering her composure, she smirked. “I see. You must be too shy to talk about yourself. So, let me just refer to your card then.” She picked up a white four by six index card with the number seven in bold at the top. “I see you like long walks on the beach and pina coladas.” He barked out a laugh in spite of himself. He had to give it up. Torn Finngarick was a funny guy. “Let me guess. I’ll bet you also like getting caught in the rain.”

“Yes. I’m a simple guy, easy to read. Long walks on the beach and pina coladas are my idea of fun.” Her rust-colored eyelashes swept down and to the side as she looked away. “Sooooooo. Let’s see what your card says about you.” He shuffled through cards and held one up pretending to read. “Here we are. Little Miss Sheltered McManners. For fun you like spraying with Lysol and wearing stilts. All the better to look down on other people.”

“Mr… you know, really, the most interesting thing about you is that you chose Nightsong for a fake name. I don’t need stilts to look down on you. I could be lying face down on the floor and wouldn’t have any trouble.”

One of his brows arched. “Well, well, well. Honesty. Wasn’t expecting that.”

The facilitator’s voice rang out, “One minute.”

“Sixty seconds.”
His malicious grin was sexy in spite of its intent.
“Just long enough for me to say that I’ll bet your cunt is buttoned up tighter than your sweater. I’ll bet it’s so sanitary that it doesn’t even smell like pussy. A shame because I
like
the smell of pussy. For one thing it’s honest.”

Mercy didn’t think of herself as prudish, but hearing that tirade come from the mouth of a complete stranger sitting on the other side of white linen was shocking. While she was trying to make up her mind between blushing and blanching, he decided to add one parting comment.

“You know, hives is not a good look for you.”

“Time!”

She wasn’t about to allow that to be the last thing said between them. “You’re an authority of good looks? Have you seen a mirror? When did post-apocalyptic remnant become the new GQ? You look like an extra from a zombie movie set.”

“Time!”

He glanced toward the facilitator at the front of the room, who had repeated herself, more forcefully, for
their
benefit.

“Good. ‘Cause we’re done here.” He shoved the chair back as he stood, throwing his splayed hands out in front of him to punctuate his exit like a petulant teenager who’d been wronged.

“Excellent. Because I couldn’t have stood the smell a second longer.”

Three minutes later they were still standing at table seven, locked in an argument that seemed to be spiraling into a frenzy instead of winding down. While the other would-be speed daters turned spectators looked on, the facilitator kept helplessly calling “time” and was ignored.

Finally, Raif ended it by storming out of the restaurant and walked for two blocks in dense New York City pedestrian traffic before ducking into an alley. He stopped and put his forehead on the cold composition wall of the closest building.

“Gods’ teeth, why am I
such
an asshole? A big mouth, broken asshole?”

Fingers shaking, she gathered her purse and jacket without meeting the eyes of any of the onlookers. If she’d ever been more humiliated, she couldn’t remember when. She got almost to the end of the block before bursting into tears. So much for speed dating.

She was glad it was windy and cold for the six block walk back to Columbia. People would assume the color in her face was from weather and not from crying.

CHAPTER 2

Sol in Shamayim

He could pinpoint the moment when the well-oiled machine jumped its tracks. In fact, on reflection, he sensed she was going to be trouble the minute she materialized in midair and plopped on the floor as a bloody, oozing, pile of goo. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was a harbinger of change.
Elora Fucking Laiken
. Turned things upside down and inside out and, if it ever got back to ‘normal’ after she arrived, it never stayed that way for long. Babies at Jefferson Unit! Unbelievable!

In the beginning, after she recovered from the interdimensional journey and was given conditional freedom of the facility, he was resistant as stone to the idea of using her in Hunter Division. The idea of a female knight in Hunter Division would remain eternally ludicrous even though the gifts she acquired through transition to a new dimension outfitted her perfectly for the job of slayer.

There was only one thing that might change his position on the matter. It just so happened that the one thing was what they had to have – the help of a very old vampire. Luckily the vampire in question, Istvan Baka, took a fancy to the young lady. First he wanted a private audience, private being a highly relative term given that his every move was monitored by Knights of the Black Swan through a glass enclosure.

After he signed a contract to act as consultant, the vampire more or less embarrassed Sol into using Laiken’s unique talents by pointing out that she was very likely Black Swan’s most powerful asset. Yes. That’s exactly what he’d said during the same phone call when he’d asked for cleanup because the girl had just taken out a vampire. Alone. Without any training. With a toothpick!

After that he couldn’t really say no without looking like a chauvinistic ass wipe. So he let her replace Sir Landsdowne as fourth member of B Team. He’d hoped the three remaining members would draw a line, but two of them gave her an “up” vote.

For a little while it seemed like it might work out okay. Then Sir Hawking was disabled in a confrontation and she responded rash and ready, which got her eaten and infected by vampire. Well, that may have been overly harsh. No one asks to be eaten. Exactly.

Her partial conversion to vampire made for a fairly tense twenty-four hours, but it led to a miracle of science, courtesy of Laiken’s blood and Monq’s brilliance, Or so they believed.

Certainly the advent of a vaccine that would cure the vampire virus was heralded as the most important development in Black Swan history and none of them doubted it. Why would they? It seemed that centuries of dedication would resolve the vampire part of the organization’s activities with a feel-good win. Something no one would have ever thought possible.

It was The Order’s first ever cause for real celebration. Sol would never forget the slogan that popped up right away. “Shoot to cure.”

Of course it benefitted Baka. The vaccine gave the old vampire a new humanity card. Twice. No cause for complaint there. He was even tapped to head up the task force to convert hunters to healers, another great Vaccine Era slogan. He formed a network of rehabilitation and treatment centers for vampire who had been successfully reconverted to human.

The original target date of how long it should take to effectively stamp out vampirism was calculated based on the best guess estimate of the number of vampire, number of active hunters, and the amount of vaccine being produced and dispersed.

At first there was a marked decline in vampire activity. So much so that Jefferson Unit was quickly and efficiently reconceived as a research and training facility. Too quickly and efficiently in Sol’s opinion.

Of course J.U. had always been a research and training facility, but it had also been one of the crown jewels of the Black Swan Hunters Division, home to the most elite slayers on the planet. There was such a certainty that the vaccine was going to be the end of the vampire plague. The rush to reorganize and redistribute resources left Jefferson Unit feeling like a ghost town. The hunters and all the staff who supported them, including medical, were transferred. The facility felt sad, abandoned, and retired.

If that was the whole story, you might be inclined to say that it was a good time to die. And, if that was the whole story, he might have been inclined to agree. But he was privy to information about the progress of the “Great Vampire Inversion”. That was the name given to the era of revolution, when humanity would free itself from the most dangerous and most rampant of the monsters that make prey of people. It was a phrase that later mocked the hope it implied and made them seem childlike in their naïve and gullible rush toward belief in the vaccine as a fait accompli.

The reports had come in during his time away from work with Farnsworth. Sol had been called to Edinburgh for an urgent meeting and had to leave Farnsworth where she was and not knowing whether he’d make it back before the clock ran out on their vacation time. As a fellow employee of Black Swan, there was no question that she understood, but that didn’t make it feel less like leaving her on her own in the middle of their long-planned romantic interlude was a shitty thing to do.

Farnsworth though? In Sol’s opinion she was a great dame. She didn’t make him feel worse by looking disappointed, didn’t even mist up when he kissed her goodbye. The first ten years she worked at J.U. she saved most of what she earned by living in the small onsite apartment that came with the job. With food, utilities and housing included, she was able to sock away enough to make her modest dream come true.

She bought a precious yellow cottage on the beach at Cape May and spent whatever needed to be spent to keep it maintained to perfection. It was less than a two hour drive away from Fort Dixon, but it was a world away. Every chance she got she retreated to her little bit of private heaven.

When the question arose about where they would go for a romantic escape, she suggested her getaway.

“Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate a cheap date as much as the next guy, but I’ve got a lot of unused vacation funds. I could take you anywhere you want to go. Do anything you want to do.”

She gave him that special smile that never failed to make him feel like he was made of pure gold. Made his cock feel just about that hard, too.

She turned her chin up at an angle and kept a hint of that smile on her lips as she said, “Can I have a rain check on that? Next time I might just rise to the challenge of spending all your vacation stash, but this time I’d like to just hide you away and have you all to myself.”

Damn if that didn’t make Sol fall even more in love with her. Before that he would have said he couldn’t love her more, but she just kept stretching the limits. Like she was bringing a withered heart back to life and gradually filling it with healthy fluids, making it swell bigger and bigger.

“Whatever you say, beautiful.” She saw both love and amusement on his face when he reached up and tucked a stray tendril behind her ear. “Have me all to yourself, huh? I like the way you think.”

When the big day came, Sol borrowed Storm’s silver convertible Porche roadster. Storm had never driven it to California because he didn’t need it there. It had been parked in the underground at J.U. for months without use, but it turned over when Sol pressed the ignition. There were two seats in the car and not much room in the trunk, but most of what Farnsworth would want and need was already at her cottage.

It was too cold to put the top down, but convertibles are romantic even when the tops are up, wind noise and all. They have a way of making a vehicle's occupants feel young. And sexy.

On the trip down they chatted easily about places where they’d been, people they knew in common, and bucket list items even though it was still early in life for them to be composing bucket lists. When they were twenty minutes away, they made a grocery stop at the last supermarket en route. They bought more than the space left in the trunk, but Farnsworth was a good sport and laughed about sharing the passenger seat with one of Sol’s duffels between her legs.

It was cool but sunny when they arrived and the March wind was doing its reputation proud. Sol pulled the car underneath the house between thick weathered support pillars. There was a store room and guest room next to the carport, but the two floors she used as real living space began twelve feet above ground level.

He carried groceries and bags up the stairs while she opened up the house. That involved engaging the motorized storm shutters, lighting the pilot and turning on the heat plus her favorite part of the ritual - affixing a unicorn flag to its holder on the deck.

“There,” she said, turning toward Sol with a grin. “Now we’re officially in residence.”

He stared at the flag for a minute. “A unicorn?”

She laughed. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It was a blue and white unicorn on a light gray background. And it was beautiful. As unicorns go it was dignified with a fine proud head, flying mane and long elecorn.