Blood Hunt

  Blood Hunt

  By Christopher Buecheler

  Part 2 of the II AM Trilogy

  Blood Hunt – Kindle Edition

  Copyright © 2011 Christopher Buecheler.

  All rights reserved.

  http://www.iiamtrilogy.com/

  http://writing.cwbuecheler.com/

  Blood Hunt is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First Edition: September 1, 2011

  Cover Art by Karla Ortiz

  Cover Design by Christopher Buecheler

  Have You Read The First Book?

  Blood Hunt is the sequel to The Blood That Bonds. If you have not read the first book, there’s good news: it’s free! Head to http://www.iiamtrilogy.com to download it – it is available for every major eReader, including Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Sony Reader, Kobo, and more. You can also purchase the print edition.

  Dedication

  For my parents, Bill and Leslie.

  Acknowledgements

  As is the case with most books, this one would never have reached its present form without the efforts, enthusiasm and encouragement of many people. It's a privilege to list them here, and I can't thank them enough for all that they've done.

  My wife Charlotte. She is my best friend, my toughest critic, and my muse. Her love and faith in me keep me going on these projects.

  My editor Lauren, who did double-duty in a very short time-span, hunting down copy errors and suggesting ways to make the book better. If there are any flaws left in the text, be sure that they are my fault and not hers.

  My cover artist, Karla, who really saved my life on this one, working with a completely unreasonable deadline. I love her vision of Two, and I hope you do too!

  My trusted readers: Charlotte, Nora, Joost, Trevor, Caryn, Charles, Diana, and Kim (to whom I also owe thanks for some copy-editing of her own). Their feedback helped greatly in identifying what needed to change between drafts.

  My fans, who've provided constant feedback and support on social networking sites, reviewed my books on the web, and sent me their thoughts via email. It is amazing to me that there are so many of you out there. It's incredibly motivating, and I've worked hard to make sure this book was worth your patience. I sincerely hope you enjoy it!

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Voices in the Dark

  Tori Perrault shifted position, arched her back, thrust her hips. Breathing hard, she glanced down. Tangles of dirty-blonde hair, dark and damp with sweat, framed the edges of her vision, swayed with the motion of her body. A droplet caught briefly on her lower lip and trembled there, reflecting what dim light there was in the room, then fell to burst on the chest of the man below her. Occupied as he was, he didn’t notice.

  Tori felt him gripping her buttocks, pulling her against him, straining. Her lip curled in an unconscious snarl as she tilted her head back, eyes closed, trying to focus. Trying to feel. The sweat, more a response to the room’s heat than to either exertion or stimulation, rolled down her body.

  “Oh, Christ, baby …” he moaned, his voice high and weak and strained, and Tori knew he would finish soon. She tried to tamp down her annoyance; he was almost done, almost there, and she was still here. She was just starting to get into it.

  She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t his fault. She required so much effort, so much time. Her body had spent twelve years in a heightened state of sensory awareness beyond human conception; was it any wonder that this return to something resembling “normal” felt empty and dull? It would take time for her to adjust to her current state – perhaps even years. Surely, though, her ability to feel would return eventually.

  The lump of muscle below her had short brown hair and dark eyes, and if she’d known his name at the beginning of the evening, she had forgotten it since. Burned away by alcohol, perhaps, or apathy. Maybe he’d never told her. She didn’t care now, knowing that he was nearly there – she just wanted it to be over.

  Here it was. His hands clenched tight with a pressure that might have been painful to someone else, and he thrust deep within her and held there. His breath caught and he leaned his head back, baring his throat, groaning. Tori could see his veins throbbing. This is the part where I tear your throat out, she thought, a bright flash of adrenaline streaking through her, there and then gone. No, not that. Not anymore.

  He let out a long, groaning exhalation, and Tori felt liquid warmth flood her. A moment more and the hard thing inside her began to go limp. She leaned down, kissed him once, and rolled off without ceremony. She sat staring out at nothing as he groped for tissues, heard the scrape of a lighter as she reached for the bottle of cheap tequila on the nightstand. She drank from it directly, coughing a little.

  He tapped her shoulder. “Smoke?”

  Tori accepted one of the two lit cigarettes he held, put it to her lips, dragged, still staring at the far side of the room. The sheets pooled in her lap, leaving her breasts exposed; she could feel the man glancing at them from time to time as he sat beside her, saying nothing. Tori sat. Smoked. Stared.

  “Good?” she asked after a while.

  “God damn, baby.”

  “Good. Stop calling me baby.”

  “Uh … ‘kay.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Tom.”

  “You gonna be here when I wake up, Tom?”

  Tom was silent. The right side of Tori’s mouth, the side he couldn’t see, lifted up in a brief smirk.

  “That’s what I thought,” she told him. “You left your ring on the sink. Don’t forget it.”

  “Oh. Didn’t think you saw that.”

  “I see everything.” Tori flicked ash into an empty glass on the nightstand.

  “You pissed?”

  Not about that, thought Tori. She told him no.

  “Cool.” Tom yawned, stubbed out his cigarette, and rolled over on his side, facing away from Tori. Within minutes he was asleep. Tori sat. Smoked. Stared.

  I see everything, she had told him, and it was true. There was little that escaped Tori’s notice. When your eyes could read newsprint from across the room and your mind could recall events as a series of detailed snapshots, it was hard not to notice everything. The trick for Tori wasn’t paying attention, but making herself stop.

  She closed her eyes to focus on her body, still stuck in a state of arousal she no longer wanted. Rapid heartbeat, hard nipples, warm and wet between her legs. She supposed she could try to finish the job herself, but the prospect seemed unappealing. She instead went to the bathroom, cleaned off the mess that Tom had left, and returned to the bed without waking him.

  Across the room was a window, facing out into an alley. Across the alley was the blank face of a brick wall, illuminated only by the dim glow from a streetlight somewhere near the front of the building. Sitting in the dark, staring out the window, Tori could make out each individual crack in the masonry. She passed the time by counting them.

  The warmth between her legs began to fade, finally, and Tori took another swig from the bottle, willing sleep to come. Three quarters of the alcohol was gone, and Tom had barely touched it. A woman her size should have been hanging over the toilet right now, or heading for the emergency room. Tori’s head swam a bit, but she was far from drunk. She smirked again. Drank again. Sat. Smoked. Stared.

  She was glad Tom would be gone when she woke up. It was better when it went this way. Tom had what he wanted from her, and Tori had escaped from her parents for an evening without needing to play the awkward morning-after game. She had no more desire to feign any sort of connection with Tom than he did with her.

  Somewhere his wife was lying cold in her bed, waiting for him, a
nd he was here, asleep in a motel next to a strange girl he’d just fucked. Tori supposed this should bother her, but it didn’t. She found it difficult to care about the wife, or about Tom, or about anyone else for that matter. She cared for her parents, annoying though they could be. Then there was Two, more of a sister than any biological relation could ever have been. After that, who? Rhes and Sarah? Molly? Surely they were wonderful people, but Tori had known them so briefly that she sometimes had a hard time picturing their faces.

  The friends she had once known in Ohio were all new people. Gone or grown. Married. Raising families. Tori had existed in a kind of suspended animation for the past twelve years, and they had passed her by. Her body was still twenty-one. They were all in their mid-thirties. The girl who had once promised to someday stand as Tori’s maid of honor was dead, killed in a car accident. She had left behind a husband, two daughters, and a house.

  Tori glanced at Tom and felt guilt, though not about his wife. No, it was for her parents; they would be wondering where she was. Her mother especially. At times like this Tori felt remorse, but it would be a different story when she was home. She was fighting with them more and more often, frustrated by their concern, smothered by their love. It had only been six months since her return after more than a decade of darkness and madness and death. Was it right for her to feel so constrained, so pressed upon, or was it simply a selfish reaction to good intentions?

  Tori sat. Smoked. Stared. Eventually her body cooled. Eventually she slept.

  * * *

  She woke gasping, sweating, shaking from a dream that she couldn’t remember. It was still dark, still night, and she grappled with panic, disoriented by her unfamiliar surroundings. After a moment, memory filled the darkness: Tom and the motel. Right.

  He was gone. She could see that the other side of the bed was empty, but even without the light leaking in from the street, she would have known. There was no warmth there, no sound of breathing other than her own, which was slowly returning to normal.

  Tori ran a hand through her long, golden semi-curls, tousled and damp with sweat. A glance at the digital clock on the nightstand told her that dawn was still more than an hour away. Plenty of time to get home, sneak quietly in, and catch a few more hours of sleep before work. This was not an uncommon occurrence; Tori needed very little rest, perhaps four hours of sleep each night. Her body seemed to want no more.

  She slid out of the bed and moved to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, relieved herself of the night’s alcohol intake. When she was done she stood for a moment, naked, posing for the mirror. She had the sort of waist and hips that mannequins and magazines made every young woman pine for, though few could ever hope achieve. Bright blue eyes, full breasts, her only visible blemish a strawberry-colored birthmark on the inside of her left thigh. The blood had erased everything else. Baby, she thought, you oughtta be in pictures.

  Tori knew she was attractive, and knew she was lucky to be so. She understood this in a way that was detached, not arrogant. It was useful to be attractive, but beyond that it was not of great importance to her. Tori had seen too much, known too much, lived too much to hold such concerns. Far more interesting, in her opinion, were the secrets hidden behind her form. She flexed, looking herself over, searching for any sign of what she was. There was no outward evidence of her interior strength. No bulging muscles stretched her skin, no veins stood out like roadmaps.

  There was no indication that the naked woman in the mirror before her, long-legged and shapely, could bench-press nearly four hundred pounds. No sign that she could run a six-minute mile without becoming winded. There was no sign at all of what she had been for twelve years, no exterior hint of the changes that more than a decade of vampirism had made to her physiology. Abraham’s blood had worked within her, changing her, and those changes had not entirely reversed after her return to humanity. It had been too long, the blood too strong, for its marks to be completely wiped out.

  The cigarettes, the booze, the sex … nothing fazed her, hurt her, made her sick. Tori had not so much as come down with a cold since her return to Ohio. She had slept unprotected with more than three dozen men without becoming pregnant or catching any sort of disease. Sometimes she felt like a superhero. Other times she wondered what the point was. She could not be too overt with her abilities; to do so invited all sorts of unwanted questions. She could drink and smoke and fuck without repercussion, yes, but she spent most of her time trying to hide the gifts that the blood had given her.

  This is how Clark Kent feels, she thought as she made her way back to the bedroom. All that time spent pretending not to be Superman. Fantastic.

  She was pulling on clothing, nearly ready to leave, when the voice came without warning into her head, overwhelming her thoughts in a rush like a tsunami, the words strung together and incomprehensible, ranting in a nonsense language.

  SasemapestrovahPestrovahNankefalsonsaNanaguivesonsa.

  Tori stumbled, put one hand against the wall and the other against her forehead to steady herself. When the voice came to her, it was usually as a whisper at the back of her mind. This was direct, loud, and for a moment Tori felt sure her knees would buckle under the onslaught. She made a small cry, closed her eyes, and tried to fight against it.

  And then it was gone.

  She was sitting on the bed, though she couldn’t remember moving there. Sitting and shaking, the prickly feeling of cold sweat on her spine exacerbated by the rough cotton t-shirt she was wearing. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming in ragged gasps.The superhero feeling was gone. Left in its place was nothing more than a scared little girl, nervous and shaking, wondering what was wrong with herself. Tori dressed quickly, glanced one last time around the room, and left.

  * * *

  Her room was dark and bare and cold, not much more inviting than the motel she had left. There was a double bed on a steel frame at one end, a cheap desk at the other, adorned only with a laptop and a set of speakers. Tori’s mother often pressed her to decorate, but to Tori that seemed as though it would bring an unwelcome sense of permanence. This was not her home.

  Tori loved her parents, was glad to be back with them, but could not see living here in their little ranch house, in this forgotten part of Ohio, as anything more than the most temporary of situations. After a dozen years of living in the woods surrounding Abraham’s palatial estate, Tori had come to value both freedom and solitude. The two-bedroom, single-bath house offered little respite from the presence of her parents. She shuddered to think what it would be like when her father retired.

  She was pulling her clothes off when the knock came. Great, she thought, rolling her eyes. It would be Mona, of course – her mother. Tori was convinced that her father Jim would someday sleep through the apocalypse. She debated pretending to be asleep, decided against it, and opened the door.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Mona was a short woman, plump from years of hearty, home-cooked meals and no lack of desserts. She had been beautiful once, like Tori, though not nearly so tall, and unlike many beautiful girls she had also been kind and friendly. She still retained a sort of glow about her that made most people feel comfortable. She was the type of woman, Tori reflected, that one thought of when somebody mentioned their grandmother. Kindly and concerned, Mona looked at Tori, and the worry in her eyes was touching.

  “It’s very late, Tori.”

  “I know. I’m sorry if I woke you … was I making too much noise?” Tori knew she wasn’t, knew that Mona didn’t sleep well even under the best of circumstances. Her mother confirmed this.

  “No, no … I heard the car pull in. I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right.”

  “Everything’s fine, Mom.”

  Mona’s eyes searched Tori’s face for some hidden truth. “Your eyes are all puffy and … and you smell like cigarettes.”

  Good, Tori thought. Better than smelling like Tom. Out loud she said, “I was at a bar.”

  “Until five in the
morning?”

  What could Tori say? I was trying to drink myself blind when I met this guy, and I was horny and bored, and he was cute, so I took him to a motel and fucked his brains out. You know how it is, Mom.

  Instead she shrugged, said, “We went to the diner for a snack and coffee. Got to talking.”

  “We?” Mona raised an eyebrow.

  “Mother …”

  “I’m sorry, you’re right. You’re an adult and it’s none of my business. I just worry, angel.”

  The guilt flared back up and Tori sighed. “I don’t want to hurt you or Dad. You know that. I don’t want you to be scared. What happened before, when I disappeared, I … trust me, it can never happen again.”

  “I wish you’d tell us more about it. Your friend’s story, it … it doesn’t explain much.”

  At first her parents had eaten up the explanations that Two and Tori had proffered. It was not until later, after much consideration and, Tori suspected, many sleepless nights on Mona’s part that they had begun to question. Tori felt anger warring with her guilt.

  “No. There’s nothing more to tell, and you need to forget it, Mom. You can’t let it eat at you. Why won’t you trust me?”

  “I do trust you, dear. I just—”

  “You just worry. Right. Stop worrying.”

  “I can’t.”

  Tori sighed. “I have to work at ten.”

  Mona frowned. “You don’t get enough sleep.”

  “I’ll get what I need, if you’ll let me.”

  Mona looked at her for a long time, and Tori wondered what it was her mother was seeing. Surely not the daughter she had sent off to college twelve years before, a bubbly, vivacious girl who had been quick to smile and friendly to everyone she met. What must Mona think about this new version of her daughter, the one who was brooding, angry all the time, harsh and judgmental?