Vampire Assassin (Jane #1)



  Vampire

  Assassin

  (Jane #1)

  By

  Samantha Warren

  © 2011, ©2013 Samantha Warren

  The following story is a work of fiction and all names and characters are strictly the creation of the author.

  All rights reserved.

  This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any manner without expressed written consent from Samantha Warren.

  Cover Art © 2012 Kalen O'Donnell

  ††††††

  The

  End

  ††††††

  He didn't notice me at first. They never do. That's one of the things about being plain—you often get ignored. By the way, it's not true that if you turn into a vampire, you automatically become beautiful. I’m just as dull and unbeautiful as I was alive. The only difference now is that my hair refuses to hold color for any length of time, so I’m constantly re-dying it.

  Today, however, that plainness was working in my favor. I was practically standing right next to him. Yet he was so oblivious to my presence, I could have punched him in the nose and he wouldn’t have been the wiser. I didn't want to punch him, though. I wanted to kill him. But not here. Not now.

  I watched as he stooped over to put his briefcase in his car, all 6'4" of him. He was a foot taller than me and quite handsome. He had dark brown hair, a chiseled jaw, and lovely blue eyes. They weren’t really blue. He had an unfathomable obsession with colored contacts and his eyes changed hue more often than Paris Hilton changed handbags.

  He slammed the door to his BMW a little too hard and peeled away from the curb in alarming fashion. A bit irritating, really. I wanted him dead, just not like that. Regardless, he’d officially had the last spat he would ever have with his mistress. Oops, sorry. I meant secretary. It was the typical forbidden lovers’ quarrel:

  “When are you going to tell your wife about us?”

  “Don't hound me! I can’t handle this right now!”

  “But you said you loved me! Don't you love me?”

  “I’m not dealing with this!”

  Cue slamming of door and sobbing of delusional administrative assistant.

  I glanced at my watch. It would take him 45 minutes to get home. I watched him round the corner and walked over to the frozen yogurt stand.

  "Blueberry burst, please." I settled on a bench and enjoyed the creamy deliciousness.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was weaving through traffic on the highway. I'm one of those drivers most people hate. If there's a gap just big enough for my car, I'm in it and gone before you can blink. Halfway to the target's house, I spotted his car stuck in a knot of traffic. It was wall to wall. There was no way I was getting through, but then again, neither was he.

  Jacking my steering wheel to the right, I veered out onto the shoulder of the road and gunned the engine. The cars beside me blurred into a colorful line, some blaring their horns at the crazy lady who was whipping past them. A cop turned on his lights, but he was jammed between two SUVs and he wasn't going anywhere.

  The next exit led to a series of back roads that would have taken any normal person even longer. I'm not normal. I reached his house about ten minutes before he arrived, giving me plenty of time to recap what I knew about him.

  On a typical day, he got home and sat in the car for a few minutes while he checked for lipstick smears, perfume stench, and other telltale signs of his blatant infidelity. Then he'd walk into the house carrying whatever gift he’d bought to assuage his guilty conscience. Sometimes it was flowers, sometimes chocolates. This time, it was a pearl necklace worth more than the car I owned when I was alive.

  Usually when he got inside, his son would immediately run to greet him. It wasn't the boy’s fault. He was only four, still too young to realize what a bastard his father was. The man’s daughter, however, couldn’t care less about her doting daddy. She lovingly referred to him as Mr. Doucheburn. Get it? His last name is Washburn? Well, I thought it was funny.

  His beautiful, blond, too-young-for-him wife was typically in the kitchen making supper. It rarely tasted any good, and it almost always was burned or undercooked, but she was hot and a tiger in the sack, so he wasn't ready to let her go just yet.

  But he wasn’t greeted by his loving son, bitter daughter, or cookie-cutter wife that fateful evening. You see, while she looked like the token blond bimbo usually snagged by guys who feel like they have something to prove, Becky was actually shrewdly calculating and sharp as a tack. Before she married Mr. Doucheburn, she held a 4.0 at Yale and was planning to join a well-known law firm in New York City. She was also a very smart shopper, allowing her to sock away three-quarters of the monthly allowance her husband gave her into stocks and other high-yield savings options. She and her kids never failed to look the part of upper middle-class in sale items and elegantly disguised, well-made knock-offs. Only Becky's step-daughter and her investment profiler knew her secret. Well, and me. But I don't count because, for all intents and purposes, I don't exist. Except in movies.

  Anyway, Mr. Cheating Dirtbag (his real name is Bob, by the way) came home to a house full of nothing that evening. Becky decided to be “spontaneous” and took the kids to dinner at their favorite restaurant, after giving me specific instructions to not mess up her spotless house. She didn't want to have to explain to the maid about why the perfectly off-white carpet suddenly had a massive, spreading stain in the middle of it.

  I was waiting in the shadows when he pulled into the garage. True to form, Bob went about his evening scumbag ritual, then stepped out of the car. He had found a nice set of mauve lips on his collar, so he went to the toolchest-turned-armoire and changed. I let him change and get as far as the door before I showed myself.

  “Hello, Bob.”

  Tripping over himself, he let out quite the stream of expletives. They usually do. Like dropping the F-bomb is going to save them. Once he’d recovered his composure a bit, he glared at me and spit out, “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

  “Well, Bob, technically I’m not in your house.” They always ask that, and I always respond the same (assuming I’m not actually in the house). It typically takes them a minute or two to think of a comeback to that.

  “I don't fucking care. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Now, Bob, no need to be vulgar. Can’t we just be civil about this?”

  “What the hell do you want?” He was getting a bit hysterical now, dropping his favorite word in favor of something more PG-rated. I didn't blame him, really. Here I was, standing in his securely locked garage, inside his pretty little gated community that was supposed to be safe from strangers. It definitely helped that I knew someone on the inside and had the passcode on the back of a fancy business card shoved deep into my pocket.

  “Why, Bob, I want you. Your blood, to be more specific.”

  He was shocked into silence. There aren't too many people that can come up with a response to that one. Bob eventually recovered a smidge and started stuttering as he fumbled with the door to the kitchen. I just smiled and advanced on him.

  I always leave the area clean. No point in making things worse for the poor cops that have to come in and try to figure out what happened. I do sometimes get a bit creative, though. And Bob deserved something special. No fake suicide in the car, no attempted robbery, nothing mundane and boring. I took him up to the bedroom, which was the agreed-upon death scene per his adoring wife’s contract, and set to work. When all was said and done, I was pretty pleased with myself. By then, the marks on his neck had faded to nothing and the cops would be no closer to finding the truth than they were before he died.

  Before I left, I opened th
e curtains in the bedroom, so I could see the story play out from the top of the house next door. As planned, Becky returned home and went about her evening routine, purposely staying out of the bedroom until the little one was in bed and her daughter was downstairs watching the new Melrose Place. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them well enough and knew when the moment was coming.

  I saw Becky's shadow under the door before I saw the tips of her fake Prada shoes. In slow motion, the door handle turned. She was bracing herself. It's always hard for the client. They know it's coming, but usually the victim is someone they’re close to, physically and socially, if not emotionally. Bob was a bastard, but he had shared her bed repeatedly and was the father of her son and stepdaughter. The little boy would be devastated. She would never tell him the truth. She would tell the girl once the investigation was completely wrapped up, so there would be no chance of her slipping up and incriminating them both. Becky knew Bob’s daughter wouldn’t be upset about the true manner of his death. The girl hated him and always blamed him for her real mother’s death, with just cause. Becky had bonded with her quickly.

  Becky eased the door open at about 8:30, more than an hour after her husband’s death. She was greeted by a beautifully embarrassing sight. There dangled Bob from a length of heavy-duty rope procured from the garage, for all appearances