Page 32 of Silent Stalker
EIGHT
My stakes keep going home with strange vampires.
We spentmost of the night at Central Park. We’d missed three vampires, which the police helped flush out of hiding. Like the others, they were staked until we could get blood into them. One by one, they went to some brood’s safehouse.
As we’d already taken on three victims, our brood handled providing the needed blood to get the victims on the road to recovery. I worried several of the vampires wouldn’t make it, but I accepted I’d done everything I could for them. As warned, my stakes went with them, as the weakened vampires tended to clutch them and refuse to let them go once removed from their flesh.
“I don’t understand,” I told Ben. Emerick lounged at my feet and yawned, showing off his big teeth.
“What don’t you understand?”
“My stakes keep going home with strange vampires.”
“I have a theory. For those who have done someone wrong, the stakes are a brutal punishment as they’re escorted to the swift end of their life. For victims, it comforts them as you needed to be comforted. A significant amount of magic goes into the carving of a good stake. It’s more than just taking some wood and carving it to look like a stake. If the average person did that, the stake would basically be an annoyance for a vampire. The age of the wood still matters, but it’s the carver’s skill, magic, and intent that makes the stake potent. Your stakes are potent because you carved a lot more into them than the desire to kill vampires. You carved seeking salvation, and that’s what they understand. And every stake you continue to carve, I suspect, will have that same trait, because you live to save others. And to spite your maker.”
Spiting my maker had been my sole reason for living for months, and while I wanted to stake him so he could never hurt anyone again, I had more important things to live for.
I wondered how that would change my stakes—if it would change my stakes.
If anything, learning what my maker had done solidified my need to ensure he met his final death. However, I also wanted to take down anyone like him, those who would brutalize anyone for the sake of ambition.
Learning my stakes could be used in gentler ways helped. If anything, my relief over being able to accomplish something good strengthened with each passing night.
While a vampire, I could do good.
I wasn’t just some blood-sucking monster lurking in the darkness waiting to prey upon the weak or careless.
“Do you think they’ll come back? My stakes, that is.”
Ben chuckled. “Your stakes will be returned when the vampires no longer need them. Already, Luca grows edgy around your stake. Mistress Avalon has reclaimed it, and it will be returned to you soon. He no longer needs its calming influence, and it’s sentient enough to understand this. Luca has other things to be doing rather than cuddling with a piece of wood capable of reducing him to sun-scorched ash.”
“He does?”
“Let’s just say the brides are very interested in the various things he can offer them, and even in his state, he’s been a complete gentleman. Mistress Avalon has agreed to allow him to participate in physical therapy through combat training with him, and I doubt he will leave her clutches single. Such is his luck.” Ben chuckled. “Now that he’s more coherent, he’s rather confused about the matter.”
“Well, yes. One minute, a crazy chick with stakes is brawling with him. The next, he’s being invited to cuddle puddles with potential long-term benefits. Anyone sane would be confused about that.”
“It’s especially confusing when you consider that he knows he’d broken the nose of our brood’s mistress, newly wed to our master, and he’s alive to tell the tale.”
I giggled, and I nudged Emerick with my toe. “I have utterly ruined your reputation. You should go to Ben’s car, get in the back, and mourn the loss of your reputation. You’re now newly married to a crazy chick with more stakes than sense and a tendency to stick her ass out of dumpsters.”
Laughing, Ben took the hint and headed to his car across the street, dodging the mix of cop cars and brood vehicles on call to get the vampires to the safehouses they would recover in. After counting to make sure I had the appropriate number of stakes on my person, I followed, sliding into the back. With a wicked grin, I patted my lap.
I didn’t even need to call him to get the point across, and spitting feline curses at me, Emerick hopped over me to get into the vehicle before heaving a sigh and settling onto the seat and resting his chin on my knee.
“My father never let me have any pets, so this is like having the supreme pet. He’s big, he’s warm, and if someone bothers me, I can feed them to him, Ben.”
Still laughing, Ben closed my door before getting behind the wheel and replying, “He’s going to make you pay for that later, Pepper.”
“I have noticed I am being carefully trained to generally like when he’s making me pay for something. He’s going to have to stop making me like the various ways he’s making me pay if that’s going to be effective.”
“While you have a point, you probably shouldn’t tell him that. He might stop making you like it.”
I widened my eyes. “But why would he do such a mean thing to me?” I regarded my arm, which had been wrapped by one of the paramedics. In what I considered to be an absolutely unnecessary precaution, the paramedic had given me a ridiculous number of vaccinations just in case I might have contracted something. “I’m going to be so sick tomorrow night, Ben. The paramedic said so. I don’t even know why the paramedic had so many vaccinations, but he made me deal with them all. Isn’t there something cruel about issuing like twenty vaccinations to someone on the same night?”
Then, because I could be plenty evil and mischievous when I wished to be, I poked Emerick’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you protect me from those needles?”
Emerick stared at me with one ear twisted back.
