Damned if I Don't (The Harker Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

Edie

As the truck hits the highway leading up to Atlanta, I’m struck by how much the city reminds me of Dallas. Granted, I’m not one hundred percent familiar with Dallas, but I swear that the skylines look almost identical, and the sprawl I see before me looks to be about the same size. So maybe Atlanta is Dallas, but with peaches.

And maybe Atlanta won’t have the same outcome as Dallas. Meaning that we won’t be ambushed and lose. I have to believe that, or else I’m going to go nuclear on all of this shit. I can’t take it anymore. I have to settle it here. Now.

There is just one bench seat in Lorne’s truck, and we’re all squeezed together on it. Lorne in the driver’s spot, then Carl, then me and Jude. Lorne smells of chewing tobacco, and he spits into an empty plastic Coke bottle as he drives. He’s both exactly who I was expecting and something a little more. He didn’t ask me about my missing arm, and he seems genuinely interested to get the show on the road.

I instantly like him. I remember my mom telling me about the Southerner who was no-nonsense, yet he’d do anything to help you out.

Including driving in this awful traffic. I thought Austin was bad, but traffic here is horrible, even after nine o’clock at night. On the other side of the highway, I see a line of cars six lanes across going back as far as I can see. Sometimes, seeing something as mundane as a traffic jam brings me back to what being normal means. And right now I desperately need it.

Lorne is not a very attentive driver, and the truck swerves all over the place as he’s busy unscrewing the Coke bottle or shoving more chaw into his mouth. It’s enough for Carl to look over at me and give me his best pleading gaze. It actually makes me chuckle, because it feels like Carl has almost forgiven me.

Almost.

“Sorry to hear about the kidnapping,” Lorne says, as he looks at me. The car glides into the lane next to us to the angry honk of a horn. The old man doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Who were they?”

“My brother-in-law and my niece.”

Jude, Carl, and I decided not to fill Lorne in on the whole Progenitor story—it’s not relevant to finding Graeme and Amelia. Even though I trust Lorne, I’m hedging my bets. The fewer people who know about that, the better.

“Your niece,” Lorne says, “Is she…?”

“Yes. She’ll be the next Harker.”

“And Anthony says he’s here? In Atlanta?”

“Yeah.” I take out my phone and pull up the screenshot that I took, where the Find My Friend app showed Graeme’s phone earlier. I’ve been trying to check it ever since, but Anthony turned off the damn phone. I anticipated it, but I’d done it out of blind hope. “This is the last place where they could be.”

Lorne peers at my phone. “Redmont and Peachtree? That’s in Buckhead.”

“You know where that is?”

“Oh yeah.” He nods vigorously. “Lots of office buildings. Not my side o’ town, but…” He shrugs. “That’s what happens when you don’t work in an office. Does sound like it could be a trap though.”

“I already told her that,” Jude chimes in. “But it doesn’t matter. We need to find them, regardless. Amelia’s only three years old.”

I hear the desperation in his voice and my heart flutters. I mean, I’m only twenty years old and I’m certainly not thinking about kids or anything at the moment—vampires can’t have kids at any rate—but his protectiveness towards Amelia is endearing. He may have been a monster in the past, but he’s someone completely different now. I guess that’s the difference between Jude and Alejandro.

The monster that was Alejandro died at least fifty years ago. Jude is the here and now. In any other circumstance, I’d be more upfront and ask him out, like I did with Mike. And we’d hump and have sex and fight and break up. Like any of my previous relationships.

But these are different circumstances, and I have no idea how to proceed from here.

At Jude’s words, the muscles in Lorne’s jaw tense. “Looks like we’ve gotta find them fast then.”

“Can you take us there?” I ask.

He grins at me. “Already on our way, sugar,” as says, as he takes an exit to merge onto another highway. So many highways and it feels like the time is slipping through my fingers.

I settle back into my seat and try not to look like I’m being impatient. Because I totally am. I just keep thinking about how scared Amelia must be, or what Anthony is doing to them.

Is there a reason for him to keep them alive? Other than to torment me. I gulp and wrack my brain. I don’t know what I’m going to do if something were to happen to them. I promised Meghan that I’d look after them, and I
thought
they were safe.

Someone must have been at the hotel where they checked in. Or Aunt Tessa slipped them a tracking spell like she did with Carl and me. I guess it’s not how they were found that matters, but what we do now. But I wish I could kill the person who ratted them out.

I jump as Jude places his hand over mine. He gives me a grim smile as he coaxes my fingers to unclench and lay flat in my lap.

“We’ll find them,” he promises in my ear.

“I hope you’re right. And I hope that we’re not walking into a trap.”

He shrugs. “Is it a trap if we know about it?”

I chuckle despite myself. “Possibly? It’s not a surprise party.”

Jude’s gaze turns towards the windows, the skyline reflected in his gaze. Sometimes I look at him and wonder who he was before. Even now when I have some sort of inkling of who he was, his mind is still a mystery to me. I imagine that he’s still a mystery to himself.

“We’re going to a bunch of office buildings, you say?” I ask Lorne.

The old man nods. “Yep. It’s the hoity-toity part of Atlanta.”

“Do you know of a vampire hangout there?”

“Oh yeah. A few, actually.”

He turns off the road again, and I feel it in my gut as the truck slows down on city streets that we’re getting close. True to his word, there are tall office buildings that tower over the landscape, industrial and oddly dystopian in how they look, like I’m watching a 1980s movie. There are offices, but there are also smaller high-end restaurants on the ground floors of these buildings.

As it’s way past normal business hours, there’s a marked decrease in the number of cars here, except for clusters around the restaurants.

My vampy sense goes off the charts as we near a parking spot. At any given time, I can always sense a vampire somewhere nearby, but there’s a lot here, and they’re all over the place.

“Buckhead’s a happening place for vampires,” Lorne says, throwing the truck into park. “As you’ll see.”

Edie

“Man, this kinda feels like Congress Street,” Carl exclaims as he steps down from the truck. He’s talking about a high-end street in downtown Austin. I have to admit that I too I feel a sense of familiarity when I get out of the truck. My cousin has his hands stuffed in his pockets as he casts his gaze around the parking lot.

“Almost feels like home,” Jude says. He looks at me as he says it and a flutter tightens in my chest. “Vampires and all.”

“A bit,” I agree.

Lorne jumps down from the tailgate brandishing a stake in each hand. “Lemme see that phone again?” he asks.

I pull the phone out of my hoodie pocket, pull up the screenshot—which is infuriatingly hard with one hand—and pass it to him. He tucks the weapons under his arm and peers at the screen. He looks up, and nods towards a bar. “Thattaway.”

“Is that a vampire hangout?”

“Yep. Troublemakers, all of ‘em.”

That’s all the information I can get from him as he takes off at a fast clip, headed towards a bar. Every fiber of my being is telling me
not
to follow him, to run away. But where there are vampires, there could be Graeme and Amelia.

And that’s a risk we have to take.

We walk up to a hipster bar called The Elephant Room, where Lorne breezes past a bearded bouncer. To my utter surprise, the bouncer is human, and gets up with a “hey” as Carl and I walk past. Jude skewers him with a look, baring his teeth as we head in.

I wonder how long it will be before the bouncer calls up reinforcements. Or calls the cops.

Inside the dimly lit bar, Lorne looks out of place among the young and happening twenty-something crowd. There’s not a single vampire on this floor other than Jude, and I curiously look around as I follow the old man to the door of the men’s room. Of all places.

“Just right in here.” Lorne flashes me a smile, and flips the stakes in his hands, like he’s a chef at a hibachi restaurant, before pushing through the door. “It’s soundproofed. You’d never believe it if you didn’t see it with your own two eyes.”

I see Jude’s questioning gaze and I shrug before I follow him into the men’s bathroom. At first, it looks like any normal men’s restroom—I assume—as there’s graffiti on the walls and it’s out of paper towels. The bathroom smells of piss and I wonder just how drunk their clientele is at ten o’clock at night.

Then I see the door to the handicap stall banging against the lock, an “Out of Order” sign taped to it. I frown and push it open. There’s another door in this stall, and I gingerly push it open.

Below me is a set of open stairs that lead into the vampire nest. It’s a typical kind of vampire hangout, where a strobe light makes everything seem like a badly functioning film strip. The dance floor is filled with sweaty, undulating bodies, some vampire, some human. A DJ is up on the stage playing some dubstep while strippers dance to the beat in cages around the floor.

Imagine something like this being underneath a random, normal bar. Carl curses, loud enough for me to hear over the pounding music. The good thing about the lighting and the ear-splitting beat is that no one has turned to look up at the Harker. I have anonymity for a little while longer.

Graeme and Amelia are nowhere to be seen though, and my hopes begin to sink even further.

“What do you want to do?” Jude asks.

“We’re going to ask the DJ nicely to use his microphone,” Lorne says, gesturing to the vampire with sunglasses up on the stage.

“Because everyone’ll love that,” Carl says, rolling his eyes. “You’re going to have a vampire mob on your hands.”

“It’s the quickest way to find out information,” Lorne counters.

“That’s fine,” I sigh. My adrenaline is pumping, and I want this to be over as quickly as possible.

Jude grabs my wrist. “May I? I want to make sure that I’m ready, just in case.” His voice trails off, almost ashamedly.

I don’t want to do it, but it would be good if he’s at fully capacity when we’re up there. My blood would take him there.

“Yeah,” I say through a dry mouth. “Don’t glamour me though.”

I hate being glamoured. That’s one of those things where it feels like I lose my free will and I have no control over my body. The Progenitor made his point abundantly clear that I was something like a slave to him. He forced my body to kneel in front of him, when no other vampire can wrap my head with their encouraging words and mind fuck.

Jude doesn’t protest. He knows me too well to fight that. In fact, I’ve bitched to him plenty of times about how I hate it.

He extends his teeth and bites into my wrist. I feel my skin break as his teeth tear into my flesh and my fingers go numb as my blood flow is interrupted. I manage not to wince—if anything, the pain makes me feel more alive. What’s more, it’s strangely hot, and I don’t know why I’m turned on by Jude feeding off me.

I never would have guessed that I would enjoy being a vampire’s snack. I think Jude’s the only one who gets this pass though. It’s an intimate ritual, one that suddenly makes me feel jealous thinking of him doing that to other girls.

It’s the same as eating beef or anything like that.
Still, I can’t help but feel green at the thought of his lips around another girl’s wrist. And I’m ashamed. He hasn’t eaten in a few days, so he probably needs this more than I can understand.

Lorne curses under his breath and turns away, the sight of the Harker offering her blood to a vampire is too much for him to take.

Jude’s eyes are on me the entire time as he slurps my lifeblood from my wrist. Finally, it seems, with a great amount of effort, he pulls away from my wrist and licks the wound dry. He sighs and staggers a bit.

“You’re like a hit of cocaine,” he murmurs, his voice ragged. He licks his lip around his piercing, the silver glinting in the strobe light.

Once again, I feel the heat in my cheeks and between my legs at his words. I’m glad for the cover of the dim light so that Carl and Lorne can’t see me, but I’m sure that Jude has heard my heart speed up.

“Let’s do this,” Lorne says gruffly. He steps forward and gets swallowed up by the crowd.

I’m still a bit dazed, but I follow him, heading towards the small set of stairs that leads to the DJ’s platform. Lorne bounds up it and I follow him.

“What the hell?” the DJ exclaims. Suddenly, he recognizes the old man and I see a frown crease his forehead. “Oh, it’s you, old man.”

Yep, Lorne’s certainly been here before.

“I was wondering if we could use your microphone,” he grunts. “The Harker wants to talk to the crowd.”

The DJ’s eyes fall on me and I see him visibly stiffen and pale. His Adam’s apple visibly bobs up and down in his throat. “The Harker, I…”

At that second, I’m not paying attention to him. My eyes are on the turntable where, inexplicably, I recognize Graeme’s unmistakable phone case, a sleek black case with a huge dent in the side from one-too-many drops. A cord is plugged into the headphone jack –
he’s playing music off Graeme’s phone?!

“How did you get that?” I ask.

“Wha-?” the DJ asks as I push past him and I pick up the phone. It
is
Graeme’s phone and I fumble with it awkwardly trying to unlock it with one hand. I grunt in frustration and finally take my teeth to the jack and unplug it.

Immediately, the music turns off. The sea of dancers stops to look at us up on stage. Some of them shout angrily at the stage, and start to storm it.

“Hey!” one shouts.

“Fuck you!” another one shouts.

“Edie,” Carl warns.

But I’m not concerned with any of that. All I’m seeing is that I’m holding Graeme’s phone in my hand, when it shouldn’t be here. When I don’t see Graeme or Amelia nearby.

“
Where the fuck did you get this?!
” I scream into the DJ’s face, who staggers backwards into Jude’s chest. Jude knows when to go along with whatever I’m doing, and he grabs the DJ’s shoulders, holding him in place. They’re both vampires, but now I’m glad that Jude juiced up on my blood.

It seems we may need it.

“I don’t know, man!” the DJ cries. “Someone gave me it to play!”

“This is Graeme’s phone,” I explain to Carl and Lorne.

“Fuck,” Carl mutters.

I finally manage to swipe the unlock screen. I always told Graeme to use a password in case it was stolen, but he never did. Now, I’m able to look through his information without any sort of security, and I’m thankful for it.

There’s an unread text message from a private number. I pull it up, and there’s a picture of Graeme and Amelia tied up in a darkened area with a single source of light blaring in their direction. The fear in both of their eyes is palpable, Amelia’s tearstained face striking me to the core.

It was sent three hours ago.

My stomach roils and I feel like I’m going to throw up. I flash it towards everyone, and I can see as Carl’s expression turns ill.

“I don’t know what that is!” the DJ cries, flailing helplessly.

“Who?” Jude roars as the crowd gets more and more unruly. “Who gave it to you?”

“I…I…” The DJ flounders, as he looks between us for a way out. The jeering from the crowd grows in intensity, but I don’t care.

“There!” Lorne shouts, pointing across the floor. A group of vampire are moving their way through the crowd, their every movement punctuated by the strobe light.

“Them!” the DJ wails. “They gave it to me!”

“Edie.” Carl warns. He must realize that I’m about to go nuclear. Good for him, I don’t fucking care anymore. If I burn this place to the ground, it would be worth it to get my family back. I may not have Glimmer anymore, but I am sure as hell going to fuck some shit up.

I meet Jude’s piercing blue eyes and he gives a slow nod.
I’m right behind you.

Another reason why I’m falling for him.

I pocket Graeme’s phone as I jump down from the stage and storm through the crowd. Even though I look fierce, some of the braver vampires try to pick fights with me or make catcalls. They seem to be very angry that I stopped the music.

I don’t even fucking care. Music seems like such a small problem when your family is being held captive.

“Hey, you bitch!” one says, as he grabs me by the hoodie.

Almost immediately, Jude’s fist slams into the vampire’s jaw, throwing him into the crowd. His friends push him back towards us, his broken jaw flopping wildly. He dazedly throws a haphazard punch towards Jude, who ducks out of the way, and the vampire crashes into the group on the other side, hitting a girl in the chest. Her guy flails towards us, but gets caught up in the fight among the crowd.

Pandemonium breaks out, but the chaos is easy enough to navigate that I’m able to keep moving, intent on finding the bastards that had the phone.

As I make it to the end of the gauntlet, the lights finally turn on, dazing me momentarily. I glance back to see Carl, Jude, and Lorne barely making it out. The crowd swarms behind us, swallowing the space that used to be our path.

They’re with me. Supporting me. And based on their expressions, I know that even Carl is ready to go to war with me to find where Graeme and Amelia are.

Free of the sea of people, I quicken my pace to catch up with the small group of vampires trying to disappear into the night. They’ve almost made it, but I grab the woman’s shoulder and spin her to me.

“Give them back!” I scream.

The woman responds with a roar. In my own berserker mode, I scream back at her, tears streaming down my face. I’m pissed, as pissed off as I’ve ever been. I’m flaming mad, ready to toast anything in my path to get to them.

“Harker!” the female vampire warns her comrades. They look about to bolt, but Jude has moved in front of them, roaring his own challenge. They don’t miss a beat or a chance to try pummeling him back, but he lazily sidesteps their advance, moving in what almost looks like a slow dance.

I’ve never been so glad as I am right now that he had a taste of my blood. Whatever that does to vampires, he’s reveling in its fury, and it can only benefit us at this point.

A Latin phrase is shouted behind me, and the vampire I’m holding is immobilized. I hadn’t realized that she’d been about to grab my neck, but Carl saved me. I silently thank him as I deliver a roundhouse kick to her face, using the momentum of my Doc Marten to pin her to the floor.

“Get the others!” I shout. The vampire under my shoe hisses at me, and I increase the pressure on her throat, effectively shutting the bitch up.

Lorne joins in, and I see why he has lived to be an old vampire hunter. The man has skills, especially with a stake in each hand. He uses them like batons when a vampire rails on him. He holds them expertly, so it’s no surprise that these vampires can’t get past their defenses.

With Jude, Carl, and Lorne fighting the group of four vampires, I can take this moment to intimidate my prey further. It’s probably a good thing considering my current state, but I can still maintain my anger.

I press harder, causing the vampire to gag, her hands scrabbling at the shoe. She’s turning blue in the face, but I allow no more air through her windpipe.