Marked: a Vampire Romance

By Kate Rudolph

Marked © Kate Rudolph 2016.

Amazon Kindle Edition.

Cover design by Kate Rudolph.

All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

This book contains sexually explicit content which is suitable only for mature readers.

Published by Kate Rudolph.
www.katerudolph.net

Gold gripped the handle of the passenger side door of the car and tried to look nonchalant. Her fifteen-year-old sister, Lily, was driving. At just after nine at night, this downtrodden district was nearly abandoned, but Gold remembered her sister learning to walk. And to bike. There’d been plenty of spills then. She was only waiting for the car crash to finish the trifecta.

“Stop freaking out,” Lily told her, knuckles white against the black leather steering wheel. “You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m not freaking out,” Gold said through clenched teeth. “Pay attention to the road.”

Lily heaved a sigh that only a teenager could heave. But she kept her eyes on the street ahead of them. “You know I’m supposed to be at Crystal’s birthday party, right? She has a chocolate fountain. I can’t believe you’re making me miss it for one stupid ghoul.”

That was enough for Gold to let go of the door handle. Instead, she pinched the bridge of her nose while Lily kept talking about how amazing Crystal’s party was supposed to be. At twenty-five, Gold had missed out on her fair share of friends’ birthdays, graduations, weddings, and even—scarily enough—baby showers. It was probably why she could now count the number of friends she had on one hand, with a few fingers to spare.

But Lily kept talking. “It’s just one ghoul, why can’t you take care of it?” She glanced over, eyes wide and hopeful, as if Gold would instruct her to turn the car around at once and let her go to her friend’s party. When that didn’t happen, Lily’s shoulder sagged and she turned back to looking at the road. “I just don’t see why we need two huntresses for this.”

"Because it's
just
a ghoul. This is the perfect hunt for a beginner," Gold explained. "I was chasing deer and bobcats for a year when I was fifteen. We couldn't find an undead mouse, let alone a person."

Slaying evil was their family duty and curse. Gold had been introduced to the world of undead things when she was just four years old. A roving zombie killed their dog while it was playing in the back yard. Her grandmother had taken care of the undead, but Gold suffered nightmares for weeks after. She hadn’t understood what she was then. But a few years later, the family sat her down and laid it all out for her.

The Joneses had been tasked with cleansing the world of the undead scourge. It was a duty going back generations, long before the first European made his way to America. They were gifted with the ability to sense their prey and use their reflexes to fight them. But they were still only human.

"How is that a good thing? Don't we want there to be no undead?" Lily was still in the early stages of understanding her place in the grand scheme of things.

"It's why we moved.” Kenzie, Virginia had been a nice town, but too small for the Joneses. “Once the undead figure out where we live, they stay away. But they just keep on coming to Jasperton." Even after nearly ten years, the undead flowed into town in a steady stream. It was probably the proximity to Chicago that kept them close.

"Wahoo," Lily said, her tone deadpan. Like most teenagers, she was not happy to be charged with a heavy destiny.

They passed the last stop light in Jasperton and the road opened before them. The street was dotted with dilapidated buildings, most abandoned for more than a decade, the only residents rats and squatters. "Stop the car," Gold said. Lily slammed on the brakes and Gold flew forward, the seat belt cutting into her neck. She cleared her throat and readjusted herself before pointing to a weed strewn parking lot in front of a burnt out strip mall. "Park over there." Lily did so without argument, suddenly serious.

Once she turned the headlights off, the street was cast in darkness, only the tiny sliver of moon giving them light. "Now close your eyes and concentrate."

Lily let her hands drop from the steering wheel as her eyelids drifted shut. She breathed in and out, long and slow.

“Focus on the ghoul,” said Gold, trying to guide the meditation. It was a difficult trick to learn, but once a huntress got it, the undead were easy to spot. Gold had locked onto the ghoul a mile from their house. Even now, she could sense it close to them.

"It's west of us," said Lily, her brows scrunched in thought. "About a mile away."

"Are you sure?" That wasn’t right. The ghoul was much closer than that and Gold wasn’t going to mentally let go of it until they had it in their sights. "Focus on the ghoul,” she instructed. Lily had probably latched onto another, possibly stronger undead. Gold would check it out later, when her sister wasn’t there to get in the way or get hurt.

Lily wasn’t ready to handle a vampire yet. If that was what it was.

Lily shook her head, tone tinged with frustration. "No, now it's north. Maybe two streets over?"

"Good." That was what she wanted to hear. There was an abandoned house on Wyler Street that would make the perfect hiding place for an undead. Gold would bet twenty bucks that it was hunkered down there.

They got out of the car and opened the trunk. Hidden in the wheel-well was an arsenal that would have made a militiaman proud. Gold pulled out a handgun and handed it over to her sister, along with a huge machete still in a spine sheath, and a road flare.

Lily held the weapons but didn’t suit up, waiting to hand them back over to Gold. But Gold unlatched a hidden compartment to reveal a rifle case. She took the case and slung it over her shoulder.

"I thought we weren't supposed to use that," said Lily.

Gold patted the case. "This is for security." She looked at her sister’s weapons. “Suit up. It's one ghoul. You can handle it.” She’d already discussed it with their mom before she’d left town for the month, and now Gold was doing her best to seem confident. Lily needed to learn. “Simple enough to extinguish. If you get into trouble, scream for help or light the flare. Then run for your life, ‘cause I'll take it out."

"Wait, what?" Lily slid the sheath on and stuck the flare in a holder on her belt. The gun she kept out. Ghouls were normally slow, but they could rush when the feed was on them and she wouldn’t have time to draw the pistol.

"You can handle this, Lil. I believe in you." Still, Gold gave her a tight hug before sending her on her way. She didn’t know how their mom did it.

Gold set herself up on the roof of an old shop. The stairs inside were half-rotten and she needed to climb onto the roof from a window, but hers was the safer job tonight. Once she was set up, she flashed a laser pointer in Lily’s direction, giving her the greenlight. Then she said a little prayer.

Please, Lord, keep her safe.

She settled in to watch through the rifle’s scope. The ghoul had hidden itself in the first floor of the small house. There was a huge window that let Gold see the entire scene. Lily walked up the driveway and around the back of the house.

The ghoul shambled about in the living room. Gold trained her sight on it, ready to take it out if Lily got into danger. Then the ghoul jerked and Gold was sure that it was because Lily had opened the back door.

Blood
. The scent wafted over, choking her and making her eyes water. Gold could feel it pouring down her throat, drowning her.

Invigorating her.

Making her strong.

A vampire. One mile north. Just as Lily had sensed. Gold cut off her senses, shuttering that latent psychic ability. She could not abandon her sister for that hunt, but she would find him later. A vampire that strong—strong enough to send out a psychic attack to an unknown hunter—could tear through the city in a matter of days. She couldn’t let him do that.

Why was she so sure he was a him?

A scream broke off Gold’s thought. She trained her gaze back on the house in front of her. The flare lit, momentarily blinding her. She looked away, blinking madly, hoping that Lily had done as instructed and run like hell. She gave herself two more seconds, then she turned back to the scene.

The ghoul had picked up the flare, but Lily was nowhere in sight.

Good.

Gold rested her finger on the trigger and then pulled with only the slightest force. The gun kicked back, butting into her shoulder. She’d have a bruise in the morning, but it didn’t matter. Two more shots and the ghoul went down, the flare falling on top of him and lighting him up like kindling.

With the speed of a thousand huntresses, Gold disassembled the gun and put it back in its case. She slung it over her shoulder and ran across the roof, vaulting through the window to the stairs with the carelessness of a suicidal woman.

By the time she made it outside, Lily was waiting for her, shaking, the gun still fully loaded and in her hand. A great gash ran down her arm where the ghoul’s claws had slashed her.

Thank God that ghouls couldn’t infect humans like that.

“I’m so sorry!” Lily cried, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I fucked it up. I can’t do this.”

Gold pulled her close and let her get it out. “You’re still alive and that thing is dead. That means you succeeded.” It took several minutes before they could let go of each other, and Gold’s eyes weren’t dry when they got back to the car.

Gold drove home in silence. She knew that Lily was going over everything that had happened to her, figuring out where she went wrong and how she could do better. Crystal’s birthday party with its chocolate fountain was completely forgotten.

And somewhere out there, moving south now and getting farther away, a vampire stalked the streets.

A ghoul wouldn’t be the only thing that Gold killed that night.

Adam Luther maneuvered the second to last bookshelf into his store. It was nearing 10:30 and he had been closed up for an hour. Even on Saturday night, customers didn’t come to a bookshop so late. He kept it open anyway, an excuse to haunt Jasperton in the late hours of the night. He’d been here for twelve years, and the way it became a ghost town after 9:00 still set him on edge.

For decades, Adam had bummed around the cities of Europe, drinking in the nightlife—quite literally—and living it up as only a libertine could hope to. Perhaps ‘
libertine’
was overstating it, but Adam knew the value of a good story.

It was only in these hours alone, when everyone had gone to sleep and the monsters still hid away, that he let the mask slip. While shuttering his shop for the night, he was simply a man who had lived for far too many years, who had committed far too many sins, and only wanted his rest before he burned in hell.

The weight of the years, all 343 of them, weighed heavily tonight. The moon was but a sliver in the sky and Jasperton was quiet. As one of the damned, he was consigned to these hours of darkness, cast out from the light of day.

He was growing maudlin, one glass of merlot going to his head. That was the surest sign that the need for a feed was imminent. When simple wine could affect him like this, he knew he would soon grow weaker until he was little better than the puny mortals who didn’t know that they should fear him.

Adam walked back outside to retrieve the last rack of books, but the sound of an SUV rumbling down the street distracted him. He wanted to tell whoever was driving it was a dangerous night to be out. There was a ghoul out there that he intended to hunt. Until it was off the streets, it would be a threat to all of the humans of Jasperton, and perhaps the greater Chicagoland area.

He might have been a monster, but that didn’t mean he let other monsters live in his city.

The SUV pulled up to the traffic light outside of his bookstore—Lot’s O’ Lit—and stopped at the red light. Adam looked over and caught sight of the driver, who was haloed by the light from a streetlamp.

His breath caught. His fangs ached.

In three centuries, he’d seen a lot of faces. After a while, they all blurred together. There were only so many ways that eyes, a nose, and a mouth could be arranged. But once in a blue moon, no, once in
ten
blue moons, there was a new face, shocking in its novelty. The woman driving the car had one.

Her blond hair was held back, a tight braid falling over one shoulder. She looked toward him and the first thing he saw were her lips, full and shining. Her eyes were cornflower blue, and her nose gave her that regal profile that belonged on a coin. A small scar cut across the top of one of her cheeks, a beauty mark sealed in pain.

Lord above. If Adam were human for one night, he’d lie her down and take her until the sun burned him to ashes at dawn. She would be worth it.

Her lips opened in a silent “oh” and her eyes narrowed. She looked him over and Adam felt like there was a piece he was missing. The knowledge in her eyes was painful, enough to bring a grown man to his knees, though she couldn’t have been more than thirty.

His store was on the corner and only ten feet separated him from her car, but the light changed and she drove on, and a unique, beautiful face disappeared down the lonely street.

Adam shook his head. The madness of his thirst nipped at his heels. If he didn’t get it under control, it wouldn’t be a night of imagined bed sport with the girl. It would be bloodshed and pain. Hunger rippled through his veins as he recalled the sweet taste of hot blood pooling around his fangs and pouring down his throat.

Feed first. Hunt later.

Ghouls were easy prey, but he couldn’t risk the hunt when he was compromised by bloodlust.

He quickly put away the bookshelf and turned off the lights to the store, locking it behind him. Jennifer, the head clerk, would need to deal with the books in the morning. Right now he couldn’t concentrate.

He took off down the street, headed toward Hansel Lane, which housed the two rowdiest bars in town. But before he even made it a block, he spotted the black SUV parked in a lot outside of a closed restaurant.

His beautiful girl was out for a stroll. She’d make delicious company.