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V for Vampire Hunter

STAKE.Check.

Favorite lace-up military-style boots.Check.

Holy water.Double check.

All the makings of a great, unoriginal vampire hunter costume. But make no mistake, this one was the real deal. Three hundred years of genetics, to be precise.

A birthright. One I was never given a chance to grumble about because I was trained to be an elite Hunter from the very moment I was born.

“Sock ‘em like puppets and put the dead in undead,”as my white-haired, angel-faced grandmother often said.

The same lady all the kids in the neighborhood praised as the “Most Lovable Grandmother” was one of the fiercest and deadliest martial artist vampire hunters the Organization employed. Now seventy-five and basically deadly by mouth only, Grandma Rose merely trained like the devil and took no prisoners when it came to teaching me how to be the next best vampire huntress.

And believe it, the bruises all over my body accounted for all the hard work and dedication I’d put towards this thankless job of cleaning up the trash under the guise of a sweet, unassuming teenager.

Barely over five feet, normal physique, freckles everywhere, ginger hair, and hazel eyes made me appear less than dangerous. Actually, it sort of worked in my favor since I looked more like the prey than the hunter. The countless, blood-thirsty bastards never saw me coming.

While my fellow teens were out partying and making horrible life choices, I was here, stalking prey outside a decrepit farm house because some of us didn’t get a damn night off. Not even on the most fun, some would argue, spookiest night of the year could I act my age and spend a night out with my peers, living bad decisions and tasting the euphoria of adolescence.

Instead, I was crouched beside a prickly bush, showered by moonlight and eaten alive by bugs. But it was Halloween—a vampire’s favorite night to play.

Imagine a night where you were permitted to let it all hang out: fangs, pale-ass skin, haughty light-colored eyes, and dark circles that would rival any new mother. It was a feast every year. Every year the disappearances were chalked up to the stupid choices of teenagers who made one terrible choice too many.

Vampires sucked the blood right out of you, like the stories said. Just, they were clever enough to pose each death as a freak accident. Car crashes, severed limbs, decapitation—you name it, they did it. Vampires were crafty little devils and figured out over the course of their immortal lives that too much attention was bad attention.

Hell, I learned that in only seventeen years of life.

So, our vast network of vampire hunters kept careful track of freak accidents in all the different regions, watching for patterns and then calling on us special folk, the ones with the blood of the elders, to carry out the kills.

Aka, me and my kind.

Unlike normal people, we were faster and twice as strong as any muscle man. We easily tracked vampire movements and picked up on scents like damn bloodhounds. And to add spice to an already spicy mix, most of us spent our lives honing the gifts we were born with.

Interestingly, females of the bloodline were stronger and deadlier. So, the only female to be born outside of my grandmother in our family line for nearly four generations meant the expectations that I would become a hardcore badass were far and away the worst part about this job.

I never got a damn minute to breathe.

Hence why a seventeen-year-old, decked out to the teeth in weapons and practically frozen, was crouched near an abandoned farm house, waiting in the wings for one wrong step, one wrong move that offered enough of an opening to do the only thing I was good at.

Killing vampires.

I sensed the thing inside, lugging an unconscious teenager over his shoulder.

Decked out in a fitted floral vest, Victorian lace jabot, and ruffled sleeves even I snickered at, the undead bastard really tried his hand at appearing the perfect embodiment of Lestat fromInterview with a Vampire. Even his perfect Shirley Temple curls pulled back into a low ponytail offered an almost iconic sheen in the moonlit painted hay-scape of the barn. And if not for the unconscious body over his shoulder, no one would be the wiser to what he was or what he was doing there.

To be fair, even with the teen over his shoulder, most would attribute it to a night spent drinking and the designated buddy who had the unfair task of getting the bastard home.

I toed closer before comically catching my shirt on a branch. Clicking my tongue, I damned the bush for stealing my focus and yanked myself free.

I tracked the undead bastard all the way from town to this barn thanks to an injury on the teen’s head, likely from being knocked out.

Unlike the stories told, vampires didn’t have any sort of mystical power over humans to turn them into mindless minions. A head bash was as close as they got to magical compliance.

And unfortunately for me, Lestat was surprisingly popular this Halloween, so finding the undead bastard took far too long. I was already cutting it close with an injured victim taken hostage. Since Halloween was one of the busiest nights of the year, it was me, myself, and I tonight. I didn’t have time to call for back-up, so one way or another, this bastard was going down.