Page 2 of Hot for Slayer (Scared Sexy Collection #1)
M y mother didn’t raise a quitter.
Well, my mother didn’t raise me at all .
She dropped me off at the abbey once my brother came into the world, after promising to Saint Fursey that if my father begat the male heir he so ardently wished for, she would dedicate her eldest daughter’s life to piety and labor.
Dear Mommy was very generous with her pledges, especially when they involved sacrificing other people.
It was unfortunate for me, the eldest daughter in question—and, let’s be honest, even more unfortunate for the abbess—that my disposition wasn’t quite monastic material.
Not that I was a rebel or a miscreant. That would have required scheming, hard work, or well-organized defiance, and Little Aethelthryth was too much of an absent-minded, stargazing dreamer for that.
Of course, that was an issue in and of itself, because I constantly wished for things that weren’t compatible with my destiny.
I wished to travel. I wished to laugh. I wished for ballads and dances and tales.
I wished for a life that I couldn’t have, which was, apparently, my greatest flaw.
Despite being compelled by the Benedictine Rule to pray eight times a day, the abbess still found time to remind me that if I kept coveting a future that didn’t belong to me, I would end up in freezing water for eternity, and my bones would rot inside my body.
Her credibility may have been slightly undercut by the fact that she also believed in putting the livestock on trial for misbehaving, and in plucking off the entirety of her eyebrows.
(Regrettably, I cannot recommend growing up in a small nunnery located in eighth-century East Anglia.) Still, she wasn’t wrong about me: I want things that do not belong to me all the time . Chief of which: companionship.
My favorite part of being in the convent, of course, was the taste of sisterhood it gifted me. The women I lived with, they were my people. My family. My community. They taught me the beauty of sharing a life, and I naively assumed that this kind of fellowship would forever be within my reach.
Then my vampire maker yanked it away, and I have been aching for it ever since.
The problem lies with the disposition of my kind.
A lot of legends assume that we like to stick together.
They speak of clans and nests and hives, where vampires gather to join forces in preparation for our nefarious deeds.
They imply that we form a structured society, that we do meal trains, that we date and bang it out and have cute little vampiric children.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Most vampires are extremely territorial.
They cannot stand close proximity with others, crave competition even when natural resources abound, and are more likely to murder each other than to extend a dinner invitation.
Vampires suck—no pun intended—and are condemned to an eternity of conflict and solitude.
So, of course, a vampire is what gregarious, companionable young me was turned into.
And because the abbess, the nunnery, and the fortnightly mandatory vows of fasting didn’t raise a quitter—nor did they manage to beat the stubbornness out of me—even thirteen centuries into my vampiric tenure, I have yet to accept my new circumstances.
That, I fear, will be my demise.
My latest bout of misfortune started a few months ago, when a new vampire moved into a house located just a little too close to my place.
Initially, I didn’t think too much of it. New York is huge, and I was by no means the only vampire living in the city. Manhattan, however, has been my personal hunting ground for the last decade or so, chiefly because of the abundance of my favorite kind of meal.
My motto is: If I have to suck someone dry every few weeks, why not make it a Goldman Sachs executive?
But all of a sudden, I was no longer alone in my seven-block radius.
Which could only be interpreted as a challenge, and left me with two options: getting the hell out of the place that had been my home for the previous ten years or putting some effort into running the new vampire out of my territory.
Stubbornly, I decided to bring shame upon my species by doing neither.
I liked my cramped little apartment. How early the winter sun set in the city.
The way the people walked fast until they blurred, unaware of the fragility of their short little lives, day after week after month.
I enjoyed the four seasons, the museums and movie theaters, the scent of the eateries I would never step foot into.
More recently, a few small raccoons seemed to have acquired me.
They’d climb up the fire escape and stare into my window until I provided them with food, hiss at me while they consumed the fruits of my labor, and then unceremoniously scurry away, no doubt to some other idiot who’d also purchased a bodega rotisserie chicken just for the occasion.
The point is, I’d been having a fine time. I didn’t want to spend weeks planning an ambush on some asshole who was trying to pick a fight, but I also didn’t want to move. So I carved out a third option for myself: I would ignore the new guy and hope he’d do the same.
Naturally, he didn’t. Instead, after a few months of uneventful coexisting that lulled me into a false sense of security, he attacked me while I was taking a nighttime stroll in Central Park.
No biggie. I thought it was shitty of him not to give me some warning before resorting to violence—a courtesy horse head in my bed, a scribbled note pinned to my door with a bloody dagger.
Still, this was obviously a baby vampire.
A male of just a few hundred years. Fighting him off took very little effort.
I left him unconscious under the Obelisk and thought, Fuck this. I’m not dealing with the mood swings of an adolescent. I’m moving.
My first mistake was not restraining him.
My second, stopping by my apartment to collect a couple of things: the bronze comb Mother had bestowed upon me before I joined the convent; the small portrait of Donna Lucia, a human who correctly guessed that I was a vampire and still traveled all over Europe with me, painted by Botticelli in the 1400s; the cassette tape of songs I composed during my shoegaze era. That kind of stuff.
Teenage Dirtbag Vampire was there, waiting for me, and this time he managed to take me by surprise, knock me out, and drag me to an abandoned building, where he tied me to a chair bolted in front of an east-facing window.
I regained consciousness a little before sunrise, just long enough to ponder whether in my almost fourteen hundred years I’d left a permanent mark on the world and whether anyone was going to notice my absence.
At the very least, I thought, the raccoons will. Once they’re hungry.
Sunlight began to filter through the glass, and all I could think about in my last few seconds was something that hadn’t crossed my mind for at least a decade.
As long as you don’t let anyone get to you before I do, Aethelthryth.
Ah, yes. Lazlo Enyedi. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be too heartbroken.
If it makes you feel better, I thought fondly at him, willing the universe to pass on the message, I would have preferred it to be you.
Apparently, I would have preferred it so much, my brain produced him out of thin air. Enyedi, the worst H?llsing slayer to ever set eyes on a vampire, was standing in front of me. One last mirage before the end.
“Hey,” I told him with a small, amused smile. “Couldn’t bear to let someone else butcher me, huh?”
“I know what’s mine,” he muttered in his usual clipped tone. He moved to free my tied wrists, and his hands felt so warm and assured and uncannily real on my flesh, I began to suspect that maybe ...
“Hang on. Are you actually here?”
Just as a sunbeam reached the chair, he tore through my bindings and pushed me none too gently away from the light.
That’s when Teenage Dirtbag, who clearly had been waiting for a pyrotechnic show from somewhere in the shade, decided that he wasn’t going to let a random slayer interfere with his kill.
It led to a three-way scuffle during which I lost track of who was doing what, and then to a very cinematic sequence that ended with Lazlo throwing Teenage Dirtbag off the fire escape.
I wish I could have watched him burn to death, but I was busy dealing with my own pickle—more precisely, the fact that before Lazlo had gotten to him, Teenage Dirtbag had managed to tackle me and break my legs, my hip bone, and my left shoulder, making it impossible for me to move.
The fractures were going to heal quickly, but not fast enough for me to escape the rapidly approaching sunshine.
This is it, I thought. The end.
That’s when Enyedi sprinted to bodily push me out of the light, hit his head on a collapsing ceiling beam, and fell unconscious on top of me.
Which would be where we are at, right now.
Clearly, this slayer really wants me to die on his terms.
“Um,” I say as his limp weight flattens me. My tendons and bones are already reknitting together. I am a vampire. I have superstrength. Still, slithering across the sunny floor while covering myself with his body is a feat, and so is dragging the both of us to a windowless hallway.
So much so, my neurons must be too fatigued to work.
What the hell am I doing, pulling Lazlo with me?
Propping him up against the drywall? Running my hand through his dark hair to assess the severity of his wounds?
He’s a slayer. He only saved me so he could slaughter me himself .
Now I’m stuck in an abandoned SoHo building with him, and I’ll have to spend the hours until sunset hunted by him.
Unless I kill him first.
The thought hits me along with a tinge of guilt, which I push down incredulously. Did the raccoons eat your prefrontal cortex, idiot? You have to kill him. Immediately.
Yes. I do. I have to behead him. The one thing slayers can’t heal from. But Dirtbag took my weapons, and I—
Lazlo must still have something sharp somewhere on his person.
I throw myself into him, running my hand across an expanse of muscles that I would find more impressive if it weren’t exclusively dedicated to murdering me and my bloodline.
He still has four— four! —blades on him, hidden in a variety of places.
I take the longest one from his boot, lift it to his throat . ..
And let my hands fall.
He just saved my life. And I’ve known him since before the 1100s. I still remember his dumb Crusade outfits.
Do you also remember when he cut off your chin with his dumb Crusade sword? It took, like, five weeks for it to grow back to the right shape.
Correct. That’s why I have to do this. It’s him or me, and—
“Fuck,” a confused voice says.
When I glance at him, Enyedi is blinking at me, massaging the side of his head.
Kill him now. Kill. Him. Now.
But I don’t. Because I’m too busy listening to the five words that change my life forever. “Who the hell are you?”