Page 19 of High Stakes

I looked at my feet, shoved into the sleek, shiny heels I hated. “I don’t want to let everyone down.”

Maru considered my lie for a moment and then clapped me on the back. “Then don’t. Be the badass we know and love. You should land directly in front of Enoch at the gala. Drive the stake through his heart and run like hell. Disappear. Get somewhere tall and jump. The tech will bring you home.”

“You just said you didn’t trust the tech.”

“I don’t, but I trust you.”

* * *

Maru insisted on walking me back to my room. He promised to see me off in the morning and left me to get changed and ready for bed. But when I tried to lay down and close my eyes, I couldn’t turn off my mind.

Victor’s warning threw me off kilter.

He invested years in us. How could he even suggest that I not come back, even if I failed? Maru was right. If I failed this time I could always go again, earlier in the past this time so Enoch wouldn’t see it coming. And I could keep going back until I did stake him. Failure taught a valuable lesson.

If one of us managed to kill our mark, it would destroy a lot of vampires and take the burdensome strain of protection off the military forces. It would also make the vampires think twice about what humans were capable of.

More than anything, I wanted it to be my stake that landed true.

I perched on the edge of my bed and turned on my wall screen. The bright rainbow of pixels blazed to life. With the remote control in hand, I flipped through the digital images. I needed to remind myself of what Enoch was and what he did to people. Innocent people.

It wasn’t Enoch’s face that should fill my screen or my mind. It was theirs. It wasn’t who I was targeting, but why.

Why I let them alter me. Why I pushed to be better, stronger, faster. Just as ruthless as he was. Why I wanted a better future.

The cameraman’s hand shook as he pushed a bent metal door, the hinges squealing in protest. Inside, the camera focused on a feeding vampire who drank his fill before tearing his fangs from the neck of an elderly man. “You’re dead,” the vamp promised. The cameraman turned. He tried to run, but wasn’t fast enough. His camera hit the ground but kept rolling. For hours, it recorded vampires carelessly stepping over the man’s body. Until dawn, when humans picked him up and carried him somewhere to be buried.

Enoch wasn’t the one who killed him, but he played a part in creating the monster that did – either him or his brother or sister had sired the lines of vampires that killed him.

I scrolled down. The image of a sheet of paper with simple typewriter font came up next.

Asset Eve - Target Enoch

Asset Abram - Target Asa

Asset Titus - Target Terah

It was our confirmation of mission papers, when we were first accepted above the other Assets as the ones who would travel and were assigned our targets.

Pushing a button, I knew what would load next. I forced myself to watch anyway.

Grainy video feed from a convenience store security camera flickered across the screen. It was a scene that haunted my dreams and made me agree to let them turn me into a monster, into a killing machine almost as blood-thirsty as the vamps.

Mom held my hand as we walked to the register to check out. She let go of me for a split second and hurried to fish money out of her purse, and in that second, just after the sun had set behind the tall skyscrapers, a vampire entered the store. She thought she had enough time to get milk for me. She was wrong.

Mom pushed me behind her, backing toward the counter where the clerk began to panic. The clerk reached under the countertop and hit a button before fleeing into the back room, slamming it closed before we even had a chance to run for cover. Mom told me to go out the door on the other side of the store, the side where sunlight still spilled onto the streets in places, to run and not stop.

That was the last time I saw her alive, except for on this tape.

The vampire’s long, stringy, bleach-blond hair hung over his shoulders, the ends tinged red with someone else’s blood. He’d already fed from someone in the parking lot, we’d later learn. But he was new and had to keep trying to fill the unfillable void within himself.

Mom ducked down an aisle, putting candy bars and chips between her and the monster, but he was too fast. He caught her near the coolers in the back and slammed her into the glass doors, then he fed on her until her hand couldn’t grip the glass anymore and slid down it. Satiated, he casually strode off and left her to die on the floor. In her last moments, she reached out toward the door I’d run out of and mouthed something before her chest stopped rising.

Running as hard as I could, I found a female sergeant and took her back to the store, where she called for backup. They wouldn’t let me inside to see her, and I knew when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics emerged with a person lying beneath the stained white sheet that my mom was dead and I would never see her again. I was all alone.

The sergeant took me to the compound that night. For weeks, I volleyed between tears and numbness.

I stayed there, working whatever chores a child could do until I grew into a teenager. Then, while running an errand, Victor spotted me. He put me in the program and into training, saying I was perfect. Exactly Enoch’s type. I didn’t even know who Enoch was at that point; I just knew I was angry and hurt and alone. I wanted revenge on the vampires, and Victor provided me with a chance to do exactly that.

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