Page 39 of Hunting His Vampire Mate

It was the early hours of the morning, and the darkened tents loomed over us on either side, silent and menacing. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy still lingered in the air and there were patches of bare earth that were so soaked through with spilled soda and slushy that the soles of my shoes became sticky and caked with clumps of dirt. The ferris wheel ahead of us was blackand skeletal in the distance. And nothing moved at all except my father and I.

“It’s just ahead,” he said, so low that I almost didn’t hear him.

I nodded, but his thousand-yard gaze had already slipped away from me. The expression on his face was flat and unreadable.

He led the way to the funhouse, where all of the deaths had occurred. The façade had been shaped into the likeness of a clown’s face, impossibly large, and its gaping mouth was the entrance. In the daytime, or even at night with the carnival lights everywhere, it would have seemed cheerful. In the pitch black, with only the half-moon and the smattering of stars poking through the clouds to light it, it seemed almost impossibly sinister.

Dread twisted in my stomach, but I didn’t say anything. After all, this was just a part of being a hunter. All you could do was try to be as prepared as possible, then step into the dark and hope you survived to tell the tale.

We turned our flashlights on the moment we stepped inside. We hadn’t used flashlights in the carnival grounds because that would have been equivalent to announcing our presence for the security guards who were no doubt patrolling somewhere nearby. And all of the carnival workers were holed up on the other edge of the field, but they had windows in their bunkhouse trailers, surely. They might have seen us as well. Stealth and silence were paramount when hunting in places that you weren’t supposed to be.

The mirrors were everywhere, distorting our reflections into grotesque shapes. The funhouse seemed to be holding its breath, and I could feel the presence watching us. Waiting for us to get far enough inside so that we couldn’t easily escape, perhaps. I wondered how the spirit had led workers here. Or perhaps thiswas sometimes a place where the newer carnies—the ones who didn’t know any better—went to party?

I wondered if the workers warned them. Probably. But anyone who didn’t know how real these things were might discount the warnings. They might chalk the warnings up to a hazing ritual, or perhaps discount them as the superstitious nonsense of an older generation. I could see it easily enough.

But there were no parties in here tonight. Just the hushed waiting of the mirrored walls, the narrow pathways that stretched around us, labyrinth-like, easy to get lost in.

“We should attract it,” I said, stopping after we rounded our third corner and wound up at a dead end.

My father paused and turned back to me. His expression didn’t change, but his gaze locked onto something just over my shoulder. “No need.”

When I turned, my blood turned to ice in my veins.

There was a clown at the end of the hallway, watching us. It was dressed in rags and so inhumanly tall that it was hunched over, like it was on stilts, its back scraping up against the ceiling. Its limbs were skeletal-thin and far too long to be human. Its mouth was filled with cracked teeth, stretched in a grin that seemed inhumanly wide, too big to fit properly on its face. And its eyes were empty sockets that oozed black ichor.

Wraiths and revenants were like that, too. Somehow, when they became dark and malevolent, they stopped looking anything like the humans they had once been. They became grotesque and twisted. No one was quite sure why: perhaps it was a reflection of the poison that had infected their souls? Or perhaps they assumed those forms only to terrify their victims.

I pulled out my weapon—a modified flare gun, filled with rock salt—and pointed it at the poltergeist. In close quarters like this, it would be loud. But it would paralyze the spirit long enough for us to—

“No,” my father said, shoving his backpack into my hands and pushing past me without waiting for my reply. “Let me.”

He advanced on the creature and started singing a song under his breath.

It was one of the old tribal songs. We had no contact with any of his family anymore, not since my twelfth birthday, after my father had taken Kyle and I from our mother. Our grandmother had begged him to take us back, to let us lead normal lives away from the horrors of the supernatural world. He had refused. The fight that had ensued had been so bitter, with so many harsh and final words exchanged, that he hadn’t spoken with her since.

I didn’t entirely blame my grandmother. Most of the men in the family—and a few of the women—had been hunters, and they had largely ended up the way most of us did sooner or later: dead at the hands of a monster. And the ones in the family who still remained, the ones who had rejected our family heritage, wanted nothing to do with us or with anything remotely related to the supernatural. But my father still remembered a few of the old legends and songs he had been taught as a boy. He told us a few of the legends when Kyle and I were children, but he refused to sing us any of the songs. The only time he sang them was when we were facing down a poltergeist. It was our last real connection to our Navajo ancestry.

The creature began swaying to the music. It lost its grin, its face going slack and receptive. Though poltergeists are hands-down the most dangerous type of ghost and cannot actually be killed, they have one critical weakness: they’re easily entranced by music.

I dropped to my knees, set the flashlight down beside me, then wrenched the backpack open. I fished out the enchanted locket we were using to imprison the spirit. It was one of those old-fashioned oval lockets with spots for photos inside it. But before I could pop it open and dart forward to suck the spirit intoit—poltergeists, because they cannot be killed, must always be trapped inside of an enchanted object—my father turned to look back at me.

I glanced up at him and saw the resignation in his dark eyes.

There was relief there, too.

Horror choked the words off, all except one. “Dad?”

His gaze raked over me, like he was trying to memorize my face.

“Forgive me,” he said.

That’s when I realized he was no longer singing.

Before I could move, the poltergeist reared up and seized my father. Its fingers seemed to vanish into him. Its mouth widened again and there was a blinding light, just like there always is whenever a poltergeist sucks the life out of you.

My father’s face went slack and staring in an instant.

I rocketed to my feet, my flashlight beam going wild when my foot kicked it. I popped the clasp on the locket and darted forward with a strangled shout lodged in my throat. But I already knew I was too late.

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