Page 29 of Cursed to Be Mine
“Yes. And the vampires are the Blood Fangs.”
“So the witches are what, the Shadow Domain?” she asks, and I can’t tell if she believes this or not.
I nod. “Not every member is a sup – a supernatural, but all the higher ups are.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I watched a woman get killed by avampire in broad daylight.”
“Wait? They can walk in the sun?”
“Some can,” Detective Henry Howard says as he makes another turn. “There are two types of vampires. You have what we call the regs – those that can’t go out in the sun without burning or consume anything other than human blood. Then you have the daywalkers, who can pass for human in every regard.”
“So how do you know…”
“There are signs. Most notably, the spray I gave you. To a human, that’s just like pepper spray, but to a vampire, any vampire, it burns like acid. One bite from a werewolf will kill a vampire in twenty-four hours unless they can find a healer.”
“They don’t heal themselves?”
“They do. But werewolf saliva greatly hinders their healing ability for some reason.”
“There’s also their eyes,” I say, taking over the lesson again. “A lot of sups have a unique eye color you won’t ever see in a human. Like purple or silver.”
“Can’t they just be wearing colored contacts?”
“We don’t kill people we aren’t one hundred percent certain are monsters, Scarlett,” Detective Howard says, a bite to his tone.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like… How do you…kill them?”
I look at her in approval. The first time Howard told me all this, I called him more than just crazy. At fifty, I was too old to be believing in monsters. But believing in them or not didn’t change the fact that they were here.
And they were destroying our great nation.
“You don’t need to stake them in the chest, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I say. “A bullet to the heart,any damage to the heart, really, will kill them. Regular bullets will slow them down unless they’re in a rage. They can regrow limbs, but it takes weeks, so cutting one off is a good way to incapacitate them.”
“But you need to cut off their head or rip out their heart after, just to be certain they don’t heal,” Detective Henry Howard pipes in as he turns left, towards the Twelve Mile Swamp Conservation Area.
“But we’re just on recon, right?” Scarlett asks, her eyes flicking between us. “What does that mean?”
I nod at the electronics all set up beside her. “If we don’t have a target already tagged, we send out drones to search for them. Once we find one, a minimum of three teams close in on them.”
“And then what?” Her voice is quiet, on the verge of belief.
“And then we send them back to Hell, or we bring them in to learn more about them.”
She blanches, and I know she’s able to read between the lines. “Are any of them good?” she asks.
Detective Howard snorts. “They’re not like criminals with a bad past or rough upbringing, Scarlett. They’re the devil’s children. That’s all they are. Not one of them is capable of love.”
He makes a final turn onto a dirt track, then pulls over a short while later. Crawling into the back, he motions for Scarlett to move. She does so without question, trying her best to stay out of the way. But she takes up a fourth of the space, and I have to shove past her when I wriggle through.
For a moment, all that’s heard is Scarlett’s heavy breathing and the gentle hum of Henry’s electronics. On the screen of one of the three monitors he has set up, a small blue dot moves quickly down the streets ofSt. Augustine. He picks up a radio and gives its coordinates and direction of travel to the teams stationed somewhere out in the woods and swamp.
He hits a few keys, and on the other two monitors, sixteen cameras pinned to the front of shirts and jackets come online.
“Nicole, Nicole, Nicole, this is control base, over,” he says into his radio.
“What? Over.”
