“I see,” Nathan murmured as they reached the second floor and he led her down the hall toward his apartment. “You’ll be safe here.”
“How…?”
Her question trailed off when he stopped in front of one of the closed doors. He pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
“Come in,” he invited as he flicked on a switch while entering the apartment.
Vicky followed him inside and froze when the single, bare bulb hanging from the cracked ceiling revealed what lay within. What the room lacked in furniture, it made up for in weapons stockpiled against the walls of what she assumed would be the living room in a normal person’s apartment.
There were so many weapons that, in some areas, they were stacked five feet high and spread out from the wall to cover a couple of feet of the brown, industrial carpet. The one trunk in the room was closed, but Vicky would bet money it contained an arsenal. From what she could see, every one of the weapons was explicitly designed to end a vampire’s life.
Delightful. Rolling her eyes, Vicky wondered if she would be better off hightailing it out of here and taking her chances with the Savages. Nathan’s sister may be a vampire now, the hunters might have allied with Ronan, but they’d been the enemies of vampires for millennia.
Just because she experienced wicked fantasies about the things she yearned to do to him didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to lop off her head. After Duke, she’d had enough of bedmates who turned out to be praying mantises in disguise.
Then she realized that Nathan wouldn’t risk the fragile truce he’d established with Ronan by assaulting her when she’d done nothing to warrant it. Besides, if Nathan wanted her dead, he would have left her on the street with the Savages.
Stepping further into the apartment, Vicky frowned at the newspaper clippings tacked to the dingy, white wall across from her. The articles covered a ten-foot square section of space; a pinned map of the Northeast hung next to the newspapers. Red thumbtacks pinpointed different locations throughout the map.
Swallowing, she glanced at Nathan as he closed the door behind her and locked it. “So, what’s with all the weapons? Are you preparing to become the next Dexter?” she asked.
“I don’t know who that is.”
She blinked at him. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a TV show. He’s a serial killer, but you know, kind of a good guy, in a weird sort of way.”
“When I have the time for it, the only TV I watch is the news,” he replied.
“The news is depressing.”
“And a TV show about a serial killer is uplifting?”
“Dexter is misunderstood; most of the people on the news are just flat-out assholes.” Vicky pointed at the newspaper clippings. “But I can tell you’re fascinated by daily events.”
“I’m not a serial killer.”
“How many vampires have you killed?” she inquired.
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
He shrugged out of his leather bomber jacket, removed a stake from an inner pocket, and tossed the jacket onto the counter dividing the galley kitchen from the living/murder room. If he broke plastic tarps out from somewhere, she would be out of here faster than a mechanical rabbit outrunning a greyhound.
Vicky’s hand went to one of her stakes as she eyed the weapon in the hands of a man trained to kill her. Nathan had agreed to work with Ronan against the Savages Joseph was gathering, but he’d been born and raised with only one purpose, destroying her kind. And until his sister became Ronan’s mate, Nathan hadn’t been discerning about the vampires he destroyed, good or bad. Judging by the power she sensed emanating from him, he’d excelled at killing too.
Still mortal, he possessed demon DNA like vampires, was far stronger than a human, and moved with the lethal grace inherent of vamps. She could probably take him. As a purebred vampire, she was physically stronger than him, but he’d been training to kill for far longer than her. She wasn’t about to take any chances. Removing another stake from inside her coat, she clasped it at her side as she watched his every move.
“I’ve been hunting since I was eighteen, so I guess I’ve killed around eighty vamps in five years,” Nathan replied as he pulled back the heavy blinds covering the window in the kitchen to reveal the metal fire escape. Nothing moved in the alley below or on what he could see of the street, but he didn’t think they’d lost the Savages. He set the blinds back into place and moved on to the next window.
“I’m not sure what classifies as a serial killer, but I’m pretty sure that might be a super-level murderer,” Vicky said. “Like Ted Bundy is giving you a slow clap kudos from Hell kind of killer.”
His eyes narrowed as he glanced at her over his shoulder. “I kill to protect others.”
“And before Kadence met Ronan, you did it to every vampire you came across, whether they were innocent or not.”
He winced at the reminder, and his eyes fell to the stake in her hand. He’d saved her tonight, yet he didn’t blame her for being wary of him.
“We didn’t know better before then,” he stated. “If we had, things would have been different. Now that we know hunters can detect a Savage vamp by smell, we only hunt the vampires who kill.”
“Good to know. What about the human collaborators you also use to hunt with? You don’t exactly treat them kindly.”
“What do you mean?”
“My sister-in-law, Paige, was a human who worked with hunters on the west coast before she became a vampire. The guy who trained her, Nabel, pretty much used her to lure in a vampire and almost got her killed.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“It was more than unfortunate!” Vicky snapped, irritated by his blasé attitude.
“Hunters aren’t perfect, and neither are vampires. My father put an end to the practice of using human collaborators a couple of years ago before he died. At one time, such partnerships were believed to be a big help. In the end, far too many humans were killed to justify the continuation of the practice.”
“Hmm,” she grunted.
“We’re not vicious; we only meant to keep people and our kind safe from vampires. We made mistakes in doing so, but we’ve also saved countless lives.”
He didn’t tell her that he lay awake at night, rehashing his numerous kills and trying to figure out if some of them were innocent vampires caught in the crossfire. He suspected a few were. No matter how many times he told himself he hadn’t known how to tell the difference between Savages and other vamps, or that there even was a difference between them, the guilt still ate at him.
“Are you going to attack me, Victoria?” he inquired.
“Are you going to attack me, Nathan?” she retorted.
“No.”
CHAPTER 3
He turned his back on her and walked over to another window in the kitchen. Her eyes ran over the bare Formica countertops, the cracked and chipped blue tiling, and the white cabinets sagging on their rusting hinges. There was no table or chairs.
To her right, a small hallway ran to the open door of a bedroom. When she stepped back, she saw an air mattress with a blanket tossed over it inside the room.