High Stakes

Part One

Part 1

KOTA:

I pass around the crumpled paper, dumbfounded--which isn't an adjective that I'd ever describe myself. But now? I am.

"Dude, how could you and Nathan both be living on the same block as one? How long have we been doing this?" Gabe mocks.

Christ, like I haven't been thinking the exact same thing? The guys and I have dedicated our lives to eradicating these monsters, and one is apparently living across the street from me.

"Sang Sorenson, female, age eighteen, origin unknown..." Dr Green reads from the paper, not bothering to recite her address. We've already established she's been living right under Nate's and my nose.

North is washing blood off of his hands in the sink of the trashy hotel we had broken into just an hour before, and Luke diligently wipes down everything he touches, careful not to leave any fingerprints behind us when we leave.

"Sang? What kind of a name is Sang?" North grunts as he crosses his now clean arms over his chest, narrowing his eyes.

"Because that's the important take-away from the info?" Silas snorts, elbowing him aside so he can wash his own hands.

"There are fourteen names on this list," I mutter as the paper makes its way back to me.

"And?" Mr Blackbourne says dryly. His eyes are slightly tinged red from all of the blood in the air. The hair raises on my arms every time I see it, even though I know he's the most controlled of all his kind and would never harm any of us. He's completely self-loathing toward his people, and wants to wipe them out even more than we do, but it's always eerie when his normally human-looking appearance makes those slight shifts--red eyes, and oh yeah, the razor-sharp fangs--revealing his true self. Sometimes I feel a bit odd, fighting them with one of them. But he's an incredible asset; saved all of our lives at multiple points.

"We've already dealt with two of them on there. Why don't we pay the others a visit?" Nathan cracks his knuckles menacingly.

"You've never suspected anything off about this girl?" Victor asks me, stepping carefully over the body we're all ignoring slumped on the floor.

"Is she hot?" Silas asks, completely serious.

I shrug, "I've barely even seen her. She avoids other people completely. So far the only times I've seen her, she's been alone--purposefully. Walks the other way if someone nears her."

I don't mention the fact that I've been watching her quite a bit, actually. She drew me in the moment I first saw her, when her family moved in. If she is one of them, which we haven't confirmed and I'm hoping with everything in me that she's not, then she's unlike any of them we've ever met.

Sang Sorenson spends most of her time looking at the ground, if she's around other people. When she's exploring the forest? She's fascinated by the world around her, absorbing nature and what it has to offer, carefree and beautiful. I rub a hand over my face--maybe I do watch her too much.

"We don't know if the list he gave is accurate," Luke kicks the body below us, "She could just be someone he knew. Or maybe another thrall?"

A thrall was what the dead punk was--a slave, mind and body--to his vampire master. He didn't give us the name of his master, although we did our best to extract that information (hence the corpse) but he did give us a written list of other vampires in the Charleston area. Fourteen wasn't a big enough number for the amount of deaths and assumed thralls in the city, though. We didn't trust the information he'd given us. We'd have to do our own recon.

It could be true that she was a thrall, although she didn't seem like it. Vamps liked to have pretty girls as their thralls, for obvious reasons, and she is definitely beautiful, but she didn't fit the normal profile. She wasn't overly-sexual, for one.