Bring On The Night Read Free

vampires and werewolves. Sometimes the same body has evidence of both.” She looked at Trent. “What the freaking hell is going on?”
    “We think it’s exactly what it looks like, the joining of forces of at least one vampire and one werewolf, possibly more of one or the other or both.” His voice was flat. Obviously he’d had time to accept the idea.
    She, however, had not. “Vampires and werewolves do not join forces. The two courts have fought wars against each other. Even now, we don’t have a peace accord with the werewolves. It’s more like, I don’t know...an extended pause in the conflict.”
    He nodded. “I know that, as does our king. Nonetheless, looking at the evidence...” He gestured at the papers, but didn’t seem to want to look at the photos again.
    “What does he want me to do?”
    Trent took a long drink of coffee. “This is a very delicate matter. You and I know what a precarious hold the king has on his throne. Subjects like you and I are loyal to him, and to his philosophy of the Justice Killing. We choose not to hunt among the innocent and instead take our prey from the predators of the mortal population. Not all vampires agree, you know that. And certainly werewolves have no such moral compunctions. If he lost his grip on the Vampire Throne and his position in the Court of Monsters...”
    She finished for him. “The number of innocent victims would skyrocket.”
    “Which would in turn bring notice to our kind.”
    “It’s hard to imagine mortals accepting we’re real, in this day and age.”
    “Even so, it’s always a possibility, and if it happened, it would lead to war, war within the Vampire Court, war between vampires and werewolves, and other creatures in the Court of Monsters. And war between mortals and those of us who are...not.”
    They sat quietly for a long moment. Trent drank his coffee as she went through the file. “I take it I’m going to Concord.”
    He nodded. “Find out who’s doing this, and stop them, before too much attention is drawn, be it mortal or otherwise.”
    She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound so simple.”
    “I know it’s not, and so does the king,” he said. “There aren’t many he would trust enough to send to your aid, Jessamine, should you need it, but should things get complicated, you know I’ll do everything I can.”
    The sound of her name, the name the king had given her years ago, startled her a bit. She’d known Trent a long time. He meant it when he said he preferred the company of his books. He was a man, a creature , of solitude. So was she, for that matter. Events in the past had brought them to an understanding of each other, and a mutual trust. No doubt this was why their king sent Trent to her, to ask her to risk her life in this matter. She gazed at Trent calmly as he drank his coffee, letting him read her thoughts in the set of her face, the resolve in her eyes. She would find these creatures that had formed such an unheard-of alliance, and she would stop them. There was no question it would mean killing them.
    * * * *
    Long after Trent left, taking one of the yellow-and-orange roses with him, she stayed up to read through the file with care and make notes. The Concord police went from not caring about the crimes because of the status of the victims, to theorizing they were drug or gang-related. A local journalist thought it might be a serial killer, though she noticed the theory didn’t seem popular with police. She made some notes of her own, conducted some research online. Exhaustion began to pull at her, dragging her thoughts down into a jumbled pool.
    She shut down the computer, washed the coffee cups and turned off the lights. The bed was cold but she didn’t notice. She heard faint sounds of traffic outside the apartment building, the mortal world going about its daytime business. Her car, with its windows tinted darker than legal, was parked in the building’s underground garage. She didn’t drive it