Light and Shadows: A Kaitlyn Strong Story Read online

  Light and Shadows

  By

  Art DeForest

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2016 Arthur D. DeForest

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by other means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

  Dedication

  To Tammy Tapey

  Your cousins are your first friends. They help you through the hard times.

  Sometimes they help you write books.

  THANKS CUZ

  Additional Thanks to Diane and Dorene, for going the extra mile.

  Every time.

  Like what you read? Questions? Comments? Let me know.

  https://www.facebook.com/Art-DeForest-1703044689948412/

  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01CDKZA0O

  Books by Art DeForest

  Kaitlyn Strong

  I Love the Shadows

  Stalking the Shadows

  Savage Shadows

  Kaitlyn Strong, Books 1-3

  Hunter’s Saga

  Hunter’s Game

  Hunter’s Chase

  Hunter’s Vengeance

  Hunter’s Home, Books 1-3

  Fangs crouched low in the shadows at the mouth of the alley, his ears flattened against his skull. He stared intently into it, sharing what he saw over our mental link. Two men, well vampires, stood flanking a lone steel door in one of the buildings. We expected that. We were sneaking up to the back entrance of Sasha’s, a popular dance club that was, incidentally, a cash cow and hunting ground for the Abandonado clan. Given that, we were pretty certain that it’d be guarded.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I nodded confirmation that our guess had been right, to the team behind me. Deacon Caine, my partner, nodded in response, absentmindedly adjusting the grip on the large silvered dagger in his right hand.

  Seeing his confirmation, I rose from my crouched position and started singing drunkenly as I staggered my way into the alley. I felt the gaze of the guards fall instantly on me as I came into view. They tensed for a moment, hands straying to the guns hidden underneath the jackets of their thousand dollar suits.

  A sense of warning came to me from Fangs at the move, but I continued my drunk party girl act, weaving my way closer to them. Being vampires, they picked up the smell of cheap tequila that I’d taken a shot of a little earlier. I’d also dribbled a little down my front. You know, just to help the effect.

  I saw them both relax visibly as I entered the circle of light cast by the fixture over the door they guarded. I was dressed up in black leather pants that hugged my ass like a second skin and a crimson silk, button down blouse. It was unbuttoned dangerously low, revealing entirely too much of my gravity defying cleavage. That was one of the perks, pardon the pun, of being a vampire girl. Gravity didn’t make things sag as you grew older. A custom made leather jacket rounded out my ensemble. It had all kinds of neat hiding places where I kept the tools of my trade.

  One of the guards leaned over and whispered almost sub vocally to his partner. “I love it when the food delivers itself.” He said as a smile spread across his face. No human would have heard his comment, but that was yet another perk of being vampire, excellent hearing.

  I looked up about then, as if I had just noticed them standing there. “Hi!” I said brightly with a drunken wave. “Can you help me? I can’t seem to find my car.” I said, looking around with a confused look on my face.

  The guy who’d mentioned food delivery, started down the stairs in my direction. He was good looking, with wavy black hair and a goatee, that had been trimmed to within an inch of it’s life. His buddy, who stayed up on the landing, was just as pretty. Clean shaven with a swarthy mediterranean cast to his complexion. He was grinning now too as Goatee came down to retrieve their dinner. It was almost a shame to disappoint them.

  I pretended to stagger as Goatee reached the bottom of the steps. Instinctively he reached out to steady me with a hand to my upper arm. As soon as his hand touched me, I struck.

  The arm he’d touched coiled around his and locked it in place between my arm and ribs. His shock at the move was just starting to register, when the kukri I’d pulled from it’s home in my jacket, flashed forward, taking his head. The surprised look on his face quickly disintegrated into ash, along with the rest of him.

  A strangled cry of outrage escaped his buddy’s lips as he began clawing his gun out of the shoulder holster snugged against his side. The momentum of my swing pulled my arm across my body. I used that to my advantage. Taking a step towards him, my arm flashed back and I launched the kukri across the bare six feet of space between us, lodging it in his upper chest, but missing his heart. Damn it.

  I jumped across the intervening space between us as the force of the kukri’s strike pushed him up against the building. As he rebounded off the wall, I reached out and grabbed the handle of my knife where it protruded from his chest. My plan was to pull it quickly from his chest and finish the job by taking his head in dramatic fashion before posing confidently for the benefit of Deacon and the rest of the team as they entered the alley to back me up.

  Unfortunately, the heavy blade of the kukri was lodged in bone and gravity is an unforgiving bitch. Pulling on the blade just made the movement of my prey towards me all the faster without making any noticeable progress in sliding from his ribcage. I tried to pivot on my left foot, in order to hip toss the goon down the stairs. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to accomplish the move before he crashed into me and sent us both crashing to the alley below.

  At least the guard had something soft to fall on...me. The impact of his body with mine was made even more fun for both of us by the kukri sticking out of his chest. The handle of the knife struck me squarely in the solar plexus. Causing all the air to woosh out of my lungs. It’s a good thing I don’t need to breath.

  The impact also pushed the blade, up to the hilt, in my attacker’s chest. “Damn,” I thought. “I’m never going to get that out!”

  The guard wasn’t about to make it easy for me either. As I tried to wiggle out from beneath him, I felt his hand reach up to clench my throat, holding me in place. Using his grip he pushed himself up off of me as his other hand reached for his pistol.

  I tried desperately to push him off, but he clung to me like a limpet, sprawling his legs and using the weight of his body to stay in place.

  Since my attempt to buck him off failed, I reached up to grab at the hand going for the gun. I was kinda successful and managed to hook a finger into the sleeve of his jacket, temporarily halting his progress.

  He growled in frustration as he jerked his arm roughly towards his shoulder holster. I could have held him, but the fabric of his jacket succumbed to the struggle of two very strong vampires and tore along its seam, freeing his hand to grasp the grip of his pistol and pull it free.

  My eyes widened as the gun came across. I desperately tried to grasp his hand and prevent the barrel from lining up with my skull. I failed. The look in the goon’s face was one of fierce glee as the gun came in line with my forehead.

  He took that expression with him into whatever happens after the final death. The blade of a large dagger swept blindingly fast through his neck.

  Having a vampire explode into dust while laying on top of you isn’t fun. Not only were my eyes open, my mouth was too. Eww. Blind, with a thin layer of vamp ash coating my throat. Yay me! I rolled off, coughing and trying to
clear my throat while simultaneously rubbing at my eyes, so I could see again.

  The first thing I saw when my vision cleared was my seventy pound Savannah cat companion sitting there with his head cocked in a questioning manner. “You were a lot of help.” I coughed at him. He just stared at me for a minute before casually raising a paw and starting to clean his ears.

  Rolling to a sitting position, I saw a large hand attached to a well muscled arm being held out to help me up. My eyes continued to travel up past chiseled pecs encased in a tight black tactical shirt to a pair of cobalt blue eyes glinting at me with suppressed mirth.

  “What?” I said grumpily as I took the proffered hand. “You couldn’t knock the guy off me before you dusted him?”

  “I feared that I didn’t have sufficient time to accomplish both tasks.” Came Deacon’s cultured baritone response.

  As I stood up and started dusting myself off, a masculine chuckle sounded from behind me. “Nice move on the stairs. Did you plan that?”

  I turned around to glare at the speaker. Marcus Quinn stood there grinning impudently at me. He was clad in black tactical gear, similar to Deacon’s. The main difference was that the pants he wore were made from a tough stretchy fabric that wouldn’t explode if he had to change into his lycan battle form. Being a lycanthrope, Marcus spent each full moon as a huge black wolf. His battle form, kind of a cross between man and wolf was awe inspiring to see. It was hell on his wardrobe, however.

  I snorted at his question as the three other lycans that made up the rest of our assault team, came up behind him with similar grins on their faces. “Shut up smart ass.” I said angrily with maybe just a bit of a grin of my own. “Are we going to sit here and critique my fighting style all night or are we going to kick some Abandonado ass?”

  All the humor left the eyes of the group arrayed about me as we got back down to business. Marcus nodded his head once before heading up the stairs to the club entrance, pulling out a set of lockpicks as he went. A couple of short minutes later, with my kukri back in the sheath at my back, we formed up and made a tactical entry into the club.

  The lycans led the charge. They were schooled in weapons and tactics as well as having trained extensively together. They all carried silenced MP5’s as their primary weapon. Each .45 caliber round in the weapons had a sintered silver bead inside the hollow point head of the round that broke up on impact, leaving a trail of silver dust through the wound track. It did a lot of extra damage, and it made it a damn sight harder for supernaturals like lycans and vampires to heal the wound.

  The hallway we entered was empty. Thick red carpet led down the hall and a thumping dance beat pounded down from the far end. A set of stairs, leading up, could be seen halfway down the hall. On past the stairs, two doors, one on each side of the hall led to the club manager’s office and a storage room.

  The stairs and what they led to, were our primary target for the evening. With a little bit of luck, the humans dancing away in the noisy club down the hall, would never know about the violence that was about to happen above their heads.

  Upstairs were several rooms where the vamps hunting in the dance club brought their compelled and clueless snack treats, once they’d been culled from the sea of humanity on the dance floor. If our intel was correct, some of the treats never made it home. It all depended on the story they gave when questioned under compulsion. If there was no one close to the victim, that would miss them, they were never seen again.

  Whether they were simply drained and disposed of, or taken off to someplace else for even more nefarious treatment, no one knew. Part of our job tonight was to hopefully find a trail of breadcrumbs that led to more Abandonado holdings that we could take out. The more we could weaken their infrastructure the sooner we could end this stupid vampire civil war.

  Our luck held and we made it up to the next floor without being seen. A long hallway stretched out before us with several doors on each side. There was also a door at the end of the hall. Above each door was a light. All but two of them were on.

  It was an old system, used by bordello’s in the past, that showed the girls which rooms were occupied. As the team started lining up to assault the first lighted door, something occurred to me. I quickly clicked my fingers almost inaudibly to get their attention and motioned them back.

  “Back in the day,” I whispered, “the rooms with the lights out were often used to denote which rooms were occupied. It gave the johns an extra second or two to make their escape, as the cops entered the empty rooms with the lights on.”

  Deacon raised one eyebrow in my direction. “When this is over, you will have to regale us with the story of how you came to be in possession of such information.” He said, whispering with a quirked lip.

  “I do read you know.” I whispered with a scowl on my face. “Get your mind out of the gutter, sheesh!”

  The team dutifully lined up on the first unlit door. Also like the old style bordellos, the doors didn’t have locks on them. This was so a bouncer could gain quick entry if one of the girls got in trouble. Why the vampires had stayed with this theme, I don’t know. After all, the people who worked there were not the ones being roughed up. Maybe they were nostalgic.

  Marcus held up three fingers from his position right behind the point man crouched by the door. When the last finger dropped, he tapped him on the shoulder. And the team made a quick quiet entry. Deacon and I remained in the hallway, covering their backs in case anyone heard the commotion.

  Two quiet clacks of an MP5 action cycling was followed by silence. With the silencers Marcus’ team used, the sound of the action was about all you heard. I hazarded a glance in the room to see a party girl lying in a bewildered daze on the bed, blood oozing from a set of puncture wounds on her neck. Something in a vampire’s bite made wounds heal very fast after the feeding. That fact made it easy to feed on a temporarily compelled person and get away without anyone, even the victim, knowing what happened. The fact that there was any blood at all on the girl’s neck showed that the vampires dinner had been interrupted rather suddenly.

  The vampire herself was laying on the floor with a stake sticking out of her chest through a black sequined party dress. Two bullet holes could also be seen in the dress. The wounds underneath were quickly healing. I had expected to see a man in that position. I guess that just goes to show how old and set in my ways I am.

  I gave a quick thumbs up to the team at their nearly silent capture of a potential source of information as I went in and quickly compelled the girl on the bed to remain silent and to take a nice long nap. When she woke, she wouldn’t remember any of this unpleasantness.

  The remaining door with it’s light out was the one at the end of the hall. Leaving the vamp paralyzed by the stake through her heart and the girl off in dreamland, we formed up to make entry once more.

  The entry went smoothly and Deacon and I remained focused on the hallway, hoping that no one else was going to bring up a happy meal.

  Shots once again sounded quietly from within the room, but this time there were more than two. Multiple shots began rattling off from the team and a hoarse shout erupted from within, pulling my head around in that direction. The sight of the room sent me staggering back as I was rocked by the flashback.

  Blood and chains, implements of punishment and torture hanging from rusty hooks driven into dirty walls, all conspired to send me hurtling back to the basement dungeon where I’d been forcibly turned from an innocent girl into what I was now. The room seemed to be the twin of the dungeon that Darius, the demented former head of House Abandonados, had used for his sick, twisted pleasures.

  I just stood there, frozen in place, reliving that time. I could feel the grit of dirt on the hard table beneath me. The steel bite of the manacles dug deeply into my wrists and ankles once more. The tools of pain hanging on the walls were well used by their sadistic master. During it all, the gloating face of Darius floated in my vision savoring my screams of anguish.

  I d
on’t know how long I stood there, locked in place, but suddenly, the entry was filled with a large chest snugly encased in a black t-shirt and kevlar vest. I looked up into Marcus’ concerned gaze as his hand settled gently on my shoulder.

  “We’ve got this covered. There’s no one you need to compel in here.” He said gently, trying as best he could to give me a reason to leave the room while maintaining what remained of my dignity.

  I nodded jerkily and turned around, my eyes met Deacon’s briefly as I resumed my post. Sympathy and rage were mixed in his expression. He was one of the few who knew what I’d gone through and the expression told me he’d like nothing better than to resurrect Darius just so he could kill him again...slowly.

  I took a deep breath and attempted to focus once more on the job at hand. I berated myself silently as I stood, covering the hall with my Kimber 1911A1. “What the hell, Kaitlyn?” I scolded myself. “It was eighty years ago. I thought you were over that crap.”

  The self recrimination threatened to gain momentum when I felt a warm furry head bump rather forcefully into my knee. I jerked my gaze down to see Fangs tawny face staring up at me. A wave of love and understanding flooded our link as he rubbed his head against my leg.