Beautiful Reaper

Beautiful Reaper

By David M. Bachman

Copyright 2014 David M. Bachman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter One

Unfortunately, the sight of a large wooden cross was no longer just a symbol of Ray’s own religious beliefs. Rather, the sight of one now meant that, because of someone else’s interpretation of religion, someone was about to die soon. Previously, only one cross had been hammered into Kat’s driveway during daylight hours, and a shootout less than twenty-four hours later had resulted in the deaths of four people. This time, a total of four large, crudely-made wooden crosses had been planted in Ray’s front yard. He hoped that it didn’t imply there would be four times as many deaths to come.

Ray stood there toward the end of his driveway, arms folded, his weight shifted to one foot as he stared at the crosses that apparently represented a death threat. A militant fundamentalist group, the Christian Resistance of Sanguine Sin – commonly called the CROSS – had established itself as a very real threat to vampires all across the United States. Up until recently, their actions had largely been symbolic and had only consisted of public protests and such designed to intimidate and harass. The only violence they committed against vampires had been through bounty hunters that were card-carrying CROSS members, professional assassins that tracked down and executed supposedly rogue vampires – sometimes legally, sometimes not. Publicly, they did not advocate violence, but the FBI had already begun to investigate the CROSS as a racial hate group and a domestic terror organization.

When six men had surrounded Kat’s house just outside the city limits of San Tan Valley, Arizona, and shot it full of holes while Ray and Kat had been inside, the CROSS had officially taken a much bolder, direct approach to things. No longer did they simply consist of a few hundred or thousand disorganized members that talked a big, hateful game but only acted independently on a small scale. Now, they were banding together, coordinating attacks, and making terrible headlines. The attack upon Kat and Ray had been the most widely-publicized and dramatic, but it hadn’t been the first, nor the last. Other vampires had been attacked and killed, sometimes gruesomely, and sometimes randomly. A few times, victims of the CROSS hadn’t even been vampires at all. Some had only been unlucky humans that had been mistaken for being vampires, or they had been attacked for having associated with vampires.

As he glanced around the area, Ray felt himself touching the grip of his pistol through the T-shirt under which it was hidden, tucked into the front of his waistband in a custom-made holster. There was no threat here, at least not right at that moment. The crosses had been planted there at some point during the daytime, probably hours ago. The sun was but a bloody red glow on the western horizon by then, bleeding through a gathering of almost-but-not-quite storm clouds.

Although there had been no less than three people in Ray’s house at the time, all three had been asleep for the day, and vampires were notoriously heavy sleepers – dead to the world, hence the legends. The south side of Ray’s house, which faced the street, had no windows. His neighbors on either side of his home wanted nothing to do with him, ever since they had learned about his Change, so there was no point in even asking them anything. And the residents across the street were all gone during these summer months, all those snowbirds that only moved to Arizona from out-of-state during the cooler winter months.

Four huge crosses, made of wooden stakes about two inches in diameter, had been hammered into place in broad daylight, and nobody had seen or heard a damned thing. It wasn’t a comforting thought at all. What if the CROSS hadn’t decided to bother with a warning this time? What if they had decided to make a repeat performance by shooting up Ray’s house this time? What if they had broken into the house and pounded stakes into everyone while they lay helplessly asleep? What if they’d simply firebombed the house while everyone was asleep?

His only reassurance was the fact that Ray’s home, being in a much more urban setting, was somewhat guarded by the relatively close presence of other people. Kat’s house, way out in the middle of the desert, didn’t have any neighbors for at least a mile in every direction; Ray’s nearest neighbors were only about ten yards away on either side. Cowards like these CROSS guys didn’t want witnesses. Unintended victims or collateral damage would only bring additional attention from law enforcement and harm their already shady public image. Even if Ray’s neighbors shunned him personally, they likely wouldn’t hesitate to talk to the police if their homes were threatened by a spreading fire or stray bullets.

Ray let out a heavy sigh and, doing what he originally came out here for in the first place, he retrieved his junk mail and bills from the mailbox before heading back inside. He immediately tossed the newspaper-like bundle of useless coupons and advertising into the outdoor trash bin before taking the water and gas bills back inside. He closed the front door with a bit more force than he intended in his frustration.

Aisha slinked up to him, emerging from the bedroom in nothing but an oversized pink T-shirt that barely kept her covered. She seemed to immediately pick up on Ray’s tension as she wrapped her arms about his waist, tilting her head slightly as she looked him over.

What’s the matter? she asked. Something in the mail you didn’t want?

He didn’t want to freak her out, especially not right after she’d arisen from bed. Finding out that they’d just been issued another death threat wasn’t exactly a good way to start the night. Aisha wasn’t prone to hysterics, so it wasn’t that Ray was worried about scaring her. Rather, as a Sabertooth vampire, she was more prone to anger than anything. Telling her that some homicidal religious zealots had staked their front yard with four wooden crosses would, at best, put her in a foul mood and, at worst, cause her to throw on some clothes, storm out of the house, and start immediately looking for someone’s ass to kick.

Something like that, he sighed dismissively. Ray kissed her briefly on the lips and moved away to head for the kitchen. I’ll start breakfast.

Aisha caught him by hooking a finger in his waistband. Hold up. What’s bugging you?

Nothing, he lied. Ray was a terrible liar. Aisha didn’t have to be a Fallamhain vampire with psychic abilities to see through that.

She frowned slightly. You’re still thinking about Kitty, aren’t you.

Well, in a way, he was, so he simply nodded in reply to that. It wasn’t that he was thinking of his relationship with Kat – at least, that wasn’t at the front of his mind right then. Rather, he was thinking of how he would keep Kat safe, as well as Aisha, Chelsea, and himself. It had been over a month since the last round of violence in their lives. The threats of danger had become more vague and general, rather than specifically being focused upon them. They had all began to settle into new routines in their lives. And Ray had actually begun to hope, perhaps foolishly, that they had finally found a new normal. He had even dared to believe that the worst was behind them.

Aisha touched his face gently, giving him a brief kiss. You need to stop beating yourself up over what happened, babe. Really, you both need to stop. All you’re doing is making yourselves miserable, and you're pulling the rest of us down with you.

Violent history aside, what Aisha was alluding to was something that had been the first sure sign that things were anything but stable. Kat was gone. Well, not really gone, at least not in the permanent sense. More like … absent. Increasingly, over the past few weeks, she had been actively trying to avoid everyone in the bloodline she had created, the House of Peterson. Particularly, she had distanced herself from Ray, her first bloodspawn and would-be lover. For some time, they had all been together. Then, Kat had begun sleeping on the couch. And then, once her house had been repaired, she had moved most of her things back there. She had begun sleeping there alone. It wasn’t that she felt safe enough to be alone again, especially out in the middle of nowhere. In her own words, she still loved Ray; she just didn’t feel welcome in his bed anymore.

They weren’t angry with each other. There hadn’t been a fight or a sudden falling-out. It was just like things had dissolved between them. The bond that they’d briefly shared, that thing they had both believed was a passionate love, all of that had just sort of faded away, dying out like a campfire in a downpour of rain. All that remained was a smoking, smoldering pile of ash. Ray wasn’t even sure if a tiny ember of that emotion still remained in Kat, or if she was officially done with him, only staying in touch with him out of necessity because of their blood ties.

He shrugged and went into the kitchen, taking out his pocket knife to open the envelopes. Ray blamed himself. Following what had been dubbed the San Tan Shootout, he and Kat had felt inseparable, their souls utterly fused. Everything had just fit right into place for them. Alas, every time they had tried to go out on a date or have some intimate time together, chaos had always intervened. First a random attack, then a huge shootout, and then … Aisha.

Well, to be fair, Rick Gomez had been to blame for the last mess. Rick had been a rich and increasingly powerful sociopath. Previously, he had dated and then stalked Kat; a year later, after she had denied him the Change, he had sprung up again, pretending to help Kat and Ray out with an offer of employment. In addition to amassing wealth, Rick had also been collecting girls, two of them being Aisha and Chelsea. He had hoped to add Kat to his stable. Aisha, in a crafty but desperate act, had tricked Ray into claiming her as his own, stealing her by blood rights from Rick, just as Rick had similarly stolen Aisha from someone else before.

Of course, that hadn’t gone over well. Rick had retaliated by doing some terrible things to Kat in the name of a supposed adult film contract – all of it on camera, of course – before making a big show of marking her, thereby claiming her. A brief hostage standoff had ensued, Kat and Chelsea had nearly been killed, and others had died before Ray had been assisted by Raina and Keith Fallamhain in killing Rick. Kat had survived, just barely, but a part of her seemed to have died during that ordeal. It wasn’t just the pain, the horror, and the humiliation of her experience that had all but entirely done away with Kat, giving way to the much more serious and less personable Katarina. Rather, it was Ray’s tie to Aisha that had surely hurt her the most.

Aisha had initiated it, Kat had insisted that Ray go along with it, being in line with the Code and all that, and she had insisted that she wasn’t holding a grudge against Ray or Aisha. The fact that they had both put their own lives on the line for her sake to essentially rescue her from Rick Gomez was something for which Kat had claimed she would forever be grateful. However, Ray had never forgiven himself for his part in the whole mess. He’d been stupid enough to mark Aisha and, thus, to claim her. He had taken Kat at her word when she had literally ordered him to sleep with Aisha. And he had given into Aisha’s advances, spending the night in her embrace while, unbeknownst to them, Kat had been held against her will, drugged, and used by Rick and his associates for hours on end.

As a result, Kat was hurt, humiliated, and ashamed, while Ray endlessly blamed himself for every damned bit of it. Meanwhile, Aisha did feel a bit of guilt for her own part in the matter, but she was sort of caught in the middle of things. She had been trying to console both of them, trying to bring them back together, but the harder she had tried, the more they had seemed to drift apart.

Aisha glided past Ray and began taking out things from the fridge and cabinets to make something. My turn to cook. Ham and cheese omelets sound okay?

Yeah, sure. His mind was so far away, she could have suggested garlic and silver and he probably would have agreed to it.

He glanced at the bills. Having up to four people living under one roof, as opposed to just one, certainly made a difference. At least everyone had agreed to pitch in for living expenses, the biggest being electricity and food. Two Commoner vampires and one Sabertooth made for quite a grocery bill – lots of protein, carbohydrates, and iron. And even though Kat had been living alone at her own place lately, Ray was still out-voted two to one on keeping the thermostat set lower. Kat and Ray both preferred to keep it at eighty, and until she had left, they had been okay with keeping it at seventy-eight. Now, it was down to seventy-six. The central air conditioner seemed to run almost non-stop, and the electric bill reflected that, being almost double the norm.

Kitty texted me a while ago, Aisha said as she laid a skillet over the rear burner. She said she wants to talk to you. Said it was urgent.

Ray looked at her with a raised eyebrow. Why didn’t she just call me?

Aisha glanced at him with a sad look, saying, She thinks you don’t want to hear from her anymore.

Why would she think that?

Well … you’ve never called her since she left, Aisha replied with a shrug, turning on the hood vent’s fan. Honestly, I’m surprised she even bothered to contact me. She’s been giving me the cold shoulder lately, too. She turned toward Ray, leaning a shapely hip against the side of the stove as she folded her arms under her ample breasts. This whole situation is so screwed up between all of us. It’s like, we’re all friends, we all care about each other, and nobody’s mad at anyone, but we’re avoiding each other lately like we’re diseased and contagious.

Ray laid the bill down upon the bar countertop. I haven’t been avoiding you, have I?

Well, not exactly, she admitted, but I think maybe that might be part of the reason why Kitty’s freezing us out. She’s not jealous. She’s just feeling left out. It’s so weird. This is her bloodline, but she says she feels like nobody wants her around. And it’s not like we’ve been trying to push her away. I mean, you and I both have all but begged her to come back. She combed a few strands of her straight, jet-black hair over her pointed Sabertooth ear with her fingers. I’m honestly starting to worry about her. She’s isolating herself from the whole world.

I’m worried about her, too, Ray agreed with a nod, thinking again of the crosses in the front yard. I don’t like knowing she’s alone out there. She’s not safe.

"I don’t think she wants to be safe. Aisha winced. I wonder sometimes if she's feeling suicidal. God, I hope not."

The thought had already occurred to Ray, and more than a few times. He already knew for a fact that Kat had seriously entertained the thought of killing herself, even before her ordeal with Rick. Just as Ray had told her and truly felt that she gave him a sense of direction and purpose in life, Kat had insisted that he had been the one to give her a real reason to go on living. They needed each other. Codependency? Perhaps. But whatever it was called, Ray didn’t care, as long as it kept her from giving up on life. But now that they had been drifting apart, and now that Kat had been putting such distance between them, both emotionally and physically … well, what then?

I’ll call her, he said, already reaching to dig his phone out of the leg pocket of his carpenter jeans.

As Ray thumbed through menus on the touch-screen phone, he saw Chelsea walking into the kitchen from the guest bedroom, rubbing her eyes and giving everyone a lazy, quiet wave of greeting. Aisha smiled and bent down slightly to kiss her on the cheek. Aisha had assumed a sort of strange role in Chelsea’s world, now that Rick Gomez was no longer running their lives. She was one part big sister, one part boss, one part close friend, and one part lover to the thin, young brunette Commoner. With Rick dead and gone, she had been lost and alone, and only Aisha had volunteered to take her under her wing, not just to comfort and protect her but also to guide her.

Chelsea was very naïve in some ways, very streetwise and jaded in others, and almost painfully submissive overall. She was now nineteen, but she had been through nearly as much in the past year alone as Aisha had been in most of her adult life. From what Ray had heard, Chelsea had come from a very messed-up family. Both of her parents and two of her three siblings had been addicted to one thing or another – drugs, booze, gambling, whatever – and as a middle child, she had endured abuse from nearly every direction. Rick had liked her, not just because she was adorable with her freckles and sort of pixie-like short haircut and dainty features, but because she almost didn’t know how to say no to anyone or anything. Whether it was a learned thing via abuse or if she really just was that submissive by her very nature, Ray wasn’t sure, but she seemed to want very little in life beyond what others wanted from her. It had made her an easy target for predators like Rick Gomez, or abusive boyfriends she’d had before him.

Aisha had been trying to steer her away from that kind of life, trying to show her what it was like to have at least somewhat normal companions in life, and hoping she would learn to understand that it wasn’t normal or right to be used and abused by friends or family. She did have to be firm with her at times, as Chelsea had almost immediately sought to get right back into stripping and porn films because she’d thought it had been expected of her. Those had been about the only jobs she’d ever had, and Aisha had refused to let her throw herself away like that.

Chelsea did, fortunately, have one talent and passion of her own: singing. And she was damned good at it, too. Aisha had been trying to find a way to help Chelsea apply herself through that. And Aisha’s justification for occasionally getting intimate with Chelsea was simple. It wasn’t anything that they hadn’t already done before under Rick, and it was better for her to be with someone that cared for her, someone she could trust, rather than some random guy that might only want to use her. She was, after all, almost magnetically drawn to abusive jerks.

Hey, Ray. You okay? You looked spaced out, Chelsea said with a thin smile as she approached him. He’d actually been staring at her, though he hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t been leering; rather, his brain was just a tangled mess at the moment.

He blinked and shook it off with a smirk, still holding his phone. Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just got a lot on my mind right now.

What’s up with all of the sticks in the front yard?

Aisha spun to face them with a curious look, holding a spatula in one hand. Damn. Ray had been hoping to think of a way to break that bit of news gently to her, but he’d been too busy thinking about Kat and everything else to even get that far. He was getting fuzzy-brained. He knew what this meant. It wasn’t just stress, nor was it because he had only been awake for less than an hour. He was creeping towards the early stages of bloodlust again.

It had been too long. Eating right and living a calm life had helped keep the need at bay, but at some point, he would've needed to get at least a taste of the real thing in his system. It had been over a month since some redneck had stabbed Kat before stabbing Ray with the same knife, exposing him to her blood and thereby initiating his Change. He was still trying to get the hang of this whole being a vampire thing.

Ray tried to play dumb. It wasn’t hard. He certainly felt dumb. What do you mean?

I went outside a minute ago to see if it looked like it was gonna rain, she said, and then I saw those big sticks in the front yard, like a bunch of crosses. You didn’t put those there, did you? Because, like, I thought you weren’t religious…?

Again, Chelsea was terribly naïve about some things. It wasn’t so much because of her age, but simply because she was almost as clueless as Ray was about some of these vampire-related things. Aisha laid the spatula down on the cutting board nearby and immediately started for the front door, giving Ray a strange look.

Weren’t you just out there? she asked him as she passed.

Yeah, I, ah … I was gonna tell you…

She was already out the front door, still wearing only her oversized T-shirt as she padded barefoot out onto the concrete patio blocks that made up the front walkway. She didn’t have to walk all the way around to the front yard to see at least two of the crosses. Ray followed her out, and Chelsea excitedly went with him, wearing short-shorts and a ragged T-shirt that had been