Aurora Sky: Vampire Hunter (6 page)

“And then she called me.” My father moved into the
doorframe. I didn’t know if he meant to walk through and scold me by the front
door or block my way to the kitchen until I apologized.

“I am neck deep in work right now. It’s the end of the year.
You know what that means.”

Mom put my coat away. “Yes, I’m sorry, Bill. If I hadn’t
been so worried…”

“It’s not your fault, Dana.”

My father looked at me with an expression I’d never seen
before. Blame.

Funny, ’cause I wasn’t the one who threatened not to come
home the last time he left the country on business.

I held him in my gaze. The creases in his forehead deepened.

“Go to your room, Aurora,” he said.

“I’ll bring you up a cup of warm tea,” Mom said.

“No tea. She needs time to think about what she’s done.”

I really wished I’d get the feeling back in my face because
I would have liked to roll my eyes. I wasn’t sassy by nature, especially not to
dear old Dad, but it burbled inside me in the form of a smirk twitching over my
lips.

“Oh, you think it’s funny, do you?” Dad said, stepping
toward me.

“Bill!” Mom said.

The fog lifted momentarily, and I saw him clearly—this man
who’d stopped raising me, who ceased knowing me years ago. Like the forgotten
wife at home, I was the forgotten child. And now that I was an adult, a senior
in high school, he thought he could send me to my room?

I leapt to the first stair and faced my parents for one
final show down.

“I’ll go to my room,” I said. “Happily. If you like, I’ll
even spend Christmas in my room.”

Then I raced up the stairs.

 5

The agents called me in for orientation at the end of the
year. I was to report to duty early in the morning.

Mom didn’t have to make any excuses to Dad. He had checked
out of Hotel Sky an hour earlier.

Mom sat sipping a diet soda, reading the newspaper at the
kitchen table. The ice cubes in her drink cracked against the glass every time
she lifted and sipped.

I’d barely taken three bites of my oatmeal.

Mom looked at my bowl. “Is that all you’re eating?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Mom frowned. “You’re going to get hungry if you don’t finish
your food.”

No I wouldn’t. Not with my stomach full of knots.

Mom folded up her newspaper. She sounded resigned. “The
agents said to bring a change of clothes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

At least they weren’t making me wear camo. Then again, they
could have hundreds of pushups and jumping jacks in store. Maybe I would be
drenched in sweat by the end of the day.

I stared out the window as we headed downtown toward
Elmendorf Air Force Base. Each passing street brought us closer to certain doom.
A beige sedan pulled into our lane right in front of us and, instinctively, I
threw my right foot forward and pressed it into the mat. My mom pumped the
brake and grumbled at the driver.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I liked the tone of her voice. It was firm and assertive.
She never took her eye off the road.

“Yes,” I all but whispered.

We drove down the Glenn Highway a short distance before my
mom took an exit right and crossed the bridge over the highway to the gated
entrance leading into Elmendorf.

The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach returned as we
approached the line of cars at the gate. I wasn’t aware the feeling had gone
until it came back worse than before.

“What if we turned around?” I asked suddenly. “Tell the
agents I’m ill. Tell them I’m not ready yet.”

“Aurora, you’re going to have to get this over with at some
point. I think it’s best you complete orientation before the new semester
starts. You’ll feel better once it’s done.”

We were currently fourth in line. The lead vehicle, a truck,
didn’t appear to be going anywhere. A young military man leaned outside the
booth, took something from the driver, and disappeared back inside.

“Don’t worry,” Mom said. “I know you’ll do fine.”

The military man’s head reappeared right before the gate
went up, and the truck drove forward. The next vehicle went right in.

Now only one car stood between me and captivity.

I turned to Mom. “Talk to them! Tell them I’ll pay them back
for the operation. I don’t care if it takes me my entire life. I’ll get their
money back.”

“They don’t want money,” Mom said. “I tried that. I would
have paid any price to get you back. But we can’t buy organs…the government
can. We’re lucky. The agents chose you. They wanted you to live.”

Melcher and Crist didn’t want me to live so much as serve. Why
did my mom have to try and glorify this?

The car in front of us sped through the open gate. Mom drove
forward, right up to the gates of hell.

“Hello,” she said with a bright smile. “I’m Dana Sky, and
this my daughter Aurora. We have an appointment with Agent Melcher.”

The young military man showed no emotion. “IDs.”

Mom and I dug out our wallets and pulled our driver’s
licenses out of their tight compartments. The man glanced at our cards, turned
to a walkie-talkie, and spoke into it. “The VH recruit is here. Over.”

Static ensued followed by scratchy words saying, “Send them
in. Over.”

The young man handed Mom our IDs. He tilted his head toward
a black sedan waiting just through the gate. “That black sedan is your escort.
Follow him.”

The gate lifted and we drove onto the base.

My mom and I didn’t speak as she followed the vehicle in
front of us. The black sedan tuned on its right blinker. Mom did the same. We
followed it down a wooded road. If my internal compass was any good, we were
now traveling north, adjacent to the now-hidden Glenn Highway.

“Is this where you came to pick me up before?” I didn’t
recognize anything, but I was in a fog the last time I left here.

“Yes.”

We followed the sedan down a quiet road. A parking lot
emerged through the trees, leading directly to a building that looked like a
bunker with no windows.

The sedan pulled into a parking spot. Mom took the one
beside it.

I turned to my mom. “Will you wait for me?”

I’d seen Mom grab the Nora Roberts novel she was reading.
That was a good sign.

“I don’t know. I need to ask how long orientation lasts.”

Agent Crist stepped out of the passenger seat of the sedan.
Agent Melcher joined her, and they waited for my mom and me to step out. The
agents were dressed in their matching gray suits and wool military coats that
fell above their knees.

“Good morning, Mrs. Sky. Good morning, Aurora,” Agent
Melcher said. “No need to come inside, Mrs. Sky. I’ll call you when Aurora is
finished.”

“When will that be?”

“It could take a few days.”

“A few days!” my mom and I said at the same time.

Melcher grinned. “That all depends on Aurora.”

I turned to my mother with pleading eyes. She hesitated.

“My daughter needs more time.”

Relief washed through me. I wanted to throw my arms around
my mom in that moment and kiss her cheeks. Only the scowl on Agent Crist’s face
stopped me.

“She just started her kickboxing and tae kwon do lessons.
Couldn’t you let her finish senior year first?” Mom asked hopefully.

Crist’s eyebrows lowered as her upper lip rose. “The time
for negotiations is over, Mrs. Sky. I thought you understood the terms.”

Mom looked from me to Agent Crist and frowned. “I just don’t
see why Aurora has to get started so soon.”

Melcher took a step forward. “Don’t worry about a thing,
Mrs. Sky. We’ll call you the moment Aurora is finished. The sooner we start, the
sooner she can go home.”

Mom frowned then turned and gave me a quick hug. “You’ll be
fine, sweetie, and as soon as you’re done I’ll be here to pick you up.”

The moment Mom released me she hurried back to the car and
pulled away. The pit in my stomach expanded as her car disappeared from sight.

Melcher smiled at me as though I were a child. “Let’s go,
Aurora. You’ll feel better once you understand what’s expected of you.”

If Melcher was the doting dad, then Agent Crist was the
wicked stepmother who couldn’t stand to see Melcher’s attention directed away
from her. I could feel the burn of her frown even on my back.

I followed them through a sliding door into the lobby of the
building. A young woman in camouflage pants and a matching jacket sat at a
front desk. She nodded at Agents Melcher and Crist with the same detached look
as the man at the gate.

“This is our base of operation,” Melcher said. “On the right
we have our own private hospital and surgeons, which you’ve already seen. It’s
small, but it’s the state’s best. On the left are our administrative offices,
where we’ll go first. Then in back, we have our training facilities and several
holding cells.”

What? Were they going to lock me up if I didn’t do as I was
told?

I followed the agents down a glaring hallway. There were no
pictures on the walls. We reached a set of double doors, and Crist swiped a
keycard to open them. There was another reception desk manned by yet another
drone. The soldier looked at the agents briefly, never sparing me a glance.

Melcher led me into an office with two desks and shut the
door.

There were no photographs on either desk; no pictures on the
walls; no décor of any kind unless you counted the wooden cross nailed to the
wall. It formed a triangle with Crist and Melcher when they sat down.

“Have a seat,” Melcher said.

I selected the chair in front of him. It was either that or
fry under Crist’s direct glare.

Melcher rested his elbows on his desk and leaned forward.

“Let’s get right down to it. Our unit is rather peculiar. We
specialize in the identification and elimination of demonic forces.” Melcher
paused to smile. “Don’t worry, we won’t ask you to do both. We have undercover
informants specially trained to weed out these unholy threats.”

At the moment, the only threat I sensed was that of Agents
Melcher and Crist.

“You have been recruited for a very special role in the
fight against terror, Aurora.”

Maybe if I stared at Melcher hard enough he’d come right out
and say what he meant.

“What is a VH recruit?” I asked, remembering what the guy at
the front gate had said.

“Vampire Hunter,” Crist said.

I started laughing so hard I had to grip the arms of my
chair to keep from falling to the floor. The agents won points for creativity,
I’d give them that. Great way to break the ice. Now we could move onto the real
reason I was there.

As my giggles subsided, I noticed Melcher and Crist weren’t
laughing.

“You heard right,” Melcher said. “You’ve been recruited by
your government to eliminate the reanimated dead.”

“Vampires,” Crist clarified in a harsh voice.

I looked from agent to agent. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Melcher frowned. “The demonic plague is no joke.”

Since when did the military start allowing fanatics to run
their own special units? Now that I was trapped on base, playing along seemed
like the best idea until Mom picked me up and got me the hell out of that
madhouse once and for all.

“And how exactly do I eliminate vampires?” I asked.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Melcher said. “Your body is now a
weapon—your blood. As I mentioned briefly before, a team of government
scientists recently discovered a combination of organisms that, when mixed with
AB negative blood cells, are lethal when consumed by the undead. From there,
they found a way to safely inject these organisms into hosts, such as yourself.
When your blood cells are transferred from you to the infected, it sends them
into a state of temporary paralysis.”

Crist looked me in the eyes. “By transferred, he means when
one of them bites you.”