Midnight Predator.

by Amelia At.w.a.ter-Rhodes.

CHAPTER 1

SOME PEOPLE USE THINGS; they destroy. You're a creator, a builder. The words came unbidden to her mind, completely inappropriate at the moment.

Distracted by the memory, Turquoise missed a block. She hissed in pain as the knife cut deep into the meaty underside of her arm. She caught her attacker's wrist and twisted, sending the young woman attached sprawling to the ground, as her father's words faded from her mind. Once, they might have been right, but now, they could not have been further from the truth.

The woman Turquoise was fighting wasn't clumsy for long. In a near-blur of burgundy hair and black leather, Ravyn Aniketos sprang to her feet. Turquoise rolled her shoulders, trying to work out the kinks in them, and blinked quickly to clear her tired eyes. This match had been going on for too long. She was bleeding from where Ravyn's knife had sliced through her arm, and she could feel the warm, sticky drip of blood down her back from a second wound on her left shoulder. Ravyn's black leather pants had been slit open in the thigh, and she had a shallow wound low on her jaw, which would probably heal without scarring.

Earlier, there had been other combatants; most slunk out the back door, defeated, within the first few minutes.

The fight was a compet.i.tion of stealth and hunting ability. In near darkness, the compet.i.tors found and marked one another-a quick knife slice, just enough to draw blood. If a hunter was marked three times, he or she was out of the running. Turquoise was pleased to have lasted so long, but only victory would satisfy her pride. Ravyn likely felt the same. The next one of them to land a blow would win, becoming the leader of Crimson, the most elite unit of the Bruja guilds.

Somewhere in the building, a clock struck, once, twice . . .

Turquoise lost track of the clock's tones as she struck again. Ravyn cursed as the blade narrowly missed her stomach, and Turquoise barely managed to evade an answering strike to her cheek.

They were both getting tired, and tired quickly became clumsy. Only the fact that they had both been fighting for hours kept them evenly matched.

The clock finished its song, and left the room in eerie silence, broken only by the ragged, heavy breathing as the two fought.

"Ravyn. Turquoise."

Turquoise slid a fraction of her attention to the voice but did not allow her gaze to leave Ravyn.

"Sheathe your weapons," Bruja's leader, Sarta, instructed. Someone flipped the switch and both fighters blinked against the sudden light. "I have a feeling that this compet.i.tion could go on for days if I let it, " she announced, "but Bruja law does call for a limit."

Ravyn licked the blade of her knife clean, her cranberry-colored gaze resting on Turquoise all the while, as if daring her to react.

Ravyn had no fetish for blood, and she professed to hate vampires, but she did love to give a show.

"Well, Sarta, if you're going to call a halt to our fun, do you also plan to name a winner?" Ravyn was still panting slightly, but not enough to affect the smooth drawl in her voice.

Turquoise wiped her own blade on the leg of her ruined jeans. She didn't speak yet, preferring to catch her breath. If it was ten now, then she and Ravyn had been sparring for almost five hours. This fight had begun at sunrise.

Five hours, and they were left in a draw. Turquoise's muscles ached with fatigue, but she would rather have finished this than stopped now. She wanted the t.i.tle.

Crimson. It was the most elite of the three Bruja guilds. Cold-blooded as snakes and vicious as hyenas, members of Bruja were the best predators in existence. To be recognized as the guild's leader would fulfill the promise Turquoise had once made. She had sworn that no one would ever mistake her for prey again. If that meant abandoning a few of the social mores of the daylight world, as Bruja members so frequently did, so be it.

The leader of Crimson was second only to Sarta, the leader of all three Bruja guilds. Turquoise had trained and fought and competed for the position. She knew she was the best Crimson had. She could out-stalk and out-fight any vampire and had, many times. She would win this t.i.tle, whatever it took.

"Rematch," Sarta said simply. "Onyx and Frost still need to compete today. You two are obviously matched evenly with daggers, but a Bruja member needs to be able to use any weapon at his or her command." She paused for dramatic effect. "A tie is decided in a private duel, one month after Challenge, witnessed only by the other leaders. The weapon is decided by the member who has been in the guild the longest-in this case, Ravyn-and the bout goes to third blood." Ravyn sighed, looking at Turquoise past burgundy lashes. "In one month, and I choose the weapon. In that case . . ." She walked around the room, examining the walls, which were decorated with weapons of all sizes, all shapes, and all designs.

She paused to run a finger down the blade of a broadsword, but then shook her head and moved on. She glanced at the crossbows, but they were the traditional weapon of Crimson's sister guild, Onyx-not appropriate for a Crimson duel. She pa.s.sed foils, epees, and sabers, and did not even pause to glance at the thick wooden staves.

Finally, she pulled down two leather whips, and cracked one expertly. "I choose these."

Ravyn tossed one of them to Turquoise with a sly grin, and Turquoise almost let it fall to the ground before reflex made her catch the handle. Of the entire selection of weapons in the Bruja hall, the whip was the only one she hated. Ravyn could not have made a better choice.

"Turquoise, do you accept the challenge?" Sarta asked.

"I accept." She was grateful that her voice stayed even. She hated whips. She could use one if she needed to, but not with any precision.

"Then get out of here," Sarta ordered. "Come back the day of the next full moon. The match will begin at sunrise."

Turquoise nodded, then turned her back to Sarta and Ravyn, and stalked as gracefully as she could from the fighting floor.

She paused next to the cork a.s.signment board, collecting herself before she left the halls.

Ravyn had come up behind her to look at the board. Turquoise's instincts told her to leave. Ravyn, like all Bruja members, was not someone Turquoise trusted at her back. So of course she forced herself to stay and read the notices.

Turquoise ignored most of the posts. She was a mercenary, but she had standards, and she preferred vampires as her prey.

There were numbers up on a couple of shape-shifters, but none sounded interesting. Besides, Turquoise was still a little wary of putting a knife in something that breathed and bled like a human, even if it did grow fur, scales, or feathers occasionally.

The rest of the posts she tried to avoid reading. She liked to think no amount of money was worth stalking human targets, but she knew most Bruja members disagreed. Some argued that cowardice kept her from hunting her own kind. When Turquoise had first joined Bruja, the older members had taken bets on how long it would take her to make her first human kill.

They were still waiting.

Turquoise finally slipped away from the hall, stretching as she shouldered open the door to the bright outside.

A stranger, a young woman no more than twenty-five years old, was waiting for her. She held up her hands to show she was unarmed. "Turquoise Draka?" she inquired. Her voice was polished, the accent vaguely English.

Turquoise nodded cautiously. Her eyes had adjusted to the sunlight now, and she sized up this woman. She looked fairly harmless, with brown hair pulled back in an elegant twist, and wearing a cream business suit over a chocolate -colored blouse. A leather folio leaned against the wall beside her.

However, the woman's heels made no sound on the stone walk as she approached, and even in the mid-June heat, her face showed no hint of sweat. Turquoise trusted her ability to recognize a vampire on sight, but just because this woman was not a bloodsucker did not mean she was human.

"Ah, and here is Ravyn Aniketos," the woman called, as Ravyn slipped tiredly through the door. Though she must still have been sunblind, Ravyn drew a dagger instantly upon hearing her name.

Ravyn and Turquoise exchanged a look, and a mental shrug pa.s.sed between them. Although they were enemies at times, rivals for power always, they were both intelligent enough to put their differences aside if confronted by a threat. Vampire, witch, shape-shifter, or human, this woman didn't stand a chance if her intentions were less than friendly.

"Something I can help you with?" Turquoise inquired warily.

"Yes. My name is Jillian Red." The name had the sound of a pseudonym. Jillian extended her hand, but did not seem surprised when no one reached out to shake it. "I have been following your careers for about a year now. You both hold quite impressive ranks, and have shown a certain rancor toward a breed I am not too fond of myself."

Bored already, Turquoise a.s.sumed the woman's lengthy speech was just winding toward another job.

Ravyn had actually started to walk away. Turquoise debated doing the same, but was stopped by the woman's next words.

"You both show a certain promise in your history, namely, some unpleasant experiences with the trade."

Turquoise did not need to ask which trade. From the sudden tension that pulsed through Ravyn's body as she turned back, she had understood the words just as well.

"And what do you know of our history?" Ravyn asked, voice silky as a black widow's thread.

Jillian Red sighed. "You, Ravyn, first came to vampiric attention when you were fifteen, and were brought into the trade by a low-power mercenary named Jared. You were lucky enough to avoid the professional slave traders, but unlucky enough-"

Ravyn shook her head, sending silky cranberry hair shuddering about her shoulders. "This is unnecessary."

"Unlucky enough," Jillian continued, "to be in the midst of vampires who respected Jared's claim of ownership and because of it would not come to your aid no matter how much they disapproved of his treatment of you."

Ravyn was by this point visibly simmering, her frame so rigid Turquoise suspected bone and sinew would shatter if the hunter tried to move.

"Shortly after he acquired you, Jared was found dead," Jillian finished, "and about a week after that, you entered Crimson."

"What is the job?" Ravyn snapped.

"Shall we find some place to sit and discuss the particulars?" Jillian suggested. "Even if you choose not to accept my offer, which I doubt, you will be well-paid for your time."

"Lead the way," Turquoise said, when Ravyn did not immediately speak. If this woman knew as much about Turquoise's history as she did about Ravyn's, that knowledge could make her inconvenient, if not dangerous. It would not hurt to learn what she wanted.

CHAPTER 2

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, they were gathered around a small table in Jillian Red's hotel room, looking at pictures the woman drew out of her briefcase.

"This is a copy of a painting made back in 1690," their host explained as she placed the first print on the table. "I don't suppose either of you recognizes it?"

The painting focused on an intimidating building, the outside walls of which were painted black with an abstract design in red.

The grounds maintained the pattern with burgundy-leafed ground cover that had been carefully planted around black stone. A path of white slate wound sinuously up to the door, which was flanked by lushly growing roses. The blooms, which had been carefully depicted by the artist, were pure black.

The painting looked familiar, but Turquoise could not place it.

Jillian Red launched into a history lesson. "In the early sixteen hundreds two sisters, vampires both, founded an empire they called Midnight. This building was the heart, the symbol so to speak, of their power. They were less than five hundred years old, young compared to most of their kind, but they both were ruthless, and more organized than their elders; their determination allowed them to take control swiftly."

Jillian glanced at the white stucco ceiling, and continued, "Jeshickah, the younger of the two sisters, was the absolute ruler of Midnight. For a few hundred years, she controlled nearly all the vampires, the shape-shifters, and the witches. As for the humans . .

. they were little more than cattle. If a human was sold into Midnight, that was the end."

"You keep saying Midnight was," Turquoise thought aloud, anxious to get to the present and learn what the job was. She was not a fan of history, and she already knew more about the vampiric slave trade than she cared to. "What is it now?"

"I'll get there," Jillian chastised. "In the early eighteen hundreds, Midnight was destroyed by a group of older, stronger vampires.

The building was leveled, and every living creature caught inside was killed. Of course the vampires survived, but with the property and slaves lost, the empire lost its heart, and the rival power was able to take control.

"The new leaders banned the slave trade-they did not approve of caged meat-but as you two have witnessed, the laws have slackened over time. The original vampires of Midnight were able to pick up the trade again." Jillian sighed. "That might have been bad enough, but . . ." She reached into her briefcase again, and this time pulled out a glossy eight-by-ten photograph.

"This was sent to me a few days ago."

The photo did not need to be explained. Someone had rebuilt Midnight.

"The trade has been pulled together by a new master, one of the trainers from the original Midnight. My employer, who wishes to remain anonymous, was unconcerned about Midnight 's revival until recently, when the original founder returned. With the groundwork already in place, Jeshickah is expressing an interest in taking charge again. My employer would like that threat eliminated.

"The offer for Jeshickah's death is a half million to each of you, with that much again to split as you wish if the job is done within the next week. I am only the agent, and have only been contacted via writing, so I can offer little more information than I have given you. Are you interested?"

"Why hire two Bruja to go after one leech? It's a waste of money," Ravyn asked, the question both practical and suspicious. An anonymous employer could mean many things. It could be he had no intention of paying, or more likely it meant that he feared his target.

"My employer has a wish to have this job over quickly," Jillian answered. "Hiring two of you is insurance. If one of you does not succeed, the other might."

In other words, they were expendable, and Jillian's anonymous employer wanted to have a backup in case one of them got killed. Someone either didn't have much faith in Bruja abilities, or had more information than Turquoise and Ravyn were receiving.

"Sounds fun," Ravyn acknowledged, sc.r.a.ping away a speck of blood she had just noticed on one of her burgundy nails. "With luck, we won't have to worry about the rematch, either," she added to Turquoise.

Turquoise shrugged. This job was worth too much to turn her back on. Besides, she had never met a vampire she couldn't beat.

"You say get inside," she inquired, tacitly accepting Jillian's terms. "How?"

"That's one of the reasons the job isn't cheap," Jillian said, a slight smile on her face. "You're on your own to get into Midnight.

You'll have to use any means necessary, Turquoise."

Turquoise knew what Jillian was hinting at. "I need to make a call."

An hour later, Turquoise found herself in yet another hotel room, this time with a fairly attractive, dark -skinned gentleman three or four hundred years old. It was hard to tell exactly, since in appearance he was twenty-five at the most. As broaching the topic of any vampire's past could be dangerous at best, Turquoise had never asked.

"Milady Turquoise," he greeted.

"Nathaniel, always nice to see you," she responded sincerely. Nathaniel was a vampire, true, and that was not his only flaw; he was also a mercenary and an a.s.sa.s.sin, as necessity dictated. However, since Turquoise also fit most of those descriptions, she did not hold Nathaniel's profession against him.

Luckily, Nathaniel's line thirsted more for money than for blood. If anyone thought it strange that a vampire and a human had a close business relationship, no one had spoken of it. Nathaniel had taught Turquoise most of what she knew. He had taught her what a mercenary was, the value of her talents-among them hunting-and most importantly, where to find buyers for the skills she was willing to sell. He had also once saved her life, not to mention her sanity.

"I don't suppose this is a social call," Nathaniel stated. "You on a job?"

She nodded, debating how much she needed to tell him. Though he would offer her a chance to buy his silence, Nathaniel would be willing and able to sell any information she gave him.