Page 50 of Meeting Her Mate
“You’re gonna hate me for suggesting it,” I said, afraid of what I was about to say.
“Judgement-free zone. Lay it on me,” Will said.
“The thought that the vampires who killed my parents are still out there...it’s tearing me apart. Do I not deserve the right to take revenge?” My heart was palpitating now, and my mouth was completely dry. How would he respond to this?
To my surprise, he said, “You’re perfectly within your right to do that. I’ll even help you,” Will said, placing a hand on my shoulder.
Will had spoken so many times of the uncontrollable metaphorical beast of rage that he wasn’t able to control. I understood him now. As I stood there, imagining the two vampires who had murdered my parents in front of me, I felt the same beast stir inside me.
Chapter 18: Will
It was not going to be like searching for a needle in a haystack. From Alexis’s account, I already knew two key details about the vampires who had killed her parents. One: They spoke in thick British accents. Two: One of them had slash scars on his face.
I was a little apprehensive about how I would go about finding two particular vampires, but then it struck me. I was the alpha. All I had to do was issue a command to my pack, and they would do as I wished. So I did exactly that. I issued the order to the entire pack to keep an eye out for two particular vampires, describing them as best as I could.
Alexis felt like a changed person after the visit to the cemetery. While we did not meet all that much after that, I checked in on her every now and then at the warehouse. Not too much as to appear clingy and not too little as to make her think I was disaffected. Despite her opening up to me and getting some sort of closure by visiting the cemetery, I could still feel that she was in pain.
I know how I would have felt if Edward, the man responsible for my misery, had still been alive, and I would have been incapable of taking revenge. I was no stranger to revenge. Contrary to popular opinion, it did change things. At the very least, it doled out justice. At best, it evened the karmic scales of the universe.
I trusted my pack. In the brief time that I had spent as their alpha, I had trained them well. I could trust that they’d be able to hold their own if they got into a fight. Lately, it seemed that they had started accepting me as their leader. They were friendlier to me now. Sometimes, they’d invite me to their homes for tea or dinner. People were warmer towards me than when I had first assumed the role. The most probable explanation for that was that I’d kept a lid on my anger and my outbursts for long enough for people to overlook or forget it.
In the meantime, Alexis told me that she was keeping a tab on what Maurice was doing through the emulator phone. Mostly he was concerned with winning the next mayoral election. For the most part, he was lying low. I recalled the night when I had spied on him meeting Ralph in person. Alexis corroborated it and told me that she had seen him come out of Beckett Pharma’s building. Both of us concluded that the man, as deceptive as he was, played things close to the chest and did most of his dealings in real life rather than on the phone. That would explain his sparse cellular activity.
Eventually, it turned out to be Vincent who tracked down the two vampires. I hadn’t said this to anyone, but I knew deep in my heart that if there was someone in the pack who could accomplish this task, it was Vincent. That boy was the smartest kid I had ever met. Other than Maliha, who was smart but in an extremely twisted way. Vincent was more along the lines of wholesome.
“So I did a little spying, but don’t worry, I was careful enough not to get seen or caught,” Vincent said to me on the eve he made his discovery. We were in my home’s living room, sitting at the table, drinking beers.
“So, how did you find them?” I asked. “Was it difficult?”
“It was rather difficult now that you mention it. There are hundreds of vampires roaming around, and almost any two of them could match the description that you gave us. At night, they spread all over Fiddler’s Green, across the forest, and everywhere in between, ensuring their trucks make it out of the cove safely onto the highway. I figured it was going to be impossible to track all of them at night. But then, the best idea came to my mind,” Vincent said, barely able to hold himself back with excitement. His eyes were lit with fascination, and his face kept curling into a grin. “They all leave from the same place. The cove! That’s their only entrance and exit point.”
“That does make sense. They live there, after all,” I agreed. “Their ships go into the cove, and their trucks come out of it.”
“Exactly! So, if there was ever going to be a time to identify two vampires from a sea of hundreds of them, it was at the entrance. And I did that. I found them.”
“How?”
“Well, in the morning, when the vampires can’t come out into the sun, when they’re hiding deep within the darkness of the cove, I snuck around to the entrance and hid a long-range wireless mic there. Then I stayed put and waited for the night while listening to the mic’s audio. When the vampires started coming out, most of them were talking in your standard American accent, except for two chatty fellows who were talking in a cockney accent. I tagged them using binoculars and even confirmed that one of them had scars on his face. Here’s the best part, though: I know exactly where they are!”
“Good man, how do you know that?”
“Well, I followed them all night. They don’t just patrol the roads.”
“Go on, then. What is it that they do?”
Vincent grinned harder. “I guess they’re supposed to be on patrol shifts, but they take a detour in the forest and shack up in an abandoned building. I guess it was a forest ranger’s station. But that’s not even the interesting part. They’re apparently dealing some methamphetamine on the side. I peeked in through the window and saw them messing around with stolen high school laboratory equipment, making crystal meth.”
“Is that a drug?”
“They call it poor man’s cocaine. It’s quite dangerous and bad for your health. It rots your teeth. You can overdose on it and die,” Vince said. “I figure they’re dealing on the side.”
“And they gather there every night?”
“I’ve been following them for two nights and found them in there both times,” Vince said.
“One last thing,” I said. “When the vampires were leaving the cove, did any of them carry sniper rifles with them?”
“Not a single one of them had a rifle,” Vincent said. “Why?”