Night Calls - Nyx Slaughter Book 1 Read online

  Night Calls - Nyx Slaughter Book 1

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Night Calls

  Published by Amber Lynn at Smashwords

  Copyright 2012 Amber Lynn

  * * * * *

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

  If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Warning: This book is the musings of a foulmouthed female assassin with Violence for a middle name. Reader discretion is advised due to language and violence.

  * * * * *

  This is the first book in a series I hope to write many more. I want to thank my best friend for taking the time to read through my ramblings and point out a lot of times my mind wandered and made absolutely no sense.

  I have to also thank my husband for putting up with my days of ignoring anything he said. I know it caused a lot of frustrations, but in the end I baked him a cake and everything was forgiven.

  Thank you to you, the reader, as well, for taking the time to download this book. It was a fun for me to write and I hope you enjoy it.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  My life, isn’t it grand

  “Any last requests?” I ask my captive. It has become more of a catch phrase with me than anything else. Frankly, I get a little bored asking it, but I don’t want to disappoint. The fact that it took me two days to run this jerk to ground has me hoping this will be over quickly.

  “Yeah, go fuck yourself,” he says as he tries to spit at me. The silver chains holding him down make it very hard for him to move, though. Unlike some of my other acquaintances in assassin school, I like to do things up close and personal. None of that sniper shooting from blocks away.

  If someone has warranted me being called in, they have a right to know exactly why they are dying. You would hope they already had a clue that killing a person eventually catches up with you, but most of the ones I meet aren’t that bright.

  “That isn’t a very nice thing to say to a lady,” I retort.

  “Show me a fucking lady and you may get nice. You are just the bitch they hired to kill me. Stupid no good Collective, what have they ever done to help any of us?” he asks.

  “From what I understand, they have made a world a better place for all of the paranorms out there, it’s people like you who go around killing humans that make it harder for them to work,” I reply.

  “They try to strip away what we really are. We are killers, haven’t you ever read the book before? It spells it all out. We are meant to rule the world. The Collective wants to make us humans, but we ain’t ever going to be human,” he snarls at me. “Why don’t you just get it over with, so you can go back to hiding away with the other werewolves that think blending in is a good idea?”

  “Since I am not a werewolf, I think that would be a little hard to accomplish and I am getting tired of talking, so let’s get this over with,” I say raising my gun.

  “How in the world do you not know you are a werewolf? You hang out with paranorms all day; one of them would have had to tell you by now. This is just great; the famous Nyx Slaughter doesn’t even know what she is. Too bad you are fixing on killing me, we could have tried to have a little fun now that I know you could handle my extra energy in the bedroom,” he says with a sad laugh.

  “Gross. And I am not a fucking werewolf,” I say really getting pissed off. This is the second execution I have attended recently where the guilty party tried to claim I was a werewolf. Maybe it is the fact that I do hang out with paranorms all day and their scent is finally wearing off on me. I don’t really know, nor do I care.

  “Come on it would be a lot of fun. I promise I would make it good for both of us,” he states.

  “In your dreams dog. Everyone knows that Nyx Slaughter is the mangy human left on the Collective's doorstep the day she was born. I have gotten over it, so you can too,” I reply.

  “Just so you know, when I die I am totally coming back to haunt you just so I can get a look at what I am sure are your delectable boobies,” he says laughing. This guy is clearly delusional because flat chested and I go hand in hand.

  “And just so you know, William Gene Johns you are sentenced for death for taking six human lives. A jury of your peers has already convicted you. I am just here to carry out the execution. In the name of the Grand Collective, I remove you from this world to make it a better place for others.”

  With my speech over, I shoot him twice in the heart. Once would have been enough, but he was really pissing me off. I watch as the silver works its way through his body. It’s not exactly a pretty sight seeing his veins expand and start to burst. After about thirty seconds, his body is nothing more than blood and fleshy bits.

  I collect my chains and toss them in the back of my vehicle. They will be due for another hose down when I get home. You would have thought William would have noticed me throwing the silver chains at him. Obviously if I can touch them, I cannot be a werewolf. Just goes to show his IQ.

  I leave his remains to wash away with the next storm, and climb into my old, beat up Suburban. I know it’s a tank, but I need the room for all my supplies. I never know what I am going to run into on one of these assassin assignments, but I like to be prepared for anything.

  For vampires, I have the UV headlights that help slow them down and an arsenal of cutting and burning devices. Staking them in the heart, like books suggest, will do you very little good when they can just regrow it. Chopping their heads off and burning the body is about the only thing that keeps them down permanently. As for werewolves, silver really is the key for them. I imagine, cutting their heads off and burning their bodies would work just as well, but why go through all the extra effort when a single bullet will do?

  Most of my calls are for those two species and most of them are for execution purposes. I get occasional calls to help with other kinds of shifters, demons, witches, and general misbehaving paranorms, but they are rare. People have started to figure out if you want someone killed, you call Nyx.

  I try to only take cases from the Collective, because they have tried the guilty party. Every once in a while, I will be compelled to take a private party case, if enough proof of wrongdoing can be given to me. I am a simple assassin and could probably detach myself from the situation if need be, but I prefer to take cases where the target is a no questions asked ruthless killer. I don't get involved in political killings and revenge stuff if I can help it.

  I check the clock and see that it is just after one in the morning. It seems like my day is just getting started, but it is already half
over. When you spend your life chasing down the things that go bump in the night, you tend to pick up their sleeping habits. I am usually only outdoors from nine at night to about five in the morning. The rest of my time is spent indoors training. I don’t think I have actually seen the sun in three years.

  I have been on this earth for twenty-two years and all of that time has been spent with paranorms. I don’t know why, and no one else has ever appeared to have the exact knowledge, but the day I was born a woman dropped me off at the Collective’s door. No note or explanation, no name given.

  I have since found out a little information about my dad, but nothing has turned up about my mom. I don't know if she was who dropped me off or not, but I was told looking into it would be dangerous, so I have resisted finding out more information. Not that the danger part scares me, it is just no sane person leaves a human with a collection of paranorms for safe keeping, meaning I would be searching for some crazy psycho I would eventually have to kill.

  From the moment I was dropped off, Frank, who is one of the top werewolves in the Collective, raised me. He has been a strong father figure and groomed me to be able to do the job I do today. For a human growing up in the world of paranorms, it was both interesting and aggravating.

  These days normal humans know about the Collective, but that wasn’t the case just a few decades ago. We were a back alley type of society that skirted along the edges. Nowadays it isn’t as bad, but I doubt the human world knows of the assassins like me out there and for the most part paranorms just blend in with society. They do know we police our own kind because they are ill equipped to do it and they hate that fact.

  Learning all of my training and being the kick ass fighter I am now probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been dropped off that day. For that I will always be grateful. The aggravating part of growing up there was never belonging. Everyone else around me was special and no one wanted to be a friend to a human.

  My only consolation was my friend Ryan. He was an orphaned werewolf that also fell under Frank’s guidance. With him being a paranorm he didn’t have to hang around with me because everyone accepted him, but he always tried to make me feel special.

  These days he is kind enough to pretend to be my boyfriend. We both know he has a mate out there somewhere for him, like all paranorms do, but he still sticks around to try to keep the teasing down. He also claims that I need the protection. Recently, I have been trying to set him free of any obligation he feels towards me. The man is twenty-four and needs to start thinking about settling down and making his own little pups.

  So far, I have allowed his excuses to stay linked as a couple, but they are going to have to stop soon. More and more he tries to act like a real couple even when there aren’t other people around. Hand holding in private and kisses that go past our previously agreed on pecks are starting to annoy me.

  I realized early on in life that I was never going to settle down with a husband, two kids and a white picket fence. I think the Collective realized that as well and that is why they have been grooming me for this job from the moment I could hold a knife in my hand. It took a lot of work as a human to learn to fight well enough to take on any species thrown at me, but I have made it through and I can only get stronger.

  That is enough thinking about how I got to this point for now. I take my smart phone out of the glove box and start up my Collective app. I scroll through looking for the now deceased Mr. Johns and hit the terminated button when I find him.

  As I go to put the phone away it starts vibrating. When I am on cases, I never have the ringer on and even the vibration has been known to give off my location, so I leave it in the car. When I look to see who it is, I find a text message waiting for me that makes me smile.

  Hey Cheeseburger, I am a little hungry tonight and was wondering if you weren’t too busy to come join me for a midnight snack. XXX Hawk

  I guess that means I am going to have to make a pit stop before heading back to the Collective for the night. With no one else on my target list currently, I welcome the interruption, especially from Hawk. I start up the Suburban and head towards town.

  Chapter 2

  A hawk in the hen house

  Hawk, known to everyone else as Sebastian deYork, is a vampire that runs, for lack of a better term, a den of iniquity called Sins. It is actually a pretty nice place, if you don’t mind getting eyefuls of people doing activities most people don’t witness outside of the bedroom. I take that back, most people probably don’t even see these activities there. That is one of the reasons the place is so popular.

  I have spent quite a bit of time over the years either visiting Hawk or running down targets that frequent these types of locations. I long ago lost my blush at what went on between those four walls. I mean you can only see people getting it on in so many ways before it becomes a little bit boring.

  As Ryan is my best friend inside the Collective, Hawk is my best friend outside. If it came down to it, I would love for Hawk to be more than just a friend, but we both know that isn't possible. It's a little odd how connected I feel with Sebastian.

  We met about three years ago during one of my first missions. I tracked the vampire, whose name I don’t even remember, to Sins and froze when I first got a glimpse of what really went on inside the building. At the time I was a nineteen-year-old rookie that hadn’t even thought about kissing a boy, so my brain took a little while to process things.

  I knew the basics. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl, although rumor is love isn't a requirement. Boy ends up sticking appendage between his legs into any hole the girl lets him. Even that knowledge does not prepare one for Sins

  In my frozen state I heard a whisper behind me. “A newbie, how nice. Do you find anything appealing?”

  I turned around to face away from the chaos and found a pair of onyx eyes staring back at me. They drew me in like they were delving into my soul to find all my hidden secrets. I had no idea how long I stood there as he studied me, but I finally shook myself out of it to take in the rest of the man standing before me.

  He was probably almost a foot taller than me, making him around 6’4” and had a pale face with very Roman looking features. His shoulder length hair was black to match his eyes and his lips had an unnatural redness to them. I knew instantly he was a vampire and thankfully not the one I was after. He could have killed me ten times over as I stood there like an idiot. He looked not much older than me, but had this sense of age about him. He had to have been the most beautiful man I had ever seen.

  “I can help you find who you are looking for, but I do ask that you please take the killing outside of my place of business,” he told me in a velvety smooth voice.

  “Crap. I cannot believe I came in here with my guard down. What a rookie mistake,” I said chastising myself. I had trained for years with a mind reading vampire within the Collective just so instances like this one don't happen. Put a little porn in front of me and evidently that training went straight out the window. Thankfully, over the years, that was the only time I met Sebastian without my walls securely in place.

  “You are still just a baby, don’t worry about it. I didn’t get that much information out of you, so you had to have been pretty heavily guarded. I just picked up your reason for visiting my establishment because it was what you were concentrating on before your mind went blank,” he extended his hand and said, “My name is Sebastian, by the way.”

  “Thanks for trying to make me feel better Sebastian, but it was still stupid of me. I am Nyx, and as you may have guessed I am here with an order of execution from the Grand Collective,” I told him shaking his hand.

  During the shake he lifted my wrist up to his nose and inhaled deeply. I watched as he closed his eyes and they rolled back in his head. When he opened them again they were totally black, no whites at all. Having been around a few of the vampires in the Collective I knew that look wasn’t a good sign, but as quickly as it appeared his eyes shifted back.
r />   “You will have to come back some time to visit me once this nasty assassination stuff is over. I have a feeling we have a lot to talk about Nyx,” he said my name almost purr like.

  That night he helped me lure my target outside of Sins and into my vehicle, so I could carry out my order. A week later I returned to Sins with a bottle of blood as a thank you gift. From what I understood it was a very good year hence, I thought it would be a nice present.

  He had met me just as I entered the building like he somehow knew I was coming. I handed him the bottle, telling him what it was for and after looking at it carefully he said, “Thank you for this, but I have a proposition for you that I am hoping you will accept.”

  “I am all ears,” I said to him, curious what this centuries old vampire may have in mind. I had been asking people that would actually talk to me around the Collective what they knew about him and all they could come up with is he is one of the old ones. Not exactly the life story I was hoping to come back here equipped with.