Chapter Five

New York, March, 2024

“Steady. Steady. All right, this time you have to make it all the way to the Walker tomb to get your coffee.” Simeon placed Emily’s favorite, a mocha with extra whipped cream, on one of the ornate stone urns that graced the Walker tomb in Mountain Rest Cemetery.

“I don’t like practicing in a cemetery. You have the homecourt advantage,” Emily huffed, walking stiffly. Her crutches rested on another ornate tombstone.

“You need to practice on uneven turf if you’re ever going to get back to full strength. Besides, the dead can be quite friendly.” Simeon smirked.

“The undead , you mean. Yeah. Some of them. Present company excluded.” She turned green eyes toward her reward and locked on, her vision laser-focused.

She never saw his face fall, but it did. In the month since she’d been out of the hospital, he stopped by her small apartment every day. She even let him in yesterday, a first.

But then she said things like that, and he knew her feelings hadn’t changed.

Emily Van Helsing hated him—and he was falling in love with her.

She was everything he’d looked for across oceans and decades. Cunning, stalwart, beautiful, brave... Kind. She had her prejudices, but she was learning to release them, little by little.

“Mr. Minegold brought me a babka last night,” Emily groaned as a dip tested her weakened right ankle, the one that had sustained a slight fracture in the accident. Her walking cast, a clumsy thing of gray plastic and black straps, made her move awkwardly, even without the crutches. “I should have packed a big slice to go with that coffee.”

“Yeah? He loves to bake, that guy. I have some of his rugelach back at my place. If you want, we can—”

“Nope. My brain is the only body part that’s fully recovered, Crow. I’m not setting foot in your place.”

“Suit yourself.”

Don’t torture yourself, Simeon. You don’t fancy her. You fancy the chase . To covet that which you can never have. You need a new form of lust now that you’ve nothing to hunt.

“When you get stronger, I’ll chase you all through this place and the woods up at White Pines. I know the owners—well, slightly.” Simeon tried to keep his voice cheery and nonchalant.

“Chase me? Why?” Emily stilled, rocking to keep her balance.

“Because someday, you’ll believe I’m not a threat and move onto a vamp who is—and you’ll still need to know how to be the huntress, Van Helsing.”

Her green eyes glittered in the late winter moonlight, her gaze catching his. A smile? Ever so slight, but it was there. “Huntress. I like it.”

“You wear it well.”

Her smile stayed as she triumphantly grabbed the coffee and drained it in long, shivering gulps.

“Come on, love. Let’s get you home.”

“Don’t call me love.”

New York, April, 2024

“I’ve got two tickets to the play-off games, Pine Ridge Lumberjacks versus the Philly Firebirds.”

Emily opened the door to find Simeon standing with an outstretched bouquet of tulips and a ticket.

“You have to stop bringing me things. Every single time you come over, you bring something.”

It was wrong to like it. He was a demon. Vampire. A bad, bad, horrible murdering creature.

Except that... Well, since she was largely out of commission and had to sit on her butt, she had started digging through the family’s digitized archives on her new but cheap laptop.

Simeon Crow had killed 437 men and 21 women by her family’s estimation. Most of them had names recorded, and many she could trace.

Crow had told her the truth, at least partially. Many of his victims had criminal records or lurid pasts. Sometimes she dared to toss out a name and see if he remembered the victim—and he always did. He spoke with deep satisfaction about taking scum off the streets of London.

The same way my grandfather spoke about taking out vampires. I don’t agree with his methods, but I was actually rooting for Simeon when he told me about that wigmaker who used to take much more than a girl’s hair.

“Come on, you never leave this place. You need a night out,” Simeon wheedled, brandishing the ticket.

“I do go out! I go to the Night Market. I get coffee. I took a walk this morning. What did you do—read about someone getting railed by some muscle-bound mobster?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” He gave her a charming smile that suddenly hit her stomach in an unfamiliar way.

Breathless.

No, no. Just taking a long time for your ribs to go completely back to normal.

“You okay?”

“I... Allergies.” She knew it was a lie.

“You ought to run to Madge’s, or maybe see Farrah Fenclan. They’ll do you up a potion for that.”

“Yeah, I’ll stop by the shop.” Magic shops, herbs, potions, holy water—it was all familiar. Whenever her father moved them, they found the laundromat, the nearest Chinese restaurant, and every magic shop and den of the occult in their new city. Her father had taught her that magic users were neutral, neither friend nor foe, simply a weaponsmith, providing tools to make what they needed to harm the true villains—the werewolves, the vampires, the demons, and whatever other obscure monster lurked nearby.

“How’s your head?”

Emily jumped a little and snatched the ticket out of his hand. “Fine.”

“You sure? You went quiet and far away for a minute.”

“I told you. Allergies.”

“Allergies make you do that? That’s a new one on me, Huntress.”

Damn him. The way he said that name...

“I’m hungry. I was just about to eat when you showed up.” Don’t mention food in front of the vampire, Van Helsing.

But the food she was about to eat had come from a vampire—Jakob Minegold. It was matzo ball soup, and it was one of the few homemade meals she’d ever had.

Two vampires were taking better care of her than her own father had. Crow was probably just keeping in her good graces, but Minegold...

“Minegold made me soup. Probably should throw it out...” Those were her father’s words exiting her mouth.

A low snarl made her whip around, healing body annoyed at the sudden, violent motion.

“Don’t you say a word against Jakob Minegold. That man is the soul of kindness! D’you know he’s a war hero? Well, no, you wouldn’t know because he doesn’t tell anyone, but I found out. He saved an entire train from Warsaw bound for Treblinka. That man became a monster to save his children, his wife, and hundreds of others!”

Simeon’s eyes were shining with hero worship—and maybe tears.

Why? Why would an evil murderer worship something good? “Soul of kindness? Vampires don’t have souls. They have demons.”

Crow flinched. “Not all of us. Some of us have never taken an innocent life. We keep our souls. I mean, they. They keep their souls.”

“What? No. I’ve never heard of—”

“You probably wouldn’t. It’s incredibly rare. There are only a few other vampires I personally know of who have their human souls. They all live in this town.”

“And they hang out with you?” Emily crossed her arms.

“Not much, but we know each other. They probably don’t know of me. Decent vampires don’t travel in the circles I used to, and you know very well the Van Helsings and their monster-hunting brethren made sure vampiric deaths were never publicized, never to be confused with the pedantic human serial killers if they could help it. I imagine your grandfather cleaned up more of my crime scenes than Scotland Yard ever did.”

“Bastard.”

Crow looked away, smug tone gone. “I’m not sure on that score. My father was never around, that’s all I knew.”

“Yeah, well... Mine was, and he wasn’t so great at it. You didn’t miss much.”

“You can talk. You didn’t grow up in a time where a lack of ‘parentage’ could make or break you. You didn’t have to be kept ‘humble.’ constantly reminded of your birth, your poor mother, the fact that you oughtn’t to be in a school, in a job, or at a house party among rich yobs and knobs,” Crow suddenly reached for the empty vase on her packing crate shelf. Instead of hurling it, he snatched it up and simply held it, shoulders heaving.

“You break it, you sweep up,” Emily whispered. The only things she had “on display” had come from the people of this town—most of them from Minegold and Crow. If he smashed one of the vases he’d deigned to give her, so be it.

“You can see it still stings, over a century later.” He put the vase down gently.

“No excuse for killing.”

“Maybe not. But what about killing others before they kill again, Huntress? The police in the late 1800s probably caught one out of every ten killers. Too easy to make it look like an accident back then, or too easy for some just to go missing. A murderer is nothing but a bully who takes more than your confidence or your good name. He takes your life. A rapist takes away dignity and safety. The ones who prey on children take away innocence and more. Maybe killing them wasn’t the answer, but... It seemed like a bloody good one at the time. And isn’t that what you do, Van Helsing? Kill them before they can hurt another innocent soul?”

She had to swallow three times before she could make her mouth work. The weight of his challenge was too heavy. “I’ll go to the game with you.”

Crow’s eyes widened, and his face changed from a dark leer to joy. “You will? All right, then! I’ll pick you up at six? Dinner on the way?”

“This is not a date. I hate you, you hate me, and I’m going because a hockey stadium is full of people for you to snack on. Not on my watch, buster.”

She returned to her fridge and ignored the soft murmur behind her.

“Don’t hate you, Huntress. Quite fond of you, really...”