White Rock

Once again it would be remiss of me to think that I did all of this by myself. So I’d like to take this page to talk about the people that helped make this book happen.

Thank you to the writers, both aspiring and published, over at Forward Motion for their help in whatever capacity was necessary. I may not have been a regular attendee in the chat channels but whenever I was I received more than enough encouragement. Special mention to fellow Indie Author J. A. Marlow for her incessant mantra of Write, write, write. It was a bit of a push at times when I needed it.

Thank you to Bill, Leif, Seleane, Judy, and Sean for agreeing to be my Beta Readers. You were upfront about what you liked, didn’t like, and what could be improved. The product within these pages is better for your feedback. Special mention to Joiey, who wasn’t a Beta Reader, yet still managed to get a copy. Despite the extremely unpolished state of the manuscript, he tore through it in two days and his feedback consisted of one simple question. When’s the next one?

Once more I have to send a huge thank you to my family. While I largely write for myself, they have been supportive of my process, and what I go through in trying to bring this product forward.

Finally, I want to send a thank you to my fans, most especially those who have left me reviews. I may write for myself, but having completely strangers come along and say that they loved the book is the primary reason you are seeing this series move forward. I plan on giving you all a lot of material to digest over the next few decades, so I hope you’ll stick around for the journey.

Author’s Note

A long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I ever made any money off my writing, I would donate a portion of what I took him to charity. With that in mind, 10% of all proceeds made off the sale of this book and other’s within The Eternal War series will be donated to Child’s Play.

Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of gamers have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Millions of dollars in donations of toys, games, books, and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since its inception. More information on this worthwhile charity can be found at www.childsplaycharity.org.

I started writing as a way to enhance my own gaming experiences. I still game as much as I am able and will always view myself as a gamer. Moreover, as a game, this is the most worthwhile cause available to us, a way to present the gift of gaming to children who could really use it, if only to forget their situation for a little while.

Even if you end up not liking this book, I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that part of your purchase will go toward this great cause.

Chapter One

I think it speaks of how messed up my life is when my only reaction to the auctioneer’s assistant blowing his boss’s brains out with a shotgun was to sigh and say, Figures.

The sad part is that I hadn’t wanted to go to the auction in the first place. I clearly remembered turning to Virgil on the elevator ride up an hour or so earlier, and asking him what the hell we were doing.

Well, Cheryl, he said, you’re here because you decided you wanted to be the face of Erikson Construction Company when it came to its charity efforts. I’m here as your ‘plus one’. He adjusted the tie he was wearing, a garish purple number that clashed horribly with the salmon colored shirt he had picked out for the event, a charity auction being held at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant in Reunion Tower. You know, the tower that is usually pictured offset from shots of downtown with the ball on top. Yes, there’s an actual restaurant inside, and I was fast moving up an elevator to join some of Dallas’ social elite as they gave, gave, gave to whatever charity felt appropriate for such a lavish setting. Aside from the tie and the shirt though, Virgil was decked out in a black business suit that I had bought for him a few months ago when I had suckered him into the role of my steady ‘plus-one’ companion for the events that offered them. The color had been a compromise. Initially he’d wanted it to match the tie.

Oh yeah, I said, but mostly because nothing else came to mind. I smoothed the front of my dress, the third time I had done so since we had arrived. I did my best to avoid displaying my general disinterest in these events, but inevitably I fidgeted enough that anyone paying attention would notice. Fortunately, only Virgil was that interested in what I was doing so it was a minor issue.

We were alone in the elevator, apparently two of the last guests to arrive, so he had no problem saying, You should try to put on a better face for these events. It’s almost as if you don’t care.

You know that’s not entirely true. I like the idea of the charity, I just don’t see a point in attending most of the events they generate. Especially given the people I’m required to mingle with. I had met more than a handful of the social elite who attended the city’s charity functions during the past six months. The sad part was that I was probably the only honest one out of the entire lot. This coming from a vampire hunter who was constantly forced to lie so I didn’t come off as crazy. For them it was all about the prestige of being a benefactor for a charity, as well as an excuse to catch up with people they called ‘friends’ but never saw anywhere else. For me, it was an attempt at caring what the hell my company did in a way that I couldn’t screw up. I’ll be the first to admit that my intentions weren’t entirely honest in the endeavor, but that was beside the point. The situation had changed, and I had adapted. I said as much to Virgil right before the elevator dinged and the doors opened. The timing was impeccable, as the incoming retort died on his lips.

Instead, he said, Just be nice to him. The current faction aligned to his viewpoint will take any insult as fuel that you’re unfit to even have a token stake in your company.

I turned and smiled at him. I’ll ignore how ludicrous that is and be the perfect lady. He snorted, then we stepped off the elevator and put on our game faces.

If you’ve never been to the restaurant that encompasses the middle floor of Reunion Tower, then you’re missing out. The elevator opened into a small foyer where we were immediately met by the maître d'. Even there, I got a sense of class and of the care put into the image of the restaurant. I had eaten dinner a few times with my father as a kid, when it was known as the Antares, and at least once since Wolfgang Puck had taken it over, but I was always impressed. The food was excellent and the view breathtaking, especially at night. It really did the landmark justice.

However, deep down I felt as if the restaurant in Reunion Tower was Exhibit A when it came to what outsiders didn’t like about Dallas. Too upscale, too wine and dine crowd, and not nearly enough history to give our fair city the proper amount of depth. Hell, our shining moment in that regard was the death of President John F. Kennedy. It’s not something we were proud of, but the city had done little since then to move us into a realm where we could speak about that tragic event as if it weren’t some morbid merit badge. I both loved and loathed the city I lived in, and this restaurant was one of the reasons for that.

In addition to the maître d', the event itself called for the presence of a little security, mostly to protect the auction items. A tall and cute police officer waved a detector wand over my body, checking for weapons. I smiled at him, something to which he seemed immune, as his face refused to budge out of its stoic visage. However, the corners of his mouth did respond when Virgil showed him his pearly whites, so it looked like I just wasn’t his type. After the wand, he asked for my purse, and almost as soon as he opened it he pulled out my handheld Taser. Ma’am, he said with a disapproving look on his face, I’m going to have to hold on to this for the duration of event.

I sighed and said, Could you hand me my wallet? The officer’s face scrunched up for a second before he shrugged and reached into my purse to pull out the black leather wallet I carried around with me everywhere. When he handed it to me, I opened it and brought out the identification behind my driver’s license. I handed it to him and waited for his reaction.

To be fair, I was pulling a whammy on him. For a second, he simply stared at it, then he looked up at me and said, The FBI huh? His voice was tinged with disbelief. I couldn’t blame him.

I know it’s strange, I said, but just because I have money it doesn’t mean I don’t need to hold down a real job when I’m not doing things like this.

I guess you have a point, he said. But do you really expect to use this thing?

It was a smart and honest question, so I shook my head and said, No, but haven’t you ever been in a situation where you weren’t armed and wish it hadn’t been the case? I may not expect to use it, which explains why it’s only a Taser and not my gun, but having it on hand can’t be a bad thing, can it?

The officer thought about it for a moment, then shrugged and put the Taser back in the purse. When in doubt, blame it on management, he said as he handed it back to me. Try not to cause any trouble with it, if you please. Otherwise it might not look good on the report, special privileges or no.

I took the purse from him and said, I’ll be on my best behavior. The statement echoed what I had said to Virgil only a moment before. It was the truth, because I almost never intentionally went out looking for trouble. It seemed to find me just fine, thank you very much. That’s why I stuck to the rules my old mentor, Cho, had instilled in me early on during my Hunter training. Rule numero uno was, Never go unarmed. Given that it wouldn’t have been very nice for me to show up to a charity function with my Glock 19 in tow, concealed handgun license and special permissions be damned, and how socially awkward it would have been for me to get caught with a stake up my dress, I had settled on the next best thing.

I possessed other weapons that would have fit in the ensemble, which was comprised solely of a dress that fit into the little black category, but my choices were limited because of the attire. It had a form fitting top with crossover straps that met just below my neckline, and the hemline stopped short of my knees by a couple of inches. The straps were big enough that I could have hidden a couple of knives behind them, and if I had really wanted to I could have slipped in some of my other goodies, one of which was a handle-less miniature sai that could fit snugly in my fist.

Lack of options was why I didn’t like wearing dresses in the first place. Plus, well, I’d never really gotten into the idea of showing off how pretty I looked. Which dresses had a bad habit of doing. They tended to attract undue attention toward me and I could think of few situations where that was a good thing.

In the end, Virgil had convinced me that it wasn’t worth the effort of hiding everything on the off chance something happened. I hadn’t been able to find a reason to disagree with him that wouldn’t also seem a bit crazy, and relented. I blamed the six-plus years of hunting demons that lived off human blood as the impetus behind me accessorizing in a manner different from everyone else. It made life difficult at times.

After Virgil was cleared, we signed the guest list and were escorted to our table. Once we were out of the foyer, the room opened into a very beautiful, wide circular view of downtown Dallas. It was, however, imperfect since the outside charm of Reunion Tower, the patterned lights, was only made possible by a crisscrossing of metal bars with all the intersections holding the lights. It obstructed the view to a degree. If I had to grade it overall I would have given it a solid B because of that, but then I’m somewhat of a cynic.

From the foyer, we stepped onto a circular platform that went all the way around, and allowed us to get to whatever side we wanted to, despite whatever direction the restaurant was turned. Did I mention that it rotates? Every forty-five minutes the restaurant makes a revolution, so patrons were never stuck looking at only a single portion of the Dallas skyline. Okay, so maybe that increased it to a solid B-plus.

A string quartet had been brought out for the occasion, lending an air of regality to the affair. It went with the dresses, jewelry, and overall haughtiness of the patrons. Never mind that the charity was for underprivileged kids living in the metroplex. Though I guess that was the entire point. The rich and powerful of Dallas get one night to showcase exactly how rich and powerful they are, while also partaking of a charity auction where all the proceeds were going toward a good cause. Overall it was win-win. I just didn’t like the game. Especially since the one night comment wasn’t true. An event like this occurred fairly often, at least according to my calendar.

Everyone was already seated at their assigned tables, and waiters were going around to fill wineglasses as the crowd awaited the arrival of the food. We approached a table just to the right of the small stage where the quartet was playing, and the back of my neck immediately tensed up when I saw who was sitting there. Virgil sensed the change in my mood, and leaned over to whisper some words of encouragement. I barely listened, and instead focused on the companions Virgil and I were apparently to spend the evening with.

The one on the left was Joseph Redmond, a son of a bitch if I ever saw one. He was Erikson Construction Company’s CEO, and the bastard had been seeking to buy out my significant portion of the company since he had been brought onboard two years ago. If I had known he was going to be that way when we hired him, he never would have made it on the list of candidates. Oh, he had talked a big game about expanding our revenue stream and embracing the wave of government contracts that had been falling from the sky, but his true motivations from the beginning had been to see me sell the company my father had left me. The only reason he wanted to do that was so he could add a feather to his cap when he turned around and resold it to someone else, making everybody rich in the progress. Of course, it wasn’t just him who thought this way, as Virgil’s comment from earlier had reminded me. The board of directors was neatly divided down the middle when it came to my involvement on the business side of things, which truthfully was minimal at best. He used to have more on his side before a situation from last year had caused a few to switch, and a couple of more had come to my side when I’d stepped up and offered to represent the company at charity events. So at the moment everything was at a stalemate, which was how I wanted it. I figured if I gave Joseph enough time he’d see that I wasn’t going anywhere, and look for greener pastures. That was the hope, at any rate.

The second person at the table, the one on my right, was one Alison Crawford. She was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News that had been hounding me since the aforementioned situation. I think some of the gossip to come out of it had intrigued her enough to try to get a story. Which meant she had been bugging the hell out of me. Not incessantly of course. I got the sense that Alison prided herself on not being extremely annoying, but she did make it a point to contact me at least once a week to see if I’d warmed up to the idea of conducting an interview. The bloody persistence of it all had been wearing me down enough that a few dozen more calls might see me agreeing to do it. Judging by the look of things, I had to assume she was Joseph’s ‘plus one’ for the event.

Both of them were dressed for the occasion, with Joseph in his usual Armani best and Alison in a strapless white dress that might have contained even fewer adornments than my outfit. That they were together didn’t bother me so much as that they seemed to actually enjoy each other’s company. I had long been convinced that Joseph couldn’t have made friends with a vampire, let alone a normal human being, and what little I knew of Alison had given me the impression that she had better taste.

I’d be careful around him Alison, I said when we were within hearing range, Joseph has a tendency to talk your ears off without showing a whole lot for the effort.

The results from last quarter would beg to differ, he responded smugly. To his credit, even though the statement was assholish at best, he stood and swooped around the table to pull out my chair for me. Virgil stepped in before the gesture could piss me off and did it instead. My savior. Again.

You say it like you had anything to do with that, I said after I had settled in to my chair. My research shows that the preliminary work for those government contracts was already in place when you stepped in. They would have been signed if a monkey had taken over.

You mean the research Virgil did, he countered, while giving Virgil the slightest of nods as my best friend sat across from Alison. It’s the worst kept secret in the company that he does all your grunt work, so please stop acting like you actually contribute anything to the overall bottom line.

I smiled at him. He hadn’t directly answered my barb and had gone right after my contributions to the company, so I took the response as a win for me. Like all men in power, he didn’t take kindly to anything which might make him seem powerless, something I had done without too much effort. What I do for Cheryl, said Virgil, who always tried his best to keep things cordial, is make sure she’s well informed of what’s going on. Let’s be honest, a prettier face one might never see, but she doesn’t have much of a head for numbers, and never has. Did you know that she was over at my house doing extra studying for our trigonometry exam when her father was killed?

Well. Damn. I hadn’t expected that one. Not from Virgil. The look on Joseph’s face when Virgil mentioned the death of my father was priceless, and made me wish I could have pulled my phone out of my purse fast enough to capture it. As much as I had stung him with my comments, Virgil had effectively killed anything he could have said to or about me. I did my part, making sure to show some of the grief I felt every time I was reminded of the day that had changed my life forever, but inside I was smiling. Virgil deserved an award for doing that.

I did not know that, was all Joseph could say.

Throughout the exchange Alison observed our conversation with rapt interest, her eyes darting back and forth between whoever was talking and who they were talking to. I glanced at her as the conversation ended, and got the sense that she had filed every word away in her mind for recollection later. Now I was convinced that giving her any information about myself would be a dangerous proposition. Who knew what might inadvertently slip out, despite efforts to be careful while speaking.

After Joseph’s final comment, she must have felt it appropriate to finally step in. That was revelatory, she quipped. And all in the first five minutes. Makes me wonder what’s coming next.

My apologies, said Joseph, whose demeanor lightened as he shifted the conversation to his guest. Cheryl tends to bring out the worst in me, so I’m sorry for not introducing you sooner.

I waved it off. I wouldn’t bother. Alison probably has me on speed dial.

I can always take it off if you like, she countered. You know my price for doing so.

If you keep it up, you might eventually get me to pay. Partially true. If anything finally giving in would likely get her out of my hair.

What’s this? asked Joseph as he looked back and forth between the two of us.

Shortly after that hullabaloo last October, said Virgil, Alison contacted Cheryl about doing a short interview concerning, I forget, what was it?

The kidnapping, she said.

Ah, yes. The kidnapping. Virgil grinned. He hadn’t forgotten but forcing her to say it out loud forced her to offer a false smile in return, and her body language shifted just enough to let me know that she was feeling slightly guilty for incessantly asking.

Then I can see why Cheryl hasn’t warmed up to the idea, said Joseph, which surprised me because I had long since been convinced he would vote for someone’s death if I were opposed to it. Personally, I wish we could put it all behind us.

Ah, there it was. He didn’t want any attention given to me. At all. He lamented the lost momentum the kidnapping had caused him on pressuring me to sell, and had been fighting a rear guard action ever since. It was one of the few good things to come out of that ugly incident.

There would be more to it than that, said Alison in an attempt to justify her actions, but the kidnapping would be the centerpiece of the story. So little is known of the person Detective Stonebriar tried to save, I thought maybe the metroplex would appreciate knowing who he had risked his life for.

The last bit caused Joseph to perk up. Now there’s an interesting idea.

Damn, that didn’t bode well. One that will not be explored anytime soon, I said with a note of finality in my voice. I didn’t need the two of them working together to make my life more difficult.

At that moment, a waiter stopped by to fill our wineglasses, and as he did, an all too familiar buzz tickled the back of my mind. My body tensed and my fingers unconsciously flexed around a stake that wasn’t there. I glanced at the waiter, but it wasn’t him. The buzz, my psychic sense of all things demonic in nature, was too light for it to be him. At least one was nearby though, maybe more.

I caught Virgil’s glance, and motioned for him to look down. I dropped my hand into my lap and made the sign language symbol for the letter V, my way of relaying to him the presence of vamps in a situation where speaking it out loud might not be advised. His face remained passive, but he did make a small motion with his hand for me to keep it cool.

He was right, of course. Even if a confrontation occurred, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. It added to the overall frustration I felt for even having to attend the event. I knew that I had willingly agreed to appear, but most of these events had only myself and the person I brought with me, which was Virgil more often than not. That Joseph had decided to attend this event had prompted more than a few questions on my end, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have decided to come simply to get under my skin. It was only half working, thanks to the early verbal win from Virgil and I, but that wouldn’t last forever. With vampires in the area, everything he did that grated on me was just going to have that much more of an effect.

I couldn’t wait to get away.

Dinner, contrary to the company, was excellent. Given that the entry fee was a couple hundred dollars per person, I had expected no less. Good food by a master chef isn’t something one experiences often. A simple bruschetta graced our table as the appetizer, and it tasted absolutely delicious. It made waiting for the main course much harder than it had any right to. It didn’t help that our table was a visual definition of tense, so that left Virgil as the primary conversation instigator. He did his best to steer the conversation toward simple matters, like how we expected the Dallas Mavericks to do in the playoffs and what our thoughts were on recent celebrity news. Alison was the most frequent contributor, but I did get into the basketball discussion since I’m a major homer when it came to Dallas sports. Blame my dad, a diehard Cowboys fan for all of his life, but I think part of it was the competitiveness of it all. I’m a competitive person deep down, so it wasn’t hard for me to get into anything where a clear winner could be determined.

As our debate over the value of seeding in the playoffs wound down, we were presented with the main course, a Greek wheel, steak rolled up in a pinwheel with feta and various spices, with a potato dish that had more flavors than I could keep track of. The simple addition of French cut green beans with a master chef twist added some color to the plate. Far be it of me to identify the twist but they didn’t taste like any green beans I had ever had before so I assumed something special had been done with them. Coupled with the wine they had poured for us, everything blended together to create an assault on the taste buds that I probably would have enjoyed more but for that incessant buzzing in the back of my head and the presence of Joseph. At least during the meal he kept quiet. Of course, that only made me paranoid about what he was up to.

When everyone had finished their meals, and all the plates had been cleared from the tables, the auctioneer came out and announced that the auction would be held shortly. He asked for everyone to gather on the second level of the restaurant, where everything had been set up.

I’ll be honest in saying I had no intention of buying anything. I make good money as a part of my company, and the stock value I hold is measurable in the eight digit range, but outside of a few guilty pleasures that mostly run into electronics, I’d never been into the things that run for tens of thousands of dollars at these events, especially when it came to art. Virgil, on the other hand, had a handy list of everything up for auction and as he pulled it out in anticipation of the event, I caught several of them highlighted for bidding. I could almost taste the glee coming from him as we joined the crowd of people headed up the stairs.

The second