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  WARRIOR MATE

  Bloodline Warriors: Shadow

  By L.J. Red

  Warrior Mate

  Copyright © 2019 by L.J. Red

  First Electronic Publication: July 2019

  L.J. Red

  www.ljred.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission by the author, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not the be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organization is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

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  Chapter 1

  Brigit pulled open the door to the precinct and stepped quickly to the side, narrowly avoiding being elbowed in the face.

  “You calm down!” the man who had almost hit her shouted, swinging wildly, his back to her, facing down the two officers in front of him. The uniform who had brought him in, a young man, very new to the precinct, was clearly unable to get close enough.

  Brigit grabbed at the perp’s flailing hand before he could hit someone else and threw her weight to the side. Using his bulk against him, she brought him smoothly to the floor.

  “Hey, get off me,” he shouted, bucking underneath her.

  “Cuffs,” she said shortly, keeping the man pinned in an arm lock one-handed and raising her other hand for the cuffs. She didn’t take her eyes off the man beneath her, holding him down grimly, her knee in the small of his back. Despite his attempts to throw her off, and her much smaller size and weight, she managed to get him cuffed in a handful of seconds. She finally let him up and handed him off to one of the officers. Only then did she pin the young officer who had brought him in with a glare.

  “Cuffs on before he gets the chance to maul someone next time, alright?” She walked past him and traded an eye-roll with the uniform at the desk. Ignoring the usual parade of late-night visitors—streetwalkers and soon-to-be locked-up drunks, the state attorneys in tired suits with even more tired eyes—Brigit went through to the bullpen.

  The usual smell of sweat and stale coffee made her wrinkle her nose. The strip lighting lit the room with an unforgiving glare; still, it was a shade more welcoming than the chilly Chicago night outside.

  Her partner, Dana, wasn’t at her desk, and Brigit’s shoulders eased slightly. It wasn’t that she was avoiding her friend, it was just… ok yeah, she was. She was avoiding her. How exactly was she supposed to deal with the fact that her best friend and partner had become a vampire?

  Not any vampire either but one of the Shadows—the seriously terrifying enforcers of the vampire world. The ones who kept the law and executed the rogue vampires who broke it. Hell, Dana had helped kill the Monster of Chicago—the vampire who had terrorized Chicago for months, murdering innocent humans and leaving their bodies, and body parts, strewn across the city. Brigit was glad he was dead and proud of her friend for tracking him down and stopping him. She just wished the price hadn’t been so high. Plus, it was weird to her that Dana didn’t seem to see it as a price at all. In fact, she’d embraced becoming a vampire. Brigit didn’t know how to deal with that. Hell, if it was up to her, she’d have nothing to do with vamps at all. Only, that was impossible because now her best friend was one of them… and so… avoidance.

  Brigit flopped down into her seat. For once, her desk was practically empty. It was weird to be able to see the chipped varnish; usually it was completely covered in case files. Feeling useless, turned on her computer and stared at the loading screen, tapping her nails against the desk. She hated sitting around twiddling her thumbs. She needed to be doing something, solving a case. That was her life.

  Dana becoming a vampire had caused changes in more than just their friendship. No one was sure what it meant for the Chicago PD. Was Dana technically dead now? Could a dead person work? Could a vampire also be a cop? Brigit knew Dana had gotten very good at ignoring the stares and mutters from their fellow cops. Brigit had put her own job on the line, telling their captain she’d walk out if Dana was fired. She might be struggling to accept her friend as a vampire but Dana was still her friend, and she wasn’t going to let her get fired just because she sacrificed her life to protect the city. Captain Davis had gone to bat for Dana, ensuring that she kept her job and her position as Brigit’s partner, but Brigit knew he was taking a lot of shit from higher up. Which meant he had to be extra careful about which cases to give them. Brigit glanced at her empty desk. Which was why her desk was so damn tidy.

  “Hey, where’s your vamp partner? Sun’s down. Shouldn’t she be here now?” Sanders called from across the room.

  “What, you want me to hold your hand, Sanders? You scared?” She looked him up and down scathingly, from the tips of his short hair to the greasy stain on his shirt. “Don’t worry, she doesn’t eat junk food.” The cops behind him jeered. He flushed, his sandy blond hair standing out against the red of his skin, and sent her a rude gesture. What a dick. It was one thing for Brigit to worry about the state of her and Dana’s friendship, but it was a totally different thing if some asshole decided to insult her. Dana and Brigit had caught enough flak being women on the force. She wasn’t going to stand up for any more insults.

  The door to the bullpen rocked open and Brigit tensed, but it wasn’t Dana. It was an unfamiliar man: tall, with dark skin and close curls with a dusting of gray. He was wearing a suit. She sat up straighter. A nice suit. A Fed suit. He paused for a second, scanning the room, then fixed his eyes on the captain’s office and walked through the room toward it. The bullpen fell silent in his wake and Captain Davis appeared at the doorway to his office, clearly tipped off by the unusual silence. Brigit only then noticed the two people following the black guy. This first was a short man, thick bottle glasses balanced on his nose and messy brown hair. A step behind him was a woman with a short black bob and skin a shade lighter than the first Fed. All three disappeared into the captain’s office.

  “What’s that about?” Dana’s voice came from directly behind Brigit and she jumped about a foot in the air.

  “Holy shit!” she said loudly. Everyone turned to stare. Oops. Brigit glared them all down.

  “Sorry.” Dana slipped into her seat opposite, looking remorseful.

  “You scared the crap outta me. You’re like a cat.”

  “I know, I forgot—” Dana broke off.

  Forgot she had vampire skills now. Brigit swallowed nervously. “It’s cool,” she said into the silence before it could stretch too long. She sent a small grin at her friend and Dana returned it. Brigit caught a hint of fang behind Dana’s lips and looked away quickly. Every now and then Brigit forgot what had happened, and then she’d see something like Dana’s fangs and remember. She’d see a light in her friend’s eyes. A quality to the way she moved, a kind of grace. A restrained strength that seemed to go beyond the muscles in her arms to something deeper—a core of strength that no human could carry. It was impressive. Brigit couldn’t deny that, but it scared her a little. Sometimes she missed her human friend. They couldn’t go out in the sun anymore to catch a coffee. They were constrained to late shifts, and while Dana se
emed happy, Brigit wondered if she ever missed the sunrise, or if the thought of drinking blood turned her stomach.

  And yet, being a vampire seemed to suit Dana more than being human had. She seemed more comfortable in her skin. Then again, perhaps that was less due to her vampire nature and more due to the man who had turned her—Lucian, the leader of the Shadows, and apparently Dana’s soulmate. Brigit had been skeptical that such a thing was even real. Soulmates sounded like a fairy tale, and vampires sure weren’t fairy tales, or if they were, it was the old ones—the dark, powerful, terrifying kind of ones. Brigit shivered. Was it worth it, she wondered, to give up your human life to gain a soulmate in return? She supposed she would never know. After all, there was no soulmate out there for her. Brigit McReeve was not the kind of woman who found a soulmate. Nope, she was one hundred percent modern American: no soulmates, no vampires, no strings, no drama. That was how she liked it. If she needed to scratch that itch she’d find a one-night stand in a noisy club; no muss, no fuss.

  Brigit had never really believed in the whole true love thing. Her parents had it good, it wasn’t like she didn’t believe in love at all. But all that girly sighing over prince charming who was going to storm in and knock down your enemies and then whirl you away on a shiny great horse? Get real. She could knock down her own damn enemies thank you very much. Oh, she knew what she looked like: a tiny, baby doll blonde. That was all anyone saw when they met. Her mom had tried to dress her in pretty dresses when she was a kid until she’d come home from the park with her brothers with ripped dresses and skinned knees enough times that her mom had finally admitted defeat and let her wear jeans. Brigit had fought against the cute little girl crap until her teens, when she’d discovered makeup and boys and realized there could be a kind of power in being five-foot-nothing with big eyes. Of course that hadn’t stopped her joining the academy and learning just how to use that five-foot-nothing against attackers twice her size. She was good at her job. She was proud of it, but if people were going to see her as just a pretty little thing? Well, then she’d use that against them.

  “Anything new?” Dana asked, breaking Brigit’s train of thought.

  She flicked through the handful of cases on the computer. “Someone threw a brick through the window of a vampire-owned shop.”

  Dana frowned. “Another vandalism. Dammit, why do people keep doing this crap?”

  Brigit shared her frustration. The city was still so torn up; it had been months since the Monster of Chicago had died but anti-vampire feeling was still heavy in Chicago. For a short while, things had finally been starting to change and then, just last month, the Vampire Ravagers, a gang of vampire criminals, had attacked the Sanctuary. The battle had been splashed across news headlines up and down the country. “Vampire criminals gone mad.” “Vampires roam the streets of Chicago.” They weren’t far wrong. It had been a mess. All the police had been able to do was clear the surrounding area. The fighting had been so thick and so dangerous they couldn’t even get near the Sanctuary. Then, when they were finally able to carve a path through, the battle suddenly, explosively, ended. The Shadows were still standing, the Sanctuary building was half-wrecked, and inexplicably, all the Ravagers were dead, some of them just disintegrating where they stood, leaving creepy skeletal corpses of ash and dust. Brigit still had nightmares.

  She leaned back in her seat and let her eyes fall shut. She wasn’t sure if she preferred the nightmares over her other dreams. For the past few weeks, her dreams had been… weird. Foggy and indistinct. Usually she remembered them after waking, but lately she hadn’t been able to pin them down. All she remembered was searching, searching desperately for something, or someone. She couldn’t explain it. It was like she was pulling on a thread that attached her to someone else, someone hidden from her. The strange unfulfilled feeling lingered long after she woke. She rubbed her eyes and opened them again. It had to be some weird stress thing. Too many late shifts in a row.

  The noise of the TV suddenly blared across the room and Brigit looked up. A man with a gray crewcut and ruddy face was speaking angrily on the TV.

  “Oh, not this guy again,” Brigit said, recognizing him. “Turn it off.”

  “No, I wanna hear what he has to say,” Sanders said, nodding to one of the other cops to turn it up. Brigit gritted her teeth, trading a wary look with Dana.

  “We have Mr. John Cleaver with us today,” the interviewer said, “Mr. Cleaver, isn’t it true that your political campaign has been built on the idea that vampires pose a threat to the rest of humanity?”

  “I believe that humans should protect themselves,” he said, his beady eyes flicking to the camera, then back to the interviewer. “Look at what happened in our fine city of Chicago only recently, the vampire war that spilled out across the streets.”

  “Well,” the interviewer interrupted, “couldn’t you argue gang violence has always been—”

  “No no, gang violence is one thing, but vampire gangs are quite another.” He leaned forward. “It’s undeniable that vampires are stronger than us, faster than us, and they can’t be killed as easily. We, humanity, need to protect ourselves.”

  “I understand your campaign has attracted a great deal of attention from the group known as HUNT, the Human-Undead Neutralization Team.”

  Cleaver leaned back quickly. “My campaign has no affiliation with HUNT. Of course, I don’t condone violence.”

  Brigit scoffed. “What a liar.” She didn’t know how connected he was to HUNT but it was people like him that encouraged the attacks and vandalism she’d been seeing across the city.

  Cleaver’s little eyes were screwed up, dark and ugly. “But,” he said, “I understand that our citizens feel threatened by the danger that vampires pose. Look at the Monster of Chicago that so recently killed his way across our city. Law enforcement was no help whatsoever. Firm measures must be taken.”

  The feeling in the bullpen changed at that.

  “I like how he doesn’t mention that it was police and vampires who saved the city from the Monster in the end,” Dana said.

  Brigit glanced at Dana. “Ignore him. He’s just saying whatever will get him the most votes from scared, angry people. And turn that shit off,” she said loudly. There was some grumbling from Sanders, but one of the other cops grabbed the remote and turned the channel to a different station.

  “Lewis, McReeve, get in here.” Captain Davis’s voice cut through the room.

  Brigit jerked upright. “Sure thing, boss,” she said, leaning in toward Dana. “You know what this is about?”

  Dana shook her head. “The Feds are still in there right?”

  Crap, Dana was right; they were. Were they in trouble? Was this about Dana being a vampire? Shit, were they going to lose their jobs?

  “This is Special Agent Morrell,” the captain said, introducing them. “Agent Novak.” He pointed to the guy in glasses. “And Agent Franklin,” he finished, pointing at the woman. “Detectives Lewis and McReeve are the officers you want,” he said to Agent Morrell. “Lewis is the one to speak to about the vampires,” Captain Davis added.

  Wait, vampires? What was going on here? Brigit opened her mouth to ask but the captain fixed her with a look and she held her tongue. The special agent turned to both of them, standing up.

  “This is unorthodox. I’m just going to come out and say it. We’re putting together a joint task force. You, Detective Lewis, are the only vampire law enforcement official in the US currently, and Detective McReeve”—He turned to her—“You’ve worked alongside a… vampire”—He glanced back at Dana—“who you also knew as a human. Put simply, you’re the closest we’ve got to experts. We want to create a joint task force to deal with vampire-related crime. We would have approached the vampires directly but… they’re not the easiest to get hold of.”

  Brigit and Dana just stared at him. So. Not losing their jobs. Cool. A joint task force with the Feds… Brigit shuffled her feet. This was not how she expected today to go.
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br />   “We want to put you and my two agents together into a team,” Special Agent Morrell continued. “A test run here in Chicago. If it works, we want to roll the model out to other cities, other states.” He looked at them both, his eyes earnest and tired. “We need to get a handle on vampire-related crimes and I believe this is the way to do it. I’m going out on a limb here; not everyone at the Bureau wants to work with vampires. We’re just as angry about what’s happened in this city as anyone else.” His voice grew stronger. “But I believe that working together is the way to solve it. Not fracturing along our differences.” He paused for a moment and Brigit tried to gather her scrambled thoughts. He wanted them to work together? Feds and cops got along about as well as cats and dogs on a good day, and that wasn’t even mentioning the whole vampire situation.

  “There is one further thing,” he began. “We need more vampires in on this.” He looked at Dana, and Brigit saw her friend’s eyes widen. “The Shadows, I believe that’s what they call themselves?”

  “Yeah,” Dana said roughly, and while her face was impassive, Brigit heard the surprise in her voice.

  “Will they do it?” Morrell asked. “Send one of their people to join the team?”

  Dana was silent for a moment. “Who’s in charge?” she asked.

  “From the top, I am,” he said. “On the ground”—He glanced at Captain Davis, then back to Dana—“you are.” Dana nodded slowly, and Brigit was impressed that she took it in her stride. Hell, she wouldn’t want to be in charge of a crazy idea like this. She almost didn’t want anything to do with it at all, except for how, dammit, she agreed with Morrell; unless they worked together it was going to be assholes like Cleaver out there calling the shots, and more bricks through more windows.

  “I can speak to them,” Dana said. “I can speak to Lucian. They want to protect the city as much as we do.”