“You want what every abandoned child wants. You want to find your father. But you don’t want a happy reunion, no, not you. You want to kill him.”
I stared at him. He’d spoken aloud what I hadn’t even allowed my subconscious to whisper, and he was right. It was the other reason I hunted vampires, to kill the one who fathered me. More than anything, I wanted to do that for my mother. If I could, I would feel I had in some small way atoned for the circumstances of my birth.
“You…” I could barely speak with all the thoughts flying through my mind. “You can help me find him? How?”
A shrug. “For starters, I might know him. Know a great many undead types, I do. Face it—without me, you’re looking for a needle in a fangstack. Even if I don’t personally know him, I already know more about him than you do.”
“What? How? What?”
He held up a hand to stop my babbling. “Like his age, for example. You’re twenty-one, right?”
“Twenty-two,” I whispered, still reeling. “Last month.”
“Indeed? Then you have the wrong age as well as the wrong address on that fake license of yours.”
He must have gone through my purse. Well, it made sense; he’d also stripped me when I was unconscious. “How do you know it’s a fake?”
“Didn’t we just cover this? I know your real address, and it’s not the one on that license.”
Oh crap. That defeated the purpose of why I’d gotten the phony ID to begin with, in case I ever lost against a vampire and he rifled through my things. I hadn’t wanted one to be able to track down my family. That had been the thought, anyway. Stupid me never expected a vampire to follow me home.
“Come to think of it, pet, you are a liar, possessor of false identification, and a murderer.”
“Your point?” I snapped.
“Not to mention a tease,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Foulmouthed, as well. Yep, you and I will get along famously.”
“Bollocks,” I said succinctly.
He grinned back at me. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But back to the subject. You said your mum carried you for, what, four months? Five?”
“Five. Why?” I was more than a little curious as to his reasoning. What did that have to do with how old, or how undead, my father was?
He leaned forward. “See, it’s like this. When you’re changed, it takes a few days for some of the human functions to cease completely. Oh, the heartbeat stops right off and the breathing as well, but some of the other things take longer. Tear ducts still work normally for the first day or so before you cry only pink due to the blood-to-water ratio in our bodies. You might even piss once or twice to get it out of your system. But the main point is that he still had swimmers in his sacks.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, luv. Sperm, if you want to be all technical about it. He still had living sperm in his juice. Now, that’s something which would only be possible if he’d been newly changed. Within a week at most. Right off, then, you can pinpoint almost exactly how old he is, in vampire years. Add that to any recent deaths around that time and place matching his description, and bingo! There’s your dad.”
I was stunned. Just as promised, in a few seconds he’d given me more information than my mother had known all of my life. Maybe, just maybe, I’d stumbled onto a gold mine. If through him I could learn more about my father and killing vampires, and all he wanted in return was to pick the targets…well, then, I could stomach it. If I lived long enough.
“Why do you want to help me find my father? In fact, why do you kill other vampires? They’re your own kind, after all.”
Bones stared at me for a moment before replying. “I’ll help you find your father because I reckon you hate him more than you do me, so it’ll keep you motivated to do what I say. As for why I hunt vampires…you don’t need to bother about that now. You have more than enough to concern yourself with. Suffice it to say some people just need killing, and that goes for vampires as well as humans.”