Huntress Ch. 02

Hopefully, I have some people who have stuck around thus far. Thank you, for that. Here is chapter 2. Just as an idea for where this is going. It is going to turn into a romance eventually, but if someone could let me know how the pacing is, I would appreciate it. I feel like things are moving to fast? But I'm not sure how to slow them down. Comments are always appreciated.

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The city had made a smart decision when they put the police station a few blocks away from the downtown area clubs. Sage was mentally thanking who ever it was that came up with the idea because her feet were screaming bloody murder. Without even looking down at the peep-toes, she knew the skin around the crimson painted nails were most likely white and swollen from lack of blood flow. God, she hated wearing heels. The more her feet hurt the worse she could feel her posture becoming. By now, her walking would be a dead giveaway as to how bad she was hurting, but it was hard to care. Self-preservation kept the shoes on, and she pushed herself tall and straight as she entered the police station.

The downtown police station always buzzed with life on a late night .She didn't have to walk in to figure that out. She knew from experience.

A few older officers glanced her way, and sat back in their chairs, eyeing her. Recognizing her.

She had spent a good amount of her childhood and teenage years sitting opposite a detective or an officer's desk, handcuffed and usually bloody from a fight. She kept walking ignoring the looks.

That had been so long ago. She couldn't even remember the last time it had happened.

Well, actually she could, but when she had turned eighteen her record was expunged. The only place that her past existed was within the minds of the officers who'd arrested her.

Sage stopped once a giant desk barricaded her from the rest of the station. The officer, whose big fluffy hair reminded her of the heroes in cheesy 70's movies, gave her a skeptical once over, before meeting her eyes and smiling. While it had taken him a few seconds to recognize her, Sage knew his face immediately. "May I help you, ma'am?" His voice held a slight taunt.

Sage folded her arms within themselves. She wanted smack the grin off of his fat face. Had wanted to since she was 14 years old. "I'm not in the mood, Wade." She made sure the tone of her voice implied that she wasn't lying. Wade continued to smile, ignoring the serious air around her.

"Your sister is taking your place, you know that. All this stupid shit she keeps getting into trouble for. Guess it runs in the family, huh?" Wade chuckled as he pushed himself up from his desk and over to a key ring, hanging on the wall. He fished around amongst the keys for a few seconds before saying, "Got caught with a full bag 'a coke, this time. Right down the street." He gave another hearty chuckle. "If I didn't know better, I would think your family is as dumb as a bag of rocks." He found the key, and disappeared around the corner. "And at the rate your sister's going I'm starting to doubt how much I do know."

It took everything in her not to follow him into the back room, subdue him with his own handcuffs, and lock him in a cell. Wade had been the arresting officer for a number of cases that Sage had been involved in. Most of them had been minor cases, but Wade had taken joy in landing a few punches on her, claiming she had swung on him and resisted arrest, bumping her charge up so that she'd spend at least few weeks behind bars. Every night he would walk back to the holding cells and watch her, teasing her, yelling at her. Hoping to get a rise out of her so that he could give the cameras a semi-valid reason why he went into her cell and beat the shit out of her. It never worked, of course.

Sage wasn't an idiot.

She could hear Wade's belt clang with every step he took. She listened as his footsteps stopped. A lock clicked and after a slight struggle, she heard the light tap of heels trying their best to keep up with heavier footfalls.

He appeared from around the corner, hand gripping the forearm of a tall blonde, whose eyeliner had been smudged around her eyes, and whose lipstick was in a perfect oval around but not actually on her thin lips.

"Jesus Christ," Sage muttered under her breath. She couldn't even look at her. "Look who came to see you, Vicki," Wade's comment made her blood boil. As Wade leisurely made his way behind Vicki to undo her cuffs, Sage made a conscience attempt to avoid looking into her sister's eyes. She could feel them on her, begging for even the slightest glance. Begging her to say something reassuring.

But Sage wouldn't give in. She kept her eyes on her sisters joined wrists, and as soon as she was free, she lunged for her, pulling her away from Wade. The graying cop twirled the cuffs on his finger, and gave a smile that made Sage almost reach for the SR9 that was strapped to her upper thigh.

With controlled urgency, she pushed her sister towards the exit, and turned her attention back to Wade. "I know that putting handcuffs on me gives you a raging boner, but try and keep my sister out of your sick fantasies."

Wade fell into his chair and sat back, fingers intertwined and set over his bulging belly. "Well, I sure have missed you down here, Sagey. It's been—what, like, 7 years since you graced the bars with your presence." He tilted his head to the side and pouted his lips. "Do come back and see me, soon, won't ya?"

Sage was halfway across the station before he'd even finished his last sentence. She had to get out before her trigger finger itched a hole into someone's chest. She hated cops. More than she hated vamps. Not only were they unfair bastards, but they were nosy and far too assuming of things they didn't know. A cop was a classic example of giving regular people far too much power. They didn't know what to do with it and so they abused it.

Sage met her sister outside the doors. Victoria had taken off her heels and was crying into them and her hands. The sound of her sister's sobs hit her like a ton of bricks. Sage didn't know what to do.

So she started walking.

Behind her, Victoria's flat feet made odd plopping noises as she made an effort to keep up. "I'm sorry," she sobbed. She was short without her heels. Sage had almost forgotten how much taller she was than her sister. "I wasn't doing anything. I was waiting for a friend, and a cop just came up and searched me. He used that probable cause shit."

"Wipe your face," Sage told her. Victoria stopped walking for a second then hustled to reach her sister again. "Are you mad?"

"Do you want me to be mad, Vick?"

"No. Of course not. I just want to know what your thinking. You've been super quiet lately."

Sage stopped walking and turned to face her younger sister. She almost didn't recognize her with all the shit that was covering her face. The thought that her sister had grown up to be something foreign to her scared Sage a little. She remembered when Vicki's face was as smooth as a baby's cheek and her voluminous eyelashes housed the giant green eyes behind them. Sage had loved her little sister's eyes; always bright despite the daily torture their father and mother put them through. They had been a safe haven for her.

Now they looked like someone else's; empty and dead, caged in by spiky eyelashes, painted black by old caked mascara. Her blond hair that had once been a prize for everyone that saw it gleam in the sun was now washed out white with black underneath it all.

No, this wasn't the girl Sage had raised.

"I'm thinking that whatever you were doing, you need to not do it again."

Immediately, Victoria's sobbing face contorted in anger. "I said I wasn't doing anything. I was fucking si—" "Don't curse at me," Sage muttered as she began walking again, moving out the way to avoid a couple that passed by, holding hands and laughing. Victoria rushed to keep up, rage now filling every barefooted step she took.

"I was freaking standing off of Pine Street waiting for Chelsea to come and pick me up." Victoria squealed dramatically.

"What is with you? You always think that I am doing something. I never do. When I get stopped, it's because the police think I'm you. They miss all the trouble you gave them and they miss waking mom up in the middle of the night with phone calls of how you stabbed a detective."

Sage did her best to discard that memory before it was able to manifest into a full thought. She failed. Their mother had been livid. Wade had been the one to make the call. No one ever saw who this wounded cop was nor did his name ever come up. The only concern was that she be incarcerated for harming an officer. Of course, at her trial that charge was dropped. There had been no evidence, only rumors. The cop that she had supposedly 'shanked' never even showed up to testify.

Despite everything, her parents still punished her harshly, and that incident had caused her father to give Sage her first black eye.

"Then if you know all of this, why do you insist on putting yourself in situations to get arrested? Okay, so the cop thought you were me, that's all fine and dandy, but a bag of coke, Vic. A bag of coke?" There was very little inflection in her voice. She didn't have the energy for it. Instead she stopped, turning her back to an empty space between two abandoned buildings and looked at her sister. "You have kids, Vic."

The younger girl sighed, annoyed. Sage took a deep breath before continuing, but stopped at the smell her nose picked up. "You've been drinking too?"

Victoria shrugged. "I had a few shots before I left the house."

Now that she said it Sage could smell alcohol and cigarettes all over Vicki's clothes, pouring off of her in nauseating waves. No, she had had more than a few shots.

Sage repeated her last statement. "You have kids, Vicki."

"What does that have to do with anything? I was just hanging out, meeting some people up for a drink to re—" "To relax, right? And then you were going to go home to your two sons, wake them up with how much noise you make coming in the house. Pass out on the kitchen floor, forcing Jordan to get out of bed and drag you into yours, then stay up with you to make sure you don't vomit and choke. Then at 7 o'clock, he will leave you, wake and dress his brother. Make lunch for both of them, and leave for school. Two hours later in math class, he is gonna fall asleep and miss learning his times tables, and he will continue to fail the third grade."

Victoria was taken aback, and dramatically, she even put her hand on her chest. "How do you know Jordy is failing?"

"I'm his aunt, I'm supposed to know because you don't. Now doesn't that story sound oddly familiar?" God, it did. She had done the same thing almost every night growing up. She'd barely passed middle because she had been so busy keeping her parents supplied with alcohol and her sister from her father's fist. That couldn't have been how Victoria wanted to raise her kids. it was no life for them.

"I don't get to go ou—" Victoria stopped talking abruptly and pushed Sage out the way to look where her shoulder had been. She squinted her eyes to look into the darkness of the alley that they stood in front of.

"What?" Sage looked back and forth from her sister to the alley.

The younger girl shook her head slowly. "I thought I saw something, but I guess not."

Sage settled her hand over her cotton-covered thigh, tracing the outline of her gun cautiously. Her sister picked up where she had left off. "I don't get to go out often. I just needed a break." Her voice had become a high-pitched whine, begging for Sage to understand.

"You should have thought about that before you decided to have kids," was her sister's only reply. Childishly, Victoria stomped her feet. "You never want to take care of them for me so I can go have a life. My life is all PTA meetings and soccer games. I'm 23, Sage. Meanwhile, you, the supposedly good aunt, is out partying every night with you're roommates. You don't even invite me!"

Sage shrugged. "You can't afford a babysitter." She glanced down the street, both directions.

There had been a scant number of people around before they had walked so far, but now their surroundings were completely abandoned, giving the dilapidated area a ghost town feel. The hairs on the back of Sage's neck were at attention. The metal strapped to her thigh burned with anticipation. Something wasn't right.

"I can't affo—" Victoria cut her sentence off with a brief high pitched scream, that made Sage reach underneath her dress and remove her gun.

The younger girl turned around twice, looking everywhere. Sage took a step back as she watched. Her sister's eyes landed on her, alarmed and frightened. "Did you see that? You had to have!"

"What did you see?" Sage dropped her voice, listening to the silence.

"I don't fucking know! Can we please go back the way we came? We can take the bus back to my house."

Sage ignored her sister's request. She took slow steps backwards, looking everywhere. Some one was watching them. She could feel eyes on her. More than one pair. The adrenaline in her blood kicked up double time, and a smile spread on her lips. She needed this. Arguing with her sister had only made the numbness spread wider and go deeper. She needed to feel this. She needed this excitement.

"Sage," Victoria whispered, her voice shaking, as she watched her sister disappear into the alleyway. "Where are you going? Don't leave me out here."

Sage allowed herself to settle into the darkness of the alley. Yes, someone had definitely been watching them as they walked down the street, and now it waited, biding its time.

'Not human', her mind told her.

There was no way a human could follow her and her sister six blocks without making one mistake, one noise. Sage gave a small laugh, as the adrenaline continued to pump heavily in her system.

"If I were you, the last thing I would be doing, huntress, is laughing."

Victoria shrieked as a man's voice reverberated out of the blackness of the alley. The low tenor seemed to bounce off the walls and windows of the empty buildings. Sage couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from, the echo, throwing her off.

"Oh, yeah? And why is that?" Sage answered cautiously. The metal from her gun had gone from ice cold to almost too hot against her palm.

The speaker gave a short chuckle. "Oh, you'll see."

Sage felt more than saw, the hand the came at her. The cool air of a barely missed punch, spurred her into action.

She ran out the alley, back to her sister, pushing her down the street. "Go! Go!"

Victoria went without asking questions, and Sage hobbled behind her, trying to peel off her stilettos. "God dammit, why didn't I just take this shit off before?"

Fucking self-preservation.

At blinding speed, a short man with a scruffy moustache and baseball cap, appeared in front of Victoria, halting the both of them. Victoria shrieked again, and the man smiled, baring sharp canines at her. Sage peeled the heel off her left foot, and chucked it at him, like a pitcher would a baseball.

The thin stiletto of her shoe jammed itself into the man's left eye, and his cry made the skin on Sage's arms rise with goose pimples. Sage pushed her sister passed him, as he cowered, covering his face. As she passed, Sage pressed her SR9 to the middle of the hunched vampires back, and pulled the trigger.

A small eruption of blood and ash plumed out of the vampires wound and overtook his body. Sage stopped to watch ash blow away in a gentle breeze and the blood fall to the ground in a sickening splat before grabbing her peep-toe once again and replacing it. She secured the strap, then took off after her sister, just as she heard the pounding of a number of approaching footsteps.

Victoria was running as fast as she could possibly could, and if Sage hadn't heard the sound of shoes running behind them, she would have congratulated the younger blond on actually being smart for a change.

Don't ask questions, don't look back. Just run.

Victoria turned a sharp corner, and before Sage followed, she stopped and fired at three vampires that were ahead of the small crowd that had formed and was chasing them. The three vamps were dust and liquid before they hit the ground.

Sage continued running, but stopped when she didn't see her sister.

There was no way she could have run that fast.

"Shit, Vic—"

A swift kick to the chest cut Sage off and caused her to stumble back on to her ass. A tall man whose hair seemed to go down to the end of his back, stood ahead of the group, ready for a fight. He barred his fangs at her, eyes wide and reddish. Cursing, Sage picked herself up from the ground, only to be thrown back again, by another kick, this one to the face. Stars, lines and dots decorated her vision momentarily, as the pain jarred her brain.

The longhaired vamp, smiled when she finally looked up at him. "You're not so tough, huntress." The man's voice was a soft accusation, and it made Sage's stomach turn.

Just as he made a move to come at her again, Sage lifted her gun and put a bullet in the middle of his forehead. The vampire froze for a second, not registering what had happened. He took a step back, took a deep breath, and then laughed nervously. "A bullet to the head?" He glanced back at Sage's other attackers, encouraging them to join with his laughing. A few unsure chuckles erupted into full-blown cackles within seconds. "How have you survived, Huntress? Do you know nothing of our kind?" His laugh became almost obscene, as he and a few members of the crowd behind him pat their stomachs and slapped their knees. Sage waited for them to finish.

She had yet to pick herself off the street.

"What do you have to say for yourself, huntress?" The vamp swiped some stray hairs from his face before returning to a fighting stance.

"Remote activated expanding hollow points."

The vampire's reacquired poker face twisted into confusion. "What?"

Sage reached under her dress, pulling out a skinny black remote, similar in width and length to the band of a wristwatch. She flashed it to her attacker and then to the men behind him. "Remote activated hollow points," she repeated. "Instead of regular hollow points that are supposed to expand upon entrance, these don't expand until I press this button," Sage pointed to the only button on the small remote. "And I guess it's a little misleading because they aren't really hollow at the tip. We filled them."

Sage's attacker fingered the hole at the top of his head, his eyes darting at her then at the hole he couldn't see. "With what?" he whispered.

Sage shrugged. "What a silly question," she replied, and pressed the button.

An unholy scream erupted from the longhaired vampire. He fell to his knees, clutching at his head, clawing grotesquely at his face. Sage took the opportunity to return to her feet, and approached him leisurely. She bent over till she was at eye level with him.

"If you had been nice, I woulda just shot you in the heart and ended it all, but now..." Sage shrugged. The man continued screaming, not hearing a word she said. Behind him, the vamps scattered. A few running down the street while two others stepped into the shadows to disappear.

Sage hated when they did that. It was like riding a vampiric elevator to wherever the hell they went. Once a vamp reached a shadow, they were gone.

"Bastards."

A sharp scream pierced the night, drowning out the tortured vampire who was now squirming in the fetal position.

Sage moved instantly, following the echo. She wanted to kick herself for getting too involved and forgetting about her sister. Vicki didn't have any means of protecting herself, if a vamp got a hold of her—