The Fool Read online

  THE FOOL

  a prologue

  LIZ MELDON

  Copyright 2015 Liz Meldon

  Published by Liz Meldon, Smashwords Edition.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  Thank you for purchasing this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  PLEASE NOTE

  The Fool is a prologue to the Games We Play serial. Book 1, The King, is slated to be released late 2016. It is a novella intended for mature readers only.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, my first and greatest thanks goes out to my main beta reader and critique partner, A.R. Farryn (@ARfarryn). Her endless support and excitement for my work always touches my heart, and I’m so grateful to have found her. As a budding author and talented screenwriter herself, I can’t wait for someone to snatch up her first book.

  I feel that cover art is incredibly important for self-published authors, so a great many thanks goes to James (Humble Nations) at GoOnWrite.com for his beautiful work.

  Much thanks go to my editorial team: Monica (@JMWEditor) and TR Perri (@TRPerri). These two basically make sure my rambling is coherent by the final draft. Authors would be nothing without their editors.

  It goes without saying that my friends and family have been wonderfully supportive. A shout out to my parents who are probably sweating a little while I get this whole writing career sorted out. Thank you for years of support and love. Again, sorry I write book porn instead of primatology research papers. This is more fun.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  O N E

  “Who the hell hosts a masquerade ball these days?” Delia huffed, picking at her nails as she held the phone to her ear with her shoulder. “Are you sure that’s what’s happening?”

  “Evening garden party, technically,” Hugh corrected, his tone clipped. As Delia’s long-time informant on the local vamp clans, he always made it abundantly clear just how much he hated her questioning his information. “But masks are required. Some sort of high society mixer between human and vamp elite.”

  “Huh.” She pursed her lips, her heart racing. “And she’s going to be there? You can guarantee that?”

  “Her attendance has been all over the chatterbox.”

  Delia pulled the phone away from her ear when he started hacking, his smoker’s cough sounding worse and worse every time they talked. Her nose wrinkled when she heard him snort back some fluid, then spit noisily.

  “Ugh, Hugh…can you not—”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped, and she imagined him rolling his eyes. “Look, that’s all I’ve got for you. I can send you the location if you want.”

  She shook her head, straightening from her slumped position on her floral-print second-hand couch and flipping her lengthy brown hair over her shoulder. “I’ll need an invite too.”

  “That’ll cost extra.”

  His too-obvious delight made her sigh, and she grabbed her laptop from the cushion beside her, propping it open to check her bank statements. “It always does, doesn’t it?”

  “Them’s the price of hunting vamps, sweetheart.” Hugh chuckled as Delia held in her scoff.

  Them’s the price of hunting vamps when you weren’t important enough to warrant a discount. The more respected hunters in her vampire hunting league, the ones who were actually good at their job, usually got their information at reduced rates. Rats like Hugh wanted to stay in their good graces. No one cared about pissing off a low-level hunter with barely fifteen kills under her belt.

  Hmm. She could afford an extra hundred for the invite, but not much more. Shockingly, being a vampire hunter didn’t exactly pay well. Sure, she was comfortable—Delia had enough to cover her expenses and her frequent bar nights—but that didn’t leave much to tuck away into a retirement plan.

  Not that she needed a retirement plan; most hunters were lucky if they made it to fifty. If their injuries didn’t put them out of commission, then eventually a vamp would catch up with them. She’d heard too many stories like that—what was the point in planning for a cute beach bungalow in Florida if all she had to look forward to was a vengeful bloodsucker’s relative snapping her neck?

  It was a good thing she actually liked her job—most days. Delia had done a lot of aimless wandering after high school, never exactly feeling the call of college or university, and had been swept into the hunter fold by her Aunt Julia, a hunter out west who was among the small percentage to make it into her senior years.

  Cancer got her aunt before any vamp could. She’d died a respected woman in a man’s world, and a part of Delia wanted nothing more than to reach the same status at some point. Making money was satisfying and protecting the general public—who knew nothing about the vampires living among them—gave her a real sense of purpose. But it was respect she sought. There was a family legacy to live up to.

  And so far, she wasn’t exactly doing a great job. Conversations like the one she was in the midst of with Hugh were a constant reminder that she had a long way to go before she hit anywhere near respect.

  “Send me the bill along with my invite,” she said briskly, and then disconnected before he could object.

  Hugh technically worked for the league, which meant—technically—she was above him. Sometimes he needed to be reminded that while she paid for his services, the only reason he was employed—and alive—was because hunters like her actually had a use for him. If the vampire community ever got a hold of Hugh or any of the other rats, the league would probably find their guts strewn across Main Street.

  Tossing her phone aside, she propped her laptop up on her knees and sunk into the couch, feet resting on the coffee table. She was going to be there tonight. She. Claudia—head honcho of the regional vampire clans. Queen bee. Elusive and dangerous, she’d been listed as a top priority target for years, though very few hunters had ever seen her. At the league headquarters, an immense multi-level facility built below Harriswood’s historic library, were dozens of hand-drawn pictures of Claudia, all taken from various memories. Most claimed she had fiery red hair and piercing blue eyes, while others insisted stick-straight black locks and an even blacker stare.

  At this point, Claudia had reached mythical status, and no matter how hard a captured local vamp was interrogated, no one gave her up.

  While Claudia hadn’t broken any of the vamp-human interaction laws the head league in Washington had created for the twenty-first century, Delia had always thought her bosses just wanted to kill her to remind the nearby clans that they were not to be underestimated—that the league was an entity still to be feared and not the lapdog of the local police department.

  The bylaws were in place to keep unsuspecting humans safe, but also to comfortably sustain local vamps. Most involved the issue of feeding—how many humans per month, where the vamps could acquire them from, how to go about the act itself. Delia and her fellow hunters needed to familiarize themselves monthly with the rules, usually through online quizzes provided by the league’s trainers, so that everybody knew just how far their jurisdiction went.

  But not everyone played by the rules, hunters included.

  Once, back in her aunt’s early days, the job of both the national and international hunter leagues had been to kill all vamps on sight. Any vamp. Anytime. Times had changed, however. The few humans who knew of their bloodsucking neighbours were a little more open-minded, and most vamps had shrugged their
medieval attitude and adapted to the modern era. These days, the league worked alongside local police to minimize violent vamp-on-human attacks. Balance—that was the goal. It was all about secret integration, helping vampire communities blend among the human ones.

  Unfortunately, there was also a huge transient population of vampires belonging to no clan, no family—and they tended to not play by the rules, be it for pay or fun. Petty crime. Break-ins. Drug rings. Highway robbers. Cops wouldn’t risk their lives to lock them away, so they were the ones Delia was tasked to wrangle, she and other unimportant hunters. Usually in teams. And Delia tended to be the designated driver.

  Oh, that and a lot of dull surveillance work on the larger clans.

  Which was…thrilling.

  She flinched when an email alert pinged, the laptop’s volume cranked from her recent reality TV binge with lunch. After muting everything, she quickly opened an email from Hugh.

  Don’t u ever hang up on me again, Delia. I’m srs.

  Her eyebrows shot up. Anyone who couldn’t be bothered to use proper grammar in a business email didn’t exactly strike fear into her heart. Ignoring his threat, as she always did, Delia scanned the block of text that followed for key details of tonight’s garden party masquerade mash-up. Invitation pending, apparently.

  With a soft sigh, she sent a quick sorry and thanks his way. He might have been a world-class prick, but Delia knew she’d be way out of the loop without Hugh. He was among the few rats who actually worked with low-level vamp hunters, though he still shamelessly overcharged for his services.

  Once her response was sent, she reread his mammoth email in more information, nibbling her lower lip as she honed in on the location.

  The Banesview Hotel, George Street, was a building she’d only seen in passing, despite having lived in Harriswood for almost five years. A quick internet search brought up dozens of pictures of the hotel; it was as exquisite as it was old, its immense grounds backing on to the thickly forested border at the edge of the city.

  Harriswood sat in the dip of a valley, surrounded by tumbling hills on one side, pine forests on the other two, and a lake to the north that was always too cold for swimming. It was a painter’s dream, drawing hundreds of tourists in the warmer months for hillside camping and downtown partying.

  Little did they know the city was filled with vamp clans looking for their next meal, plus two packed high schools full of surly, destructive human teens aching to escape to somewhere bigger and better.

  Delia had come from bigger and better. She preferred Harriswood.

  Midway through her examination of the penthouse suite pictures posted on the Banesview Hotel’s website, her phone shrieked obnoxiously by her side. After nearly dropping her laptop, startled—and embarrassed that her own phone startled her—Delia grabbed the damn thing and swiped her finger across it, too flustered to even check who was calling at four in the afternoon.

  “What?” she demanded, assuming it was Hugh calling back to give her another piece of his mind for hanging up earlier. The voice on the line chuckled, and she immediately felt heat rise to her cheeks. It wasn’t Hugh—not even close.

  “I’m sorry,” Kain said smoothly, his familiar deep rumble making her sit up a little straighter. She was a sucker for accents, and the Irish hunter always managed to get the better of her—professionally and privately. “Did I wake you up?”

  “No,” she mumbled, slowly closing her laptop and setting it aside. Of course it’d be Kain calling—gorgeous, brown-eyed, shaggy-haired Kain with abs that could break a man’s fist on impact. “I was just…I just got off the phone with Hugh. Thought he might be calling me back.”

  “You really need to hire a better informant, Dels. Hugh’s shit.”

  “I dunno,” she said as she stood, wandering from the couch to the window of her apartment. Below, traffic had started to pile up as people fled the downtown business district, probably hoping to start their weekends early. “He usually gives me pretty good leads.”

  “I’ll tell my guy to cut you a deal in the future.”

  Delia could almost hear the smile in his voice, and she wished she couldn’t. He was probably only doing it because he’d snuck away without saying anything the last time he spent the night at her place. It was never fun to wake up to a raging hangover and an empty bed. While she’d been hurt at the time, the incident had been easy to brush off; Kain, like many of the hotshots in their league, male and female, wasn’t looking for anything serious.

  “So what’s up?” she asked, perching on the wide-set white window ledge, her knees bent up to her chest and an arm wrapped around them. “Anything I can do for you on this fine afternoon?”

  “Me and the guys are headed to McKinney’s tonight,” he told her, and she practically melted hearing him say the bar’s name with that scrumptious Irish lilt of his. “Want to tag along? I can pick you up on the way.”

  “Aren’t you on patrol tonight?”

  “Nope. Switched shifts with Kenny,” he said.

  Down below, a woman’s purse seemed to have spontaneously combusted in the middle of the intersection, its innards scattered everywhere. While Delia felt bad for her, she couldn’t help but chuckle softly at the roar of horns that blared once the traffic light switched to green and the woman was still there collecting her things.

  Kain cleared his throat on the other end. “What’s funny? Something I said?”

  “Oh, no…” Delia rolled her eyes as the woman continued scrambling after her runaway make-up and scarf and charger cords, cars inching around her to make the light. If they stopped rushing her, maybe she’d stop dropping things. Impatient assholes. “Just watching the usual disaster outside my window.”

  “Wish I had an apartment on Main Street. I’d never need a TV. Always a show over there, day or night.”

  “Yeah, that’s totally why I don’t have cable,” she said with a sigh. That and all the local cable packages were ridiculously expensive. She’d always expected smaller cities to be less of a drain on her wallet, but she’d slowly learned that wasn’t the case, not in Harriswood anyway.

  “So you comin’ or what?” Kain demanded, and she was pretty sure she heard him cracking open a can in the background.

  “Was that a beer?”

  “Stop changing the subject, Dels.”

  “I…”

  She licked her lips, wanting nothing more than to climb into the front seat of Kain’s car and breathe him in. He was a catch, through and through, aside from his sheer unwillingness to commit to anyone.

  “I know you’re not working,” he wheedled playfully, which brought a smile back to her lips. “I checked the schedule. Come on. We’ll drink, play darts…maybe I’ll feel you up in the parking lot again…”

  She scoffed, her cheeks starting to hurt from grinning.

  “Wow, how can a lady resist such a perfect evening?”

  “Right, so I’ll pick you up then?”

  “No,” she said, not sounding quite as assertive as she would have liked. “No, I’m…I’m okay. I’m not really feeling a bar night.”

  The stunned silence on the other end made her bite her lip, knowing full-well that he’d probably see through her lie in ten seconds flat.

  “But you love McKinney’s,” Kain insisted slowly, as if working through her excuse aloud. “And you like hanging out with the other hunters. Beer usually gets you anywhere…”

  She replaced her lip with her pinky nail, staring out the window, wincing as he slowly poked through her lies.

  “…Dels, are you—”

  “I’m training tomorrow morning,” she said a little too quickly, gripping her hand in a fist to keep from biting her nails. “I don’t want to be hungover.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since the last time I barely made it through warm-ups,” she argued. That much was true, at least. “I’m just having dinner with a friend instead, then it’ll be an early night.”

  Kain’s continued silence stumpe
d her; either he’d swallowed the story and was annoyed he had to arrive at the bar alone, a blow to his inflated ego, or he still wasn’t buying it.

  “You don’t do dinner with friends—”

  “I do so!” Her voice cracked, and she wrinkled her nose, knowing she’d given herself away.

  “Chatting with Hugh…for… Oh Jesus, Dels.” He huffed noisily into the phone, and she slid off the window ledge, pacing. “Please tell me you didn’t fall for that masquerade bullshit the snitches have been trying to sell everyone all week.”

  The heat that flooded her cheeks this time was no longer from that sexy accent. Instead, she felt every eye roll, annoyed glare, and pitying sigh the other hunters threw at her on a weekly basis. Squaring her shoulders, she tried to keep her voice even.

  “Kain, I don’t want to go to the bar tonight—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he said, groaning. “You are going, aren’t you? Delia, it’s a crock of shit. No one actually thinks she’ll be there.”

  “I do!” There was no point in fighting it anymore—he was onto her. “Claudia can’t be predicted! Maybe she’ll take the opportunity to mingle because no one thinks she’ll be there.”

  “Top-shit vamps don’t strike me as the types to mingle.”

  She gritted her teeth, aware that he was trying not to be condescending to her—and failing.

  “Claudia least of all,” he said with a sighing. “Dels, she’s top of the list. Most wanted. She wouldn’t actually come to Harriswood for some party at the Banesview. Don’t be ridiculous. Gladston, maybe. Dover if she was in the mood for overpriced cabs and long lines…”

  “Well, if no one else is following up on the tip, then I may as well—”

  “Please tell me you didn’t pay for that lead,” he demanded. When she paused for a beat, he groaned again. “I’m going to kick Hugh’s balls into his throat the next time I see him. He’s taking advantage of you.”