Call Number

Excerpt From: Call Number

The sex would be fantastic with a handsome, sexy creature like this one. That is, before she terminated him.

Maris Alton observed the vampire through hooded eyes, watching to get a sense for who he was before she brought his life to an end. She adjusted her tight black skirt and planted her ass more firmly on the wooden bench fronting a paved walkway. A quick glance at her vidmonitor hidden in her wristwatch indicated his name was

Diego Sanchez and gave all his pertinent physical details. But she didn’t need the vidmonitor for those. She had the real vamp.

The screen kept flashing the word, Terminate, in what she considered a chunky font accompanied by the faintest whirring sound, undetectable to a human ear.

The vampire, who appeared to be an ordinary although extremely sexy hunk of a man, was much more interesting. He strolled across the tree-lined park with a confident demeanour, whistling softly, his hands in his hip pockets. Well-fed robins sang in the tree branches overhead as the sun, its warmth faint against her skin, sank low on the horizon.

He was, Maris decided, rather unusual for a vampire. For some reason, they were usually dark haired and dark skinned. Diego wore his golden brown hair short and with her super-sharp eyesight, recently enhanced along with other parts, she made out his eyes were a deep violet colour. So very unusual.

Maris sighed. Normally, she would have followed her orders and simply terminated the subject. He was a vampire, one of the loathsome creatures that still inspired dread in the twenty-first century, likened to a perpetual murderer. Or so the Diamante League had told her. Some higher up probably had a burr up his ass about vampires and had decided to get rid of them—once for all, before he homed in another dreaded target. Diego, however, was far too out of the ordinary to kill without a second thought. And, she suspected, the changes in her ‘tronics were more subtle than she’d been led to believe. She wanted to try out the fascinating differences she’d detected since her last upgrade barely a week earlier. She was a bot after all, with no say as to what she wanted. But this once, couldn’t she prove to herself that she was more than a combination of metal pieces jumbled together in a human body? Even she didn’t know how much of her body was human and how much was bot.

The late summer sun began to fade away, ushering in the dusk. Soon, the world around her would be immersed in a grey gloom before the full darkness of night fell—the time when the undead came out of hiding, relaxing into the knowledge they were less likely to be detected by those wishing them harm. Or termination. Diego strolled closer, his suit jacket flung over one arm and his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. In black trousers and matching jacket, a startlingly white shirt, and highly polished shoes, he looked like a business man out on an evening jaunt without a care in the world.

Maris didn’t think it was possible with all the ‘tronics inside her, but the skin on her arms broke out in goose bumps. She shivered against her rising trepidation and anger. What made this bloodsucker any different than the other eight she’d terminated in the last six years? Why couldn’t she terminate him in one simple second? Those were her orders from the Diamante League, a self-styled group who’d vowed to execute every vampire on earth and in the near galaxy.