Sunglasses at Night (Claws Clause 3)

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it. Things are going well back at HQ, too. Your uncle says ‘hi’.”

Her uncle called her on the phone only an hour ago for a report. Funny how he didn’t mention that Eddie was in the area.

When Tabby didn’t respond to that, Eddie filled the quiet. He was good at that. Honestly, the guy never shut up.

And that was saying something coming from her since talking was the one thing apart from hunting that she was good at.

Leaning into her, he made small talk. Tabby pretended to be interested in it.

After a few more minutes of it, she decided that he was getting too close. She knew she was smaller than most slayers, and Eddie was tall, but did he have to loom like that? He had a tendency to take over any room he was in—but this was her room.

Well, for as long as she was in Grayson it was.

Drowning him out, Tabby sank onto the nearest couch, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a pack of bubble gum. She unwrapped a piece, balling the wrapper up and tossing it absently on the floor in front of her. Popping the gum into her waiting mouth, she started to chew while unsheathing her weapon.

Still yapping, Eddie bent down. He picked up the wrapper, shaking his head as he crossed into the cramped kitchen, placing the wrapper into the garbage can. She rolled her eyes. It shouldn’t bother her as much as it did and, yeah, maybe she was being childish, but damn it! If she threw the wrapper on the floor, let it stay on the floor, right? She would’ve picked it up eventually.

When Eddie walked back into the room, Tabby busied herself with inspecting Venice.

That caught his attention. Or maybe he realized that she couldn’t care less about the new security system Boone was installing at HQ.

They were slayers. They were the security.

“You still using that sticker?” he said. She couldn’t tell if that was a sneer or simply surprise before deciding it didn’t matter. She didn’t care what he thought either way. “I’m sure your uncle could get you a better piece than that.”

Tabby was sure he was right, but “better” was in the eyes of the beholder. To her, Venice was the best weapon she could have. A sixteenth-century long dagger that had been enchanted lifetimes ago to be a slayer’s weapon, she—and Venice was always a she—never grew dull, and despite being only ten inches long and five inches wide to suit her smaller hands, Tabby never failed to cut through the muscles, the tendons, the meat of any targets she was hunting.

No matter what kind of Para she ran across, you couldn’t go wrong with a little decapitation. Well, except for phantoms. Good thing they were surprisingly law-abiding.

Unlike pop culture would have you believe, slayers didn’t only target rogue vamps. Her too-many-times great relative—Abraham Van Helsing—and his time with Dracula might’ve been the humans’ first example of the slayers who worked behind the scenes, but it was only one example.

The story of Van Helsing and Dracula getting out actually was the main catalyst behind the Slayer’s Code being finalized and enforced. Centuries of silence almost went up in smoke when Stoker blabbed her family’s secrets. From then on, the rules that made up the Society’s tenets weren’t just guidelines anymore.

They were laws.

And Tabby knew better than most what the cost for betraying the Society and its code was. It was the reason why her parents were gone—and the reason why she’d been raised by her uncle.

At the unpleasant reminder, Tabby got up.

Shake it off, Tab. It couldn’t be helped.

The only thing she could do now was follow the code herself and get the job done.

Still, while slayers were responsible for policing all of the paranormal races, most members of the Society had a specialty. Tabby’s was the Nightwalker which meant that she had to kill her targets more often than not, and that she had the weight of the Claws Clause on her side. Because Nightwalkers who killed once—draining their victims to take every last drop of blood they had—would only kill again.

Rogue Nightwalkers didn’t get to go in a Cage. They were executed. And Tabby was one of the ones who wielded the executioner’s ax.

Well, dagger.

Same shit.

“Eddie. I appreciate you checking in on me.” How she didn’t choke on that whopper of a lie, Tabby would never know. It was necessary, though. Last thing she needed was her uncle’s lapdog running back to him and complaining. “But you’re wasting my time.”

Oof. Probably not the most diplomatic way to put it.

Boone would understand. More than anything, her uncle hated people who wasted his time. Tabby was like him in that way.

And Eddie knew it.