Right on cue, the wailing sound came again, but this time, I swore it came from downstairs instead of from the end of the hallway. I poked my head into the stairwell to listen, and sure enough, the sound repeated itself from the bottom of the stairs.
This was like a horror movie, but then again… I was one of the monsters.
It faded away like the person was on the move, and it was followed by the quiet click of the stairwell door as it opened and shut on the first floor. After I went down a few steps and paused to see if I heard it again, I heard another soft click and then a faint giggle from below me.
I slowly started to go back up the stairs. Just when I had made it to the top stair, the wailing sound came from below me again, and this time, it was immediately followed by a little feminine giggle.
I didn’t wait around long enough to see who was fucking with me. Instead, I left the stairwell as quickly and as quietly as I could, sprinted down the hallway to the next stairwell, and bounded down that set of steps like my life depended on it.
And for all I knew, it did.
I wasn’t about to spend my whole fucking night in pursuit of some goddamn ghostlike vamp that liked to lead people on wild goose chases all over a residence hall. I had other shit to take care of, and I had already expended more energy that I wanted to on my trip to campus.
If this little giggly sorority vamp wanted to play games, she would just have to find someone else to play with.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs on the south side of Furnald Hall, I looked through the narrow window into the hallway. I didn’t see anything, so I silently opened and shut the door, moved toward the exit, and paused just before I opened it.
The wail sounded again, but it was still further down the hallway, so I figured that meant the game-playing vamp hadn’t figured out that I had moved on yet. I pushed open the exit so slowly that it felt like I was moving through mud, but I wanted to make sure that the bloodsucking sorority sister didn’t hear where I was.
As soon as I stepped outside Furnald Hall and clicked the door shut behind me, I sprinted away from the dorm before the wailing vamp tried to follow after me.
“Good fucking riddance,” I panted as I ran in the direction of Butler Library.
The apocalypse was difficult enough even without creepy wailing vamps thrown into the mix, and since I still had to deal with Isaac and the two girls with him, on top of the fact that I had to get all the way back down the Hudson, I was glad to leave the residence hall behind me.
It took me less than a minute to reach the South Lawn, but I saw the massive library up on my right even before I reached the grass. It looked almost like a palace or at least like something that belonged on the main strip in D.C., not just on some university campus, even if it was a nice-ass university.
Butler Library had as many windows as it did columns, and the columns were all almost as tall as the building itself. Above the columns were the names of a bunch of dead Greek philosophers, and I could see how in the light, this building would be as beautiful as it was impressive.
But at night in the middle of a power outage, all I could think was that it looked like a fucking trap.
Of course, Isaac left the classroom that he was supposedly hiding in, so he could go hide in the library. Only a vamp would want to do something like that, if for no other reason that because a human wouldn’t risk moving at all. Plus, a human definitely wouldn’t want to move into a big-ass creepy library with so many places for vamps to hide and ambush them.
But for a vamp who probably wanted to kill his sister’s boyfriend and then take control of her and her roommates, it was the perfect place to hide out until I brought them right to him.
It wasn’t that I wanted to kill Nat’s brother. I liked Isaac, but I knew that vampire Isaac and human Isaac were two very different people. I had managed to hold onto my humanity when I turned, or so I thought, but I’d seen enough other vampires to know that I was one of the few goddamn exceptions to the rule.
And if he was the bloodsucking asshole that I guessed he was, I had to be prepared to kill him and then go back and tell Natalie what had happened.
If Isaac only had two human girls with him, then I stood a pretty decent chance in a fight against him, but at the same time, I knew that he had just been hiding out while I had fought my way onto campus. He wouldn’t have used as much energy as I had, so there was a good possibility that he was stronger than me right now.
So that just meant that I would have to be smarter.
I hovered on the edge of the South Lawn so I could get a good look at everything before I crossed such a big open space to get to the library doors. Even though the campus was totally dark, it somehow made it seem like there were even more shadows, and in the slight breeze, everything looked like it might be moving.
When I was sure that the only movements on the grass were in my own imagination, I hurried forward across the dark lawn. I wanted to keep out of sight as much as possible, but there weren’t any places to hide on the way up to the library, so I just had to hope that Isaac wasn’t watching from one of the many windows in the library. Then again, even if he was, I wasn’t sure how strong his vamp vision was, so there was a chance that he wouldn’t even be able to tell it was me.
The lawn up to the main library doors was filled with more college students that had been caught outside when everyone turned into bloodsuckers. I steeled my stomach as I passed them, but even as I walked by corpse after corpse, I felt like I might be getting used to so much death.
It still made my stomach tighten, but I wasn’t even surprised by it anymore, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that said about me. I didn’t want to become like all the other vampires that I’d met, and I worried that if human death started not to matter to me anymore, I would end up just like Kowalsky or the NYPD vamps.
I might be a vampire, but I didn’t want to lose my fucking humanity.
But even as I had the thought, I knew that I would never let that happen to myself. As long as I had Natalie and the girls, I knew that I could never be like the other bloodsuckers all over the city. Every time I thought about any of the four girls, all that came to my mind was how much I wanted to keep them safe, and if that didn’t mean I still had some humanity left in me, then I didn’t know what did.
And if that wasn’t a good enough motivation to destroy Isaac and any other vamps who got in my way, then I sure as hell didn’t know what would be.
Of course, these students’ deaths mattered. They just weren’t my mission right now, and just because I didn’t stop to mourn them or feel sick when I saw their drained husks, that didn’t mean I was a monster.
It just meant that I knew how to keep myself focused. I couldn’t be distracted by every horrible thing that I saw, or I would never make it back to the girls. And right now, that was the only thing that mattered to me.
When I reached the main library doors, they were unlocked, but I hadn’t expected anything different. If the campus had any kind of protocol for emergencies like automatically locking doors or something similar, they clearly hadn’t been activated in time.
At least that was one less obstacle on my way to finding Isaac.
After I gently shut the door behind me, I looked around the main floor of Butler Library. It was almost as impressive on the inside as it was on the outside, but I guessed that it needed the chandeliers to be on to really give it the full effect.
Instead, the only brightness in the library was the faint light from outside that filtered in through the tall windows. It was just enough to make shadows seem to move and flicker along the edges of my vision, but I trusted my sight enough to know that there was no one else on the main floor with me.
Or at least, not yet.
I moved away from the main library doors, but I didn’t immediately go over to the stairwell. I wanted to check in with Isaac again first, and I also wanted to get a better sense of the library’s layout. I walked over to the front desk, hoppe
d over the counter, and looked around for any kind of map to the building.
I found a stack of maps beside a computer that looked like they had served as the librarian’s mousepad. There were six floors in total, and I had actually entered on the second floor. The layout of every floor looked just about the same, and each one had a combination of study and viewing rooms, computer labs, reference desks, and endless aisles of books.
Basically, there were just way too many fucking places for another vamp to hide and ambush me from.
I pulled out my phone to text Isaac and then took a deep breath. If the size of this main floor was any indication, the rest of the floors would be massive, too, and that was a lot of area to check for an ambush. I would just have to hope that Isaac told me the truth about what floor he was on, and that would at least limit the area that I wanted to scope out first.
After I triple-checked to make sure that Natalie’s phone was on silent and wouldn’t even buzz if she got a text, I typed a message to her brother.
In library but we can’t find you, I texted. Where are you?
Sixth floor, Isaac texted back just a few seconds later. Rare book room.
You all still okay? I responded.
Just peachy, Isaac replied.
I sent him a thumbs up emoji and then glanced back at the map to check on the location of the rare book room. Just like with every other floor, there were several different stairwells that I could take to get up to the top level. The rare book room itself was at the back of the sixth floor, and it stretched along the entire wall in a skinny rectangular shape.
“Alright, let’s just hope that you are where you say you are,” I muttered.
I replaced the library floor plans back underneath the mouse, walked out from behind the front desk, and started to move toward one of the stairwells. The library was big enough to have its own cafe in it, but as I walked past it, I saw that some vamp must have shut the door behind him and turned the cafe into his own personal hunting ground.
I was pretty sure that there were more bodies inside the cafe than I had seen in Furnald Hall. Some of them had collapsed over the backs of chairs, a few were spread-eagled on top of the cafe tables, and the ones who hadn’t just dropped to the floor were slumped halfway across the cafe counter like the soy milk and scones behind the counter would somehow protect them.
Of course, whenever the vamp or vamps had finished their slaughter inside the cafe, they had opened the door and left their handiwork behind them, and that was how I could see all of the details of the scene now. And as I walked by it, I noticed that the whole floor of the cafe glistened in the dim light, but I knew from the smell that it wasn’t blood.
It was coffee that had spilled from all the undergrads who had either dropped their drinks or maybe tried to throw them at the bloodsuckers as a last-ditch effort to save their lives.
I moved past the cafe and then past a computer lab, where all the shadowy monitors just waited for someone to flip the power back on. Since I didn’t hear anything from inside the lab, I didn’t look too closely to see if there was anyone inside.
Every time I passed another row of books, I braced myself for a possible attack, even though I still hadn’t seen or heard any signs of a vampire or a living human yet. Other than the spilled coffee in the cafe and the corpses everywhere, I was surprised by how neat the library still looked.
Maybe that meant the librarians were the ones who had grown fangs instead of the students, and even in their vampire state, they had made sure that not a single book was out of place on the shelves.
But as I glanced around the library and realized that none of the corpses looked like vamps, I wondered where exactly the bloodsucking librarians and all the other fanged fuckers had gone after they massacred everyone in the library and the dorm hall. I knew there were still campus cops who were out and about, but since the NYPD apparently wanted to get rid of all civilian vampires, I couldn’t figure out where the rest of them had gone to.
Maybe they had all just found hiding places of their own, just like any humans who might have been able to survive up to this point. Of course, I didn’t imagine that there were very many people left, but I knew there were supposed to be some old underground tunnels beneath Columbia’s campus, so maybe either vamps or humans had found hiding places down below.
When I finally reached the stairwell, the door was propped open, so I stepped inside and hid underneath the stairs themselves to try to listen for any sounds above me. At first, there was only silence, but when I tilted my head to the side, I heard a faint noise that almost sounded like running water from somewhere higher up on the stairs.
But no, that wasn’t quite right. It was definitely the sound of something liquid, but it wasn’t running water. It was more like a water fountain, and from what I could hear, it seemed like someone was trying to slurp up the water a whole mouthful at a time instead of sip by sip.
I inhaled through my nose, and immediately, all my senses became fully alert, and my mouth started to salivate.
“Shit,” I murmured.
I knew exactly what that noise was.
Someone on the staircase above me was drinking human blood.
Chapter 10
I didn’t know if it was Isaac or some other vamp, but right now, I didn’t care. I hadn’t been able to help the boy outside when he had been attacked by the campus security bloodsuckers, but maybe I could at least help whatever human was trapped on the stairs.
I bounded up the stairs two at a time, but I only had to go up about a flight and a half before I found the source of the noise.
Two bloodsuckers were feeding on someone halfway between the third and fourth floors. Both vamps were women, and from what I could see, it looked like their victim was a man.
They had him pressed up against the wall, and one of the women was on the step just above him, while the other one was on the step just below. The vampire above him was drinking from the human’s neck, but the other woman knelt in front of him to feed from an artery in his thigh.
Both women were so focused on their prey that they didn’t even notice the fact that I had appeared below them on the stairwell. It gave me a second to plot my next move against them, but one glance at the human’s face told me that I might already be too late.
Still, even though he looked next door to death, I couldn’t just walk past him like nothing was happening. And besides, the man had so many other puncture marks on his arms and calves that it looked like these women had been toying with him for a while now.
If they were going to kill him, they should have just killed him outright and not dragged out his suffering any more than they had to.
Since I didn’t want to make any noise that might tell Isaac exactly where I was, I worried about using the bat in the middle of the metal stairwell. I didn’t want to accidentally strike it against the railing and let Isaac know my precise location, just in case he happened to be somewhere besides the rare book room on the top floor.
Or just in case he had any other vamps who were allied with him, that he might have sent out to spy on me and the girls… but if that was the case, it wouldn’t be long before Isaac figured out that Natalie and the other girls weren’t with me.
I decided to tuck my Louisville slugger into my belt until I had dealt with the first woman, and then I could take it out to deal with the second vampire if I needed to. As soon as the bat was safely out of my way, I took a deep breath, fixed my attention on the bloodsucker at the human’s neck, and flew up the stairs toward her.
The moment that I was on the stair below her, I grabbed her by the back of her hair, pulled her off the man, and then hurled her head first over the stair railing. She was so surprised that she didn’t even have time to scream before her skull slammed into the ground a flight and half down.
If I had only thrown her with the strength of a human, she might have just been badly injured, but because I threw her with my full strength as a vamp, her skull broke open like a
watermelon as soon as it hit the ground below. The smell of moldy blood filled the stairwell, and as soon as I saw her black brains spilled out across the floor, I turned my attention back to the other bloodsucker.
I had attacked her friend so fast that the second woman had only just looked up from the man’s thigh. Blood ran down her full lips and dripped in between her breasts, but the woman didn’t leap forward to attack me. Instead, she stood up, grabbed the man by the neck when he started to sag down, and licked her lips with a smile.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” she told me as her gaze wandered up and down my body. “If you wanted to join in, you could have just said so.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Don’t you give a shit about your friend that I just killed?”
“Eh, she was kind of boring,” the female vamp responded with a shrug.
“And you’re kind of killing him,” I said with a nod to the man with half-closed eyes.
“That’s kind of the point,” she purred. “Don’t you want to help me finish him off?”
“Actually, I think I’m gonna have to pass on that,” I said. “I don’t work with bitches.”
The woman snarled at the insult, and then she let the human drop to the ground. His head bounced against the stairs, but when his brains didn’t burst all out over the steps, I thought that maybe there was still a chance that he wouldn’t die after all.
But only if I took out this female bloodsucker first.
She lunged toward me with her bloody lips curled into a wide smile, but I stepped out of her way just in time. Her body slammed into the railing instead of me, and I immediately stepped up behind her to try to push her over the edge to join her friend downstairs.
Before I could send her over the rail, the vamp flung her elbow back and rammed my chest just underneath my collarbone. There was a brief stab of pain, but it only made me lose my grip on her. It wasn’t enough to do any real damage.
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