“Really?” Heidi asked, surprised. “You were a vampire, too?”
“Well, no,” Kelly laughed, with some embarrassment. “I was a half-dead.”
“What’s a half-dead?”
“Okay, you know how a heroin addict can get severely addicted to the point that they will do anything to get the drug, even rob and kill?” Kelly said. “I was bitten by a vampire named Lin Tang, just enough to get addicted to it. Without it, I went through severe withdrawal, so I did whatever Lin Tang told me to do just so she could bite me again. All I wanted was to get away from her, but I didn’t want to face the DT’s.”
“How did that happen?” Heidi asked, now intrigued and alert. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Kelly shook her head.
“It’s okay,” she answered. “It does me good to talk about it. Let’s put it this way – I was a wild child. Stubborn as a mule, ready to fight anybody and everybody. Must have been my Kiowa blood. Anyway, I met this guy, he took me to this exclusive club, and really worked to get me to join. I got antsy about it and tried to get out. That’s when Lin Tang appeared and I found out my so-called boyfriend was a half-dead.”
“And you willingly became a, what did you call it, a ‘half-dead’?”
“It was either that or be bled dry by Lin Tang,” Kelly said. “She was mad that I wasn’t a willing recruit but she couldn’t let me go either. After I became one of her subjects, she used that anger and rebellion within me to make me head of the group. My first act was to give my now former boyfriend a serious walking impediment.”
“I know a lot of women who’d love to do the same thing to their exes,” Heidi said, with a wide grin. “But, back to the story. Lin made you head of her group, just like that? I’ll bet that went over well.”
“Yeah, except for this scuzzball named Lincoln,” Kelly replied. “He got his revenge. Lured me into a trap during a recruiting mission and left me for dead. If Ryker and Angelica hadn’t happened along, I’d have been face down in a gutter, dead or probably something far worse.”
“Did they inject you with the serum, too?” Heidi finally asked, after an uncomfortable silence. “I still don’t know how I feel about being used as a guinea pig. I can’t bring myself to forgive Ryker for saving me just to be used.”
“Yeah, I heard about your reservations in the holding room,” Kelly said. “I thought the steak was bad or something.”
“No, it was actually pretty good.”
“Good, because I cooked it,” Kelly noted. “As for Ryker, I wouldn’t be so hasty to condemn him. After all, without him, you’d be dead. There’d be no making up for any mistakes or helping others. Yeah, Cantrell’s strange and abrasive. And aloof and weird, and a bunch of other adjectives I won’t repeat. But if you need help, he’s got your back.”
“You’re right,” Heidi agreed, sheepishly. “Maybe I needed someone to lash out at since I haven’t been able to get back at these vampires. God, I hate myself for getting taken so easily. I teach women how to defend themselves and not make themselves targets. Then, I go and do all the things I preach against.”
“You know, you have twenty-four hours a day to blame yourself for what happened,” Kelly said. “Or you can use it as a practical example of what not to do. Now, onto more important things; since Dolores is busy, it’s up to me to give you a crash course in the world of vampires.”
“Okay. Let me put my seatbelt on.”
Diane Simmons shivered a little in the night air as she stood just in the shadows outside of the Fulbright Hotel, one of the most luxurious hotels in North Texas. The dress she wore was even slinkier than the one she’d used on Michael Anderson. It was not made for warmth or comfort.
About twenty feet behind her stood two others, a man and a woman, impeccably dressed. They seemed to be looking straight at Diane, but their eyes were carefully scanning the surroundings. Inside their jackets, they carried nine-millimeter pistols. They were half-deads, who ranked high enough to act as bodyguards for Diane on certain missions.
Diane strained to hear the music coming from the grand ballroom and wished she could be inside. But, she wasn’t a vampire – not yet anyway. One day, if she served her master well enough, she would be inside with Riordan and his ilk. Right now, though, she did not rate high enough for entry into the foyer.
Still, Diane was Lin’s obedient servant – her position as head of the half-deads depended on it. Without her new life, she knew she’d be back working as an escort for some sorry madam or pimp.
“Are we getting impatient?”
Diane gasped, jumping forward about a foot when she heard the voice behind her. She looked toward her bodyguards, who neither moved nor blinked. Turning, she breathed a sigh of relief as Lin Tang materialized out of the shadows.
“No need to be afraid, Diane,” Lin said, as she approached her lead half-dead. “It is a weakness. Do not worry. You are not late. It is I who must apologize for the hour of this call.”
‘You, mistress?” Diane asked, somewhat incredulous.
“That is not important now,” Lin said, dismissively. “Pay attention, for the mission that I mentioned to you earlier is canceled. It can wait. I have a new target for you.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“You, no doubt, have heard that Duke is dead,” Lin continued, as she began to pace back and forth on the sidewalk. “That is an affront that cannot be allowed to stand. No. Will not be allowed to stand.”
Diane was even more confused. She tried to steady herself on her six-inch stiletto heels as she contemplated her master’s words. Lin, meanwhile, seemed to enjoy manipulating the gullible woman.
“Surely I would not be able to persuade the vampire responsible to give up such information, mistress,” Diane blurted.
“It was not a vampire,” Lin retorted. “No, I am afraid that we have a human hunter. One who has no idea, exactly, what he has stumbled into.”
“How will I find this person, mistress?”
“Through the man who knows everything about this town, Diane,” Lin answered, coyly licking her lips. “You know, Diane. You are very lucky.”
Diane said nothing.
“I trust very few humans,” Lin continued. “I once trusted humans implicitly, even after I was turned; that was before they murdered my master, Lo Chang. Before the one called Cantrell Ryker tortured him for the sheer fun of it. However, I have developed a fondness for a few humans, and, I do not mean these sniveling familiars.”
Diane cast a wary glance at the nearby guards. If any of them took offense to Lin’s words, they did not show it. That was probably wise, Diane thought.
“Kelly White Cloud was one such person,” Lin said. “But, she is dead now. Betrayed by a human, of course. And now I have you, Diane. And do you know why I have a fondness for you?”
“No, mistress.”
“Because you always do as I ask and have never failed me, Diane,” Lin replied, walking up close enough to Diane to playfully nip at her neck. “So, I know you will not fail me this time.”
“I will not fail you, mistress. M-mistress, please.”
Lin smiled and then bit again at Diane’s neck. She drank quickly and then lapped the wound with her tongue so that it healed. She stood back to let Diane experience the rush that her bite brought.
“T-thank you, mistress,” Diane gasped, after recovering her faculties. “Who is my target?”
“A private detective,” Lin replied. “He works for one of Mr. Riordan’s police contacts, but I would not hesitate to say that he does not tell Detective Hernandez all that he knows. Put him under your spell, Diane and then he will tell me everything he does know. Everything.”
Hendricks slowed his truck along Jacksboro Highway and turned right onto the driveway of a gray building that said “Manuel’s Garage” on an overhead marquis. He eased into an open bay, shut off the engine and climbed out. Manuel Acevedo came out of a side office, wiping his dirty hands with an even dirtier towel.
“Hey, muchacho, what’s wrong with the truck this time?” Avecedo asked. “You keep running this baby into the ground, you’ll be making the last few payments for nothing.”
“The boss around?” Hendricks asked.
“Oh, boy, is he,” Avecedo replied, motioning towards the open doorway. “You’re just in time for the tribunal.”
“Tribunal?” Hendricks gave Manuel a curious look. “What is this? Ancient Rome?”
“You’ll find out,” was all Manuel said before turning his attention to Ian’s truck.
Puzzled, Hendricks went into the office, looked around past the bookshelves, crowded with tattered auto manuals and an old television, and settled on the closet door. He opened it, stepped inside and turned on the light. He ducked past a row of overalls hanging on a clothing bar. At the back of the closet, he pressed a panel and watched it swing open. He found himself at the top of a long flight of steps, lit only by a single light bulb.
He descended. When he got to the bottom the barrel of a shotgun came out of the shadows and into his face. He threw his hands up defensively and the shotgun was pulled back.
“Jeez, didn’t Manuel say I was coming down?” Hendricks objected. “And I thought there was some kind of tribunal going on? Don’t tell me Ryker finally broke the camel’s back with this Springtown mess?”
Horace Garvey stepped into the light and apologized. The gangly man, who looked barely old enough to be in college, tilted his faded red baseball cap to the back of his head, propped the sawed off shotgun on his left shoulder and stepped aside. Hendricks eyed the man warily and walked past him. He knew Horace Garvey was far older than his baby face announced and he wasn’t about to underestimate him.
“You wish, kemo sabe,” Horace joked. “No, we’re actually talking about the mess you started with your little phone call.”
Hendricks walked down a long, narrow hallway, followed closely by Horace. As it became much cooler, he realized he was passing under the hills upon which used to sit some of Fort Worth’s finest mansions in Cowtown’s heyday. The rich soil kept the hallway naturally cool. It also made it smell a little musty, he told himself. He could imagine all sorts of molds and fungi growing in the dark recesses and corners.
“What exactly is this little tribunal about?” he asked Horace.
“About killing these freaking vampires once and for all,” Horace said. “Starting with Lin Tang.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Hendricks gasped. “Lin Tang? Just cut to the front of the line, why dontcha’?”
Hendricks came around a corner and found himself in a wide open room that had long metal tables and comfortable-looking office chairs. They were all there. Jesus, Wesley, Jessie, Dolores, Marcus, Angelica.
And they were all looking at him.
Ryker flipped through the 500 channels available on Marcus’ satellite television package and still found nothing worth watching. Frustrated, he turned the television off and went into an adjacent room. Sitting down at the computer desk within, he logged on to the Internet and fished through the headlines – carefully avoiding the Springtown reports.
He played a few games of freecell and solitaire before switching to one of the military-style, first-person shooter games. After about an hour, he was tired of those and gave up. He didn’t even feel like writing another chapter in his memoirs. Truth be told, he was already on the third volume of a series he could never publish.
“To hell with this,” he muttered.
He went out into the living room and grabbed his jacket. He picked a backpack up from next to the couch and went to the basement door. He pulled a set of night-vision goggles from the pack, put them on and then headed down into the basement, his target was one of the safehouse’s emergency exits.
In the living room, the telephone buzzed.
“Looks like someone’s going to get hung. I’m hoping it’s not me,” Ian said as he stood before a semicircular table in the underground compound of the Hunters.
He felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck. He glanced around at the table’s occupants – Jesus, Dolores, Elvis, Marcus, Angelica, Jessie and Horace, who had just taken one of the last two available chairs. Jessie look shot daggers at him and he wished he’d never taken her out on that disastrous date six months earlier.
“Actually, Ian, you’re in the way,” Jesus replied. “You’re blocking the computer screen. Have a seat.”
Looking over his shoulder, Ian saw a rather complex organizational chart being beamed from a small laptop computer onto the opposite wall. Half the chart was on his coat. Sheepishly, he moved around the table and sat down next to Garvey.
“What I was referring to earlier, Ian, was to see where you stood in our arrangement,” Jesus said. “As you should know, the battle against Riordan has been taken up a notch.”
That’s an understatement, Ian thought.
“Don’t tell me you actually approved killing Lin Tang’s right-hand man?” Ian asked, more than a bit stunned. “I can see Ryker doing it, yes, but you, Jesus? Dolores?”
“It wasn’t Ryker’s idea,” Jesus retorted. “But, what’s done is done. And, in the long run, it is probably a good thing.”
“A good thing?” Ian queried. “I just got reamed by my police contacts. They’re itching to find out who did it before Lin Tang and Riordan rip them a new one. You’ve stirred up a real hornet’s nest. I hope you have a good follow-up plan.”
Jesus nodded at Marcus, who stood up and moved around the table. He stopped next to the organizational chart. He pressed a button on a remote in his pocket and the chart changed.
“Yes, Ian, we do have a follow-up plan, but it may get us all killed,” Marcus answered. “Then again, how is that different from any other day? We don’t have too much choice as we are just a small group. What you see here, plus Michael Lee, Cantrell, Kelly White Cloud and a new member we just got in recently. Oh and Manuel in the garage, of course.”
Ian studied the chart and saw that it broke down the Hunters group into different categories. He saw titles for Leadership, Technology, Weapons, Transportation, Planning, Intelligence and Training. Each header had one or two names next to it. His name was next to Intelligence, along with Kelly White Cloud and Ryker, and he suppressed a groan at having to work with Cantrell.
“Is this just an organizational chart?” he asked. “Just noting who’s who with what specialty, or, is it what I think it is?”
“It’s what you’re thinking,” Wesley replied.
“Not afraid of a little hard work, are you, Ian?”
Ian frowned at Jessie’s cutting remark. She clearly didn’t know how thin of a line he treaded on a daily basis, acting as a double agent. He was taking a big chance just coming to the compound, though his news was very important this day. Normally, he called via one of his coded cellular phones.
“You realize that I can’t be put into a position of being possibly compromised,” he noted. “And you do realize that Ryker is supposed to be dead.”
“Can’t be helped,” Marcus chimed in. “If we are to take this fight to Riordan’s doorstep, we need to be as efficient as possible. That means training in not only our specialty, but cross-training in another. We’ve got to hone our organization. No more random patrols just to seem like we’re doing something positive. We don’t have a great deal of time.”
“And we may have even less.”
Everyone looked up to see Michael Lee entering the room.
“Okay, then, why do we have even less time?” Jesus asked.
“I tried to establish comms with Cantrell at the safehouse,” Lee said, scratching his scruffy beard. “I still haven’t gotten an answer.”
“Damn it,” Jesus groaned.
Ryker nibbled at the egg salad sandwich he’d purchased at a local gas station just after leaving Marcus’s safehouse. As he did so, he brought the binoculars back up to his eyes and peered down at the street. He was in an empty suite in a partially-finished office building near downtown Fort Wo
rth.
It had been a chore getting into the building. He’d gone through the sewers, a hole in the wall, a sea of rats, who didn’t like his intrusion, and up an old drainage pipe from the previous building that had occupied the site. Then, he had to crawl through an air vent to the shaft of the freight elevator, and ride to the tenth floor on the car’s roof, when the building’s lone security guard made his rounds. From there, he climbed a maintenance ladder up to the twelfth floor, going faster than normal, as he needed the car to provide a safety net in case he slipped.
He’d obviously made it, scampering into another vent just as the guard returned to the freight car and went back down to the lobby to take another nap. He’d made such a treacherous journey because of what he found in his e-mail. Months earlier, he’d had Michael Lee set up a program to monitor activity by any of Riordan’s front companies.
Tonight, that program had come across a gala event organized at one of Fort Worth’s most posh hotels. Riordan had rented out the entire banquet hall and Ryker could see why. The security guards were numerous and at least two of them were familiars, who worked directly with Travis Pratt. A third, he was almost sure, he’d seen with that pasty-faced bastard Porter Coleman.
Ryker didn’t know why Riordan was hosting the reception, but he had gambled that it was extremely important. More than likely, he figured Riordan was putting more corporation officers, political leaders and cops on his payroll. He wanted to see who else he might have to add to the Hunters’ target lists.
His cell phone vibrated in his tunic pocket. He ignored it. It could only be an irate Jesus. He really didn’t feel like explaining his actions yet again. Jesus would just yell at him some more.
Sometimes, he wished he was still with Moonrise, Inc. He’d been brought in to the group as a liaison between the various departments – the group was divided into sections that handled cults, covens, vampires and miscellaneous. Competing for funds, the groups had fallen into something worse than the interservice rivalries that plagued the American military. Ryker was supposed to work to facilitate communications between the sections, as he was an outsider who had no personal connections in any of the departments.
Dark Tidings: Volumes I & II Page 17