Chapter 22
A distant explosion rocked the floor under our feet.
“What is that?” I asked Drake and Lauryn over the noise.
“Molotov Cocktails. Monty figured they’d be effective weapons. We’ve got to follow that explosion,” he shouted and tried to go as fast as he could without dragging Lauryn. I was tempted to pick her up and carry her. Drake rushed to the back hallway that I’d come from.
Fresh smoke billowed down the hallway and Lauryn coughed violently.
“Get down on the floor!” Drake stayed on his feet and we followed as quickly as we could on all fours. A cacophony of voices echoed in the distance. We came to a corner and turned into an open space, the antiseptic smell reaching my nostrils. We were back in the hospital room. A shudder raced down my spine and every inch of my body wanted to flee. But my friends were in there.
I took a deep smoky breath and plunged into the room behind Drake and Lauryn, pushing her protectively between us.
“Drake!” I heard Callie’s frantic voice from somewhere across the room. I struggled to see her through the smoke.
“Hold tight Cal, we’re here. Is he okay?”
“No, he’s not okay blood bag. He’s dead.” An unknown voice shot through the smoky haze. Drake and Lauryn unleashed a barrage of shots in the direction of the voice. Rage seethed through every vein, every nerve, every pore of my body.
“Go find them and hold tight.” I growled, my fangs sliding into place. I waved smoke out of my face and they disappeared to my right. The smoke cleared the further we moved into the room. The vampire leaned up against a door ahead of me and looked lazily in my direction. His jeans and shirt were covered in blood, but his perfectly coiffed dark hair looked like he’d just walked out of the salon. As he took in my face and my clothes, his expression changed.
“You!” he shouted.
“I do have a name, you know. Why does everyone just keep referring to me as ‘you’? It’s really quite offensive.” I skirted to the side, trying to keep him within sprinting distance in case he decided to bolt out the door.
“How did you get out?”
“Why don’t you ask Steve? Oh, wait, you haven’t seen him in awhile, have you? Did your great leader desert you?” I chuckled, inching closer.
“He would never…”
“No? Well maybe he couldn’t help it. I didn’t give him much of a choice.”
“You’d never stand a chance against Steve.”
“No? Then why am I standing in front of you covered in his blood? Your friends Margo and Todd didn’t believe me either, at first. But then they took off. And where oh where could they possibly go right now? It’s daylight, and as Steve made me quite aware, you’re not able to walk in the sun.” I glanced to my right. The smoke cleared on this side of the room and Drake’s and Lauryn’s heads were visible from behind an overturned table. The same table Steve had staked me to so he could take my blood.
“I let your friends live, but sadly, I can’t do the same for you. It seems you killed my friend, and I don’t take too kindly to vampires killing my friends.” I snarled.
“You’re a freak. You’re not supposed to be friends with humans. They’re food. You’ll learn one of these days when you accidentally kill one yourself. And then what? Then you’re no better than me. You’re a vampire. You kill people. It’s what you do.” He looked at me in a mixture of disgust and fear.
I kicked off with my foot, speeding across the room the fastest I’d ever moved. I was nothing but a blur to everyone, the vampire included. I knocked him to the floor, my knees pinning his shoulders. I pushed my face close, until my nose was nearly touching his, our breath mingling. “Unlucky for you, I’m in the mood to kill vampires today.”
His eyes widened in horror as I grabbed his stiff hair and pulled as hard as I could. There was a loud pop as his head shot free with more propulsion than any of the others. I was sprayed across the face with more vampire blood. Veins and strings of muscle swung in front of my face and blood showered from his head onto his newly separated body. I tossed the head to the side and rolled off the body as it shriveled away to nothing. Another pile of dust in designer clothes.
I heard quiet sobbing from the other side of the room and walked over to the overturned table. A distraught Callie sat on the ground, her legs folded, Monty’s ashen face resting gently in her lap. His throat was a bloody mangled mess, the artery hanging wide open where the source of his lifeblood had drained out. Much of it was on Callie’s pants. Ernie and Lauryn knelt together on the side, looking down painfully at Monty’s still form. I could gather their scents, still vivid and tasty, but Monty’s was gone. I pushed any thoughts of hunger from my mind as I looked at my friends’ distraught faces.
“We’ve got to get him out of here.” Drake said quietly. He stood up and grabbed a metal chair from the corner, heading towards the nearest window of darkened glass. There was a deafening smash as he threw it through. Panes crashed to the floor. He used another chair to clear some of the shards that remained, accidentally slashing into his arm, but not bothering to stop. Daylight spilled into the room and washed over us. The smoke redirected from the hallway and was sucked out the open window.
He returned and stood over us. “Okay, out we go. Everybody goes to the car and then Vicky and I return to finish this. If you guys are in the sunlight, you’re safe. I’ve got Monty. You guys go first and Vicky, step out before me so you can take Monty as I step over the windowsill.”
We all nodded and rose to our feet. Callie and Lauryn climbed through the window first, followed by Ernie and then me. Drake handed me Monty’s limp body through the window, which I held gently until he could take it from me. We trudged across the parking lot, the sun bright in the cold air, reflecting off the snow on the ground. The minivan stood at the edge of the lot and we loaded Monty onto the bench in the back through the hatch. Everyone else climbed in and Drake grabbed two of four gas cans and handed them to me. He pulled on a backpack and grabbed the other two and we turned silently back to the building, a small cloud of smoke billowing out the window we’d left through.
“So we’re torching it, I gather?” I glanced around, taking in our surroundings. The building itself was a small office building, two stories high. It stood at the edge of a large industrial park and backed up to a forest. The buildings were abandoned, faded for-sale signs lining the streets.
“The trick is not to get gas on ourselves, because I doubt we’ll be able to survive a fire.”
“How many are left in there?” I asked. “Steve wasn’t dead. And there were two others with him and more that made it to the upper floor.
“Lauryn and I took out about ten, I think. I don’t know how many Monty and the others got before…before…” he trailed off.
“There seemed to be so many last night when they picked me up. But maybe they weren’t all here.”
“We took care of everyone we saw. No one got away. They were cocky because they thought I was just a blood bag,” he said.
“Yeah, how did you manage that?” I asked, curious as I had also noticed that none of them seemed keen to the fact that he was one of them.
“I had smeared human blood on my skin under my clothes. It was so hard, the smell of it all around me, but I made sure I was full before we did it. It was a great disguise.” We paused before the main entrance and he looked back to the minivan. “He might live, you know? Well, not live, but still be with us.”
“No,” I said. My heart lifted, swelling slightly back to life.
Drake turned to look at me. “We knew this could be deadly, so we took every precaution we could. Everybody elected to take a few shots of my blood before we came here. Just in case. But I’m not you. I’m not sure if it’ll work. Or if he’ll be anything like us.” His eyes filled with tears. “I want it to work, but it’ll never be the same.”
“It’s not your fault. How could any of us ever know? Let’s just hope that he’ll come back to us. And we’ll make it work.” He blinked back his tears and tapped his gas can to mine. “I do believe we have a building to torch.”
We turned to the main door which dangled from its hinges.
“Let’s light it up,” he said.
We sped through the main floor as fast as we could, leaving a trail of gasoline and throwing lit Molotov Cocktails into every stairwell. The building quaked with each explosion, debris falling on us from the ceiling. At the front door, we emptied what was left of the gas cans on the floor in front of us and stepped onto the tile in the entryway. Drake pulled out a book of matches and struck one on the back. He flipped the book of matches open so that all of the matches were exposed and lit them, so the whole pack burned. He dropped them onto the carpet where the flame roared to life and raced down the hallways. We turned and stepped out into the sunshine.
We crossed the parking lot to the car, the fire in the lobby raging behind us. We climbed into the silent minivan and watched the building burn in front of us, flames licking out of the broken window we’d come out of earlier. Nobody, not even Steve, could make it out of there alive. Even if the fire department came and managed to put out the fire, deadly sunshine would be waiting for them out of every window. It was over. Over.
My heart would have been grateful, if only the horror of it all wasn’t coming back with us. Now began the waiting, the hoping that Monty would return, that Drake’s new young blood could save him.
I bit my lip and looked over at Drake. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know he was thinking the same thing.
Bloody Little Secrets Page 36