by Phil Malone
“Place your hands in the air,” Kolka warned him.
“No." Bleda turned his attention from Lucado to Melody. “If you’re here, then Sallow can’t be far. Where is he?”
“Eddie was right." Melody started backing up the steps. “You do like to talk.”
Bleda laughed. “Eddie? You don’t know him at all. You don’t know what he’s capable of." He started up the stairs.
“I’m warning you…”
Lucado tugged at Kolka’s sleeve from behind. “He’ll kill you…”
Melody was already in the hallway, still retreating.
But Bleda kept coming, taking each step deliberately, one at a time. “Put that gun away or I’ll shove it down your throat.”
Kolka fired. Two shots, pointblank. Both tore into Bleda’s center mass. Both hit him in the heart.
The force of the impact threw Bleda backwards, knocking him down the steps to the landing below. Kolka started down, instinct kicking in. He had to check the man’s vitals, make sure he was down for good.
“What are you doing?" Lucado grabbed his arm, frantic, and jerked him back. “Don’t go down there, detective. I’m begging you.”
They heard a cough from below. A groan. Kolka turned back to the body, in disbelief. Bleda stirred, propping himself up on his elbows. He held his hand to his chest, where dark, thick blood welled from the two gunshot wounds.
“Whoever you are, you’re dead,” Bleda muttered. “That’s going to need at least eight hours to fully heal.”
When he looked back up at the stairs, Kolka, Lucado, and Melody were already gone.
They slammed the door on the staircase. Kolka braced his back against it, looking around wildly for something to hold off the vampire. Melody had already dragged a chair from the nearby bedroom. Kolka took it from her, wedging its back beneath the doorknob.
“That’s not going to hold him,” Lucado warned.
He led them down the hallway, around a corner, throwing open doors left and right. Behind them, they heard the door to the stairs burst open. Melody almost squealed, clapping a hand over her own mouth at the last moment.
Lucado chose a bedroom and herded the others inside. He put a finger to his lips and shut the door as quietly as he could. In the dark, they felt their way to the closet, climbed in, and shut that door behind them as well.
Feeling around with one hand, Lucado found a chain dangling from the ceiling and gave it a gentle yank. The light came on. They stood in a closet surrounded by musty, moth eaten old clothes, but it didn’t have a rear wall. The racks of clothing continued on into shadow.
“How did you know this closet would connect to another room?” Kolka asked, as they crept along.
“I didn’t. But after exploring downstairs, I’m not surprised that it does.”
At the far end of the closet, they reached another door. There, they waited, listening. Kolka pressed his ear against the wood. He glanced at Lucado and shook his head. “All quiet,” he whispered.
Silent as thieves, they stole out into another bedroom. They heard nothing, saw nothing. There was no sign of Bleda.
In the hallway once more, Kolka couldn’t decide which way to go. At any moment, Bleda might burst unexpected from any closed door, from around a corner. He still held his weapon ready, his fingers playing nervously along the grip. Though his first shots didn’t kill Bleda, at least they knocked him down.
He turned to Lucado as they tried doors, one at a time, looking for the other staircase. “So how do you kill them?”
“Sunlight alone won’t do it,” the old man answered. “During the day, they’re not as powerful. They’re easier to kill. But bullets won’t get the job done either. Cut off their head. Stake them through the heart with something like that." He inclined his head toward Melody’s broken chair leg. “Something made of wood.”
“What about crosses, holy water, that sort of thing?”
“I’ve never been brave enough to try. I can’t help but think that’s just superstition, dating back to a time when people were more religious. Makes sense they’d want God to defend them from an evil they couldn’t stop.”
“How did the superstition even get started?" Kolka inched towards a corner in the hallway. He glanced around, quick, then nodded and beckoned the others on. “I mean, why isn’t it common knowledge that they exist?”
Lucado shrugged. “Maybe they have a tight knit community. Good discipline. Maybe they just don’t want us to know.”
Kolka tried another door and found stairs. Instead of leading back down to the foyer, though, the bare wood steps climbed up into a dimly lit attic. The walls had no plaster, only the wood frame of the house showing through, with the spaces between filled in with insulation.
“I thought you said there was a trap door,” Kolka said, turning to Melody.
She hurried past him, pausing on the first step. “Eddie’s still up here. Help me get him out while we have a chance.”
“Edgar Sallow?” Lucado asked. “Do we really want to rescue him?”
Melody wasn’t listening. She proceeded up the steps, without waiting to see if the others joined her.
“If she left the attic through a trap door,” Kolka muttered to Lucado, “then there must be more than one way in and out of here as well. Maybe we’ll luck out and find a window we can slip through.”
Lucado grimaced, and flexed his kneecap. “That would be a long drop.”
When they reached the top step, they found Melody looking around, confused. Support beams compartmentalized much of the attic, while the dips and contours of the roof blocked their view of the whole space. “Over here,” she said, pointing toward a pile of debris that lay just on the other side of a bulky air conditioning unit.
They came around the corner, finding worn out and broken furniture, some crushed glass, even the lacerated ropes that had tied Melody’s wrists. But no one else was there.
“He was…” Melody turned in a circle, looking all around. “He was right here." She pointed toward the depression in between some boards a short distance away, where the folded ladder fit snugly against the trap door. “That’s where he let me out.”
Kolka knelt beside the door and cracked it open an inch, just to get an obscured view of the dim hallway below. “Maybe he slipped out after you were gone.”
“But he was dying! The vampire was drinking his blood for days; he barely had the strength to move.”
“Even though he cut you free? And broke off a piece of that chair to use as a stake? And crawled over here to let you out, pulling the door back up behind you?”
Melody stared at Kolka in disbelief. She looked a little hurt. “But he was so pale,” she said.
Lucado took her by the arm. “I don’t think we should linger here any more. We don’t know where Bleda is. Or Sallow, for that matter.”
They went back out the way they’d come, since Lucado didn’t want to jump or climb down a ladder. For him, the steps were hard enough. Kolka took one last look from the top of the stairs, but saw no windows leading outside.
Near the bottom of the stairs, a sudden burst of shouting made Melody and Lucado jump and stagger backwards.
“Sallow!” they heard. “I don’t have to catch you to punish you! Have you forgotten?”
“He must have made a run for it,” Kolka whispered. “Let’s go, while we have a chance.”
“Somewhere around here must be that staircase that led right down to the foyer,” Lucado said. “We just have to find it and get to the car outside.”
“Then we’re home free,” Kolka agreed.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. But it’s better than being in here.”
Melody watched them, wide-eyed. “What if Bleda is just waiting for us by the front door?”
Kolka and Lucado exchanged a worried glance. “I have to admit,” Lucado said, “that’s what I would do.”
“There are other ways out of the house. We found the back yard, and that door in the laundry room. Anyway,
we can’t just stay here." Kolka motioned for them to follow as he crept along the hallway, still checking doors.
Aside from a bathroom, a sewing room, and a musty old nursery, they found nothing useful until they turned a corner. There, they saw a shattered chair and a door hanging off one hinge. The same stairs where Kolka shot Bleda.
Kolka almost shook his fist in frustration. “Between that shortcut through the bedrooms and the attic, we got turned around again. We’re right back where we started.”
“Where does that lead?” Melody asked.
“The back hallway.”
“If no one’s there, maybe we should just make a run for it.”
The shouting from below had fallen silent. Bleda could be anywhere, but if he was chasing Sallow instead of them, then the back hallway might be clear. Kolka nodded to Melody and Lucado, then started down the steps.
Melody stayed right on his heels. Lucado took a little longer to descend, palm braced against the wall since there was no banister. Kolka and Melody waited for him in the empty hallway, glancing around nervously with every tic and groan uttered by the old house.
“No more stairs,” he mumbled. If they had to flee upstairs again, he was done for.
Kolka didn’t want them to get caught out in the open, and he thought he knew which direction would take them to the front part of the house. He led the others into a bedroom, checking the closet. It was shallower than some of the others they’d seen, but Kolka noticed a latch in the back. He pulled aside a disguised sliding door and they emerged in the bedroom closet on the other side of the hallway.
Through the open door, they could see light coming from some of the rooms Kolka and Lucado had already visited. Before they left the bedroom, Kolka turned to the others and spoke in a low voice. “If we get separated, find your way outside. Doesn’t matter how. The front door, the laundry room or the garage, go out a window if you have to. Just get outside and away from this house any way you can." He looked from Lucado to Melody. “Understood?”
They nodded. Melody clutched the stake tighter. From what Kolka remembered, the hallway opened onto the living room, and the foyer was right next to that. If Bleda was waiting for them by the front door, they might be trapped. He hoped the gun would buy them a few seconds to squeeze past and make a break for it.
Instead, they found themselves at the other end of the hallway, nowhere near the door. Kolka remembered poking his head into the room earlier. It was some kind of library, only a few cushy chairs arranged around a coffee table and bookshelves full of old photo albums, knick-knacks, and memorabilia. From the door, the base of the stairs was obscured behind one of the bookshelves.
“It’s this way, I think,” Kolka said, when Melody gave him a wide-eyed, helpless look.
Kolka and Lucado found themselves tracing half remembered steps, and doing it badly. They opened a wrong door onto the screened in porch, from there took a shortcut through a pantry, revisiting the kitchen and the dining room. They turned a corner into the living room, at last, and stopped short.
Bleda slumped on the sofa, sweat beading in his hair, fingers pressed against his temples. He looked up at them with red-rimmed eyes. “I’ll deal with you later, Sallow,” he said. “Three loose ends I have to take care of first.”
He ran his fingers through his hair and rose from the chair as if hoisted by invisible strings. Leering, he bared his fangs at them. “Who wants to die first?”
Melody bolted. Kolka pushed Lucado backwards, almost toppling him over. He fired his gun, but somehow missed. In between eye blinks, Bleda sidestepped the place where Kolka aimed. Behind him, a lamp burst.
Then Bleda was on him. He grabbed Kolka by the throat and lifted him with one hand. With the other, he snatched the gun out of Kolka’s grasp.
Kolka felt the snub end of the revolver dig into his breastbone. Spots danced before his eyes as Bleda squeezed his windpipe shut. The edges of his vision filled with black, closing in. Bleda said something, but Kolka couldn’t hear him over the roaring in his ears.
He grabbed the hand that strangled him and tried to pry the fingers off with his failing strength. They might as well have been carved from marble.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lucado staggered back against the dining room table. One moment, Bleda stood in front of the sofa in the next room, fangs grinning at them. The next, he was a wolf among sheep, with Kolka an inch from death.
Panicked, Lucado swung his sword. The blade bit into the meat of Bleda’s bicep. His fingers twitched apart, and Kolka collapsed to the ground like a wet towel.
A coughing fit informed Lucado that Kolka was still alive. He yanked the sword back, slicing through an extra inch of meat. Bleda hissed in pain.
From the corner of his eye, Lucado saw Kolka groping his way back to his feet. Then Bleda aimed the gun at him.
He flung himself through the door to the kitchen. “Run!” he heard Kolka’s strained voice shout. A gunshot rang out, but sounded like it smacked into the plaster wall.
“Split up!" Kolka’s voice came from elsewhere in the house. An adjacent room, no doubt, though there were too many of those to be sure which one. “He can’t chase both of us!”
Bleda’s face appeared in the kitchen door as Lucado reached the sink. “He’s wrong, you know,” the vampire said. “I can be pretty fast when I want to be.”
Lucado seized an armful of dirty dishes, as many as he could hold, and started flinging them at Bleda. One crashed against the wall as Bleda took a step closer. Another sailed through the space where his head had been a split second earlier. Bleda swiped a third in midair before it could crash into him. A fourth shattered against his chest, a fifth against his cheek. Neither did any damage.
Lucado was out of ammunition. He hobbled towards the back of the kitchen. Wasn’t the garage this way? He couldn’t remember.
As he passed a clock above a small table, Lucado noticed the time. Five forty-five in the morning. No wonder Bleda was slowing down. It was nearly dawn.
He made it to the back yard before Bleda caught up with him. The vampire snatched him by the back of his shirt and whirled him around. Before he could raise his sword, Bleda twisted his wrist and forced him to drop it. Lucado cried out in pain.
“Scream, you feeble old man,” Bleda growled at him. “I’m going to break every bone in your body, and I’m saving your skull for last.”
The tears in Lucado’s eyes blurred out the back yard, the sneer on Bleda’s face, even the faint pink tinge along the horizon. But he saw the garage door open, saw an indistinct figure emerge wielding an axe.
Whoever it was, they raised the axe just as Bleda started to turn his head. Then the world tilted sideways, and Lucado tasted a mouthful of wet grass.
Well, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first time tonight.
He blinked the tears away and looked up. Bleda was shrieking, helpless to reach the axe embedded in his back. Appalling curses spat from his lips. Kolka loomed over Lucado, grabbing him under the armpits and heaving him onto his feet.
“It’s almost dawn,” Lucado managed to wheeze. Kolka nodded, and half dragged him through the door, through the linen closet, back into the kitchen while Bleda screamed behind them and promised both a horrible, bloody death.
Kolka was still coughing and massaging his purpling throat. Lucado’s arm felt sprained, maybe broken. Smashed porcelain plates crunched underfoot. They staggered out to the dining room, then the living room.
Bleda raged behind them, closing the distance only slowly. He couldn’t dislodge the axe from between his shoulder blades. Every time he smacked it on something, he screamed in wordless fury and pain.
They could see the front door, slightly ajar. Maybe the girl escaped, Lucado hoped as he leaned on Kolka’s shoulder and limped forward as fast as he could. It would be good if she lived.
As soon as they reached the foyer, Bleda caught them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It took Melody less than a second
to regret racing out the door and leaving her rescuers behind. She stood in the front yard, blanketed in shadow, even though she could see the black sky turning grey along the eastern horizon.
The front door stood open. She didn’t know which car was Detective Kolka’s, and had no way to drive it, or even shelter inside if it was locked. A gunshot sounded from inside the house, making Melody jump. Bullets wouldn’t stop Bleda.
She had the stake in her hand. Eddie was gone. Maybe he’d been faking weakness the whole time. Her dad wasn’t around to help her. If she didn’t do something, Kolka and Lucado might get killed in a matter of minutes. They could be dead already. And there was a good chance she would join them.
But there was nowhere else to go. All the windows along the front of the house were dark. Even with the lights on inside, the curtains were too heavy and the night too oppressive. Together they blotted out any hope she had of peeking through the windows to see what was going on.
She could run to one of the other houses along the street and hope someone friendly answered her knocks. If Bleda came after her, though, she’d only get someone else killed.
Steeling herself, Melody approached the door.
As soon as she reached the foyer, she heard screaming. In her fright, Melody almost ran back towards the street. Instead, she forced herself to make a dash for the living room. She found a dusty, overstuffed easy chair near the corner of the room and crouched down behind it. At her back, she had an escape hatch if she needed it, a wet bar that led even deeper into the bowels of the house.
She waited, balanced on the balls of her feet, while the screams and curses drew closer. The dining room stood at an angle, giving her a poor view into it. She was watching when one of the accordion doors burst open, someone’s foot, knee, and elbow heaving into view.
It was Kolka, helping Lucado. Both of them, alive. Melody’s heart sang. She almost bounced to her feet and raced to usher them outside. Almost.
The door hadn’t finished sliding shut before Bleda collided with it. He bulled through, snarling. Melody was shocked to see an axe lodged between his shoulder blades.