“And will you cover for me if I have to miss class again?” I asked. “I’m having a hard time with this.”
“Of course I will,” she said. She rubbed my arm. “And so will everyone else. I’ll tell them if you want me to. So that you don’t have to. I know how hard this is for you.”
Oh, if only you did, I thought. But what I said was “Yes. Please. And thank you.”
THE ADDRESS NICK HAD given me turned out to be some martial arts training facility in Manhattan. It was in what looked like a regular office building, with a FedEx and a Starbucks on the bottom floor.
Nick was already there, stretching and warming up on the wooden floor. He was awfully flexible for such a muscled man; when I walked through the door, his right leg was forward in split pose, and he was touching the ground with his inner thighs. I don’t know that I had ever before met a man who could do the splits.
As far as I could tell, we were the only two people in the small suite of rooms. When I asked Nick about it, he said, “I’ve rented the dojo out for the next three hours.”
Three hours. I didn’t think my occasional afternoon workouts at the campus gym had really prepared me for this.
I was right. I warmed up with him, stretching out on the floor in a variety of unlikely poses.
Luckily for me, I remembered enough of my childhood dance and gymnastics lessons—the kind that practically every girl my age had taken as a child—to keep up with him. More or less.
Then we got into the lesson itself.
“When you’re fighting vamps,” Nick said, tossing me a sharpened stake, “you really only need to know two things: how to hit them in the heart and how to keep them from grabbing you. We’ll start with staying away from them.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes learning to duck and weave without dropping my pointy stick.
“Vamps are fast,” Nick said, “but even they usually telegraph their next movement. It’s a bad idea to look at their eyes, so you have to watch the way they sway, watch for twitches that might indicate which way they’re going to move next.”
He demonstrated several moves, and I copied them over and over until they felt almost natural. I was again thankful for early dance training.
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s see you do that against an opponent.” He moved across from me and grabbed at me. I ducked and spun away from his hand. He nodded approvingly.
I was still basking in that approval when he reached out and snagged my arm. He twisted it up and behind me until I winced in pain and dropped the stake in my hand. As soon as this was over, I was going to sign up for yoga lessons. I clearly needed to be able to twist my body in unnatural directions.
“You can’t quit watching a vamp, even for a second,” he said.
“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.” I pulled away from him and rubbed my arm. I was ready the next time he grabbed for me and I twisted away, dropping down to a crouch and sliding away by shifting my weight. This time I didn’t wait for his approval but danced around behind him. We did this for another half hour, and he rarely caught me.
“Now let’s add the stake,” he finally said. He rummaged around in his black gym bag at the side of the room and pulled out a vest of some sort. When he strapped it on, I saw that it had several red circles painted on it.
“Body armor,” he said when he noticed me watching him. “It’s new—both bullet- and knife-proof. If vamps were smart, they’d start wearing these. It would be almost impossible to kill them if they did. Lucky for us they haven’t figured it out yet.
“These targets,” he said, pointing to the red dots, “are kill zones. If you hit a vamp hard enough with a correctly-angled stake at any of these spots, you’re almost guaranteed a killing strike. So. Hit me.”
I thrust a stake at his chest, hitting slightly below the heart target. Nick reached down and corrected the angle of the stake.
“Don’t hold back. If you can knock the wind out of me, then you’re hitting hard enough to kill a vamp.”
It took me four or five tries to finally hit him in a way he found acceptable.
“You’d be dead by now if I’d really been a vamp,” he said.
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I muttered.
“I’m not here to encourage you. I’m here to teach you to kill vampires.”
After about thirty minutes, I was fairly consistently hitting the kill zones.
“Okay. Let’s put it all together now,” Nick said.
By the end of the three hours, I could dance and spin around Nick as he lunged for me. And about half the time, I could actually kill the “vampire” attacking me.
“Nice work,” he said. He tossed me a towel from a stack by the door. “I always like teaching these techniques to women. They may not have as much upper body strength as the guys on my team, but they tend to be better at the movements.”
I wiped my face on the towel. “You’ve taught this stuff to women before?”
“Used to have a woman on my team,” he said. “Scarlett. Ex-cop. Damn good fighter.”
“What happened to her?” I almost dreaded hearing the answer. If he said she’d been killed by a vampire, I might never leave my apartment again.
“She quit,” he said shortly. I didn’t pursue it—his tone didn’t invite curiosity.
Nick began packing his gear back into his bag. “Okay. Let’s go kill some vamps.”
“What?” My voice squeaked out of me.
“You wanted to learn how to kill vamps. You’ve got the basics. Now let’s put it into practice.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
As we walked out of the building, the last of the sun’s rays stretched out across the sky. We climbed into the van and Nick pulled away from the curb.
“This should be a fairly easy job,” he said. “Just two vamps holed up in an apartment on the Upper West Side. Normally I’d handle it by myself, so it seems like a good training opportunity.”
I still wasn’t sure I agreed that I was ready, but at least I felt marginally safer with Nick along.
We pulled up in front of a building near Morningside Park on a dark winding street. The buildings of Columbia University glowered over us from the top of a hill, negating what little sunlight filtered down to the streets below. Nick parked the van and got out, swinging his gym bag. As we approached the front entrance, he handed me a couple of stakes. I gripped one in each hand and hoped I wouldn’t need more.
“Stay behind me. Don’t engage with them unless you have to but be prepared to fight.”
I nodded nervously, and he walked in the main entrance. It had had a buzzer at one time, but the lock had been broken open. The building wasn’t abandoned, though. There were stained welcome mats in front of a few of the apartment doors, and I could smell something cooking, something spicy, like curry. From a floor somewhere up above, I could hear a baby crying.
We made our way up two flights of stairs. Nick walked to a door and without hesitating, kicked it in.
I’d never seen someone kick in a door before. It’s pretty impressive. I guess the vamps inside thought so, too, because when I followed Nick into the apartment, they were cringing against the far wall, hissing and growling.
This was the first really good look I got at a vampire—I’d been too busy killing the first one and running away from the second one to get more than a fleeting impression of what they looked like when they were alive—or undead, anyway. I realized that these vampires didn’t look like the vampires I’d seen in movies. In movies, the vampires look fairly human; they just have some long pointy teeth up top.
These vampires looked fairly human, too, until they opened their mouths. Unlike movie vampires, they had long pointy fangs both top and bottom—upper and lower fangs. Once they opened their mouths, they looked utterly inhuman. They looked like animals. The sort of animals who will eat you for dinner.
Nick stepped slowly across the threshold, and I followed behind him.
Black painted plywood covered the windows, but from the single bulb dangling in the hallway, I could see that the apartment was a mess. A yellowed carpet full of small cigarette burns covered the wooden planks of the floor. There were several stained blankets on top of the carpet, but no furniture.
Ashtrays overflowed onto the floor and onto the body of a young woman.
Very young. Sixteen or seventeen, at the most. She lay on her side as if she’d gone to sleep. But her skin was white and bloodless, and her eyes were open. She was totally naked and had bite marks all over her body. All over. Up and down her arms and legs, on her neck, I could even see one in her armpit. She was thin, with stringy brown hair. In fact, she was thin to the point of emaciation, like she hadn’t eaten well in a long time. Probably a runaway.
A red haze crossed my eyes, and when it cleared, I was furious. I couldn’t stand the thought of these two leeches bringing that poor defenseless girl up here and draining her dry. Her life might not have mattered to anyone else, but suddenly it mattered to me.
Nick had told me to stay behind him.
I had every intention of staying behind him.
Really.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I flew past him in a rage, screaming that same wordless scream I’d howled out when I’d seen Greg dangling from a vampire’s grip.
I wanted them to die. Painfully.
And then they were away from the wall and I was in between them, spinning and dancing and jabbing at them with my stakes.
I don’t think they even ever knew what hit them, really. They had stepped away from the wall to attack us as soon as they realized that the light streaming into the darkened apartment was from a light bulb and not the sun. But instead of jumping us, they found themselves set upon by a screaming banshee with a stake in each hand.
I took the first one out almost instantly. I slammed a stake into his heart, up under the ribcage, just as Nick had shown me. I flipped the other stake from my left hand into my right and turned to face the second vampire.
He grabbed at me, but I swerved away from him and spun back to smash the second stake into his heart, as well.
I stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, looking around for something else to hit with a stake.
The only possible target was Nick, and he was still standing in the doorway, his mouth hanging open in surprise.
I let my hands drop to my sides and stood up straighter.
“They pissed me off,” I said.
“Apparently,” he replied. And then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard that he bent over and held his stomach.
“What?” I growled.
Nick controlled his laughter with some difficulty and looked up at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “You just call me if you ever need backup, okay?”
Nick pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and called his team in to help with the clean-up. When they got there, the three guys looked around.
“Nice place,” Dominick, the shortest of the three, muttered.
“Good kill though,” John said.
“It’s not mine,” Nick said. “It’s hers.” All three of them turned around to stare at me.
“By yourself?” John asked me. “Again?”
“I got angry,” I offered. It sounded lame, even to me.
Dominick let out a low whistle. “Wow.”
Tony didn’t say anything, just looked at me appraisingly.
Nick and I left before the other guys had finished their Merry Maids routine. I wondered what they did with the dead bodies, but I didn’t ask. Nick drove out to the Bronx and dropped me off at my apartment.
“Call me if anything important comes up, okay? See you later, Dixieland.”
“Dixieland?”
“Yeah. You know. New Orleans. Dixieland.” He grinned and waved.
I waved back and went inside, happy to be home. And even happier to know that the first time hadn’t been a complete fluke. I could kill vampires.
It made me feel a little safer.
Chapter 5
A day and a half later, as I got dressed to meet Malcolm Owens, I reminded myself that I wasn’t going on a date. It had been less than two weeks since Greg had turned all evil. I hadn’t even called my mother yet to tell her that Greg and I were... well, that we weren’t anything any longer. Except maybe mortal enemies.
And even if this were a date, the sorts of things I was considering asking him to do for me weren’t the sorts of things one brought up on a first date. I could just hear it now: My fiancé was attacked by vampires, and now he is one, and I keep getting attacked by vampires, and I think the law firm he worked for may know something about it. So what I want you to do is sneak into the law offices, break into their files, and see if you can find out what they know about vampires and my ex.
Wait! Where are you going? Come back!
Right. Definitely not first-date material. Or any date, for that matter.
So. Not a date.
I nodded firmly to myself, grabbed my handbag, and trotted downstairs to the street.
I’d been going to the gym in the afternoons, and I could already feel a difference as I headed for Arthur Avenue and the restaurant we’d agreed on—I felt stronger, more confident, more able to take care of myself.
The four pointy chopsticks I was carrying in various places—taped to the small of my back under my shirt, slipped into the top of my boot, held by my bra in the cleavage between my breasts, in the back pocket of my purse—didn’t hurt either.
I’d suggested that we meet at Giovanni’s on Arthur. They have the second-best Italian food in the neighborhood, which is saying a lot. The best Italian food is at Roberto’s, but I’d rejected that as too date-like; the tables were small and intimate and the whole place was lit by candles. Giovanni’s back room was big and airy, with plants in the window and red-checkered tablecloths. More “family friendly” than “first date.”
Malcolm was already seated at a table in the back when I got there. He stood up and helped me into my chair. Not a date, I reminded myself.
We both ordered and chatted about inconsequential things as we ate. Everything seemed perfectly friendly, but I was nervous. I knew I wanted to ask him for his help, but I couldn’t figure out how to even begin to bring the conversation around to vampire attacks. I think that perhaps that’s a difficult conversational gambit under any circumstances, and I didn’t want to break the pleasant mood. But I was also beginning to fear that Malcolm did see this as a first date, so I needed to figure out some way to bring it up.
Then, as we drank our after-lunch coffee and shared a piece of cheesecake, Malcolm reached into the backpack he’d carried into the restaurant and brought out an object wrapped in a plastic grocery sack. He placed it on the table between us.
“The other night after the security guards left to take you home, I walked back across campus,” he said, nodding toward the plastic bag. “I found this on the ground over by the fence.”
Watching him warily, I unrolled the bag and looked inside. At the bottom of the sack lay my letter opener, covered in dark brown streaks. Well, I thought, at least the forensic guys don’t have it. I looked back up at Malcolm without responding.
“You want to know what I think?” he asked. I still didn’t respond. Instead, I rolled the bag back up and put it back on the table. “I think,” he continued, “that you were carrying that thing the night you got attacked. I think that you stabbed the guy with it. And I think that’s why you didn’t want me to call 911.”
I sat completely still, not answering him, but not denying what he said, either.
“And what I’m wondering is this: if you stabbed the guy who attacked you, why didn’t you tell the police that? Why didn’t you tell them that this thing existed? They could have gotten a blood sample from it, maybe used the DNA or something to track him down.”
I frantically tried to think of something to say, but Malcolm didn’t give me a chance.
Conflicting emotions flitted through me: embarrassment that my fabulous wooden-chopstick-turned-stake-hiding technique hadn’t worked out so well, fear that Malcolm might decide to turn the bloody letter opener over to the police, elation that he’d figured part of it out by himself and maybe I wouldn’t have to explain everything to him after all.
All of this was followed by a moment of sheer gut-wrenching humiliation. I’d been working hard to remind myself that this wasn’t a date, but I suddenly realized that it was emphatically not a date; it was an attempt on Malcolm’s part to figure out what had happened—something he’d already told me he was inclined to try to do.
I was on an anti-date.
I felt myself blush a deep red, part embarrassment, part anger.
If my life were a movie, at this point Malcolm would announce that carrying around a bunch of pointy wooden sticks clearly indicated a fear of vampires. But it wasn’t a movie, and he didn’t make any announcement at all. Instead, he just stared at me inquisitively.
“If you’ve had this since the night I was attacked, why didn’t you bring it up when I saw you at the train station?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as I stared at him. “Or turn it into the police yourself?”
“I don’t know for sure what it is,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m just guessing. I’m hoping you can tell me what’s up.”
I looked at him for a long time, then finally went with an edited version of the truth: I told him that my ex-fiancé had worked for a law firm. That he’d gotten mixed up with some unpleasant people.
That we’d broken up over it (well, we had, sort of) and that now I thought he was possibly stalking me, or maybe those unpleasant people were stalking me for him.
Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1) Page 5