And she didn’t even know the half of it.
I went back to all my classes, explained to my professors that I had been absent so much recently because of the breakup. It was a little embarrassing—some of them seemed to think my excuse was thin. But I didn’t care what they thought as long as they let me finish out the semester.
As far as I was concerned, my life was great. None of the other big bad vampires knew where I was, and I was quite certain that I could take out any newbie vamp who came along. Including Greg.
And if I couldn’t handle something on my own, I could always call Nick and the guys.
So that was my state of mind the night I got jumped beside the playground across from Middle School 45 in the Bronx, three weeks after we had cleaned out Deirdre’s den.
I had walked down to Modern Groceries to pick up a few essentials: milk, eggs, root beer, Pringles—the usual. I was walking back up the street toward my apartment building, swinging the plastic grocery bags and humming tunelessly to myself. I had plans to go home, snuggle up with Millie the cat, and stare at my television all night long.
I didn’t even notice the figure lurking in the shadows behind the fence. Have I mentioned how much I hate it that vampires can hide in shadows?
He jumped out at me from the opening in the fence just as I was passing by. As usual, I didn’t scream—just let out a little squeak. I did, however, drop all my groceries instantly and scrabble for my knife.
This vampire was big and ugly. All the vampires that Deirdre had kept around her had been beautiful. Even Greg was attractive, much as I hate to admit it now. But this guy had squinty little eyes and an enormous nose stuck in the middle of a pock-marked face.
I would just hate to go through eternity with pockmarks.
He moved back inside the fence and I followed him.
We circled each other on the concrete playground, just like those guys who do those cheesy fake wrestling shows, each of us waiting for an opening, a chance to take the other one out.
He lunged at me and I ducked, then spun around to meet him.
I love my knife with its vampire-killing wood inlay on the blade. I adore it. It’s perfect. It’s all sharp and pointy and slides right into vampires’ hearts—especially when they’re new and slow and have the fighting skills of a frog. From the time we entered the schoolyard, it took me about fifteen seconds to slam my lovely knife into his chest. He looked from it to my face, a bemused, almost hurt expression passing through his eyes.
Then he fell over.
I pulled my knife out of his heart and wiped the blade off on his pants leg. A gush of blood followed.
That’s when I called Nick, propped up the dead vampire, and settled in to wait for the guys to come to my rescue.
So there I was, hanging out in the playground where moments ago I had been attacked. The worst part of it was knowing that there were more vamps out there in the dark, maybe even watching me right at that very moment. The hairs on the back of my neck kept tingling in that way that’s supposed to signify that you’re being watched. In my case, I was pretty sure it just signified that I was totally creeped out.
Eventually, though, I moved around so that the big dead vampire was covering my back. And I mean that literally. I spread his legs and plopped myself down right between them so that I was leaning up against his chest, big bloody post-mortem wound and all. Ruining my shirt was the least of my worries. At least this way no one would stab me between the shoulder blades.
And hey, maybe anyone driving by would think we were just a couple of kids sitting in the playground enjoying the late-summer night air. Or making out. Whichever. As long as none of the passers-by thought, “Oh, my God. There’s a woman sitting on the lap of a big dead vampire,” I’d probably be okay.
Truth be told, that was just about the longest half-hour of my life up to that point.
Second longest. Right after the half-hour Deirdre and Greg spent sucking my blood. Anyway, this one was right up there.
Finally, after what seemed like roughly seventy-two years of waiting, John pulled the van up to the curb beside the entrance. All four guys piled out, swinging their black gym bags and laughing and talking.
“Hey, Elle!” said John. “Got another one for us, huh?”
“You are the most vampire-attracting woman I have ever met in my whole entire life,” Dom said.
“I cannot believe how these things are just drawn to you.”
“Okay, okay,” said Nick. “Let’s get to work. Tony, help me get this vamp to the van.” The two of them each grabbed an arm and hauled the vampire upright. Or tried to, anyway. The wire I had used to tie his shirt to the fence caught them off-guard and they almost dropped him.
“Let me get that for you,” said John, and reached down to rip the collar. “There you go.” He turned to survey the playground in the dim reflected light from nearby streetlights.
Dom pulled the portable wet-dry vacuum cleaner out of one of the black bags and put it together.
John took a flashlight, a sponge, and a spray bottle of bleach diluted with water out of his own bag and started searching for any blood spatter, looking for spots that he could clean up without the vacuum cleaner.
Nick climbed back out of the van and headed toward us. I guess that Tony was still in the van examining the body.
That’s when the rest of the vampires attacked.
They flowed out of the shadows of the buildings around us, pouring onto the playground from every direction.
That’s what it seemed like, at least. Afterward, when we compared notes, we figured out that there were probably only ten or fifteen of them at the most. But at that moment, with vampires slithering over the fence, moving like snakes up and around and across every obstacle, all I could think was that we were overwhelmed, five against a hundred, a thousand, a million—far too many vampires to count.
We all froze as we realized what was happening. I just had time to think, We’ve been set up, when the first of them hit the ground running. They split up, several of them moving toward each of us, cutting us off from one another. I saw two of them heading toward the van. This was clearly a planned attack. My knife was in its scabbard nestled against the small of my back, the crucifix tucked into the front of my jeans. I grabbed them both and bounced on the balls of my feet, finding my balance as Nick had taught me.
And then I didn’t have any more time to think.
Three of them formed a circle around me, snarling and hissing like animals. I spun around, trying to keep all of them in my line of sight. The scene took on that slow-motion unreality that so often comes upon me in a fight. The last fight, the one we had been cleaning up after only seconds before, hadn’t had that effect on me, maybe because I had felt so confident of my ability to take him.
Now, though, I had plenty of time to see the moonlight flashing on their dripping fangs as they all lunged in toward me at once, as if on cue.
One of them caught both of my arms, holding me in a grip so hard I was sure it would leave bruises. I used his hold to balance me as I kicked both feet up, hard, into the groin of the vamp directly across from me.
He clutched himself and doubled over in pain—as my feet hit the ground, I again realized how lucky I was that vampires could actually feel pain.
The third vampire took a step away from me, leaving me an open space to move into. That didn’t free me from the first vampire’s clasp, though. He was taller than I, so slamming my head into his face wasn’t an option.
Instead, I body-checked him. He was expecting me to struggle, to move forward in an attempt to get away. My sudden thrust backward threw off his balance and his hold on me loosened for just an instant.
It was enough. I wrenched my arms from his grasp. He scrabbled at them, leaving long bloody scratches from elbow to shoulder where his nails scraped across my skin.
I made a dash for the fence, spinning around so that it was at my back when I got there. It wasn’t perfect cover, of course, but
at least it kept these three from forming a circle around me again. The one I had kicked was still limping when he got to me.
I held the crucifix out in front of me, and two of the vampires hissed and cowered. The third, however, the one who had grabbed my arms, just smiled and took a half-step closer.
So not all of these vampires were complete newbies. Okay, then. Him first.
Still waving the crucifix at the others, I turned my knife around so that the hilt balanced on my fingertips. With a flick of my wrist, I threw it at the oldest vampire.
The knife sank into his chest. On the wrong side. “Dammit!” I said aloud. I was going to have to practice that knife-throwing trick some more. At least it hadn’t bounced off his chest entirely and skittered across the playground.
The vampire looked down at the knife sticking up out of his chest and then back up at me. He smiled, wide enough so that his fangs showed. Still gripping the cross, I swung my hand around toward him. He just shook his head as if amazed that I hadn’t yet realized that the crucifix had no effect on him.
But the stake I had whittled on the other end did. He was still gloating over the ineffective crucifix when I slammed the pointy end into his heart.
I don’t know why they’re always so surprised to die. They’re the ones who start it by going after me.
Before he’d even stopped gaping at my hand still holding the crucifix embedded in his heart, I had grabbed the hilt of my knife with my other hand and yanked them both out.
The motion sent him reeling backward and he crumpled to the ground.
Apparently, the other vampires were just as surprised by his death as he was because they were standing stock-still, staring at the corpse collapsing onto the pavement, when I spun around to face them again.
One of them snarled and looked at my face, the all-black of his eyes gleaming red in the darkness. I looked away from his face, concentrating on his body, looking for any flicker of motion that might betray which way he would go when he lunged at me, as he was sure to do.
Just then a long, low whistle sounded from somewhere on the other side of the playground. The two vampires I was fighting whipped their heads around at the sound.
And then they were gone. With the same suddenness with which they had entered the playground, all of the vampires left it, flowing back up and over the fence and sliding away into the darkness.
I whirled around in a circle, looking for any stragglers.
There were three.
I still feel responsible. I think we all do. We were taken off-guard. We were far too comfortable with the idea that we could take out any vampires who had the nerve to go after us.
We weren’t paying enough attention to our surroundings. We weren’t watching each other’s backs. Not closely enough.
I still see them sometimes in nightmares, silhouetted against the soft orange glow of a failing streetlight: two of them holding Nick up against the fence, pinning his arms and legs with their entire bodies, like lovers snuggling up in bed against his struggling limbs, holding his head straight up by the hair, the third hanging upside down from the fence, gripping it with fingers and toes as he buries his face in Nick’s neck. The others slide across Nick so that for a moment, I can’t see what they’re doing.
In my dreams, I can’t get there fast enough—the slowing of time and motion that helps me focus in fights works against me as I dash toward the foursome, screaming for the other guys to help me.
Then the third vampire looks up at me and smiles Greg’s smile, the one that used to make my heart thump with joy.
And the worst part of it is always waking up to the knowledge that it wasn’t just a dream.
Greg made eye contact with me for just a second, just long enough to make sure that I knew it was him. Then he nuzzled his face back into Nick’s neck. I heard Nick scream as the fangs slid into his neck. Greg wrenched his face away with a jerking flip of his head, and I saw a spray of blood fly from Nick’s throat. The blood looked almost beautiful, glittering black in the moonlight. The scream gurgled away into nothing, the night filled instead with my own shouts as I raced toward Nick.
The two vampires holding Nick let go and slid up the fence. Greg, his mouth black with blood, kept his eyes on me as he skittered up the fence backward. He slid over the top feet first, then paused long enough to blow me a kiss before he dropped to the ground and faded into the shadows.
John and I reached Nick at the same time. He lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the fence, and we knelt on either side of him. Blood still flowed from the front of his throat. I could see muscle and tissue glistening in the wound.
I thought he was dead until I heard a gurgling rattle in his chest, like air trying to force its way through water. I grabbed his hand and stroked the hair away from his forehead. John ripped off his own t-shirt and wadded it up, holding it to Nick’s neck to stanch the bleeding. That awful wet rattling sounded in Nick’s chest again.
“Oh, God, Nick,” I said, “Hold on. We’ll get you to a hospital. Tony’s coming. Hold on.”
“Tony! Get over here!” John yelled. Tony had left his fighting position by the van as soon as the vampires abandoned the fight, but he had almost the entire playground to cross.
I didn’t see where Dom came from; he was suddenly just beside me.
Nick looked into my eyes and smiled.
That smile terrified me. “No, Nick. You hold on. Dammit, Nick!”
But he just kept smiling. He squeezed my hand. Then he mouthed the words, “It’s okay.”
And just like that, he was gone.
Chapter 26
“Come on, guys, we’ve got to get him back to the van. Now. Move it!” Tony’s voice came to me as if from a distance.
I stood up, still holding Nick’s hand. It had gone limp in mine. Dom, John, and Tony all lifted Nick’s body off the ground and headed toward the van at an awkward trot. This time it wasn’t a vamp looking so surprised by death, it was me. I’d never thought, never really thought, that we’d lose one of the team. I’d feared for Malcolm, of course. Feared that I might screw up and end up dead—wasn’t that what Nick had said? The only mistakes were the fatal ones? But the rest of the team, particularly Nick, they’d seemed unstoppable, invincible, until right now. For a moment, for a very tiny moment, I understood the surprise I’d seen on so many fangy faces.
As I followed them, the sounds of the Bronx slowly filtered back into my consciousness. The Bronx is never silent; there’s always a background hum of traffic, car horns, distant sirens, planes flying overhead. But on top of that, there were other sounds, sounds of activity and concern. The noises we had made while fighting, Nick’s scream, our subsequent shouts, had alerted the neighbors.
Lights were flicking on in the row of apartment houses across the street from the playground, and people were beginning to peer out of windows.
The guys maneuvered Nick’s body into the back of van, then jumped in after him. John took the driver’s seat. Dom and Tony took their usual seats on the bench behind him. I followed them and slammed the side door behind me, taking one last look out the window to watch as we pulled away from the playground littered with dead vampire bodies.
The police were going to have a field day with this one. Nick would be furious that we had to leave a scene like that behind.
Would have been furious, I corrected myself silently. Nick’s seat in front of me seemed horribly empty. I stood up in the tiny space and crawled over the bench seat, moving to the back to sit with Nick, cradling his head in my lap so that the ride wouldn’t jar him. It just didn’t seem respectful to leave him back there alone. No one said a word as we drove back to the shop.
WE GOT BACK TO THE shop and Tony took Nick’s body into one of the unused rooms. The rest of us stood in the common room staring at the ground.
Finally, I spoke. “I’m going to go take a shower.”
“Yeah,” Dom muttered.
“I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
John didn’t say anything at all.
In the shower, I scrubbed at the blood on my hands, on my face, in my hair, watching it swirl down the drain in reddish-brown streaks. Some of that was Nick’s blood, I realized. The thought drifted in front of me without really connecting to anything else. When that blood was inside Nick’s body, he was still alive.
I didn’t bother putting on clothes. I just wrapped a towel around me and padded back down the hall to my room, the one I had lived in when I had stayed at the shop just a few weeks ago. I didn’t dry my hair or comb it out or do any of my usual nighttime rituals. I just dropped the towel to the floor and climbed into bed.
It was still dark outside when I woke up early the next morning clutching a pillow. I felt like I hadn’t slept at all.
I rolled over and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
“Hey.”
Malcolm’s voice startled me. I pulled the covers up around me and sat up to find him slouched in the lone chair against the far wall.
“You came back,” I said.
“Yeah. Tony called me and told me what happened.”
“How long have you been there?”
“A while. I didn’t want to wake you.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and leaned against the wall at the head of the bed.
Malcolm moved to sit beside me. He stretched his legs out in front of himself and rested his hand on my foot. We sat that way for a long time without saying anything. Malcolm’s fingers stroked my ankle and the top of my foot.
Finally, I rested my head on my knees and let myself cry those heaving sobs that had been trying to work their way out of my chest ever since I’d seen Nick collapse to the ground.
Malcolm wrapped both arms around me and I turned to him, putting my head on his chest.
Somehow we ended up lying down on the bed, and then we were kissing—not soft kisses, but hard, demanding kisses. Then Malcolm’s hands were under the blanket, roaming across my body.
Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1) Page 24