Renfield was faster than he looked. One moment Bloodshot was striding toward him, his hand slipping into his trench coat for the steel rod, the next he was sprawled on his back, Renfield towering over him.
“He has the quickness of our kind,” Westenra explained. “You’ll not take him unawares.”
Renfield swung the heavy steel pipe and Bloodshot flopped out of the way, the pipe crashing into the stage and leaving a gaping, splintery hole. Bloodshot made a grab for the spear, but before he could seize it Renfield booted him in the ribs and sent him tumbling sideways.
The vampire throng below roared its approval.
They want a show? Bloodshot thought. Well, we’re in a theatre. Might as well give ’em a show.
Because Bloodshot had his back turned, stooped over and feigning injury, he was able to get ahold of the makeshift harpoon. In one motion he whirled and let the barbed spear whistle out at Renfield, the chain snicking rapidly as it unfurled. Faster than he would have believed, Renfield shifted his hips aside, lifted his arm, and the spear went whistling under his armpit. Bloodshot wrenched the barbed spear back just as Renfield looped the heavy pipe one-handed at Bloodshot’s head. Bloodshot ducked the whooshing pipe, caught his own spear with his left hand, then jabbed at Renfield’s bare left foot with the spear. This blow connected, the barbed spear piercing the white flesh atop the giant’s foot. The giant snarled, hauled back on the foot clearly intending to take the spear with him and thus deprive Bloodshot of his weapon, but Bloodshot yanked at the same time and a big, meaty chunk of the giant’s foot ripped free with a ragged squelching noise. Renfield roared.
The vampire audience growled its disapproval.
Infuriated, the giant swung the immense pipe again, but again Bloodshot eluded its bruising arc. Tumbling to his right, he somersaulted in a tight ball and came up with the harpoon ready. He pumped the spear at close range. In desperation Renfield threw up a hand, palm out, to prevent the harpoon point from puncturing his chest. The barbed spear punched through the giant’s palm, causing him to bellow in pain and whirl away. This time the force of the giant’s movement was too powerful for Bloodshot to resist, and snagged in the giant’s bleeding hand, the harpoon was prevented from returning to its master. Worse, the giant stumbled away so rapidly that the chain reached its limit and towed Bloodshot along with it. He’d cinched the end of the chain around his elbow, and when the giant hauled him forward, the chain jerked so violently that it nearly dislocated his shoulder.
Renfield’s hands were full—his heavy pipe in one hand; Bloodshot’s makeshift spear ruptured through the palm of the other—so when Bloodshot leaped at him, Renfield’s raised arms moved sluggishly. Before Renfield could block Bloodshot’s attack, Bloodshot delivered a savage haymaker to the side of the giant’s face. Renfield twisted sideways with the blow and came down badly, his forearm trapped under the heavy pipe. There came a dull crunch as Renfield’s forearm snapped under his own weight, and the giant’s outraged roar transformed into a wail of pain. Standing over the giant, Bloodshot dropped a knee on the side of its head, the devil mask having torn halfway off its face. Bloodshot clutched the spear poking through the giant’s hand, put a big boot on the giant’s wrist, and pulled. The spear ripped out of Renfield’s palm, leaving a hole the size of a cheeseburger in the creature’s hand.
Renfield lay weeping on his back. The vampire crowd had gone silent.
Bloodshot raised the spear, preparing to plunge it through the giant’s chest. But he paused, spear clutched high above his head.
“Wait a minute,” Bloodshot muttered. He reached down, grasped the edge of the devil mask and tore it free. The face staring back at him was surprisingly normal, if a bit ugly. But if you looked closely enough, Bloodshot decided, you could see deep down the insidious fires banked within Renfield.
“I just realized something,” Bloodshot said.
“And what is that?” Eric Westenra asked in a thin, sullen voice.
“You said he has the quickness and strength of the vampire, right?”
“So?”
“He’s only half a vampire.”
Westenra said nothing.
“He doesn’t have the healing part, does he? Which means I don’t need to get him through the heart to kill him.”
Bloodshot knelt over the now distraught giant. “By my count, you killed forty people and two dogs,” he said. “Forty people who deserved to live. And I really like dogs.” He sat astride the giant’s chest and clutched Renfield’s face so that the giant looked like he was puckering up for a kiss. “I could kill you quickly,” Bloodshot said. “But I’d rather let them have you.” He nodded at the vampire horde, which had gathered at the edge of the stage.
Renfield threw a terrified glance that way. The orange eyes glowed avidly back at him. “NO!” he screamed.
“Dinner’s served,” Bloodshot said, and shoved the giant into the crowd. Renfield disappeared in a frenzy of teeth and blood.
Bloodshot straightened and turned to Eric Westenra. “Now, which one of you wants to die next?”
The worst part about being with Mina Murray, Malcolm decided, was how powerless she made him feel. As a serial womanizer he knew well what it was like to be charmed by a woman, how weak-kneed a comely lass could make a man feel. And like most womanizers Malcolm had often joked about how he was only obeying his nature, how man was meant to lust after beautiful women, and that he was, after all, only at the mercy of his own base desires.
But Mina Murray gave new meaning to being at a woman’s mercy.
From the moment he’d entered the vampire theatre, Malcolm had scarcely been able to look away from Mina’s fathomless eyes. Staring into her gaze was very much like diving into a dark lake at midnight, letting the cool waters wash over you, and feeling utterly relaxed and soothed by that vast liquid womb.
So when, amidst the chaos swirling around Bloodshot and the vampires onstage, she charged at Malcolm like some subterranean panther, Malcolm had been too transfixed by her beauty to fire on her. And so he’d lost his weapon and been dragged through the theatre door into the terrible room filled with bloated corpses. He had walked through it with Bloodshot prior to entering the theatre, but Mina had even less trouble navigating the corpses than Bloodshot had, moving unerringly to an opening not far beyond the theatre entrance and taking Malcolm inside.
When they stopped moving, Malcolm realized they were behind the stage. Furthermore, enough light was filtering into the room from various gaps and pipe holes for him to see Mina’s face.
Malcolm wished he couldn’t.
Because it was the same thing as it had been at the newspaper office, Mina drawing him closer, her visage mostly human, but the orange glint of the vampire dancing in her eyes and the elongated incisors poking from out of her sensual mouth.
“You desire me,” Mina breathed.
Yes, Malcolm thought. God help me, I do.
“You will join me,” Mina whispered.
“Yes,” Malcolm answered in a thick voice.
He could see her milky flesh, the plunging neckline of her dress.
“Join me,” she said.
From beyond the wall Malcolm heard a shout of pain.
Bloodshot.
“Be mine,” Mina urged. He could smell her now, her dizzying warm animal scent.
Heart pounding, Malcolm slid his hand into his pocket.
Mina opened her mouth wide, her eyes blazing orange. Her fanged maw drifted nearer Malcolm’s neck.
He could feel her warm breath, the touch of her cold fingers.
“Now feel eternity,” she said.
Malcolm plunged the carving fork into the back of her neck.
Mina shrieked and scrambled away from him, her eyes huge with pain and anger and her hands clawing at the handle of the fork. Malcolm rose and took a couple of blundering steps toward the doorway, thinking, I’m actually trying to get back into the theatre?
But he needn’t have worried. He was nearly to the door
when something cracked him in the small of the back. He was rolled over, seized by the shirtfront. Mina shook him like a doll. She brought her face close to his, her eyes feral, maniacal. “You could have lived forever!” she growled. “And instead you chose this?” And on the last word she reached back and yanked the carving fork loose, the long steel tines sliding out of her neck. They pulled free with a slurping sound that would have turned Malcolm’s stomach under other circumstances. But his terror was too great for him to feel disgust.
Mina raised the bloody fork as though about to plunge it into Malcolm’s chest, but something stopped her. Her vampire’s features narrowed with some cunning epiphany. “I know what you deserve,” she said, her voice gone raspy. “Your succulent flesh will serve the Master nicely.”
She grabbed him by a pant leg, dragged him back into the room. Toward something that looked like an open hole in the cement floor. Though he had no idea what lay within that hole, the sight of it—a pitch-black smudge on a shadowy canvas—filled him with an atavistic dread. Desperately, Malcolm unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his jeans. His pants slid off, Malcolm now in his boxer shorts but on his feet and sprinting away from Mina. She shouted something in a furious voice, then turned and pelted after him. He knew she would take him down again, so the only thing he could think to do before she tackled him was to drop to the ground.
For once, luck was on his side. Her lithe form went hurtling over him and crashed into a set of rusty floor-to-ceiling cast iron pipes. Two of the pipes gave way upon impact, one of them unmooring from the floor, the other ripping out of the ceiling and pointing a spiked diagonal toward the entrance of the room. Mina’s body tumbled forward and smacked the wall, but she was on her feet on the instant. Unthinkingly, Malcolm stepped in front of the diagonally pointing pipe as if offering himself up to her. She leapt for him, claws out, like some pouncing lioness. Malcolm moved aside at the last moment, seeing as he did her expression change from cruel triumph to aghast surprise.
Mina impaled herself on the jagged cast iron pipe, the force of her jump compelling her body down the pipe’s length more than three feet.
Malcolm exhaled trembling breath.
Mina twitched on the pipe.
Malcolm thought of Bloodshot, of the opportunity he now had to make things right.
He left Mina’s skewered body in the dark room and prayed it was the last time he’d see her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
“So here it is,” Westenra said. “The true test: Machine versus Vampire.”
Bloodshot wiped his bleeding mouth, grinned. “I noticed you let Renfield have a crack at me first. Could be maybe you were hoping you wouldn’t have to be part of this true test.”
Westenra spread his arms toward the other four vampires who’d sat the thrones but had now risen. “There is no way you’ll thwart all five of us.”
“I also noticed,” Bloodshot said, nodding at the others, “that they didn’t come to your rescue when I had you pinned over there on the stage.”
Westenra drew himself up. “They knew I had the situation under control.”
Bloodshot chuckled. “Okay, Eric. Show me what you’ve—”
But before he could finish, they were on him. All five at once. Bloodshot had expected the five “chosen” vampires to be stronger than the vampire horde below, but what he had not counted on was the unholy agility of the quintet, their blinding speed. One moment they’d been as motionless as their carved thrones; the next they were blurring toward him, their talons outstretched eagerly and their faces contorted with rage. They moved as quickly as …
Well, Bloodshot mused, they moved as quickly as he did.
Quincy Morris waylaid him first. The vampire was the biggest, and he was clearly one of the most physically formidable. Despite the fact that Renfield had been far larger, Morris’s bone-crunching tackle under Bloodshot’s ribcage packed more force than any of the giant’s blows had. Morris nailed him with a shoulder, but even as he staggered backward from the runaway train that had just smashed into him, the unnamed female vampire
(L-something, her name starts with an L)
clambered over Quincy and tore through Bloodshot’s scalp with a savage clawed swing. Bloodshot would have gone down anyway, but John Seward made certain of it, striking him a glancing blow in the side of the head. The three attacking vampires drove him to the ground, landing on him with their combined weight and pounding the air out of his lungs. As if that hadn’t been painful enough, the moment he landed, another vampire—Arthur Holmwood, he saw with a glance—fastened on his legs, clawing through the fabric covering his thighs and slicing through the skin beneath. Bloodshot imagined a mischievous cat at work on some sofa cushion, only this was no cushion, this was Bloodshot’s flesh. Good God, the pain was extraordinary. He had a moment to wonder where Eric Westenra had gone, but the moment the thought had ended, there came a concussive boot to his ear, Westenra using his head as a football. Stars exploded in Bloodshot’s vision, his brain going fuzzy. He realized with the impotent panic of a fever dream that he was in very real trouble now, the five most powerful vampires acting in concert with each other and proving too much for him. The female vampire snapped at the underside of his jaw, and though he jerked his head down to stop her from sinking her fangs into his carotid artery, she still managed to excise a large flap of skin from his jawbone. Quincy Morris lunged for his throat on the other side; Bloodshot got an arm up to ward him off, but John Seward darted in under his arm and bit him on the chest. Bloodshot thrashed to rid himself of Seward, but Arthur Holmwood remained on the offensive on the lower half of Bloodshot’s body, his steamshovel claws now digging up ribbons of flesh from his upper legs.
I’m going to die, Bloodshot thought. The notion came to him matter-of-factly, without drama or self-pity. Yet there was in it a regretfulness that surprised him. He’d been a bad man before they’d changed him. Now he was … something else. But whatever he’d become, there existed in him a terrible thirst that could not be slaked. The desire to atone for the things he’d done but could not remember. The longing to be more than he’d been—to be more that he was. And then there was Jillian … Jillian …
Distantly, Bloodshot became aware of a change in his legs, a releasing of pressure. He realized the vampires tearing his upper body to pieces had ceased their attack as well.
Bloodshot peered blearily up at the figures. They moved like participants in some weird, ritualistic dance. Four vampires stalked toward some backpedaling figure. Another figure teetered several feet off, an arm held out as if for balance. Bloodshot frowned. Something about its shape was strange. Something seemed to be protruding from it … the figure pawing at it …
When the figure sank to its knees, Bloodshot understood what had happened. He also realized who the backpedaling figure was.
Malcolm.
Malcolm, God bless him, had somehow survived his ordeal with Mina—had Malcolm killed her?—and rather than saving his own skin, had returned to help Bloodshot. Earlier, though Bloodshot didn’t like to admit it, Malcolm had wounded him deeply by offering Bloodshot up for the vampires. And even if Malcolm hadn’t known exactly what was going to happen, he’d nevertheless set up Bloodshot to save his own hide.
But now, for whatever reason, be it guilt or some urge far nobler, he had returned. And because he’d returned, Arthur Holmwood was sagging sideways, glassy-eyed, the length of cast iron pipe Malcolm had skewered him with jutting out of his chest.
The only question was, where were Malcolm’s pants?
Pushing the question away, Bloodshot reached into his trench coat, grasped the makeshift harpoon.
His clearest shot was at the one named John Seward. But the toughest vampire, the creature calling himself Quincy Morris, was nearest Malcolm. If Bloodshot hurled the spear at Morris, he might pierce him in the side and deter him from attacking Malcolm. But if he impaled Seward now, he’d kill the vampire for sure and reduce their numbers to three.
Bloodshot had to chance it. Rising slowly, Bloodshot reared back and heaved the spear, the whistling sound it made sharp enough to make the four remaining vampires whip their heads back at him in surprise.
But not fast enough to save John Seward’s life. One moment the spear was cleaving the air; the next it had punched through Seward’s chest, nearly the entire length of the spear having ripped a hole in the vampire’s heart.
Seward slumped forward, the spear supporting him for a moment before he tumbled sideways and lay still.
Bloodshot yanked on the chain, worried for a second that it wouldn’t return to him without getting snagged in Seward’s innards. But it did slide through after a bit of resistance.
Reeling the chain back in, Bloodshot said, “I thought you all had me. I really did. But I guess I underestimated Malcolm, and it looks like your friend Mina did too.”
Quincy, for the time being anyway, had turned away from Malcolm. He wore a distraught look that suggested to Bloodshot that Quincy cared more for Mina Murray than he’d let on. Maybe the two were lovers. Or maybe Quincy had just wanted them to be.
“What are you saying?” he asked Bloodshot.
“I’m saying Mina’s as dead as your buddies here.” Bloodshot nodded at the unmoving bodies of John Seward and Arthur Holmwood.
The remaining female vampire said to Malcolm, “You aren’t strong enough to kill one of us. You’re pathetic and frail, Mister … Mister …
Malcolm grinned. “Why don’t you just call me Van Helsing?”
The name brought snarls from all three vampires.
“Those are some lovely boxer shorts,” Bloodshot remarked. “What are those, hearts?”
Malcolm shrugged. “A Valentine’s Day gift from a lady friend.”
The vampires were staring at Malcolm in outrage.
Bloodshot attacked.
Bloodshot: Kingdom of Shadows (Kindle Worlds) Page 14