InsistentHunger

by Lyn Gala

  “What partner?” Jim asked with exaggerated innocence.

  “You don’t exactly inspire trust with all these secrets.”

  He shook his head. “You wound me. Okay, so it’s time to arm ourselves.” He dropped the back gate on his truck and reached in to catch the handle of a huge trunk and pull it close enough to open.

  Paige rested her hand on her weapon. “I have a Glock 22 with fifteen shots and two extra clips.” That sounded like a lot of ammunition to Paige; however, Hunter seemed less than impressed.

  “Hollow point or standard ammo?”

  “Standard.”

  “Swap it out for hollow point. To kill these guys, you want to take out the entire brain, enough that they can’t get the brain to control the body anymore. One shot with standard ammo, even through the eye, is going to limit their movement without killing them.”

  Paige crossed her arms. “Yeah, well the police department frowns on hollow point. More importantly, I’m here to watch what you’re doing. I’m not interested in going in there like Wyatt Earp.”

  Hunter leaned back against his truck and studied her. Sadly, he shook his head. “You still want to find a way to save your Brady.”

  “It’s my first priority,” Paige admitted.

  “That’s why I hate most women hunters—they want to save someone, they all want to fucking save someone. I thought you were tough enough to deal with reality. Get your head around this, Silver. The only goal is to kill them.”

  Paige smiled sweetly. “Keep suggesting that I’m incompetent and you’re going to meet the not-nice side of my personality.”

  “Sweetie, you have no idea what not-nice really looks like,” Hunter said, but he turned back to his trunk before he could see her glare. “The first line is going to be low-level vamps. They’re more like zombies than anything you see in a vampire movie. If you try to kill them, you’re going to give the big boys time to prepare, so the goal is to slip through them without having anyone notice. That’s where these come in.”

  He pulled out a bag of little rubber balls in neon colors. “Shake a few in front of them before throwing them—they’ll track the movement. The best strategy is to throw three or four at a time. They’ll feel this weird need to collect them all.” He tossed her the bag.

  “If they’re too close, they’ll still focus on you, so this is the second line of defense. God, I love jacks.” He pulled out a clear bag of jacks—some shining silver and some neon plastic.

  “The buggers feel a need to count them and usually they’ll stop to line them up perfectly. Predictable as hell, these guys. Once you toss them, you move as slow as you can. The faster you move, the greater the chance they’ll pull themselves out of their trance. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll stand very still until they start really getting into their counting. Once they’re focused, any small objects that are the same will keep them busy, so once they’re good and counting, toss some white rice down and they’ll want to count that too.” He tossed her bags two and three—jacks and rice.

  “And if they catch me?”

  “If they get their hands on you, you’re pretty much done for, Silver. Those low-levels aren’t fast or smart, but they are strong. They grab you and you’re done for.” Hunter didn’t sound too worried about her.

  “They’ll eat me.” She couldn’t prevent a shiver from traveling down her spine. She wasn’t a coward. She’d faced a bank robber once. She’d been covering a side alley and he’d managed to squeeze through a bathroom window so small that a Chihuahua shouldn’t have been able to fit through. However, he’d been motivated. They’d faced each other over their guns and she’d held her own until backup could arrive, so she wasn’t a coward. But the idea of getting eaten really was too much.

  “Not exactly,” Hunter said. “It’s more like they absorb energy. They won’t bite you, but they’ll hold you until they either crush you or they’ll just drain you of energy until you collapse. I’ve heard of coroners calling it acute renal failure or heart attack, but what it comes down to is that whatever energy keeps you running will just drain out of you and into them. They get real frisky for a while after eating someone. But the good news is that you’ll leave a really pretty body behind. Well, except for how your expression will be twisted in pain.”

  “Oh. Great. Thanks for that bit of cheer.” Paige swallowed down the bile she could feel climbing up her throat.

  “No problem. Of course, some people do get away. They usually die slow of some lingering illness the doctors can’t ever cure.”

  Paige glared at Hunter. “You should get a job writing for Hallmark,” she commented sarcastically. “Wait, do you mean that you leave these zombies behind you, blocking your escape?” Paige’s voice rose in fear at the very thought.

  “Yep.” Hunter grinned. “If you kill even one, it will make a mess and all this noise and the higher-level vamps are the bigger danger. Low-level vamps don’t even seem to get hungry. They certainly don’t go out of their way to feed. They just seem to eat whatever life wanders near enough to catch their attention.”

  Paige watched as he attached the bags to his belt using small hooks. “Why do you do this?”

  “Retirement was boring.”

  She snorted. “Give me a break. You lost someone. When you told me the vamps grabbed you…you lost someone.”

  This time his grin failed him and he glared at her. “You’re a pain in the ass, Silver. Luckily for you, I happen to know that most good hunters are. So, mid-level and high-level vamps are going to be more like humans—smarter, less willing to fall for this shit.” He jiggled the rice bag. “However, there’s a big range.”

  “So some of them will stand there stupidly while someone shoots them in the head?”

  Hunter’s familiar grin returned. “Like the one this afternoon? Yeah. Startle them and some will take that much time to decide how to handle the new threat. Others will be on you so fast that you won’t have time to pull the trigger. It’s kind of a toss-up.”

  “And if that one had come at me that fast?”

  “I still would have shot it and really hoped that I missed you. This is not a game for the weak of heart, Silver.”

  “Nice, good to know you have my back.” Paige could feel her adrenaline start to pump. Hunter sure as hell wasn’t going to put his neck on the line for her if things went pear-shaped. “If you start shooting these upper-level demons, are the ones at our back going to come after us?”

  “Not until they’re done counting or until something moves in the line of sight. They really aren’t that bright. Here.” He held out a Berretta for her. “This has hollow point ammo. Even with hollow point, follow up with a second and, if you’re feeling nervous, a third head shot. If you don’t destroy the brain’s ability to control the body, it will just keep coming after you.” It was a good gun, but it wasn’t Paige’s and she hadn’t fired it or cleaned it or held it in her hand until she was comfortable with it. She ignored his offer.

  “Is there some reason we’re going in there—some goal other than to kill as many vampires as we can?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Hunter shoved the Berretta into his belt.

  “No,” Paige said firmly. Creatures that just wanted to count the pretty balls didn’t feel worthy of hunting down. Paige certainly didn’t want to kill someone only to discover they weren’t the monsters of mythology later. Mistakes like that…you couldn’t fix them.

  The man who killed her mother, who drove drunk because he didn’t stop and think, he couldn’t bring her mother back after he sobered up. Growing up, Paige had watched him tear himself up with a sadistic sort of glee. Killing someone did that to you. It changed you. So using lethal force would be her last choice, and then she wanted some sort of proof that these guys were evil as opposed to being mindless or just really fucking scary.

  “Brady might be in there.” He poked a thumb toward a house sitting far up on the hill. At one point it must have been a majestic plantation with white co
lumns and wide porches where people stood watching for boats to come up the tributary. Weather had stripped the paint so the dark form was barely visible with the clouds covering the moon. Paige stared at the building. He was testing her—checking to see if she was as ignorant of Brady’s location as she was pretending.

  “Have you seen him?” she asked, carefully to make her voice unsteady.

  “Nope, but the vamps who used that house for raisings were using this as their base. He’s probably in there.”

  “And you’re going to kill him.” Paige didn’t have to work to make her voice flat and cold.

  “Look on the bright side—he might be one of the low-levels. I generally leave those since they aren’t much danger without the higher vamps. If you kill them, the mid-level vamps will just make more and that’s just not ideal. So you want to let them keep their stupid little guard dogs until you get rid of all the upper-level vamps. Then you can clear out the idiots easy enough. Hell, in the old country, if you knock on someone’s door at night, they’ll ignore you and wait to see if you knock again. The low-level vamps are so stupid that they’ll just wander away if the door isn’t opened immediately. If Brady’s one of those mindless zombies, I won’t bother killing him unless we get lucky and clear the whole nest out.”

  Paige still didn’t feel good about any of this. “That’s the only goal here—to kill?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m not okay with that. I’ll watch from a distance.”

  Hunter frowned at her, clearly confused. Maybe she wasn’t as predictable as he’d thought. “And if I get in trouble?”

  Paige smiled. “I’ll trust you to get yourself out of trouble.”

  “Damn, you’re cold. I admire that in a woman.”

  “You do know your pickup lines are slimy, right, especially since you know I’m with someone?”

  Hunter grinned. “Hey, I’ve learned to enjoy life to its fullest. Even if I don’t have a chance, I figure it’s worth making a play. Maybe your Rick is really bad in the sack and you’re shopping for someone new.”

  “He isn’t and I’m not.” Paige was grateful for the dark because she felt herself blushing. Brady wasn’t bad at all. Not even close to bad.

  With a chuckle, Hunter pushed his trunk back into the bed of the truck and closed the gate. “If you want to watch from a distance, that’s fine with me. Maybe you’re actually smart enough to stay out of this game.”

  “And if you go for Brady, I’m probably not going to be on your side,” she warned darkly. If he wanted her to believe Brady was in the house, she wanted him to know that she wasn’t going to stand by while he killed her partner.

  Hunter gave her a sour look. “And here I thought you were starting to develop some common sense.”

  “Is there a good spot to watch?” Paige asked. She was sure he’d checked out the territory more than once.

  “Halfway up the slope on the east side. There’s a place where a burn took down the big trees and you can see pretty good through the grass.”

  “Well, that’s where I’ll be. Try to not get yourself killed.” Paige started walking as she tucked the bags into her pockets. She was just lucky she didn’t wear tight jeans.

  “You are one cold woman,” Hunter said behind her, but he said it in a tone of voice that was almost admiring. Funny, she was working on a four-year dry spell with men and now she had two trying to get in her pants. Well, one trying—the other had already succeeded. Paige’s body still felt taut and stretched and right and she was trying hard to not think about anything other than the fact she’d enjoyed it. The guilt and the fear and the weirdness at the thought of sleeping with a demon—she wasn’t ready to deal with all that.

  The tall thin trees gave way to a field of tall grass and swamp flowers and Paige crouched down, her hand on the butt of her gun as she watched the night. Clouds drifted, allowing a little more moonlight to shine down. The house was gray with age, bare wood gleaming, and as Paige watched, a shadow moved away from the broken stump of an old tree. It was a person. Sort of. It was moving in slow, deliberate steps. She couldn’t immediately identify the body language, but after a second, she realized what it looked like.

  When she was ten, the woman two farms over had about a hundred kids, or at least eight, anyway. One of them was born with Down Syndrome and Paige used to babysit him during harvest so he didn’t get in trouble when the family was out trying to get the crops in. For about two weeks in fall, a full-sized farm required more attention than even seven kids, one mother, one father, a grandfather and two aunts could provide. No one had extra energy to make sure Cody kept out of trouble and he never did grow up enough to really trust around a lot of machinery.

  For those two weeks a year, Paige practically moved over to the Williams’ farm and played with Cody. He was four or five years older, but he would see something as simple as a red rag on the barbed wire fence and smile in delight at the beauty of it.

  Paige was fairly sure that Mrs. Williams started inviting her over because she was worried that Paige had pulled back from almost everyone after her mother’s death. Considering how idiotic people kept telling her how it was a miracle that she’d survived out on that road, Paige had good cause to start hating people. Her mother had died—that wasn’t a miracle.

  And then pretty much the whole town knew her father had developed a serious love affair with the bottle and the school made her talk to a counselor about grief and loss once a week. Cody was the only one who made her feel normal. He didn’t care if she was cranky and he never asked her to talk about her mother. He lived in the minute.

  The shadow had his same deliberate steps, the head moved in the same lazy arcs, the person changed directions with the same random sort of pattern. It looked like Cody down there. Yeah, she was not going to be hunting down any low-level vamps if she had a choice about it. If they tried to eat her, then she’d reconsider, but in general, she was not okay killing things that weren’t good at defending themselves. And whoever had written all those vampire movies—they were idiots. Huge idiots.

  Movement caught her attention and she watched as Hunter moved through the trees. When he came out into the clearing, the clouds cleared from the moon and entirely too much light streamed down.

  Two more shadows rose from the weeds around the house, each moving with slow deliberate steps toward him. Hunter detoured toward the first one and she could see him raise his hand and shake it. He threw his toys, and for a second, only the vampire’s head followed the movement arc of the balls in the bright moonlight. Then with a tilt of his head, he headed for the toys. Hunter stood perfectly still for several seconds before he turned to intercept the second vampire.

  These weren’t feet-dragging, brain-eating zombies, but they weren’t vampires either, no matter what Hunter said. More importantly, these creatures didn’t have anything in common with Brady. She imagined Hunter shaking his toys in Brady’s face before throwing them. Yeah, that would not end well. She really hoped that wouldn’t end with Hunter dead, but she had her doubts. When Brady had threatened to kill Hunter, he looked pretty damn serious.

  Hunter distracted the second vampire, but numbers three and four were moving toward him. It seemed like they picked up speed after a while because number three had a good trot going. However, he caught the path of a particularly bright green ball and he detoured to chase the same toys vamp two was chasing. That left vamp number four—a woman in a long dress who seemed to move slower than the others.

  Hunter waved his hand and the balls were sailing through the air and she detoured north. Honestly, this was turning out far more anticlimactic than Paige would have guessed. Her stomach had knotted in fear, certain she was going to see carnage and blood.

  Instead, Hunter was just walking up to the front door. A fifth vampire—the shadow that had reminded Paige of Cody Williams—hadn’t even figured out there was anyone on the property. He seemed to be fascinated with the tilting remains of an old hand-crank well. He pushed th
e handle a few inches and then let it slide back with gravity. And then he repeated the same movement over and over. These guys weren’t too bright.

  Hunter got to the porch and he was moving slower now. If the higher-level vamps were faster and smarter, he was going to get himself killed taking on a house of them. Paige shook her head. If he was willing to commit suicide, she wasn’t going to go running to his rescue. Not this time.

  A window opened on the second floor and a woman looked out. She pushed open the doors that led to the second-story porch, but didn’t step out onto it, which was good because Paige was guessing that thing wasn’t going to hold anyone’s weight for long. In the moonlight, Paige couldn’t see many details, just the hair pulled back into a bun with a few shadowy wisps blowing around her face, a seriously hourglass figure and a tight dress. She wasn’t screaming in fear, so Paige figured she wasn’t a victim, but she sure didn’t move like the other vamps.

  Worse, Hunter didn’t seem to react to her presence on the porch above him. Paige could feel a cold desperation to help, but she was too far away and if she called out, she might alert the vamps in the house.

  Lowering a knapsack to the ground near the door, Hunter backed away from the door and off the porch. He had a second knapsack over his shoulder and Paige frowned. He’d given her all sorts of advice for handling the low-level vamps, but now that she thought about it, he hadn’t told her how he planned to handle a house full of smarter, faster demons.

  The Cody vamp turned to watch Hunter, and for a second, he seemed to debate whether this interesting new movement was worth giving up his toy. He lingered near the well mechanics, but then he did start walking toward Hunter with that curious head tilt. Hunter froze and waved his arm in a wide arc before letting go of more balls. Cody vamp happily wandered off to the side and dropped to his knees in the grass in search of the baubles. Yeah, Paige would have to be in a pretty shitty situation before she’d even consider killing one of those vamps.