I glanced at Greta. She had a hungry look in her eyes. I imagined it was the same look that I had in mine when I woke up each morning, ready for my next drink of the red stuff. That’s the other problem with Greta. She’s always hungry.
“What about one of these?” she asked with mock sincerity.
We walked out into the street side by side. I stopped to lock the door behind me, casually, as if there was no rush.
“Sorry, honey. You know the rules. No pets.”
We were both smiling; it seemed to confuse the werewolves. They outnumbered us five to one and they expected trepidation at the least, outright terror at the most. Cocksure bravado was not in their list of likely prey responses. Unfortunately for them, we weren’t prey.
A wave of holy power hit me as they crossed the center lane. The four in the middle were true believers; no wonder they felt confident. I realized immediately why Greta hadn’t wanted to fight them on her own. She doesn’t heal from holy wounds easily. The more powerful the vampire, the more quirks he or she has. That was one of hers.
The true believers were going to be the real problem. Most werewolves just charge in without thinking, but these guys held back, waiting, I supposed, on the good reverend’s word.
“Let’s not do this, Reverend,” I said. “I’m not a bad guy. Ask Jackie, down at the—”
Reverend made the sign of the cross with his rosary-clad paw and spoke Latin:“In nòmine Patris, et Fìlii, et Spìritus Sancti.”
“Amen,” the other werewolves said in unison. My teeth went numb, my fangs retracted, and I took two involuntary steps backward. You only feel power like that every once in a while, and generally not from locals. These guys were from the Lycan Diocese, or the one with the rosary was; he had to be. What the Inquisition was to witches the Lycan Diocese is to vampires and other things that might threaten the therianthropic flock. Your average skinchanger can’t go to them for help, but William obviously had some pull.
This was exactly the sort of attention I’d wanted to avoid.
“William was right to call us,” said the big one with the giant cross. He unlimbered the heavy thing as he spoke and swung it like a giant hammer. Greta screamed, but I couldn’t move, as if a spell were fixing me in place. The cross hit me midchest, igniting the front of myWelcome to the Void T-shirt and hurling me back into the brick next to theCasablanca poster at the side of the Pollux’s main entrance.
“I was kind of disappointed when Deacon sent you instead of coming himself. I see that I was wrong,” one of the other werewolves told him. Three werewolves on the left teamed up on Greta, grabbing her as the one called Reverend advanced. He placed his rosary-wrapped paw at her throat. The sizzle and pop of her flesh was all I could hear, the smell of the rosary charring her flesh.
She screamed out one word, “Daddy,” and then, suddenly, I was free. I could move again.
Speed. Most vampires have it all the time. Mine comes and goes. Sometimes I can control it, but usually it just kicks in and out. This time, it kicked in. Each sizzling pop of Greta’s flesh resounded like a gunshot. My whole body began to vibrate. I felt like I was going to lose control, go into one of my rage blackouts, but then, somehow, I didn’t. In a wave of remembered cinnamon scents, my proximity to Rachel, even asleep upstairs in the Pollux, gave me reins for my rage. I took a deep breath and charged.
In an instant I was on the three werewolves holding Greta, bypassing the two werewolves with the cross-studded collars that were headed toward me. I cocked my hands back and plunged my claws through the backs of two of Greta’s captors. My hands closed around their hearts and I let them each beat a single time before I tore them out.
It must have broken Reverend’s concentration or something, because suddenly Greta could move, too. Greta’s claws were out and I couldn’t stifle my laughter when she gave Reverend a knuckle-deep two-finger eye poke, Three Stooges style, accompanied by an imitation of Curly’s famous “Nyuk nyuk.”
I tossed the two hearts I was holding down onto the pavement. The remaining werewolf with a grip on Greta let her go and threw up. Weak stomach, I guessed.
Reverend drew back howling, clutching at his ruined eyes, blood matting the fur around them. The sight distracted me, and the two collared werewolves took the opportunity to sink their fangs into either shoulder. The shoulder bite I’d gotten on Friday had hurt; two hurt more than twice as bad. The added sizzle of their collars against my cheeks didn’t help either. I grabbed them both by the scruffs of their necks like oversize puppies and flung them across the street. The movement didn’t do my shoulders any good, but I didn’t have much choice.
“Don’t fucking bite me,” I snarled furiously. “I’m the vampire! I bite you. You do not get to fucking bite me!”
I pointed my finger at the remaining combatants. “You can claw me. You can hit me. Hell, run me over with a truck, but no biting or I’m going to stop dicking around here and you won’t even have time to run away.”
Everybody stopped.
“And another thing, your fight is with me and me alone. You touch my little girl again and when I’m done with you, I’ll get your scent from the pieces, I’ll track it back to your home and I’ll bring the fight to your kids, your family. Does that sound fucking fair to you, assholes?”
They seemed to suddenly shrink before me, or maybe I was expanding. I could feel a familiar burning in my chest. I wasn’t just standing on the brink of a blackout, I had jumped off the cliff and now everyone was waiting to see if I would catch the rope dangling behind me.
“Oh, great!” Greta sighed. “You guys went and pissed him off! Now he’s going to go all uber vamp and I’m not going to get to play anymore.”
“Okay,” Reverend said softly, his paws still pressed to his eyes.
“Okay what?”
“Just let us leave. We heard what happened to the Howlers, but we assumed you’d had help. Lots of help. We couldn’t believe that you’d done it alone. I can see we were wrong. So just let us take Jim and leave.”
“Who the hell is Jim?” I asked.
He pointed blindly in the direction of the werewolf with the broken neck.
“Okay, Reverend.” I smiled. “You have a deal. You grab your boy Jim and get the hell out of here. Anybody that wants to go can go, but if I see you around here again, you die. Oh, and I want you to tell your boss something for me.”
“You can’t do that, Reverend!” one of the collar-wearing fuzzies protested. “They’ve killed Bruce and Annie. We can’t just walk away. They are unholy monsters. We have to kill them, now!” One of them had been a girl? I glanced down at the bodies, but they were too furry for me to tell. Dead werewolves do change back to human form, but only when the sun hits them.
The Reverend seemed to think it over before answering his packmate. He didn’t take long. “I’m sorry, Paul, but William is going to have to come out here with us if he’s going to send us up against something like this. That isn’t a normal vampire. It can’t be. A normal vampire could not have broken free of my spell like that. You can stay here if you want, but the rest of us are going.” Eyes still covered, he turned blindly back toward me. “What is it you wanted me to tell William?”
“Tell him I know who killed the werewolves out at the lake and it wasn’t me or any of my people. I’ll admit to having killed his son, but he killed my son, not to mention my car, so I’m willing to call it even and let things blow over. If Willy Boy won’t go for that, then I’m even willing to find the ones responsible for what happened out at the lake and gift wrap them for your boss. You got all that?”
Reverend nodded.
“One more thing. Tell him I’ll need an answer by tomorrow night.” I pulled Greta back to the sidewalk, trying not to pay attention to how badly burned her neck had gotten.
I shouldn’t have spent so much time talking. Reverend pulled his hands away from freshly healed peepers, a bit bloodshot but clearly functional. This time my speed didn’t kick in. Damn it. Before
I could react, the two werewolves next to him grabbed me, one furry bastard on each arm. Reverend reached up and put the paw with the rosary over my eyes. An eye for an eye. It was even less fun than El Segundo, but this time I had Greta at my side. I heard the slight jingle of werewolf collars as they ran for her, but she was already in motion.
I heard the swoosh of Pug Nose’s big hammer-cross thing, and felt the displacement of air brush past my face as it just missed me, connecting with Reverend instead. His skull caved in with the sound of a smashing watermelon, music to my ears.
“You missed,” Greta taunted.
Two sets of claws I couldn’t see tore into my belly, spilling my guts onto the concrete about the same time I heard the sickening tear of a werewolf’s head being torn from his neck.
“Grow that back, Rev.” Greta laughed again, but the laugh turned into a shriek and a sizzle. Damn it. Not sure of what to do, I jumped backward, carrying my two captors with me, shattering the glass doors at the front of the Pollux and landing with a crash in what used to be the ticket booth.
The werewolf on my left arm relaxed his grip and I used the moment to tear free of him; then I pulled in the one on my right and sank my fangs into his throat. Werewolf blood doesn’t taste much different than human blood. The tricky part is not getting any fur stuck in your teeth.
I didn’t have time for a prolonged snack, just enough to speed my healing. Blood is both food and medicine for us. I tore out enough of his throat to put him out of the fight, and rubbed my eyes against the wound. Gross, but effective. My vision returned, but it was still cloudy, like viewing the world through a sheet of wax paper. Lucky for me, werewolf silhouettes are easy to recognize.
I turned on the second werewolf just in time to get a claw slash to the chest as he extricated himself from the ruined ticket booth. Cuts and scrapes from the glass dotted his hide. Behind him, I could see Greta going toe to toe with pug-face and the others in the middle of the street.
A minivan sped by, swerving to avoid the melee, and I could only imagine what the driver would remember. Greta used the distraction to snatch the railroad-tie cross away from Bulldog and concuss him with it, her hands igniting even as she touched the wood. She sank her flaming claws into Bulldog, using his blood to extinguish the flames, and then latched onto his neck with her fangs.
I pulled myself upright and boxed my opponent’s ears. He howled in pain and I did it again. The second time, I heard the pops I was waiting for and he dropped to his knees.
I saw that Greta was now on her own against the collared werewolves that had been helping Bulldog, so I simply wrenched my opponent’s jaws apart, taking the top half of his skull with me as I turned away, hastily stuffing guts into my rapidly healing torso.
I charged toward Greta only to get pulled off my feet by Jim, the werewolf with the no-longer-broken neck. He had the same fighting style as the wolf from the alleyway, and I had terrible déjà vu as he battered my head first into the concrete, then the brick, then the bench in front of the Pollux.
I caught afwoosh of flame out of the corner of my eye as Wolfboy kept swinging, applying the tiger by the tail principle. One of the werewolves had removed his collar and strapped it around Greta’s neck. He and his companions were holding her down as she burned.
So much for keeping my temper. My vision blurred, and then everything went dark, but I could still hear the screaming. Usually, a rage blackout was a hole in time that I could never get back, but this time was different. I heard flesh rending and tearing. I heard bones break and smelled fur charring. Underneath it all, there was another noise, like wings flapping in the night. Finally, when everything was silent, I could see again. Greta was in my arms and the fuzzies were scattered in piles across the street. One of them was impaled on the massive railroad-tie cross, his ribs splayed open by the massive wooden center beam protruding from his chest. The rosary beads and cross-studded collars were nowhere to be seen. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what had happened to them.
I took Greta inside the Pollux and called Tiko. He’s an oni—sort of a Japanese ogre. His kind are body-disposal specialists. They eat them. Sometimes they play with them first. I don’t ask any questions as long as the corpses go away and don’t show up again.
“I need you to get out here,” I said when he answered. “I’ve got a bunch of dead werewolves for you…and the good news is that some of them had shiny new trucks.”
Tiko said he’d get there as quickly as he could, but that he was going to have to charge extra. “I have a few cousins over in Georgia who could help,” he offered, “if you’re going to keep killing off werewolves left and right. We can only eat so much.”
“Yeah. Call ‘em,” I said, sighing. “There may be seventy more where those came from and who knows what else.”
I hung up before he said anything else and carried Greta up to my office. She was pretty badly burned. There would be no talking to William now. Son for son, I was willing to accept. I was even close to overlooking the Mustang. But now he’d fucked with my little girl and there was going to be hell to pay.
20
ERIC:
EYE OF THE…?
One of the things Roger taught me was that a sire, if he or she is powerful enough, can heal their offspring with their blood. Not that he’d meant to teach me on purpose, but near the end of the whole El Segundo thing, the only way we found to heal the cross-shaped burns Roger received was to take him home to mommy. He, like Greta, had difficulty healing wounds inflicted with holy implements. I’d thought the burns were pretty darn funny, myself. Anyway, we’d looked up Roger’s sire in Atlanta and she had taken care of his wounds.
I didn’t get to meet her; Roger made me wait outside. For weeks afterward, I had to hear how she’d had this whole ritual that I thought was her way of making sure Roger knew what a pain in the ass it was to do the healing for him. Roger had been impressed, but I was pretty sure that it was little more than the strategically placed flour women get on their faces in the movies. You know, so the audience can tell they’ve been toiling for hours to bake those instant cookies?
As far as I could tell, the ritual was like that, all pomp and circumstance, and highly unnecessary. Fortunately for Greta, she had me for a sire; trust me, I’m powerful enough, and I have no use for ritualistic ass kissing.
I tore my wrist open with my fangs and bled directly onto her ruined face, working the blood into the remaining skin, smearing it across bare bone where necessary. Skin bubbled back into place, like burning in reverse. Greta’s hair grew back long and blonde, the same as when I had embraced her. My blood bubbled like thick red hydrogen peroxide over the marks on her neck, only when the bubbling was over, the wounds weren’t just disinfected, they were gone.
I moved on to her injured hands, withered stick fingers crackling as I doused them liberally with blood. It started to work immediately. The claw marks on her side and a nasty bite she had taken to the left calf healed just as quickly after a similar treatment.
When I was done with the front, I rolled her over and checked her back. There were a few claw marks, but they had already started healing, so I left them alone. My own wounds were gone by the time I finished with hers, but I didn’t feel the hunger I thought I should. Between my own healing and bleeding all over Greta, I should have been ravenous. Instead, I felt nothing.
I washed myself off using the sink in my Pollux bedroom and changed into jeans, tennis shoes, and a freshWelcome to the Void T-shirt. By the time I was done Greta was waking up. The clock in my office read four o’clock. That meant I’d slept for a good hour before the fight, maybe more. I should have been feeling the daily hunger as well, but I wasn’t. True, I’d ingested a little werewolf blood, but that didn’t account for everything.
“Dad?”
Greta stood up, covered in blood, and looked down at what was left of her clothes. The running shoes were okay and her panties had survived (they were soaked with blood, but technically intact); the
rest was in a desperate state. “Okay, either you healed me or you thought it would be fun to blood wrestle your unconscious naked daughter.”
I averted my eyes. My first thought was to send her down to the dressing room Rachel had appropriated, but Greta was taller than Rachel and more endowed. “You can probably find some clothes across the street in the club, but if Tiko is out there, I’m going to want to walk over with you. Oni have two favorite pastimes: eating people and raping them. Tiko is a good guy as far as oni go, but—”
“Seeing me naked and covered in blood might stretch his self-control a little?”
“Yeah, something like that. And you can’t kill him…. I need him right now.”
She walked out and I waited, listening. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, the door opening and closing, but I didn’t hear her go outside. I couldn’t hear Tiko working, but I assumed that was why she had stopped. Finally her footsteps echoed on the stairs again, then down the hall to my office door.
“Is he out there?”
“Yep.”
“So you came back to get me.” She nodded and I headed out with her. “Good girl.”
“Dad?” she asked on the stairs.
“Yes?”
“Is there something wrong?” She bit her lip nervously. “Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?”
“What? Where the hell did that come from?” We stopped midway down the stairs and she put a hand on my shoulder. She looked genuinely concerned.
“No, nothing, it’s okay, it’s just, you know, your eyes…”
I didn’t know. “No. What about my eyes?”
“They’re still…doing the thing.”
Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires Page 53