Gina turned the corner, almost twisting her ankle. She wasn’t quite as graceful in heels as I was. When she wasn’t in drag, after all, she was Geraldo. A rather handsome Hispanic gay man.
And he had a totally different personality—Geraldo was a quiet artist. Introverted. Sexy in his own way. But I wasn’t his type, being a trans woman, so I’d never pursued him.
Only as Gina did she wear heels. Gina was a rambunctious, glamorous queen. But Gina only lived on stage, and for brief moments after her shows. She didn’t have as much practice in heels as I did.
You’d rarely catch me in flats; my butt looked better in heels. What can I say?
The vampire snarled. He was pissed. It was like some random stranger had walked by and taken food off his plate.
I knew he’d be angry. Pissed off vampires can be difficult. When they rage out, they get an extra dose of strength.
But this wasn’t about strength—it was about speed and agility. That’s where I had the advantage, because angry vampires also tend to act recklessly.
His jaw dropped, flashing his fangs in a futile attempt to terrify me, and he charged my position.
Sure, he moved fast. Not as fast as me.
I didn’t have my stake on hand, but I had my heels. I quickly grabbed my shoe from my right foot and kicked off the other.
Everything happened so quickly, it was all a blur.
I widened my stance, bracing for the collision. As the vamp dove at me, undoubtedly hoping to tackle me and feed from me. I parried to the right, narrowly avoiding his first attempt to take me out.
The vampire did an about-face. He didn’t hesitate before charging me a second time.
Predictable, I thought. The bloodsucker had falled into my trap.
The first time, he had a good run at it, a chance to build up speed, leading his charge head-first. Not the best angle for staking him.
Staking a vamp takes precision. I needed to get him straight on.
I set him up well. The first time, I pivoted to one side to avoid his assault. He came at me, this time, more upright, with his arms wide open, hoping to wrap me up before I could evade his charge.
Big mistake, asshole.
I was ready. I widened my stance for leverage. I held one of my Louboutin stilettos in my right hand at my side.
I had to time this perfectly.
I couldn’t show him my hand until he already had all his chips on the table. Until the momentum of his charge was too much for him to change course.
It all happened so fast that if anyone saw us it would have been a blur.
The vampire snarled as he dove headlong toward me, his arms still wide, his chest exposed.
And I thrust my stiletto heel into his heart.
Wide-eyed and jaw-dropped, the vampire looked at me in shock. The bloodsucker’s skin turned gray before he collapsed at my feet.
“Perfect,” I said to myself, looking over the vampire. Most vampires tried to stay up with current styles. They almost always wore black. Not because they were “goth,” but because black allowed them to blend into the shadows.
But older vampires, who’d walked the earth for more than a century, tended to default to older styles. I suppose they found keeping up with trends wearisome. And by the look of this one, the way he was dressed, I was certain he hadn’t been turned any time in the last hundred years.
This was what I was looking for.
Most younger vampires didn’t have a clue who Alice was—the vampire who stole my abilities. This one, an older vampire, would at the very least know of her. Even if he couldn’t tell me where she was, it was the best shot I’d had in a while to gather actionable intelligence on my target.
Usually I’d stake a vamp, and once it was clear they didn’t have any helpful information, I’d cut out their heart, burn it, and be done with it.
I’d have to take a little more time with this one, just in case he had information I could use. Couldn’t do it here. Didn’t have enough time. Not with the cops likely on the way.
I used to take more time with the vamps I caught. But over many hunts, I gained a sense for which ones might be more or less helpful to me.
A good interrogation took time to prepare. Of course, with my heel firmly lodged in the vampire’s heart, I literally had all the time in the world. Once I got him out of the alley.
I had a place. Not my apartment. Another place, for situations like this.
Contrary to popular belief, staking a vampire doesn’t totally kill the creature. Remove the stake and they come back. But it’s generally the first step. Hard to cut out a vampire’s heart if he’s still breathing.
And, technically speaking, he’d stay like this—dormant and corpse-like—indefinitely, so long as my heel remained in his heart.
Not that I intended to take any longer than necessary.
I had to set the scene: bind the vampire to ensure he couldn’t escape, then make sure I was near a window so that when the sun rose I could pull the curtains, if needed, as a way of forcing the vamp to talk.
Hopefully it wouldn’t take that long.
I cracked my knuckles and grabbed the vampire. I tossed him over my shoulder, careful not to dislodge my stiletto from his chest in the process. It must’ve been quite a scene—a diva, now barefoot, with a body across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
I might not look like much—but I’m one strong bitch.
And this vampire was about to find out I could be intimidating as hell when I wanted to be.
2
I YANKED MY stiletto heel out of the vampire’s chest. It wouldn’t take him long to come to.
I wiped my shoe off with the sleeve of my shirt; I didn’t want the blood to set in. I didn’t drop eight hundred dollars on a new pair of Louboutins to have them ruined before I’d even had a chance to perform a full set in them. So far, I’d worn them for only a single number.
Getting information was my prime objective. But that wasn’t the only reason I was looking forward to torturing this particular vampire.
He’d gone after one of my people. I had a vendetta.
I secured the vampire’s limp body to a chair, bound in chains, garlic cloves pressed through the links.
Perhaps it was a long shot.
I mean, assuming that any vampire could help me find the one vampire I was really seeking was sort of like assuming any Canadian you met had probably knew your friend in Toronto.
To date, I’d pulled off this stake-and-interrogate routine a dozen times. Again, not every vampire warranted the full treatment. But when I’d first started hunting these bastards, I used to do this for all of them—before I’d realized how many vampires there were, and how statistically unlikely it was that any random vampire would have good information on Alice.
The building was unused most of the year. The abandoned former factory usually housed the Edge of Hell, a pseudo-haunted house attraction in the West Bottoms. One of those walk-through experiences where costumed ghosts, goblins, and axe murderers jump out at visitors to give them a scare.
Not that frightening, if you ask me. I mean, if you’re paying to be scared, how terrifying can it really be? Especially when you know that the monster leaping out of the darkness toward you is really just a minimum-wage worker.
Of course, the exhibit was only in operation for Halloween season. That meant, the rest of the time, I could use the place to interrogate vamps.
None of them could tell me where Alice was. Half of them didn’t even know who she was. But most of the vampires I’d caught before were younglings, turned at some point during the last couple decades.
I couldn’t say exactly how old this vampire was—but I was relatively certain he had at least a century or two behind him. It wasn’t like I could just saw him in half and count the rings.
Not that I was opposed to trying, if it came to that.
But based on his accent, a few choice words from his vocabulary, and the way he carried himself, he generally gave t
he distinct impression that he’d come from another era. He was the sort I might have eaten if he were human when the witches first brought our kind to the new world… when they blessed the waters with our elemental essences.
If I was right about his approximate age, it meant he was probably a vampire before Alice was even turned. And given her reputation through the years, it was hard to imagine he wouldn’t know something.
The vampire groaned.
I slipped my stiletto back on my foot and examined his face. The vampire had a long scar down his right cheek. A wound, presumably, he’d endured at some point before he was turned.
His eyes remained shut. He’d open them, eventually. Once he realized he was back in the land of the living.
Usually when a vampire comes back from being staked, they spring back, ready to feed. The garlic I’d added to the chains made him more sluggish.
The vampire slowly opened his eyes.
“Good morning, sunshine,” I said.
The vampire winced.
“Oops,” I said. “My bad. I forgot that sunshine is a loaded word for you.”
“Who… What… Where am I?”
“The girl you tried to bite earlier. She was a friend of mine.”
“I didn’t mean… I just… I have to…”
“Yeah, yeah. You have to eat. You are what you are. I’ve heard the spiel before. No worries. She was just bait, anyway.”
“Bait?”
“And my heel was the hook.” I held my shoe and polished it in front of him. I hadn’t used Gina as bait at all, but I wanted him to think I’d manipulated everything. That I was in control, and had been, from the start. He’d be more inclined to cooperate if he thought I was more than an opportunistic hunter. I wanted him to believe I was a mastermind—and he’d fallen into a carefully set trap. “Normally I’d use a more conventional stake. But you know, every run-of-the-mill hunter uses stakes…”
“Well, you didn’t kill me. You could have cut out my heart if you wanted to…”
“You’re more useful to me alive, bloodsucker,” I said. “I’m looking for someone.”
The vampire shrugged, his hands tied behind his back. “What makes you think I’ll know the person you’re looking for?”
“Not a person,” I said. “A vampire.”
The vampire rolled his eyes. “Not likely. There are more of our kind these days than you know. And I prefer to work alone.”
I smiled at him. The loner vamp—another sign he was older. Younger vampires tend to horde up, form little vampire gangs. A foolish effort; I’m not the only hunter out there. And when vampires congregate and too many bodies start piling up, hunters will track them down.
Older vampires know better. Small enclaves of two or three vampires, generally. They spread their killings out—both in terms of space and time. Older vamps, in fact, don’t have to feed as often.
But older vampires also have histories. And back when Alice was turned, when vampires like this one roamed the continent, most of them knew each other. If he was as old as I suspected, he’d know who Alice was.
But I needed to hold my cards close to my chest. I couldn’t let him know what I suspected.
“First,” I said, trying to sound friendly and conversational, “why don’t you tell me your name?”
“What is it to you?”
“What is it to you what it is to me?” I asked, returning a question with a question. “I asked you your name, and seeing that your heart is still inside of your chest, obviously I don’t want you dead. But if you press me… well, I just polished my heels. I’d hate to have to use them again.”
“Staked by a shoe.” The vampire grunted. “Humiliating.”
“It’s a stiletto! Christian Louboutins,” I protested, my voice reaching another octave. “Do you know how much these beauties cost? Consider yourself privileged.”
“I don’t really care.”
“You will, if I stake you again and cut your heart out.” My words were threatening, but my tone remained conversational. A lot of interrogators, including other vampire hunters, make the mistake of raising their voice and cursing out their subjects. I’ve found that remaining calm and patient is more successful.
It isn’t just that people—if you could call vampires “people”—are more inclined to cooperate with someone they perceive as friendly, but a harsher tone communicates an impatience, an urgency, that would actually give my subject leverage in the interrogation. If the vampire thought I was desperate for information, he’d likely resist, knowing that in the end I couldn’t kill him.
A calm interrogator is more frightening. If he got the impression that if I killed him I could casually move on to my next lead, he’d be more rather than less likely to talk.
The vampire shook his head. “As long as I’ve lived, it would be a mercy to end my existence.”
“Or,” I said, “if you want to die, I could just leave you bound in garlic.”
“I could tolerate that.”
“Or, I could leave you bound in the sun. From what I understand, the sun doesn’t kill you. But it burns you… It’s like hell on earth, is it not?”
The vampire looked at me, his eyes meeting mine. I could see, from the way his red irises darted back and forth, that he was scared. It’s not every day that someone strikes fear into a vampire’s heart. “Why don’t you tell me your name?”
“You aren’t exactly in a position to negotiate.” I held my stiletto into a single beam of light shining in the window from the street. “And I asked first.”
“My name is Wolfgang.”
I cocked my head. “I think I’ve heard of you. Not a common name. German, isn’t it?”
“I was born in das Vaterland,” the vampire said. “I was turned shortly after we arrived in the new country.”
“The name’s better suited to a werewolf. I’ve met the original one, by the way.”
Wolfgang raised an eyebrow. “The original werewolf?”
I nodded. “I’m familiar with the original vampire, too.”
“Niccolo the Damned.” Wolfgang paused a moment. “He was my sire.”
“Not surprised. Haven’t seen him in a while, have you?”
Wolfgang shook his head. “He has seemingly disappeared.”
“You can blame me for that.” It was a lie; I didn’t know what happened to him. I hadn’t actually met him, personally. But one of his progeny, a female vampire named Mercy Brown, had befriended me when we were both locked up in the Vilokan Asylum for the Magically and Mentally Deranged. Last I’d heard from the other vampires I’d interrogated, she’d managed to take her sire’s place as the head of the Vampire Council. She was possibly the only vampire I’d tolerate.
Mercy, too, I once used as bait. I knew that Alice, the vampire who took my abilities, was hunting her. It’s why I originally went to New Orleans. But I’d only recently become human at the time, and eating humans was a habit I’d yet to shake. Come to find out, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans has something of a stranglehold on the supernatural community in her city.
My dietary choices got me locked up in her asylum where, as luck would have it, I happened to encounter Mercy. All I had to do was wait until Alice showed up. I knew the vampire couldn’t resist the chance to corner Mercy in a facility she couldn’t easily escape. But when Mercy and I ended up teaming up to take her down, well… Alice escaped.
I tracked her north, all the way to Kansas City. But then the trail went cold.
That was five years ago.
I never stopped looking.
Alice was a nightwalker. A vampire created by the Order of the Morning Dawn to eliminate other vampires. The Order hated vampires. They despised witches. The older the vampire or the witch, the more likely they were to be on the Order’s most-wanted list.
But the Order was also insanely hypocritical.
If it took making more vampires in order to eliminate vampire-kind, if it meant using witchcraft to kill witches… for the Order
, the ends justified the means.
Probably why she was able to excuse attacking me and stealing my shapeshifting ability—because she could use it to get closer to Mercy. I was deemed an “acceptable” cost.
Besides, I wasn’t human. I was expendable.
The Order of the Morning Dawn… speciesist bastards.
I tracked the Order down. It was the first place I looked. But from what I could tell, Alice had defected. She’d never reported back after she escaped Mercy and me in New Orleans.
But this vampire… he was the best shot I’d had in a while.
Wolfgang rolled his eyes. “I highly doubt you staked Niccolo the Damned.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t say I staked him.”
“The only thing you’ve proven is that you know who my sire is,” Wolfgang said. “And that you realize he’s disappeared.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It isn’t information about Niccolo that I’m seeking.”
“Then what is it you want, hunter?”
“I’m looking for a vampire. A nightwalker created by the Order of the Morning Dawn.”
Wolfgang huffed. “You’re looking for Alice?”
I nodded.
“Try wonderland.”
“I’ve followed every rabbit hole I can find,” I said, “and none of them let me to her.”
“Why are you looking for Alice?” Wolfgang asked. “You aren’t a vampire. You aren’t a witch. There’s no reason why you should have a vendetta against… Unless… Wait…”
I cocked my head. “Spit it out, vampire.”
“You’re the shifter! I’d heard the rumors, that she’d suckered some elemental into giving her his abilities…”
“Her abilities,” I said. “I’m not a him.”
“Whatever,” Wolfgang said. “Most vampires want her dead, too. You’re barking up the wrong tree, shifter.”
“Then help me,” I said. “Help me find her and I’ll let you go.”
Wolfgang rolled his eyes. “You have no intention of freeing me.”
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 93