by Declan Finn
Enrico smiled. “Can we have some of that? I can think of some guys who would really like being that strong. Blood or saliva. Either way.”
Bram cringed. “Normally, the saliva thing isn’t usually recommended like some sort of performance-enhancing drug. It’s not a steroid. It’s a supernatural force. And the blood to make minions … there are a lot of side effects you don’t want.”
Robert cleared his throat, loudly. “Marco, what does this have to do with your problem?”
Marco smiled. “We treat the vampire virus as the methadone to my shapeshifter virus’ heroin.”
Robert laughed. “I hadn’t seen that coming.”
Captain Hendershot looked around the room, as even Enrico nodded. “What am I missing?”
The doctor laughed at him. “Methadone is used to treat heroin addiction because it competes with the same sites in the brain that heroin uses. If the vampire virus is in Marco’s system at the same time as the lycanthropy virus, the two should fight each other. At the very least, the vampire virus should look at the competing virus and see it as something that doesn’t belong in the new host.”
Enrico snickered. “So that means she has to—”
Tolbert gave him a dirty look.
Marco looked at him and growled.
The mafia knee-breaker fell silent.
Amanda slapped Marco lightly on the arm. “Behave, Marco.”
He chuckled. “Come on, I don’t get to have any fun around here?”
Robert raised his hand, and waved it, drawing everyone’s attention to him. “Pardon me for interrupting, but I think this is a little more urgent. First, the werewolf that bit him is still outside?”
Dougherty nodded. “Aye, sir, he is. At least his body is, we put a bullet in his head on general principles.”
Amanda shook her head. “We could have interrogated him.”
Marco took her hand in his and squeezed it. “Unlikely. We’re talking about a lone wolf attack—” He winced at his own pun. “Pardon the expression. I can’t imagine he was sent in with a goal of surviving. If he said Allahu Ackbar on his way to dusty death, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
Bram raised a brow. “How did you know that he had the ISIS logo tattooed on his shoulder?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “The second problem is simple: the next full moon is tomorrow night.”
Chapter 16
Once Bitten
Without a word, Marco took Amanda’s hand and rose from the love seat, walking straight out the living room and upstairs. She didn’t even hesitate to follow him, because she knew what he had on his mind. It was business, but it would be pleasurable enough.
Marco opened the door for her with his free hand and drew her into his bedroom before him. He closed the door, and they pulled each other closer, coming together in an embrace that would have appeared to an outsider that they were tackling each other. They kissed each other with an out of control passion that was less about his soon-to-be-furry medical condition, and more about unbridled impulse. Her arms wrapped around his neck, holding him to her lest he escape.
Marco’s hands slid down her back, untucked her shirt, running both of his hands along her lower back. Amanda combed her fingers through his hair as her tongue penetrated his mouth and deepened the kiss.
Unlike the last time they had molested each other with this much fervor, their fronts were pressed against each other. Amanda had hardly noticed until they both started moving to the bed, and found herself poked in the stomach.
Amanda gasped at the sensation. Marco growled, as though he was a car that had just revved its engine. But neither one pulled away as they fell onto the bed.
His mouth went to her neck as though he was going to devour her.
She started to pant. “I’m supposed to bite you. I have to bite you.”
Marco growled. It was only slightly playful and mostly feral. “And I want to do more than that with you.”
Amanda’s fingers curled on his back, her nails just barely digging into his skin. He growled even more fiercely and pressed the length of his body against her. She groaned.
Amanda flipped Marco over, pinning him at the wrists as she straddled him. Her mouth shot to his neck and kissed and licked at his skin.
It was his turn to gasp. And then groan.
Then he felt the pinch.
Her fangs had slid into his carotid artery. She gave a contented little purr as her lips closed around the skin. She didn’t drink, but continuously ran her tongue over the punctures. This drove her saliva into his blood, and with it, the vampire “virus.” She allowed herself to simply taste his skin.
He was hers. All hers.
As she felt Marco pressed against her, Amanda could only imagine being all his.
At the thought, her heart stopped, dead, for five seconds, and then sped up. It both thrilled her, and terrified her, like a roller coaster with a deliberately rickety feel to it.
Amanda pushed it out of her mind—all of the excitement at the prospect of marrying him, and all of the terrors it brought with it. She focused on his taste, on his touch, and most importantly, his smell.
It was certainly the smell of home.
Police Commissioner Ray Wilson hung up the phone, then looked at Jennifer Bosley. He sighed. “You know, your friend Marco is quite a handful. Did he come back to New York to start a war on his first night home?”
Jennifer rolled her deep brown eyes and shook her head. “I only just met him a few hours ago.” She grinned at him. “You can’t blame this one on me, dearie.”
Wilson shook his head. “There’s got to be something within the vampire community to ride herd on this sort of thing, isn’t there?”
She tilted her head forward and looked at him, as though over glasses she didn’t wear. “You have a problem with him ridding your fair city of troublesome vampires?”
Wilson deflated and leaned back in his chair. “No, I guess not. But it would be nice if he didn’t go on a rampage and leave a mess for other people—namely my men—to clean up.”
“The last thing I would do is tell you how to do your job—or how your men should do it—but fighting people like me isn’t neat or orderly.”
Wilson scoffed. He had encountered more of his fair share of the fang-and-fur set in Vietnam than he could ever tell anyone, so he understood her statement as well as anyone. “Right now, I have to clean up a large part of Fifth Avenue because it looks like a row of buildings had bombs planted in them. Then I have several reports of wolves roaming the streets. Can you believe it? Wolves? What’s next, dragons?”
Bosley winced. Wilson cocked his head at that. She tended to be unflappable, so that was telling. “What am I missing here?”
“If all of this is connected … dragons would be the least of your problems.”
Marco finished duct taping the curtains of his room so no sunlight would penetrate, and sat back next to Amanda.
“Are you sure you do not want to come to my place?”
“That’s about ten miles from here,” Marco answered, “and in the dark. I don’t want you to be a walking target.” He shrugged. “No offense, but we don’t know how Igor located you so easily last night. For all we know, we could have some kind of vampire-offspring connection we don’t know about. Besides, I don’t want someone to take a shot at you.”
She smiled. “How sweet.” She glanced around the room, crucifixes dangling from the ceiling and rosaries hanging on the walls. “And the shrine chic?”
“I don’t want Igor eavesdropping on us.”
“He’s Misha,” she corrected.
“Whatever.” Marco smiled. “Besides, there are some things I want to try, now that I’m in control, and not a furry.” He raised both hands before him in what looked like a modified boxing stance, but what was actually a Krav Maga pose. She was a little surprised that he bothered with that level of formality. Most of the time, he would say that it gave away precisely what to expect from him.
But then again, Marco would expect someone to anticipate him and plan to use that against anyone who presumed to know his skills
So, Amanda decided to act accordingly—and assumed that he would do something other than use Krav Maga. She tried to think of any fighting style Krav didn’t steal from and failed.
Amanda sighed, then leaped for the ceiling, pushing off with her hands. She came down on Marco, pinning him to the floor without a problem.
She smiled. “Was that what you wanted to try?”
He grinned slyly. “You have me right where I want me.”
She raised a brow at this. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Marco muttered. He shifted beneath her, uncomfortable with just how much he enjoyed his predicament. He didn’t want to move, he did not want to stop, and he didn’t want to jab her with his growing arousal. “By the way, do you know why I went to San Francisco?”
She stared into his deep blue eyes a moment. The little microscopic motions of her eyes made it look like she tried to look inside his head. Amanda finally nodded. “Because you were in love with me.”
“Ah…” was the best he could come up with. Now he gazed straight into her eyes. Lord, he just wanted to… “So, when did you figure it out?”
“When you told me you were in love with me. After that, it did not take a genius to reason backwards from there. You were afraid to let me get near. Why?”
Marco smiled, an expression absent of any real mirth. “There are times I scare myself. Being a killer by instinct isn’t exactly relaxing. Personally, I don’t give a damn that I had it, but around you…”
“So you applied for the farthest away college you could find.”
He nodded. “I was afraid of hurting you…I’m quite effective at hurting things. Though in your case, I was afraid of hurting you emotionally.”
“And now you know better, right?”
Marco laughed. “You’re kidding, right? Now, you’re the one who’d better be careful of hurting me.” He sighed, content.
Amanda’s lip turned up slightly at the comment but decided to go back onto the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me how scared you were?”
He knew what she meant—his predatory nature. “Because I didn’t want to be reduced to Ajax.”
“The cleaning solvent?”
“Ajax, perhaps the second greatest fighter of the Trojan war. He wasn’t Achilles or wily Ulysses; he won through brute force. But when the war was over, there was no place for him in the peaceful society he’d helped create. He was a warrior who had nothing to fight. In the end, he killed himself, rejected by all that was left, because he gained nothing from the war, though he helped win it. For the modern set, think of the first Dirty Harry movie—he’s the opposite end of the coin from the serial sniper of the film, brutal, cold-blooded, and the only thing that stands between the monsters and society, but at the end of the day, he’s left alone, and society doesn’t want old soldiers around. They’re ‘too brutal,’ ‘too violent.’ It happened to Sherman, Ariel Sharon, Ajax, Patton, all because they had to go into the hell of war, play by the rules of death, and were demoted in the eyes of all because ‘that’s not how civilized people behave.’ Well, I don’t want to be just a counter-predator.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Anti-terrorism is blowing a hole in an ISIS leader's brain from a mile away with a sniper rifle. Counter-terrorism is bombing Arafat’s compound and half of the West Bank, fighting terror with terror. A counter-predator is like having a serial killer that preys on other serials.”
Marco’s eyes went dark and nearly black, letting his rage, his intense violent streak burning through. “This is me.” He blinked back to normal. “And this is me.” He looked into Amanda’s eyes and smiled, letting all of his love and passion burn through differently. “And this is me.”
He leaned up and kissed her deeply.
Marco paused and almost jerked when he felt Amanda’s hand grip him. She smiled herself and whispered, “And this is you, too.”
They stopped for a moment and stared at one another for a shocked moment, unsure of what do to next. Both of them had been terrified of what they would do to each other. But they still wanted each other with a passion that neither one had felt before.
Marco’s hands roamed over Amanda’s stomach, dipped down under her shirt, and came up, sliding along her skin. His hands didn’t go anywhere wrong, just around her waist, and up her back. And Marco went in for the kiss.
Amanda turned her head, and Marco didn’t stop, going for her shoulder, and slowly kissing up her neck. She gasped at the sudden contact.
“Marco,” she said tensely, “I think I need to bite you again.”
“Hmmmmm,” he growled. “I think it’s my turn to bite you,” he said as he took her earlobe between his teeth and tugged slightly. “And you taste good.” He pressed against her. Amanda’s breathing speed up. His lips touched her ear, and he said, “I want to eat you up. And I don’t mean in a bad way.”
That was enough out of character for Amanda to slide her hands from his back and place them on his chest. She didn’t want to push too hard since she didn’t want to send him into the wall. “Marco, this isn’t you. This is the animal talking.”
Marco paused, his lips still on her neck. He pulled back, studying her face, confused. “You’re kidding, right? You know what I thought when I first saw you?”
“Take a picture, it will last longer?”
He shook his head. “That’s what I said. I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He leaned in, going almost nose-to-nose with her, his eyes boring into hers. “I want you.”
She pressed on him a little more. “No, you can’t. You don’t believe in –”
Marco blinked, his eyes going straight to blue. “Wolves are monogamous. They mate for life. Like Catholics.” His left hand stayed on her lower back, and his right touched her face. “I’m proposing…again. I don’t want your body, I want you… and your body.”
Father Rodgers sat in the recently vacated love seat. He took a drag on what was left of his cigar and relaxed, looking up at the ceiling. “Well, we have a temporary fix to a long-term problem.”
“I’m worried about the next three nights,” Robert answered. “Everything else can wait, as far as I’m concerned.”
Bram looked back and forth from the priest to Marco’s father and back again. “Neither one of you is worried about what’s happening upstairs right now?”
Robert smiled as he rose from the bed. “He’s turning into a were-something, and she’s a vampire. They went up…” He looked to the priest. “What? Three minutes ago?”
Rodgers bobbled his head in a semi-nod. “About.”
“If something untoward were going to happen, we would have heard the bed collapse by now. I’m interested in turning in if no one else minds.”
Hendershot nodded, then looked to Bram and Dougherty. “Take up positions. We need to secure this house, and perhaps this block. We’ve seen some of the weapons that the assassin’s minions have used before. I don’t want an RPG coming in through the front window. Monsignor, do you wish me to take you home?”
Rodgers shrugged. “I can sleep on the couch, if that’s okay with you, Doctor?”
Robert nodded. “Sure. Not a problem.”
Enrico shrugged. “I’m going to wait for the cleanup crew, get a ride with them.”
Tolbert nodded. “I’ll be around for a few. My patrols have been stranger and stranger lately.”
The ninjas all pulled out of the room. The doctor went straight up to bed. Enrico moved into the hall, looking through the glass of the new front door for his clean-up people.
The only two people left in the living room were Rodgers and Tolbert.
The cop looked at the priest for a moment, studying him as he slowly, thoughtfully processed the cigar. “What’s on your mind, Monsignor?”
Rodgers blinked behind his coke-bottle glasses and looked at
Tolbert. “What do you mean?”
Tolbert crossed his long legs and folded his hands on his knee. “You have the look of my L.T. when he starts thinking over problems.”
Rodgers nodded slowly. He focused his eyes on a spot over Tolbert’s head for a long moment. “Marco told me about his run-in with Misha—the latest threat.”
“And?”
Rodgers’ eyes were still off somewhere else. “Back in September, the threat was invulnerable: it healed so fast, cutting his head off was like cutting through water – the wound was healing before the blade came out the other end.”
Tolbert cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “That Mister Day thing, right? I understood that he was some sort of demon.”
Rodgers nodded. “He was Asmodeus, one of the princes of Hell itself. Which makes me wonder what greater threat this vampire might be.”
The cop winced. “I’m going to need a bigger gun.”
“Oh, if that were the case, guns wouldn’t help much.” The priest shook his head leaned back, considering the next problem. “In addition to that, after a certain level, vampires begin to manifest other powers. Stronger powers. The one I’m worried about is Soul Fire.”
Tolbert laughed for a moment, thinking over just how ridiculous it sounded. “Soul fire? Sounds like a crappy Game of Thrones title.”
Rodgers chuckled. “After a fashion. In this case, it’s a weapon. I would even call it one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of vampire powers and abilities.”
The cop shook his head. “So what? They throw fireballs? Big deal. That hasn’t been impressive since the flamethrower.”
Rodgers’ eyes narrowed behind his glasses, and his mouth went into a straight line. He pulled the cigar out of his mouth. “Has anyone explained to you why crosses burn one type of vampire, and not Amanda?”
“One’s good. One’s evil?”
“After a fashion.” The priest sighed. “You see, vampires have free will. They’re not automatically evil. After one becomes a vampire, the soul and the body of the vampires become so close together, any actions taken on their part literally become part of them. The more good or evil actions they commit, the stronger they are. And if they’re evil, everything in Bram Stoker applies.”