Kreshnik somehow reached around and found the handle of the sai jutting out of Boone’s stomach. Wrenching the sai, the vampire rolled out from under Boone as the latter screamed in agony, clutching his punctured midsection.
Kreshnik rose and locked its eyes on Boone, cursing in his language and spitting. It stalked off, away from Boone, and the wounded man used this as an opportunity to get up on his knees and then his feet.
When Boone turned, Kreshnik was shouldering the RPG and aiming it at him.
“Fuck!” Boone went to run, stepping on one of his discarded stakes, which rolled under his foot. He collapsed as Kreshnik fired, the rocket streaking over Boone’s prone form.
“Oh dear,” murmured Rainford as the rocket broke through the fence ringing the park and impacted one of the pumps at the gas station. The warhead exploded and then the gasoline reservoirs under the ground ignited. The men watching the fight against the fence evaporated as the chain link fence itself disappeared.
Emmanuela shook her head.
Kreshnik stared at the fireball blossoming in the night like a child staring at fireworks. Boone rushed the vampire, shooting in low, wrapping his arms around Kreshnik’s upper thighs, using his momentum to lift the vampire into the air. He slammed it to the dirt and yanked the emptied tube from its fingers.
“I would not have believed this,” Rainford spoke to Emmanuela, watching as Boone repeatedly pummeled the felled vampire with the body of the RPG. “Astounding, utterly astounding. You know, by all rights, this man should be dead.”
“We’re running tests on his blood now,” confided Emmanuela. “It’s a pity I won’t be able to share the results with you.”
“It’s a pity you will not be able to see them yourself.”
Boone’s head snapped back, Kreshnik’s booted foot connecting with his jaw. He staggered backwards, shaking the stars out of his head. When he had cleared his vision enough to see, he saw Kreshnik standing there, Boone’s own M-249 grasped in both of the vampire’s hands, leveled at him.
“Ah shit…”
The vampire said something and then fired but the light machine gun did not respond.
Kreshnik looked down. The box magazine had come detached and lay at the vampire’s feet.
Kreshnik cursed.
Stash, thought Boone, tackling the Albanian.
“How long do you suppose this can continue?” Rainford asked Emmanuela. The street across from the park was a raging inferno.
The man and the vampire were beating each other mercilessly, their shadows dancing on the ground. Boone bled from the face, nose and mouth. Kreshnik, because of its nature, did not bleed. Yet the vampire looked worn.
“Ohhh…” Rainford winced as Kreshnik’s gloved hand broke Boone’s nose. “Tsk, tsk, tsk…”
Boone staggered back, his nose flat against his cheek. His right eye was blackened and closing. Blood from the gash above it blinded him. His midsection screamed up at him from where the sai had penetrated and he thought he had a few broken ribs again.
“Emmanuela,” he called to the nun, “blade.”
She tossed him the kukri, wondering if Boone could see well enough to catch it or if it’d wind up in his chest. He caught it.
“Thanks,” he muttered through a mouthful of blood and loose teeth.
Backlit by the roaring fire, Kreshnik rose to its full height and stretched its arms, its cape temporarily blocking out the flame. The vampire reached its left hand to its right and peeled off the tight leather glove, revealing the gnarled, clawed hand.
Kreshnik flexed the fingers of its hand, the knuckles cracking.
The vampire leaped into the air, drawing back its clawed hand, intending to land atop the man and finish him once and for all.
Boone swung wildly with the curved kukri, the blade slicing through the vampire’s bared wrist, the hand dropping to the grass.
Kreshnik looked with incredulity at the bloodless stump of its right arm. Boone snatched the clawed hand from the grass and lashed out, slashing the Albanian across the face with its own taloned fingers.
“Oh my…” Rainford’s voice died out under Kreshnik’s agonized howl. A clawed finger had blinded it in one eye.
Boone showed no mercy. He dived on the beast and hacked at it with the kukri, driving it to its knees, then down onto its back, its one hand reaching up futilely to fend off blows.
He only stopped to fling Kreshnik’s hand at Rainford. The dark Lord leaned his head to the side as the severed hand flew past. Boone continued to chop up Kreshnik with the Gurkha blade.
Rainford shook his head at what he was seeing.
“Okay,” Boone finely sputtered, blood drooling out of his mouth as he stood, the kukri held loosely in one hand. Kreshnik lay unmoving, a tattered shadow on the dark ground.
“You and me, old man.” Boone promised more than he could deliver, tottering towards Rainford, looking like he might collapse before he took another step.
Kreshnik took him from behind.
The vampire rose from the ground, wrapping one handless arm around Boone’s neck, its other arm gripping Boone’s cargo shorts, lifting him off his feet. Boone’s face contorted, his breath and voice choked off.
The vampire dropped to one knee and when it did it slammed Boone down across its other knee. Something in Boone’s back audibly broke as his body bent backwards over Kreshnik’s thigh.
Emmanuela grimaced.
“Well done, Kreshnik.” Rainford meant it. He stepped forward to better watch the Albanian finish the man. “He was like none other.”
Boone lay broken over Kreshnik’s knee. He was still alive.
“fu-fu-fu…”
“What’s that you say?” Rainford asked, again finding it outrageous that the man lived.
“…fuck you...” the Boone muttered weakly. His head hung limply.
Using its one good hand, Kreshnik righted the mortally wounded human being, Boone crumpling to his knees like a rag doll. Kreshnik loomed behind him, sirens from approaching police and fire vehicles filling the night.
As Emmanuela and Rainford watched, Kreshnik lowered its mouth to Boone’s neck, latching onto the flesh there. The vampire relished this meal, a foe vanquished, a man who had cost him more than he expected, an enemy—
Kreshnik pulled away from Boone’s neck, grasping its own throat.
“What is this?” Rainford asked aloud.
The tall vampire was making choking noises, sputtering. It had let go of its hold on Boone, the man collapsing listless to the grass.
“Kreshnik? Whatsoever is it?”
“Samos…” Kreshnik spoke the word clearly, its hand and stump shooting up to the sides of its head. The vampire looked like it was in enormous agony. Its head was vibrating.
As Emmanuela and Rainford watched, Kreshnik looked to the sky in bewilderment, sputtered “Samothracian,” and then its skull exploded, showering the woman and the dark Lord with chunks of bone.
The headless corpse crumpled near the man it had beaten and drank from.
“Now this…” pronounced Rainford. “…is beyond words.”
“This complicates things,” stated Emmanuela.
“Extraordinary. Don’t take your thumb from that detonator.”
Emmanuela looked down at the device in her hand.
Rainford spoke with conviction. “He must come with me.”
“No.”
“Emmanuela, our own date with destiny will have to wait. This is something that demands immediate attention.”
“How do I know you won’t kill him?”
“Kill him? That’s the furthest thing from my mind…”
Boone lay bleeding on the ground.
Emmanuela thought about it, looking towards the conflagration that brightened the night.
“I’m going to let you take him, Rainford,” she said. “But the next time you and I meet will be the last.”
“Agreed,” said Rainford. “But this…” The dark Lord gestured to Boone’s i
nert form. “You must admit this is remarkable.”
“Take him and go,” Emmanuela prodded the pile of ash that had been Kreshnik with one booted foot.
Rainford bent and picked up Boone’s body. The man was heavy, but Rainford was a child of the night. For the dark Lord, the man’s weight was negligible. Boone was still breathing. Rainford walked off the way he and Kreshnik had come, cradling Boone like a broken rag doll.
There would be much to attend to. Emmanuela and her sisters were back in the picture after a prolonged absence. Kreshnik’s mother would need to be informed of her son’s demise and her wraith assuaged. The man in his arms would take time to heal. Only after Boone had recuperated could his training begin. Though Rainford predicted the man would not be a willing pupil, the dark Lord knew he would be his teacher.
Thursday
9 September 1998
55.
7:05 A.M.
“Where’s mom?”
His daughter, Carter thought, was thirteen going on thirty. She came out of her room in the morning and that was her greeting for a father she hadn’t seen in near to a decade, Where’s mom? She’d been avoiding him when he got in last night, in her room with the door closed, because she knew he was going to have to talk to her.
Carter sipped from his mug of coffee before he answered her.
“She took your brother to school.”
Deanna didn’t look like she liked that answer.
“Which is good,” her father continued, “because it’ll give us some time to talk.”
“Talk about what?” the way she said it. She wanted a confrontation. Carter decided he was going to have to play this one real cool.
“Well, for one, the school called yesterday.” Before she could say something or dismiss it, Carter kept on. “Yeah, I know you know. I know your mother already talked to you, all right? And I know you’re probably looking at me sitting here, saying to yourself, where was this guy the last nine years? And now he wants to come back into our lives and tell us how we should live ‘em?”
Deanna had fixed herself a bowl of cereal and before she could leave the kitchen to eat it in the living room in front of the t.v. her father motioned to the chair—“Please”—at the other end of the table he sat at.
“Your mother explained to me what happened. How close are you to this girl? To those boys?”
Deanna had sat at the table and was eating her Fruit Loops. “I used to think me and Jasmine was chill, but now she can just stay away.” Carter looked at his daughter as she ate, wondering where had his little baby gone. This girl that looked like Tanji was obviously putting a lot of thought into her hair and make up.
Between the phone call from the school dean and talk with other mothers, Tanji had pieced together what had happened and told Carter. A group of kids from Deanna’s school had partied at one of the kid’s houses the weekend past. Kid’s parents weren’t home. One of the girls, a kid Santa Anna knew Deanna had been friends with since second grade, got drunk. They were all drinking, smoking weed. When her friends left the room the girl started getting romantic with her boyfriend, started giving him oral in front of all his friends in the room. His friends had lined up and she had done them all and when they were done they had taken turns peeing on her.
Monday at school some of the girls were talking, whispering “lemonade” when the girl walked past. The kid had broken down and someone got her to the guidance counselor. She’d explained the whole thing. These fucking kids, thought Carter, only thirteen, fourteen. Where were they learning this shit? Where was the parental supervision? Christ.
Deanna hadn’t been at the party, but she had been one of those kids whispering.
“You know…” Carter thought carefully about what he was going to say, because he wanted her to listen, he didn’t want her to shut him out. “Something like that happens to a person, she can’t be feeling too good about herself. You know that right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“I look at you and I think to myself, if anyone ever hurt my baby…I don’t know what’d I’d do. I imagine your friend, her parents must be feeling something like that right about now.”
“Maybe they are,” Deanna admitted as she poured herself more cereal. “Maybe Jasmine should have thought about that before she did what she did.”
“Yeah, maybe she should’ve. But don’t lose sight of something, Dee. Your friend was drunk. What those boys did wasn’t right. Matter of fact, what they did was wrong, worse than wrong.”
“And what I did?” Deanna gave her father the look Tanji gave him, the look that could tip one of two ways. “You’re gonna say what I did was wrong too, right?”
Carter decided not to treat it like a question. “I know you know that. But there’s one thing I don’t want you to forget, and that’s this: she’s still your friend, Dee. Don’t forget that. I haven’t been here for you, almost ten years of your life. She has. And if Jasmine ever needed you, she needs you now.”
Deanna looked like she was holding down a lump in her throat.
“I know how kids must be talking about your friend at school. What she did, what happened to her. It’s horrible. But you’re grown up enough to know, Dee, that the right thing to do ain’t always the popular thing to do.”
“Mom always says that…” Deanna had tears in her eyes.
“Because your mother,” Carter winked at his daughter over his coffee mug, “is a very wise woman.
“’Nough of my sermon.” He passed some brochures across the table to Deanna. “You too old for this now?”
The girl took them and immediately her face lit up. “Disney!” She wiped the tears out of her eyes.
“Yeah. We’re thinking of going, your mother, brother and I.”
“What about me?” She looked like she couldn’t believe he hadn’t included her.
“Well, I wanted to check with you first. Eighth grades’ a big time in a girl’s—in a young lady’s—life. What with graduation and high school and all next year…”
“No, daddy, this is so hot! When are we going?”
“Been talkin’ to your mother about that. You’ve got a couple of days off end of November for Thanksgiving. We’re thinking maybe if you can keep your grades up and your mouth closed, we take the whole week, head down before Turkey Day.”
“Oh daddy, mums the word, I swear!” Deanna was beaming. “That would be so great!”
“Wanted us to stay in the new Animal Kingdom Lodge, but that’s booked…” Carter drew it out for all it was worth. “But your mom called and they’ve got a room for us in the Grand Floridian. That’s this one here.” He indicated the resort in the appropriate brochure.
The look on his little girl’s face…she could dress and talk and carry the attitude of a woman twenty years her senior, but Carter knew she was still his baby girl. Even after all this time.
“What time does the bus pick you up?”
Deanna looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh, dad, I gotta get going—it’ll be here…”
“You have a good day at school, today. Hey, Dee—”
She stopped in the kitchen doorway with her bookbag.
“Nothing. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Bye, dad.”
“Bye girl.”
Carter sat at the table for awhile. He listened to Deanna finish up whatever her morning routine was before she headed out for the bus, and then he listened to the bus stop and pick her up. Tanji was going to do some food shopping after she’d dropped little Carter off.
He had some errands of his own to run. Should head into the city, see Hephaestus. Carter had decided that the next night Enfermo came to visit, Enfermo died. Silver bullet would be the easiest way, but Carter couldn’t be firing a gun out of his house. That would bring the police. Maybe he could stick the beast, if he could get a stake or knife close enough. But Enfermo was a vampire, and as such was a lot faster and stronger than Carter. Heph would have something he could use, something quiet.
&nbs
p; Carter stood at his bureau in the bedroom he shared with Tanji and looked in the mirror at his throat. The puncture wounds were old, looked like scars. Most people wouldn’t know what they were looking for, wouldn’t know what they were if they saw them. Carter never forgot what they were, never forgot how he’d gotten them.
Yeah, Enfermo was gonna have to die. The vampire had promised him nothing bad would happen to Frank, that they just wanted Boone. And now they were all gone, all missing. Not just Boone, but Frank, Bowie, Madison, Hamilton, even Jay.
He pocketed his cash, his house and car keys, and some quarters.
He locked the front door behind himself. He’d be out a good part of the morning but Tanji had her keys.
Carter walked to the curb and waited as a car passed in the street. Birds were chirping and darting around. He looked both ways without thinking about it and walked across the street towards his Honda Accord. He thumbed the alarm attached to the key and the car chirped.
He opened the driver’s door and thought it was going to be another hot day, though not yet. Carter settled down behind the wheel and inserted the key in the ignition, twisting, the engine catching. He reached across his body with his right hand and pulled the seat belt over and down, clicking it into place.
Carter adjusted the rear view mirror, glancing in it at the marks on his neck.
There was a tap on the driver’s side window.
The last thing Carter saw were the dark gaping holes of a double barreled sawed-off shotgun pressed to the glass in the gloved hands of a man with a Fu-Manchu mustache and sunglasses.
Johnny Spasso fired both barrels of the twelve-gauge through the driver’s window. He took a step back and looked in at what was left in the driver’s seat. Satisfied, Spasso tossed the sawed-off through what remained of the glass to rest on the blood splattered front seat. He turned and walked in front of the idling car, mounted the sidewalk and strolled unhurriedly towards the corner.
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 28