Song of the Vampire (Vanderlind Realm Book 3)

by Gayla Twist

  Dorian nodded, his lips a straight line. “I believe you’re probably right. I mean, you know your mother best, but I have to wonder how the rumor got started in the undead community.” He ran a finger under his lower lip, thinking. “I have to wonder how this all came about.”

  That was something I’d been trying to figure out myself. “Maybe she’s been telling stories at the facility,” I suggested. There was a chance Mom had been bragging about having a daughter who was a vampire. The only people who would have taken her seriously, of course, would have been actually vampires. And why would they be hanging around a looney bin? Unless it was for the same reason that I visited Sterngrove from time to time.

  Dorian examined his watch. “We’ve got to go.”

  As we headed for the stairs, we heard male voices from below. “Did they find the fourth man?” I asked in a low voice. “John?”

  “Actually they did,” Dorian said. “He made it to the tent somehow, although he was in terrible shape. Out of all of them, he definitely looks the worse for wear, but we’ve been feeding him well, so I’m sure he’ll heal up soon enough.”

  The men had gathered by the front door. Their hair looked like they’d all had a bad day at the salon, and their eyebrows had that overly plucked look of a drag queen, but besides that, they seemed in pretty good shape. One man still looked a bit like melted candle wax; I assumed he was John.

  Another of the men must have noted the direction of my glance as we entered the foyer, because he immediately said, “John, this is Haley. We owe her our lives.” I could tell by his voice that he was Kirk, although he didn’t look the way I had expected. His hair was white and he must have been somewhere in his fifties when he’d been turned.

  “Thank you,” John said to me, his jaw moving in a weird way that reminded me of poorly executed special effects in a low-budget horror movie.

  “He shouldn’t have wimped out,” the vampire that I was guessing was James grumbled to the guy standing next to him. James was young and good looking, with jet black hair and bright blue eyes. He reminded me of one of those heartthrob teen idols from the fifties. “Then he wouldn’t be in such lousy shape.”

  It didn’t seem fair that the vampire who gave up pursuing me was having issues regenerating while the others would be back to their old selves by the end of the evening.

  “He’s still a good guy,” the other man said under his breath. I was guessing that he was Dimitris. He had a round, moon face and small eyes. All vampires were various levels of good-looking, but I doubted Dimitris had been very handsome when he was a mortal.

  “He cut and ran,” James said, obviously disgusted.

  “You know, I can hear you. Right?” John said, reaching up to hold his jaw in place.

  “I want you to hear me,” James told him, doing nothing to conceal his malice.

  “Take it easy,” Kirk told him. “He did what he did. You don’t have to keep bagging on him.”

  “We would have been better off without him,” James grumbled. “Makes for a better cut.”

  In a flash, Dorian got right up in James’ grill. “There is no cut. Not anymore. You got that?”

  “I was just joking,” the guy said, acting like he was offended. “I made my choice.” He gesturing toward his friends. “We all have.”

  “We’re with you,” Kirk said to Dorian. “We owe Haley our lives and we will defend her.”

  “That’s right,” James agreed, smirking. “There’s no reason to be all uptight about it.”

  James reminded me of my old boyfriend, Tommy. Well, he wasn’t exactly my boyfriend; he was just using me to get laid. But they had that same kind of personality; they said jerky stuff and then called people uptight if they got offended.

  “We should go,” Kirk said. “We’re burning night.”

  Viggo magically appeared, as if on cue, handing Dorian and me each a satchel full of the weapons we’d gathered in the armory.

  “Do we get one of those?” James asked, eyeballing our supplies. “Might come in handy.”

  Dorian gave him a flat look. “No.”

  Chapter 25

  Haley

  Dorian made the bounty hunters fly in a formation around me. James, John and Dimitris were in front. Kirk was behind me, along with my maker. It was a weirdly confining way to fly. James had tried to give Dorian an argument about the setup, but Kirk had told his buddy to shut up and cooperate.

  My maker also insisted that I have a stake at the ready at all times. It seemed rather ridiculous — I wasn’t exactly a trained fighter — but I didn’t argue with him. There were an unknown numbers of vampires out there hunting for me, so it would have been stupid if I didn’t try to protect myself, at least a little.

  Dorian thought the most likely spot for an ambush would be just outside the castle. That’s where he seemed the tensest, practically pressing himself against me as we flew. Once we’d cleared Tiburon, he relaxed just a smidge, backing off, allowing a bit of air between us. I knew he was just worried about me, but I wasn’t the one in danger of being staked. I should have been the one clinging to his back to keep him safe.

  The Tiburon River wasn’t much of a river, but we had to fly over a bridge to cross it anyway. The whole thing about vampires not being able to cross water was a myth, but some members of the undead were a little shaky around water anyway. It would have made more sense just to cross the river at some random spot, but Dorian didn’t want to stop and take a survey to find out if anyone in our group was suffering from hydrophobia. Simply following the bridge seemed like the most expedient route.

  Just as we reached the other side of the river, there was a loud crack somewhere off to our left. Dorian grabbed me by the jacket and jerked me back, but he wasn’t quick enough. We were pelted with something small, like bits of gravel. The flesh on the side of my face immediately started to burn. I began clawing at my cheek, digging out a small piece of metal.

  Dorian and I had been spared the brunt of the shrapnel spray, but the other vampires received the brunt of the blast. They were instantly howling with pain, digging at their chests and faces.

  From behind a patch of trees Thelma and the male vampire appeared, a large silver net spread out between them. “There she is!” Thelma shouted and they charged toward us.

  But Kirk was faster than either of them. He shoved me out of the way while snatching the stake from my hand. “Silver shrapnel?!” he demanded. “You shot us with silver shrapnel?” He flung the staked with the deadly accuracy of a knife thrower in the circus, hitting the man directly in the chest.

  “Eddie!” the woman shrieked as her partner fell to the earth, writhing.

  “That’s right, Eddie. That’s his name,” I heard James say. “I just couldn’t think of it. That was really bugging me.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” the woman shrieked, flinging the silver net at Kirk, which he easily dodged.

  “Take it easy, Thelma,” he said, putting up both hands. “Calm down.”

  I dug another stake out of my satchel.

  “Calm down?” she exclaimed. There was no way she was calming down. “You staked Eddie. I’ll show you calming down, you bastard.”

  She went to pull what looked like a small gun out of the breast pocket of her jacket, but Kirk wasn’t sitting around, just waiting to be shot. He rushed her, pinning her arm to her body before she could pull the weapon clear. “Stop it, Thelma! Just stop it! Don’t throw away your immortality.”

  “What good is immortality without Eddie?” she sobbed and I couldn’t help but remember how she wasn’t very thrilled with him when I’d overheard their conversation a few nights earlier.

  “You’ll find someone else to love,” Kirk assured her. “Give it a couple of decades.”

  She went limp in his arms, overcome with grief. Kirk adjusted his grip, trying not to let her fall. And that’s when she raised the gun, pointing it straight at me.

  “Haley!” Dorian shouted, just as the gun went off.


  “What are you doing?” John yelled at the same time.

  I jerked to the side, the silver bullet tearing through my hair and making it sizzle, but missing my flesh. Kirk thrust the woman’s arm upwards just as another shot went off. “What are you doing?” he bellowed.

  “Why should anyone be able to have a baby?” Thelma shrieked. “Why should anyone have that happiness?”

  “Stop it!” Kirk shouted at her. “Or I’ll stake you dead.”

  But Thelma wasn’t stopping; she was crazed with grief. She was thrashing so wildly that she broke out of Kirk’s grip and smashed him in the face with the pistol.

  “Holy crap,” Dimitris exclaimed.

  “Thelma, please. Stop this,” Kirk pleaded, struggling to deflect the beating.

  “For crying out loud,” James said, breaking a branch off an obliging tree. “Enough of this shit.”

  “No!” I gasped, realizing his intent.

  “Don’t!” Dorian yelled, rushing forward.

  “Wait!” Kirk shouted, trying to twist Thelma away from him without releasing her. But it was too late; James plunged the jagged piece of wood into her back.

  The vampiress released a shriek of agony, the wood protruding from her chest. Kirk thrust her away from him, narrowly avoiding the tip of the branch.

  Thelma still had the pistol and she started firing wild in my direction. Dorian tackled me in the air, forcing me out of the way while shielding me with his body. But I could still see her over his shoulder; she was disintegrating rapidly, barely able to squeeze off the last round before she fell to the ground. In another few moments she would just be a pile of rags and hair.

  “Oh God,” I gasped. It was just too horrible. We all stared for several seconds at the spot where she had fallen.

  “You didn’t have to stake her,” John said in a quiet voice.

  James glared at him. “What was I supposed to do? She was going to shoot Haley. And you were just floating there with your thumb up your ass.”

  “But…” John stammered. “She’s dead. You could have at least tried to subdue her.”

  “And then what?” James demanded. “Take her with us? Tie her to a tree?”

  “Come on. We’d better get going,” Dorian said to everyone in general. “There’s nothing we can do for her now. Besides, it’s only a matter of time before mortals start showing up after all those gunshots.”

  We flew cross country, avoiding populated areas as much as possible. It was still pretty early in the evening, so mortals were driving around in their cars, or socializing in bars and restaurants. I envied them. When I was a mortal, I didn’t have a lot of extra money to go out to eat. I never got to dine at a five star restaurant. I’d never drunk a nice bottle of wine paired with some sumptuous meal. Thinking about it made me crazy because I didn’t know what was worse, knowing what I was missing or not knowing.

  Sterngrove, the facility where my mother was staying, was at the southern end of Ohio, just north of the Kentucky border. It was a pretty nice facility, so I figured someone with some cash had to have been footing the bill. I sure didn’t have that kind of money when I was mortal. Dorian had offered to take over financing my mother’s care before we left on our trip, but somebody at the Sterngrove office had informed us that Mom’s bill was covered for as long as she cared to stay. That was kind of mysterious, — my mother had never told me about her secret benefactor — but it didn’t necessarily prove that my dad had a set of fangs.

  Driving to Sterngrove from Tiburon took a couple of hours, with not much to see out the window. Flying took a little longer. We could travel as the crow flies, so that should have made things shorter, but we couldn’t go at the same speed as a car. There were vampires who could really build up a burst of speed, like fifty or sixty miles an hour. Dorian told me that there were even competitions around the world for the fasted vampire. But it was a lot like competitive sprinters; no vampire could travel at sixty-five miles an hour for an extended period of time.

  “Ease up,” Dorian said as we drew up on Sterngrove. We’d been skimming along the treetops of the light woods near the facility. We stopped before the open green space that made up Sterngrove’s lawn, hovering in the air, just inside the cover of trees. “Dimitris,” Dorian said. “I need you to scout ahead. Go see who is where. But try to be covert about it.”

  I had to wonder why Dorian had chosen Dimitris over Kirk, but I assumed he had his reasons.

  “This is stupid,” James said, turning around. “It’s not like they’re not going to be able to figure out we’re coming.”

  Dorian glared at him. “Are we going to have a problem?”

  “No,” the other vampire said, rather sullenly. “I made my choice.”

  “Good.” He turned to Dimitris. “I need you to do a little recon,” he said. “Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Yeah, I can handle it,” Dimitris said, sounding annoyed, as if it shouldn’t have even been a question. “But James is right. We really don’t stand a chance. They’re going to get Haley, no matter what we do.”

  “Except for this way, we don’t get any of the bounty,” James muttered.

  “Cool it!” Kirk barked at him. “We talked about this.”

  “You know what, Kirk? You’re not in charge,” James told him, anger seething from his eyes.

  “You’re not in charge, either,” was his friend’s response. “Right now we need to focus on Haley. Once we’re through with her, then you and I need to have a talk.”

  “Screw that,” James said. “I make my own choices.” He lunged quickly forward, making a grab for my maker.

  Dorian anticipated the attack and darted to the side, leaving James grasping at thin air.

  But James wasn’t done with his attempted assault. Reaching into his boot, the raven haired vampire pulled out a stake.

  Rather than simply waiting to be attacked, Dorian grabbed James by the shoulder, flipping him around.

  “Don’t!” Kirk shouted, but it was too late, James was already swinging his stake.

  Dorian was expecting the attack; he blocked the strike and brought in his own blow, like a boxer making an uppercut to the body, but instead of wearing gloves, Dorian was gripping a piece of sharpened wood in his fist. “You made the wrong choice,” Dorian growled as James looked up in surprise, his face contorted with pain.

  I wanted to scream, but I knew that would only draw attention to us, so I clamped my hand over my mouth as James’ shriveling body slipped loose from the sky and quickly descended toward the ground.

  “Here! She’s over here!” Dimitris yelled, making a grab for me, but I had a new stake in my hand and I was willing to use it. I stabbed at him and he jerked back a few feet.

  “Haley!” Dorian said, trying to rush to my aid. Kirk hopped on his back, pinning his arms to his sides. “Haley run!” he shouted.

  Dimitris tried to move on me again, but I threatened him with the sharpened piece of wood. “Get the hell away from me.”

  This made him laugh. “You don’t have the guts.”

  “Oh, yes she does,” Dorian assured him as he struggled against Kirk, who had him locked in a full nelson.

  Dimitris paused for a moment. “Fine, maybe you would try to stake me, but you’d have to get in close to do it. You can’t outfight me and you can’t outfly me.”

  He had a point.

  Plunging my hand into my satchel, I yanked out the mini-crossbow, already loaded with a wooden bolt. “I don’t have to outfight you or outfly you,” I told him. “All I have to do is pull on this little trigger. And I’m not a bad shot.”

  Dark figures rose into the air over Sterngrove. It was the vampires who had been waiting to ambush me. There were at least a dozen of them, looking around, trying to draw a bead on our location.

  “Over here!” Dimitris shouted, wildly waving his arms over his head to signal them.

  “Shoot him, Haley. Shoot him and get out of here,” Dorian commanded.

  “You take of
f and pretty boy will be eating splinters,” Kirk warned me.

  I jerked my head around to see that Kirk had acquired a stake from somewhere and had it pressed to Dorian’s chest.

  “Dorian!” I shouted. Then I pointed the crossbow at Kirk’s face. “Let him go!”

  “You can’t make that shot,” Kirk sneered. “You’re just as likely to hit lover-boy as me.”

  The other vampires were getting closer. There was only a few seconds left before they’d be at the edge of the woods, right up next to us.

  “Haley, they’re not going to stake me,” my maker insisted. “If they do, then they’ll have to face an inquest. They’ll have to justify their stupidity. They’ll be locked away in coffins for an eternity. They might even have to face the sun.”

  I shook my head. Even if there was a chance I would be able to outfly the other vampires, I would never be able to leave Dorian behind. The thought that they might hurt him, just to get at me, was excruciating. I couldn’t bear it.

  “Fly, Haley!” Dorian commanded. “Do as I tell you! Get out of here!”

  “I can’t,” I told him, looking into his stormy gray eyes, my voice just a rasp.

  The other vampires were too close, anyway. I could see Elaina among them. “How nice to see you again,” she called out as they descended into the trees to join us. She gave a bright smile. “Dorian! How lovely to see you again. I’m delighted to see that you’ve found your protégée.”

  “Elaina, you’ve lost your mind,” he stated in a clear voice. “This is taking being baby-crazy a bit too far.”

  Her eyes widened. “You have no idea the extent I’m willing to go.” Turning to me, she said, “I’d hate to have to hurt your maker just to get you to behave. Have you decided to cooperate? Or are you going to continue to be foolish?”

  I hated her so much that I wanted to rip her face off. But seeing that wasn’t an option, I simply turned the tiny crossbow around, pressing it against my own neck. “Why don’t you guess?”