“Sorry?” Rain took a step towards her. “You’re sorry? You came into my house, drugged my brother and me, stole my car, asked me for sanctuary, and then led killers back to us—killers who are after my brother and an innocent girl right this moment—and you’re sorry?”
Lita prickled. “What do you want me to say, Rain? You think I wanted this to happen?” She pushed off from her position leaning against a coffin and threw her hands up. “You think I like the idea that we’re stuck here while God knows what is happening to your brother and Amelie? I’m just being realistic. For all we know, they’re both already dead.”
“He’s still alive,” Rain said flatly.
“How the fuck do you know?”
“I know.”
“Well, that’s grand, but you’re still on your own. I don’t know how I managed to get out of this little situation alive, but I’m not about to tempt fate further once we get out of here. I’m going straight to the road and pitching a thumb until I can get a ride the hell out of here.” She turned and started walking away from him.
Rain was right behind her. He took hold of her upper arm and spun her around forcefully. “No. You don’t get to walk away from this one. Your demons spilled over into my life, so this time you’re just going to have to face them.”
“I’ve been staring at a demon for the last two days. Go to hell,” she spat, then shoved his shoulder in attempt to pull away from his grasp.
Rain’s reaction was immediate. He balled up his fist and cracked her across the jaw with a sharp right hook.
Lita stumbled a step and brought the back of her hand to her cheek. Her eyes seemed to come ablaze with emerald fury, her lips turning up in a smirk. “Is that it, Vampire? Is that all you have to fucking say to me?” She lunged forward, returning a much harder punch to his chin, punctuated by a fierce right jab to his chest, sending him back a few steps of his own.
Releasing a furious growl, Rain hurled himself at her, taking her by the shoulders and slamming her against the back wall of the mausoleum. She winced, closing her eyes momentarily, and then glared up at him as she stood there pinned. “What’s it gonna be, Rain? What the fuck are you gonna do?”
Despite the dim light, from this distance she could see the tendons in his jaw and neck flexing, his eyes roiling with fury, looking like he was on the verge of snapping…and yet, somehow holding back, hesitating.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lita said impatiently, then grabbed him by the back of the head and brought their lips colliding together.
Rain couldn’t even act surprised. As he pulled her body against his, deepening the kiss, he could feel her heart pounding rapidly in her chest. The sound of it filled his ears like a drum beat, and it seemed to draw his own body into its rhythm. As her warmth began to spread into him, he could feel it quickening him, arousing him, making him feel alive again.
Their hands moved desperately over each other’s bodies. Rain slipped his up Lita’s sides, bunching her shirt, so she broke the kiss and pulled the tank top the rest of the way off. In turn, she grabbed his coat and yanked it off his shoulders, allowing him to drop it off his arms. The coveralls were next, and as she unzipped them and pushed them down, she yelled in frustration at the sight of a t-shirt and jeans. “Goddammit, are you naked under there anywhere?”
Rain couldn’t help laughing as he stepped out of the coveralls, but the mirth was quickly cut off when Lita accidentally cracked him across the jaw with her elbow while yanking his shirt up and off. She didn’t offer an apology and he didn’t seek one, only took her by the back of the neck and pulled her towards him, the intensity of their movements resuming as though it had never missed a beat.
The last of their clothing discarded at their feet, Lita tugged Rain, guiding him to one of the two coffins where she hopped up to sit on the edge. After an intense shiver at the feeling of cold stone against her skin, she pulled Rain simultaneously back into their kiss and between her parted legs. He moved against her, and though the friction felt nice, he seemed to be having trouble finding the right angle. “Here. Let me,” she said at last, and reached down to guide him.
Though Lita had made use of a handful of men in her time, her reasons for doing so amounted to little more than satisfying an itch. She always got what she needed out of the situation and then discarded it by the wayside. For everything she had survived as as a child, it sometimes surprised her that she wasn’t completely repulsed by the very idea of another person touching her. Yet somehow, over the years, she had managed to almost completely detach her adult sexuality from the traumas of her youth. The only thing that really held her back from seeking out true intimacy was the heat. Any time another body came that close to her, she felt like she was smothering in the heat it forced onto her and into her. It felt like it was killing her, and she had never been able to get past that frightening sensation enough to find complete pleasure with any partner.
But as Rain finally slipped inside her, she felt at first nothing but cold. It was both startling and exhilarating. When he moved into her completely and she wrapped her legs around him, she gasped at the chill that filled her entire being. Running her hands over his back as she pulled him against her, she became dimly aware of the familiar texture of damaged, irregular flesh, but further consideration of the matter could wait until later. As he began to move against her, inside and out—as they rocked together in quickening, breathless rhythm—she felt warmth begin to fill them both, but it was not the strangling sensation she had experienced in the past. All at once, she realized his body was warming her by the heat of her own fire, and with that realization came the possibility that she was not the dead thing inside that she had been sure she’d become in her short time on this Earth. She suddenly understood that she was capable not only of having warmth within her, but also of sharing it with another. Her heart was giving his body life for just a little while, and the sensation made her feel truly alive for the first time in a long, long time.
Giving in completely to that shared rhythm, the two slipped to the floor. Lita guided Rain’s hands to help her find what she needed, and the sensation of her lost in that pleasure against him brought him to his own conclusion shortly after. In the moments following, they just held one another, savoring the warmth they had created between them, Rain trembling slightly with his lips near her ear, Lita slowly catching her breath with her cheek on his shoulder.
II
“I imagine you could use this,” Rain said, handing Lita a leather flask he had retrieved from his coveralls. She was sitting on most of their discarded clothes, though she had put her underpants and tank top back on, and had pulled Rain’s coat over her as a makeshift blanket. Taking a sip from the flask, she shuddered at the unfamiliar taste of whiskey, but nodded a simple thank you.
Rain stood and turned around, thoughtfully surveying their enclosure with a renewed sense of calm. Looking up at him, Lita had to contain a small gasp that tried to escape her. He had put his pants back on, but nothing else. She was sure he had done so as a courtesy; he didn’t seem ashamed of being naked, and certainly had no reason to. He was all slender muscle, lines of definition cut firmly into his flesh. Lita had never put a great deal of stock into physical appearance, but Rain was undeniably attractive.
However, none of that was what had caught her breath in her throat. It was what she saw on his back, what she had briefly felt during their intimacy. All of his flesh from shoulder to waistline was a crisscrossing latticework of deep, straight scars. On top of all that, seared into his left shoulder was some kind of symbol. It was a crescent moon curved around a circle with a single droplet shape stretching down from the underside of the moon.
“Good God, Rain,” Lita whispered. “Your back.”
Rain glanced over his shoulder, as though he had forgotten it was there. “Mmmm,” he said, then turned back to face her and leaned against the end of the coffin they had recently defiled. It was then she noticed for the first time the two long scars across his ch
est and abdomen, which formed a faint X in his flesh.
“What does the symbol mean?”
“My father was a blacksmith; it was his trade symbol. He branded me when I tried to run away when I was twelve,” Rain said soberly.
“I can’t imagine why you’d want to run away,” Lita replied. “What about the other scars? On your back and…” she gestured to her left eye.
Rain answered almost nonchalantly as he went about lighting a cigarette. “All from my father’s bullwhip. This one on my eye is the last he gave me before I killed him.”
Lita grimaced, suddenly thinking of the bloodstained piece of leather she had found in the closet. “How did you get up the courage to kill him?” She knew all about how much mustering that took. It was no small thing.
“I was turning into a vampire, so he was trying to kill me. I killed him first.”
“So…you turned right after that?”
“No, first I killed the vampire that made me, then I turned.”
“What, just some random vampire attack?”
Rain hesitated for a beat, then said, “It was my mother. She was attacked and turned when Alex and I were very young. We thought she was dead, but my father kept her locked away in a room in our house. One day I got too curious about that room.” He took a deep drag from his cigarette.
“Jesus, why would he keep her?”
Rain shrugged. “Maybe he just couldn’t let her go.” Diverting, he nodded towards her bare feet peeking out from under his coat. “How’d you get yours?”
Lita glanced down and quickly pulled them from sight. “The fire from the first Amelie job. Would’ve been all over for me if she hadn’t pulled me out of there.”
Rain was quiet for a stretch before asking his next question. “How many people have you killed?”
Lita swallowed, then said quietly, “Ninety-three.”
Rain nodded and brought his cigarette to his lips.
“What about you?” Lita asked cautiously.
“What about me?” Rain asked, raising an eyebrow from behind a cloud of smoke.
Lita sighed, took a swig from the flask, and then looked at him earnestly. “Look, Rain, the way Alex talks I know you haven’t always been…whatever it is you are. A vampire with a conscience, I guess? Well that means, at some point, you were a standard-issue vampire, so I’m assuming you didn’t play nice with the locals. If you want me to help you once we get out of here, I need you to be straight with me. So how many is it?”
Rain stared at her for a moment that seemed to stretch on for miles. When he found her eyes to be utterly unwavering, he said, very slowly, “Twenty-one thousand, seven-hundred forty-two.”
Lita coughed involuntarily, then cleared her throat. “How…is that possible?”
“I became a vampire when I was thirteen years old in 1711. From that moment, I killed indiscriminately for nearly three-hundred fifty years.” Rain stated this very matter-of-factly, burying any emotion he had about the matter.
Though Lita was no stranger to death, she couldn’t even wrap her head around a number of that magnitude. Merely trying brought up goosebumps in her flesh. She rubbed her arm in effort to be rid of them. “So, wait, two things. First, you don’t look thirteen. Second, what happened to change things? Why did you stop killing?”
“To the first question, the answer is simple. While it is true that vampires are immortal, the myth that they retain the age they were when they turned is erroneous. Within a year of becoming, every vampire’s body changes to peak physical condition, which appears as a mid-twenties age. If they start out young, they grow older. If they’re turned when they’re old, they actually get younger. It makes them more effective killers.”
“So you didn’t have to work for that body?”
“No.”
“Lucky.”
“Hardly.”
“And the moral one-eighty?”
Rain cleared his throat and snuffed out his cigarette. “At the end of the Last War, the Great Plague that was nearly wiping out humanity also left me starving. I once heard that the immunity rate was only 0.015 percent, so it was nearly impossible to find someone to feed on who wasn’t ill. I was too afraid to drink from the dying; I didn’t know what it would do to me. Then, one day, I came upon a perfectly healthy young boy—no older than Alex was when he died—just sitting in a park playing in the middle of a city full of the dead.” He paused and reached for another cigarette. Lita could see his hand shaking.
“I didn’t attack him right away. I talked to him for a little while, trying to make sure he wasn’t sick. Of course, he had no idea what I was. He asked me if I wanted to see a neat trick, and then he touched the ground and made a flower grow right before my eyes.”
“He was a Gifted,” Lita said.
Rain nodded. “The first one I ever saw. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t care. All I could think about was eating. So I took him, and I fed, and he tasted like nothing I’d ever had before. But his blood…it did something to me. It changed me.”
“It gave you a conscience,” Lita said.
“I think it partially healed me. Made me just a little human again. Since that day, I’ve had to live with everything I’ve done…and I have a photographic memory. It was just very sharp when I was human, but once I became a vampire I could recall everything I did or saw.”
“You remember all of them then?”
“Every last one.”
Lita let out a low whistle. “And you can’t even get drunk. Fuck.”
“Tell me about it,” Rain said, and lit his cigarette.
“So now you just…what?”
He shrugged. “Live. Or as close to it as I can come. It’s easier—a little, anyway—with Alex here.”
“But you don’t know how he got here, or why?” Lita asked, then stifled a yawn.
Rain shook his head.
She sighed and repositioned some of their clothes into a makeshift pillow before lying down. She shivered, pulling the coat tight around her. “And now I might have gotten him killed all over again.”
“He’s still alive,” Rain said with remarkable assurance.
“Okay, say he is. What then?” She yawned again.
“We’re going to find the people behind this.”
“And do what?”
“Damage.” He snuffed out his cigarette. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it come nightfall.”
“You got a plan?” Lita murmured, already drifting.
“I do,” Rain replied. “We check the house, and then we find Jonas.”
SEVENTEEN
Alex awoke to darkness. His first instincts pushed him towards panic, and his breath quickened as he tried to sit up. Fortunately, he did so slowly enough that his head touched metal with a soft tap and not a loud thud. His chest tightening, he lay back down and moved his hands to feel the walls around him. Almost right away he realized he was inside a trunk, and he knew this because he had been in one before.
Some months earlier, he had wondered what it must be like for Rain on the occasions they had been caught without safe refuge at the dawn hours. Those had been long days which Alex spent sleeping restlessly in the back seat after they’d found an out-of-the-way place to park Rain’s car. He knew it must be infinitely worse for his brother, crammed inside a trunk for hours on end. He was much taller than Alex, and didn’t fit particularly well. So one afternoon, bored and alone while Rain rested, Alex had gone out to the car, climbed into the trunk, and closed the lid. He stayed in there for nearly ten minutes before becoming unnerved and releasing himself. At the time, he hadn’t had any reason for doing it other than pure curiosity, but today he was thankful he had.
However, that trunk had been easy to escape from. After the first incident that led to Rain spending the day in there, the two of them had decided to retrofit the latch with a release button inside. The mechanics of the job had been simple enough, and Alex had enjoyed working on it with his brother. This trunk, on the other hand, seemed to
have been altered for the exact opposite purpose. Whatever upholstery that might have once lined it had been stripped away. There was no spare tire, nor did there seem to be a jack or any other normal trunk tool either. Feeling the lid again, Alex realized it had several outward dents in it. People had been locked in here before, he suddenly realized, and they had tried to kick their way out.
A suffocating feeling surged up inside him and his mind started towards panic once more. What was he doing here? Why had he been taken captive? Taking a slow, deep breath, he did his best to push those questions down and out of the way of rationale thought. They didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was escape. He could tell the vehicle was moving, but he had no idea how much time he had before it reached a destination. He couldn’t hear anything coming from the cab of the car, so whoever was in there was driving in silence. He remembered going after that big guy and stupidly getting pulled into a chokehold. And then there was some kind of creature he’d never seen before…what the hell was that thing? And Amelie, Christ. He had no idea if she was still alive, but he knew he had to get out of here and find out.
He moved his hands blindly over the locking mechanism of the trunk and furrowed his brow. The setup was different than Rain’s car, but not by much, and it didn’t seem to have been reinforced in any way. Slipping his fingers down over the large hook that held the trunk closed, he found it to be worn and battered, but still very secure. There was no way he could manipulate it without making enough noise to draw attention. But as he had told Rain when they were working on his car, it wasn’t the latch you had to worry about, but the brain that controlled the latch. In this case, that brain was a simple mechanical device inside a small box just above the hook.
Feeling the box, Alex discovered it was held closed by only two small screws. However, two screws might as well be a padlock to someone without any tools. He cursed the loss of his switchblade to the lake outside the Red Mare Tavern, and resolved to find a new one when this was over. Perhaps even some sort of multi-tool. He had seen those peddled at markets in Maple City, but most were rusty or in ill repair. Right now, he would take the rustiest screwdriver in Ayenee over the only tool available to him: his thumbnail.
The Crimes of Orphans Page 24