by Rob Cornell
In the darkness, I couldn’t make out much more than that.
I sensed a presence beside me before Odi emerged from the shadows.
My boots grated against the concrete when I pivoted toward him in my crouched position. Echoing in the recessed entryway behind us, the sound seemed a dozen decibels louder than it was. That’s all we needed, getting discovered ten seconds after we showed up.
“Look, man. I—”
Odi held up a hand. “Don’t sweat it.”
I tried to read his expression, but he kept his gaze on the building across the street. He’d sounded sincere enough. I didn’t buy it, though. I started to say something more, but he spoke over me.
“You guys need to go around behind this building.” He pointed outward into the darkness. “There are six vampires shadow walking the perimeter, and this little bit of cover won’t do you much good if any of them glances this way.”
Mom and I wasted no time retreating around the corner. This lot didn’t look much different than Zinctech’s. Broken blacktop with weeds choking every crack. Black crumbles of asphalt scattered like stones. Faded yellow lines that had once demarked parking spaces.
Once we were beyond the vamps’ line of sight, Odi circled back. I couldn’t see him, so I pictured him casually crossing the street, maybe getting stopped by one of the sentries, some quick questions, then an open invitation to join the nest.
Mom and I exchanged looks, both of us wondering how long this would take, and what we might find inside. A bunch of vamps sleeping in? Just the hanging captives? Another set of guards?
Odi’s intel would tell us soon enough. But, really, not as soon as I would have liked.
Only a couple minutes later, Odi was back with us, a pained look on his face.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Turns out there is a secret handshake.” He held out his hand. His palm had the pattern of the Star of David seared into the skin like a brand.
My shoulder itched at the sight, where I had my own brand of a completely different type. “What the hell?”
Odi drew his hand back and studied his palm for himself, wincing at the sight of it. “One of the guys met me at the door. He asked me why I wasn’t out doing The Work. Which totally weirded me out, because it sounded like God’s work, ya know? Like passing out flyers door-to-door.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I needed a rest.” He tried to close his hand, hissed through his teeth, and uncurled his fingers. “That’s when he went to, like, shake my hand. I didn’t think anything of it. So I shook. And he burned me with this like he had one of those joke buzzers.”
I wrinkled my brow. “But it didn’t burn him?”
Odi shook his head. “I think it was something like a coin, but with the symbol only stamped into one side.”
I noticed our voices had risen from our initial whispers and started to reverberate against the brick facade we stood by and into the night.
“We should get back to the car, talk there.”
“Why would he do this?” Odi asked, holding his hand up as if swearing an oath, displaying the mark.
“I don’t know. Let’s work it out at the car before they hear us and—”
“Too late for that.”
The voice had a soft lilt, but a gritty tone. I spun toward it. Three vampires stood in a row a couple dozen feet away from us.
Chapter Twenty-One
The vamps were all fangs and wrinkly gray faces. The one in the center had half his head shaved, the other half had long black hair with white streaks through it. I could tell he was the one who had spoken by looking at him. He had the posture of a leader, and his nails were a good four inches or more, made for scooping out eyeballs or shredding flesh. The long nails suggested some age.
The other two looked a lot like Odi—about the same age, similar casual dress, only with long sleeve tees instead of flannel. Typical high school kids, but undead. Which meant they could have been any age at all, from seventeen to a hundred, though probably not more than that.
We had a second before they charged us. But for a couple of sorcerers like me and (especially) Mom, a second was sometimes all you needed.
I conjured a quick fire ball and threw it at the face of the apparent ringleader in the middle. He dodged easily, the flame shooting over his shoulder and into the distance.
Mom threw a blast of pure green energy at the teen vamp on the left. He didn’t have the same reflexes as his boss. Her beam struck him in the chest, blowing a hole clean through where his heart would have been had Mom not vaporized it. He took two steps, then crumbled to dust.
Odi charged at the teen on the right, meeting him halfway. He crouched low, like a linebacker, and hit Teen Vamp with his shoulder in the gut. Teen Vamp lifted off the ground about three feet and sailed backward a half dozen. But Odi lost his balance and tripped on a loose chunk of asphalt. He got his hands out to break his fall just in time to save his face from some serious road rash.
The lead vamp I had missed reached me and clapped both hands around my throat. I could feel his thumb nails pressed under my chin like a pair of blades ready to slice me a new mouth. He lifted me off my feet, bared his fangs, and unleashed the worst smelling breath I had ever encountered. It smelled like an overflowing diaper pail left in the sun for a good week. If he hadn’t been squeezing my neck so tightly, I would have gagged.
He pushed his face toward me, mouth wide, as if he meant to bite off my nose.
Then, after a flash of green light, his face disappeared.
His whole head disappeared.
I had a bit of déjà vu as he continued to hold me up even while I stared at the smoking stump of his neck with a scorched stub of his spin sticking out. A second wave of déjà vu hit when he turned to dust and I dropped back to my feet.
For a second I wondered if I was having a nightmare, reliving the night outside Sly’s shop. But the vamp dust that now powdered my sweaty but cold face felt too real. Some of it had blown into my mouth as well. It tasted like ash with a hint of rot.
I spat and wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand. All that did was smear sweat and ash around my lips. If I had looked at a mirror in that moment, I imagined I would have looked like a deranged clown who had run out of face paint and went with soot from the bottom of a fireplace instead.
Odi hopped to his feet and scanned our surroundings. The vampire he’d tackled had disappeared. He’d likely shadow walked his way the hell out of there. And was possibly getting more friends from the nest.
“The car,” I said, that ashen hotdoggy taste still on my tongue. “Now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
We all climbed into the car, slamming our doors shut in near unison—thunk, thunk, thunk.
I started the engine and squealed the tires as I made a U-turn and raced out of there. I didn’t have any conscious destination or direction in mind. I drove until we were clear of the industrial park, then kept driving until we had a few miles between us and them.
I pulled into a BP and parked along the side where they had the air pump, because it was out of the way, and mostly out of reach of the lights.
I cut the engine and thumped back in my seat. Neither Mom nor Odi said anything, leaving the car silent except for the muffled grumble of a Dodge Ram parked in front of the station, the driver presumably somewhere inside buying a pop or some of that yummy gas station jerky they kept in the clear containers at the counter. I got heartburn just thinking about them, and I was only thirty-two. Heartburn was for old people like Mom. You know, mid-one hundreds.
Random thoughts like that let my subconscious think things through on its own. But even after the truck’s owner came out with a Mountain Dew and a bag of Cheetos and pulled away, the subconscious hadn’t kicked up anything good.
“How the hell are we going to get those people out of there?” I asked.
Mom leaned forward with her head between the seats. “So much for the element of s
urprise.”
“Sorry, guys,” Odi said. “I led them right to us.”
“Not your fault,” I said. “This isn’t an ordinary nest.” I twisted in my seat to face Odi beside me. “What did they do after you got burnt?”
“The dude said I obviously did not belong there. Emphasis on the obviously. Then he opened his coat, showed me a pistol in a holster on his belt, and told me to get lost. I didn’t argue.”
“How does burning you with a religious symbol tell them you don’t belong? That would burn any vamp, at least to some degree.”
I was mostly talking to myself, but Odi said, “That’s a cross between and elephant and a rhino.”
“An ‘elephino,’” Mom said with wry amusement in her voice. Maybe she was warming to Odi already. Or at least accepted my forced relationship with him like I had.
“You guys are so cute,” I said. “But can we stay focused?”
“Oh, that’s good coming from you, Sebastian,” Mom said.
“Yeah,” Odi added.
“Why did they burn you?” I said, pretending we were already back to serious so maybe they would follow suit.
Odi shrugged.
Mom scooched back in her seat and sighed.
“You didn’t see it before you shook his hand?” I asked.
“No. But I wasn’t looking for it. He just had it in his palm.”
“But if you had known it was there, you wouldn’t have shook his hand.”
“Hell no.” He held his hand out. The skin was having trouble healing. “It still hurts like a bitch.”
“So the vamps who are part of that nest know better than to shake hands with the guards.”
Odi leaned his head back against the headrest and stared up at the ceiling. He sighed. “Duh.”
I hitched a shoulder. “No big deal. We’ll figure out another way.”
“We don’t even know how many are inside,” Mom said.
“So what then? We leave them in there? Wait until dawn and burn them down with the rest of the nest?”
Mom rubbed her face and groaned softly. “I don’t know, Sebastian. I’m a scholar, not a demon hunter. This is outside my wheelhouse.”
Odi chuckled. “Well, you did better than Sebastian back there. You totally obliterated that dude’s head. It was awesome.”
“Hey,” I said. “I did nearly the exact same thing the night of the riots. And that was while the vamp had me lifted off my feet, too”
Odi laughed some more. “That’s so pathetic, dude. You remind me of this kid I skateboard with.” He made his voice mockingly nasal. “I can do a bone drop off a minivan. Just get me the minivan.” He brought back his normal voice. “Of course, no one had a minivan.”
He hadn’t noticed his use of the present tense when talking about the friend he used to skateboard with, but I did. Odi’s days thrashing with his friends were long gone. I’m not sure he realized that. I had noticed how he sometimes forgot he was a vampire the same way I sometimes did.
“Can we get back on topic…again?”
The mood in the car quickly sobered.
A junker made mostly of rust sputtered and squealed its way up to one of the pumps. The sound made my skin go tight and made my nerves frizzle like frayed wiring. It shouldn’t have bothered me so much, but I was on edge. I kept thinking about those bodies hung upside down and weeping blood from dozens of old wounds. Their agony had worn them so thin, they couldn’t even struggle anymore.
Despite all that, I did appreciate that this gas station wasn’t getting the same vamp treatment as the one across the street from Sly’s shop. In fact, there weren’t any signs of vampire rioting in the area. If they were rioting again, they had decided to leave Troy out of it. I wondered if it had to do with their nest being located in the city. I also wondered, seeing as how the nest appeared to have more organization than normal, if the spots they were hitting weren’t as random as they seemed.
If we could get our hands on a vamp from the nest to interrogate, we might get some of these answers. But adding secondary objectives to a task that already seemed impossible fell into the cart before the horse category.
“Could you shadow walk past them?” I asked Odi. “Get inside without the noticing?”
“Not now that they know about us. If they don’t see me, they’ll probably smell me before I get through the door.”
“What would he do once he got inside anyway?” Mom asked.
“I’m brainstorming, all right? I don’t know.”
The driver of the junker looked as weathered as his car. Lifting the nozzle from his car back to the pump looked like it took some effort the way his shoulders slumped while he held it. He had a wiry gray beard and more gray through most of his curly hair.
I idly watched him climb into his car and start the engine. A loose fan belt or something screeched from under the hood. Besides the rust and the coughing engine, the car had all sorts of dents, and the bumper had at least three rolls of duct tape holding it together.
The two of them both looked like they’d ran straight through a brick wall.
My brain sparked. “Whoa.”
“What?” Odi asked, but I didn’t answer until the junker and its rough passenger pulled away.
I pictured that wide entryway the vamps’ building had, nothing but glass and sheets of wood.
“We storm the castle.”
“What are you talking about? They won’t make the same mistake those others did. They won’t come out of the shadows until they’re right behind you. They’ve got guns. And they’ve got fangs.”
“And we’re driving an old ‘87 Reliant,” I said, “that the Ministry, now that I’m on the official payroll, will pay to replace if it’s damaged during the course of duty.”
“Oh, goodness,” Mom said from the back. “You…”
I looked over my shoulder. Even in the darkness, I could make out the slight, upward curve of her mouth.
“Is this how it always is when you hunt?”
I laughed, full on and from the belly. “No way. These vamps have given me extra special challenges compared to the usual bounties. Makes my job look positively dull in comparison.” I waggled my eyebrows. “Why? Does it excite the mild-mannered scholar?”
She spat air and looked at me like, Are you serious? “You know full well there’s nothing mild about my manners. And just because I’m a little exhilarated still doesn’t mean I approve of your occupation.”
“Just a little exhilarated?” I asked and winked.
Odi waved his hands out in front of him. “Whoa. Hold the onions for a sec. Are you saying you want to drive straight into the nest?”
“Not drive, my young apprentice. We’re gonna crash this baby…” I thumped a fist on the dash. “…right through the front door.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The trick would be getting the angle right. If the nest had been on a corner, we could have come almost straight on, jumped the curb, and smash. But the nearest cross street was more than half a block down. We would have to tear ass down the street, then curve the car around, without slowing too much, and then barrel through the entrance. Because I didn’t want to just break the glass and boards with the front end of my Reliant—I wanted to blow clean through as if pulling into a garage.
If we got lucky, we would run down a few vamps on the way.
I threaded through the industrial park from a different direction than we had entered last time, coming off a back road instead of turning in from Big Beaver, a four-lane main road that only had one entryway into the park, which would make us easy targets if any of the vamps were posted there waiting for our return.
Would they? Did they even suspect why we had come in the first place? Our brief encounter with the three vampires, two of which we dusted, couldn’t have told them much about us. I had a reputation among vampires as the Unturned, many of whom thought my condition abhorrent, as if denying the vamp blood inside of me was some kind of unholy blaspheme.
&nb
sp; But not every vamp knew the Unturned on sight. And our tussle had begun and ended so quickly, even if the one who had escaped did know who I was, it wasn’t likely he had identified me in the confusion.
I hoped so, anyway. Because, while they didn’t like the whole unturned thing, they would hate me even more for having killed their elder.
I let the car idle, headlights off, a few blocks east of the nest, the complete opposite direction from which we had approached the first time. Odi kept an eye on all the surrounding shadows for anything lurking within, while I went to the trunk. I still had the shotgun Sly had brought to our showdown with Goulet almost two weeks ago, as well as the box of silver slugs that came with it. I also had the handgun I had used to actually kill Goulet, and a couple of magazines to go with.
I gathered the weapons and ammo and got back into the car.
I handed the shotgun over to Mom. She loaded some slugs and pumped the first round into place.
I released the magazine from my pistol and checked the bullets. The mag held thirteen rounds, and every one of them was silver. I slid the magazine back and thumbed off the safety. No reason for a dramatic racking of the slide. I already had a round in the chamber.
Odi peered around his seatback at Mom. “You’re one badass lady.”
She laughed. “I’ve had my share of scrapes. You can only uncover so many ancient monuments or catacombs before you wake up something nasty.”
“We ready?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom answered.
“Roger Wilco,” Odi said. “Whatever that means.”
I handed my gun to Odi. “Hold this.”
He took it gingerly, as if it were a baby bird, or a ticking bomb. He held it with both hands, not bothering to take it by the grip.
“You’re going to have to hold it a little tighter than that when we hit the door.” I pointed in his face. “Don’t lose it.”
He clenched his teeth and gazed down at the weapon. He wrinkled his nose as if it stunk. “There’s silver in there, dude.”
“Don’t pull the trigger and you’ll be fine.”