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that the entire kitchen staff was branded with a hot iron for assisting her.
The smell of freedom heated her blood. She hadn’t been outside on her own in weeks. Penny, who was as excited as her companion, pulled at the leash to hasten her on. The bright moon was both a bonus and a bane. It illuminated her way, but it also made her conspicuous. She looked up at the undulating metal structure, its beauty marred by guilt, shame, and anxiety, which had imprisoned her for nearly three months. With a deep breath for courage she turned away and ran.
Her platform tennis shoes lacking arches were hell. She felt like Herman Munster trying to jog. She made it as far as a parking structure across the street before the alarm sounded. Someone had discovered Sebastian’s body. With her heart thudding painfully Poe and her dog ran for it.
It was Liam who caught her scent first. Poe had never seen him because he spent most of his time in the old gift shop that had been converted into a guard post. Like most vampires, the half-black, half-Irish dead had his own special gift which was a heightened sense of smell. The moment the alarm blared he raised his nose in the air. He ran for Trench’s room.
He sniffed Sebastian’s decapitated body then the air.
Liam left the room, walked calmly to the elevator, and pressed the down button.
His nose led him to the kitchen which had nearly destroyed Julia Poe’s scent. He opened the back door.
He stared down the guilty-looking kitchen staff and took out his walkie-talkie. “The girl’s on the loose.
She’s only been gone five, ten minutes tops. She left through the kitchen.” He stepped out in the street and 285
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sniffed once more. “I’m guessing she’s heading toward the downhill parking lot. Oh, and she’s got her dog with her.”
“We’re on our way,” the other voice on the wave said. “Careful. She’s armed.”
Liam followed in a swift gait. He knew exactly where the girl was. Her unmistakable scent, which Trench had inculcated in him by handing him Julia Poe’s laundry items before they were washed every few days, honed his olfactory senses. Julia, the pretty human Trench was obsessed with, had a pleasant bouquet, a unique scent that if bottled would make women – human and vampire alike – gain instant sex appeal. No wonder vampires and humans desired her so.
He ran as her smell became more potent and led him to the edge of the parking structure bleeding down an incline. He could smell her dog as she had been groomed with No Tears baby shampoo. He was focusing on the dog’s scent when he actually saw the animal growling at him from across the street. The dog with the coarse, dirty white fur was almost comical. Liam’s preoccupation with the dog lost him footing, and the cattle rustler came out of nowhere to point her Sig Sauer at his head. Before he could say a word, Poe lodged a knife in his throat and twisted the neck meat counter-clockwise. He fell dead a few beats later.
Poe dropped the knife and wiped the black blood on her designer dress that made her look like a streetwalker. She picked up Liam’s weapon, a 9mm of an unfamiliar make, and held it with her left hand.
The bag of knives hung on her shoulder. She took Penny’s leash and ran. That was when the first 286
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flashlight bobbing in the dark descended. Unable to see nothing but flashlight bulbs but needing to shoot the pursuer in the head as he was most likely wearing a bulletproof vest, Poe breathed in and prayed. “I need help. Let me see in the dark, Mom.”
She raised Liam’s weapon and pointed at the light, letting the voice in her head guide her. Now, it said. She fired. A flashlight clanged to the floor, and a thud followed. Music to her ears. When she reached Olive Street, a well lit part of the city, Poe found herself surrounded by men in black suits holding various types of intimidating firepower. She grabbed her dog, hid behind a parking lot column, and peeked carefully out.
“Come out, Miss Julia. We won’t harm you,”
said one of the men. “Mr. Trench is on his way. Let’s not make this any worse.”
Poe blinked twice. She raised her Sig Sauer and fired at six heads in succession before anyone could react. “Let’s make it worse, asshole,” muttered Poe, feeling like her old self again. She spotted a figure hiding behind a painfully thin palm tree and aimed for the back of the head that peeped a few inches out.
The shot shattered his skull, and she stopped herself from laughing in glee at the fallen vamp. Three more and life would be fantastic again. They shot at her from different directions – one near a parked car, the second behind a steel post, and the third by a truck.
Poe unclasped Penny’s leash. “You gotta run, girl.
You hear me? We both gotta run like hell!”
She bolted and locked her eye on the parked car since it was the closest. Sure enough, the vamp showed himself. She took him down on the run and with her right hand fired at the dead by the post. She 287
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ducked as the farther combatant by the truck shot at her. Poe rolled to the street and shot at the vamp’s foot under the truck. The old trick worked again. He screamed like fire ants were grilling his nuts, which left Poe and Penny free and clear to keep running.
They didn’t scurry a block before Trench’s Town Car skidded to a halt in front of them. Like a deer caught in headlights, Poe paused and wasted precious moments. She screamed, “Get outta here, Penny!”
When the dog refused to budge, Poe kicked her viciously in the rump until she yelped and ran away.
Poe sprinted the opposite way toward the Museum of Contemporary Art which was a half-block away. When the driver, a balding vamp with a goatee, pursued her with superspeed, Poe glanced back and aimed for his head. The dead fell near her sneakers. Poe lost count of how many bullets she had left. The Sig Sauer was empty, and her other gun had two or three bullets at most.
She tripped on the sidewalk and painfully landed on her left wrist. Italian patent shoes that gleamed in the lamplight were inches from her hand. She looked up to find an irate Quillon Trench staring down at her and wearing no scarf to cover his displeasure. Poe’s nostrils flared and she lifted her gun to shoot him, but he was too quick. He wrenched the weapon from her hand and pulled her to her feet.
He looked at her searing, unapologetic face and slapped her. Poe’s head reeled, and the edge of her lower lip trickled with blood. “You killed my best men, Julia Poe,” he said quietly, wiping the blood from her mouth with a forefinger. “And you’re going to pay for it.” He licked the blood from his finger to illustrate his point.
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CHAPTER 14
HE WOULDN’T ALLOW THE other masters of the city to murder Poe. Trench said it was his men that were killed and Poe was his to intern as he pleased. He did grant concessions, concessions he regretted most bitterly, that would assuage the bigwigs of Downtown. Quillon sent for reinforcements from his many farms. He resisted the presence of boots-on-the ground LAPD thugs to mar his classy new digs, but in the end he had no choice. His brow furrowed at the thought of outfitting the undead cops with expensive suits that belonged to the truly dead.
He was considering such dire details while waiting for Poe to finish her bath. Trench had thrown her out of his room and back into her old one. He had tied her hands with rope while she lay face-down on her soft bed the past couple nights. He didn’t want to see her face while he and others lashed her back with a whip cut from stingray tail.
Trench loved her, or so he thought, but she’d killed too many men to be allowed to live like his pampered princess. Every lash hurt him more than it hurt her. When master vampires came to ladle her blood, he seethed inside. The fools believed that Poe’s blood was potent and gave them strength. He had no choice. Poe had tied his hands. This was the third day of her punishment. After she’d been bathed 289
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by Kawana and placed back on the freshly laundered sheets, he would supervise the roping of her hands.<
br />
When satisfied he would dismiss Kawana, his beautiful and loyal ex-lover. “Why can’t everyone be like her?” he muttered and looked to the bathroom.
“You’ve got to hold on, Poe,” said Kawana, carefully running warm water infused with Epson salt onto her back. When the feverish girl didn’t answer, she continued. “Help is on the way. I’ve been communicating with Ed. Remember Ed? The guy as strong as me? We’ll he’s been rounding up our old crew the past few weeks. They’re going to be here soon, so be strong, girl.”
Poe shrugged her eyes tearless as she held onto the slippery edge of the tub. If she didn’t breathe too hard, the pain in her back didn’t sting so much. “If they come, they’ll die,” said Poe, thinking about Maclemar and Michelle and feeling suddenly ill.
“I’m not worth it, Kawana.”
“Of course you’re worth it! You’re a symbol of hope to the resistance. We can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Everyone’s scattered around the Central Valley, and each site is secret,” Poe said, her voice huskier in hopelessness. She winced at the two days worth of lashes on her back. “Why would they want to risk their lives for me? And who’ll rescue me? Some poor ex-cattle with no powers?”
To this, Kawana had no answer, and she sloshed the bloody bath water pointlessly. “I don’t know who’ll come, Poe, but I do know that powerful 290
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vampires and special halfdead like Ed know where each batch is living. He’ll find a way to gather them all. I know it.”
“My dog is free. That’s enough for me,” was the last thing Poe said. Sainvire is dead. I want to die, too.
Trench pushed aside her hair that had grown long over the months and inspected her back. “Tsk tsk.
Your beautiful back. I’m so sorry, Poe. I have limited options in this matter.”
Poe didn’t even grace him with an answer. She’d stopped speaking with her tormentor for the past few days. Inside she thought, You’re loving this for what I’ve done to your face, you asshole.
She shut out the smell of burning candles placed randomly around the room like an offering to her.
There was nothing she hated more than scented candles. They gave her headaches like strong cologne and evil vampires. And they were bad for the environment.
Three of them dressed for the opera came in.
Juno Liman, a long-haired, white-skinned vamp Goth freaks would have loved, shook hands with Trench and walked over to Poe who trained her eyes to the wooden floor. He ran his hand on her rounded ass and gave it a slap, leaving a temporary imprint of his hand. Samuel Clemens, not at all related to Mark Twain, sauntered in and glanced at Poe’s freshly washed back. “I can almost taste her sweetness. Her power,” he said. The last dead that the came into Poe’s room was a hulky master vampire named 291
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Franco Sebastiani. “When do we eat?” he said as he took the whip from Trench’s hand. Quillon bit back his annoyance and said, “You may proceed, Sebastiani.”
The three vampires took turns lashing Poe’s bleeding back while Trench, hidden behind his scarf, swallowed his rage. Four vampires had abused Poe two days before and another three last night. The girl was running a fever from the wounds that kept reopening with every slash of the whip. He watched Poe’s face contorting with pain, her beautiful lips trembling. Yet she never made a sound. After a while the girl fainted.
“Alright. That’s enough, Sebastiani!” Trench said with iron. “Have another go at that whip and I’ll—”
A great boom interrupted the beginning of Trench’s tirade as the foundations of the concert hall trembled. Another explosion followed by gunfire reverberated around the acoustically sensitive building.
“What the hell?” said Samuel Clemens. His blood-filled spoon shook with the foundation.
“It’s not another rustling, is it?” asked Juno Liman, his mouth dripping with Poe’s blood. He flicked back his long locks.
Their questions left unanswered, the door to her room flew open and a man in a long black coat with a hood entered like a typhoon, hacking off Sebastiani’s arm which clanged to the floor. Before Liman could react the tall man in black split him in two at the waist and kicked his lower half out of the way.
Another explosion shook Frank Gehry’s architectural 292
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masterpiece and woke Trench and Samuel Clemens into action.
His incisors dripping from rage, Clemens flew at the man. He tackled the cattle rustler until they both crashed into the wall next to Poe’s bed, smashing a hole from room to hallway. The intruder grunted and flew back through the hole. He slammed Clemens against the entertainment section, demolishing the sound system. Like gutting a fish the stranger sliced the master vampire from stomach to shoulder.
When the man in black turned back for Trench, the vampire was gone. The rat-a-tat of semi-automatics and the hallow boom of grenades exploding made the soothing music hall a den of chaos and disorder.
The hooded man cut the ropes from Poe’s bruised wrists. He carefully turned her over without allowing her raw back to touch the sheets. An angry groan escaped his lips as he inspected the many fine scars running down her legs that had turned white.
The girl was unconscious and feverish. “Poe,” he said gently. “If I had known, I would’ve come back for you.”
Poe’s eyes fluttered open. “Kaleb?” she asked weakly.
“Yes. I’m here, Poe.”
Poe shook her head to clear the cobwebs and touched the vampire’s scar above his lip. “I’m naked.
Give me your coat and get me out of here,” Poe said weakly then passed out.
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Morales, Michelle, and Passionada took turns looking after Poe. She’d been unconscious for three days.
Infection had set in the wounds, and Morales didn’t have antibiotics on hand. He made do with double doses of expired Tylenol and round-the-clock application of cold cloth on the areas of her body that hadn’t been marred by a whip.
“That bastard Trench,” Morales muttered angrily. The sight of Poe’s raw back like it had been copiously scratched up by a T-rex made him want to land a piledriver on the master vampire who had dared treat his friend so brutally. He’d dealt with many abused cattle, but he’d never seen such purposeful torture of a human being.
Maclemar wanted to be part of the roster, but after bouts of cursing and near-hysteria at seeing Poe’s state, Morales had no choice but to ban him from the sick room. Sainvire, who visited frequently, merely stood watching over the girl in his usual silence, his face contorted with rage. Dressed in black t-shirt and dark slacks, the vampire never moved from his position facing the girl’s bed. Morales sometimes forgot about his silent presence.
“You didn’t know, Kaleb,” he had told the vampire. “You thought the Revs got her. It wasn’t your fault.”
To this, Sainvire said nothing. His grim gray eyes never left the pus-filled wounds on Poe’s back.
He had circled the mine for five days straight but could not find a sign of Poe and Penny. He had no idea that he had put the woman he loved in the clutches of Trench by allowing her to retrieve Plasmacore for his sustenance.
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They’d been staying in Dogtown where they were hiding three choppers under tarps to cloak them from airborne eyes. Vampires mostly avoided Passionada’s home due to the superfluous dogs that could intimidate even the ballsiest of undead, not to mention the roadway sinkholes and piles of cars surrounding the area.
Passionada had cleaned the cotton candy machine just in case the girl woke up. She felt awful for battering Poe over the head and handing her to Maclemar. As penance she helped Morales as much as she could, washing bedding, changing bandages.
On the third day as she was arranging wild flowers in a vase t
o put on Poe’s bedside, the girl stirred. Being over six feet with heels on, Passionada quickly kneeled on the floor and touched the girl’s forehead for any sign of fever.
Hers was the first face Poe had seen after three days of freedom. The girl’s wingtip eyebrows drew together, and she tried to push herself up.
Passionada’s gentle touch and the horrible pain in her back stopped all thought of standing up.
“Mija, don’t move. Your back is still raw,” she said. Her red puckered lips glimmered with lip gloss.
She pushed Poe’s hair away from her face. “Once you scab over you’ll be able to move again. But for now lie still and be patient.”
“Passionada,” Poe said tiredly, her mouth dry.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Venice. My pad. You’re safe now.”
“You hit me over the head—”
“I know, and I’m sorry. Kaleb’s orders, you know.” Passionada poured water in a glass and put a swirly straw in it. “Here. Drink up.” Poe sucked on 295
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the straw until the glass was empty and stared at the woman with perfectly applied make-up. She shivered at the memory of being trained to look like Passionada. “Our friends will be glad to know your fever’s broken. Maclemar and Kaleb will be especially pleased.”
“Sainvire’s alive?” she asked with confusion.
She thought the man in black rescuing her was only a figment of her imagination.
“Well he’s a vampire, so he’s considered dead,”
Passionada winked. “But he’s alive and well. It took him a few days to heal on the rock you left him.
Snaring a jackrabbit gave him enough energy to get to the mine. After healing up with Plasmacore he went looking for you. He searched for a week. The poor man thought you were dead. He rejoined Morales and his crew bound for Santa Cruz.”
“I wasn’t dead. Trench took me,” Poe said. She was barely audible.
“He didn’t know until Ed scoured each settlement to find you. He met with Kawana, and she told him of your imprisonment.” Passionada rose. “I better get your boys in here.”
Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles Page 25