by Rob Cornell
Teresa came bounding out of Jessie’s bedroom her pistol up.
The vamp glanced at her, then dodged sideways, grabbing Kate and pulling her in front of her as a shield. Kate screamed. She kicked. She thrashed. The vamp’s grip held her easily. She opened her mouth and held it inches from Kate’s throat.
“No,” Lockman shouted.
“I’ve got the shot,” Teresa said.
He trusted Teresa’s aim. But he had no way of knowing if the vamp had more ogre blood in her. He didn’t know how precise a shot would put her down if that were the case. He held out a hand to signal Teresa to stand down.
“I’ve got it, Craig. Just like you had it for me.”
“She’s the one had the ogre blood in her.”
A corner of the vamp’s open mouth curled up. She laughed.
“Stand down, Teresa.”
Teresa pulled back the hammer on her pistol. “I won’t shoot until you’ve cleared Kate.”
“Come with me or I’ll drink her dry.” The vamp nodded at Lockman. “My king wants you,”
Kate stared at Lockman, eyes wide and pleading. Her shoulders hitched as she tried to draw breath with the vamp’s arm bracing her across the chest.
“Then he can have me. Let her go.”
The vamp eyed Teresa. “Put down your weapon.”
Teresa visibly swallowed. “Craig?”
“Do it,” he said.
Teresa eased the hammer back into place, set the gun on the floor, and kicked it away.
“Okay,” Lockman said. “Now let her go.”
“Why should I?” The vamp ran her tongue up the length of Kate’s neck. “I could kill all of your friends just for sport.”
The color in Kate’s face drained.
Something didn’t make sense. Lockman tried to pull together the loose and jangling pieces in his mind. What was it? Then it clicked together. “Teresa, pick your gun back up and take the shot.”
“What?”
The vamp snarled. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill you all.”
“Grab your gun. Take the shot.”
The fear in Kate’s eyes seared Lockman’s heart.
“She doesn’t have ogre blood in her.”
“How do you know?” Teresa asked.
“Because she would have killed everyone by now, just like she had at LaRue’s place.” He stared the vamp in her yellow eyes. “Take the shot, Teresa.”
“I’ll take the shot,” a voice said from behind them. Something cut the air. Lockman only glimpsed a flash of metal. Then the dagger pierced the vamp’s eye.
She screamed, let go of Kate, and probed the hilt of the dagger with her hands.
Lockman grabbed Kate and dragged her across the living room toward the hall into the kitchen. That’s where he found Marty’s brother, David. He had a matching blade to the one in the vamp’s face. “Get back into the kitchen. I’ll take care of this bitch.”
Outside of Marty driving his sword into this vamp’s neck, Lockman had never seen an ogre warrior go toe-to-toe with a vamp. He wasn’t about to miss this. He ushered Kate into the kitchen. “Wait here. Don’t move.”
“Where are you going?”
“To back up our big, green friend.”
When he returned to the living room he found the vamp and David circling one another. The vamp had pulled the knife from her eye socket and held it at her side. Blood gushed from the hole like dark red tears. Teresa took the opportunity to recover her pistol.
Lockman smirked. This would be over soon.
David swung at the vamp’s throat with his blade. She dodged easily and countered with a kick to his stomach. David barely moved. Lockman started to realize why ogre blood made the vamps so strong. If any of an ogre’s strength transferred through the blood, that plus a vampire’s own natural power would make a dangerous mix.
The vamp swung out her blade in an arc at David’s face. David leaned out of the way then countered, cutting one of the vamp’s deformed ears clean off her head. She screeched and backed off, but the wound didn’t faze her for long. These ogres needed to start coating their blades in silver.
The vamp’s blade flashed and caught David’s arm, sliced through his bicep. Red blood trickled down his massive green arm.
He roared in response and plowed toward her, his blade low.
She didn’t move. In fact, she spread her arms and let David jam his knife into her belly. He lifted her off her feet by the knife handle alone. The vamp bared her fangs, bent forward, and sank her teeth around the wound in David’s arm.
Fuck.
“Teresa,” Lockman shouted. “Put the bitch down.”
Teresa held her pistol in both hands, drew a circle with the barrel. “I don’t have a shot.”
Sure enough, David’s back was to them and the vamp clinging to him hid behind his large body. David must have heard. He swung around, giving Teresa an open target of the vamp’s back. But with the vamp wrapped around him like that, Teresa would risk having some of her rounds pass through and strike David.
David twisted his blade and tried pushing the vamp off of him. Should have been easy for him. The vamp should have went flying across the room and into the wall.
She held firm.
She’d had enough blood.
The vamp wrapped her legs around David’s waist and drew her face away from his arm. The blood around her mouth looked like a marred attempt at clown make-up. She gripped his head in her hands and twisted. The sickening crunch echoed through the room as David’s head turned completely around. The vamp dropped off of him and he collapsed, the ogre’s dead weight enough to crack the floor.
The vamp turned to Teresa and Lockman. She wiped David’s blood from her mouth and sucked it off her fingers. “Ogres are so strong,” she said, sounding as if in mid-orgasm. “And so stupid.”
Teresa unloaded on the vamp. The silver bullets hissed against her flesh, but the rounds themselves bounced off her chest, leaving behind only red welts.
Lockman’s heartbeat pounded in his throat. No way. No fucking way. But it made sense. Vamps were never stronger than right after a feeding. And this was no ordinary feeding.
They didn’t stand a chance.
Worse still, Jessie chose that moment to shuffle sleepily out of her room. “Dad, what’s going on?”
Lockman ground his teeth.
The vamp took them all in, as they stood there staring back at her. A slow smile cracked her face. “You’re daughter?”
The cobwebs of sleep must have cleared out of Jessie’s head. She went rigid. “Oh, shit.”
The vamp’s yellow eyes shined. “You murdered my daughter. Did you know? The one this mortal,” she pointed at Teresa, “called her sister. I turned her. She was my offspring and you took her from me.” She cocked her head, studied Jessie.
Lockman put himself between the vamp and Jessie. “You’ll have to rip through me first.”
“No, I’m taking you home to my King.” She sauntered forward until only a few inches stood between them. “Don’t worry. I’m not entirely insensitive. I’ll let you watch your progeny die.” She swung an arm and knocked Lockman aside.
He careened off the wall and fell to the floor.
Kate tried to pull Jessie away, but the vamp yanked Jessie out of reach and kicked Kate between the legs. A quiet grunt slipped out of Kate’s mouth and she dropped into a curled ball. The vamp held Jessie by the head, just as she had when she turned David’s neck around.
An explosion tore through Lockman’s insides. He felt obliterated. An insubstantial mist. He reached for Jessie, though the vamp had drawn her to the center of the living room. “No. Please.”
The vamp slowly turned Jessie’s head one way than the other, like a puppet master making her puppet shake its head “no.” Jessie puffed hard, each breath brining her one step closer to hyperventilating.
Lockman stood up off the floor. “I’ll go. Just leave my friends…my family alone.”
The vamp emitted a guttu
ral Ha. “Just like the pimp. You mortals think you can barter for your lives. But your lives are ours for the taking.” She sank her teeth into Jessie’s throat.
All of Lockman’s senses went on overload. He could taste the ham sandwich he’d had for lunch hours before. He could smell his own sweat as well as the iron stink of blood in the room. The blood flowing from his daughter’s neck and out around the vamp’s lips such a vibrant red, it shone in the light like a candied apple. And he heard something like chanting, a steady, mumbled drone from somewhere behind him.
He felt like he could do anything. Including ripping this vamp’s head from her shoulders.
Growling like an animal, Lockman launched himself past the vamp feeding on his daughter, snatched up one of David’s daggers, then drove it down through the back of the vamp’s skull,
The vamp reared her head back, her scream gurgling through her mouthful of blood. She shoved Jessie aside and spun.
Lockman held onto the dagger’s hilt like a saddle horn and swung around her, using the momentum to get up on her back. She bucked, but he wrapped his legs around her waist and held firm. The muscles in his arms and thighs burned at the effort. The vamp’s uncanny strength was undeniable. He would end up on the floor and possibly dead any minute now. But if he could buy enough time for the others to get Jessie out of there…
“Go,” he shouted. “Get her out of here.”
He no sooner said it and the vamp flipped him over her shoulders and body slammed him to the floor. She looked down at him, bloody fangs bared. He could see the vampire bloodlust in her yellow eyes. Her pupils had dilated to pinpricks. Her lips quivered like a mad dog’s.
“Do it,” Lockman said. “Bite me.”
The vamp opened her mouth to an impossible width, jaw unhinging with a pop. Blood coated her tongue and palate completely which made her mouth look like a gaping wound with fangs.
The roar of an engine filled the room and a great crash came a second later. A pair of blinding lights shone at them both. Lockman had to close his eyes.
The vamp screamed.
The smell of burning and rotten flesh wafted over Lockman. He cracked his eyelids open enough to see the vamp’s silhouette standing over him, hands over her face and screeching. Thousands of hours of training and many more on the field prepped Lockman to take any opening an enemy gave without having to think about it.
He rolled away from the lights and scrambled to his feet. Pain knotted his back and around his sides. No time for pain. On his feet he could see what had come crashing through the front of the flat. Vera had broken through enough to shine her headlights into the room. The lights had an odd bluish tint and were brighter than any headlight he’d ever seen. These were not the headlights they had used while driving around New Orleans.
The vamp backed away from the light, her flesh smoking. When she tried to step out of the beams of light, the headlights turned like a pair of eyes and kept the vamp in the middle of the glare. The bloodsucking bitch howled more like a werewolf than a vamp. She turned away from the lights, looked at Lockman, out of her reach. Looked to the floor where Jessie lay, out of Lockman’s reach.
He saw what was coming next, but he couldn’t move fast enough.
The vamp scooped up Jessie’s limp body. Cradling Jess in her arms, the vamp leapt onto Vera’s hood and ran over the top of her, out into the night.
No thought needed. Lockman ran after her. He jumped up on Vera and slid on his hip across the top of her and down the back window. He hit the ground running, had to stop after only a half-dozen steps. Panting, he looked both ways down the narrow street. No sign of the vamp or Jessie.
He paced in a circle, hands clawing at his hair, tears burning in his eyes. Police sirens moaned in the distance. Lights in neighboring houses and apartments came on. Shadowed faces peered out through parted curtains. The smell of night blooming jasmine turned Lockman’s stomach. He would never be able to stand that smell again. He kept seeing the blood flowing from Jessie’s neck. And Jessie’s blood painted on the inside of the vamp’s mouth. His daughter’s blood. Her blood.
Blood.
Oh, God, her blood.
Chapter Forty-Two
What have we done?
Teresa couldn’t get her hands to stop shaking. She worked them together, kneading her palms, squeezing her fingers. Nothing worked. Then there was that feeling in her chest, as if a black hole had consumed her organs and left an empty ribcage behind. Fuck, she couldn’t even imagine what Craig and Kate must feel.
Kate.
She still lay on the floor, curled in a fetal position, groaning. Teresa knelt at her side. They had to get out of here. Now. Dealing with authorities when you had the weight of a government Agency behind you was one thing. Rogue players in the supernatural world, on the other hand, did not mix well with cops. They’d deem them crazy and throw them all in a padded room. Or end up in a padded room themselves if they saw the giant ogre on the floor.
Aw, hell. That made her think of Marty. There’s no way he could have slept through the chaos out here. She looked down the hall toward his bedroom. Then she looked over her shoulder toward the flat’s shattered façade where Craig had rushed out after Jessie and that fucking vamp.
She couldn’t pull this crew together and get them out of there herself. For an instant—just that, an instant—she contemplated taking off. She shut down that thought and hurried down the hall to get Marty.
She found him on his knees in the middle of the room. He whispered something under his breath, what sounded like a song with only a few notes. The words didn’t make any sense. Didn’t sound like words at all. Least not any she’d heard before. His eyes were closed and he swayed in a small circle. She realized he was chanting.
“Marty, what the fuck?”
He continued chanting and swaying.
Teresa moved closer and slapped him across the face. “Wake up!”
His eyes fluttered open. He gazed up at Teresa and for a moment he looked like he didn’t recognize her. He blinked a few times and his brow furled. “Teresa?”
“We’re in deep shit here, brother. Snap out of it.”
“I had a vision.”
“You can tell me about it later. The vamps have Jessie, and Kate and Craig are pretty much out of commission. And if you listen close, you can hear the sirens coming.”
Marty shot to his feet. “Where?”
She led him over to Kate. He picked her up easily and threw her over his shoulder. “Vera, you mind backing up?”
The car revved its engine and squealed its tires as it reversed in an arc onto the street. Her headlights blinked and the bright blue light turned to a normal hue. Fucking car was amazing. Marty had thought of everything when he built her, even before possessing it with a guardian angel. UV headlights. Brilliant.
Marty carried Kate out of the hole in the front, Teresa started to follow him then paused. She looked back at the end table by the couch. The artifact Jessie had brought with her sat right where they had left it. Teresa retrieved the cube before dashing out after Marty.
While Marty put Kate in the car, Teresa ran over to Craig. He knelt in the middle of the street, weeping openly. He looked up at her.
“She’s gone.”
The sirens grew louder. She rested a hand on his shoulder. “We have to go.”
His face turned to stone. He stopped crying all at once. The look in his eyes chilled Teresa. He got to his feet. “Kate?”
“Marty’s got her. She’s in the car.”
Craig nodded and they both strode over to Vera.
Marty met them car side. “She’s in shock more than anything.”
“Where do we rendezvous?”
Marty’s eyes shifted from Teresa to Craig. “Get Kate to a hospital. We’ll reconnect later. Things are too hot right now.”
“Bullshit. I’m going after Jessie.”
Teresa’s face pinched. She thought of Mandy. What the vamps had done to her. Jessie’s fate would be
no different. It took all she had not to cry. She rubbed Craig’s back. “She’s gone, hon.”
“No.” His voice sounded like tearing cardboard. “We go after her now, we get her before they harm her.”
“We don’t even know where the vamp took her.”
“The spots on the map. She’s taking her to one of those spots.”
Now the sirens sounded like they were on the next block. Marty grabbed Craig by the arm, pulled open Vera’s driver-side door, and shoved Craig toward it. “Get the fuck in there.”
Craig braced himself against the edge of the car’s roof. “I’ll get her on my own.”
“Like hell,” Teresa said.
“What about Kate?” Marty asked. “She needs you, too.”
Teresa looked through Vera’s windshield. Kate sat in the passenger seat, near catatonic.
“I know,” Craig said. “But she won’t make it if I don’t get Jessie back. Neither of us will.”
Marty growled. “You stubborn son of a bitch. The café. Meet us there in an hour.”
Craig exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath and nodded. He climbed into Vera and the door closed on its own. A second later, Vera accelerated away before Craig had his seatbelt on.
Red and blue lights flashed at the end of the street as a pair of police cars turned the corner, heading their way. Teresa and Marty took off, ran between a pair of houses across the street. They had parked on the next block and Teresa was glad for the precaution. They managed to slip into the shadows right as the police cruisers came to a halt in front of the flat. Teresa spared a second to look over her shoulder as she realized they had left David behind.
“Marty, your brother…”
“I know.” They came out from between the houses and jogged to the Lincoln. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
They got in the car and Marty started the engine.
“The police.” Teresa felt a sob catch in her throat. “What’ll they do with him?”
Marty put the car in gear and shot off down the street. “Same thing mainstreamers always do when they run into the supernatural. Explain it away and forget about it.”