Librarian. Assassin. Vampire. (Book 1): Amber Fang (The Hunted)

by Arthur Slade

  When I went back, the door was partly open. Percival was still snoring. I crept in and identified a distinguishing tattoo on his lovely, thick neck—a black widow spider.

  I must have been overtired because when I went to turn his head for a better angle, he shot straight up and said, “Whodafuk?” I grabbed his Mohawk with one hand and his shoulder with the other and bit somewhere in between, but I didn’t get good suction, so blood went spurting into my eye, onto the white sheets, and halfway across the cell.

  “Gettoffme!” He half shouted. His life squirted out in red arcs.

  Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

  I tightened my grip, but my hands were slick with redness. He smacked me with a punch to the forehead. I took a second bite but was knocked back by another fist. Now there were four little fountains of red.

  Mom would kill me if she saw this mess.

  I dug my claws into his arms and stabbed my incisors right below his tattooed spider. And got good suction. Horpon dropped his arms and went still.

  The bite of a vampire secretes a paralytic agent along with an anticoagulant. Paralysis occurs in less than a second.

  Always finish your meal. Mom had repeated this several thousand times.

  I had to keep draining the blood until my food expired. There was a chemical release on death. At least, that was the way Mom explained it; it wasn’t like we had any textbooks. The chemical was acetylcholine, and it told my brain I’d finished eating and reset my clock. If I didn’t feed all the way to my dinner’s death, then my thirty-day clock didn’t get reset, and an uncontrollable bloodlust could flick on at any time. Cue the crimson insanity. Cue the cops hunting me down. Cue my death.

  When I was done, I wiped my face and whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Horpon, for offering up your life.” He didn’t reply.

  I often slept after dining, but if I was caught snoring beside my deceased food, it would cause a hubbub. I snuck out of the prison the way I’d come in.

  I washed the blood off my face in a babbling brook a thousand yards from the prison, retrieved my hidden backpack, then walked into Walla Walla and hopped a late bus to another country.

  3

  SETTLING IN

  Three days and three train rides later, I was renting an apartment in Montréal, Canada. The suite was in a building that had been poorly designed in the 1950s and not improved on since. But the location was ideal—a few blocks from the Université de Montréal, where I could continue my library science degree. I could speak passable French, which I’d picked up a few years earlier in Louisiana. I was working hard to erase the creole sayings I’d been taught, including Lâche pas la patate, which loosely translated to, “Don’t let go of the potato.” In other words: be obstinate. The Québécois tended to turn up their collective noses to such quaintness.

  Food should never turn its nose up to me.

  Whoever had darted me obviously knew my name, so I chose an identity I hadn’t used for ages: Amber Tyrell. I hadn’t used my real first name for a few years, and it felt good to bring it back into circulation. I was me again.

  Mom had put the passport together. I still matched the photograph even though three years had passed. That was the great thing about aging so slowly. Twenty-four years on this planet, but I didn’t look a day over twenty-one.

  I didn’t know much about the longevity of my kind. Mom said her grandmother had lived to be two hundred five and only died when a train hit her. Alzheimer’s had done it. Well, technically, the train did it, but Alzheimer’s had made her go on a meandering walk. Old Japetha Fang had thought the light coming toward her was an angel. It was not.

  I believed I’d be more difficult to track down if I moved half a continent and a whole country away. Neither the FBI nor the CIA played nice with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I still sweated when I thought of the drone and those tranquilizer darts.

  Things had been easier when Mom was here to guide me. To guide us, that is.

  I spent two hours at a computer in the public library, digging around the registrar’s codes, tapping my finger so hard I chipped the granite tabletop. When I finally cracked the password, I was able to insert my name into enough classes to fill out my semester. My goal was to finish my Master’s degree, find a quiet job as a librarian in a populated place, and spend my time researching my meals and trying to track down Mom. Her trail was frozen. But we Fangs didn’t let go of the potato so easily.

  The last name Fang was pretty much all I knew about my family. Heck, I didn’t even know my father. Whenever I would ask about him, Mom would give me that familiar strained smile. “Oh, he was a pair of teeth and not much more.”

  She had been a wizard with investments. The consistent windfalls provided me with a modest-enough sum to live a frugal yet tasteful life. I did occasionally get a student loan. Easy to do when you just changed your name to avoid paying it back.

  The next morning, I took a bus to the Université de Montréal. A phallic bell tower loomed over the campus, and the buildings were done in a yellow brick, art deco style. It was not beautiful, but it felt permanent.

  I strode down the hall and sat in the back row of an elective I’d chosen: Comparative History of Socio-Religious Mentalities. The room stank of too much perfume on the women and coffee breath and underarm effluvia on the men. To be fair, the women had coffee breath too. But why was it that some men didn’t shower before a morning class? It would have made the world a much more beautiful place. Smell-wise, that is.

  Professor Slemay was one of those humans who’d been gifted with a nasally voice and an obnoxious ability to eviscerate his students. Some professors were there to teach; others to prove their superiority to the rest of humanity.

  “How about you, Mademoiselle Tyrell?” he asked in French.

  It took me a moment to remember that Tyrell was my last name. “Yes, monsieur,” I said.

  “I would like to know your opinion of the French Revolution. In particular, the economic situation that precipitated it.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t lose my head over it,” I said.

  This got a bit of snicker from my classmates. As jaded as I was, I did love the sound of human laughter. Slemay’s measuring eyes and his measuring brain made a check mark beside my name. He was also holding his ledger white-knuckle tight.

  “Well, Mizz Tyrell,” he said. “I was looking for an answer with depth.”

  “I am not deep … but I’m very wide. That’s a Balzac quote, by the way.” I was drawing attention to myself. Don’t stand out. Mom’s words. But Professor Slemay was so pompous. So … so human! “I’m a little behind on my reading, sir. I’ve only just begun attending your extraordinary class. Perhaps you would like to ask one of my fellow students?”

  “I judge my students by their ability to prepare for class,” he said.

  My dander was up, along with the hairs on my back of my neck. Old food should not talk to me this way. I pointed at him. “The economics of the time can be summed up in one word: greed. The nobility lived tax free. The peasants and the bourgeoisie did not. The country was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War and from supporting the American Revolution. The French Revolution came about because of the pressure put on the lower classes. Raise the taxes enough, and eventually the masses begin building guillotines.” Apparently my dander was dandered to the max because I just couldn’t stop myself. “Does the brain inside the decapitated head die immediately, or does it have thoughts for a few seconds? Professor Slemay, what did Marie Antoinette think in those seconds and was it deeper than your thoughts right now?”

  He stared at me with dead lizard eyes. “That’s a notable answer.” He made a notation in his ledger.

  My mother was hissing in the back of my head. Stand down. Stand down.

  I’d made an enemy. And I’d broken one of Mom’s laws. But the approving glances I got from my fellow students made me feel slightly better.

  I began searching for my dinner right after class. I had twenty-five days be
fore I’d have to feed again, and I was looking forward to dining on my first Canadian, or Québécois, as they called themselves here. I wondered if they’d taste a bit maple syrupy, perhaps with a soupçon of rubber hockey puck.

  I made my first trip to the courthouse on Rue Notre-Dame to stick my nose into transcripts of court cases. Montréal had its share of gangs—Rock Machine and Hells Angels being the most notable. The polite Canadian stereotype did not apply to those tattooed ruffians. I didn’t like feeding on organized crime. I’d spent some time hunting down members of the Mafia in Boston. Being shot by a henchman was a very unpleasant experience. I healed quickly, but bullets still hurt. A lot. And a headshot would take me out. At least, I’m pretty certain it would. I didn’t want to know what type of gray matter might grow back after my brains had been blown out. And, even when you got your kill done, the police had an annoying habit of becoming extremely interested. Two fang holes did tend to arouse suspicions. I’ve read their reports about the vampire hit man.

  Hit man! How that frosted my feminist heart.

  I did have to admit, it was an adrenaline rush when you’re hunting food that fought back. It’s not curiosity that killed the cat, Mom would say, it’s adrenaline.

  I dug up an old lady who’d murdered four husbands and hadn’t spent a moment behind bars. I could smell her guilt on the papers. But there had been several articles about her in the major papers and a documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. When she died, it would make the national news.

  Ah, she wouldn’t work. Nose to grindstone again.

  I read. And read. The Canadians didn’t kill each other as often as my fellow Americans. Perhaps they got all of their aggression out at hockey games.

  I’ve been on this earth for twenty-four years. According to my calculations, I’ve had to research and hunt down one hundred sixty-eight meals. Sometimes I find the process a little boring.

  I should point out that for the first two years of my life, I was breastfed. And that from ages three to eleven, my mother did all the research to feed us. Oh, and she brought me my dinner. It was very touching. And a lot of blood for me to handle. I’d sometimes sleep for three days after a meal. But at age thirteen, it became my job to find my morally agreeable food. We all had our chores to do.

  I found no good leads the first day. There would be time. Human beings, even polite ones, liked to kill each other. And many didn’t feel remorse. It was in their nature.

  It was in my nature to eat them.

  4

  FINDING MY MEAL

  I fell into that all too familiar student life pattern: studying for classes, writing essays in the library, and returning to my apartment to read for pleasure. I never watched TV. I preferred words on paper. I bought a wooden rocking chair, and it became my reading chair. Mom used to rock me to sleep every night and stroke my hair, so I found the motion comforting. I put the picture of Mom and me on my mantel.

  My French became more passable, and day-by-day, I adjusted my accent so it didn’t sound so Louisianan. I dropped all the creole, though I would miss saying Bon-temps fait crapaud manqué bounda—which we all know means, “Idleness leaves the frogs without buttocks.” They’d been speaking their own French here for about three hundred years. I learned to imitate it.

  I continued to hunt for dinner.

  I didn’t want a young victim. They hadn’t had time to be remorseful, which sometimes came with age. I stationed myself in the courthouse library and dug through old documents. I did love research. My life depended on it, and so studying for my Master’s had turned my brain into a highly efficient research machine. And no one ever suspected librarians of anything beyond saying shush. When’s the last time a good murder was committed by a librarian? We’d rather read about it.

  I went through index cards—yes, they still had index cards—and finally unearthed the story of a woman who had poisoned her parents in 1950: Claudette Finnegan. She’d inherited a goodly sum and only spent twelve years in prison. According to my math, she would be nearly eighty-five-years-old. She might be dead.

  I did some more sifting and discovered she was very much alive and very, very rich. She even owned a share in the Montréal Canadiens, and lived in a top floor condo on St. Catherine Street.

  I used some clever magic to find her phone number, which meant I looked it up in an old copy of the phone book. I dialed the number. “Bonjour,” she said.

  “This is Sarah Coxwell. You don’t know me.”

  “No, I don’t, and I’m about to hang up.”

  “Ah, one moment, please! I’m a psychology student at Université de Montréal. And I wonder … have you ever felt any remorse about your parents’ murders?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “I’m studying the effect of time on remorse. Since no remorse was declared in the trial, did you develop any contrition as time passed?”

  “You’re brave. Clap yourself on the back. Ask me what’s in my right hand.”

  “What’s in your right hand?”

  A raspy chuckle followed. “A glass of champagne. I’ve had one every day for sixty years. I live in a world where others make my meals and bring them to me. Lobster one day, tapas the next.”

  “Are you implying you haven’t developed any remorse?”

  “I am saying that I enjoy these fine things in life. I did not enjoy my parents. Put that in your thesis, child. Most parents live far too long.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Finnegan. You won’t believe how much you’ve helped me.”

  She laughed. It was not light-hearted. “My pleasure. Have a nice day, sweetheart.”

  I had my next meal.

  5

  A NEW SLAB OF FOOD

  Time passed. An old lady died. There was very little press other than an obituary in the Montréal Gazette.

  And in my ever-present need to stay under the radar, I kept a steady row of B+’s to my name, just below the dean’s list. My mouth remained shut in Comparative History class. When Professor Slemay asked me a question, I could sense people waiting for my clever reply, but I expressed only blandness. The expectations of my fellow students dropped.

  I was beginning to feel slightly safe.

  A new slab of male food walked into my GLIS 645: Archival Principles and Practices class. He had either signed up quite late, or his attendance had been severely spotty. He sat a row over from me. He was handsome, had a skull earring in his right ear, a square cut to his jaw, and a confidence in his eyes. Most of the men studying to become librarians weren’t alpha males, but he clearly was. His hair was wavy yet short. His heart was beating seventy-seven times per minute. I could separate the sound it made from all the other beating hearts in the classroom. I glanced up at him, took in all this information, and looked away.

  We were well into the argument about the benefits and detractions of the ICA standard, ISO standard, and DIRKS standard, and the discussion was getting rather heated. By that, I mean a woman who was wearing 1950s-era glasses was sub-vocalizing about why she loved DIRKS. I kept my mouth shut. I’m an ISO girl, through and through.

  When class was over, I headed toward the bus stop. Only a few steps into the journey, I noted that someone was following me. Even without turning I could guess the weight (197 pounds) and the sex (male, but it was mostly the weight that determined that). I took a path to my left, and he followed.

  I slowed down, and in a move that would look like I was falling, I flipped against the wall and extended my leg to trip him.

  He hopped over my proffered leg. It was alpha boy from class. He shot me a questioning look.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I stumbled.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He had a Louisianan twang to his French.

  “I’m fine. Were you following me?”

  “Following you?” He wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “I was trying to catch up with you.”

  “Why?” I asked. I kept my voice cool. You showed the slightest bit of interest in a ma
n, and they interpreted it as an open invitation to a night of romping.

  “Your notes.”

  “My notes?”

  He nodded. “I hope it’s not too much of a bother, but I’ve been sick and would appreciate catching up.”

  “Did you ask Mary Lemieux in the third row? She’s a much more meticulous note taker.”

  “No. I didn’t. I was only interested in your notes.”

  I switched to English. “You wanted to talk to me, you mean?”

  He switched to English without batting an eye. “Well, yes. If that’s a by-product of getting your notes.”

  By-product? Nerd alert! “Where’d you get that accent?”

  “Louisiana. I grew up there.” His eyes were gray. This was the longest conversation I’d had with anyone for at least a year. “I have a cousin who lives in Montréal. I recognized your accent too. You only spoke once today, but it was enough.” Damn! I’d worked hard to stamp out that twang. “Quiet as a mouse, aren’t you? But I bet there’s a lot going on inside your head.”

  Did he think I’d roll over at the first compliment? Although, I must say, my smile was genuine. “You can tell that?”

  “I have a knack for ‘getting’ people’s personalities. Anyway, about your notes.”

  “Sure. I’ll share them.” There was a cleft in his chin. His jugular was very attractive. If it’d been later in the month, I would’ve been staring at it.

  He held out his hand for a shake. “Dermot.”

  Despite my instinct, I took his hand. It was a strong grip. “Dermot? Really? Your parents lose a bet to an Irish man?”

  His laugh was genuine. As I mentioned before, I did like the sound of human laughter. “They wanted to reflect our Irish roots. Not that any of us have set foot in Ireland in the last hundred years. And your name?”