One (Rules Undying Book 6)

by R. E. Carr

  “Do you have any idea how much of a mess I have to clean because of you?”

  Paige snarled. “Had your chance. Now you pay.”

  “Damn you to hell!” Su Min tried to disappear, but in the thick smoke and snows of debris, Paige could easily pick out her outline and block blow after blow. Finally, the sheriff dropped her pretenses and began fighting in earnest. Both wounded and winded, the fight didn’t last that long. Even with one arm, Paige managed to soundly beat down the ancient vampire. Wheezing and covered in toxic cellulose, Su Min finally collapsed at the werewolf’s feet. Paige grabbed a plank off a convenient palette, making sure to rip the wood at a sharp angle. She dropped on top of the vampire and held the stake directly over where her heart would have once been.

  “Murdered . . . by a monster . . . how fitting,” Su Min choked out.

  “Paige!”

  Paige snarled as she heard a guttural voice tinged with a Texas accent. She drove the hunk of wood down. Su Min screamed.

  “No!” Jonathan howled, running towards Paige. He lifted her and hurled her against the dumpster, then turned to see the stake driven squarely into Su Min’s shoulder joint—causing her extreme pain, but not enough to kill her instantly.

  Paige struggled back to her feet. “This ends tonight,” she choked out. “It has to end.”

  “Don’t,” he whined, the effect slightly lessened by his guttural voice. “Paige . . . don’t.”

  Paige grabbed another improvised stake. “Kill or be killed,” she growled. She then pointed the stake at Jonathan. “Choose her.” Paige looked at him with pleading eyes. “Or choose me.”

  Jonathan lumbered over so that the stake just touched his chest. Paige dropped her weapon and pulled a small metal object out from the tattered remains of her sweatpants. She placed the little box on a chain in his hand and closed his claws around it. Footsteps began to draw closer and sirens grew louder and more numerous. Paige held his paw for one more second, then turned and ran into the night. She heard a surprised roar and a gunshot behind her but kept running. She followed the scents of her pack all the way into a parking lot behind a pharmacy where a van full of rotisserie chicken awaited. Paige swiped one, then felt the needle jab into her neck. She stumbled over next to the other woozy members of her pack, while Billy Black and Bernard stood triumphantly over her.

  As the world started to spin, she curled up next to a large, red werewolf, gnawing on a chicken leg as the engine roared to life. “He didn’t come with her?” Billy asked softly. Bernard stabbed Paige one more time with an injector, sending her off to a dreamless sleep.

  27

  “My name is Gail Filipovic,” the image choked out. “I’m an RN on staff at Biogenesys Labs here in Boston, and I’ve been working, quietly, for the past three years to uncover the greatest conspiracy the world has ever known. I need to tell you something that’s going to sound completely ridiculous, but you have to hear me out. I need to tell you that vampires are real.”

  “Is this you?” the cop across the table asked. He wiped the sweat off his shiny bare head and stared at his notes, flipping them over and over as if he were looking for something. Meanwhile, his partner, a younger woman with a perpetual resting bitch face, raised a brow and slid a printout onto the middle of the table.

  “Harker, it’s Gail Harker now.”

  The woman turned to Gail’s companion. “And you are honestly telling me that you are Private Steven James DeMarco?” She lifted the corner of a photo of a GI. “Born in Queens in 1922? What—were you frozen like Captain America?”

  “Wow, that is more believable nowadays? It’s kinda sad, isn’t it, Pumpkin?” He lifted his cuffed hands and snapped the chains, pausing for just a moment to admire his new strength. “Although actually, I’d rather be Steve Trevor, because he got to bang Wonder Woman—and didn’t have to wear tights.”

  “Really?” Gail asked as she snapped her own cuffs even more easily than he did. “Since when do you care about comic books?”

  “Since you guys kept leaving me out front with the Viking and Dorkimus Rex. Every once in a while, the Tailed Wonder would step in, and I’d have to listen to it for hours.”

  “Holy shit,” the cops said, both reaching for their weapons. Steve raised his hands and gave a terrible reassuring smile.

  “Hey, now—just trying to show you what we can do. Please don’t shoot us,” Steve said, flashing his fangs.

  “Are those fangs? Did you honestly have fangs put on? Who is your dentist, Bela Lugosi?” the lady cop asked.

  Gail let out a deep sigh and shook her head. “I must have had the same dentist,” she muttered, then flashed an equally toothy grin. “This is miasma at work. No matter what we say, you are going to try and find a way to logically explain what you see, and vampires simply aren’t logical.”

  “You’re both on a lot of drugs, aren’t you?” the male cop asked.

  “We wish,” both Steve and Gail responded in frightening unison. Gail peered over and read the IDs, then turned to the younger cop. “Look, um, Detective Kittle . . . wait—that’s your name, Katherine Kittle?”

  “You got a problem with that?” the detective deadpanned. She looked at both vampires skeptically. “OK, just for one moment, let’s say we believe that you’re both really vampires and that you’ve turned yourself in for your involvement in the incident on Friday night. Why take the risk of exposing yourselves and this so-called vast conspiracy that you claim exists in your videos, Miss Filipovic?”

  “Harker,” Gail corrected again. “Did you hear what happened back there? Did you see any of the videos—”

  Detective Kittle slammed her fist on the table and yanked back her sleeve to show off a bandage. “I was there,” she said flatly. “And I did see some crazy things, but what I saw was not a vampire.”

  “It may have been a werewolf,” Steve noted.

  “Yeah, there were a lot of werewolves . . . which is the reason why we are here,” Gail said, cringing a little. “Wait—you weren’t bitten, were you?”

  The other detective shifted his chair ever so slightly away from his partner. Detective Kittle paused for a moment. “Why, am I going to turn into a werewolf too?”

  “That depends, have you been vaccinated for chicken pox?” Gail asked.

  “No, I was lucky enough to get it when I was eight, in the summer, so I didn’t miss a damn day of school. Now what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Werewolves are caused by a virus. It shares immunity with chicken pox—much like if you got cowpox back in the day, you wouldn’t get smallpox.”

  Detective Kittle let out an audible sigh of relief. It was Steve’s turn to look confused. “Let me get this straight—you’re perfectly OK with the concept that you might turn into a werewolf because you were bitten by one; but you can’t handle the two perfectly calm and genial vampires sitting not two feet away from you?”

  “I actually saw the werewolf. Vampires are ridiculous,” Detective Kittle scoffed. Her partner nodded in agreement.

  “They turn into giant, slobbering man-beasts. That is far more ridiculous than vampires!”

  “Steve, calm down. Just do the thing.”

  “Which thing?”

  “The turn into someone else thing.”

  “I don’t know how to voluntarily do that thing,” he hissed.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Steve,” Gail grumbled. Gail pointed to the older officer. “You there, Detective Grant—pull out your phone and try to take a picture of us. Seriously, just try to get a selfie. Use filters if you like.”

  Detective Grant pulled out his phone. He kept looking through the viewfinder, then out, then back. He handed the phone over to Detective Kittle, so she could do the same. She banged the phone against the desk then looked again. Detective Grant snatched it back before she could whack it again. They both stared at the mirrored wall in the interrogation room. Gail and Steve both waved at their complete lack of reflections.

  “Wait for it,” St
eve said.

  Detective Kittle shoved away from the desk and pulled out her gun. “If you’re a vampire, then shooting you won’t kill you?” she asked.

  “No, but it will hurt a lot, and I don’t think you want to be stuck in a room with two angry vampires,” Gail said calmly.

  Detective Kittle then yanked the necklace from her neck and pressed it against Steve’s forehead. She looked rather confused as her gold cross didn’t so much as sizzle. She paused to feel Steve’s cool skin. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and gently eased her shaking hand away.

  “I’m Catholic too. Crosses don’t work on me.”

  “Eastern Orthodox here,” Gail added. “The religious stuff only works in the movies.”

  “Unless the vampire is a religious nut, then yeah, they can have . . . what do you call them, Pumpkin?”

  “Psychosomatic reactions?” she offered.

  “Yeah, that. Vlad Tepes is famous for it, the big idiot. You’d know him better as Dracula—”

  “You expect me to believe that Dracula is real too?” Detective Kittle asked.

  “I’d just figured that you’d have heard of him, so it was a good place to start. If you really wanna go down the rabbit hole, I’ll tell you exactly why we are hiding here in Nashville Police Headquarters and not running off and being all secretive. Do you really want to go there yet, Detective Kittycat?”

  “It’s Kittle,” she corrected. “Yeah, let’s go there. I don’t have hours to hear all this crap about vampires. I want to know why two vampires were at what can only be described as a war zone, why my city has gone crazy, and why you came here.”

  “We need protection, actually,” Gail said softly. “We may have pissed off some very powerful vampires. And the werewolves here have declared open war on vampires in your city.”

  Detective Grant dropped his pencil. “Come again?”

  “Vampires more powerful than, say . . . Dracula?” Detective Kittle asked sarcastically.

  “He’s a wuss who goes off on drunken tangents and thinks holy water will kill him, even though Gingersnaps and I totally spiked his drink once and nothing happened. No, we kinda pissed off . . .”

  Gail buried her face in her hands as she waited for the big reveal. Steve let out a deep breath then blurted out, “King Arthur and his evil, shapeshifting sister—Morgana. Also, their son, Mordred, may be causing some havoc as well because his wife tried to blow up his ex-wife last Friday night—starting said vampire-werewolf war in your fine city.”

  “You’re going to have to excuse us for a minute,” Detective Grant said. Detective Kittle made no attempt to hide the contempt on her face as they left the room.

  “We are so going to get shot,” Gail whimpered before banging her head on the desk. “Still, we had to try and warn them. They think Nashville is being attacked by gangs or terrorists.”

  “One guy on TV claimed it was aliens. It’s sad that he was the closest to the truth,” Steve said, leaning back and staring at the camera in the ceiling. “If this goes bad, Pumpkin, remind me to whammy someone to take us to the control room to snag any audio they have on us.”

  “At least this time we got to talk to detectives, and one of them was even there on Friday night, so we weren’t just immediately locked up in a holding cell to wait for a shrink.”

  “Fifth times the charm, Pumpkin. Just like I always say.”

  “Don’t get too excited, Honey Bunny. For all we know, they are going for the shrink now, and you’ll be kissing cops until sunrise again.”

  “I wouldn’t mind sucking face with Detective Kittycat.” Gail punched his arm. “Hey, I’m just saying she’s cuter than the average copper I’ve had to kiss all weekend.”

  “You just like blondes.”

  “Not always—and I guarantee you that in her case, the carpet doesn’t match the drapes—”

  He was cut off by the door bursting open. Detective Kittle looked even more perturbed than normal. She raised a dark eyebrow and said, “Well your lawyer just showed up, so we need to let you talk to him before questioning you further.”

  “He did?” both Gail and Steve asked. They exchanged confused looks. Both held their breath as a man in a suit strode confidently into the room. “Oh crap,” Steve muttered as he saw green eyes glaring at him.

  “I need a moment with my clients, thank you,” a throaty, Texas-accented voice ordered. Detective Kittle rolled her eyes, seemingly unfazed by his good looks and dazzling smile. Jonathan raised a brow and shrugged as she left.

  “Well, howdy, Bro. I’ve been looking for you. You can imagine my surprise when I find you telling the Nashville PD exactly what you are, then I find a whole bunch of confused cops telling the same story about how they got hit in the head. Really, dude—you need to change your stories from time to time.”

  “Jonathan?” Gail asked weakly.

  “Yes and no, babe. It’s getting really blurry, but thank goodness, I still talk proper and don’t sound all Masterpiece Theater yet.”

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Gail asked, looking away. Jonathan set his briefcase on the table, opened it, and pulled out a tablet. After a few awkward moments of trying to type in his passwords, he turned the screen so that both Gail and Steve could see a video loading. Steve bit his lip as a pale, haggard Paige flickered into view.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you are watching this video, it means that either the sheriff or Mina didn’t agree to my terms,” Paige said softly on the screen. “I don’t know if I’m still alive or if my pack survived, but believe me, we have quite the surprise in store for the bloodsuckers.”

  “We are sick and tired of running and hiding. We have been pushed all the way into a corner, and in my family, we believe that you only know what kind of person you truly are when you have nothing left, and you have nowhere else to go.”

  Steve looked away. Gail squeezed his hand.

  “Vampires have hidden in the shadows long enough. You have beaten us, maybe even broken us, but in the end, you forged us into the monsters we are today. Know this—if you refuse to leave our city and leave us in peace, then you have started this war, not us.”

  “Oh, boy, this cannot be good,” Gail whispered.

  “If the vampires in Nashville leave now, the city will calm down, you might even be able to control the damage and retreat back to the shadows; but if you stay and you attack, we will make you suffer for every moment you stay. We will expose you to the good people here—and if you retaliate on the humans, we will hunt you down. For every human and werewolf that you kill, we will make two more of us. If you really want to face a werewolf army, we will provide it.”

  “You vampires are so sure of yourselves, aren’t you? I can hear you even now saying, ‘oh no, we’re not in any real danger—those pesky furballs go crazy and die young’. Well, you should ask yourselves one thing. ‘Where did we get all this comforting information?’”

  The Paige on the screen smiled bitterly and motioned to someone in the background. An equally haggard-looking woman with graying fuzz on her head limped into view. Gail covered her hand with her mouth.

  “Meet the newest member of our pack, Dr. Zenya Antonova—foremost expert in werewolf biology. You know, maybe it wasn’t such a smart plan to keep desperate, dying bondsmen on staff—especially those with advanced degrees in genetics, biology, and organic chemistry. We thought that Dr. Kunal Langer had betrayed us too, but now I see what he really did. You used these people, sheriff. The other families chewed them up and spat them out. Let’s not forget a particularly pissed off branch of the Matsuoka family, either. We have Dr. Reiko Nakano to thank as well, for her insight into vampire operations. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to take her son away from her, after all. Your own people, the humans you used and abused, figured out that you would never change and never stop hurting them, so they made us what we are today.”

  “Oh god,” Gail gasped.

  “Now you know where you stand, blo
odsuckers. You were right when you called us infected, sheriff—but the funny thing about viruses is that they mutate. You should know that Dr. Antonova here had the chicken pox when she was a little girl. Like I said—if you come after us, more of us will fight back. The choice is yours.”

  “Yeah, I was married to a badass . . . err . . . am married? I’m not still one hundred percent sure how any of that works. Needless to say, Steve, our mom is pissed. But—since you, Gail, gave Paige Kevin’s laptop with most of the sheriff’s agents and hideouts clearly listed on it—she really can’t do much but retreat right now. All the explosions and bodies and stuff, those are the agents that refused to leave town or join Team Werewolf.”

  “The police saw us. Oh my god, that detective—”

  “Yeah—and the videos are all over YouTube, too. Vampires all around the world are in a tizzy trying to stop the spread; and here you are just handing yourselves over on a silver platter.”

  “It was my idea,” Gail said quickly.

  Jonathan raised a brow. “That’s surprising . . . usually Bro here corners the market on stupid ideas. Then again, if I thought my own kind wanted me dead and there were werewolves out to get me—”

  “But you are a werewolf,” Steve countered.

  “They kicked me out, too. Paige said I need to pull myself together before I can be with them, and she’s right.”

  “Did you know . . . about all this?”

  “No, darlin’,” Jonathan sighed. “They were smart and knew they couldn’t really trust me. I mean, part of me is a bloodsucker who lied about who he was for eighteen hundred years. I don’t even know who I really am or what I should do right now, so what’s to say I wouldn’t just run off with Mina the first chance I got?”

  “Is she OK?” Gail asked softly.