“How is he doing? I mean, after what we did to him before?” I hoped the answer was that he was still twisted and crippled by the attack, and I’d be able to single-handedly take him out, thus ending our problem forever.
I knew that wasn’t to be when Ziggy shrugged. “He’s dangerous now. He’s been feeding on his fledglings. The last one was some woman from Nevada who came up here thinking he just wanted to talk. I don’t get how these people can be so dumb.”
It must have been March, the madam of the vampire brothel I’d met on my travel to rescue Cyrus. I couldn’t feel too bad about her. There were just some people who made my life easier by dying.
“So we should steer clear of the guy?” Bill asked.
I answered for Ziggy. “Yes. I think our plan should be simple. We fight our way in, or as far in as we can. I’ll get myself into the house and look for Nathan. There’s nowhere else they would be keeping him, right?”
Ziggy shook his head. “No place I can think of.”
“Then I’ll go in and find him. If I run into Dahlia or the Soul Eater, I’ll try to make it back out.” A spark of hope ignited in my chest. “Unless you think they’re not here.”
“No, they’re here.” Ziggy took the binoculars, scanned the area quickly and handed them back. “Look, the humans are out and about. When he’s not home, the humans are locked in the barn. Just in case one of them comes to their senses and tries to get away. If the Soul Eater and Dahlia and me—when I lived here—were home and somebody tried to take off, we just…”
“I get it,” I said, not wanting to hear the rest. “Fine. So, the humans are out, the Soul Eater is in, and we’re going after Nathan. There’s no time like the present.”
Ziggy and Bill got out, then opened the back doors for Max and Henry and I. We gathered our weapons quickly, as if attack could come at any moment. And it could.
I’d planned my weapons for speed. A stake in each back pocket, a few vials of holy water in a passport holder hanging around my neck. I’d lined the pouch with a plastic bag, just in case the vials broke, and tucked the whole thing inside my shirt. A knife was concealed by my pant leg. I didn’t have a neat holster or anything to hold it there, so it stayed in place with a strip of duct tape. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it, not because it was my last line of defense, but because it would hurt like hell to rip it off.
Ziggy and Bill were more heavily armed. Ziggy had Nathan’s big, scary ax in one hand, his crossbow strapped across his back. I couldn’t help but remember the first night I’d met Ziggy, when he’d shouted, “Die, vampire scum!” and charged at me with the very ax he held now. It seemed years away. It was hard to believe it had only been a matter of months. Bill, on the other hand, was content to take his gun and a couple of knives I was pretty sure he’d taken from the kitchen drawer. Still, both of them had stakes in every available pocket, and a few, I’m sure, duct-taped the way my knife was. Max had stakes, but when I had offered him other weapons, he’d just shrugged them off and said, “I won’t need them.”
“They’ll see us coming up the driveway,” Ziggy said, handing Henry a stake and a knife. We figured he would know what to do with them.
“Well, if they’re going to see us anyway, might as well make an entrance,” Bill reasoned. “Get back in the van. I’m driving us down there.”
“Try to take out a few of them on the way in,” I said, silently praying we wouldn’t get ourselves killed in a car accident before we could get ourselves killed in the assault on the house.
“Will do,” Bill assured me cheerfully as we piled into the vehicle. The engine roared to life and Bill did indeed make an entrance. He ignored the gravel driveway, charging the van instead through the low-lying brush that lined the road. “Element of surprise,” he shouted over the noise of branches clanging against the underside of the van. He was enjoying himself way, way too much.
“We do need this to get back, you know,” Max yelled as I braced myself against the backs of the seats. I squeezed my eyes shut as we passed between two trees. When I opened them, the driver’s side-view mirror was gone.
The house was surrounded by a huge lawn, and on either side abandoned fields. Bill plowed through the field, toward the house, where a few startled human servants clustered. They didn’t have time to get out of the way, and I heard body parts hitting the undercarriage of the vehicle. It reminded me of the way dandelion heads sounded smacking against the bottom of my little red wagon as I’d pulled it through the backyard as a child.
“Here’s good,” Ziggy yelled, pushing the door open. He jumped out, ax swinging.
Bill took advantage of the cover of the car to shoot a few of them from where we sat. I hadn’t even seen him open the window. I clapped my hands over my ears, thinking I would never be able to hear again. Soon, a ring of dead and critically wounded humans surrounded the van.
Ziggy let us out of the back. “More coming. From the barn,” he said, helping me down. Bill joined us at the back, reloading.
I looked toward the house, my goal. We were about a hundred feet away, and the distance seemed impossible. More humans came from that direction, and some vampires. I could tell that was what they were from the fact they weren’t wearing heavily soiled clothes like the humans. “Great. Bill, keep clear of the clean ones, they’re probably vampires.”
“Will do.” He tried to pick off a few of the approaching humans in the direction of the barn, but they were too far out of range. All we could do was wait for them to get to us.
Henry stood beside me, holding his stake in one hand, the knife in the other. “Henry, follow me and…Max.”
“I’ll kill anyone who tries to get in your way,” Max vowed.
Bill looked at me for a minute as though he might be one of those people, his hand flexing around his gun. Instead, he said in a tight voice, “We’ll back you up. You just worry about getting inside.”
“What about the ones coming that way?” Ziggy jerked his head toward the creatures nearing from the direction of the barn.
Bill shrugged. “I guess we end up in the middle and go down in a blaze of glory.”
I guess that must have seemed reasonable to all of us, because it only took a briefly shared look and we were off, running headlong into the mass of humans—it seemed, frighteningly, as though their number had grown. Over my left shoulder, Ziggy’s ax flashed, and a stream of blood sprayed the side of my face.
“Sorry,” I heard him shout from somewhere, though the volume wasn’t necessary. The only noise was our own exertion. The creatures didn’t make much sound. No screams, no wisecracks, just an occasional grunt as one of them fell. It was an eerie kind of quiet, because you expect a battle to have more sounds, like in the movies. All I heard was the rhythmic slash of Ziggy’s ax and the crack of Bill’s gun.
The first one to try and hit me, a rail-thin man with eyes that seemed to bug out of his dirty face, missed. I grabbed his arm as it swung past and forced it down, feeling the pop as the joint of his shoulder separated.
“They haven’t been fed yet,” Ziggy called, and I turned in time to see him twist a woman’s head completely off her body. I shuddered at that and turned back to my goal: the house.
Another of the humans grasped my leg. I looked down to see a scrawny girl, her hair thinning in patches over the mottled skin of her scalp. I wondered if she clutched me for help or to harm me, but I didn’t need to wonder further when she sank her teeth into my leg. I kicked her free and fended off another set of snapping teeth at my right arm.
“You’re right, they haven’t been fed!” I elbowed a shockingly elderly woman in her throat, praying she wasn’t someone’s beloved grandmother.
“Watch your blood, everybody!” Max warned, and I saw him hit one of the creatures in the side of the face so hard its jaw completely detached and flew into the melee. He really didn’t need weapons, after all, as it appeared werewolves were a lot stronger than vampires.
Bill screamed, and I turned to see him
press the barrel of the gun into the top of a sandy-blond head that had latched on to his forearm. He squeezed the trigger, sending a spectacular stew of brain, blood and bone over the front of his shirt before the body dropped, teeth still embedded in his flesh.
“Careful you don’t shoot yourself, for fuck’s sake!” Ziggy yelled, bringing his ax down on the back of a creature he’d kneed in the groin. “Carrie, get to the house!”
I turned to Henry, who waited patiently at my side. “Why the hell are you just standing there?”
A creature grabbed him, dragged him back and released him when it realized he had no blood in him…something I hadn’t realized until that moment, either. But even under attack, Henry waited to act. “Henry,” I called as we became separated in the action, “kill all these humans!”
That was all it took. Suddenly Henry, a weapon in each hand, began to plow through the humans like a killing machine. It was a bizarre dance; Henry grabbed a human, pulled them close, jammed the knife low in their abdomen and slit them upward, as though he was opening an envelope. The hot, foul smell of open bowel filled the air by the time he gutted his second creature.
“Carrie, watch out!” Bill shouted, bringing me back to the reality at hand. Another human reached for me. I got a sick feeling in my gut when I saw how young she was—probably sixteen and, under normal circumstances, scared for her life. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance, and she was definitely not a normal girl. Her eyes registered nothing but feral hunger and a desire for destruction. She gripped both my arms and pulled, and I thanked God she hadn’t been fed tonight, or I might have had no further need for sleeves. I tried not to think of Cyrus—the first time I’d known him—and the perverse joy he would have had watching me destroy this poor girl. But she was beyond help, there was no doubt in my mind. I lifted one foot and kicked at her, not caring where my foot connected, and then, because I couldn’t reach my knife, I found a stake with the hand I’d freed and jammed it hard into her chest. In my mind I saw the view from the inside, skin, sinew, cartilage splitting and splintering under the force and point of the wood. I saw the pumping core of her and kept forcing, until my hand followed the hole the stake had made and buried with a wet sucking sound into her chest. Her eyes rolled up, displaying only white, and blood gushed from her mouth and nose. I yanked my hand back, horrified and ashamed at my actions, and let her drop.
Through a heady rush of bloodlust, I viewed the house ahead of me. I needed to get there, fast, before I did something else. Something I would regret more than jamming my fist through a teenager’s rib cage, if I could ever possibly top that. I started just throwing the humans aside for Max and Henry to deal with, buying myself time and forward momentum. For a split second, I felt guilty at leaving the guys to fight all of the creatures on their own. But some weird elation at being closer to my goal filled me, made me feel more powerful, ready for anything.
That was Dahlia, and I knew it in a second.
I don’t know if she thought she was driving me closer to my doom. Maybe she and the Soul Eater were waiting just inside the weathered front door, and they would kill me instantly when I stepped inside. But whatever reason she had for messing with my mind now, she reminded me of one crucial detail.
Using a spell I’d improvised, I imaged the word back shooting from my mouth like a gale-force wind. The creatures were knocked back long enough for me to scream, “Remember to use that spell!” I saw Ziggy’s face brighten under a mask of blood. I turned back to the house, but I heard one of the creatures scream—finally scream—and the sound of flesh tearing like the pages of a book.
As soon as I got free of the battle, I ran to the house as fast as I could. My lungs burned and my legs ached as I pushed myself up those final steps, but I didn’t let myself stop. The door was unlocked, so I abandoned all pretense of stealth. Dahlia knew I was there. If she was in the house, she would hear me.
“Nathan!” I screamed, and I was impressed in some detached corner of my mind at how desperate and horror-movie damsel-ish I sounded. “Nathan, where are you!”
Carrie, get out!
For the first time in far too long, I heard Nathan’s thoughts through the blood tie, soaked in fear and pain. And weak. More weak than I’d ever heard him.
“I’m not leaving here without you!” I shouted, scanning the wide hallway for any of the creatures, or other vampires. “Tell me where you are!”
The house was built like an old Southern farmhouse, though how it got to the middle of Michigan I had no clue. The entrance hall was long, with a staircase leading to the second story. Beyond the staircase I could see the back door. On a hot summer day, when the doors were both open to let in the breeze, you would be able to see all the way through the house.
Unluckily for me, it wasn’t a hot summer day. It was night, and though I could make out the general layout of the house, I wouldn’t be able to see if something was shuffling around in the darkness.
Come on, baby, you’ve got to tell me where you are, I thought, partly for him and partly to urge myself on the search. There was no answer. Maybe they had him drugged, and he couldn’t remain conscious.
Of course, it could be much worse. I prayed he was just drugged.
I ducked through a doorway to my right. It was a large dining room, with remnants of the last meal still on the table. The overwhelming stench of the corpse made my eyes water and my throat flex closed. There was a large kitchen knife buried in the body’s face. The whole thing was hacked to pieces and in some places partially skinned. I couldn’t tell if the poor soul was a man or a woman, but it had certainly been fed better than the mindless zombies they’d made the humans outside into. Sticky globs of jelled fat gleamed on the table in the moonlight from the windows, and the beefier parts left on the corpse wobbled as I disturbed the floorboards by walking on them. I pulled the collar of my T-shirt over my nose and moved to the door I assumed led to the kitchen. No leftovers there. In fact, nothing at all, except for a few blood-crusted cups in the sink. I moved on.
Back in the hall, I considered my chances of finding anyone in the rooms to the left side of the house, and weighed them against getting trapped upstairs if the humans from outside came in after me.
They won’t. They’re not allowed. Nathan was conscious again.
Where are you? I tried to keep my mental voice even, despite the panic I truly felt. Please, Nathan, I can’t do this alone.
Get out of here, he insisted, and then the connection broke again. I wanted to scream my frustration. Instead, I ran through the door near the foot of the stairs, which led to a small living room scattered with broken furniture and then, guided by the miraculous appearance of a sliver of light under another doorway, to a back bedroom lit by candles and, tied to a narrow bed, Nathan.
It was a strange sort of relief, finding him. I would have preferred to find him in a much different state. He lay on his stomach, arms stretched above his head, wrists tied apart to the white-painted iron spindles of the headboard. His feet weren’t tied, but he didn’t try to move. There were marks on his back, long slashes indicative of a whip or a scourge. My gaze darted—guided by Dahlia’s urging in my head, no doubt—to the old-fashioned washstand at the end of the bed. It was a scourge, all right, a wicked weapon with a surfeit of leather straps, all ending in some terrible, sharp object that appeared to have been added as a homemade afterthought. I saw at least two broken razor blades tied to it before I tore my tear-filled eyes away.
“Nathan,” I said quietly, approaching the bed. The blood on his back was still sticky; the wounds hadn’t healed. Either Dahlia had just been here, or he was wounded beyond healing. It doesn’t look that bad, I argued with myself.
I knelt beside the bed, gagging a little at the smell of his blood. Usually, it would have been a comfort, but not when there was so much of it soaked into the sheets and mattress below him.
“Oh,” I whispered, reaching to touch what little skin on his back remained unmarked. I couldn’t he
lp the pity in my voice, or the half sob.
He turned his head to me, his eyes black and swollen shut. The lids flickered as if he would try to open them, and they did open, just a little. “You’re really here?”
“I’m really here.” I touched his hair, matted and sticky with blood. Underneath it I felt hard, scabbed over wounds. “You’re going to be okay, we’re getting you out.”
“No!” He tried to shake his head, but it was a pathetic half movement that caused him to whimper in pain. “No,” he began again, more subdued. “You can’t move me.”
“Bill is here, Ziggy is here. They’ll help me carry you.” I didn’t mention Henry. There was no time to explain, and he had no energy to be pissed at me.
The ropes binding his arms weren’t tied in any sort of complicated knot. If he had wanted to get free, he would have. I wondered why he hadn’t tried, then chastised myself inwardly. He was wounded and weak, though a sick part of me couldn’t pity him too much, as I’d seen much, much worse.
I pulled the binding free and his arms, hands purple from lack of circulation, dropped to the bed. He screamed when the movement jostled him.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, feeling suddenly that something was definitely far worse than I had anticipated, but not knowing exactly what.
“Don’t move me,” he pleaded, but I couldn’t heed him. If he was severely injured, I had to know the extent.
“I’m sorry, I have to.” I eased one hand under him and he screamed again. I’d never seen him like this, so completely delirious with pain. “Roll over, please. I can’t lift you.”
“No,” he sobbed, but he did help me a little as I slid my other hand beneath his torso and tried, gently as I could, to ease him onto his back. The sheet stuck to his chest and stomach the way a wet washcloth sticks to skin. It pulled away with a sloppy, sucking sound, revealing flesh so bloody I couldn’t tell where the injury originated from. Once he was completely on his back, and unconscious as a result, I lifted one of the tall pillar candles from the bedside table for more light. I looked around the room for a light switch, but saw nothing. I wondered if the place even had electricity.
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