by S T Branton
It passed like a flash flood. I wiped at my face, thankful that whatever makeup I’d been wearing had long since disappeared. Then I stood up, took a deep breath, and smiled. Not a great smile. Certainly not my best. It was progress, though. For the first time in a small eternity, I was able to take in that store and think of happy things instead of flames and carnage.
Maybe there was more to life than vendettas after all. Maybe I could be a hero.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, warned the voice in the back of my head. Rocco Durant still deserves to die.
True. Nothing would change that. Still, I had time, which meant I could shift my priorities a little. Marcus, on the other hand, apparently had a lot less time than me.
Shit was happening to him like crazy. I had just seen him kill a damn ogre in the back of a strip club. An ogre. It did not feel real, and yet, I was there. And if he was right, there was inevitably more carnage to come. There was absolutely no way to predict where this road would lead, but he’d already brought me to the first toll booth.
The least I could do was pay what I owed and continue on at his side. My personal gripes could wait—for now.
After all, we were friends, weren’t we?
***
The walk home was different from the walks I’d taken over the past five years. Not different enough that I no longer saw the swarms of rats pouring in and out of dumpsters, or the loud drunk peeing on the corner of a building. There were still roaches, piles of garbage, and a million cigarette butts on the street.
None of that had changed.
But now I had a better reference point for how much things could suck, and they didn’t suck as much as a lecherous old ogre who’d been finding various places to rot in the dark over the considerable span of his several-hundred-year life. They didn’t suck as much as a Roman Centurion putting the neck of a whisky bottle in your eye.
It was screwed six ways till Sunday, but it was perspective, and that was what I’d needed for the last five years. I just didn’t realize how badly until Marcus literally fell into my life.
I made a mental note to thank him in the morning. Then, as I reached the front of my building, I squinted at something out of place in the dark. The front light was out, which was weird. That thing always buzzed like it had been on continuously since 1970. And there was a silhouette lying draped across the sidewalk in front of the door.
It took one more step for me to see that it was a body.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I shuddered. My stride faltered. “Oh, no.”
For obvious reasons, I was not great about happening upon people who were dead, and I prayed that wouldn’t be the case here. A homeless person passed out from drugs or alcohol, I could handle. Dead bodies just hit a little too close to home.
Unfortunately, it happened to be directly in front of the place where I needed to be, so I steeled myself and started forward again.
I held my breath. Part of me had dared to hope that I was mistaken about the shape. Maybe it was a discarded rug, a futon mattress, or yet more trash bags. As I approached, however, I could see that I’d been right. To my horror, I knew the person to whom the body belonged. A floppy hat was pulled down over the face.
“No, no. Sam. Please be sleeping. Please be sleeping. Please be sleeping.”
I crept as close to him as I could bear, searching keenly for signs of breathing. For half a second, I was sure he must be dead. Then, his chest rose and fell, and I almost cried with relief. I shook myself and prepared to step carefully over him.
Sam sat up. “The monsters are after you. Beware!” His hand shot out and gripped my pant leg with a terrifying strength. I clapped a hand over my mouth to hold in a scream .
“What monsters?” I asked.
He squeezed my leg. His eyes were wide and staring. The hat lay upended in his lap where it had fallen. “They’re inside!” he whispered loudly. “Beware!”
He was seriously freaking my shit out. I nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
He watched me edge toward the door. Never blinking.
I was glad to get into the stairwell, away from whatever was going on with him. He’d never shown signs of instability before, but maybe he’d finally run out of his last meds, or his demons had caught up with him. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. I took the stairs two at a time up every floor, not pausing until I reached my landing. My heart hammered in my chest. I produced my key, put my hand on the door handle, and it swung open.
“What the hell?” I looked down at the handle and saw that a good portion of the lock had been blown apart, probably by a gun. The breath caught in my throat. Awesome. The one night I happened to be totally defenseless was the night my place finally got broken into.
Well, I still had my fists and my feet. I pushed the door open the rest of the way with my foot, and I brought my arms up in a boxer’s stance as I moved into the loft. Every muscle in my body was tense like steel cable. I must have looked confident, but I wasn’t. Punches, no matter how hard, would never be an even match for a gun.
I’d been the underdog for years, but that didn’t mean I had grown to like it. Just once, I want to be the asshole with the advantage.
“Marcus?” I moved to the light switch and flipped it.
Stars exploded across my vision. I stumbled, reflexively grabbing the side of my head before realizing I’d been hit. I turned toward the invisible source of the blow and found myself face to face with a mountain of a guy in a dark suit.
My first thought was Rocco, but it didn’t take long to correct myself. The suit was too cheap. And this guy didn’t have any scars.
Yet.
He pulled his lips back into an angry snarl and locked his hands around my upper arms. “You’re dead meat, girlie. Worse than dead meat.”
“Yeah?” I dug my feet into the floor and fought back, but his sheer bulk gave him incredible leverage. “You gonna run me through a wood chipper, or what?”
He took a step forward, and my heels slid backward along the floor.
“Don’t give me any bright ideas. They’ll find you in a dumpster as soon as I get what I need.”
So, he was looking for something. He jerked me to the right, and the room twirled around me. All my shit was strewn across the floor. My bed was cut open, and my blankets were ripped apart. All the bottles had been smashed into a mosaic of balefully glittering broken glass, and all my crates lay in pieces. The table still stood, but even the chairs were tumbled over, to say nothing of my makeshift bathroom wall. The wreckage made it easy to see that at least the scumbags left my plumbing intact.
Where was Marcus? No way he would have gone this long without showing himself if he were present. I brought my eyes back to the guy who was doing his best to pin me against a wall. “What happened to my friend, Frankenstein?”
He furrowed his heavy brow, and his grip momentarily loosened. I used the opportunity to regain some traction in my feet and shove with all my might against him. It was like shoving into a damn brick wall. He didn’t budge. He just held me still while he thought about how to answer. Was it possible he had never seen Marcus?
“Don’t matter,” he said after a prolonged pause. “Just tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, shitbag,” I answered honestly.
His lips curled back again, and with a frustrated roar, he tossed me across the room. I somehow managed to careen into a piece of my ruined bed, and while I struggled to get my bearings, he let out this weird, unearthly screech. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
I looked up, but there was no way to describe what I saw.
His face was morphing. The skin stretched and bubbled over a shifting skeletal structure. Teeth elongated to needle points in the growling mouth. His skin, previously blotchy and uneven, had drained of color except for the great black bags beneath his eyes. And his eyes—I almost couldn’t look at them. They reminded me of the paralyzing, bloodless stare just like the man at
the slaughterhouse whom I now knew to be Delano. This man, standing in my apartment, was a similar kind of creature as that demigod Marcus had warned me about.
I didn’t like this one bit. I liked it even less when he came flapping at me in high gear, shoulders pushed forward, fingers curved inward like talons. If I thought my nails were in dire straits, they were nothing compared to his. I had no doubt he could slit my throat with his thumb if he wanted to.
I swallowed hard. First ogres, now vampires? Even as all this bullshit was slowly becoming real in front of my eyes, I’d had enough of it.
“All right, Twilight,” I said. “Let’s rumble.”
The vamp was fast, but in these close, cluttered quarters, it was more of a hindrance than a help. The first time he tried to snatch me with one of his horror-movie hands, all I had to do was jump to the other side of a pile of debris. The movement was enough to throw his momentum off kilter, and he teetered precariously on his center of balance.
“I don’t have time for games, foolish girl!” He had acquired a snakelike hiss in his voice—maybe because of all those fangs.
“You’d have more time if you hadn’t wasted so much on jacking up all my shit!”
He scooped up a piece of a cinderblock and hurled it at my head. I felt the side of it whiz past, way too close to my face, almost grazing my cheek. It exploded into dust and shrapnel against the back wall.
“Where is it?!” he howled. His teeth glistened, and the ghostly eyes burned with a feverish hunger.
“Where’s what?” I glanced at the mess on the floor. “I don’t know where anything is now that most of it’s in pieces on the floor. And guess whose fault that is, huh? Like an ass-ugly bull in the world’s shittiest china shop.”
He was not convinced or impressed. The next thing he threw was a handful of bottle pieces, which also shattered spectacularly upon impact. “Wretched imp!” he shrieked.
“Hey,” I said. “Haven’t heard that one before.”
I crouched among my minefield of wrecked furniture since he didn’t seem eager to carve a path through it himself. He was waiting for me to stray within reach of his long, sinewy arms just for a second. That was all it would take for him to end it.
We both knew that. So, we were locked in a standoff as I tried to figure out my weapon situation. I groped blindly through the debris, unwilling to take my eyes off the vampire. He was still changing, and he didn’t seem to like it. His ears were longer now, and his limbs looked like they were growing, too. Creepy, sharp shoulder blades tore through the back of his shabby suit.
“Is that why you guys wear such cheap shit?” I asked him. He grunted, stretched out his freakishly long arms, and gathered up more things with which to pelt me. I blocked the worst of it with a chair. “It’d be real cool if you could cut that out. Like, now.”
My hand hit something long on the floor, and my fingers closed automatically around a grip. I grinned. I’d forgotten about our practice swords.
Not the best, but better than nothing. I made sure my hold on it was ironclad. The battered wooden sword was my only shot. The vamp wasn’t as stupid as I wanted him to be. As soon as he caught sight of what was in my hand, he knew my game, and he flew into a frothy rage. But the full length of his limbs made him even more unwieldy in the limited space we had. I watched him knock stuff off my counter, kick the table over, and then try to nail me with the chair. A flying splinter dug into my cheek.
First blood. All bets were off.
It was reasonable to believe that the angrier he got, the more dangerous he was, but I needed him to let his guard down if I wanted to drive a dummy sword into his heart. Raw emotions were the easiest way to manipulate him without him noticing. So, I made myself stay put where he could see me. The fact that I remained alive and full of blood bothered him intensely.
He began to make poor decisions.
It started when he rose to his feet, which were now a bunch of grotesquely long, clawed toes clad in the remains of his shoes. He lurched toward me, swaying precariously on two feet with his knuckles dragging on the floor.
I wrinkled my nose as I stared into his wasted face. “Did you agree to become this? I mean, have you seen yourself? It’s not pretty.”
My taunting had the desired effect. His eyes blazed with fury, and he rushed at me. Once he got in range, he tried to grab me, but his swings were wild. I got the impression that he wasn’t used to his body, and he didn’t know how to use it effectively.
The long fingers were easy to elude; it was the nails, now fully formed claws, that made me nervous. A lucky hit could end everything, and bleeding out on my own floor was not how I wanted to die.
I adjusted my grip on the training sword. The creep was so obsessed with getting his hands on me that he’d stopped guarding himself. If I had any chance at all, it was going to come very soon. It would be even better if I could disable one of his hands for any length of time, but that was me thinking like an action hero.
Be realistic. Focus, Vic. Just get the job done.
Then, the grabbing arms stopped swinging. The vamp crouched on all fours, low to the floor. His eyes were trained like laser sights on me. He was going to pounce.
It was the best I could have hoped for. He might as well have gifted himself to me on a silver platter as far as I was concerned. I had the perfect maneuver in my repertoire already. All I had to do was nail the timing.
He leapt, and I swear time slowed down while his body climbed on its arc through the air. I saw each individual claw outstretched, poised to tear me to pieces the same way he’d dismantled my stuff. I saw the great, sallow plain of his upper torso, and I dashed forward to position myself underneath the right spot. As he began his descent, I swept the blade upward and thrust it with all my might into the vampire’s bare hide.
The sword was dull. It took an insane effort to get that blunt, chipped wooden blade to perforate the vampire’s leathery skin. A sickening, popping tear told me I’d finally achieved my goal. The weapon seemed to be sucked up into his body, at least, until the hilt bridged the wound. I’d been prepared for torrents of blood, but there wasn’t much at all.
The monster’s whole body stiffened. His limbs went rigid, then limp in rapid succession. I put my hands up just in time to knock him to the side as he fell, saving myself from being crushed beneath his massive form. The sword handle stuck out straight from the left side of his breast. He attempted to paw at it, but each movement of his arm got weaker and weaker.
In the last moments before life left him entirely, he started to look more human again. I averted my eyes, but I heard the thump of his limbs losing their forced tension and hitting the floor.
Silence reigned for about ten seconds. Then, a weird whispering took up, and I found out that even more of the legends were true.
The sons of bitches really did turn to ash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The first thing I did after killing the vampire in my apartment was to find an unbroken glass and fill it with water, which I drank. Then, I picked up the table and its corresponding chair. I had to dig my roots into mundanity, to drag myself back into the real world. The ashes were still there on the other side of the room. Now, I saw that there were more scattered all around and mixed in with everything else.
There was also blood. But no Marcus.
The cold hand of dread squeezed my stomach. The pieces of the big picture were falling into place in my mind. Marcus had fought there and stood his ground with every ounce of honor in his body, but he must have been overwhelmed, or else he would still be around.
The loft had been tossed. The vamps were searching for something, but what? It was hard to believe there was something in my possession that they just had to have.
Then it hit me. The sword! Duh. I felt very, very stupid. Of course, the vamps wanted the sword. I was willing to bet that blade put my dummy sword to shame when it came to slaughtering monsters. The only problem was this: where was the sword now? Marcus shoul
d have had it, but they wouldn’t have taken him with them if they found everything they wanted. And they wouldn’t have left old dry bones around for me.
They still hadn’t found what they needed. Hopefully, that meant Marcus was still alive.
A tiny mewing came from the cracked window. When I saw the cat clinging to the outside sill, I rushed over and scooped it up into my arms, momentarily overcome with a rush of concern for something other than myself or Marcus. “Sorry, baby.” I stroked its soft ears. “Glad you’re okay.”
I spent a few minutes pacing restlessly around the loft, holding the kitten and clearing a path in the rubble of my life as I tried to figure out my next steps. Obviously, I needed to go after Marcus. There was no way I was leaving him at the mercy of a pack of vampires. That being said, I was not foolhardy enough to attempt a rescue on my own.
Fishing Marcus out of the river was one thing. A potential vampire den was a whole other ballgame. I was going to need reinforcements, and my options were limited. There was really only one person I could even consider asking for help.
Except, I didn’t want to consider Deacon St. Clare. I would’ve been perfectly happy to never see him again. Too bad I didn’t have a choice. I stopped pacing, put down the cat, retrieved my phone from my bag, and frowned. I also did not have his contact information. Then, I remembered how I’d met him the first time, and my eyes lit up.
Bingo.
Jules answered on the second ring. “Hey, Vic. What’s up?”
“Sorry I’m calling at such an odd hour,” I said. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“You know the answer to that without having to ask,” she said. “Name it, and it’s yours.”
“Okay.” I bit my lip. “Do you have Deacon’s number?”