Scorned

by Tyffani Clark Kemp

  “Yeah,” she finally said. “One for the other.”

  I smiled back.

  “That,” Tate said, “is the coolest thing I have heard in a while. ‘One for the other.’ Too awesome! How’s your niece doing?”

  “Alright,” I answered. “She’s still having seizures, but she’ll be fine.”

  I looked at the time on my phone. After six. It was already dark. I shuddered.

  “Yeah,” Tate said. “It’s dark out.”

  “We’re going to get something to eat,” Gavlin said. “Do you want to come?”

  I thought about it. I was pretty hungry. “Yeah, I think I will. Let me tell Pierce.”

  “Let Tate tell Pierce,” Gavlin suggested, though it was really more like an order. “It’s after dark. You’re not to go anywhere by yourself.”

  I nodded. That was fine with me. I did not want a repeat of last night.

  Tate left and came back with a twenty. “From Pierce,” she said. “He wants something to eat, but he says if you bring him Chick-Fil-A he’s going to turn you into a chicken.”

  I smiled. Pierce didn’t eat Chick-Fil-A. I did, and suddenly that’s what I wanted.

  The four of us went to the food court and sat down to eat in silence. No one really had anything to say. When we were done I took Pierce a burger in a Chick-Fil-A bag.

  “I don’t want that,” he said. I just shrugged, pulled out the burger and attempted to take a bite. “Oh, you think you’re funny?”

  “Yes, I think I’m quite hilarious.”

  “Where’s my change?”

  I shrugged. “There wasn’t any.”

  “Man, please.” He made a face like he didn’t believe me. “There won’t be any the next time I borrow money from you, either.”

  I smirked and let him eat his burger.

  Pierce’s cell phone rang and it was loud. He swore and dropped his burger trying to get to his phone.

  “Shit!” He pulled the phone from his pocket and answered it with a quiet, “Yeah, man.” He was quiet for a moment. “Alright. I’ll tell her.”

  Pierce handed me another twenty. “Gable needs some cash down in the food court. I want change this time.”

  I smiled, took the twenty, and left.

  My mage detail wasn't in the waiting room. I guessed they’d taken a collaborative bathroom break, so I just went down stairs. I made sure the elevator was empty before I stepped in and punched the button for the lobby. When the car stopped on the second floor, my stomach flew into my throat and my skin started to crawl up my arms. A man got on, his face hidden by a baseball cap and a hoodie. He nodded to me and he turned his back as the doors closed.

  “When we get of this thing,” his voice hissed, “go left.”

  “What?” He turned so fast that I forgot to breathe for a moment and he grinned around sharp, pointed fangs.

  “So sorry I couldn’t get to you the other night,” he said, and his voice held a bit of a lisp, “but I’m here now.”

  The brand new vampire was one of the paramedics that were supposed to check me out last night. He took a deep breath through his nose like he was scenting the air, and when he looked at me his eyes flashed hungry and desperate.

  “She won’t let me feed until you’re dead,” he said. “I guess I’m just going to have to feed on you.” His face was buried in my neck before I knew what had happened, but all he did was smell my blood through my skin. It was all he had time to do. The elevator doors opened and he gripped my hand so hard, that I was acutely aware of the strength he held, though I was pretty sure he wasn’t.

  Oh, dear God, save me.

  I made a frantic prayer and chided myself for not having my cross yet again. Stupid me for going into a hospital without thinking about all the dead people that might rise again and come after me. But, where were my new bodyguards?

  The vampire dragged me along for a few feet at a speed that wasn’t very human. “Slow down,” I whispered. He stopped and blinked at me.

  “What?”

  “Slow down. You won’t fool anyone walking like that."

  My help threw him, but he recovered quickly and we slowed, though his grip on my hand was still too tight. I was going to have a bruise and I wouldn’t be able to help Eddy at all for a very long time.

  Three cheers for unemployment!

  The vampire dragged me to the morgue. It was cool, as I’d always expected it to be and all of the dead bodies were tucked away in their refrigerated cubby holes. There were three that stood open, though. Three bodies that should have been dead, but weren’t. Alive and beautiful for all eternity.

  Until I kill them.

  What made me think I could kill three vampires? Just because I'd gotten lucky and killed one? Three vampires waited to drink my blood and drain me of the very essence of my life. One vampire just wanted revenge and one more yet wanted something from me, but I wasn’t completely sure what yet. My body? My blood? My life? My love? I didn’t know, but possibly made me think I could kill them?

  The morgue door shut. I was locked in and alone with three baby vampires that hadn’t fed. What little I knew about vampires was enough to tell me that my position wasn’t good, and I didn’t have much hope for myself. I took a deep breath, ignored the aching pain in my hand, and made myself do something I should have been doing my entire life. I made myself be more observant and took in my surroundings.

  The door was far enough away that, if I made a run for it, I wouldn’t make it before the vampires converged on me, so I knew that was out as a means of escape. There was another door on the far side of the room, but I didn’t know what was in there or whom I might find. It would literally suck if I ran in there for escape and ran into Perdita or another vampire that she’d made just to eat me in case she couldn’t get to me. The rest of the room was perfectly empty except for the refrigerated cubbies that held all the dead people.

  The doors to that room on the far side swung open as if on loose hinges and the other two baby vampires came in. One had a grin on his face, the third, a woman, looked very uncertain. When she saw me, however, her face contorted in such rage I thought she might actually kill me from the adrenaline rush. That is, if vampires had adrenaline rushes.

  “So it’s your fault we’re like this?” she screamed, and she was on me before I could blink. She had her hands around my throat and was screaming in my face like I’d done the deed myself.

  “I had a family! I had children and a husband! I had parents! Look what I’ve become!”

  I choked, trying to tell her it wasn’t my fault. I’m not the one who killed her, but I stopped trying.

  The vampire who had my hand suddenly let go and the female drove me backward. She was flying, her feet trailing behind her, and we were rushing at a speed I knew would kill me if she drove me into the wall. We stopped with a sudden jerk. Something behind me hindered our progress.

  “We’re not supposed to kill her.” The vampire from the elevator was behind me, holding me so we wouldn’t plow into a wall, making me a human sandwiched between two vampires, but I was still choking.

  “I want to kill her!” the female said and tightened her grip on my throat.

  “No!” He yelled, and he caught her wrists in his own and ripped her off my neck, tossing her backward into the air. I gasped, choking and sucking at the air, trying to get enough so I wouldn’t black out. I did not want to black out. Not with three vampires intent on my death.

  “We cannot kill her!” the vampire said. “We must wait for our maker.”

  The moment he said the words, I felt Perdita in my mind like she’d just entered the room. The vampires could feel her too because the other male vampire said, “What would you have from us, Mistress?”

  “Play with her,” Perdita’s voice hissed across my mind. Play with her. She wanted to watch them play with her food before she came and got me. Or would she have me brought to her? If that were the case, I was completely screwed.

  The two male vampires laughed
evil, cackling laughs that echoed through the cool room and bounced off the steel doors of the temporary resting places for the dead. The permanently dead, not the waking dead, because I was entertaining the waking dead.

  Where are Miranda and Gavlin?

  The question wandered through my head before I could stop it, but Perdita didn’t seem to catch it or didn’t care.

  “Run.” The word came out of nowhere and I looked up to see the vampire from the elevator standing in front of me. I gave him quizzical eyes and he stepped to the side with a grin that flashed more fang than I’d yet seen on Roman. “Run,” he said again, pronouncing the word like I should have been grateful to him, and he began to count. “One. Two. Three.”

  Hide-and-seek? Are you kidding me?

  I needed no other urging. I knew Perdita wasn’t in the far room, she’d already shown me that she was back at her lair. I ran for those swinging double doors at the back of the room and plowed through them like they would save my life.

  “Six. Seven. Eight.”

  I stopped and took a moment to get my bearings. It was an autopsy room that reminded me of the one on NCIS. There were two sets of autopsy gear sitting out at two tables. I ran, grabbed the first one, and dumped it onto the second.

  “Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.”

  “Roman!”

  I called out for the last person I wanted help from, but there was nothing else I could do.

  “Help me!”

  Roman’s voice washed through me like a wind. “LeKrista.”

  “Just help me,” I said. He opened his mind to me like he’d done only once before, and I had complete access to his vast repository of knowledge.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Fifteen.”

  The three vampires came through the double doors. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and hoped Roman knew what he was doing.

  “I’m offended, my sweet."

  “Shut up. You’re too sensitive and you’re going to kill my concentration.”

  He shut up.

  As the vampires crept closer, I took a mental inventory of the things I had to defend myself. The metal instrument tray lay on the table beside me. On the one in front of me was two sets of prosector’s autopsy tools. I picked up a pair of scissors in my left hand and a scalpel in my right. The male vampires laughed, high-pitched and animal-like. There was nothing human to them at all. In the female vampire’s face I saw nothing but loathing, disgust, and hate.

  The males looked like they were having fun. They kept scenting the air, licking their lips, and laughing.

  “She’s so scared,” the one from the elevator said.

  “I know,” the other replied. He picked up a bone saw from a table and switched it on.

  “We’re not supposed to kill her.”

  “I know. I just want to hear her scream.”

  They were in front of me, just like that, but by seeing through Roman’s eyes, I saw them move. The bone saw came dangerously close to my face and I felt the air coming off of it. I turned the scalpel in my hand, leaned back, and swiped. It bit deep into flesh with a meaty sound, and a scream of pain escaped the vampire’s lips. There was no blood. The vampire had no blood in him to lose, but if he had I would have nicked a major vein.

  The other male vampire was shocked. How could you let a little human hurt you that bad? I watched the cut vampire as he huddled his arm against himself. Having been an EMT, he would have been called in to at least one slit-wrist suicide, so he knew how much those wounds bled and he was expecting a drastic loss of blood. When it didn’t happen, he pulled back to examine it. I saw the moment that realization hit his brain and manifested in his eyes. He straightened, leaned back as if stretching, and laughed. Not the high-pitched laugh from before, but a mere, almost human chuckle. He licked his lips and looked dead at me. I looked down, away, at a spot on his chest.

  “Nice try, little girl,” he said in a voice that was low and deep and could have been seductive if his vampire powers worked on me. He stalked forward, human slow. He was trying to catch me enthrall. He wanted to throw me off my game so I’d be an easier target.

  “You’re dead,” the other male vampire said. “You don’t bleed.” He struck out without me seeing him because I was focused on vampire number two, and caught me around the throat. I grabbed his arm with the hand that still held the scalpel as he lifted me off my feet. “Lizette, over here thinks we should just go ahead and kill you. Forget the Mistress’s orders.”

  “Yeah,” I struggled to say around the hand gripping my throat. “That’s probably not a very good idea.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “But, we’re already dead. What can she do to us?”

  “Anything she wants,” I replied, and the smile dropped from his lips like it tasted bad. I stabbed the scissors into his shoulder at the joint. He screamed and released me, but I still had a grip on his arm. With Roman’s knowledge running through my mind, I knew how to center my weight and just how much force was needed to toss him. He wasn’t light, and my lower body strength is much stronger than my upper, so I used my legs to help propel him far enough away from me that he hit the wall, hard. His body crashed into the drywall and left an indentation of his form. He didn’t get up immediately and I’d lost one of my weapons in his arm.

  The other male vampire picked his bone saw back up. Subconsciously, I saw the female standing across the room, still just inside the doors, before I picked up the metal tray and used it as a shield against the saw. It didn’t do much good since the metal was thin and the saw was used to cut through bone, but it gave me the leverage I needed to twist it from the vampire’s hands. It was lucky for me that he wasn’t used to his new strength. I dumped the tools from the second tray to the table and caught the vampire across the face with it. He wasn’t a fighter and his reactions were slow, so I got in a few good blows before he snatched it away from me and sent it flying across the room. I still had the scalpel and I reached down to the table to find a second weapon, anything to use.

  He didn’t dodge it when I sliced his mid-section with the scalpel three times. They weren’t deep cuts, but they bisected each other so it was deeper in the middle. The vampire made a gut wrenching sound as his muscles gave way, and his intestines began to bulge in the middle of his stomach. He just looked at it, looked at me, and looked back at his stomach like he wasn’t sure what to do. I took a step toward him, and with all the strength I could find, I plunged the scalpel deep into his chest where I hoped his heart would be. It wasn't silver, but he was only a day old. Roman seemed to think it would be effective. His eyes widened. I twisted the scalpel, pressed it in farther, pulled it up through his chest until it wouldn’t go any farther, and pushed it in some more.

  The vampire dropped to his knees. I left the scalpel in and stepped back. He looked up at me and muttered, “Behind you,” before his eyes glazed over and he dropped to the floor limp.

  I barely had a chance to turn around before the other male vampire had his arms around me. I didn’t bother to struggle much. He looked me in my eyes and his eyes flared.

  “Please don’t,” I gasped.

  “Why not?”

  “Roman!”

  One moment later I was being squeezed to death by a vampire, the next I was bespelling him with my eyes. Roman’s power cut through me like a hot knife. It burned from the dark place inside me, waking it, and setting it to a life it had never known before. The power fed it, made it grow, made it move up through me, made it real until it began to consume me. Distantly, I felt Roman whisper something like “I’m sorry” in my head, but I couldn’t be sure. I was so consumed with that darkness I didn’t realize that the vampire was now on his knees at my feet. His hands were pressed to my stomach, like a dog begging for love. I looked into his eyes and I felt Roman eating that thing that made the dead man live. He consumed everything that the man was to become, and he did it through me. Whatever the vampire's life force was made of it sliced through me, just enoug
h to tempt my darkness but not enough to feed it. I’m not sure if Roman knew he could do it before today, but he did and he gained power and strength from it.

  Perdita screamed through my head, and I realized Roman was taking from her what little strength the vampire offered.

  The more vampires one creates, the more power is gained, whispered across my mind.

  Roman left me suddenly, like he’d pulled my heart out with him and I felt empty with nothing for my darkness to feed on. A noise caught my attention and I turned back to where the female vampire had been. An autopsy table flew across the room and there was no way for me to get out of the way. I turned and wrapped my arms around the back of my head, hoping to save something of myself when it crashed into me, but it never did.

  “LeKrista! Get in the corner!”

  I turned to see Miranda standing there between me and the table. She’d caught it and was using it as a shield.

  “Get in the corner!” Then, as if she thought I wouldn’t listen she added, “Now!”

  I scrambled across the room to the corner and huddled against the wall. Miranda pulled some round blades from somewhere and threw them at Lizette. One caught her across the shoulder, and another cut into her side, but the female didn’t go down. She hissed at Miranda, turned as if called and disappeared.

  Miranda stomped over to me and pulled me up by my arm. “Where is your cross?” she shouted. “Haven’t you learned by now to wear a cross?”

  “If you had any idea what my weekend has been like- ”

  “I don’t care what your weekend has been like. I want to know why you don’t have a cross around your pitiful little neck!”

  I stared at her. “Excuse me,” I shouted back, “don’t you talk to me like that. I had to find some way to defend myself because you were nowhere to be found!”

  Miranda looked around then, noticing the two dead vampires for the first time. “You did this? All of this? By yourself?”

  I straightened and tipped my chin up defiantly. “Roman helped me.”