The risk with staying too far back was losing him. Checking over her shoulder every few steps was also a problem. She knew someone else might be following her, whether she spotted the tail or not. If they were setting up a trap, she did not want to walk into it blindly.
Cowboy entered a department store. Clothing racks lined the center aisle. Madison ignored gaudy sweaters and corduroy pants, winter coats and heavy material dresses. Except when Cowboy stopped.
Then she sidestepped up to a rack, lifted a sleeve, and inspected dangling price tags until he started walking again. She stayed off the main aisle and cut back and forth between the clothing displayed. It felt less conspicuous.
Madison never took her eyes off Cowboy.
Muzak was piped in throughout the store from ceiling speakers.
He gave no sign he knew she was following him. His walk was casual. The heel of his boots rhythmically clicked on the tiled floor.
Muzak was lyricless songs that her father still listened to today. She recognized what was currently playing, Back in Black by AC/DC, and wondered with or without words how her father could enjoy this kind of music.
Cowboy picked up his pace, made a right, and then pushed through an employee door.
He was gone. She’d lost him.
Maybe he did realize she had been following him.
It shouldn’t stop here. She couldn’t let an employee door stop her.
Again, she knew cameras picked up her every move within the store. In the mall. Even in the parking lot. It would all come back on her sooner or later.
There was not going to be away to keep out of trouble.
No one was ever going to believe the truth.
She was here in Pennsylvania hunting down vampires, and she wasn’t sure she believed the truth. For all she knew she was still unconscious in a hospital bed, never having come out of a coma after being attacked at the carnival.
That concept seemed more possible, more probable than accepting that she was now a vampire, in a long line of family vampires, tasked with the unlikely career of killing vampires.
It was crazy. All of it. Everything. Crazy.
She reached the door that Cowboy passed through and paused for just a moment. Before she could walk through the door she was pushed. Hands slammed into her back. Her chest pressed tight against the door, before it opened.
“Get in there,” a man said.
She fell forward into the back room and stumbled, losing her balance. Her knees banged onto waxed slate-gray cement floors. She twisted onto her back. She saw two shadows loom over her. The rectangle lights above obscured her view. She would have been able to see more clearly if the lights had been off.
“You have no idea what kind of trouble you’re in, do you?” She recognized voice. It belonged to the shadow on the left. It was the same as the man who caught her arm in the food court. It was the Cowboy.
“Where’s Julius,” she said. She heard the tremor in her tone of voice; there was no way they missed it.
The guy next to Cowboy, the one that pushed her into the back room, laughed. “She kidding, or what? You talking to us? Can you understand that you’re on your back? We have you trapped. We’ll ask the questions.” He brought his leg back, and with every word he said, he punctuated it with a kick into her thigh: “Not. The. Other. Way. Around!”
Pain shot up and down her leg. She tried rolling away and scooting back from him as he kicked out at her, but to no avail. He just followed her, easily landing all five kicks.
“Enough,” Cowboy said. “Where’s the dagger?”
“Where’s my friend. I want to talk to Neal,” she said.
The guy who’d kicked her reached down. He fisted her clothing by her chest and lifted her off the ground as if she weighed nothing. When her feet left the ground, she kicked him. There wasn’t much power behind the kick, but he threw her away regardless. Her back crashed into the metal warehouse racks. The boxed contents shimmied and shook, but only Madison fell.
She crumpled onto the ground, rolling herself into a protective ball.
“Let’s get her out of here,” Cowboy said.
The two started talking, whispering. It didn’t make sense, but they were too far away for her to hear what was said, or they knew how to whisper without being overheard by other vampires. Madison wondered if they’d take her to the same place where Julius was keeping Neal. If they captured her, they’d have the dagger. They hadn’t searched her, so they didn’t know it was right inside her coat.
Once they had the dagger they wouldn’t need her anymore. They wouldn’t keep Neal alive either. He was more than their hostage. Her friend had become a liability, a threat. Neal knew too much, had seen too much.
She would be stupid if she didn’t believe Julius planned to kill both of them once he had what he wanted.
She had to wonder if Neal was even still alive.
The man who’d been delivering the beating came at Madison again. She was curled in tight, as if afraid he might kick her again.
He tried.
Once he was close to her, and she saw him draw back his leg, Madison knew he meant to do some serious damage. She wasn’t sure if the blow was aimed at her head or ribs. It didn’t matter. Once he was committed to the kick, she pushed back. Her knees slid on the polished cement floor. Her left hand grabbed onto her coat, her right reached for the dagger’s hilt.
His foot connected with the bottom shelf of the warehouse rack. A box on the backside fell. Whatever was inside shattered. Ammonia filled the back room.
Madison struck like a rattlesnake. She jabbed the blade into his leg just above the ankle, and sliced through the calf muscle up to the side of the knee. The guy shrieked in agony, falling back flat on the cement. He spun, and reached for her.
There was no hesitation. She kicked out with her legs, wrapping them around his midsection.
He threw punches toward her head. She felt skin on her face split.
She twirled the handle of the dagger around in her fingers so that her pinky was closest to the blade. Gripping tightly on the hilt, she jammed the weapon into his throat, his chest, and his stomach.
The red lava bubbled and oozed from the wounds.
It spread quickly, and devoured the clothing, the meat, the man.
Madison got to her feet, ready to continue the fight. Cowboy was gone.
Chapter 24
Madison ran out of the store’s back room and tried to calm down. She knew she was breathing fast, short breaths. There was nothing left of the vampire she’d killed. Even if police found trace remnants of. . .him, but nothing was there that could get her in trouble. She didn’t think.
It all came back to surveillance tapes. Everything did. She couldn’t imagine what police would think after watching footage of the fight, her stabbing the guy, and that guy then melting in a pool of molten lava. She figured there would have to be a lot of rewind and re-watch.
She pulled her phone from her pocket and tried to look nonchalant as she left the store and was back in the main hub of the mall. She fired off a text to her cousins.
I’m worried. Must have been on video breaking laws a doz times!
She hit send, and then regretted it. Seamus and Richelle didn’t know she’d ventured out of state. They’d armed her with a dangerous mission, though. Suppose they would have to assume she was working.
Working. She accepted the whole vampire thing. Thought she handled the adjustment well enough. A few days down the road, a month, a year later, maybe she would come unglued. Right now, she was doing okay with it. What baffled her most was the Indiana Jones stuff with the dagger, the stories about her grandmother. That was where everything became just a little overwhelming.
There were still questions. She still needed answers.
Her phone vibrated as she reached the food court. She read the text message, and stopped walking.
Looking around, she saw an empty table. She sat at it and stared at her phone.
U R not
visible on film. No pics. No Video.
She could not recall ever having seen a photograph of her grandmother.
She tapped the camera on her phone. The lens focused on the tabletop. She reversed the camera, so that it focused on her.
She saw herself clearly. Her eyes were a brilliant storm blue. Every feature on her face crystal clear.
She took a photo.
Pulled it up.
It wasn’t that she was invisible, the image captured was just a black mass in the possible shape of a person.
Madison deleted it and took another. Anyone watching would just assume some dumb teen was taking mall selfies.
She retrieved the photo.
Results were the same. She was a black blob. There was nothing distinguishable in the shot; not hair color or length, eye color, skin color. It looked more like the photograph of a black shadow.
She deleted this photograph, too.
Switching to video, she waved at the phone and smiled, depressed the stop button, and then the play button.
A featureless shadow that may or may not have been waving at the camera.
She deleted the video clip.
The mall security cameras would not have caught her sneaking through the parking lot that morning. They would not have picked up the fight by the trailers. If she hadn’t been visible, neither had the vampire she killed. Same would hold true for any street cameras when she went down to Tent City. Thankfully she had parked her Jeep across from the underpass. The best police could hope for is a description from the clerk behind the counter at the hotel. Maybe no one was looking for her. Maybe she could relax her fears about spending the rest of her life in prison, at this point. Maybe.
As she put her phone into her pocket it vibrated.
She answered it. “How was your flight?”
“Flight?”
It wasn’t Seamus. She figured they’d answered her text, and then decided to call her. She had been wrong.
“Thought you were someone else.” Madison looked around the food court. She couldn’t help but suspect the man on the phone was close by.
“You’ve been wreaking havoc on my family.”
“They’re not very friendly, Julius. I want to talk to Neal.”
“At this point, you don’t get to call any of the shots. Actually, unless we weren’t on the same page before, you’ve never been in a position to call shots. Never. I told you we’d meet after the carnival closes tonight. We would exchange your friend for the dagger.”
“That is a long way off still. I got bored.”
“No. You’ve kept busy.”
Madison tried listening for anything in the background she could use to figure out where the call was being made from. There was nothing. It was so silent from his end, as if he were calling her from a vacuum.
“I want to talk to Neal.”
“I want you to sit tight. Don’t leave the mall. Wait until the carnival closes.”
“Where will I find you?”
“We’ll find you.”
Madison did not want to give this vampire the upper hand. He held the cards. The disadvantage was hers. “I need to know that Neal is alright.”
“I’m sorry, did you say something? And Madison,” he said, without pause, “if you harm another member of my family, you will never see your friend again. I want to make sure that my instructions are simple enough for you to follow.”
Silence.
“I understand,” she said.
The call was ended.
Madison bit into her upper lip, and sat tapping the edge of her phone on the table. There was no way she could kill the next few hours inside the mall. The sounds, the colors, the smells, it was too much to take. Adrenaline still coursed through her body from the stockroom fight. She wanted to fight.
She didn’t realize she’d set her phone down and that her hands were balled into fists until fingernails penetrated the skin of her palms.
# # #
Madison occupied a table for two in the food court, sitting in a back corner. She watched people for most of the day, using the time to work on controlling her senses. A panic set in as she worried her strength from the morning feed would wane. Julius had not sounded happy with her on the phone. There would be a battle. She understood the odds of getting Neal back and the two of them making it out of the situation alive were small. There was no way she’d go down without a fight. If she was going to die, she was bringing as many vampires with her as possible. Part of her thought she should return to Tent City and have dinner.
She didn’t move from her spot.
She wasn’t hungry.
She had never felt stronger.
Instead she closed her eyes and tried to work on selective hearing, picking up on conversations at particular tables. She started with ones closer to where she sat, shutting off background noise. It took some doing, and at times she felt frustrated when her concentration broke. Once she got the hang of it, though, she gradually worked her way across the food court, picking out specific groups of people and then focusing on just them. It was a more difficult trick to perfect. She had the time to practice, and before the end of the night, she found she was getting the hang of it.
The same went for her very sensitive sense of smell. The array of odors was often nauseating. Her stomach rolled and churned. Too many times she thought she might have to run to the bathroom, apprehensive about throwing up in front of everyone. Her diet consisted of blood. The last thing she wanted to do was vomit blood across the large tiled floor. Someone would surely call an ambulance. Police. Worse, her nutrition would have spilled, and she would need to eat again before facing Julius for sure.
Her eyes worked like binoculars and flashlights. While she had been assured the sun would not fry her, it did cause pain. She found even in electric light she needed to squint or keep on her sunglasses. The light brought on a dull ache in her temples that, with sustained light, slowly grew in tempo and intensity. She needed to retrain her sight, as if suddenly forced to wear bifocals. If she tilted her head down, chin toward her chest, she could see things that were close crisply. When she looked straight on, or with her head tilted upward, her farsightedness kicked in, and she could read the print on receipts as they were spat from cash registers.
It was hard not to feel somewhat bionic.
Physical strength she had witnessed. She had both delivered and received blows that should have killed. Had she fought a person, a human–a non-vampire. She could probably dent, or perhaps shatter, a skull with a punch. She hoped she never had to test that out. There hadn’t been a lot of time to let her brain adapt to the violence. It was an award realization. It was a kill or be killed mentality, she supposed. So cliché, but how else could she look at it? How else could she accept it without going crazy? She was worried about the after. After this all came to an end, and she had time to reflect on everything that happened, her mind would explode. She had no doubt.
She gripped the edge of the table with both hands and squeezed.
The Formica crunched and splintered.
Releasing her grip, Madison turned to stare toward a bland wall. It was the only thing she could think to do to hide her tears and mask the horror that had become her life.
Chapter 25
Madison left the mall around eight. She went to the Jeep and drove it off the mall property to the lot across the street. The last thing she wanted was to have her vehicle be the only one in the mall parking lot. Police would run the plates. She didn’t want that happening.
She ran back across the street, across the parking lot, and into the mall. She made her way through thinned out shoppers toward the back, and exited from a rear door that let out to the carnival’s midway. The carnival closed when the mall did, at nine. Snow spotted the building and the few cars in the back lot. Mixing natural darkness with the parking lot lights, the spinning ride lights, and the lights on the vending and gaming trailers gave everything a frosted or frozen look. There was a black-grey glow
over the carnival, as if Madison was seeing through an obscure camera filter. It was uninviting, and eerie.
The effect was not lost on patrons. The weather had killed attendance. It seemed that no one wanted to be whipped about in circles and spun around upside down with an almost arctic wind blowing in their face. Madison hugged her coat close to her body and tried to hide as much of her face as possible. She didn’t know if she was considered cold-blooded now or not. She knew the temperatures impacted her. The cold was not appreciated at all.
She knew Julius would have people looking for her, if they weren’t already watching her every breath. The weight of the dagger under her left arm provided reassurance. It wouldn’t be long now.
People screamed.
Madison spun around.
The Tilt-a-Whirl rotated around on a track, the individual pods spun freely on wheels. Spinning while spinning caused stomachs to lurch and muscles to tighten. Screaming was often the only release until the ride finished. Other people were on the two-story Ferris wheel, laughing and talking. The games had the most people gathered. Heavy winter clothing, bags of hot peanuts, and fresh popcorn seemed most popular.
Madison moved up and down the midway.
The marks didn’t notice her.
The carnies did.
Every one of them.
If Julius had been oblivious to her whereabouts before she stepped out of the mall, he knew where she was by now, for sure. With an hour left, Madison took the time to study the enemy. She wanted to know who she’d be up against, even if it gave her enemy a chance to see who they’d be up against as well.
At the end of the midway was the funhouse—the evil clown with the wicked smile and dangerously sharp teeth.
After about twenty minutes, Madison counted up three men, two women, and one that she couldn’t tell the sex of for certain. Six vampires, plus Julius made seven–if Julius was worked the carnival. She doubted it. He was the man; the guy in charge. He wasn’t going to tear tickets, operate ride control panels, or shell out nuts from inside a stand.
Young Blood: The Nightbreed Saga: Book 1 Page 18