Then, whatever was holding down her right arm snapped.
The sudden scream made Michael twist in his seat. The safety belt pulled painfully at his shoulder.
But that pain amounted to nothing compared to what he felt as he saw Jessie jerking and flailing on the gurney as Max and Clifford tried desperately to hold her down.
It can’t be! his mind cried crazily. It’s only been a few hours! It’s not time yet!
But whether enough time had passed or not, the transformation had come over Jessie. As Michael struggled to unfasten the safety belt and get out of the copilot’s seat, Jessie screamed again. The sound tore at his heart like claws, and the awful words too late, too late! pounded inside his skull.
Clifford had tried to prepare for this eventuality, Michael knew, and now he saw the older man snatch a hypodermic needle from a kit he’d brought along with him. The syringe was full of a powerful sedative, but whether it would work on vampires, Michael didn’t know. Clifford lunged at Jessie with the needle ready to stab down into her arm.
At that instant, the restraining strap holding her right arm parted, even its thick leather torn by the incredible strength Jessie now possessed. Her hand struck out at Clifford’s head. He blocked the blow with his forearm at the last second, otherwise Jessie’s clenched fist might have crushed his skull.
Still, the impact slammed Clifford back against the fuselage wall and made him drop the hypodermic, which shattered as it hit the floor.
Max grabbed Jessie’s arm and tried to force it back down, but she twisted her wrist and got hold of his shirt. With a furious, incoherent shout, she flung him toward the front of the helicopter just as Michael finally succeeded in freeing himself from the safety belt and lunged up out of the copilot’s seat.
Michael didn’t have time to get out of the way as Max flew at him, driving him backward, out of control. He fell over the seat and into the pilot’s back, knocking the man forward into the controls.
The angle of the rotors changed, sending the chopper into a steep dive toward the earth. The sudden shift in altitude threw everyone forward, including Jessie, who had torn her other restraints loose and rolled off the gurney. As the pilot tried to right the aircraft, Michael pushed himself to his feet and saw Clifford struggling with Jessie. She threw him aside like a toy and stalked toward Michael, her lips drawn back to reveal the long, sharp fangs that had grown there.
“Stop, Jessie, please stop!” he shouted over the engine’s high-pitched whine. At the same time Michael reached around to the small of his back where he always kept a couple of short, sharpened stakes in sheaths hidden under his clothing. He slid his hand under his shirt and wrapped his fingers around one of the stakes. He could pluck it from its sheath in the blink of an eye and throw it with deadly accuracy.
But that would mean destroying Jessie, the very thing he had pledged not to do if any chance remained to save her.
The question was, had he run out of chances?
She was almost within reach now, her face twisted into a cruel distortion of what had once been so lovely. Her mouth opened wider, and Michael knew that within seconds, she would launch herself at him and try to pierce his jugular with those fangs.
“Jessie, please.” He didn’t know if he actually said the words or if they were just a silent prayer.
Memories came creeping back into her head. At first she hadn’t known where she was, who those hideous creatures tormenting her were, or even who she was. All she really knew was the bloodlust.
But then vague recollections stirred within her, even as she flailed her way free and screamed out her unutterable hatred. She knew the two men who attacked her first and recalled their names as she flung them away from her. Max and Clifford, they were called, and that meant the one who stood there in front of her now, one hand held out toward her as if he were pleading for his life, was…
Michael.
Jessie flinched back as the name echoed in her mind. At the same time, the metal floor of whatever this place was shifted again and leveled out. That threw her even more off balance. She stumbled into the narrow table where she had been strapped down and caught hold of it to keep from falling.
“Jessie, please. Remember who you are. Remember who I am.”
She let go of the table and clamped her hands to her temples as she screamed. She wanted to lunge at him, rip his throat out and bury her face in his blood as it flooded from his ruined neck. She wanted to feel it flowing hot and slick down her throat, filling her with its power.
But then she remembered another kind of heat that had flowed from him to her and back again, and the memory sent a throb through her that had nothing to do with bloodlust. It seemed to come from the dim past, since everything before she had awakened a few minutes ago felt like another life to her, something disconnected that had nothing to do with her now. This memory was so strong, though, that it made her thoughts spin crazily.
“Jessie, it’s me, Michael,” he said, still holding one hand out toward her while the other remained behind his back. Don’t trust him! a part of her brain shrieked at her. He wants to hurt you! He wants to destroy you!
“I know who you are,” she said, her voice husky and tortured as it rasped through her throat. Talking was agony, but that pain would go away if she could just bathe her throat in blood, she thought.
“Then you know who you are,” Michael said. “You’re Jessie Morgan. You write for Supernova. You’ve been staying with me and my friends.”
She cast a contemptuous glance toward Max and Clifford. She wanted to rip them to pieces and feed on the remains. “You mean you’ve been holding me prisoner.”
Michael shook his head. “No. You wanted to be there. You wanted to be part of what we do.” He paused. “You wanted to be with me.”
Again pain made her clutch at her temples. “No!”
“Don’t fight the memories,” he said. “You can do this, Jessie. You can push all the evil away. You don’t have to be like you are now.”
“You don’t know anything about it!” She stumbled toward him, dazed and unsteady. Where was she? What was going on? She didn’t understand anything anymore.
Except that she had to have blood, and as she came within reach of him the creature inside her roared up again, taking control of her. Too fast for the eyes to see, her hands shot out, the left one gripping his shoulder while the right clamped around his throat. She jerked him toward her as her head tipped back and her mouth opened wide, the fangs glistening in the strangely colored lights that illuminated this place.
Then, before she could strike, she felt a sharp, stinging pain in her shoulder and the world went away again.
Michael gasped for breath as Jessie’s hand slid off his throat and she slumped against him. He caught her and held her up as he looked past her shoulder to see Clifford standing there. The older man’s chest heaved from strain, both emotional and physical. He held up an empty syringe and showed it to Michael as he said, “I had a backup ready.”
Michael swallowed. His throat would be sore in the morning, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t been forced to plunge that stake into Jessie’s heart and destroy her for all time. Right now, nothing else mattered to him.
“It worked fast.”
Clifford nodded. “It’s a new sedative developed in one of our labs for use specifically against vampires. Half the dose she got would have killed all four of us put together.”
“What about you and Max? Are you hurt?”
“No more than we were,” Max said as he came forward to take Jessie from Michael. “Gimme a hand with her, Clifford.”
As the two of them put Jessie back on the gurney and tried to rig the broken straps so that they would hold her in place, Michael rubbed his jaw in thought and said, “So some members of the family are still trying to help the vampires, or nobody would have bothered coming up with a knockout formula that would work on them.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Max said. “Easier to kill ’em
when they’re not tryin’ to kill you.”
“No, it’s true,” Clifford admitted. “I stay in pretty close touch with the relatives who work in research and development and try to stay caught up on what they’ve discovered.”
“You didn’t think to tell me about it?”
Clifford shrugged. “You’re out in the field, Michael. Strictly operations, to look at it from a military point of view.”
“Just a killer, in other words,” he said tightly.
“Until now,” Max said. “Damn it, Michael, I thought we were all dead when you started trying to reason with her. You can’t reason with a bloodsucker.”
Michael shook his head. “That’s not true. I got through to her. You could see it for yourselves.”
“Until she got close enough to grab you. Then she went for the throat, buddy.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Michael snapped. “She’s alive, and we’re still going to try to save her.”
The world had turned upside-down, he thought. Never before tonight would he have regarded someone in that netherworld between apparent death and resurrection as a vampire to be alive, but that was the way he felt about Jessie. As Max had pointed out, he wouldn’t have tried to reason with one of the creatures before. He would have just destroyed it, as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Jessie wasn’t the only one who had been transformed, he realized. For almost a decade, killing vampires had been his life. Blood and destruction, horror and death. Sure, battling vampires was the family business, so to speak, but he had gone about it with a single-minded intensity that hadn’t left room for anything else in his life. He had been cold and hard inside, as lifeless, when you got right down to it, as the creatures he hunted.
Then Jessie had come along and changed all that. She had brought light back into his life, where before there had been only darkness. She had shown him that hatred because of what had happened to Charlotte was a hollow reason to lock away the gentler side of his nature. It hadn’t taken her long to bring about that transformation in him, either, only a few days. She had a special quality about her, an urgency that wouldn’t allow her to waste any time. Even more so than all the race car drivers he had known, she lived her life pedal to the metal.
After all, look how fast she had turned into a vampire, he thought.
The chopper flew on northward. With Jessie apparently out, Michael returned to the copilot’s seat and said to the pilot, “I’m sorry for what happened back there. You did a good job pulling us out of that dive.”
The man grinned. “I’ve been flying for the Brandt family for five years, sir. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into some trouble. Probably won’t be the last, either.”
Thinking about his family’s history, Michael nodded. “I’d say that’s a safe bet.”
Everything was quiet now at the airfield where the helicopter had taken off. The office and tower remained open all night because several corporate jets were hangared here in addition to the Brandt aircraft, and you never knew when some big-shot businessman would need to take off in the wee hours.
Still, the lone man in the office didn’t expect any more activity tonight, so he was surprised when the door opened and a tall, slender man in a dark, expensive suit walked in.
“A helicopter left here a short time ago,” the man snapped, without so much as even saying hello. He had an English accent, like the guys on those BBC comedies the local PBS station showed. “I need to know its destination.”
The night manager shook his head. “Sorry, mister. I can’t tell you that. FAA regulations.”
“The pilot filed a flight plan?”
“Well, yeah, sure. Everybody has to if the trip’s more than a short haul—” The man stopped as he realized he was on the verge of giving away more information than he should, despite his good intentions.
“And the flight plan is in your computer?”
The night manager’s nerves started to jangle. Something was mighty wrong about this guy. “Look, if you have business here, I’ll be glad to help you, but if you don’t, you’d better leave. I can call security.”
“No,” the visitor said, “I don’t think you can.”
With that, his hand shot out, grabbed the night manager by the neck and jerked him out of his chair. The manager’s feet hung several inches off the floor. He kicked and flailed, but he couldn’t even begin to dislodge the iron grip on his throat.
The tall man held the struggling manager out to the side, seemingly effortlessly, and moved around the desk to let the long, slender fingers of his other hand play over the keyboard. After a moment he smiled, nodded and said as if talking to himself, “Ah, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He’s taking her to her grandmother for some reason. How odd. Well, we’ll find out what he’s up to.”
He let go of the manager, who had started to turn purple from lack of air by now. The man fell to the floor, landing beside the desk in a heap. He lay there frantically dragging air into his lungs, and when he had gulped down enough to be able to speak, he looked up and croaked, “You’re gonna be sorry, you son of a bitch.”
The man shook his head and motioned to several men who came through the open office door. The newcomers grinned, exposing ugly fangs, as Jefferson Rendell said, “No, but you are.”
The air traffic controller on duty in the tower never heard the screams coming from the office.
Chapter 16
R ose Morgan was a compact woman with iron-gray hair worn in braids, still striking despite her years. She wore jeans and an untucked man’s shirt and was all business, not wasting any time on pleasantries as she opened the door of the old farmhouse and demanded, “Where’s my granddaughter?”
Michael was taken aback by her brusqueness. “How do you know who we are?”
“Who else would come up to my house at this hour of the night? Or morning, I should say. Aren’t you Michael Brandt?”
“Yes, I—”
“Where’s Jessie?”
Michael nodded toward the van they had rented in Tahlequah, some ten miles to the southwest. Tahlequah was a good-size town, as well as the official headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, but finding a suitable vehicle they could rent in the middle of the night hadn’t been easy.
The van had worked for their needs, though. Jessie, still unconscious from the sedative, was in the backseat along with Clifford. Max had ridden shotgun, and Michael had taken the wheel.
Locating the farm in these rugged hills, in the dark, hadn’t been easy. Michael had worried that Jessie’s now-superhuman constitution would throw off the effects of the sedative before they reached their destination. Luckily that hadn’t happened.
“She’s in the van,” Michael told Nana Rose now. “I’ll get her.”
Clifford opened the vehicle’s side door and helped Michael lift Jessie’s limp form out of it. Then, cradling her in his arms, Michael carried her toward the old, two-story white house.
“Oh, dear Lord!” Nana Rose exclaimed when she saw how pale and limp Jessie was. “She looks…she looks…” Clearly she couldn’t bring herself to say it, but Michael knew what she meant.
Now that the unholy creature inside Jessie had been tamed momentarily, she looked dead again. Michael knew that if he checked for a heartbeat, he wouldn’t find one. All of her natural functions had been shut down by the curse working its way through her.
He wondered if it was already too late to help her, wondered if the tiny spark of the real Jessie Morgan had already been extinguished.
He wasn’t going to let himself think that. Not as long as there was any hope at all.
When Michael climbed the steps onto the porch and the light that spilled through the open front door fell fully on Jessie’s face, Nana Rose clapped her hands to her cheeks and wailed, unable to hold in her horrified reaction any longer. “She’s dead! Oh my God! She’s dead!”
“No,” a deep, calm voice said as a figure appeared in the doorway. “She still lives, after a fashion.”
The man stood medium height, but his rangy build made him appear slightly taller. He wore work clothes and boots, and his hands were roughened by many years of labor. He had his silver hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Michael guessed the man’s age to be about sixty, but with the bronzed, weathered face it was difficult to tell how old he was.
“Charles, can you help her?” Nana Rose asked.
The man nodded. “I’ll try. That’s all I can promise, Rose.”
“You are of the Adawehi. You can save her,” Nana Rose insisted. “You are the Atsilasvti, the Fire Maker. You have the power.”
The man called Charles gave her a solemn smile. “I only have the power that the spirits are generous enough to convey to me. Pray that it will be enough.”
Michael’s muscles didn’t feel any particular strain as he stood there holding Jessie like that, but he didn’t want to waste any time. “Should I bring her inside?”
Charles shook his head. “No. Follow me. We have to go to the river. I’ve already begun to prepare the sacred fire.”
Michael took Jessie back down the steps and followed Charles and Nana Rose. Clifford and Max trailed behind them.
After a few minutes of walking through cultivated fields and small stands of trees, Michael began to hear the sound of running water. The little group came out in another field, although no crops grew in this one. Instead it was mostly bare dirt, as if the vegetation had been beaten down somehow.
To Michael’s surprise, he saw more people waiting for them in the light of a three-quarter moon that still hung fairly high in the sky. His eyes, which were preternaturally keen to start with, had adjusted now to the point that he could see almost as well as if it were the middle of the day. He made a quick count. Ten people stood on the bare ground, six men and four women. Michael realized as well that the open area formed a large circle that extended to the bank of the stream he heard flowing.
Charles stopped, turned to Michael and said, “These men are of the Adawehi, priests and healers like myself, and the women are powerful counselors. Rose tells me that her granddaughter is possessed by a great evil of some sort. We may be able to perform a purification ritual that will drive the evil spirit from her, but it would help if we knew what form it takes.”
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