Vampires Don't Cry: The Collection

by Ian Hall

  By Ian Hall and April L. Miller

  Preface; The Turncoat Helsing

  Chapter 1. Helsing or Vampire?

  Chapter 2. Recovery and Confrontation

  Chapter 3. Reality Closes in

  Chapter 4. The Helsing Diaries

  Chapter 5. A Vampire’s Christmas Dinner

  Chapter 6. Taking the Investigation Outside

  Chapter 7. The McCartney Legacy

  Chapter 8. We Hit Pay-Dirt: Bigtime

  Chapter 9. The Corporate and the Trash

  Chapter 10. Amos Blanche in the Flesh

  Chapter 11. Deeper and Deeper into the Mire

  Chapter 12. A Plan’s Only Good ‘Til the Action Starts

  Chapter 13. Love it when a Plan comes Together

  Chapter 14. SNAFU and FUBAR, Rolled into One

  Chapter 15. Mandy on the Chopping Block

  Chapter 16. In the Corporate Lair

  Chapter 17. The End of Amos Blanche

  The Helsing Diaries (Vampires Don’t Cry: Book 2)

  By Ian Hall and April L. Miller

  The Turncoat Helsing

  This is what you get for trusting an effing Helsing. That vinegar Mary-Christine. OMFG how she stabbed me in the back; but, I guess I ought to be used to that from best friends. After everything we went through together - months of fighting side-by-side for (as far as I knew) our common goals.

  Then, just like that, she turns me in to her father. Of course I walked right into their trap. Why wouldn’t I have? I had every fricking reason to believe she was on the level. Sure as heck would’ve thought I’d proven myself to her.

  I mean - what more needed to happen in order to gain her trust? Jackson, my foster brother, sacrificed himself to save her fricking boyfriend. Jackson Cole was all I had left in this world and I had to watch him die. For their effing cause. Then…dummy that I am…I stepped up to take over where Jackson left off. Just look where it got me.

  People give vampires a bad rap. Oh - we’re such evil killing machines. Soulless wretches out to destroy humanity. Blah, blah, blah.

  Really? So what’s a GD Helsing then?

  Jackson thought they were God’s antibiotic to some vampire plague that Satan had infected the world with. Seriously, my foster brother had some deep, self-loathing issues. But my trust in him, led me to trust in them.

  In her - Mary-Fricking-Christine Muscat.

  She was jealous of me. Sure, that sounds conceited but I have my reasons to go there. For all her “death to vampires” crap - she envied me. My immortality. My hold over men; the way I could get them to walk through fire for me. What can I say? It’s a vampire thing. I got it. She doesn’t. And there you go - the bitch was jealous.

  And no, this isn’t another “best-friend-stole-the-boyfriend” scenario. Been there. Done that. Everybody died. Moving on.

  What Cami did with Craig slapped me in the face. What Mary-Christine is doing to me now - it’s a stake through the heart. Literally.

  Here I am, tortured and bleeding, lying in some freaking sterile-looking dungeon, strapped down seventeen different ways from Tuesday. The fucking lights are miserable, blinding me and just shredding my brain. Helsings don’t just like to kill vampires; they like to torture us first.

  I can hear them talking outside the door. They’re going on about different kinds of wood. Like it freaking matters; that’s all us vampires care about, really - what kind of wood the stake they pounded through our hearts is made from. My head is so full of the Helsing drug crap that they fired into me, I can hardly think straight. And the lights. The motherfucking lights.

  Arrogant damn humans; they have no clue how vulnerable they are. Do you know what I’d do to them if I could get out of these restraints? All of them. And not one at a time. I’ve learned a few things about myself over the past few months.

  For one, decapitation is my preferred method of killing. It’s quick, it’s easy, no one suffers, and it makes this cool little crunch-pop sound that reminds me of breakfast cereal. Also - I have mastered the art so thoroughly, that I can actually do two heads at once.

  These damn Helsings just look like living bobble-heads to me. Begging to get their bobbles popped.

  But, not so much Mary-Christine. I saw her up there through the window a bit ago; she’s come to watch. Now isn’t that fucking sweet.

  Beheading is too painless for that one. I’d make it last. Not that I can drink her blood. That stuff is poison to a vampire. Just ask Jackson. But there are plenty of ways to kill a killer. And I’m sure I could invent a new one if I could just get the eff out of these restraints.

  Then the door opened, and in came Mary-Christine. Not only is she here, she’s going to hammer the stake, that sadistic little bitch.

  “Amanda Elizabeth Cross,” the guy with the stake is announcing me now, “seventeen years old; turned just last year.”

  Oh - and now there’s this dude coming at me with some kind of hammer. Isn’t that a pretty picture?

  If I get out of this, that Mary-Christine is going down.

  Helsing or Vampire?

  I remember a lot of pain.

  A deep hurt which did not recede quickly. It seemed that I lay in a bath of some liquid. A large bath, in which I sometimes drifted close to the surface, almost breaking through, then sank slowly to the dark bottom again, lying in a black world.

  Then, one of the journeys to the top seemed stronger than the others. With a gasp, I tried to suck in as much air as I could before submerging again.

  “Nurse!” I heard the words far away, but I knew the voice. Somehow it reminded me of strawberries. “Nurse, quickly, he’s waking up!”

  While I appreciated the human contact, my first response seemed to drift back down to the comfort of the inky blackness, but it seemed that hands now were touching, re-arranging me.

  They dragged a tube from my mouth, hurting my throat as it passed. I had not noticed it before.

  Suddenly, the air felt easier to breathe, and I gasped it in handfuls, pulling it into my weary, painful lungs.

  “Lyman! Can you hear me?” Strawberry voice.

  “Yes, I can hear you,” I said, but I could hear no sound.

  “His vocal chords were destroyed; he will not be able to answer you.” A man’s voice; authoritative.

  Me? Not be able to talk? The statement seemed absurd.

  “Help!” I cried, but all I could achieve was a pathetic croaking sound. I mean, I knew how to talk, I just had to re-teach my body to follow me. I concentrated hard this time. “Help.” And to my astonishment, I heard the word.

  “Lyman! Lyman!” Strawberry said.

  “Spray some fluid down his throat, nurse. Cepacol; anything.”

  I felt my mouth opened, and then a very cooling feeling, both on my throat, and farther down. It certainly took the pain away, but it also loosened something in my throat.

  “Thank you,” I moaned.

  “Lyman! You can talk!”

  Strawberry kissed me, oh, my God, those kisses were better than any medicine. Her tongue slipped inside my dry mouth. Strawberry.

  Mary-Christine. That’s her name.

  “Mary-Christine,” I panted.

  “I knew you’d make it. I knew you would. I love you, Lyman Bracks.”

  “I love you too, baby.”

  Then, firm fingers touched my face, opened one eye for me. Oh that hurt! It seemed like I lost half my eyelashes, they were so stuck together. Then the other. At least for that one I felt prepared.

  Mary-Christine stood above me, and for an instant, I thought I had gone to heaven. She looked like an angel, and she glowed. Her smile woke me up a bit, I can tell you.

  “What happened?” I asked. The smile left her face in an instant, and I knew her expression held bad news. My voice still sounded kind of croaky, but it felt better than nothing. “How long have I been like this?”

  If any smile remained on her face, it evaporated. “Three weeks.”

  Even I knew that’s a lon
g time to be in bed.

  “Can you leave the room, Miss Muscat?” the doctor asked. It seemed we both shook our heads in unison. At least he smiled about it. “Very well.” He turned to me. “Pain? Where does it hurt?”

  “Stomach,” I began, though my voice seemed deeper than I remembered, and very raspy. “Yeah, belly mostly. Like I’ve got a real bad cramp.”

  “But you’re now conscious, so it’s a vast improvement. Can you wiggle your toes?”

  I could see the white sheet move down there.

  “Lift your legs.”

  No problem there.

  “Arms?”

  Again lifted, and with all the tubes into my hands, wiggled my fingers as best as I could.

  “Now, if you were to get a very small portion of food, what would it be?”

  I lay back against the pillow, tired after my exertions. “Vanilla ice cream”

  He left the room with a grin.

  I turned back to Mary-Christine. “I have dreams. But I also have memories; some of them pretty bad. Tell me all that bad stuff isn’t true.”

  She tried her best, but tears began to flow. “I’m sorry.”

  We held hands in silence for a long time.

  So mom and dad died three weeks ago, along with five vampires. I tried to cry, but found nothing there.

  I looked at Mary-Christine, the only survivor from our side that night. I had taken that huge spear in the belly; yeah – thanks, Billy.

  “How did I make it?” I asked, and by the heavens above, she got worse, tears tumbling down her cheeks like a thousand raindrops. The she forced her hand from mine, and ran out of the room.

  She didn’t come back.

  A nurse eventually brought some ice cream, which she fed me with a small, red, plastic spoon. Despite the pain of Mary-Christine’s outburst, it tasted really good.

  Then the doctor returned. I determined to get the information from somewhere. “How did I make it through, Doctor?”

  “Ah, Lyman, you’re one of my best so far.” A smug smile effused his face. “The spear-knife combination made a bit of a mess of your insides, but you are one tough kid. I said a prayer when they brought you in. Promised myself that I’d keep stitching your innards together as long as you kept breathing - and that wasn’t easy for you on one lung.” He lifted my gown, showing me a snowflake kind of scar; six beautiful cuts, emanating from a central red blotch.

  “You kept breathing, I kept stitching. And you made it. That’s really all I can say. You obviously have the constitution of a horse.”

  A light knock at the door drew my attention, and a smiling Dave Muscat popped his head around the doorway. “Mary-Christine tells me you’re awake.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The doctor’s face clouded for a second. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Dave sat at my side and his smile soon evaporated. I lay back on the pillows, ready for whatever he’d deliver. I didn’t expect any touchy-feely stuff from Dave, and that felt good. I felt in the mood for some answers.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a point in asking about mom and dad?”

  “Buried, Lyman. I’m sorry. Your grandparents took care of it. A lot of life has passed you by, I’m sorry. We simply didn’t know if you would make it.”

  “My grandparents. Are they here?”

  “They stayed for about two weeks, they sat with you a lot, then had to go back home to recover.”

  I held my hand up with more spirit than I felt. “That’s ok. What did you tell the police?”

  “Ok, seems you’re in the mood for it.”

  “I’d like to get it all at once, and from the hip, not through some kind of filter.”

  “Okay. The official line is a house invasion; a gang reprisal thing. Turns out three of the vampires were very new, so we just left the police to find their bodies. Blamed it all on them. We tidied up the other two. A quick vacuuming; no point in confusing the police.”

  I lay silent for a second, processing the information, gathering the strength for the next question; the big one. “Now tell me the truth, how did I survive the Jasperine spear? That thing must have shredded my insides. I might be a fighter, but I’m not stupid.”

  “There’s no easy way to say this, son. It’s a pretty evil weapon. Seems that they all knew you were dying, there wasn’t any doubt. So, Mandy’s friend, Jackson, he took some of your blood, then he forced you to drink his.”

  Now that came as a surprise. Oh boy, did I not expect that one.

  Then I slowly remembered, the bite on the neck, the pulling back of my head, the warm, stinging fluid.

  “He turned me,” I said after a few moments. I felt a shaking come from the back of my mind, and I pushed it away.

  “Seems like it. Doctors say you made huge leaps and bounds getting well, almost unexplainable. We obviously don’t know the whole picture, but we can only credit most of your remarkable recovery to the vampire blood.”

  “So, I’m…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

  I’d just been dropped the bombshell. Dave had three weeks to come to terms with it.

  “Lyman, I’m sorry, kiddo, but you’re a vampire.”

  Jackson Cole lay dead, poisoned by the Helsing’s blood, and the bawling girl didn’t seem to notice; just another dead vampire among the pile. All her attention focused on that red-haired, boob-obsessed guy with the chair tied to his back: Lyman Bracks - the Helsing even Alan McCartney seems to have feared.

  For a long time, I just sat there and watched. Kind of like being in science class and you’re waiting to see if your experiment worked or not.

  Lyman was the experiment. Jackson had mixed their two incompatible bloods together and now it was my job to observe the outcome. What happens to a Helsing if forced to drink vampire blood - hmm?

  Watch that question be on the midterms.

  Well. I sure as crud knew what happened to the vampire. After howling in agony, Jackson just kind of rolled over and stopped living. I can’t say he died; technically, he did that over fifty years ago at the hand of Amos Blanche (one badass vampire by the sounds of things). But, whatever the term you might want to use, my foster brother had gone now. Yesterday he was all I had left in the world, and suddenly - gone.

  Maybe that’s why I wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere. You’d think your first instinct after watching all that crazy go down would totally be to bolt - get some distance. But, right then I had no spectacular desire to go anywhere.

  Just chill out and watch the experiment unfold.

  Seemed like neither me nor the girl even thought about calling the ambulance for way too long. She actually called her dad; I thought that seemed bizarre as heck. I mean - unless daddy was the world’s greatest surgeon or something.

  I’ll give miss candy apple her due, though, she kept calm on the phone. “Dad? Can you come around to Lyman’s? Right now. Bring mom.”

  Time kind of suspended for me right then so I’m not sure how much of it passed before the headlights shined at us through the window. Miss Frantic still cradled her boyfriend (but at least she’d stopped bawling).

  Once she heard her dad’s car pulling up outside, she got all of a sudden interested in me.

  “You have to get out of here!”

  Well. If that’s not gratitude for you.

  “No way,” I told her. “I’m not leaving here until I know for sure that my foster brother didn’t die for nothing.”

  I left out the part that if Lyman died, she would too.

  “You can’t stay; if my father finds you…”

  “He’d thank me for saving his daughter’s ass - I would think!”

  “Listen to me, Mandy, I’ll tell him everything as soon as I can. You have my word. But for right now…you just have to trust me and get out of here. Please. Please. It’s for your own good.”

  The girl’s eyes were all big, round, and terrified. She seemed sincere enough to me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.


  “Mary-Christine.”

  I rolled my eyes. Her name sounded like some Catholic saint or something.

  “Alright, Mary-Christine. I’m leaving. But, I won’t be far away and I HAVE to know if he comes out of this all right. Do you hear me? You owe me that much.”

  The car doors slammed. Two people. They were coming up the walk. Fast.

  She started crying again, but nodding so hard I thought her head might break off.

  “And if he comes to…you make sure you tell him he owes his life to Jackson Cole, a vampire.”

  I lifted the body of Jackson Cole, my friend, and sped into the kitchen.

  I barely made it out the back door when I heard the vinegar humans coming through the front. And I kept my promise - I stayed close.

  “You’re certain?” I asked. My heart contracted with every millisecond he took to answer. “A vampire?”

  He nodded. “We’ve taken some blood samples of our own, you know, to Unicorps. You’ve been changed. Sorry, Lyman, but that’s how it is.”

  “The bastard turned me to save my life.” I felt deflated beyond belief. “He tried to save my life, but all he did was fuck it up.”

  “Jackson Cole,” Dave said, nodding as he spoke. “Mandy Cross seemed determined that you should know his name, know that he gave his life in saving you. Mary-Christine has been talking about nothing else.”

  “Big fucking deal, Dave!” I felt quite entitled to cuss. “You guys get to leave the problem here, in the hospital. Me! I’m suddenly the problem; the enemy. I have to live with this.”

  “Yes, I know, but you’ve got to come to terms with this.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be first on your table, and you’ll be hammering the African hardwood stake!”

  “Hey!” Dave held his hand up, looked back at the door, but the corridor looked deserted. “We haven’t got that far yet.”

  “But you’re going to.” I felt energized. In fact, I felt damn good. Then I relaxed back onto the pillows, realizing exactly why I felt so good; my arteries were coursing with vampire blood.

  Dave patted my hand. “What we have to realize is that we’ve never had a Helsing ‘turned’ before. Any vampire killing a Helsing by drinking his blood would be committing suicide; so there are no records that it ever happened. So we really don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”