Love Bites UK (Mammoth Book Of Vampire Romance2)

by Telep, Trisha

  Near the corpse are a litter of fine clothes and whiskey bottles, and a belt half full of bullets. “Damn it,” Doc growls. “God damn it straight to hell.”

  Kate keeps one eye on the coffins, for any sign of stirring, one eye on Doc as he pokes through the detritus. “What’s wrong, Doc?”

  “All this doesn’t come from thieving off corpses and skulking in shadows,” he whispers. “They had it brought here.” He stands, pushes back his coat and puts his hand on the butt of his left pistol, a reflexive motion. In that moment, in the low light, he becomes the legend and not the man she knows. “They have a familiar,” Doc says. His boot kicks aside a belt buckle, a brand-new hat, a cattle brand that reads D-8.

  “That’s a rustler brand,” Kate says. She wishes later she hadn’t. “I heard Wyatt and Virgil talking. They use that brand to change US army cattle into that . . . D-8 for US.”

  Doc’s face goes stony still. “Is that so,” he says, and picks up the brand, stares at it before tossing it into the recesses of the tunnel. Picks up the kerosene, and splashes it over the coffins.

  The vampires scream as they burn. Trapped-animal screams. Kate knows that Doc dreams about the men he’s had to shoot, the living ones, but Kate dreams of the screaming.

  At the mouth of the tunnel, Doc watches the smoke for a moment and then buttons his jacket. Kate finally gives voice to the black thought that arose when they found the dead girl. “You’re going to have to kill him. The man helping the blood drinkers.”

  Doc drops his eyes to his dusty boots. “Yes.”

  Kate slides her hand into his. “He’s giving those things aid and comfort. He got a woman killed. He doesn’t deserve to live.”

  Doc surprises her by pressing a kiss against her dirty, sweaty forehead. “You’re the angel on my shoulder, my Kate,” he whispers. “And sometimes the devil, too.”

  Kate coaxes him away from the mine, and onto the horses. They don’t speak while they ride back to Tombstone. In the rooming house, they make love while the sun sets, still wordless. After, when she’s left watching cobwebs trail against the stained ceiling, Doc has his worst coughing fit in some months. Blood stains the sheets, and all Kate can do is watch as his body twitches.

  After that he sleeps, light and restless to every sound. Kate doesn’t attempt slumber. She’ll just hear more screaming.

  The familiar’s name is Frank McLaury, and it takes Kate and Doc nearly a month of watching and waiting at the mine to find him.

  McLaury and his brother Tom run with a gang of cattle rustlers, the Clantons, Billy Claiborne and a few others. He uses his brethren to bring women and whiskey and whatever the vampires desire back to the mine, claiming he works for a reclusive industrialist with peculiar tastes. The other cowboys are too drunk or too dumb to question him. They drink all night when they’re not rustling cattle. During the day, the gang rarely leaves camp.

  Doc is getting sicker, and he’s getting angrier, and Kate knows that he can’t keep up the constant strain of watching McLaury and killing the man’s masters one by one much longer.

  Kate goes to Virgil and begs him to intervene on the county’s behalf. The gang robs stages, steals cattle . . . Kate knows the justice-minded Virgil will take action.

  What action, she couldn’t have imagined. Virgil gets his brothers deputy badges, and before any time at all has passed the Clantons and McLaurys are riding into Tombstone spoiling for a fight.

  Doc walks with them down the alley behind Fremont Street. He orders Kate to stay inside and away from the windows, but she peers through the sheer curtains as the four men walk together in the October sun.

  When Doc and McLaury meet, Doc doesn’t say a word. He raises his shotgun and aims, but he doesn’t fire. Letting McLaury say his last words.

  McLaury sneers. “I know what you are, Holliday.” He spits in the dirt. “I smell it on you, and you can call it consumption but we know different. I smell it on you strong as your whore’s perfume.”

  Doc fires then, and McLaury goes back like a sack of skin and bones. He drops in the dirt. His living blood spills, red brown like the Georgia dirt of Doc’s home soil.

  Kate hits the floor as the Earps, the Clantons and the rest of the cowboys turn the alley into a shooting gallery. She can smell cordite and black powder, and hear screaming.

  It’s different than the vampires – it’s human and it comes from a human’s pain. A long while later, when she dares peer over the sill again, only Wyatt and Ike Clanton are left in the street. There are bodies, too. But not Doc’s.

  His footfalls when he finally comes to the room are heavy. There’s blood on his collar and on his face, ranging like raindrops into his light gold hair. Doc collapses on the bed and puts his head into his hands. “That was awful,” he mutters. “Just awful.”

  Kate goes to him and sits with him while the light changes to night. “It’s done?” she asks finally.

  “ We kill the sire, burn the last of the sire’s kin, and it’s done,” he affirms. “Tombstone is a habitable and civilized bastion of the living, once more.”

  Kate doesn’t miss the blade-edge tone. Doc doesn’t believe in civilization, any more than the average drover believes in vampires.

  “What was he jabbering about? McLaury?” To move, Kate goes about wetting a cloth in the basin, handing it to Doc. He daubs at the blood on his cheek and forehead. The cloth turns pink.

  “Nothing.”

  “John Henry.” Kate sets the pitcher down with force. “It was not nothing. I could see your face.”

  Doc lies back on the bed with his boots still on, after setting his hat carefully aside. He looks as thin and tired as Kate’s ever seen him. Pale as a corpse. Cold as one of them when she goes to at least take off his gun belt and his tie before he has another coughing fit.

  “Kate, a man in my line of work has some secrets that he keeps out of necessity, and some that he doesn’t want to keep, but he does anyway, because they’re just harmful, hateful things that do no one any good. You understand?”

  Kate sighs. The pistols are heavy as she hangs them next to his hat and she lies next to Doc, curling her body so that it fits to the shape of his, like a gun in a holster. “So you won’t tell me.”

  Doc puts one hand in her hair, his card-quick and gun-calloused fingers stroking her cheekbone. He kisses her forehead again. “Not today, my dear.”

  “But maybe some day?” She reaches back and undoes the laces of her stays. She didn’t bother putting on a dress when Doc walked out to meet the Earps. He’d need her, when he came back. If.

  Doc gives her a quick smile, really only half of one, and it’s a lie but she pretends it’s not. “Someday. Yes.”

  Perdition, Arizona

  1888

  She found him at the card table, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. He looked so familiar there, so much like Doc, that it took Kate a full half-turn of the clock hands before she could move any further than the rude clapboard contraption that passed for a door.

  A pasty-faced Irish boy was playing cards with him, red hair sticking out from his hat every which way. Doc’s eyes never blinked, never wavered from the boy’s wrists where blue veins pulsed as he laid his cards on the table.

  “Three jacks, partner. That makes three hands to me . . . ” He trailed off when he spotted Kate’s shadow across his cards and coins.

  Doc’s gaze shifted more slowly. His eyes, when he met hers, were as blank as an open sky. Kate’s bile rose and she tasted her meagre breakfast of dried venison and hardtack in the back of her throat.

  “You look like my John,” she whispered. The motion was so familiar, but it seemed to take a thousand seconds. Pump the Winchester, squeeze the trigger. Repeat the motion twice more, until the thing sitting at the card table went over backwards, crashing to the ground.

  “But you’re not,” Kate said. Doc began to laugh. Clotted blood caught itself up in his teeth, turned his grin to a shark’s grin.

  “Going to kill me,
Kate? Going to get the stake and the mallet and drive it in yourself, through the gristle and the bone? Going to listen to me scream while you do?”

  There was silence in the saloon. Utter silence, the kind you only found in the eyes of storms. Death’s acre, Kate thought. The place where nothing lives, not even sound.

  “Ma’am?” The red-headed boy broke the silence. “Maybe you should put that rifle down?”

  Doc clambered up, brushing at his coat where the rifle has shot holes. “You ruined my suit, Kate.”

  The boy squeaked in shock. “Mister . . . maybe you should sit down. You got shot up pretty bad . . . ”

  “Maybe, maybe. Maybe’s a weak word, boy. You should be more direct, you want people to listen.” Doc grinned again. Blood dribbled down his chin.

  Kate lifted the Winchester, jerked it. “Outside. The next ones won’t just be lead shot.”

  He inclined his head and, before the staring gamblers and cowboys, they moved into the street, a matched pair, step for step.

  The moon had climbed high up, shedding cold pale light on the scene. Kate caught eyeshine from behind windows, down side alleys, watching her. Unblinking.

  Behind her, the boy followed them into the street. “Ma’am, I don’t rightly know what’s happening here . . . ”

  “And you shouldn’t, child.” Kate didn’t take her gaze off Doc. He stood in the middle of the hard-packed street. He wore a gun belt, but his ivory-handled pistols were gone. Doc didn’t need the thing that made him Doc any more.

  “I’m not leaving you alone with that . . . man,” the kid piped up.

  Kate dared to glance at him. “What’s your name?”

  “James Priestly, ma’am. Out of Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

  “Well, James Priestly from Tennessee, I suggest you go back into that gin mill and you drink yourself stupid and forget everything that you just saw. For your own peace of mind, forget.”

  Priestly’s thin, freckled face crinkled into a frown that was too old for the boy wearing it. “I don’t understand . . . ”

  “And you don’t want to. Scoot.”

  The kid backed up to the saloon door, but didn’t go inside. Kate turned her attentions back to Doc. He was still, that dead stillness one could only achieve by not being possessed of a heartbeat.

  “Well?” Doc called.

  “You know why I’m here,” Kate shouted back.

  He moved, and the space between them closed, fluid, like air slipping from lungs. Doc’s skinny fingers knotted in Kate’s dusty hair, and his dry cheek pressed against hers. He jerked her neck back, exposing her throat to the sky and the moon. “You can’t do it, Kate. You wouldn’t do it to me.”

  Kate looked into Doc’s eyes, cloudy and cataract-covered as they were. “I have to,” she whispered, and felt a twist like a boot in her gut.

  Doc’s lips, cold like the night air, passed down her neck. “You won’t kill me, Kate.”

  Kate shuddered. She missed him. She’d missed him. Every night, and every morning. Every time she saw a tall slender man in dove grey in the street.

  “I will,” she told Doc. “Because I promised you I would.”

  Glenwood Springs, Colorado

  1887

  It is spring when the stage deposits Kate in Glenwood Springs. She and her carpetbag proceed down the street to the Hotel Glenwood, taking in the swelling green on the hillsides and the fragrant air. The desk man at the hotel points her to John’s room.

  She’s prepared for the worst, but not for what she sees.

  There are buds on the trees outside Doc’s window, and a soft mist clinging to the mountains beyond, but inside the room smells of funerals and graveyards.

  Doc is small against the pillows, and his hair has leached of colour along with the rest of him, hanging on his sweaty forehead, lank and grey.

  He smiles at her, and presses a stained handkerchief against his lips. “Kate.”

  She’s resolved to stay away, stay aloof, but she flies to him and lets him put his free arm about her. “You came,” he says into her hair.

  “Of course I did, you stupid man.” He smells sick, of stale sweat and staler soap, but he’s still John. She doesn’t move away.

  Doc coughs and she hears the rattle in his chest. “Nobody else did.”

  “You know people.” She’s trying to be kind, and she sits up and straightens his blanket, fetches a fresh handkerchief from the neat stack some maid or laundress has left on the dressing table. “They don’t want to see a man dying of consumption. They haven’t seen what we have, so plain death . . . it scares them off.”

  “Kate.” Her back is to him as she refolds the handkerchiefs out of want of something to do. She can see him in the mirror, almost a ghost on glass. “Kate, I don’t have consumption.”

  Her hands stop. For a movement of a watch, everything stops. “What are you babbling about, John Henry?”

  His words are lost in coughing for a long moment, but he wrestles his body still and speaks. “I need you to listen to me, Kate. Without judgment and without anger. I don’t deserve it, but I’ll be damned if I have anyone else to ask. I don’t.”

  When she approaches the bed again, he catches her hand. “All I have is you, Kate. I’ve lost every God-damned thing in the world besides.”

  Feeling the long shadow of ill omen on her, Kate sits beside him anyway and says, “All right, John. What is it that’s got you in such a sentimental state?”

  Doc tells her about the first vampire he killed, in that Georgia swamp. “She didn’t die right away. She got her hooks into me right and proper, and she . . . she fed on me.”

  Kate tries to pull away but Doc is suddenly strong again. “It didn’t make me one of them, Kate. I never drank dead blood. She didn’t kill me that night, she just . . . changed me. I could see sharper and shoot straighter. Wasn’t until I spent a few more years in wet air, breathing in graveyard dust at nights, that I realized I was getting sicker, too.”

  Doc’s gaze goes to the window, to the mountains. It’s started to rain softly, drops dribbling down the glass. “For the time I had left, I was a man possessed of the skill I needed to kill them. For the time I had left, and it wasn’t any time at all.”

  Kate is shaking now, and it’s not out of fear for her neck. “You couldn’t tell me the truth? God damn you, John Holliday.”

  He tries another smile. “You’re a little late for that, Kate. I’m damned, sure enough. Figure I have been since I drew breath in this world.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Put a stake in you? Douse you in salt and holy water? Maybe I should cut off your head and burn your bones, John. Would that be a fitting end to this life we’ve shared?”

  “If you have to,” he says softly. “Her kin are still looking for me. She was old, older than the states or the colonies. And I was a damn fool with a damn fool’s luck, and I killed her. They’ll come and they’ll feed me dead blood if they can.” Another cough, another blossom of blood. “In my weakened state, I can’t do much.”

  “No –” Kate starts, but Doc cuts her off. He’s still got that gaze, steel reflecting sun in a high blue sky.

  “I know where every vampire killer in the western territories lives and breathes, Kate. I know their weak spots and their gun stashes. I can’t be allowed to become . . . that.”

  “You’ll lose yourself,” Kate recites. She can’t help but lay out the litany of the vampire, anticipate what’s coming if John’s enemies find him before he passes. “You’ll only want blood and you’ll hunt us for revenge.”

  “Irony is rarely as elegant as the poets would have us think,” Doc mutters. “That’s why you have to do it, Kate. You have to see my corpse nailed into that consecrated ground, buried six feet deep and salted over.”

  Kate breathes in, out. She’s going to choke if she has to sit in this sickroom another moment. “When?”

  Doc releases his breath, as if there was a doubt she’d do the last thing the man she loved asked of her. “Be
fore winter, I imagine. I’ll send for you.”

  Kate goes away, and Doc doesn’t send for her. He dies quietly on his own after a near-coma of two months, unable to speak and barely able to eat. When the pallbearers arrive to carry his bones to Linwood Cemetery, on the hill above Glenwood Springs, his body is not in its bed. There is broken glass and blood, and the undertaker, a friend who understands such things, cables Kate.

  She starts hunting him, following a trail of broken bodies from Colorado back to Arizona. Back to the place where everything began to go wrong, among the silver and the sagebrush. She follows him to Perdition, and it is in Perdition that she will lay the vampire who was John Henry Holliday to rest.

  One damn way or another.

  Perdition, Arizona

  1888

  Kate and Doc stood for a long time under the moon, her heart beating too fast and his not at all. Finally, he let go of her. “You’re not scared. It’s no fun when you’re not scared.”

  “You don’t mean that, John.” Kate works the pain from her neck being twisted, grips her rifle.

  “Don’t call me that!” he flares. “You don’t know what I’ve turned into! I’m not your John!”

  “Said it myself, didn’t I?” Kate stroked the stock of the Winchester regretfully and then put it away, hanging on her back. “John . . . Doc. I’m not going to fight with you.”

  He leered. “Thought you said you came to kill me, you shiftless dried-up old whore.”

  “Kill you.” Kate nodded agreement. “Not fight.”

  “Unless you have a magic bullet inside that Winchester, don’t waste my evening,” he says. “I’ll not spend my time on nostalgic women.”

  Kate looked him in the eye, and then met the eyes of all the watching vampires in turn. “They’re going to kill me,” she said. “If you walk away from me, they’re going to kill you too. I am a killer of dozens of their kind in my own right, and I helped you to burn and ash hundreds more.”

  Doc’s teeth showed, and they gleamed under the moon. They were as long as the first joint of her finger and bleached-bone white. They could tear out her throat with a single motion.