Vampire Innocent | Book 11 | How To Stop A Vampire War In Six Easy Steps

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Sierra’s nowhere in sight, which is both freaking me out and reassuring. Unfortunately, I can smell her. No, she doesn’t stink. Vampires can pick up human scents but not as well as dogs. It’s a real pain for us to follow a scent trail, but if someone’s nearby and hiding—or has been in a room recently—we can detect their presence.

  Coralie materializes next to me and points toward the back, left corner. “She’s hiding under the shelf of cat litter.”

  “Thanks.”

  I fly along the catwalk to avoid making noise. Upon reaching the rear of the warehouse, I dive over the railing, flip on the way down, and land between two tall shelves. Frightened sniffling coming from under several pallets of Fresh Step beside me stops. While it’s perfectly understandable for her to be scared, this is the first time Sierra’s ever sounded terrified. She didn’t even react like this to the five-headed nope-a-saurus in the mirrorverse. Maybe that thing went so far over the top she dismissed it as not being real. A bunch of vampires hunting her in a warehouse is scarier for being less outlandish.

  Crouching, I peer under the shelf. Sierra’s flat on her front, pale as a ghost, wide eyed. Her face is smudged dark, like she got a little too close to a laser printer toner explosion. Like me, she’s barefoot. Curiously, she’s wearing a nightgown—but has her sword. Should I be worried it doesn’t seem too weird to mention my little sister has a sword of her own? Is it weirder Dad got it for her as a Christmas present?

  “Sare!” whispers Sierra.

  All trace of fear evaporates from her. She scoots out from under the shelf, jumps up, and grabs my arm. “Boost me!”

  “What?”

  “Blood stuff. If you don’t make me stronger and faster, I’m gonna die.”

  I point up. “We can go out the roof.”

  “And what? They come after us and catch us in midair? I’m not Sam. I don’t have wings!” She stomps, her foot clapping on the smooth concrete.

  “Over there!” yells a woman about five aisles away.

  Crap. Double crap, in fact, since Sierra has a point. Odds are, at least two of these vampires can fly. Better odds say none of them are Innocents. Yeah, they’d catch us easily, especially while I’m slowed down by extra weight.

  I nibble on my lip. “Dunno… I don’t want to mess with you.”

  “It’s not permanent. I trust Dalton.” Sierra shakes me. “Would you rather buff me now or turn me into a vampire after these morons kill me? I’ll take it, but I’d rather not be stuck at twelve for eternity.”

  Footsteps race toward us.

  Oh screw it.

  I extend my fangs and nip a small cut on my left wrist. Like the world’s cutest little leech, Sierra clamps on and suckles from the wound. Her facial expression is definite ‘eww this tastes horrible’ which reassures me a little. I’ve loaned Glim the ability to tolerate mortal food—primarily so he can enjoy beer again—but this is my first time giving blood to a living person to ‘buff’ them. Since the Transference is largely based on desire, I apply the same logic here and concentrate on wanting my sister to get faster and stronger.

  She doesn’t take much… barely two teaspoons’ worth.

  I lick my wrist clean, sealing the cut a second before several vampires appear at either end of the aisle we’re in. Two above us.

  Sierra leans her head back, shuddering like a cocaine addict after taking a hit of potent stuff. “Listen up, buttheads.” She pulls her sword from its scabbard. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I’m only gonna warn you once. Leave us alone and no one’s gonna lose body parts.”

  The vampires laugh. One woman even ‘awws’ at her.

  Admittedly, a wispy twelve-year-old in a nightgown is not exactly the most intimidating sight. Hell, I’m not much more fearsome. Becoming an Innocent didn’t make me any shorter… well not much. Mostly, it altered my appearance to make me seem younger. These guys look like a street gang. I’m sure they’re not the least bit intimidated by me.

  “Well, two-for-one,” says a spiky haired guy in a pleather jacket—with decorative chains on it.

  I glance at him. “Duuuude. Is someone filming a retro Eighties movie? You guys look like generic ‘bad guy punks’. Seriously. Time to update your style. Please tell me you’re not going to start blasting Mötley Crüe or something over the fight scene.”

  Sierra cackles.

  He snarls.

  I point the katana at him. “Wait a sec. Why are you trying to kill my sister?”

  “Wolent’s tired of you breaking tradition,” says a woman on the left.

  “Dumbass,” whispers another woman next to her. “That’s the Stefano guy. This bitch works for Wolent.”

  About half of the vampires surrounding us sigh at the ceiling or facepalm.

  “Look, I know it’s all BS. You guys aren’t even from Seattle and are just trying to manipulate the elders into starting a war.”

  Pleather jacket guy shakes his head at me. “She knows too much. End them both.”

  “Not gonna work.” I narrow my eyes at him. “The elders already know what’s going on.”

  “Whatever. Killing the two of you is still gonna be fun.” He grins, then runs at me.

  I’m not sure what the dude expected to accomplish, since he doesn’t have a weapon. It’s safe to say he did not expect me to know how to use a sword—as evidenced by his head coming off neatly to my first swing. His body keeps trying to grab me—blindly—until I stab the katana into the severed head, then he falls over.

  “Dumbass,” deadpans Sierra.

  All freakin’ hell breaks loose.

  Three more vamps come at me from the right. Another group rushes at Sierra from the left. Without a word between us, my sister and I synchronize our movements, spinning around back to back in the middle of a swarm of vampires. It’s freakish to see her keeping up with me. It is kinda silly for vampires to all speed themselves up when fighting other vampires. None of us really get an advantage over each other, since we’re all roughly the same speed. Well, these guys are a touch faster than me because they’re older, but none of them have the first clue how to swordfight.

  Falling objects, exploding bags of cat litter from missed attacks, and other crap in the background seems to hang in super slow motion—but everyone fighting is moving at normal speed. Sierra isn’t close to being vampire strong, though. Adding a supernatural boost to a scrawny kid her age makes her about as strong as an average adult man. Thankfully, she understands this and doesn’t try to rely on any maneuvers requiring brute force. She capitalizes on her small size and agility, though two guys do learn the hard way what an abnormal amount of muscle power in a small foot does to a man’s sensitive bits.

  I lop off the arm of a guy swinging a giant wrench at me, spin into a thrust between some pink-haired bitch’s boobs. My sword’s momentarily stuck, forcing me to duck a knife slash before flinging the nunchuck-wielding woman off my sword. A stab to the heart from a relatively thin blade like a katana only incapacitates a vampire for a few minutes. She slumps to the floor and tries to drag herself away, acting more like she’s too drunk to stand and doesn’t have a hole through her heart.

  Sierra hacks a guy’s right leg off at the knee, then spins around behind him to parry a baseball bat going for her head. She swipes her sword across bat guy’s throat, spinning on her toes like a ballet dancer before delivering a fancy thrust into the spine of the guy she legged.

  I swear the girl has watched Mulan too many times.

  Dalton definitely didn’t give us Chinese sword techniques. Maybe she’s merely improvising for style points and I’m imagining. A guy wallops me across the back with a chain. I let out an oof, but grab the chain before he can pull it back. Sierra darts around me, thrusting her sword two-handed up into his heart. An instant later, a blonde in a micromini and a T-shirt with an anarchy symbol rushes at her from behind, about to impale her on the end of a crowbar.

  I abandon the chain, swat the crowbar aside, then body-block the blond
e, knocking her into a stagger. Before she gets her balance back, I lop her head off. Six feet of blood sprays up from the neck stump. Ooh, she’s going to be hungry as hell when she gets her head back on straight.

  “Thanks,” says Sierra, yanking her blade out of chain guy’s chest and spearing the severed head so the body stops flailing.

  “No problem.”

  Chain guy wheezes and sinks to his knees. Sierra tries to ‘Voltron’ him, cutting him in half from head to crotch, but her blade stops about eight inches in, at his mouth. Still, cutting his brain in half is sleepy time for at least eight hours.

  Blam!

  A bullet ricochets off the floor by my foot.

  Sierra screams.

  Blam.

  I lean out of the way of a spiraling rifle bullet heading for my face. It’s not the most effective thing in the world to fire a gun into a vampire fight after everyone’s already got the agility dial up to eleven. This really is Matrix stuff. Bullets seem to be flying about as fast as thrown baseballs. Not super simple to dodge, but definitely possible.

  “Wolverine me!” yells Sierra, pointing her sword upward.

  A punk in a puffy, yellow coat—holy Eighties, Batman—swipes a switchblade at me. I parry it hard enough to send the tiny weapon flying. He ducks my retaliation and pulls a second, bigger knife off his belt.

  Blam! A bullet clanks off the shelf near Sierra.

  She flattens herself against the shelf closer to the person shooting at us from high up, snarling at me. “Sare! Wolverine me!”

  I swat the combat knife out of Yellow Jacket’s hand. “What?”

  He goes for a handgun under his coat. Oh, screw this progressively larger-weapon escalation bullshit. I stab him in the mouth, twist the blade, and slash it sideways out of his skull above the left ear. Dude falls over with a flip-top head. Really is more efficient to chop into the head than cut it off at the neck.

  Sierra ducks a woman swinging a baseball bat at her head, then kneecaps her. “Throw me up there to get the bitch with the rifle!”

  The woman swings the baseball bat at her from the ground. Sierra blocks, but the vampire bitch is strong. My sister goes flying backward into a pallet of toilet paper. She bounces off and hits the floor on her front. I rush over and pounce on ‘bat woman,’ stabbing my katana down through her eye socket with enough force to gouge the concrete under her head.

  Sierra emits a war cry, scrambles to her feet, and charges another vampire dive-bombing me from the top of the shelf. Bastard stabs me in the back before she gets to him—but Sierra proceeds to reenact a Mortal Kombat fatality on the poor son of a bitch. Her initial attack rips his knife arm off at the elbow. As he backpedals, she slashes his gut open. He makes the mistake of trying to grab her with his remaining hand—which he promptly loses. She hits him in the chest twice more before he slips in blood and starts to fall over backward. Sierra jumps over him, swinging a beheading stroke in midair before landing behind him. My turn to stab the head on the floor.

  She looks totally Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon… until her bare feet slide out from under her in all the blood. Still, the kid makes falling on her butt look smooth and intentional. Can’t blame her. The only reason I’m not recreating my first time on ice skates is the power of flight. I’m hovering even though my feet are touching the floor.

  Blam! A bag of dog food by Sierra explodes.

  Damn good thing she fell.

  “No way, kiddo!” I yell, then launch myself upward.

  The pale goth woman in the black sweatshirt with the AK is up on the catwalk where I initially entered. She fires rapidly at me as I’m rushing up to intercept her. For the most part, I weave around bullets whizzing by me at the apparent speed of ping pong balls launched out of a leaf blower. While spin-rolling out from under an incoming head shot, I catch a glimpse of Sierra leaning out of the way of a bullet coming at her from the side before throwing her sword at a green-haired dude in a biker jacket. The hurled blade plunges to the hilt in his chest. Reeling, he fires a handgun wildly, his aim ruined. She runs at him, then jumps into a double-kick, planting both feet on his chest on either side of the handle as she grabs it, then springs away into a backflip, tearing the sword loose as he falls over.

  I don’t see what happens next due to rolling over and slashing at AK bitch.

  And whoa… my sister is as fast as a vampire. Superhuman agility would make ‘movie Legolas’ jealous. What the hell am I doing? Is it a mistake giving her blood? Or am I going to rationalize it as our family is entirely messed up now? Sophia’s got magic. Sam’s got demon Pokémon. Sierra needs something to keep up. She can’t stay normal, or she’ll always be listed as ‘child kidnap victim’ in the end credits.

  Sigh. Please don’t have permanent bad side effects on her.

  Contrary to what some weeaboos think, a katana will not cut an AK-47 in half, even with a vampire’s strength behind it. She blocks, but staggers backward from the force of my strike. Yeah, I’m pissed. My right leg buckles out from under me when I try to land on the catwalk—ugh, she put a bullet in my thigh—so I keep fly-hovering while swinging at her. She’s pretty fast, but parrying a sword using a rifle has a huge flaw.

  I aim for her hands.

  She screams as her fingers go flying. The rifle falls to the metal grating out of my way. She’s got the nerve to yell ‘stop’ after shooting at me and my sister. I don’t. My slice hits her on the shoulder by the base of the neck and stops about heart deep. Her fangs extend reflexively as her body contorts in a near-death rigor. Vast amounts of blood flow out of her. Generally, vampires retain blood even from nasty wounds… but cutting the torso almost in half is an exception. Holes in the heart tend to be… messy. Slicing the heart in half? Way messy. Decapitation’s fairly geyserish, too.

  I really ought to do worse than simply chop her open. She tried to shoot my sister. Unlike me or all of these jackasses, Sierra won’t get back up in a few hours and feel sore. This whole thing looks gory as hell and on some level is disturbing. But, it’s like a video game. No one stays dead. It’s tempting to empty the rest of the rifle into her out of spite, but better not to leave my fingerprints on it just in case.

  Sierra’s waiting for me amid an assortment of bodies. Her nightgown is almost entirely red, stuck to her skin. The only part of her not coated in blood are her eyes, because she wiped at her face a little. More unsettling is her wired expression of exhilaration. I have to check her thoughts. Whew. Okay, she’s not having a ‘that was freakin’ awesome let’s do it again!’ moment. It’s a ‘holy shit we’re alive!’ moment.

  I land beside her, favoring my right leg. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine. I know this isn’t going to kill them.” She squats over one guy, wiping her blade clean on his shirt. “Should we light them on fire?”

  Wow… I stare at her.

  “What?”

  “Kinda surprising me by the bloodlust.”

  She stands. “They were trying to kill me. You think they’ll forget about it when they get back up? Just trying to be practical here.”

  “Umm. Maybe if we don’t destroy them permanently with fire, they’ll be grateful enough to leave us alone?” I fidget. Wow. I really am too nice. They were going to kill Sierra, and I’m sitting here feeling bad about the idea of lighting them on fire.

  “They won’t come after us if we burn them, either.” Sierra shrugs. “Your call. I’ve already taken out my frustrations on them.”

  “Do you think they’d have killed you or just made you forget seeing this place?”

  She taps her foot, making a gloopy pap-pap-pap in the blood. “Umm. Dunno. I don’t think they planned to kill me until after you blabbed and told them we knew about their nefarious plans.”

  “Right… Wow. You are covered in blood.”

  Sierra looks down at herself. “Yeah. It feels pretty disgusting. So are you, by the way.”

  We look at each other for a few seconds before saying, “Mom’s gonna freak” at the s
ame time.

  27

  Surprise Tentacles are Never Fun

  I haven’t seen this much blood in one place since my first period.

  Okay, slight exaggeration. Let me rephrase. I haven’t seen this much blood in one place since the nightmare I had in the weeks before my first period. Looking back, I got myself worked up for nothing. Leave it to stupid kid me to take things wildly overboard. In my nightmare, things exploded like a damn ruptured fire hydrant right in the middle of class. Probably Dad’s fault for letting me watch a really cheesy horror movie where people had arms cut off and like super soakers of blood squirted everywhere.

  My child mind applied the same logic to what periods would be like. And of course, it had to happen in an extremely public, extremely embarrassing way. I expected it would. Reality ended up being much tamer, but still unpleasant.

  On the list of things I do not miss about being mortal, the monthly visitor is in second place… right after not having to be scared to go anywhere alone after dark.

  Whew. I whistle. “Impressive. I can’t believe we took on… were there eight or ten?”

  “I lost count.” Sierra kicks a severed forearm away. “Maybe twelve.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Sore?”

  “No.”

  “Really? You were zooming around like something right out of an anime.”

  She laughs. “So were you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a vampire. You’re still alive. How the heck did a little sip of blood give you so much of a boost?”

  “Uhh.” Sierra starts to scratch her head but stops, cringing. “Eww. Blood’s everywhere. Umm. Dalton said your boost would work better since we’re closer. It’s supposed to be stronger if the vampire loves the mortal, or some sappy BS like that. Plus, we’re actual family. Don’t feel guilty or get all worried. If I’m going to have your back, I gotta be able to keep up.”