Bloodrush (7 page)

He sighed, an almost peaceful smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You almost made it, didn’t you? Almost got away.”

She sniffled. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please. I’m begging you. I just want to live. You can do anything you want to me, just please let me live. Please don’t orphan my kid. Please…”

David’s smile was almost a sad one now. “I’m sorry. I think you know that can’t happen.”

Her eyes went wide as he dragged the blade across her slender throat. Beautiful blood burbled from the hole he’d sliced in her jugular vein. This wound wasn’t like the ragged holes he’d created with his own teeth. It was clean. Neat. Surgical. There was something entrancing about the way the woman’s blood pumped from the thin line of the incision. The holes he made with his teeth were just as effective, but this had its own special allure. Staring at the wound was making his cock painfully stiff. He watched the blood issue forth a moment longer, then snapped his teeth around her tender throat. She gasped and went stiff at first, then relaxed as he began to drain her blood, eventually sagging against him. Her chin settled against his shoulder and her arms encircled his waist in a weak embrace. It was almost like being held by a lover.

It was this impression more than anything else that made him act on his earlier impulse. Once she’d been drained, he lowered her corpse gently to the floor and carefully undressed her. Her nude body was lovelier than he’d imagined, with fuller breasts and slightly wider hips. He removed his own clothes, repositioned her legs, and let out a snort of animal satisfaction as he entered her.

When it was over, he put his bloody clothes back on and returned to the dining area, where Narcisa was sitting at a table with her legs crossed. The head of the insolent fat man was cradled in her lap.

She smiled at him. “Enjoy yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Feeling any pangs of conscience this time? Any thoughts of you-know-who?”

He shook his head and answered honestly. “No. Not this time.”

“Good.” She tossed the head to him and he reflexively caught it. “That’s for you.”

David turned the head over and stared into the man’s glassy, unmoving eyes.

Not so mouthy anymore, are you?

Narcisa stood and started toward the door. “We should go.”

David looked at her. Then his head swiveled side to side as he surveyed the carnage. Everywhere he looked he saw blood and mutilated corpses. His smile widened as he thought of the field day the press would have with this story once a bit of research linked it to the earlier diner massacre. The scene was so spectacularly grisly it might even make the national news, though he doubted the authorities would ever mention the word “vampires” in their accounts of the incident to the press

He looked at Narcisa, who stared back at him with obvious impatience from the door. “Do people know about us? Law people, I mean.”

She pushed the door open, taking care to avoid slicing her fingers open on broken glass. She paused there, staring evenly at him. “About me in particular or vampires in general?”

“Um…both, I guess.”

She shrugged. “I’m a legend in some circles, but mostly they think I died a long time ago. Some have pursued me before, but they always give up the chase in the end. I’m a perpetually elusive shadow to them, impossible to catch or kill. Others of our kind aren’t so skilled. And, yes, the law does know about us. Most governments have secret units dedicated to pursuing vampires and…other things.”

“Other things?”

Narcisa’s expression indicated she’d said all she intended to say on the subject. “We should go.”

She left then and David watched the door bang shut, the impact with the frame rattling more glass fragments loose. He looked at the head in his hands again, smiling as he stroked the blood-stained hair.

He took it with him as he followed Narcisa back outside.

9: ACCEPTANCE

On the freeway again, the BMW speeding north out of Alpharetta. David stared at the head of the dead man as cold wind brushed his face and whipped his hair about. The head was on the dashboard, wedged up tight against the windshield. There was something pleasing about the way it looked there. He’d heard stories about serial killers saving trophies from their kills, but he’d never understood the phenomenon until now. He liked having this physical reminder of what he and Narcisa had done. There was just one problem—it was a piece of organic matter, subject to decay. The flesh would rot and the fat man’s face would melt away over time. He made a note to save something more permanent next time. A wallet or article of clothing. He supposed he could save the fat man’s skull, but…hmm, where would he store it?

He glanced at Narcisa. “Your secret place…will I be living there with you?”

She kept her gaze on the road. “Of course you’ll live there. What part of ‘you belong to me’ do you not understand?”

David didn’t respond to that. When she’d said that before, it’d been an abstract kind of thing. He’d understood what she meant, sort of, but at the time he’d thought she would likely kill him after a period of imprisonment and torture. Now it seemed the role she had in mind for David was a kind of kept man. A companion and plaything, but by no means an equal. A part of him bristled at the thought. The smarter part of him realized he was lucky he wasn’t just another emaciated bag of bones hanging from chains until he bled out or starved to death. The realization didn’t entirely erase his resentment, but it prevented him from saying anything stupid.

He frowned.

Except that—

Narcisa laughed.

Shit
.

He’d forgotten about the mind-reading thing. Again. Damn.

Narcisa laughed some more. “Relax, David. It’s natural to have thoughts like that. You’d be an unthinking dullard otherwise and therefore uninteresting to me. But you’re a smart boy. You know your limitations.”

“I’m no match for you and never will be.”

She nodded. “Correct.”

“You’d kill me if you ever suspected I had any serious intention of getting away from you.”

“Also correct.”

He sighed. “And there’d be nothing I could do about it.”

She patted his knee. “See? I knew you were smart.”

They drove in a surprisingly comfortable silence for several minutes after that. David’s mind kept flashing back to all the incredible things he’d done over the last few hours. Multiple murders. Rapes. Torture. Necrophilia. All things that would have disgusted his former self. He was happy to find he was still feeling no lingering flickers of conscience. The only things he did feel were a new surge of arousal and a reawakened hunger.

He couldn’t wait to kill again.

And to do…other things.

David winced at a sudden high-pitched burst of sound behind the BMW. It was followed by a pulsing strobe of blue light. He stretched his neck to peer at the rearview mirror. A police cruiser was hanging tight on their tail.

He glanced at Narcisa. “What do we do?”

“Pull over, of course.”

She eased her foot off the BMW’s accelerator and applied pressure to the brake, slowing quickly and smoothly as she guided the car to a stop at the road’s shoulder. The police cruiser pulled to a stop behind them, but the cop didn’t get out of the car right away. Several long moments passed. After everything he’d experienced tonight, David knew he shouldn’t fear any human, but he was anxious nonetheless. He recognized it as an echo of how he’d felt any time he’d been stopped by a cop as a living man, but knowing that didn’t entirely soothe his nerves. He reached for the head on the dash, figuring he should stash it somewhere. It reminded him of how he and some friends from his youth had frantically shoved beer cans under their seats during another stop a lifetime ago.

“Don’t do that.”

A hand on his arm. Narcisa, squeezing him. Hard.

“Leave it.”

David let out a big breath and settled back in his seat. “Okay.”

Finally, someone stepped out of the police cruiser. David heard a crunch of booted feet on gravel. Another glance at the rearview mirror showed a heavily muscled white man dressed in standard cop blue and equipped with the usual gear. His sidearm was holstered, but a big hand rested on its butt. David flinched at the memory of the fat woman’s bullets slamming through his body. Bullets might not kill him, but he really, really, really didn’t want to get shot again.

The cop reached the BMW’s driver’s side door and bent slightly at the waist to peer at them. “Evening, folks. License and—”

David watched the man’s face, saw it go slack.

He’d seen the head on the dash, just as Narcisa had obviously intended. The cop’s fingers curled around the butt of his gun and the weapon began to slide out of its holster. David was in motion before he even realized what he was doing, twisting and surging up out of his seat in the last moment before the gun could clear the holster, moving so fast he would only appear as a dark blur to the cop’s eyes. He launched himself at the startled, backpedaling man, hitting him with tremendous force at center mass, exploding the air from his lungs as he drove him farther backward. The cop staggered out onto the freeway and toppled backward, landing hard on asphalt. The gun flew from his hand, skittered across the road and disappeared into a grass median. David pounced on the man again before he had a chance to recover, tearing so much of his throat out it nearly decapitated him. Blood burbled and flowed like an intoxicating wine, filling David’s nostrils with its lovely aroma as it stained the road beneath them. There was a blare of horns as cars swerved to avoid the twisting figures in the road. One driver of a Lexus SUV was so startled she swerved too hard and went speeding into the median, where her luxury utility vehicle proceeded to flip several times before stopping in a grinding crash on the opposite side of the freeway. David laughed and drank deeply of the dying man’s blood.

Then he felt hands on his shoulders, pulling him away. He snarled and fought for an instant, but the hands would not be budged. He relaxed.
Narcisa
. He wanted more of the man’s blood, but not at the risk of displeasing her. She steered him away from the road and he lurched toward the BMW. She tightened her grip on him and steered him away from the car, guiding him toward a stand of trees beyond the road’s shoulder. David was still wired from the fresh infusion of blood and laughed with wild abandon as he allowed her to lead him into the darkness of the woods.

The laughing stopped as white light began to displace the darkness.

“Oh,” he said, sobering almost at once. “Magic again. Where are we going?”

She didn’t answer. There was no chance as the white light glowed brighter and the fuzzy feeling he recalled from before of disembodied near non-existence wiped out conscious thought. He relaxed and knew a few moments of seemingly timeless bliss. Then the world began to coalesce around him again, darkening and solidifying. He felt the ground beneath his feet and remembered his name as the last of the white radiance fizzled away. They were on a suburban sidewalk somewhere. He heard a snatch of conversation in the distance, saw rows of respectable houses on either side of an immaculate street.

Narcisa stood in front of him, smiling. “Recognize anything?”

David frowned.

He glanced to his left and then to his right—and froze.

Narcisa laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “It’s time, David.”

He turned to fully face the house that was obviously their destination.

Janine’s house. Her parents’ house, actually.

Narcisa leaned into him, whispering fiercely in his ear. “Are you ready to do it, David? Are you ready to rip that cunt to pieces for me?”

David shuddered.

Then he smiled and squeezed Narcisa’s hand. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Good. Who do you belong to, David?”

“You. Only to you.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

Still holding hands, they started across the manicured lawn toward the house where he’d once shared warm meals and laughter with his beloved’s family. The house where he and Janine had spent many late nights plotting their bright future together.

David and Narcisa climbed the steps to the front porch.

Narcisa rang the doorbell.

10: AND IN THE END…

David sat shaking on his knees in the middle of the blood-spattered living room, squinting against the bright sunlight shining through the large bay window behind the Martins’ plush leather sofa. He remembered almost everything now—everything up until the moment after he and Narcisa climbed the steps to the Martins’ front porch. What happened after that was an enigma. It wasn’t that the memories were hazy. They were just gone, like a file permanently deleted from a hard drive. No matter how hard he strained to remember, he came up empty.

Obviously something had gone wrong. Not because the Martins were all dead. That had been according to plan, after all. The sense of something wrong derived from the array of emotions raging inside him. Guilt. Anguish. Grief. Regret. A sense of loss so profound he felt utterly hollow inside. All things he should be incapable of feeling. These were human emotions, and he was no longer human.

Or…was he?

Perhaps yesterday’s absence of those emotions was part of some trick Narcisa had played on him, a demented mind game designed to degrade him and forever taint his soul. She was powerful almost beyond comprehension. Wasn’t it possible she’d manipulated his thoughts and impressions, had somehow immersed him in a convincing illusion or delusion? Which would mean he wasn’t a vampire after all, just some gullible sucker she’d subtly coerced into participating in a slew of appalling homicides. It sounded like a plausible scenario and yet…it didn’t feel right. Because even in the midst of his grief and confusion, the scent of blood was driving him half-mad.

He lifted a shaking hand to his mouth and tasted dried blood with the tip of his tongue. It wasn’t as electrifyingly potent as the fresh stuff, but it did light up his senses, stilling his tremors and bringing everything into a crystalline focus. The problem was it wouldn’t last long. He needed more than a taste. He licked more dried blood from his fingers and rose smoothly to his feet.

A closer examination of the scattered body parts revealed enough information to confirm that virtually every member of the Martin family residing in the area had been present for the slaughter. Janine’s parents, Ed and Margaret Martin, sat on the sofa, their heads lolling, facial features hanging slack. Ed’s belly had been ripped open, his abdominal cavity scooped out and its contents flung across the room. Loops of intestine hung from a slowly twirling overhead ceiling fan. One of the man’s kidneys was wedged in his mouth. Margaret’s blouse was in shreds. Her breasts had been torn from her body. David began to feel slightly sick again as he cataloged the atrocities. He licked more blood from his fingers to quell the nausea.

More of Janine’s relatives were quickly accounted for. Her uncle, Bob Martin, had been reduced to a limbless torso before finally being killed. His stumps had been cauterized and his face was frozen in a mask of eternal agony. A stench of burned flesh hung heavy in the air. The torso was propped in a corner by the front door. Carol, Bob’s wife, was dead, too. Her head sat atop one of Bob’s shoulders. The rest of Carol’s distinctively plump body seemed to be missing, which was strange. Janine’s brother, Michael, was also among the dead. Except for the ragged hole in his throat, his body was mostly intact. David squinted. Or was it?

David crossed the room to where Michael’s body lay sprawled in front of the large entertainment center. The corpse was on its side, limbs splayed in a way that made it look as if he’d been reaching for something behind him when he died. David stepped over the body for a closer look and immediately gagged. Michael’s lungs lay on the hardwood floor behind him, where they’d been left after being pulled out through the enormous, ragged wound in his back.

It was all suddenly too much. David staggered out of the living room, stomach heaving as he made his way by feel to the kitchen. The first thing he saw when he got there was the open oven, which provided the answer to the mystery of Margaret’s missing body parts. Her charred remains were stacked on the oven racks. The stench of burned flesh was heavier in here and David gagged again. He started shaking again, almost uncontrollably this time, and desperately tongued the remaining traces of blood from his fingers. It helped only a little. His teeth chattered. He was freezing. He needed fresh blood and he needed it yesterday. As soon as fucking possible.

He staggered through the kitchen until he bumped up against a wall by the counter. He turned and pressed his back flat against it. There was something else he was forgetting. It seemed critically important that he remember it, more important than anything else by far.

What the hell was it?

Oh, yeah.

He almost laughed when it came to him, it was so obvious.

“
Narcisa!
”

Where was she?

He had to assume she was still alive. Still
undead
, he reminded himself. Nothing short of a thermonuclear strike could kill her (and he had his doubts about the viability of that or any other apocalyptic method). So either she was still here, lurking somewhere, playing with him, or…she’d deserted him. He didn’t know which possibility terrified him more.

“
NARCISA!
”

He screamed her name over and over until his lungs were burning, but no answer came. The silence taunted him and ignited fires of paranoia. Something inexplicable had happened during the night, somewhere in that gap formerly occupied by his missing memories. He recalled what she’d said at the diner about secret government units that hunted things like her. Had some shadowy
X-Files-
type operatives caught up with her and killed her? It didn’t seem likely, but he supposed it was at least theoretically possible. And if she’d died, was that somehow connected to the apparent resurgence of his conscience? Had the severing of their mental connection brought it screaming back to life?

Or was that just another psychological hiccup, a very strong echo of his former humanity? He certainly hoped so. Because one thing was absolutely certain. He’d done many abominable things since falling under Narcisa’s spell. All those murders…they were all real. As were the other things. The rapes and the…corpse violations. He couldn’t bear the thought of enduring existence with a functioning conscience with those blood-soaked memories swirling endlessly in his head.

He pushed himself away from the wall and returned to the living room, pausing only a moment to shudder again at the carnage all around. Then he continued to the front door, hauling it open and knocking over Bob’s mutilated torso in the process. He stepped outside, squinting his eyes against the bright sunlight. He knew it should be hot. It was a cloudless, sunny summer day in Georgia. But he felt colder than ever. At least he wasn’t melting in the sun like a vampire in some cheesy movie. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He shivered and hobbled to the edge of the porch, where he craned his head side to side in a desperate search for Narcisa. She was nowhere in sight, but an old lady out for a morning stroll was headed in his direction, flabby old arms pumping as she power-walked down the sidewalk.

David ducked back inside, slamming the door shut and turning the lock. He couldn’t risk being seen by any neighbors, at least not until he’d devised some kind of viable strategy for dealing with his situation.

He frowned.

Wait a minute…

He opened the door a crack and peered outside again. The power-walking old lady had reached the Martins’ block. She was one house away. David opened the door wider and stuck his head outside, taking a longer look around. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the vicinity. He stepped out onto the porch again and waited until the old lady was directly in front of the house. Then he used his vampire speed to zip out to the sidewalk, slap a hand over her mouth, and whisk her back inside. A kick to the door slammed it shut again. The force of the kick sent the brass door knocker up and down a couple times. David’s teeth were in the old woman’s throat before the knocker was still again. She flailed against him with her weak little fists for a moment, but she stopped when he wrenched his head hard to one side and tore a huge chunk of flesh loose from her neck. He closed his mouth over the wound and drained her fast. When she was bone dry, he let her body drop to the floor. He felt better instantly. Everything was in perfect focus now. His conscience was quiet again. Thank fuck for that. Maybe the blood kept that at bay, too.

He smiled.

It was so good to see clearly again. So good to—

Something just at the edge of perception was nagging at him. It took him a moment to process it. Then he tilted his head as he turned toward the coffee table and peered at the basket of magazines, where Janine’s head was wedged in beneath the basket handle atop a copy of that month’s
Vanity Fair
.

He moved closer to the coffee table.

Suddenly his heart was beating faster—and it wasn’t just from the recent infusion of fresh blood. He hadn’t been thinking straight when he first regained consciousness. His perceptions had been off. Everything was out of whack. It was hardly a surprise that he’d jumped to a wrong conclusion.

He lifted the head out of the bag of magazines and held it up for a closer inspection. It looked almost exactly like her. Same long blonde hair, a shade so bright it almost looked white. Same delicate facial structure, including those striking cheekbones. The eyes were the same color, too, a blue as pure and breathtaking as the sky on a cloudless summer day. A day like today, in fact. It was easy to understand why he’d mistaken Lisa Martin for her older sister. Lisa was only a year younger than Janine, and the sisters’ resemblance to each other was so pronounced many assumed they were twins. A casual observer would never be able to tell them apart. But David knew Janine’s face very well. Now that his initial shock at waking up in this slaughterhouse had waned, he could see clearly that this was Lisa’s head. A tiny, almost invisible mole by her left ear gave it away. There were other telltale factors, including a subtle difference in the size of the head, but it was that mole that really sealed the deal.

David set Lisa Martin’s head on the coffee table and did another careful survey of the living room. If he’d missed something that important, maybe there were other things he was missing. He began to tremble as he concluded this fresh inspection and was left with a single, inescapable conclusion—Janine wasn’t here. And he was just as certain she hadn’t been in the kitchen. Those had clearly been Margaret’s remains stuffed into the oven. The body shape was all wrong to be Janine.

So where the hell was she?

“
Janine!
”

No answer.

He screamed her name another time or two to the same result. Maybe she wasn’t here. It was possible she hadn’t been present for the slaughter. She did live here, but on occasion she would spend the night at a friend’s place.

Or, more often, at his apartment, to which she had her own key. That was it. It had to be. It made perfect sense. She hadn’t seen him in more than a day, nor would she have heard from him. Janine loved him. She would’ve been frantic over not being able to locate or contact him. She almost certainly would’ve gone to his place in a search for answers, perhaps would even have spent the night there.

There was an easy way to confirm this.

He circled the coffee table, bent over the corpses on the sofa, and fished Ed Martin’s iPhone out of a trouser pocket. He tapped in Janine’s cell number and put the phone to his ear. It rang once. Then he jumped as a familiar noise began to emanate from somewhere inside the house. He moved away from the sofa, straining to locate the sound. He passed out of the living room and stood at the bottom of the staircase to the second floor. The sound was louder here. It was clearly coming from upstairs. The dial tone continued to buzz in his ear as he began to ascend the stairs. By the time he was halfway to the second floor, the sound was clearly identifiable as Janine’s ringtone, which was a snippet of “Telephone” by Lady Gaga.

He reached the second floor landing and rounded a corner, heading fast down a hallway. There were two open doors, one to the left and one to the right. A quick toss of each room turned up nothing. He hadn’t expected to find her in either one, but he needed to be thorough. A closed door stood at the far end of the hallway. Janine’s cell had gone to voice mail and the ringtone had stopped playing, but he didn’t need to hear it anymore to know the sound had been coming from behind that last door.

David shoved Ed Martin’s phone in a hip pocket and cautiously approached the door. He curled fingers around the doorknob and placed an ear against the thin wood. Moments passed. There was no sound. Then he heard something. A muffled whimper. Heart hammering again, he tested the doorknob. It wasn’t locked and turned smoothly in his hand. He pushed the door open and saw Janine sprawled across a bed, arms splayed behind her and tied to the wrought iron headboard.

He experienced a moment of vast relief.

“Janine—”

Her eyes went wide as she saw him come into the room and she began to jerk against the lengths of rope binding her to the headboard. The gag in her mouth muffled a scream. David felt something twist deep inside his guts. The truth was unavoidable. She was afraid of him. No, more than that. Scared to fucking death was closer to it. Terror mixed with disgust. Which could only mean she’d been here the whole time, had probably witnessed his participation in the torture and slaughter of her family. There was nothing he could say to her to vanquish her terror, so he kept his mouth shut. An “I’m sorry,” regardless of how sincere, clearly wouldn’t cut it either. That twist in his guts became more pronounced as he imagined how she saw him now—as a monster.

As a horror show freak covered in the blood of her loved ones.

David moved farther into the room, leaving the door open behind him. He peered closely at Janine’s nude form. Someone had stripped her. Narcisa? Another frustrating puzzle to which he didn’t have an answer. A white envelope with his name written across the front was attached to her stomach with a strip of duct tape. Janine squealed and jerked against her bonds again as he bent over her and peeled the envelope from her flesh.