InsistentHunger (14 page)

He pulled out a bag of little rubber balls in neon colors.
“Shake a few in front of them before throwing them—they’ll track the movement.
The best strategy is to throw three or four at a time. They’ll feel this weird
need to collect them all.” He tossed her the bag.

“If they’re too close, they’ll still focus on you, so this
is the second line of defense. God, I love jacks.” He pulled out a clear bag of
jacks—some shining silver and some neon plastic.

“The buggers feel a need to count them and usually they’ll
stop to line them up perfectly. Predictable as hell, these guys. Once you toss
them, you move as slow as you can. The faster you move, the greater the chance
they’ll pull themselves out of their trance. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll
stand very still until they start really getting into their counting. Once
they’re focused, any small objects that are the same will keep them busy, so
once they’re good and counting, toss some white rice down and they’ll want to
count that too.” He tossed her bags two and three—jacks and rice.

“And if they catch me?”

“If they get their hands on you, you’re pretty much done
for, Silver. Those low-levels aren’t fast or smart, but they are strong. They
grab you and you’re done for.” Hunter didn’t sound too worried about her.

“They’ll eat me.” She couldn’t prevent a shiver from
traveling down her spine. She wasn’t a coward. She’d faced a bank robber once.
She’d been covering a side alley and he’d managed to squeeze through a bathroom
window so small that a Chihuahua shouldn’t have been able to fit through.
However, he’d been motivated. They’d faced each other over their guns and she’d
held her own until backup could arrive, so she wasn’t a coward. But the idea of
getting eaten really was too much.

“Not exactly,” Hunter said. “It’s more like they absorb
energy. They won’t bite you, but they’ll hold you until they either crush you
or they’ll just drain you of energy until you collapse. I’ve heard of coroners
calling it acute renal failure or heart attack, but what it comes down to is
that whatever energy keeps you running will just drain out of you and into
them. They get real frisky for a while after eating someone. But the good news
is that you’ll leave a really pretty body behind. Well, except for how your
expression will be twisted in pain.”

“Oh. Great. Thanks for that bit of cheer.” Paige swallowed
down the bile she could feel climbing up her throat.

“No problem. Of course, some people do get away. They
usually die slow of some lingering illness the doctors can’t ever cure.”

Paige glared at Hunter. “You should get a job writing for
Hallmark,” she commented sarcastically. “Wait, do you mean that you leave these
zombies behind you, blocking your escape?” Paige’s voice rose in fear at the
very thought.

“Yep.” Hunter grinned. “If you kill even one, it will make a
mess and all this noise and the higher-level vamps are the bigger danger.
Low-level vamps don’t even seem to get hungry. They certainly don’t go out of
their way to feed. They just seem to eat whatever life wanders near enough to
catch their attention.”

Paige watched as he attached the bags to his belt using
small hooks. “Why do you do this?”

“Retirement was boring.”

She snorted. “Give me a break. You lost someone. When you
told me the vamps grabbed you…you lost someone.”

This time his grin failed him and he glared at her. “You’re
a pain in the ass, Silver. Luckily for you, I happen to know that most good
hunters are. So, mid-level and high-level vamps are going to be more like
humans—smarter, less willing to fall for this shit.” He jiggled the rice bag.
“However, there’s a big range.”

“So some of them will stand there stupidly while someone
shoots them in the head?”

Hunter’s familiar grin returned. “Like the one this
afternoon? Yeah. Startle them and some will take that much time to decide how
to handle the new threat. Others will be on you so fast that you won’t have
time to pull the trigger. It’s kind of a toss-up.”

“And if that one had come at me that fast?”

“I still would have shot it and really hoped that I missed
you. This is not a game for the weak of heart, Silver.”

“Nice, good to know you have my back.” Paige could feel her
adrenaline start to pump. Hunter sure as hell wasn’t going to put his neck on
the line for her if things went pear-shaped. “If you start shooting these
upper-level demons, are the ones at our back going to come after us?”

“Not until they’re done counting or until something moves in
the line of sight. They really aren’t that bright. Here.” He held out a
Berretta for her. “This has hollow point ammo. Even with hollow point, follow
up with a second and, if you’re feeling nervous, a third head shot. If you
don’t destroy the brain’s ability to control the body, it will just keep coming
after you.” It was a good gun, but it wasn’t Paige’s and she hadn’t fired it or
cleaned it or held it in her hand until she was comfortable with it. She
ignored his offer.

“Is there some reason we’re going in there—some goal other
than to kill as many vampires as we can?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Hunter shoved the Berretta into his
belt.

“No,” Paige said firmly. Creatures that just wanted to count
the pretty balls didn’t feel worthy of hunting down. Paige certainly didn’t
want to kill someone only to discover they weren’t the monsters of mythology
later. Mistakes like that…you couldn’t fix them.

The man who killed her mother, who drove drunk because he
didn’t stop and think, he couldn’t bring her mother back after he sobered up.
Growing up, Paige had watched him tear himself up with a sadistic sort of glee.
Killing someone did that to you. It changed you. So using lethal force would be
her last choice, and then she wanted some sort of proof that these guys were
evil as opposed to being mindless or just really fucking scary.

“Brady might be in there.” He poked a thumb toward a house
sitting far up on the hill. At one point it must have been a majestic
plantation with white columns and wide porches where people stood watching for
boats to come up the tributary. Weather had stripped the paint so the dark form
was barely visible with the clouds covering the moon. Paige stared at the
building. He was testing her—checking to see if she was as ignorant of Brady’s
location as she was pretending.

“Have you seen him?” she asked, carefully to make her voice
unsteady.

“Nope, but the vamps who used that house for raisings were
using this as their base. He’s probably in there.”

“And you’re going to kill him.” Paige didn’t have to work to
make her voice flat and cold.

“Look on the bright side—he might be one of the low-levels.
I generally leave those since they aren’t much danger without the higher vamps.
If you kill them, the mid-level vamps will just make more and that’s just not
ideal. So you want to let them keep their stupid little guard dogs until you
get rid of all the upper-level vamps. Then you can clear out the idiots easy
enough. Hell, in the old country, if you knock on someone’s door at night,
they’ll ignore you and wait to see if you knock again. The low-level vamps are
so stupid that they’ll just wander away if the door isn’t opened immediately.
If Brady’s one of those mindless zombies, I won’t bother killing him unless we
get lucky and clear the whole nest out.”

Paige still didn’t feel good about any of this. “That’s the
only goal here—to kill?”

“Yep.”

“I’m not okay with that. I’ll watch from a distance.”

Hunter frowned at her, clearly confused. Maybe she wasn’t as
predictable as he’d thought. “And if I get in trouble?”

Paige smiled. “I’ll trust you to get yourself out of
trouble.”

“Damn, you’re cold. I admire that in a woman.”

“You do know your pickup lines are slimy, right, especially
since you know I’m with someone?”

Hunter grinned. “Hey, I’ve learned to enjoy life to its fullest.
Even if I don’t have a chance, I figure it’s worth making a play. Maybe your
Rick is really bad in the sack and you’re shopping for someone new.”

“He isn’t and I’m not.” Paige was grateful for the dark
because she felt herself blushing. Brady wasn’t bad at all. Not even close to
bad.

With a chuckle, Hunter pushed his trunk back into the bed of
the truck and closed the gate. “If you want to watch from a distance, that’s
fine with me. Maybe you’re actually smart enough to stay out of this game.”

“And if you go for Brady, I’m probably not going to be on
your side,” she warned darkly. If he wanted her to believe Brady was in the
house, she wanted him to know that she wasn’t going to stand by while he killed
her partner.

Hunter gave her a sour look. “And here I thought you were
starting to develop some common sense.”

“Is there a good spot to watch?” Paige asked. She was sure
he’d checked out the territory more than once.

“Halfway up the slope on the east side. There’s a place
where a burn took down the big trees and you can see pretty good through the
grass.”

“Well, that’s where I’ll be. Try to not get yourself
killed.” Paige started walking as she tucked the bags into her pockets. She was
just lucky she didn’t wear tight jeans.

“You are one cold woman,” Hunter said behind her, but he
said it in a tone of voice that was almost admiring. Funny, she was working on
a four-year dry spell with men and now she had two trying to get in her pants.
Well, one trying—the other had already succeeded. Paige’s body still felt taut
and stretched and right and she was trying hard to not think about anything
other than the fact she’d enjoyed it. The guilt and the fear and the weirdness
at the thought of sleeping with a demon—she wasn’t ready to deal with all that.

The tall thin trees gave way to a field of tall grass and
swamp flowers and Paige crouched down, her hand on the butt of her gun as she
watched the night. Clouds drifted, allowing a little more moonlight to shine
down. The house was gray with age, bare wood gleaming, and as Paige watched, a
shadow moved away from the broken stump of an old tree. It was a person. Sort
of. It was moving in slow, deliberate steps. She couldn’t immediately identify
the body language, but after a second, she realized what it looked like.

When she was ten, the woman two farms over had about a
hundred kids, or at least eight, anyway. One of them was born with Down
Syndrome and Paige used to babysit him during harvest so he didn’t get in
trouble when the family was out trying to get the crops in. For about two weeks
in fall, a full-sized farm required more attention than even seven kids, one
mother, one father, a grandfather and two aunts could provide. No one had extra
energy to make sure Cody kept out of trouble and he never did grow up enough to
really trust around a lot of machinery.

For those two weeks a year, Paige practically moved over to
the Williams’ farm and played with Cody. He was four or five years older, but
he would see something as simple as a red rag on the barbed wire fence and
smile in delight at the beauty of it.

Paige was fairly sure that Mrs. Williams started inviting
her over because she was worried that Paige had pulled back from almost
everyone after her mother’s death. Considering how idiotic people kept telling
her how it was a miracle that she’d survived out on that road, Paige had good
cause to start hating people. Her mother had died—that wasn’t a miracle.

And then pretty much the whole town knew her father had
developed a serious love affair with the bottle and the school made her talk to
a counselor about grief and loss once a week. Cody was the only one who made
her feel normal. He didn’t care if she was cranky and he never asked her to
talk about her mother. He lived in the minute.

The shadow had his same deliberate steps, the head moved in
the same lazy arcs, the person changed directions with the same random sort of
pattern. It looked like Cody down there. Yeah, she was not going to be hunting
down any low-level vamps if she had a choice about it. If they tried to eat
her, then she’d reconsider, but in general, she was not okay killing things
that weren’t good at defending themselves. And whoever had written all those
vampire movies—they were idiots. Huge idiots.

Movement caught her attention and she watched as Hunter
moved through the trees. When he came out into the clearing, the clouds cleared
from the moon and entirely too much light streamed down.

Two more shadows rose from the weeds around the house, each
moving with slow deliberate steps toward him. Hunter detoured toward the first
one and she could see him raise his hand and shake it. He threw his toys, and
for a second, only the vampire’s head followed the movement arc of the balls in
the bright moonlight. Then with a tilt of his head, he headed for the toys.
Hunter stood perfectly still for several seconds before he turned to intercept
the second vampire.

These weren’t feet-dragging, brain-eating zombies, but they
weren’t vampires either, no matter what Hunter said. More importantly, these
creatures didn’t have anything in common with Brady. She imagined Hunter
shaking his toys in Brady’s face before throwing them. Yeah, that would not end
well. She really hoped that wouldn’t end with Hunter dead, but she had her
doubts. When Brady had threatened to kill Hunter, he looked pretty damn
serious.

Hunter distracted the second vampire, but numbers three and
four were moving toward him. It seemed like they picked up speed after a while
because number three had a good trot going. However, he caught the path of a
particularly bright green ball and he detoured to chase the same toys vamp two
was chasing. That left vamp number four—a woman in a long dress who seemed to
move slower than the others.

Hunter waved his hand and the balls were sailing through the
air and she detoured north. Honestly, this was turning out far more
anticlimactic than Paige would have guessed. Her stomach had knotted in fear,
certain she was going to see carnage and blood.