Revenant's Kiss (Chronicles of the Afterlife) (19 page)

It was a situation that he might have been able to ignore if he hadn’t instantly known that he was
unlikely to ever hurt her or even see her hurt. Which could prove a problem in the long run as she
clearly had no problem hurting him, he would address it when the time came, if it came, until then his
goals had to be met. Ada’s mess had to be dealt with before it got out of hand, then it was back to his
original plan, it was time for Ada’s kingdom to fall. He regretted any part now that Jennifer would be
forced to play but he could not afford to alter his plans, not when there were others relying on him to set
them free. If there was anything he’d learned in his overlong existence it was that in the Afterlife freedom
was something that could only be achieved with power. He had no interest in power or control over
anyone but himself and that in itself was what put him and his maker at odds. She would not rest until he
was a compliant slave like the rest of her followers and he would sooner be dead. But if that was his
only recourse he left several trusted others without protection, if the only way to keep that front
happening was do drag the Hunter into the Afterlife further then she’d ever been, he would do it.

Chapter 14

Jennifer paused when she reached the front doors to the morgue, she was fully aware that getting
back to see the bodies would have been a pain in the butt if not for her friendly government issued
cyborg. She was of course always glad for his assistance, she had yet to hear back from him about the
potential zombie situation. Probably because for the first time in his cyborg existence he was laughing
hysterically, she had no idea why she was bothering. She would go where the leads took her, that was
why, sighing Jennifer made her way up the steps to the entrance and pulled the government issue I.D.,
provided to her via the cyborg, from her pocket and pulled the doors out of her path. She was just a
little surprised to find the front doors open but the desk unmanned. She realized it was well past
midnight and that this place would be running on a skeleton crew but they didn’t usually leave the front
door opened without someone at the desk. Already the situation felt off, which didn’t necessarily lead
her straight to zombie confirmation, but at least told her that coming here wasn’t going to be a complete
waste of her time.

She hesitated to put the I.D. away but for now she had little need of it, so she slid it into her front
pocket. If she ran across the security that should have been at the desk she could still simply pull it out,
until then she removed the 9mm from her waistband and kept it in hand. Very quickly she made a
survey of the front desk to see if there was anything useful there, and of course to make certain there
wasn’t a half eaten corpse behind it. When she didn’t find anything she moved off to her right and down
the hall, she was grateful that it wasn’t a large establishment. She didn’t want this to take up more of her
time than it had to. She stopped at the first room that she encountered hoping that she wouldn’t have to
search in the other two. The first room was the one that contained the freezers, the second or third
could be either an autopsy room or a lab. With any luck she would only have to check one of the
victims, two to be thorough, eliminating the possibility of having to go in search of any of the bodies that
might be in an autopsy room. She’d been to more than one morgue where the freezers were in the
autopsy room, she wasn’t sure if she was lucky that this wasn’t one of them or not.

Pushing yet another door out of her way Jennifer gave the room a quick survey and again found
nothing out of the ordinary, the room was empty and if the bodies were in this room and not another than
they had already been stripped, cataloged and refrigerated. As the gun wouldn’t be doing her any
immediate favors Jennifer tucked it back into her jeans and made certain that her coat was covering it
just in case someone walked in. Moving over to the freezers Jennifer removed her cell phone from her
pocket and checked the text there that Zip had sent her indicating the freezer numbers that should
contain the bodies she was looking for. With that in mind she made her way to the nearest freezer and
pulled the door open, she refrained from flinching fully aware that she could tell this one was a mess even
before she pulled the pallet out of the freezer. She didn’t have time to be squeamish so she pulled the
body out and tried to distinguish what she was looking at. "Jesus," she felt bile rise and pushed it down,
she had seen people ripped limb from limb in front of her, she could handle a mangled body.

She was no doctor but she had seen more than her fare share of bites in her time, this bodies
upper body was destroyed. By the looks of the empty body cavity she was going to assume that its
organs were elsewhere and from the condition could presume had not been removed during an autopsy.
The neck was the same, not in any condition she’d seen a vampire leave a victim, bites ran along the
sides, chunks were chewed out of the shoulders and the front of the throat was completely gone, she
was no expert but it looked as though the ends were all frayed from being gnawed on. As if all of that
wasn’t proof enough that Dimitri had gone off his rocker half the face looked like it had been chewed off
as well. Jennifer looked up and away from the body wishing like hell that she’d had someone come
along who was a little more astute in forensics. At the very least she wished that whoever was supposed
to be at the desk had been there so she would have some idea what the hell they thought was going on.
Jennifer shook her head but pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, she was tempted to call the vampire
first just so she could tell him that the bodies might be chewed up but that didn’t make them zombies
when the corpse on the table in front of her twitched.

"You’ve got to be kidding me," she tried to remind herself that a dead body was full of all sorts
of gases and chemical reactions, that sometimes they twitched, moved, all kinds of strange things. Then
she reminded herself that the current vampire she was hunting was a sick lunatic and that it wouldn’t be
beneath him to mangle an innocent person beyond recognition and then turn them into a vampire. If they
survived the damage and the process they would heal, but with the word zombie in her head none of that
seemed like much of a comfort. She looked down at her phone for a split second in hopes that at least a
text message from Tom would be there to greet her but there were no messages for her. That was how
long it took for the corpse to grab hold of her arm, she was used to attack, she should have reacted
faster, instead she was paralyzed, terrified as that half eaten face lunged up at her. She had time to
scream and try to yank back but with the hold it had on her, and her lack of reaction to defend herself
she knew that it would take a chunk out of her first.

Before she could blink there was a sword between the things teeth and in a flash it was slammed
back down to the metal pallet beneath it, the sword slicing through the back of it’s skull into the metal
beneath, effectively pinning it. She tried to yank her hand out of it’s grip but it wouldn’t relent, at least
not until the vampire beside her grabbed it’s wrist and crushed it, which the thing barely seemed to
notice. Jennifer didn’t care how pinned down it was she back-pedaled fast enough to fall on her butt.
"What is that thing!" As if she had to ask, she knew the answer he would give her, so asking again was
pointless.

"You tell me Miss Ryan, does this look like a vampire to you," he indicated the table but from
her position on the floor she could no longer see anything but it’s flailing limbs.

"It’s.....it’s," but she couldn’t finish the sentence, she didn’t believe in zombies, vampires were
the undead, she hadn’t supposed you could get much deader and still be walking around.

"Maybe you aught to take a second look, just to be certain," he was mocking her inability to say
what might be in front of her. Instead of cowering on the floor which was her first instinct, she had no
idea why that was, she got to her feet. Just looking at it she nearly fell back over, but she forced herself
to take the few steps back to the table.

"I don’t know what it is," she said trying to convince herself that it was just another vampire
gone mad. But she had never seen a human being that was this damaged come back, she assumed it
was because they always healed the damage first.

"Well Miss Ryan, call it what you like, but I assure you it is no vampire," as if to prove him right
the thing seemed to be attempting to eat its way back up his sword. Jennifer jumped back away from
the table, the thing struck a terror in her that made no sense. "You still don’t remember anything do you,
I’m not sure that will do."

For a moment Jennifer riveted her attention onto Ethan, "what do you know about it?"

"Not enough to tell you your own story but perhaps your cousin could enlighten you, hiding
behind his oh so safe holy walls, but even they can’t protect him against this." He pointed down at the
dead thing on the table that was still struggling to try and reach them.

"Zombies, don’t exist," she tried to ascertain pointlessly because she was pretty certain she was
looking at one.

"Tell me Hunter how unschooled are you, are vampires the only evil that stalk the night." He
seemed to be regarding her in a new light, like he just might be dealing with a moron.

"Maybe it’s just a mad vampire, I’ve never seen anyone turned for all I know this is what it
looks like." She could tell that he did not like the answer that she’d just given, like it was the gravest
insult to be compared to quite so dead an undead.

"I suppose it was a mistake for me to imagine that not all Hunter’s could be more then simple
minded hill folk with pitch forks." He was not smiling and without explanation he took hold of the sword
hilt and pulled it free of the thing. Jennifer was about to go into full panic-mode again, forgetting the gun
at her back but he simply brought it back down in an arch, severing the flailing corpses head from it’s
body before it could move. "Perhaps the rest will convince you," he simply stood there like the rest was
obvious but nothing happened, the body remained lifeless which didn’t tell her anything because a
vampire with no head was a dead vampire.

"What are you talking about," Jennifer asked because she was pretty certain he would just keep
standing there if she didn’t.

"I forget your kind has such pitiful hearing, silence yourself and listen," Jennifer made to tell him
to shove it, but stopped. The faintest of sounds making her draw up short, was that what she thought it
was. She gave her surroundings a quick once over, but saw nothing, before turning to the vampire.

"You saved my life so I’m going to do something stupid and trust you to watch my back." He
looked like he was going to say something but Jennifer closed her eyes and focused her hearing. It took
everything she had not to simply run screaming from the room when she heard it. "Oh my God," she
forced herself to stay still but opened her eyes and met the vampires, from inside the freezers there was
moaning, and not the kind that indicated any kind of pain or agony, just the kind that she imagined a
zombie might make. "What’s going on?" She demanded of the vampire trying hard still to convince
herself this couldn’t be what it looked like.

"Nothing that given the opportunity for us to work together we can’t solve." Ethan pulled
something from his pocket and poured it over his sword, there was a flash and then the sword flared red
hot, charring the blood from the blade.

"Is this the zombie apocalypse, this can’t be that," she asked but he did nothing but smile at her.

"Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far," that was not comforting, that was not a no.

‘There is no such thing as zombies, there is no such thing as zombies.’
She wished that it
was the foreign voice in her head saying that but it was only her and that irrational fear, her head empty
of anyone but herself. "I can’t deal with the zombie apocalypse," she told the vampire in front of her.
She had no idea why that was true, she dealt with murderous, bloodsucking vampires all the time.
Creatures that were super strong, super fast, and would kill you as soon as look at you so why couldn’t
she do this?

"We might just have to do something about this memory issue of yours," Ethan informed her all
cryptic vampire style.

"How could that possibly help," Jennifer demanded trying to ignore the sound of nails grating
against freezer doors.

"When you know where the fear stems from it’s easier to confront, easier to control," Ethan
informed her like he had loads of experience, "I’ve every confidence you can control your fear."

Like a lightening bolt struck she suddenly had a sneaking suspicion, "you’re the voice aren’t
you?"

"Voice?" the vampire asked too innocently.