Victor just smiled.
Kira shook her head. “Crazy. Tell me, does Rolls Royce also make cars for rich old vampires, with specially tinted windows maybe?”
Victor kept smiling. “Of course.”
“Wow.”
Victor took one of her hands in his and gently squeezed it. “You’ll find that much of the world is structured to serve the most elite elements of vampire society.”
“So are there just regular scumbag vampires, bloodsuckers without a penny to their names who scurry around in dark alleys and nosh on skuzzy old bums? I mean, they can’t all be fabulously wealthy like you. Can they?”
This earned her a rare laugh from Victor. “Of course there are ‘regular scumbag vampires’, as you put it. However, our paths rarely cross.”
In a few moments Crowley returned with a dark, heavy-looking bottle and two glasses. He set the glasses on a small table in front of the sofa and used a corkscrew to open the bottle. After pouring a bit of very dark red wine into each glass, he set the bottle on the table.
“Will there be anything else, Master?”
Victor sipped from his glass before replying. “Nothing now, Crowley. You may take your leave of us.”
“Very well, sir.”
Another click of the heels and then Crowley was gone.
Kira took her first sip of the wine, savoring the taste on her tongue for a moment before swallowing. “Yummy.” She took a larger sip. And then another. “
Very
yummy.”
“The blood hunger should begin easing shortly.”
He was right. Another few sips and she was feeling decidedly less edgy. Which was a relief, of course, but the memory of what she had done still electrified her senses. She shifted a little on the sofa as she remembered the first plunge of her fangs through warm and yielding human flesh. In the past she had imagined what being a vampire might be like, but none of her fantasies had even closely approximated the reality. Vampirism wasn’t a curse. It was a gift. There was no angst. Taking life was a joy like no other, generating an almost sexual thrill in the moment it happened.
She finished off her first glass of the blood wine. “More, please.”
Victor slipped the glass from her fingers and poured more wine into it. He looked at her with a curious expression. “What are you thinking about?”
“When can I kill someone again?”
He frowned. “I thought I explained—”
She shook her head as she interrupted him. “No no no. I know I need to wait a little to drink again. I’m talking about just killing someone. Can I do that?”
“You are bloodthirsty in more ways than one.”
She smiled. “Yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it? I was a good person before you turned me. What I used to think of as good anyway. A moral person. I never hurt anyone. Wouldn’t step on a bug, not even a spider. But now I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
Victor had another small sip of wine before setting his glass on the table. “We do not keep an inexhaustible supply of victims on hand. Usually no more than a half dozen or so humans are imprisoned here at any time. Purely for practical reasons. Too many missing people in too short a time could eventually draw the wrong kind of attention. Ideally, the humans I do keep here will last several months before expiring.”
“You mean before you kill them.”
Victor shrugged. “I am not a new vampire, Kira. I’ve been around for a century and a half and I rarely kill for the sheer thrill of it anymore. No, when my humans die, it is usually because their bodies are simply worn out.”
Kira pouted, pooching out her bottom lip. “So I don’t get to have
any
more fun tonight?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Kira’s eyes widened dramatically and she abruptly sat up straighter. “You mean…”
Victor nodded. “This is your first night as my new bride in blood. I have merely explained how things normally are here. And how they will continue to be in the future. But this is a special occasion. And so I will allow you one more treat.” He clapped his hands sharply together. “Crowley!”
Crowley appeared through the servants’ door within seconds. “Yes, Master?”
“Fetch us another human morsel, Crowley.”
“Yes, Master.” The butler arched an eyebrow. “Any preference, Master?”
Victor glanced at Kira. “Darling? The treat is for you. Any special requests?”
Kira thought about it a moment.
Then she smiled.
“Bring me the prettiest girl you have.”
Monroe held Marnie’s face cupped in his hands for many long moments after the feeding had finished. Her blood-flecked lips were soft and delicious. He was possessed by a sudden desire to gnaw them off her face and suck the tasty slivers of flesh down his throat. It struck him just as suddenly that something was very off here and so he opened his eyes.
He stared at her slack features for a long, silent moment.
His shoulders sagged. “Whoops.”
Her head was in his hands.
And the rest of her blood-spattered body was sprawled awkwardly on the floor.
After a few moments’ reflection, what’d happened had become obvious. He had gone into a kind of frenzy once the first drops of her blood shot into his mouth. Things became a blur. He recalled growling like an animal and thrashing his head about as he’d drunk from the big severed vein in her throat. Drinking and drinking with lustful, greedy abandon, he’d been like a full-blown alcoholic let loose at the wildest happy-hour spot in town with a fistful of cash.
And just like a drunk, he could remember very little of what had happened after those first heady, delirious moments. Somehow it had ended with him ripping her head off her shoulders. He looked at the ragged stump of her neck and reconsidered. It looked like he’d
chewed
it off her body, which was about seven thousand different shades of fucked up.
He stared at her horribly still face and felt faint pangs of remorse. “I am seriously sorry about that. Didn’t mean to…you know…”
And then it occurred to him that it was a few additional shades of deeply fucked-the-fuck-up that he was continuing to clutch a lifeless human head in his hands—while attempting some kind of half-assed, lame fucking apology. He let go of the head and it hit the floor with a heavy
thump
. He frowned.
“Huh.”
For some reason he’d expected the head to maybe bounce a time or two like a basketball. Of course that made no real sense. Human heads weren’t made of rubber. He giggled a little at that and it struck him that he must look and sound like a crazy person. He was still half-drunk on the poor girl’s blood.
He glanced down at the head and frowned again.
It was sort of freaking him out now. So he kicked it and it went sailing across the room at a high rate of speed. The top of the head hit the far wall hard enough to crack the skull in multiple places, through which promptly oozed what he could only surmise must be brain matter.
“Um…damn. And yuck.”
Okay, so this was one obvious new thing he was learning about being a vampire. He was super-fucking-strong. And a killer. Not on purpose. Not this time, at least. He’d honestly meant to do as the girl had asked—to feed from her and somehow turn her, make her into what he was by just letting his instincts take over.
And so there was yet another obvious fact about being a new vampire—his instincts were for shit and were clearly not to be trusted.
He jumped at a knock on the door. The door was already opening as Monroe turned in that direction and tensed for some kind of confrontation. He was on edge and frightened, but a part of him was almost eager for a fight. He guessed this was another part of vampiric instinct, a natural aggression that came part and parcel with the hunger for blood.
A thin guy with pale skin and black hair came into the room. He wore a black shirt and pants, combat boots, and a black trench coat. His hair was longish on top and was swept upward in a weird kind of ridge cemented in place with an absurd amount of gel. A hank of it flopped across his forehead. So here was another guy who looked like he’d stepped out of an ’80s movie.
Valley Girl
or
Say Anything
this time.
The guy’s blank expression barely changed, except that a corner of his mouth twitched once as he took in the corpse and the wild sprays of coagulating blood. “Damn, dude.”
Monroe remained wary. “Who the fuck are you?”
The guy smirked. “I’m Lloyd, that’s who the fuck I am. And you must be Monroe.”
Monroe didn’t say anything. He just stared at Lloyd with the hardest expression he could manage, waiting for him to speak again or make some kind of move.
Lloyd reached into an inner pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a silver flask. A wolf’s head was engraved on its side. He screwed off the cap, drank deeply from it, and offered it to Monroe. “Drink? It’s good shit, man. Blood-laced top-shelf liquor. Helps take the edge off. And, brother, you look like you’ve got an edge in dire need of some smoothing down.”
Monroe wasn’t quite ready to let his guard all the way down, but he was getting no sense at all that this guy was looking for a fight or was at all angry about what he had done to the girl. He eyed the flask uneasily for a couple seconds longer, then snatched it from Lloyd’s outstretched hand.
The first splash of liquor lit up his taste buds in an unexpected way. He took a few more much larger gulps before wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. “Holy fuck.” Lloyd’s knowing expression indicated he was much amused. “Hits the spot, don’t it?”
Monroe nodded as he took one more long swig. “Hell yeah, it does. Damn.”
Lloyd gestured for his flask and Monroe reluctantly handed it back. Lloyd screwed the cap back on and slipped it back inside his trench coat. “So…” He moved his head, pointedly taking in the carnage before again meeting Monroe’s gaze. “Had a bit of a mishap, eh?”
“You could say that.”
Lloyd shook his head in an easy way that conveyed a mild displeasure but no real rebuke. “We don’t like to waste the food. Procuring tasty morsels like Marnie can be complicated. But, hell, this shit’s always a risk when indoctrinating the new blood.”
“So that’s what this was? An indoctrination?”
“Call it what you like. Indoctrination. Hazing. It’s a bit of both, I guess. You gotta prove you have what it takes. Get your feet wet.” A brief glance at Monroe’s feet, followed by a chuckle. “Or bloody, in this case.”
Monroe’s brow creased as he gave himself a belated once-over. “Damn. I’ve sort of got blood all the fuck over me.”
“You’ll want to clean up and change clothes before heading out with the rest of us tonight.”
“Heading…out? Where are we going?”
“Hunting, Monroe. We’ll be visiting a neighboring town to prowl for food.”
“Huh.” Monroe stared at Marnie’s headless corpse. Again, he felt those remote stirrings of remorse. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel bad about what he’d done. He did. It was just that those feelings seemed way more distant than they should. He had some semblance of a conscience remaining, evidently, but not enough of one to trouble himself more than mildly. “By
food
, I’m guessing you mean people.”
“You catch on fast.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that.”
Lloyd smirked again. “Yeah, you do. It’s just there’s a part of you holding on to what’s left of your humanity. It won’t last long. Listen, out the door here and down the hall to the right are some shower stalls. Get cleaned up and changed, then come on out and meet the rest of the gang.” He grinned. “Properly, this time. And get cracking, okay? It’s getting to be prime hunting time.”
Monroe indicated the corpse and the great splashes of blood with a tilt of his chin. “What about…”
Lloyd laughed. “Don’t worry about it. We got people to take care of shit like that. Get a move on, son.”
And then Lloyd was out the door and gone.
Monroe stared at the closed door for a long moment, his face twisting slightly in confusion. So strange. He wondered whether “newbie vampire greeter” was Lloyd’s official role in this odd cadre of youthful-looking vamps. Apparently so, but the far more puzzling question was why the vamp-in-chief upstairs maintained this subterranean residence for vamps of presumably lesser stature at all. He couldn’t think of any way it made any sense.
He shook his head.
Just stop thinking about it. It’ll be easier that way.
And so that’s what he endeavored to do, at least for the time being.
He found a fresh change of clothes and left the room in search of the shower stalls.
Chapter Nineteen
The Glock went boom one more time. There was a spray of blood and bone fragments out the back of a head and another zombie toppled over in the middle of the street. Brix shifted aim as she kept running and fired again. Another rotting animated corpse hit the asphalt.
Jason was in front of her, firing wildly with the gun Nikki had used to kill Trevor. One round from the revolver took a zombie in the shoulder and spun it around, putting the thing temporarily out of commission but failing to kill it. Every other shot Jason squeezed off went well wide of its target. Brix heard his roar of frustration as the weapon soon clicked empty.