Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires (49 page)

“No,” I whispered.

“What did he tell you when you asked?”

“He…he would…” I could feel my lower lip begin to tremble. Whether it was rage, sadness, or despair, I didn't know. Maybe all three. “He would say I was a moist warm tightness with all the necessary parts.” I was crying again. Talbot turned away.

“One thing about Eric, he doesn't hide his feelings. If he loved you, he'd have told you.” As he opened the door, Talbot looked back. “I'll be right outside when you're ready to learn the ropes.”

He left me alone and all I felt was the cold.

DEAD CAR

T
hey'd killed my Mustang. It lay on its back in the road, a dead metal cockroach leaking oil and antifreeze onto the asphalt. One of the wheel covers rolled across the road, the three-pronged center of the simulated knockoff hub blurring like a propeller until it hit the base of a streetlight with an insulting clang.

The trucks skidded into a circle around the Mustang, completely blocking off the intersection. Two men stepped out of each truck. As I watched, long lupine claws pushed out through their fingernails and their human teeth dropped to the ground. The werewolves' muzzles flowed forward, fangs bared. I'm sure they meant the display to be impressive, but it still looked to me more like bad special effects. At least they weren't all the same generic brown as Wolfy from the alley. These six must have come out of the variety pack; there were two gray, two black, and two that looked more like werehuskies than werewolves.

“So which two are the Cool Ranch?” I asked. They charged at me, and I fought for control. The red tinge to my vision faded even as I popped my fangs. This was important. I wanted to remember killing the bastards that had murdered my Mustang.

The two gray wolves were a little faster than the others, so they reached me first. I caught one by the muzzle, flinging him across the intersection and through the glass front of an antique shop. The shop's burglar alarm sounded as the other guy sank his fangs into my shoulder. I wondered if there was a little werewolf handbook that insisted the shoulder was the best place to bite a vampire. It hurt like an old wound, a remembered pain.

The werewolf I'd thrown into the storefront recovered quickly and raced back to help his partner. When he ripped my belly open I definitely felt it, but I know what it's like to be engulfed in flame and staked through the heart. In comparison, this was nothing. Pain is fleeting for the undead. Our nerve endings don't work the same as those of the living. The initial damage registers, but unless the weapons are blessed or something, the ache doesn't last.

As the fight went on, I gained a little more respect for their methods. They worked well together, a real team. It made me miss fighting alongside Greta.

“You assholes know you can't kill me, right?” I tightened my grip on the muzzle of the gray that had gutted me and listened to his teeth crack. He kept right on tearing into me with his claws and his buddy kept chewing on my shoulder.

They wanted me to scream or beg for mercy, but it wasn't going to happen. The injuries didn't annoy me that much. Vlads heal quickly and I heal quicker than most, but healing is hungry work and it did mean that I would need to feed again before dawn.

I planted a foot on each of the grays' chests, but before I could try to push off, the two black werewolves joined the fray and grabbed my legs. Still, I was winning, not the fight against the werewolves, but the fight against myself. The more I reined in my anger, bit it back, choked on it, the more I realized that I needed to talk to these guys, to see if I could stop this before it got even more out of hand and I was facing down twenty or thirty of them.

Just then two more werewolves showed up in another matching truck. The werewolves that got out of it were brown. “You two must be the corn chips,” I told the newcomers. They didn't get the joke, but one of the huskies hovering on the sidelines chuckled. I guess the huskies were the Cool Ranch.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, vampire?” asked one of the black-furred pair.

I considered trying to bite the gray to get him off of my shoulder, but I answered the question instead. “Yeah, take me to your leader.” Once again only the huskies seemed to get the joke. Maybe my humor was too old. “Seriously, I want to talk to your Alpha…Willard or whatever his name is.” I sighed. “Why else do you think I'm not turning to mist right now?”

Actually the real reason I wasn't turning to mist is that I couldn't, didn't know anyone who could. Animals, yes. Mist, no. I'd tried it once and instead of turning into a cloud, I'd gone translucent blue like Obi-Wan Kenobi in
The Empire Strikes Back
. It had felt like dying, all the life-force draining out of me, the world changing colors, blurring. Turning back had been hard, too. It had taken the better part of an hour, and once my body finally re-formed, I promised myself never to screw around with it again.

Roger was the only one who'd seen me do it and we'd both agreed that I shouldn't try it again. “It looked like you almost died, Eric,” Roger had told me. “I'd be scared of getting stuck that way.”

I shuddered at the memory and came back to the present. Eight pairs of eyes stared at me from unconvincing giant Harryhausen-esque wolf heads.

I tried talking again, but this time I spoke slowly and clearly. “Will you take me to your Alpha? Maybe we can work something out.” I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head.

“What the hell are you doing back there?” I asked angrily.

Two more whacks and my vision blurred; out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stake. It wasn't one of those fancy things with a real weapon grip like proper vampire hunters use. A long jagged splinter jutted out from a mahogany spindle with a dark finish, like someone had snapped the stretcher off of an old rocking chair. Either these guys didn't usually hunt vampires, or they weren't used to taking prisoners. As the stake arced toward my chest, I tried to transform.

I didn't care what I turned into: bat, cat, snake, rat, frog, wolf, or raven. I can do them all, which is unusual. I even managed a flea once. The problem is that changing into anything takes concentration, and I didn't have any to spare.

My other option was to just give in to my anger and let myself go berserk. But going berserk would mean more dead werewolves and I needed to keep the body count down if I was going to find a way to make peace with the Alpha.

Before I could think up Plan C, someone hit me again. My vision stretched and the lights went out as I felt the stake slide home. You learn something new every day. My lesson for today was: If you knock a vampire out before you stake him, you can drag him around in the back of your new pickup truck and he won't know what's happening.

Even in my unconscious state, letting them beat me grated on my nerves. I should have been able to take them. It's not like there was a full moon or anything. I know myths and legends talk about werewolves going crazy and eating people during the full moon, but as far as I can tell all the full moon does is make them bigger and meaner. I can't ever remember which one is waxing or waning, but the moon looked like a sideways grin, so I figured these boys were at about half power.

I decided to enjoy the nap. My night was fucked anyway. I'd already lost my Mustang. I didn't want to lose anything else. Fighting werewolves isn't like dealing with vampires. They travel in packs. The idea of two dozen werewolves tearing through the Demon Heart wasn't pretty. If they had me, then they'd leave the club alone; they'd leave Marilyn and Roger and Tabitha alone.

If I was lucky, they'd do what I was hoping and actually take me to their Alpha. Maybe we could work this out. I'd probably killed his son; he'd definitely killed my Mustang. It was an even trade from my perspective.

I don't know how long I was out, but my world came back in a sudden rush of pain. I swear stakes hurt worse coming out than they do going in. I was in a bag that smelled kind of like feathers, but there was flannel and something synthetic there, too. A sleeping bag. Cute. A ragged hole gaped in the bag over my chest where someone, one of my captors, I guessed, had ripped it open to remove the stake. I wasn't on fire, which meant it was either still night out or I was in a covered area someplace.

I fumbled with my watch, finally managing to hit the right button. A soft blue glow showed the time as 03:03, just after three in the morning. Still dark.

Fangs and claws at the ready, I ripped my way out of the sleeping bag and looked around. Pickup truck. Parking lot. Woods. The smell of water filled my nostrils. It smelled clean…untainted…no chlorine. There was no sign of whoever had unstaked me.

It was extremely dark…a real look-out-behind-you kind of dark, perfect for vampire vision. I took a few minutes to explore my surroundings. Crickets chirped loudly, a distant frog splashed down into lake water, and somewhere out in the night an owl hooted. The gravel lot was almost full of cars and trucks. A small building off to one side smelled like it contained a couple of poorly maintained restrooms. A concrete boat launch sloped gently down to the lake, and a set of concrete steps led down to a little marina where thirty or forty boat slips served as a waterside parking lot. There were only a few boats parked at the moment: a couple of pontoon boats, a speedboat, and a rickety-looking fishing boat made of aluminum.

Dense woods covered the lakeshore opposite the marina and I could only make out one house, old but in good repair, its short wooden dock poking out into the lake, a moored pontoon boat bobbing gently with the natural rise and fall of the water.

I remembered this place. It was called Orchard Lake. My family used to come out here when I was a kid. It was part of the county water supply, not exactly a state park, but a public lake. The homes were only accessible from the water; the absence of boats at the marina meant most of the residents were home.

Far to the left of the marina, Orchard Dam kept the lake fat and happy. It also kept all that water from destroying the expensive developments that had sprung up downstream. Below the dam, only a little creek tumbled away through the woods, while the lake itself ran some fifteen miles in the other direction.

Orchard Lake was old, a sprawling gem tucked away in a pocket of forest and mountains, slowly being encroached upon by overpriced suburbia. Sable Oaks, Greymont, and Harvest Estates bordered the Orchard Lake area, but none of them came within a mile of the lake itself. The lake homes were older houses, passed down through the families of blue collar workers, real salt of the earth folks.

Back when we were alive, every time we'd get a little plastered, Roger would talk about how he was going to be rich one day and buy up Orchard Lake. He wanted to turn it into a hoity-toity community for rich old farts and politicians. A lot of people had the same idea. Over the years, countless developers had tried to purchase the land, but nobody would sell. The news always seemed to show the same old guy claiming, “My grandpa built this house with his own two hands,” and refusing to give in even at outlandish prices.

I shook my head to clear it, wondering where the werewolf variety pack had gone. It was three in the morning. I'd been out for six hours or more, and Orchard Lake was only an hour or so from town.

“Hello?” I called out. Silence.

Why go through all the trouble of ambushing me only to unstake me in an abandoned marina and run away? Clearly, I did not understand the modern werewolf. All four trucks could be accounted for amid the other vehicles. Gravel crunching under my feet, I scouted the place a little more.

As I followed the drive down to the boat launch, the scent of gunpowder and blood drifted over to me from the nearby woods. Werewolf blood. I followed the smell up and over the half of the mountain that the parking lot hadn't claimed and found the werewolves easily enough.

They'd been cut to ribbons, dead for at least an hour. It was worse than what I'd done to the werewolf in the alley the night before. I was pretty sure there were enough pieces to make most of eight werewolves.

Just to check, I sifted through the bodies, stacking the heads in a neat little row. Two of them had obvious bullet holes. One shot had been close range to the temple; the fur was badly powder burned. Not the most pleasant of smells. The second one had been shot through the back of the head, and I didn't see an exit wound.

Morbid curiosity got the better of me and I cracked the skull open. The bullet wasn't hard to find; I just followed the trail of blackened gray matter from the back of the skull to where the bullet had lodged in the side of the frontal bone, above the nasal cavity and between the eyes.

I'm not a big gun person, but the bullet looked weird even to me. On
CSI
when they pull the bullet out of a dead guy it looks like a little metal rock, but this one looked whole, casing included.

My brain was fuzzy and my head hurt.
Concentrate
, I told myself. Each werewolf's body had long jagged claw marks, and one had had his heart ripped out. Aside from the bullet wounds, the werewolves looked like they'd been torn apart by a vampire. It would look even more gruesome in daylight, when the remains reverted from wolf form to human.

I leaned in closer, examining the wounds. They looked familiar. Damn. Resting my hand atop one of the ragged cuts, I extended my claws. They weren't quite a match, but they were close, and now the whole area probably smelled like me, too.

If not for the bullet holes, someone might have convinced me that I'd blacked out and done it, but I don't own a pistol and these boys hadn't been killed with vampire claws. Now that I was suspicious, I could find bullet holes in several other body parts. No more bullets, though.

I'd been framed.

Unable to discern anything more from the bodies, I walked back down to the boat launch. Brains and blood washed off of the single silver bullet I'd retrieved, leaving it looking bright and new. It was warm to the touch even after I cleaned it off in the cool lake water. Little markings glowed faintly in the dark.

Magic bullet. Bodies cut up to look like I did it…. But why go through all the trouble to dig out the other bullets and leave this one behind—unless I was supposed to find it? I put the bullet in the pocket of my jeans and knelt by the water.
Somebody doesn't want me and the Alpha werewolf to kiss and make up, but they don't have the nerve to kill me themselves.

It didn't particularly bother me that the variety pack had been killed, but something in the back of my head (my brain, maybe) was telling me that I'd been outsmarted. Someone had figured out that I would go with them to try to see Willard or Wilbur, or whatever his name was, and had arranged this mess to ensure that didn't happen, taking a fucked-up set of circumstances and boosting them to a whole new level of suckage.