I moved toward her again, but by then, the woman had managed to turn back around. I already knew that she had fresh blood in her system, and from the look of the man who was now slumped on the stairs, I guessed that she had taken quite a lot.
If I could just wound her badly enough to slow her down, then I could actually kill her. But even as I started to reach for the bat that was tucked into my belt, I realized that I didn’t have time for that. The female vamp rushed me with her sharp manicured nails fully extended, but by the time I brought my arms up to block her, she was already on me, and her sharp nails tore into the skin of my forearms.
I let her scratch for a few seconds just to throw her off, and sure enough, when I didn’t respond right away, the woman stopped and looked up at me in confusion.
“You fight like you’re in a sorority,” I said, and then I exploded my arms out to the sides to break her grip on me.
As soon as my arms were free, I grabbed her wrists so she couldn’t attack me again. Then I leaned my head back, gripped her a little more tightly, and slammed my forehead into the vamp’s skull.
The blow stung my head just a little bit, but it was nothing compared to the giant bruise that started to swell up in the center of the woman’s head like the horn of a fucking rhinoceros. She tried to stagger backward, but I still had a tight grip on her wrists, so she just sagged toward the ground instead.
I almost felt bad for her, but then the bloodsucker threw herself forward in my grip so that her mouth grazed my leg. She planted her feet onto the stairs and tried again, and this time, her lips came close enough to my thigh for me to feel her hot breath through my pants. She pulled her lips back so she could bite me, but just before she sank her canines into my leg, I dropped her wrists.
She didn’t see that move coming.
Immediately, the female vamp dropped down to the ground, and her chin bounced off one of the steps. Her jaw cracked, but she just pushed herself to her feet again, raised a hand to her chin, and tried to pop her jaw back into place.
I guessed that she didn’t realize that her jaw hadn’t just been dislocated on the stairs. It had actually fractured, and as soon as she tried to adjust it, the female vamp figured that out. She opened her mouth to scream at the pain, but I couldn’t let her make that much noise, so I just punched her in the mouth.
My punch spun her around backward, and it was enough of a distraction to keep her quiet. When she turned back around toward me, her jaw hung at an odd angle, but the moment she tried to say something to me, she winced at the pain of moving her mouth.
Instead, she jumped toward me with so much power that she flew up just high enough to land on top of me and wrap her legs around my waist. The woman immediately tried to tear my eyes out with her long nails, and for a second, I was so distracted by her cleavage in my face that I almost let her.
Some of the man’s blood was still in between her breasts, and the smell was so overpowering that I couldn’t help myself. Even as the woman tried to claw the skin off my face, I licked the blood from her flesh and felt the effects of the fresh energy right away.
The female vamp had one hand in my hair, and when I raised my head from her chest, she stabbed her pointed nails down at my eyes. After I batted her fingers away, I gripped her broken jaw, and the woman released her grasp on my hair. She tried to push me away, but since she still had her legs wrapped around my waist, it wasn’t like she could push me very far.
I jerked her jaw to the side, and instantly, the woman’s legs gave out. As she fell to the steps at my feet, she made one last effort to take me down with her. The woman grabbed me by the ankle and tried to twist it hard enough to break it, but I just jerked my foot away from her.
Before she could try to attack me again, I dropped to my knees beside her, grasped her by the broken jaw and the back of her head, and then just twisted. The bones in her neck all cracked, and her head flopped over to one side.
As much as I wanted to just leave it at that, I knew that she wasn’t really dead. She might be unconscious for a little while, but since she’d just had fresh blood, I doubted that she would stay down for very long. The vertebrae in her neck would probably all cement themselves back together, and then she’d be on her feet again and ready to go for another round.
The only way to keep her down was to destroy her brain, and that meant I either had to separate her head from her body, or I had to smash her brains in. After I glanced over the railing to see where I had tossed her friend, I decided to let the ground below do the work.
I picked up the female vamp, held her up by the ankles, and then let her drop down the stairwell. Her head cracked against the floor below just like her friend’s had, and her skull burst open like a rotten tomato to spill blood and brain matter all over the stairwell floor.
As soon as she hit the ground, I turned back toward the human, but now that I was able to look at him more closely, it was obvious that he wouldn’t make it. The two vamps had been playing with him and trying to draw out his death as long as possible, so it looked like they had taken blood from a bunch of different arteries.
They must have wanted to enjoy their kill, so every time they almost drank too much, they had sealed up the wound, given him a few minutes, and then started on a different artery. That was why there were so many little white puncture marks all over his skin.
As I knelt down beside the man on the stairs, he managed to flutter his eyelids open, but he still barely seemed conscious.
“Please, don’t…” The human trailed off almost as soon as he started.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll make it fast.”
Since there was no way for me to save his life, I figured that the least I could do was give him a quick death. It was more than the two female bloodsuckers had planned to give him, so if I could end his suffering a little sooner, I would feel like I’d done something to help.
And even though it wasn’t my main motivation, it would have been stupid not to realize that I could use the extra boost of blood. After all, I’d had to fight several vamps on my way here, so if I was about to go up against Isaac, then I’d better prepare myself as much as possible.
The vampire on his neck hadn’t been able to seal off the wound in his throat, so it still trickled out a weak stream of blood. I picked up the man by the shoulders, bent my head toward him, and ripped into his throat with my canines. The faster I made his blood flow, the sooner he would lose consciousness and not be in pain anymore, so I made sure to dig deep until my whole mouth filled with fresh blood.
As I drained the last of the human’s blood from his body, I felt any soreness and pain leave my muscles. I hated that I’d had to kill him, but since he would have died no matter what I did, I figured there was no point in letting the rest of his blood go to waste.
It made me feel strong as fuck, and it would also help me get back to the girls in one piece. At the end of the day, I would have done whatever it took if it meant I would get back to them safely.
After I finished draining the human, I gently laid him back down on the stairs, closed his eyes for him, and stood up again. I started up the stairs again, but when I reached the landing for the fourth floor, I decided that I should check Nat’s phone again to see if Isaac had texted, and sure enough, the impatient fuck had.
Everything ok? her brother had texted a minute ago.
To be fair, if I hadn’t had to fight these two female vamps, I probably would have already made it to the rare book room on the top floor. I was just about to text him back so he wouldn’t be suspicious, but then another text was delivered.
Which stairwell are you guys taking? Isaac asked.
I rolled my eyes. I wanted to text back that it was none of his goddamn business, but since that would definitely tell him something was off, I texted back to say that I was on the front right staircase. It was true, but I didn’t plan for it to remain true very long.
As soon as I texted him, I moved from the stairwell onto the fourt
h floor itself. I stayed along the sides of the book aisles as I made my way across the fourth floor, so I could go to one of the stairwells on the opposite side of the building.
I could only think of one reason why Isaac cared which fucking staircase I was on, and that was because he planned to ambush me before I ever made it up to the sixth floor. Of course, if he really did have the two human girls with him, he might just send some other vamp to ambush me, but either way, I wanted to take a different route up to the top.
I would just switch stairwells at every floor, so while Isaac or some bloodsucking friend of his searched for me and four girls on the front right staircase, I would quickly be moving my way up to surprise him instead.
Then again, I wondered if Isaac had figured out by now that I was alone. I felt like he would have texted some question that I couldn’t answer, or he at least would have called and demanded to hear Nat’s voice, and then the whole jig would have been up.
If he had suspected anything, I felt sure he would have asked about it because really, there was no point in killing me unless it meant he could have the four girls. And if he knew they weren’t with me, I doubted that he would go to all the trouble of telling me what floor and what room he was in, all so I could go meet him empty-handed.
So maybe he didn’t suspect anything, and maybe, just maybe, there was the tiniest chance that he might not even be a vampire at all, and then I wouldn’t have to kill him. I could bring him, his girlfriend, and her friend all back to my four girls, and then we could make our way out of the city together.
As I started up the front left stairwell, I exhaled. There was just no way that was true. None of the signs pointed to that as a possible outcome, and that all meant that after I killed vampire-Isaac, I would have to find a way to explain his death to Natalie.
I knew that she loved me more than anything, but it was still going to be difficult if I had to tell her that I killed her brother.
The only thing that would make it better would be if vampire-Isaac wasn’t at all like the Isaac she knew. If he was vicious and cruel like so many of the other bloodsuckers that I’d met, then maybe Nat would be less devastated by his death because the reality would be that Isaac had died the moment that the vaccine turned him into a monster.
But it still wasn’t a conversation that I was looking forward to. Maybe it would be kinder to lie to her about his death. I could always tell her that he had still been a human when I found him, but that we’d been attacked by too many vamps on our way back, and Isaac hadn’t made it.
But if I brought his two women back with me, they would eventually tell the others the truth.
I shook my head as I made it to the landing halfway up to the fifth floor. As much as I wanted to spare Natalie any pain, I knew that I could never lie to my girlfriend like that. We had been through too much together to lie to each other now, so even if she had a hard time at first, she would eventually understand that I just wanted to protect her, and that I had done whatever it took to make sure that she stayed safe.
When I reached the fifth floor, I exited the stairwell and started down one of the aisles of books to cross over to another set of stairs. I knew I had already gotten a little ahead of myself, but I couldn’t help that my mind always wanted to plan things out in advance. Sometimes, it was more helpful to fly by the seat of my pants, but usually, I liked to have at least a little bit of an idea about what I had planned.
As I made my way down the aisle of books, I took several deep inhales to try and check for any signs of life, human or otherwise. The smell of dust was pretty overpowering, but it didn’t have that stale mildewy undertone that vamp blood and brains did, so I felt like I was still in the clear.
Besides, one look at the books on the shelves on either side of me now told me they were more likely the source of the musty smell. They were mostly huge encyclopedias, and they looked like they hadn’t been touched since the invention of the fucking internet.
I gritted my teeth at the fact that I had chosen this book aisle to walk down. The smell of the encyclopedias blocked out almost every other scent, and I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t see anything on either my left or my right.
I had chosen to walk down an aisle instead of along the sides of the room just to add a little more variety to my route upstairs, but now I wished that I had just stuck to the wall, so I would have a clear view of everything around me.
Still, there was only one more flight of stairs between the top floor and me, so I decided that I might as well arm myself for trouble. I silently slipped the bat out from where I had tucked it into my belt, and I held it ready in my hands as I came up on the end of the aisle.
Right before I turned the corner to head out of the books and toward the stairwell, I heard a soft footstep from the next row over. As soon as I froze, I didn’t hear the other footstep again, but when I took another step forward, I heard the other person step forward, too.
Somebody had found me.
Chapter 11
There were only two more steps between me and the end of this aisle of bookshelves, and I knew that as soon as I stepped out into the open, my opponent would strike. By now, he had probably guessed that I was on to him, but there must still be enough doubt in his mind that he hadn’t gone ahead and charged around the corner.
That meant I probably had less than five seconds to make the first move before this motherfucker made it for me.
I wanted to push the whole bookshelf down on top of him and crush him underneath its weight, but even though that would have been a satisfying surprise, I knew it wasn’t a real option. The noise would have been loud enough to bring every vamp on campus straight over to the library, and that was a hell of a lot more than I was prepared to deal with.
That meant I could run around the corner and try to attack him as quickly as possible, so I could take him out before he had the chance to figure out that I knew he was there. The alternative was that I could run back down the aisle in the opposite direction and come around to attack him from the other side. He would be more likely to see me coming, but it would also give me an extra second to see exactly who my enemy was and how I should strike him.
I just wished I knew if it was Isaac or some bloodsucking friend of his. It wouldn’t really change how I approached things, but if I was going to fight my girlfriend’s brother, I kinda wanted to know when it was about to happen.
I almost took out Nat’s phone to text Isaac again and see if I heard a phone buzz, but I knew that I didn’t have time. Instead, I took two more steps forward, and just as the end of my boot emerged from the aisle, I pivoted on my heels and sprinted back in the other direction.
As soon as I started to run, I heard the footsteps on the other aisle run to keep up with me. They had to know that I was on to them, but I figured that they’d be too busy trying to catch me to actually alert Isaac-- unless, of course, this was Isaac.
I reached the end of this row of bookshelves in seconds, so I raised the bat as I came around the corner and prepared to swing her home.
The other vamp met me in the open space at the end of the book aisles, and I felt such a sense of relief that they weren’t Isaac that I almost forgot they were still my enemy.
The moment this asshole came for me with a knife, though, I remembered.
I swung my bat to block the knife blow, but this bloodsucker had a second knife in his other hand, so I immediately had to swing again to drive him back. I started to swing the Louisville slugger toward his left side, so he raised his left arm to block it, but at the last second, I changed the direction of my swing.
I dropped the bat down low and then swung it straight up into his groin.
When the metal bat crashed into the vamp’s balls, he immediately dropped to his knees and opened his mouth to howl. He got out half a second’s worth of a scream before I smacked the bat across his face to shut him up.
It wasn’t enough to kill the bastard, but it did force him to focus on our fight,
so he didn’t just scream for back-up. Whoever this asshole was, he had to be a friend of Isaac’s. There was no other reason for him to stalk and attack me, so I just had to hope that Isaac hadn’t heard him shout.
And I definitely hoped that he hadn’t told Isaac that the girls weren’t with me. I wanted to throw Isaac off with that information, so maybe he would think that I’d left the girls downstairs or found a safe location on campus for them, so then Nat’s brother would stall and try to find out where they were before he just outright attacked me.
And if I could get him to stall even a little bit, then that would give me more of a chance to try to feel out his weaknesses.
But before I could think about Isaac, I really needed to take care of this bloodsucker right in front of me first.
I swung the Louisville slugger toward his face again, but the man ducked out of the way in time and then rolled backward across the floor. As I followed him, I glanced at his hands and noticed that both knives were still in his grip, so I would have to be careful not to get too close.
“I’ll make this easy on you,” I growled. “You tell me where Isaac is, and I won’t toss you down the stairwell.”
“You’d have to catch me first, dumbass,” the vamp laughed.
“Just promise you’ll remember, okay?” I sighed.
“Remember what?” The bloodsucker pushed himself up to his feet as a little wrinkle of confusion appeared in the middle of his forehead.”
“Remember that I tried to give you a way out,” I said with a grin, and then I raised the bat above my head like I planned to swing it down like an axe.
As soon as the vamp looked up at the bat, I took advantage of his distraction and kicked straight out at his left kneecap. I felt the bone slide a little to the side, and immediately, I pulled my foot back just an inch and rammed it into the side of his kneecap for a second blow.
There was the very clear sound of something that popped in his knee, and then the vamp finally started to scream as the pain hit him. He couldn’t do anything against me now, so I just brought the bat down on top of his skull like he had expected me to in the first place, and the crack of the metal against the top of his head made him fall silent.
Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth (Book 3): Vampire Lord 3 Page 13
