Unless that problem was a vampire infestation.
We were all carrying a variety of tools and weapons. I had the special knife Ventimiglia had made for me and a whole bunch of regular stakes hanging from a tool-belt around my waist. I also had my crucifix-stake. If it worked, I was going to make a whole bunch more of them.
John looked most like a regular technician or plumber—he had actual tools dangling from his tool-belt. Of course, he was also carrying a huge crossbow and had an open bag of wooden crossbow bolts slung across his back. That kind of ruined the image.
Dom had a black gym bag full of electronic equipment. I’d seen him pack it up, but I couldn’t have named what was inside it for the life of me. Lots of wires and electrodes and little screen displays. A computer tablet or two. A few smaller electronics.
Nick and Tony just had weapons of various sorts, ranging from crossbows to stakes. Nick even had a gun, though I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do with it. I hoped he didn’t intend to shoot any humans with it, but I was afraid that was the idea.
The entire mansion was creepy-silent when Malcolm opened the door and let us in.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Passed out,” Malcolm said. “Just like we planned it.”
“No. I mean where are they? In their rooms, in the ballroom? Where?” I realized I was whispering when Malcolm answered me in his normal voice.
“Oh. Various places. Some of them are still in bed; I put the drugs in their drinks last night and this morning. I had to sneak up on the guards and inject them, though. They’re pretty much still laying around wherever they fell.”
“Where are the vampires?” Nick asked.
“Bottom basement level,” said Malcolm. “At least, I think that’s where they are. None of the humans are allowed to go down there.”
My head swam as I considered how much danger he’d been in for the last few days.
“Let’s go, then,” said Nick, hefting his crossbow to his shoulder and heading down the stairs.
Dom, John, and Tony followed him. I lingered for a moment to grab Malcolm’s arm.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Fine. I’ll be glad when this is over.”
“Was it bad?”
He didn’t look at me. “Let’s just get through this. Then we can talk.” He followed the others down the stairs. I followed him.
It didn’t take us long to catch up. Despite Malcolm’s assurances that no one was awake, the guys were being ultra-cautious. Good for them, I thought. No one was saying it aloud, but we were all concerned about the possibility that the vampires might have gotten to Malcolm.
In fact, I’d been glad to see that he could step out into the sunlight when he let us in the door. One boyfriend had already joined Deirdre’s Night Stalker Brigade. I didn’t want to think about losing another one to the forces of darkness. Not that way.
But being able to stand in the sun didn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t other ways for Malcolm to have betrayed us. I shook my head. I couldn’t keep thinking that way.
Holding my stake knife out in front of me, I crept down the stairs, hugging my back to the wall and looking over my shoulder for anything that might attack us from behind.
We reached the basement where I’d found Malcolm the first time. The long row of hotel-room-like doors stood closed and silent, looking like some scene out of The Shining. I expected a kid on a Big Wheel to come rolling down the hall at any moment. The rest of us waited on the landing while Dom and John moved down the halls opening doors one at a time and checking the rooms.
They started with the ones closest to us. Peering through the now-open doorways, I could see that they were all empty. Some of them were cleaned and made up, just like hotel rooms. In other rooms, the beds were messy and unmade. And I mean messy in the “covered with bloodstains” kind of way.
I didn’t look into the room where Deirdre had first kept Malcolm. I didn’t want to see the chair where I sat while she and Greg took blood from me.
Dom and John came trotting back down the hall, holding their hands in a “thumbs up” sign. All the rooms were clear. I breathed out in relief. Obstacle one, clear.
With Nick again leading, we began our descent into the next basement, the one that we assumed held the sleeping vampires.
The staircase ended in a small landing with a heavy wooden door at the end of it. Locked, of course. With what looked like several deadbolts. Of course.
“This is me,” John said, moving up and pulling what looked like a key ring with a bunch of tiny metal sticks hanging off it out of his tool belt.
“Lock picks,” Dom whispered to me. I nodded.
John fiddled with one of the locks for a minute, peering into the mechanism with a tiny flashlight he’d pulled out of his pocket. He shook his head. “Hey, Dom,” he said. We were all whispering now. “I think maybe this lock has some sort of electronic component to it. Want to check it out?”
Dom moved up and peered at the lock.
“See that?” John said, pointing at something inside the lock itself.
“Hmm. Yeah. Okay.” Dom reached into the black gym bag and pulled out some wires and a black box with a display monitor. He ran one of the wires into the lock, using one of John’s metal strips to maneuver it into place, then attached the other end of the wire to the box. The display monitor began scrolling through a series of numbers.
“Elle,” he whispered tersely.
“Yeah?”
“Could you back off a little? I’m feeling kind of crowded here.”
I realized I was standing practically on top of him. “Oh. Sorry.” I took a step back.
After a few long, silent minutes, the black box beeped.
The sound was loud in the stillness and I jumped.
“Done,” Dom said. “It was an alarm—the standard kind anyone could buy at Radio Shack.
Disarmed now.” He moved aside so John could get back up to the door.
A locked door with an alarm. I frowned in concentration. Why would the vampires put an alarm on their door? To get the humans to come help them if they were in trouble, of course.
But maybe more than that. Maybe...
I started waving my hands in front of me just as John dealt with the final part of the lock.
“Wait,” I said, as he turned the knob and pushed at the door. “Wait! I think that maybe some of the vampires might be...” the door swung open as the last word came out of my mouth “...awake.”
Chapter 22
A wave of warm air wafted out of the room, carrying with it the smell of vampires.
A room full of sleeping vampires smells like snakes. When I was in college, I had a friend with a pet python. He kept it in a glass tank with a heating lamp over it and fed it baby field mice that he bought from a pet store on Rampart Street, at the edge of the French Quarter. His entire apartment always smelled strange, like hot, damp wood with an overlay of something like blood—it had that metallic tinge of copper—and of something else, something indefinable and predatory and reptilian.
Deirdre’s basement room smelled like that.
It smelled like danger.
But wherever that danger lay, it wasn’t waiting for us just inside the door. If any of the vampires were awake, they were hiding somewhere out of sight.
The room itself was huge, an open space stretching out into darkness, taking up, I assumed, the entire breadth and length of the upper floors. Enormous marble pillars supported the structure above.
The floor was tiled, also in marble, and mirrors lined all the walls, reflecting the shadowy shapes of mattresses that in the mirrors looked mostly empty. We all pulled the tiny flashlights we carried out of our tool belts and turned them on. In the darkness, the mirrors fractured the light, sending it back to us in glaring beams that ruined our night vision and temporarily blinded us.
I blinked to clear the spots from my eyes. There were mattresses scattered as far as I could see.<
br />
Some of them were draped in filmy fabric attached to the ceiling with hooks—those looked like a nightmare vision out of some really bad Arabian Nights remake. Others were covered with fluffy comforters in various shades of white or black or red. One had lilac-colored sheets with sprigged flower designs all over it.
Every last one held sleeping vampires and humans. One or two held a single vampire, but most held three or more, huddled together in a pile like sleeping puppies.
No. Not puppies. That was too cute-sounding, and this was far from cute. It was hard to tell, in those confused knots of arms and legs and heads, where one vampire ended, and another began. I was drawn back to the snake imagery. They looked like snakes all tangled together. No wonder they used to call it a “slither” of vampires.
I shined my flashlight on the closest mattress and checked the mirror again. A lone human lay reflected, her arms and legs twisted into unnatural shapes, seemingly floating in the air as she slept.
Nick checked the mirror, too, and his eyes met mine.
“Hey, Malcolm?” he asked in a whisper. “Did you drug these humans, too?”
Malcolm looked startled. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure if any of these people were upstairs at any point this morning,” he whispered back.
Nick motioned us slowly back through the door. Dom closed it behind us, and we all leaned into a huddle while Nick spoke.
“Okay, guys. This is going to be a mess,” Nick said. “We have actual people in there. You’ll have to check the mirrors before you make each kill. Some of those humans might wake up and try to stop us, so we’re going to need the stun batons, Dom.”
“Right,” said Dom. He unzipped his bag and rummaged around inside it.
“Why would they even have mirrors down there in the first place?” John asked.
“Worry about that later,” said Nick. “Right now, concentrate on killing the vampires and disabling the people.”
“They like to watch their victims in the mirror,” Malcolm said. “It... I don’t know... turns them on or something to see the person’s reaction.” I tried to catch his eye, but he avoided looking at anyone.
Dom handed the batons around. “Just hold it against them and push this button,” he said, pantomiming the motion with his thumb. “It sends out an electric shock that should knock them off their feet. It takes a while for the effects to wear off.”
“Is this a Taser?” I asked.
“It’s like a Taser—works on the same principle.”
“Will it work on vamps?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It might slow them down long enough to give you a chance to stake them.”
I nodded. I didn’t like the idea of going in carrying a vampire-killing weapon in only one hand, but if the Taser-like baton slowed them down, it would be worth it.
“Once we get back in, John’s going to run a perimeter check. There are a lot of shadows in there; I don’t want anything to surprise us.”
We all nodded.
Armed now for both humans and vampires, we once again moved through the door as Dom opened it. This time I was prepared for the weird smell. Nothing had changed.
We waited near the door while John jogged around the room, Taser and crossbow at the ready. I peered into the darkness after him; it didn’t take long for me to lose sight of him in the shadows.
It also didn’t take him long to get back to us.
“All clear,” he said. “Nothing but sleepers here.”
We spread out across the room, working our way toward the back. I noticed that Malcolm chose to begin at the side of the room farthest away from me. I moved to the first mattress against the far-left wall and checked the mirror. No humans in this pile.
Lucky for us vampires are such sick bastards, I thought, glad for the mirrors. Then I imagined Deirdre watching Malcolm’s reflection in the mirror while she fed from him, and I shuddered.
I picked my first vampire and held my knife with its special wood inlay directly above her heart.
She looked perfectly normal, sleeping there, peaceful and calm and beautiful. Sweat broke out along my upper lip.
Could I actually kill something, someone, when she wasn’t doing anything to hurt me? It’s one thing to put a stake through the heart of a vampire who is snarling and hissing. It’s something altogether different to kill a beautiful young woman as she’s sleeping. In the middle of the day. In a master vampire’s hell-dungeon. On a mattress with a pile of other vampires. None of whom had reflections.
Oh, hell, I thought, and plunged the knife straight down.
I hadn’t been entirely certain that the knife would work, so I brought several regular stakes tucked into my tool belt. I clearly was not going to need them. The knife slid through her chest easily.
I felt it slice past a rib, catching for a millisecond and then sliding all the way in. To the hilt.
She never woke up. She just gasped and arched her back, and then subsided into silence.
But even without opening her eyes, she still managed to seem surprised that she was dying.
The wound I left behind spurted blood when I removed the knife. Some of it landed on my cheek, and I hastily wiped it away with the cuff of the jumpsuit. Nasty. After that, I learned to lean as far away from the corpse as possible when I pulled the knife out. I moved quickly among the mattresses, staking vampires, leaving humans alone. The huge hall was full of a strange rhythm, made up of the thwack and thump of stakes entering hearts, the sighs of the dying vampires, and pop-splurt noises as the stakes were ripped out of the chest wounds. Thwack, thump, sigh, pop-splurt. Over and over again.
So the first several kills were easy, if a tad gruesome. And by the third mattress-full of vampires, I hadn’t even had to Taser any humans.
That thought gave me pause. There was something really wrong here; I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Hey, Nick,” I called softly.
He finished staking a vampire and pulled his stake out of its chest. I cringed at the sucking noise it made. That noise was beginning to get to me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Come here for a minute.”
“What’s up, Dixie?”
“Have any of these humans woken up yet?”
He looked around the room. “No,” he said, his forehead crinkling in thought. “They haven’t.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”
“Not really. Malcolm said he may have drugged these guys, too.”
“Okay. As long as you’re sure,” I said.
“I’m not sure,” Nick said, “but I don’t think there’s anything sure in this game. Let’s just keep going and not look this particular gift horse in the mouth.”
So I went back to staking vamps. Thump, thwack, sigh, pop-splurt. My stomach heaved, and I hoped that I would get used to the noise soon.
Our ragged little line of vampire assassins had moved about a quarter of the way into the room when I first noticed the sound underlying the rhythm of our kills. I pulled my knife out of a vampire and stood still, listening.
First Malcolm, then Nick, then John and Dom and Tony all stopped, as well. In the silence left behind, I could hear a sibilant noise rising, like a wind picking up a speed. It came from the shadows in the back of the room.
Almost simultaneously, the six of us shined our flashlights toward the back wall. The light beams picked out the pale faces of vampires, all staring at us, all hissing softly, fangs bared.
“Oh, shit,” I heard one of the guys whisper.
And then the vampires charged.
Actually, “charged” isn’t really the right word, because that implies some sort of force behind the motion. And vampires don’t really move with force. They flow. They slide. They dance across the room with an inhuman animal grace.
These vampires did all of that, but they did it directly toward us. And they kept hissing.
I felt my knife-wielding hand start to shake. I dropped the flashl
ight and it rolled around on the floor, bouncing light off the mirrors and across the vampires’ faces as they circled around us. The knife felt slippery in my suddenly sweaty palms, and I redoubled my grip on it, then pulled the stun baton out of my belt.
I have no idea how many there were. All I know is that I was cut off from Nick and the others, fighting for my life. I backed up against the mirrored wall, hoping to keep them from circling around behind me. I could see Nick a couple of yards away, reloading his crossbow and firing shots into the darkness. One of the vampires sidled in closer to me, her blonde hair billowing around her shoulders as she bared her teeth and growled at me.
I slammed the end of the Taser into her stomach, hitting the button with my thumb just as Dominick had shown me.
For an instant, I thought it wasn’t going to work. Then her mouth stretched out into a rictus grin, and she collapsed. She wasn’t dead, but she sure wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The rest of the vampires backed off a bit, keeping enough distance between themselves and me that I couldn’t reach them with the Taser.
“Hey, guys!” I yelled across the room, “Tasers work!”
In reply, a crossbow bolt shot out of the darkness and thumped into a vampire standing in front of me. He staggered backward and fell to the ground. I didn’t know if that crossbow bolt was an answer to my comment, precisely, but it sure made me feel better.
And then I was in the midst of it. I found myself kicking and whirling, hitting vampires with the Taser, stopping to stake them whenever I had a moment free from immediate attack. One after another, I Tasered the four other vampires who had surrounded me. It was a lot easier to fight vampires when I only had to touch them with a Taser to bring them down. I didn’t have to aim at all, I discovered—I just had to make contact with the weapon, and they fell.
Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1) Page 21
