Reclaimed (Morta Fox Book 2)

by D. N. Hoxa

  Bugz was right. There were many states in Brazil.

  “I’m sure there will be someone to point us in the right direction when we get there.” There had to be someone who’d be willing to help.

  “That’s wishful thinking,” Bugz said. “We can’t put our hopes on that.”

  “I know someone in Brazil,” Penny said almost reluctantly.

  “You do?”

  “Yes, an independent. She owes me a favor.”

  Thank God. “Do you know where she is?”

  “She said she was from the Amazonas, but I’ve never been,” Penny said.

  “It’s right after the border,” Bugz said, pointing at the map.

  “Right, so we’ll go with that.” I, was already excited. Maybe Bugz was right. Maybe Morta was already on her way. I could hardly wait to hit the road.

  “I’ve been to Mexico before. It took me about a week to get there,” Lance said.

  “It’ll probably take us another two to get to Brazil,” Bugz said.

  “It’s not that bad.” Was it? The way they looked at me said it was. It didn’t matter. Vampires never got tired. “We better get ready. We’ll leave as soon as we wake up.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll cut your hair,” Penny said, and she took out a small knife from her pocket.

  ***

  Bugz was right. Her contact, whoever it was, said that a friend of his had seen Morta at the Mexico border. She was going to Brazil.

  The road we took was as dark as every other, yet we all saw with perfect clarity. Lance seemed to be as fast as Bugz as they both ran ahead of us. I trusted them both, so I followed their every step with Tif and Penny. We fed not too far from the house, and with our veins full of someone else’s blood, we felt unstoppable.

  On the second night, before we began to run, something occurred to me.

  “Won’t Mohg notice that Lance is missing?” I couldn’t have someone after me.

  “I don’t think so. It’ll be a while before the news gets to him,” Bugz said, but she didn’t sound too sure.

  “What if they do notice?”

  “They won’t know where to even start looking, M. Let’s just run first, and worry later.”

  But we didn’t have a later. We stopped only when the sun was minutes away from rising. There was no time to think. When running, we had to keep our eyes everywhere, and our ears strained. Only that way did we manage to pass the few vampires on the way unnoticed. I didn’t want anyone to see us, though I was wearing my mask.

  So I didn’t think for a week. I did nothing but run. Run to find her. When we arrived in New Mexico, we found a lot more vampires than I’d expected. Not as many as in Florida, but definitely a lot.

  We had to stop running a couple of hours before the sun rose, because we didn’t want to attract attention. We did anyway, just like in Florida. They could smell us, just like we smelled them. Outsiders.

  “Just look for shelter, and stay together,” I whispered loud enough for only them to hear, and they all nodded.

  It wasn’t like we could see the vampires. The streets were completely empty, but we heard them. Smelled them. Sometimes caught sight of silver eyes. The broken buildings around were filled with them.

  “Americanos,” someone said from above us. We stopped moving.

  Whoever it was took his sweet time before he jumped from the window of a building to our right and more than ten steps behind us.

  I spoke to him in Spanish.

  “Not all of us,” I said.

  “What are you doing here? You’re not from around these parts,” he said. He was as tall as I was. In fact, he was the most normal looking vampire I’d ever seen. Nothing weird about him.

  “Just passing through,” I said.

  “With a mask on your face?” He grinned. “Who are you hiding from?”

  “I’m not hiding from anyone. I was just not as lucky as you in the looks’ department.”

  He laughed dryly. “You’ve got a sense of humor, kid. I like that.”

  “I’m not a kid,” I said. “Is there something we can help you with?” The tone of my voice told him how much worth the offer had.

  “Not really,” he started walking to us, and I headed forward, too.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Bugz whispered, but I ignored her. I met the vampire halfway.

  “But we don’t appreciate strangers walking our streets like they own them,” he said, then looked behind me. “I do know her, the black one.” I turned to Bugz. She hadn’t told me she was there before. “But not the others.”

  “Like I said, we’re passing through.”

  It did me good to meet the guy. I was starting to feel really comfortable in my skin. Thinking this would be easy did me no favors. I had needed the reminder.

  “Do you work for Mohg, too? Like her?” he said, and produced a cigarette between his lips, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “No. We don’t work for Mohg,” I said.

  I didn’t know who he was, or how much trouble a lie could get us in, so I told the truth.

  “She does,” he said, and pointed back at Bugz again.

  “She doesn’t,” I said. “Now, unless you have nothing else…” I started to walk backwards. I made it to the third step before we were surrounded. Vampires rained upon us from all sides.

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you go without telling me your business first.”

  I could smell his desire to fight. I didn’t want to, because they were too many of them, but if it came to it, I would. I took a step forward before Bugz appeared at my side and grabbed my arm. The look in her eyes warned me to stay silent.

  “We’re on our way to Mohg,” she said. What the hell?

  “Are you lying to me now?” the vampire said in English. His accent was thick, barely understandable.

  “We’re not lying. I’m going to see him, and if I don’t make it in time, I’ll tell him to come ask you why,” Bugz hissed.

  “Then what are they doing here? You were always alone when you came our way before. Why did you bring them?”

  Bugz turned to look at me, and I saw the fear in her eyes. Something didn’t feel right.

  “Because she promised to take us to him,” I said. If Bugz lied, I could, too.

  “Yes, I promised Mohg I’d take them to him.”

  She was a terribly good liar. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve believed her.

  The vampire smiled and lit his cigarette. “Say I don’t believe you,” he said, and blew the smoke in Bugz’s face. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Bugz grinned. “I’ve always wanted to have a taste of you, Serpiente.” Snake. His name was Snake.

  “I wouldn’t mind a taste of you myself,” Serpiente said and winked at Bugz.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said before she turned around and headed for the others. “I’ll tell Mohg you said hi.”

  Confused out of this world, I looked back at Bugz, and at Serpiente, who was now smiling and smoking, shaking his head as he watched Bugz walking away. He did nothing. He didn’t tell his friends to stop us.

  “Make sure you do,” he called after her instead.

  I turned around and followed Bugz. Nobody stopped us. They slowly stepped back and into the shadows again. I felt their eyes on my back until we found a relatively empty neighborhood and chose a three-story, half-broken house for shelter.

  “What the hell was that about?” I asked Bugz when I was sure that nobody was eavesdropping.

  “Necessity,” Bugz said.

  “Why did you lie to him?”

  “Because he would’ve killed us if I hadn’t,” Bugz said. “You should be thankful that he believed me.”

  “I believed you, too. Your lie sounded like a perfect truth to my ears. But you said Mohg was in Long Island. Why did they believe that we were going to him?”

  Bugz froze for a second. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you have no other choice but to perfect the art of lying
. And I already told you, I believed you the first time. The vampires here work for Chandra. They already know Mohg is in on it,” she finally said.

  “Good for you,” I said reluctantly. Her answer didn’t make me feel any better.

  “We’ll leave at sunset,” Bugz said, and she disappeared from the room.

  “I don’t like her,” Penny said. I hadn’t realized she was still there in the room with me. We never slept in the same rooms together.

  “She’s helping us,” I said. “She’s a friend.”

  “Is she really taking us to Mohg?” she asked.

  Seemed Bugz’s lie had worked better than I’d thought.

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Can I sleep here with you?”

  When I turned to look at her, she looked down at her hands. She sat in the corner of the room, completely motionless. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Did Doyens sleep with their vampires? Bugz had never mentioned that.

  “Sure,” I said, and took the other corner of the room, the farthest away from the window. I’d already put a thick piece of fabric on it, but it never hurt to make sure.

  “I never said thank you,” Penny said after a while.

  The sun was almost there. My bones felt it.

  “What for?”

  “For turning me,” she whispered.

  “I don’t…I don’t exactly remember how…”

  She smiled. “I know,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Yes,” I said without thinking, and she didn’t waste a single second.

  “It was fall, 1991. You found me alone in an alley before midnight,” she said.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked as my eyes drifted shut. I tried to pry them open, but I couldn’t. The sun was up there. I was almost gone.

  “I was…”

  … crying. She looked so young. So, so desperate. That was the only reason I stopped to look.

  She sat on the floor, a dirty, torn dress around her thin frame. She hugged her knees to herself, looked ahead at the wall across but saw nothing, and cried. If I hadn’t smelled her, I would’ve never heard her. I’d never seen anyone cry so silently.

  I watched her for a long time, trying but failing to convince myself to leave. Get the hell out of there. Nobody needed to be the way I was.

  But what if she did?

  “A penny for your thoughts?” I asked. I expected her to jump. I was hiding in the shadows behind the dumpsters, and there was no way she’d seen me.

  But she didn’t jump. She didn’t scream. She only moved her head and eyes towards me.

  “Why does death sound so beautiful?” she asked me.

  I came out of the shadows and sat behind her. Her brows narrowed when I moved too fast for her to see me, then simply appeared in front of her. She didn’t even move away. I’d never seen someone so depressed. So void of will.

  “Because death is a cheater,” I said. “It tricks us into thinking it’s beautiful, until it grabs us.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered.

  Her tears kept coming, and for some reason, it made me want to hug her. I felt her pulse, the warm blood in her veins, but the craving felt no more than a sweet sorrow.

  “Why?”

  “Because, why would I? My parents left me when I was a baby. I’ve been homeless for the past three years. I’ve been raped. Beaten. Stripped of hope.” With every word she spoke, I grew angrier. “I knew it before, but I just didn’t want to admit it. I always knew that it would never get any better.”

  She shivered. I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders.

  “How can you move so fast?” she asked me.

  “It’s…complicated.”

  My mind was already made. If she wanted to, I was going to make her like me. That way, nobody would be able to rape her anymore. She wouldn’t have to be homeless. She wouldn’t have to be stripped of hope, ever again.

  “Are you an angel?” she asked me, and I laughed.

  “I’m the furthest thing from angels there is,” I said. “No, I’m a vampire.”

  “Have you come to take me?”

  “No, I…” but had I?

  “You’d be doing me a favor. I’m not sure how to kill myself,” she said.

  “You don’t have to kill yourself.”

  “I do. I’ve been thinking about it for so long. I just never know how,” she said. Her tears had stopped spilling.

  “Taking your own life is never a solution,” I whispered.

  “What other choice do I have?”

  There it was. The words fought against each other until they made it out of my lips. “You could be like me.”

  I tried, after that. I tried so hard to regret those words I said to her.

  I never did.

  XXVIII

  I was on my feet before Penny opened her eyes. I looked at her, really looked at her, and I could see the girl that she used to be. I could see it like it was right in front of me.

  What the hell was happening to me? Had she told the story the night before, or had I imagined it? Had I dreamed it?

  Or had I remembered it?

  “Stay here until I call for you.”

  I left the room before she could object. My mind was all over the place. I found Bugz downstairs in the basement. Alone.

  “What?” she said, when she saw my face. I probably looked even worse than I felt.

  “I think I…” but was it even possible?

  “You think you what?”

  “I think I remember how I turned Penny. How Hammer turned Penny.”

  Bugz’s face broke into a huge smile the next second. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Why are you smiling?”

  Panic had grown into fingers around my throat.

  “Why aren’t you?” she asked instead. “You’re remembering!”

  “I’m not remembering. I remembered one thing.”

  There was a difference, wasn’t there?

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and began to laugh. “This is great!”

  “It isn’t!” I hissed. It couldn’t be. It didn’t feel like it was.

  “Of course it is! If you remembered one thing, what’s to stop you from remembering the rest?”

  “Bugz, what if it was just a hallucination or something?”

  “Vampires don’t hallucinate,” she said, and sighed. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Why aren’t you freaked out?” I thought she would be.

  “Why would I be? This is amazing, Hammer!”

  I flinched and she saw it. But I didn’t even have it in me to tell her to stop calling me that. Again.

  “Because how is this possible? I spend half a year with absolutely no memory, and then last night, it happened just like that!” I didn’t want to ruin her mood, but I couldn’t stand in one place. “Something’s not right.”

  “M, relax,” she said, and stopped me from walking in circles around her. “This is exactly right. Don’t you want to remember everything you lost? All your life?”

  “Yes, but why now?”

  Her hands framed my face. “I don’t care, and you shouldn’t, either. What’s important is that you remembered.” She kissed me so fast that I had no time to stop her, even if I wanted.

  “Bugz…” I whispered when she leaned away. We’d done it before. Nothing could come out of it. Last time, I hadn’t been so sure, but last time, I hadn’t kissed Morta Fox. Nothing could ever compare to that.

  “I know. I’m just happy,” she whispered. “And you should be, too. I just hope the memories keep coming.”

  I didn’t share her excitement. I’d gone half a year without memories, and they decided to pop into my head, just like that? It wasn’t that I didn’t want my memories back, because I did. I wanted to remember everything, starting with Morta. I’d met her. I’d talked to her. She hadn’t triggered any memories like Penny had.

  Maybe because Morta
hadn’t told me anything from the past. But Bugz did. Dublin did. I hadn’t had any memories then.

  I asked Lance and Tif to tell me their stories, too. Just to make sure.

  Lance had known that vampires existed since he was three. He’d seen one drink from his mother while she slept. He’d spent his whole life learning about them, searching for them, and when he found Hammer, he spent a week running after him, begging Hammer to turn him. Hammer had finally caved.

  Tif had been in a fight when Hammer had found him. His friends had left him behind. He had fourteen knives in his body, and no chance of survival. None. Hammer had found him in a dark, empty street. He’d asked him if he wanted to live. Tif had said yes, so Hammer had turned him.

  They told me these things in detail while we ran at a slower pace, but nothing. No memories. Not even a feeling of a memory.

  Every night after that was harder. Harder to focus, harder to think, harder to even run. It was like I could no longer see as clearly or move as fast as the others. My mind wasn’t into it.

  Bugz kept with me, behind the others, and asked me every hour if something was up. She was expecting me to get another memory back. She was so sure that more were coming that I began to doubt myself.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I should’ve been happy, but I wasn’t. If getting the memories back felt the way the last time did, I wasn’t sure I wanted them anymore. There were questions I didn’t know how to ask, that led to answers I didn’t want to hear.

  I tried to focus on Morta. We had already passed Nicaragua. She could be close. I had to make sure my ears would pick up the sound of her beating heart.

  Two more groups of vampires stopped us, and Bugz pulled us through with the same lies as the first. I let her do all the talking. People seemed to know her. Everyone did. Maybe, if I’d taken my mask off, they’d have known me, too. Sometimes, I wished I could. Breathing wasn’t necessary, but having a piece of thick leather attached to your face was still uncomfortable.

  The third week, we went two days without speaking. Not one of us said a single word. We weren’t tired physically, but we were tired of the road.

  “Where are we now?” Tif asked while we ran.

  “Somewhere in Panama,” Bugz said.

  “Are you sure?” Lance said. “I think we already passed it.”