“Get the fuck out of here!” he snarled. “Now! Take your family and go!”
He didn’t look to see if they complied.
He slammed the thing’s head again, even harder that time. Throwing his whole weight down on the vampire’s chest to keep it more or less pinned, he gripped its hair in one fist.
Once he had it there, he didn’t wait. He dug the fingers of his other hand into the thing’s throat. Gripping the windpipe as tightly as he could––
He ripped it out with his bare hand.
Blood spurted up in a dark fountain, hitting Black square in the eyes, and the face.
He gasped, cursing, but didn’t let go of the creature under him. The vampire continued to thrash as wildly as before, but its hisses and growls turned liquid and wet, barely distinguishable from the sounds coming from its throat and lungs.
Reaching behind him to his belt, Black found the stake.
Jerking it out of the leather, he drove it down with all of his strength into the thing’s chest, right where the heart would be on a human.
The thing screamed.
It screamed and screamed, thrashing even more wildly than before.
Black leaned his weight into the stake, hitting it deeper into the thing’s chest.
When the vampire still didn’t seem to be dead, or even dying, despite its weaker movements, Black yanked the wooden stake out of its chest.
That time, he reached in with his hand, through the opening––
And yanked out its heart.
4
IT’S A WORK THING
HE WAS STILL half-lying on the thing, gasping, its heart in his hand when a voice by the door got him to turn his head.
Black blinked, turning towards the sound, still holding up the heart he’d ripped out of the vampire’s chest with his bare hand.
It only occurred to him then that the thing below him had stopped moving.
The voice was openly shocked. It was also familiar enough to pull Black out of his trance.
“Jesus Christ, Black.”
Manny stood there, disbelief and horror visible in his dark eyes as he stared. He looked from Black to the dead thing on the ground, bleeding into the wood, then back to Black.
“What the hell did you do?” he said, bewildered.
Black blinked, staring up at him. Still half-astride the now unmoving corpse of the vampire, he looked at the heart gripped in his hand, then back up at Manny.
“Stakes don’t work,” he said.
Manny gaped, staring at him now like he was a serial killer.
Grimacing at the heart gripped in his fingers, Black slowly put it down on the floor by the thing’s body, letting it fall to the wood with a heavy-sounding thud. He stared down at it, then at his hand once he’d managed to separate it from his fingers.
Even its heart was all wrong.
It was the wrong color, the wrong texture, the wrong shape. It looked like a shriveled human heart, only darker and harder, as if it was cancerous. Its blood was too dark, too thick, too sticky, as if more than half of the water and life had been leached out of it.
A different voice jerked him out of his trance that time, pulling his eyes off the heart lying on the wood, still pulsing slightly, although less-so now than when Black first pulled it out of the thing’s chest.
“You were supposed to talk to it,” Red said, his voice disbelieving, and a lot angrier than Manny’s had been. “Not kill it. What the fuck happened?”
Black scowled.
Pulling himself slowly to his feet, still keeping his bloody hands more or less away from his body, despite the fact that he was covered in the thing’s blood from the spray from its throat and chest, he motioned a bloody hand toward the open door of the jail cell.
“What happened?” he growled. “Your jail cell is from 1842, that’s what happened.”
Seeing Red and Manny exchange frowns, Black’s own frown deepened. He motioned towards the body lying on the floor, then back at the now-empty jail cell.
“The fucking thing lunged at me. The next thing I knew, I was fighting for my damned life.” He glared at Manny, then even harder at Red. “What the hell did you expect me to do? Let it eat me? Or were you thinking it would stop after it got a few good swallows in?”
Manny was frowning at Red now.
“How the hell did it get out?” he said.
“Good question,” Black retorted. “I’m beginning to feel decidedly unwelcome here.”
Red ignored him, walking up to the cell door. He looked at the metal latch, which was broken back, showing where it snapped when the vampire slammed up against it. Looking at the straight edge there, Red frowned harder.
“I don’t think it was cut,” he said. “Could that thing really have snapped the metal like that?” He looked back at Manny. “Your Colonel, did he mention anything like this? About them being this strong? I know you said they were stronger than people, but I wasn’t under the impression that meant it could break steel locks.”
Black walked over to where Red stood, still keeping his hands away from his body and now away from Red. Looking down at the latch Red was fingering, Black scowled.
“There was something wrong with the damned thing,” he said, glancing up from the lock to meet gazes with Manny. He slowly shook his head. “Granted, I’ve only been aware vampires existed for a relatively short period of time… but I’ve never seen one act like that before.”
“What do they normally act like?” Manny said, resting his hands on his hips.
“Like people, more or less,” Black said. “Really sociopathic, bloodthirsty and ruthless people… but people. I honestly don’t know if that thing didn’t speak English or if it was just batshit crazy.”
“Did you get anything else off it, before it attacked?” Manny said, still frowning, but listening now. “You know… with your psychic thing.”
Black shook his head, once. “No. I told you. I can’t read them…”
He trailed as something else occurred to him.
Walking back to the dead vampire, he bent over it, then knelt down, staring at its clothes. Close up, they looked even stranger than they had when he’d looked at the thing inside the cell. Frowning, he looked at his blood-covered hands, then back down at the vampire. He didn’t want to destroy more of the material than he already had, or foul up any other possible evidence.
“You got a sink in here?” he said.
He glanced at Red when he said it, but Elsie answered from by the door.
“This way. Come with me.”
Pulling himself to his feet, again without using his hands, Black walked to the doorway of the holding area and followed her back into the main constable’s office.
He was relieved to see the little girl was still asleep, now curled up on a padded bench by the wall behind one of the desks.
Elsie walked him to a small bathroom on the opposite side of the station, flicking a switch on the outside wall, probably to turn on the bathroom light.
Nodding to her once she opened the door for him, he walked in, and fumbled with the old-fashioned porcelain handles to the sink.
He was already halfway done with washing up when he glanced up at the mirror.
That sticky dark blood speckled his face and hair, covering his neck, his jaw, and the leather duster from his chest to his upper abdomen. He even had some in his ears.
Grimacing at his reflection, he covered his hands in the liquid antibacterial soap they had on the counter over the sink, then did his best to scrub every bit of the vampire’s blood off his skin, wetting his hair and wiping out his ears.
He even tried wiping down Manny’s leather duster, but it was harder to see the blood on that, given that it was nearly black in color and the flickering yellow light of the bathroom was relatively dim.
Eventually, he decided he’d done as much as he could.
Washing his hands a final time and wiping off the leather coat, he turned away from the sink, leaving the small ding
y bathroom with the water stains on the ceiling and tiles and closing the door behind him.
When he did, he found Manny, Elsie and Red standing in the main room with all the desks, staring at him.
“What are you going to do with the body?” Black said, wiping his face with a hand.
Elsie grunted, folding her arms. “We’ve got someone coming.”
Black nodded, choosing not to react to the disbelief in her eyes as she stared at him.
“You want to tell us what happened in there?” Red said, more or less mirroring his wife’s stare. He leaned his rear against the nearest desk, folding his arms, his lips curled in a frown. “What the hell did you say to it?”
Black felt his jaw harden.
Combing a hand through his damp hair, he decided he was done playing footsie with Red and his wife, and fielding any more stupid questions. He was done playing nice with the locals, period, even if he did love Manny a lot.
“Are they all like this?” He used his work voice––stripped of humor, of even sarcasm, much less any willingness to go there with Red or his wife. He glanced at Manny. “Is this the first one you’ve tried to talk to?”
“What difference does that make––” Red began, his voice annoyed.
“Are they all this aggressive?” Black cut in. “Do any of them fucking speak?”
That time, Elsie and Red glanced at one another, their eyebrows going up slightly.
“I don’t know––” Red began.
“When did they show up here?” Black said. “When was the first sighting? The first kill?”
Again, Red frowned, but his face grew more serious. “A little over two weeks. They took one of the Martinez kids while she was coming back from her cousin’s house.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Her mother––” Elsie began, her voice showing her to be as baffled as Red by Black’s change in tone.
“I’ll need to talk to her tomorrow,” Black cut in. “If she’s around.”
Still frowning, hands on his hips, he stared at the wooden floor of the police station, thinking. “We’ll need a fabric sample of what he’s wearing. A couple different layers.”
“What he’s wearing?” Red said. “Why?”
Black looked up, his eyes hard. “Because there’s something wrong with his clothes. Do they all dress like that? With the hats? The designs that don’t look quite right?”
Again, Red and Elsie exchanged looks.
“More or less,” Red said after a beat. “We figured it was some religious group at first.” Still thinking, he added, “We get those out here every now and then. White people, mostly. Tourists. We figured it was something like that, like they had a kind of dress code.”
“Send it to Santa Fe,” Black advised. “Or Albuquerque, wherever. Give it to your old pals in the F.B.I. I want to send a few samples to my people, too.”
Red seemed to have recovered from his shock over the change in Black’s demeanor, or maybe he’d just flipped the switch that put him back into cop mode, as well.
Either way, he turned towards the desk behind him and picked up the landline phone, dialing a number from memory. As he began to speak to whoever picked up on the other end of the line, Black glanced at Manny, then at Elsie, who was watching him more carefully now, like she was assessing him anew.
Manny, on the other hand, looked at him in open relief.
From his expression, this was the Black he’d wanted out here.
This was the Black he’d called Nick and the Colonel about.
“I’m going to need my wife out here,” Black said. “There’s something off about these things. It’s possible it’s physiological, but it might be psychological, too. She’s the only psychologist I know who’s actually interacted with vampires.”
Manny’s lips pursed in a humorless smile. “She have much experience in diagnosing their mental disorders?” he mused.
“More than you’d think,” Black grunted.
Frowning, he stared at the floor, hands still on his hips.
After a pause, he clicked under his breath, shaking his head.
“Something about this is bugging me,” he admitted. “I don’t want the Colonel coming in here until I figure out what it is.” Looking up, he met Manny’s gaze. “If there’s a whole other strain of vampirism out there, or a whole other ‘breed,’ I want to know. Preferably before the Pentagon’s scientists get their hands on them.”
Manny, now watching him cautiously, nodded slowly.
“I get that,” he said.
“So do I,” Red said, hanging up the phone he’d been on and turning. “And we’d prefer that too, frankly.” He exchanged a meaningful look with his wife. “Nothing against your military friends of course,” he said politely. “But we prefer to handle things internally. Even something like this. At least until we can’t.”
Black nodded, once.
He got that. He wasn’t completely ignorant of the history between the Feds and the Tribal Authority, although he didn’t know a ton of details from the modern era.
His friends in that Louisiana shit-hole had plenty to say about the Feds.
Thinking about them, he frowned again.
He could use some guys who were good in a fight. Maybe he’d ask around about Frank and Easton, too, see if they were living somewhere around here. He’d rather have someone around he knew anyway, and who wasn’t directly connected to this town.
Still thinking, he turned to Manny. “I need a shower. Then I need to call my wife. Can I do both things at your place?”
Manny smiled, holding out a hand for the door.
“Right this way, brother,” he said with a smile.
Black grunted. Maybe the first time, he gave his friend a genuine smile back.
“THIS IS A work thing,” he said, keeping his voice as level and calm as he could. “It’s a fucking work thing, Miri. I didn’t plan this. I would have never come, frankly, if I’d known what this was. But I’m here now, and he’s a friend of mine––”
“You said that.”
Black fell silent, staring out at the darkness of the desert from Manny’s back porch.
He sat on the top step of a rickety staircase, half-leaning on a wooden railing that desperately needed a coat of paint. Apparently this side of the house got hit by most of the wind, since a lot of it seemed pitted by sand and small rocks.
“I really didn’t plan this, Miri,” he said.
“You said that, too, Black.”
Clenching his jaw, he combed his fingers through his hair, forcing an exhale.
“You can stay at my suite,” he said. “In Santa Fe. Cowboy and Angel are there… you can hang out with them, use the spa and restaurant, hang out by the pool. They can drive you wherever you need to go, or you can get a car from the concierge and drive yourself. You don’t even have to see me.”
“Because you’ll be staying out there?” she said.
Her voice remained stripped of emotion, impossible to read.
“…You’re staying in the town overrun with vampires,” she clarified. “Vampires you think might have some kind of disease or mental problem. Or that might be a different sub-species of vampire. Is that right?”
She paused meaningfully.
Black didn’t break the silence.
He could feel she wasn’t finished.
“Insanely strong vampires,” she added. “Like the one that almost killed you tonight. While you were questioning it. Drunk. With your army buddy who’s like seventy years old and couldn’t have helped you even if he wanted to. Do I have all that right?”
Black exhaled, gazing back out over the flat terrain.
A large, yellow-tinted moon was rising up over the horizon, slightly north of due east. The light was broken up by distant rock formations as it spilled over the desert, making those formations look like dinosaurs walking across the surface of the moon.
“Miri, I’m sorry.” Shaking his head, he stared sightlessly at the dirt below the s
tairs. “I’m telling you more or less when I found out. But he’s my friend. I could just leave here if you want, just walk away. They offered to take me back in the morning––”
“Are you asking me, Black?” Her voice now held a discernible edge. “Are you really asking me if you should stay there, when you know you have a problem with those things?”
He could almost see her now.
He could see her gritted teeth, her stunning, hazel eyes flashing as she fought to speak calmly to him, to be the rational one, if only to keep from turning this into a full-blown fight. He could feel the heaviness in her light too, how him even calling her had depressed the shit out of her already. Pain rippled his light, bringing up a deeper swell of nausea.
“Gaos, Miri.” He rubbed his face with a hand. “I miss you so much.”
She clicked at him, which only worsened his pain.
“Black. Don’t go there.”
“It’s true,” he said. “It’s fucking true. I know you don’t want me to say it, but it’s true.”
He felt another ripple of heat off her light.
He could feel her light over the phone, through the light-bond they shared between them, stronger and stronger with every second that passed where she didn’t hang up on him. He could feel glimmers of her anger, but he felt that darker grief more and more, the longer her silences stretched. Even so, he couldn’t leave her light alone.
He couldn’t even back off it really.
“I’ll leave,” he said. “I’ll leave right now. Tell me to leave, Miri, and I will.”
She grunted a laugh.
There was zero humor in it.
“I will leave, if you want me to,” he insisted. “Or you can come, and keep an eye on me. No secrets. No ops or plans you’re not included in––you’re in everything from the ground floor. Everything I know, you’ll know. I just want to get a look at these things before the Colonel comes and drops bombs on half the reservation to kill them.”
“Why not call Charles?” she said, her voice still cold. “Why me, Black?”
“Because I want your professional opinion. I need it, Miriam.”
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 7
