Heartbeat (Morta Fox Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  Five vampires were behind us, running like mad at full speed. I tried to keep my mind focused and think of nothing but how to move my legs faster. But their steps got clearer with every second, so I knew they were closing in on us. I thought about making Hammer let me go, but that hadn’t served me well at all the last time we were being chased. He’d stopped right after me.

  Oh, shit, we were in trouble.

  Fear and adrenaline collided inside my chest, making my body hyperventilate with too much energy, energy that couldn’t be spent by running and that was slowly wearing me down. They were closing in on us, and there was nothing I could think to do.

  Everything changed direction in front of me when something very strong pulled me to a stop. Suddenly, I felt hands on both sides of my waist, half a second before I got thrown up, at least fifteen feet above ground and landed on the rooftop of a one-story building. I slid down the bricks that broke under the intensity of my unexpected falling.

  What the…

  Ahead, I saw Hammer and five vampires—Dublin’s vampires. They had him surrounded.

  I couldn’t fucking believe it! He’d thrown me away in the literal sense of the word! He actually threw me away from danger.

  That man was messing with my mind like no one ever had.

  I looked around, God knows for what, but the fight that just started called my eyes to it. Hammer was fighting all five of them, singlehandedly.

  My God, the man was good. He was like movies good, like Bruce Lee good, like a freaking ninja. I didn’t even see him move most of the time. His fighting impressed me more than a hundred Manhattans could.

  Fear froze me after each kick and hit he got. He recovered fast, but there were five of them and only one Hammer.

  Alone, because he threw me on a roof, which translated into the words: I’ll handle this alone.

  Minutes later and I got over being numbed by fear and started to get a taste of anger. They kept coming at him over and over again, with no regard. Saying they didn’t fight fair was an understatement. They fought dirty, and Hammer was growing weak.

  I did nothing but look. He put me there for a reason. He knew I was a coward. But a vampire kicked him so hard on the chest that he flew up, only to be kicked on the back by the waiting foot of another vampire, and red filled my vision.

  Hammer fell on his stomach on the ground, and before he could get up, two lightning fast vampires buried their feet in his gut, over and over again. A cry escaped me because even in the deafening noise, I heard Hammer’s gasps of pain. I wanted to move, go to him, help him like he helped me so many times. But…

  But what?

  As I blinked, I realized, there were no buts left.

  No excuses. Fear was never an excuse, anyway. He was going to be pissed at me, but I’d rather I died with him than watch him die.

  I fell hard on the ground, and I ran forward. I grabbed a neck and threw a body aside. All I heard was Hammer’s gasps. He might’ve died, but I didn’t want to let him die alone. I’d take as many as I could with me, because he deserved it.

  And, lucky for me, I could kill with a bite. My teeth had been sharp from the second I was thrown against that roof, so I didn’t need a second longer to prepare. I saw leather, black shiny leather wrapped around a vampire’s arm, and I bit into it. It tasted bad. Real bad. But the rotten blood that touched the tip of my tongue was even worse.

  I spit it out as soon as my brain registered the taste. I got pulled by the hair, and sharp pain bit into my shoulder. Looking down, I saw the hilt of a small knife inside my flesh. I was going to reach for it and pull it out, but my legs got pulled from under me and I fell, hard on my back, right next to Hammer.

  His dark eyes widened when he saw me, because he was still on the ground on his stomach. He didn’t get a chance to say a word. Someone stepped onto me, quite literally, and took my breath away. My hands wrapped around the ankle of the leg, and I held on to it, waiting for the pain to subside, and the second it did, I saw nothing.

  I just bit. I think it was a knee. Bone broke with a loud crack, but I didn’t loosen my jaw until I got hit in the back of my head so hard, I lost my mind for a second and fell into darkness as if the sun had just come up.

  I smelled fire the second it lit. Its strong scent filled me with warmth. When I opened my eyes and saw the orange flames, dancing on three separate sticks, I felt almost drawn to them. I jumped forward, with no idea what to expect. So when the first stick touched my arm and my new cardigan caught fire, I jumped back and tried to pull it off.

  I never got the chance because a massive body hit me and threw me on the ground again, a few feet away, and another spicy feeling of pain hit me in the stomach. I knew without looking that it was a knife.

  But the body didn’t let me move, except for my legs. I figured, vampire or not, the guy was a guy, and guys always hurt if hit in the crotch. So I made it my mission to try and catch him between his legs.

  I did so, on the fifth or sixth try. I couldn’t feel any more pain, but I could think of Hammer. We were both going to die, but I was taking as many as I could with me.

  I’m already going to hell anyways, so I might as well act on my anger.

  The guy, though I hurt him, didn’t get off me. Since his face was above mine, the second he lost a little focus, I reached up and bit him on the cheek. The strangest thing I ever thought to do. But a second later and I felt his weight increasing, and I knew he was going limp. I simply pushed him to the side.

  The second he was off me, I went for the two knives that were still in my body. I should’ve thought to look up first, because the two remaining, burning sticks fell right on my lap. I jumped up and back as far as I could, and I made it with just a few flames on my new pants. The fuckers just had to ruin my new outfit.

  I heard them step on either side of me—two vampires, while I tried to put out the flames on my thighs. I also heard them reach out and grab at me, both at the same time. I didn’t need to do much, just take half a step back. They grabbed each other’s hands instead. Once they did, I grabbed their wrists to hold them in place. They weren’t going anywhere now.

  It felt like my hands were made of steel. And when I did bite them, my upper teeth sank on one hand, and my lower ones sank on the other.

  I felt the two different tastes of cold, rotten blood, and I had the urge to vomit. But when I let go, my knees felt weak, and I fell on my butt.

  I waited for whoever was next to grab me, thinking, I at least got to kill some of them. As revenge for what they did to Hammer. Good thing my teeth killed. Otherwise I would’ve been gone before I could’ve said my name.

  “Morta…” I recognized the whisper as Hammer’s voice. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry I let him take all the hits alone, but I couldn’t.

  “Morta, come here.”

  Confused, I opened my eyes. What I saw almost made me scream. There was no other vampire with open eyes except for Hammer near me. He was still lying on his stomach, his face turned to me.

  The others—all five of them—lay on all sides, looking even worse than Deed did when I bit him. I didn’t understand.

  “Morta, I need your help,” Hammer said, and the way his eyes squeezed shut when he spoke, I knew he was in a lot of pain.

  I rose to my knees and dragged myself to him, telling my eyes to not wander away from his face and see the horror that I’d left behind. I hadn’t even noticed doing it. I didn’t notice killing so many. Five. All of them.

  “Put me on my back,” Hammer said, and I did so, without question. I pulled his shoulder, and as gently as I could, I turned him.

  Two knives, exactly like the ones that were still inside me, were buried in his stomach. Blood had wetted his shirt all around them. I reached for them immediately.

  “No! No…no,” Hammer said and pushed my hands away. I looked down at my own body. I had one in the left shoulder and one on my stomach, but they didn’t hurt. In fact they had hurt insanely the second they went insid
e my body, but that had been about it. I put both my hands on the hilts, and I pulled them out of me at the same time. Pain sliced through my torso, all around, but it vanished as fast as it started.

  “You’re…you’re…” he said, and a smile actually spread on his face while he coughed. I put both my hands on his face.

  “Hammer, what do I do?” I had no idea. Should I call for help? Should I carry him inside? Did he need medicine or something?

  “Pull them…out,” he said, gasping. “But slowly. Very…”

  “Okay. Slowly. Got it. Okay,” I said and repositioned myself. I tried the hilts with my fingers, and I felt sick to my stomach. My wounds were healed, long forgotten, but this was Hammer and it just wasn’t the same to see him hurt.

  “Slowly…do it,” he whispered, as if every word that came out of him caused incredible pain. I nodded and tried again. I had to do it. If the knives caused him so much pain, they had to come out. I just needed to do it myself. Alone.

  “Okay…here we go. If you’re in too much pain, just groan or something. Okay, I’m going to touch them now,” I said and put my shaking palms around the hilts, slowly. Once that was done, I felt like I should talk again, so I did. “Now, I’m going to start pulling them out. If the pain is too much, just groan or whisper, if you can, or here….” I let go of one of the knives and took his hand in one of mine, “just squeeze my hand.”

  He smiled again, but it was a smile half filled with pain. I was going out of my mind, watching him like this. He let go of my hand and directed it to his stomach again. “Both, at the same—” he said, but I didn’t let him finish because I knew how much every word was costing him.

  “… time. Got it. I’m going to do it now. Hold on tightly.”

  I started to pull the knives out of him.

  His every muscle clenched. He let out low moans of pain, sounds that made me shiver. I almost felt every bit of the pain he felt when I removed the thin, pointy blades from his stomach. And when it was finally done, I couldn’t let go of them, throw them to the ground or farther away, and I couldn’t stop crying.

  Hammer sighed loudly, as if finally, he was able to breathe freely.

  He didn’t sit up for a while. He rested on the ground, and I sat there with my knees under me, looking at the wounds of his stomach that were healing way too slow for a normal vampire. I looked at the knives in wonder and wondered why the hell they hadn’t done anything to me. They looked so familiar. In fact, they were almost the same as the ones I’d found when I was still human. The ones I always carried with me back then.

  “Silver,” Hammer whispered when he saw the confusion on my face. Finally, I jerked my arms and threw the knives, far away from us.

  That was why the first vampire I ever saw had walked away from me. My knives had been made of silver, and I hadn’t even known it.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t feel that much pain when I had them in my body.”

  “Looks like you’re immune to silver,” Hammer said and reached for my hands that were folded on my lap. “Stop crying, Morta.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, wiping the falling tears from my cheeks.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Stop crying. I’ll be okay.”

  “The cuts are closed. Can you sit up?” I said, because I couldn’t see him lying there, looking so helpless.

  “Yeah,” he said, and he sat up, as slowly as an old man. He looked down at his stomach. “After I feed, I’ll be as good as new.”

  I flinched but didn’t say anything. Because when he drank from people, he drank with style. They never even knew something was up. And most importantly, they didn’t die. So I’d rather he took someone’s blood while doing no harm to them than that he left me alone in the dark.

  “Hammer, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I was going to say slow you down or not run fast enough, but he didn’t let me.

  “Morta, you just saved my life. There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said and squeezed my hand a little. We both looked around at the five dead bodies.

  My cardigan and pants were completely destroyed. I tried to straighten them with my hands, but they were no good anymore.

  “I’ll get you new ones. Don’t worry,” Hammer said, and it sounded like a promise.

  “They ruined the cardigan. It was perfect. So soft,” I said, touching the other shoulder, which wasn’t burnt but cut and bloodstained from where the knife had hit me.

  “Yeah, it was my favorite, too. I have another that’s similar. You’ll like it.”

  “This was yours?”

  “Yeah. I leave things, clothes and poison near every wall. I left this about two years ago, but it was as good as new when I found it again. It’s a shame. It suited you,” he said, looking down at my—his—cardigan.

  He stood up after that. I kept watching his face, waiting for him to maybe give a sign that he was still in as much pain as before. But he just looked tired.

  “You sure know how to leave a mess,” he mumbled with a grin, looking around at the five dead, spent bodies around us.

  “I didn’t really mean to…I didn’t even know that I killed them all until you called me. I thought…I was sure we were both going to die.”

  I didn’t feel as bad as I expected to when I looked at the bodies now. I’d have never done that if they hadn’t done what they did to Hammer, and if they hadn’t tried to kill me. It was self-defense, and I strangely felt pretty okay with it. They were vampires, anyway. Not humans.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said and laughed a little. He put his arm around my shoulders to lean against me, and we started to walk ahead. The sun was maybe half an hour away so we needed shelter fast.

  “Well, they hurt you, and they were going to kill us both, so…”

  “I would’ve been dead if it wasn’t for you,” he said before he planted a kiss on my forehead. My whole body covered in goose bumps.

  “You wouldn’t have been attacked at all if it wasn’t for me.”

  Those people were coming after me, and I knew it. Hammer knew it, too. That was why he threw me away in the first place.

  “I think I’d rather be attacked,” he mumbled.

  Was it just me, or did he mean that he’d rather be attacked than be without me?

  Oh, shit, shit, shit. It did seem like that.

  What to do, what to do, what to do?!

  “Just stay away from silver,” I finally said.

  “That, I’ll do. I’ll just use you as a shield next time,” he said with a grin.

  Impulse almost made me push my elbow in his gut, but thank God I managed to stop myself.

  “So, vampires die with fire.”

  It was obvious that the vampires I’d left dead wanted me to catch fire and burn with those sticks.

  “Yeah. And with a detached head.”

  “Is that how you’re going to kill me? Because I don’t like fire very much,” I said. It would hurt too much to burn alive. I would lose my mind long before death claimed me.

  Hammer didn’t answer. I felt the shiver that ran through him, and aside from holding me tighter against him, he didn’t elaborate on the way he was going to wipe me off the face of the earth for good.

  It was better that way. I didn’t really want to know the way I was going to die. Especially since, for the first time since my Lord turned me, I felt my chest tighten at the thought of leaving life behind.

  XX

  We found a place nearby. A basement, since half of the house that had once been bright orange in color was gone. But the place was dark, smelly and twenty feet underground. Perfect.

  I slept on Hammer’s chest again. But when I felt the sun set and my eyes opened, he wasn’t there.

  “Where the hell were you?” I hissed, the second I saw Bugz, sitting on the hood of a broken car, sipping her bourbon from the small bottle.

  “Getting the information we need to leave for Brazil,” she said, as if she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Do you know what
happened last night? Do you know that—”

  “Hammer almost got killed again?” She raised her brows at me. “Yeah. I also know that you killed all of them,” she said in disgust.

  “What the hell does that mean? They were going to kill Hammer,” I said, completely dumbfounded by the look on her face. Was she really mad at me for killing those vampires?

  “They would’ve never even attacked him if it wasn’t for you,” she hissed.

  “Well, they did!” I shouted. “And I’m here, okay? I’m sorry that I’ve ruined whatever plans you had with Hammer, but trust me when I tell you that I wouldn’t have been here if I was asked.”

  “Do you know that no one ever dared to even look Hammer straight in the face? Do you know what he went through to be where he is right now? How hard he worked to get the respect that everyone has for him? Or had, until yesterday,” she shouted back.

  “I don’t know! Of course I don’t know. I didn’t want those people to attack him.”

  “Nobody would dare attack him. And then they’re all over, everywhere he goes…” she mumbled.

  “I never asked him to protect me or vouch for me.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t have the urge to yell anymore. I believed every word Bugz said. To think how much I’d damaged Hammer since day one made it hard for me to breathe.

  “He knows they’re all after you. He knows that once the word gets out about what you can do, everyone will be looking for you.”

  Fear wasn’t a foreign emotion in my body, but its intensity had grown so much in the last few days. And the thought of other vampires coming after me and Hammer made my fingers twitch.

  “I didn’t ask for this, Bugz. I didn’t ask to be able to kill vampires.”

  I was about to surrender. She was right. Everything she said was true. It was my fault that Hammer almost got killed, twice.

  “Good thing you can. Or I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  Hammer’s voice came from ahead of us. The darkness made it impossible to see him clearly until he was ten feet away from us.

  He looked so good. I wanted to smile at how good he looked. He’d fed all right. The color had returned to his face, and he didn’t look tired at all. I wondered where on earth he had found a beating heart—other than mine—in this place, but I didn’t ask.