“Jerome!” Dad yelled. “Stop my—”
The end of that sentence was going to be son, and I couldn’t let him put Jerome back in the game or this was over before it started.
So I punched my father full in the face. Hard. With all the rage and resentment that I’d stored up over the years, and all the anguish, and all the fear. The shock rattled every bone in my body, and my whole hand sent up a red flare of distress. My knuckles split open.
Dad hit the floor, eyes rolling back in his head. I stood there for a second, feeling oddly cold and empty, and saw his eyelids flutter.
He wouldn’t be out for long.
I moved quickly across the room, past Jerome, who was still frozen in place, and opened the door to the cell. “Michael?” I crouched down across from him, and my friend shook gold hair back from his white face and stared at me with eerie, hungry eyes.
I held up my wrist, showing him the bracelet. “Promise me, man. I get you out of here, no biting. I love you, but no.”
Michael laughed hoarsely. “Love you too, bro. Get me the hell out of here.”
I set to work with the crowbar, pulling up floorboards and gouging the eyebolts out for each set of chains. I’d been right; my dad was too smart to make chains out of solid silver. Too soft, too easy to break. These were silver-plated—good enough to do the job on Michael, if not one of the older vamps.
I only had to pull up the first two; Michael’s vampire strength took care of yanking the others from the floor.
Michael’s eyes flared red when I leaned closer, trying to help him up, and before I knew what was happening, he’d wrapped a hand around my throat and slammed me down, on my back, on the floor. I felt the sting of sharp nails in my skin, and saw his eyes fixed on the cut on my head.
“No biting,” I said again, faintly. “Right?”
“Right,” Michael said, from somewhere out beyond Mars. His eyes were glowing like storm lanterns, and I could feel every muscle in his body trembling. “Better get that cut looked at. Looks bad.”
He let me up, and moved with about half his usual vampire speed to the door. Dad might not let Jerome have at me, but he wasn’t going to hold back with Michael, and Michael was—at best—half his normal strength right now. Not exactly a fair fight.
“Michael,” I said, and put my back against the wall next to him. “We go together, straight to the window. You get out, don’t wait for me. The sun should be down far enough that you can make it to the car.” I gathered up a handful of silver chain and wrapped it around my hand. “Don’t even think about arguing right now.”
He sent me an are-you-kidding look, and nodded.
We moved fast, and together. I got in Jerome’s way and delivered a punch straight from the shoulder right between his teeth, reinforced with silver-plated metal.
I only intended to knock him back, but Jerome howled and stumbled, hands up to ward me off. It was like years fell away, and all of a sudden we were back in junior high again-him the most popular bully in school, me finally getting enough size and muscle to stand up to him. Jerome had made that same girly gesture the first time I’d hit back.
It threw me off.
A crossbow bolt fired from the far corner of the living room hissed right over my head and slammed to a vibrating stop in the wooden wall. “Stop!” Dad ordered hoarsely. He was on his knees, but he was up and very, very angry. He was also reloading, and the next shot wouldn’t be a warning.
“Get out!” I screamed at Michael, and if he was thinking about staging a reenactment of the gunfight at the OK Corral, he finally saw sense. He jumped through the nearest window in a hail of glass and hit the ground running. I’d been right. (The sun was down, or close enough that it wouldn’t hurt him too badly.
He made it to the car, opened the driver’s side door, and slid inside. I heard the roar as the engine started. “Shane!” he yelled. “Come on!”
“In a second,” I yelled back. I stared at my father, and the moving tattoo. He had the crossbow aimed right at my chest. I twirled the crowbar in one hand, the silver chain in the other. “So,” I said, watching my father. “Your move, Dad. What now? You want me to do a cage match with Dead Jerome? Would that make you happy?”
My dad was staring not at me, but at Dead Jerome, who was cowering in the corner. I’d hurt him, or the silver had; half his face was burned and rotting, and he was weeping in slow, retching sobs.
I knew the look Dad was giving him. I’d seen it on my father’s face more times than I could count. Disappointment.
“My son,” Dad said in disgust. “You ruin everything.”
“I guess Jerome’s more your son than I am,” I said. I walked toward the front door. I wasn’t going to give my father the satisfaction of making me run. I knew he had the crossbow in his hands, and I knew it was loaded.
I knew he was sighting on my back.
I heard the trigger release, and the ripped-silk hiss of wood traveling through air. I didn’t have time to be afraid, only—like my dad—bitterly disappointed.
The crossbow bolt didn’t hit me. Didn’t even miss me.
When I turned, at the door, I saw that he’d put the crossbow bolt, tipped with silver, through Jerome’s skull. Jerome slid silently down to the floor. Dead. Finally, mercifully dead.
The Wizard of Oz fell face down next to his hand.
“Son,” my dad said, and put the crossbow aside. “Please, don’t go. I need you. I really do.”
I shook my head.
“This thing—it’ll only last another few days,” he said. “The tattoo. It’s already fading. I don’t have time for this, Shane. It has to be now.”
“Then I guess you’re out of luck.”
He snapped the crossbow up again.
I ducked to the right, into the parlor, jumped the wreckage of a couch, and landed on the cracked, curling floor of the old kitchen. It smelled foul and chemical in here, and I spotted a fish tank on the counter, filled with cloudy liquid. Next to it was a car battery.
DIY silver plating equipment, for the chains.
There was also a 1950s-era round-shouldered fridge, rattling and humming.
I opened it.
Dad had stored Michael’s blood in bottles, old dirty milk bottles likely scavenged from the trash heap in the corner. I grabbed all five bottles and threw them one at a time out the window, aiming for a big upthrusting rock next to a tree.
Smash. Smash. Smash. Smash. . . .
“Stop,” Dad spat. In my peripheral vision I saw him standing there, aiming his reloaded crossbow at me. “I’ll kill you, Shane. I swear I will.”
“Yeah? Lucky you’ve already got me tattooed on your chest, then, with the rest of the dead family.” I pulled back for the throw.
“I could bring back your mother,” Dad blurted. “Maybe even your sister. Don’t.”
Oh, God. Sick black swam across my vision for a second.
“You throw that bottle,” he whispered, “and you’re killing their last chance to live.”
I remembered Jerome—his sagging muscles, his grainy skin, the panic and fear in his eyes.
Do you want to be here?
No. Hurts.
I threw the last bottle of Michael’s blood and watched it sail straight and true, to shatter in a red spray against the rock.
I thought he’d kill me. Maybe he thought he’d kill me too. I waited, but he didn’t pull the trigger.
“I’m fighting for humanity,” he said. His last, best argument. It had always won me over before.
I turned and looked him full in the face. “I think you already lost yours.”
I walked out past him, and he didn’t stop me.
Michael drove like a maniac, raising contrails of caliche dust about a mile high as we sped back to the main highway. He kept asking me how I was doing. I didn’t answer him, just looked out at the gorgeous sunset, and the lonely, broken house fading in the distance.
We blasted past the Morganville city limits sign, and one
of the ever-lurking police cars cut us off. Michael slowed, stopped, and turned off the engine. A rattle of desert wind shook the car.
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s dangerous.”
“I know that.”
“I can’t just let this go. Did you see—”
“I saw,” I said. “I know.” But he’s still my father, some small, frightened kid inside me wailed. He’s all I have.
“Then what do you want me to say?” Michael’s eyes had faded back to blue, now, but he was still white as a ghost, blue-white, scary-white. I’d spilled all his blood out there on the ground. The burns on his hands and wrists made my stomach clench.
“Tell them the truth,” I said. If the Morganville vampires got to my dad before he could get the hell out, he’d die horribly, and God knew, he probably deserved it. “But give him five minutes, Michael. Just five.”
Michael stared at me, and l couldn’t tell what was in his mind at all. I’d known him most of my life, but in that long moment, he was just as much of a stranger as my father had been.
A uniformed Morganville cop tapped on the driver’s side window. Michael rolled it down. The cop hadn’t been prepared to find a vampire driving, and I could see him amending the harsh words he’d been about to deliver.
“Going a little fast, sir,” he finally said. “Something wrong?”
Michael looked at the burns on his wrists, the bloodless slices on his arms. “Yeah,” he said. “I need an ambulance.”
And then he slumped forward, over the steering wheel. The cop let out a squawk of alarm and got on his radio. I reached out to ease Michael back. His eyes were shut, but as I stared at him, he murmured, “You wanted five minutes.”
“I wasn’t looking for a Best Supporting Actor award!” I muttered back.
Michael did his best impression of Vampire in a Coma for about five minutes, and then came to and assured the cop and arriving ambulance attendants he was okay.
Then he told them about my dad.
They found Jerome, still and evermore dead, with a silver-tipped arrow through his head. They found a copy of The Wizard of Oz next to him.
There was no sign of Frank Collins.
Later that night—around midnight—Michael and I sat outside on the steps of our house. I had a bottle of most illegal beer; he was guzzling his sixth bottle of blood, which I pretended not to notice. He had his arm around Eve, who had been pelting us both with questions all night in a nonstop machine gun patter; she’d finally run down, and leaned against Michael with sleepy contentment.
Well, she hadn’t quite run down. “Hey,” she said, and looked up at Michael with big, dark-rimmed eyes. “Seriously. You can bring back dead guys with vampire juice? That is so wrong.”
Michael almost spit out the blood he was swallowing. “Vampire juice? Damn, Eve. Thanks for your concern.”
She lost her smile. “If I didn’t laugh, I’d scream.”
He hugged her. “I know. But it’s over.”
Next to me, Claire had been quiet all night. She wasn’t drinking—not that we’d have let her, at sixteen—and she wasn’t saying much, either. She also wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out at the Morganville night.
“He’s coming back,” she finally said. “Your dad’s not going to give it up, is he?”
I exchanged a look with Michael. “No,” I said. “Probably not. But it’ll be a while before he gets his act together again. He expected to have me to help him kick off his war, and like he said, his time was running out. He’ll need a brand-new plan.”
Claire sighed and linked her arm through mine. “He’ll find one.”
“He’ll have to do it without me.” I kissed the soft, warm top of her hair.
“I’m glad,” she said. “You deserve better.”
“News flash,” I said. “I’ve got better. Right here.”
Michael and I clinked glasses, and toasted our survival.
However long it lasted.
The Ghost of Leadville
Jeanne C. Stein
Jeanne Stein is the best-selling author of the urban fantasy series, The Anna Strong Chronicles, but “The Ghost of Leadville” is a different sort of fantasy. Set primarily in the past it features a historical character—Doc Holliday—who was a legend in his own lifetime and later became part of a larger mythology. You don’t have to be a vampire to achieve a form of immortality.
Stein lives in Denver (which isn’t far from Leadville) where she is active in the writing community, belonging to Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. In 2008 she was named RMFW’s Writer of the Year and last year, her character, Anna Strong, received a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best Urban Fantasy Protagonist. The sixth in the Anna Strong series, Chosen, was released in August 2010. She has numerous short story credits, as well. She is also one of the editors of RMFW’s award-winning anthology, Broken Links, Mended Lives.
My name is Rose Sullivan. Although I’ve been on the earth for two hundred years, I was turned on my twenty-fifty birthday. I am eternally frozen in the physical form of a twenty-five year old. Blond hair, blue eyes, five feet two inches tall, one hundred pounds. I am small in stature which means men sometimes make the mistake of thinking a childish mind resides in this rather childish body. They only make the mistake once. I am preternaturally strong, as are all vampires, and have no tolerance toward those who try to intimidate me—or others. If I see an injustice, it is in my nature to correct it.
It isn’t always easy being vampire. There are rules to be followed. Most humans are unaware of our existence. Just as they are unaware of other supernatural beings living amongst them. It has to be. The great secret must be preserved. Humanity has shown how it reacts to that which it does not understand. Destroy first. Ask questions later.
And so I have survived as a vampire for two hundred years. Living in big cities, mostly. Able to last as long as forty years in one guise—the latest a museum curator in New York. My specialty was early Americana. Convenient since I was born to missionary parents in the American west in 1809.
But one can only do so much to disguise a face and body that do not age. It becomes apparent when all those around you take note of your “youthful” appearance that is time to move on. A hasty resignation because of “family problems,” a quick transfer of funds to whatever new identity I’ve adopted and a brief goodbye to the human hosts who have provided me sustenance during my stay. They, the few who are guardians of the secret, do not question. They are used to the plight of the vampire. They know to take the money and pleasure offered in return for blood and form no attachment. It has always been so.
And so I shed the skin of the old persona and adapt a new one in Leadville, Colorado in the year 2009.
I’ve decided this time around to eschew bright lights and settle into a quiet existence in a quiet little town. I’ve also decided to write a book. Why not? Look at a current bestseller list. The one hot topic on all the charts is vampire romance. Who is in a better position to write about vampire romance than a female vampire who has certainly experienced her share of romance? And besides, it’s a chance to set the record straight, albeit under the ruse of fiction, about many things having to do with living a modern vampire life. It’s not all bad. Not by a long shot.
There is another reason I chose to make this incarnation that of a writer. It’s a solitary existence. I’ve had my fill of city life and being forced to live among people. The smells, the noises, the desperation of a population trying to cram all of life into a few decades burdens the spirit of a vampire. I’m ready for a change.
I bought a nicely restored Victorian on the edge of Leadville. I stumbled on the place last year while on a research trip, visiting early mining sites in preparation for a museum exhibit. Leadville nestles in a fold of the Rocky Mountains, hidden, protected. At the height of the gold rush, fifty thousand called this place home. Now there are barely two thousand peop
le living here. The climate is harsh, the most often heard comment is that Leadville has two seasons—this winter and last winter. But temperature is irrelevant to a vampire. And Leadville’s one lasting claim to fame is an opera house, built to entertain the miners during the long winter. It has been restored and opens its door to the public in the summer when a flock of faithful opera fans make the trek up from Denver to enjoy the old building’s perfect acoustics. It is a gentle reminder of a gentler time. I fell in love with it at first sight.
And so I find myself comfortably ensconced on my living room couch, laptop computer open, finger poised over the keys to begin this novelist’s journey. My eyes, however, keep drifting upwards, through the window at the other side of the room, drawn to the mountains rising like stark, grey monoliths against a cloudless November sky.
A familiar landscape.
Truth be told, this is not the first time I’ve lived in Leadville.
Memories flood back.
No, I lived here once before.
Leadville, 1884
Hyman’s Saloon
“Rose. Come on over here, gal. I have someone for you to meet.”
I look up. Sunny Tom’s face is wreathed in a grin, his dozen gold teeth flashing in the bar light like fireflies on a summer night.
Are you sure? I ask him. I’ve been keeping an eye on the poker table. Miners flush with gold dollars and full to the brim with whiskey are normally good for business. But when the cards turn against them, the whiskey takes over. Bullets are never good for business and at this moment, both the whiskey and the cards are turning against one youngster new to both. I raise an eyebrow at Tom. This could turn ugly.
He shrugs. He pay for his drinks?
A nod.
Then fuck him. This is more important.
My gaze sweeps over the slight figure of a man standing beside him. Sunny Tom is six feet tall, two hundred pounds. The stranger with him is maybe five foot ten, one hundred forty pounds. He’s dressed like a dandy, striped pants, white shirt, cravat with a diamond stickpin that winks at me as I approach. He has a hat in his hand and a big Colt revolver on his hip.
Vampires: The Recent Undead Page 17
