Vampires: The Recent Undead

by Harris, Charlaine; Russell, Karen; Kiernan, Caitlin R. ; Smith, Michael Marshall; Armstrong, Kelley; Caine, Rachel; Sizemore, Susan; Vaughn, Carrie; Black, Holly

  Given that Vicki made no move to stop her, Mike figured the odds of the portal opening were small.

  “Come on.” Ren beckoned to the others. “We need to be ready.”

  “But Ren, they’re cops!” the scared boy protested, hanging back as the other two joined her.

  “Their laws have no relevance here.”

  Mike sighed. The last things he wanted to do was spend the night arguing with teenagers. “Okay, guys, I get that you’re bored and looking for some excitement but at the very least this is trespassing so let’s just pack things up, promise to take up hobbies that don’t involve graveyards, and we’ll see you get home.”

  Ren ignored him. Spearing the scared boy with an imperious gaze, she snapped, “Cameron!”

  The scared boy ran to join the others just as the center of the chalked circle flared white then black then cleared to show a dark sky filled with stars too orange to be familiar. Mike thought he saw the dark silhouettes of buildings and was certain he could smell rotting meat.

  “We are so out of here,” Ren sneered as she stepped back through the circle pulling Cameron with her. An instant later, Vicki stood holding the black and silver hoodie of the unnamed girl as the other two followed.

  Almost immediately, someone began to scream.

  Cameron.

  The circle started to close. The first fifteen centimeters in from the white chalk line already returned to grubby stone and flaking mortar.

  Mike knew what Vicki was going to do before she did it. As he charged around the crypt—to stop her, to join her, he had no idea—she shot him a look that said half a dozen things he didn’t want to consider too closely and dove through a hole no more than a meter across. Then half a meter. He couldn’t follow.

  All four kids were screaming now.

  Vicki was stronger, faster, and damned hard to kill but in another world she might be no more of a threat than Cameron was.

  Barely a handspan of portal remained. Mike snapped his extra clip off his belt, threw it and his weapon as hard as he could into the dark, then stood staring at a blank stone wall.

  The silence was so complete he could hear the candles flickering on the crypt behind him.

  Vicki had no idea what the hell she was facing. It looked a bit like The Swamp Thing, only a phosphorescing gray with three large yellowing fangs about ten centimeters long—two on the top, one on the bottom across a wobbling lip from a jagged stub. It was big—three, three and a half meters high although it was hard to tell for certain given that it rested its weight on the knuckles of one clawed hand as it stuffed bits of Cameron into its mouth. The other three teenagers crouched among the rubble at the base of a crumbling wall and screamed.

  Moonlight and starlight reflected off the pale stone of the ruins, denying them the merciful buffer of full darkness. It was light enough, they’d seen their friend die.

  The scent of Cameron’s blood pulled the Hunger up and, although Vicki drew her lips back off her teeth and shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet, she held her position. She could do nothing for Cameron.

  If the creature was willing to move on, she’d let it.

  It wasn’t.

  The kids realized that the same time she did.

  On the bright side, as it lurched toward them, ramped up terror stopped the screaming.

  It roared and swatted at her as she raced up the closest pile of rubble, too slow to connect. When the rubble ended, she launched herself onto its shoulders, wrapping both hands around its head.

  Her fingers sank deep into rubbery flesh but got a grip on the bone beneath as she twisted. Back home, bipedal meant a spine and a spinal column but she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Nothing cracked.

  It wrapped a hand around her leg.

  Snarling, she wrapped her hand in turn around one of the upper fangs, snapping it off at the base and jabbing it deep into the creature’s neck as it yanked her off its shoulders. The flesh parted like tofu wrapped in rubber and it essentially cut its own throat.

  Just before she hit the ground, Vicki realized that the orange fluid spilling from the gash was not what she knew as blood.

  One problem at a time! She rolled with the impact and bounced up onto her feet ready for round two.

  Rising up to its full height, throat gaping, it staggered back a step. Cameron’s leg fell from lax fingers. It wobbled in place for a moment, then it collapsed with an entirely unsatisfactory squelch.

  Under normal circumstances, Vicki’d make sure it was dead but nothing about this even approached normal so she turned instead to check on the kids. Heads down, huddled close and weeping, all three still cowered at the base of the wall. Stepping toward them, she kicked something that skittered across the uneven pavement.

  The 19 round magazine for a Glock 17.

  Mike’s scent clung to it.

  A heartbeat later she had the Glock in her hand. He hadn’t been able to follow her through the contracting portal so he’d . . .

  Which was when it hit her.

  Even through the nearly overpowering scent of Cameron’s blood, Vicki knew exactly where she’d first touched the ground in this new world. There was no sign of the portal.

  No way to get . . .

  The air currents against her cheek changed. She threw herself down and to the side as an enormous flock of black, featherless birds dropped out of the sky—those that could landing on the fallen creature, the rest, circling, waiting for their chance to feed.

  Scavengers. With curved raptor beaks, they ripped off chunks of flesh, fighting challengers for their place on the corpse with the bone spurs on the tips of their pterodactyl-like wings. About a dozen fought over the pieces of Cameron.

  They weren’t particularly large, but there was one hell of a lot of them.

  A shriek of pain brought her back up onto her feet and racing toward the kids. Denied their place at the feast, a few of the birds were making a try for fresher meat, wheeling and diving and easily avoiding Ren’s flailing arms. Vicki could smell fresh blood. One of the kids had taken a hit.

  Twisting her head just far enough to avoid a bone spur ghosting past her cheek, she grabbed the attacking bird out of the air, crushed it, tossed it aside. And then another. And then she was standing over the kids, with blood that wasn’t blood dripping from her hands, teeth bared, killing anything that came close enough.

  After a few moments, nothing did.

  Recognizing a predator, those scavengers not feeding pulled back to circle over the corpse.

  Ren screamed when Vicki turned toward her.

  “Be quiet!” Vicki snapped, giving thanks for the whole Prince of Darkness thing when Ren gave one last terrified hiccup and fell silent. Considering the welcome they’d already had, the odds were very good screaming would not attract bunnies and unicorns. “Now do whatever it is you have to do to get us the hell out of here.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “Open the portal that’ll take us home.” Vicki gave her points for looking in the right direction but, given Ren’s rising panic, didn’t wait for a response. “You can’t, can you?” She kept her tone matter-of-fact, used it to smack the panic back down, didn’t let her own need to scream out denial show. “Not from this side.”

  “We weren’t going to go back.” Ren waved a trembling hand at the corpse and the scavengers and the sky of red stars. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

  “Yeah, well, surprise.” A scavenger with more appetite than survival instinct tried to take a piece out of the top of her head and Vicki crushed it almost absently, wiping her hand on her jeans as she watched the circling birds. Some of them were flying fairly high. They’d be visible as silhouettes against the night to anyone—or anything—with halfway decent vision. It reminded her of lying on the sofa with Mike, soaking up his warmth, and watching television . . .

  “They’re going to draw other scavengers. The way vultures do. Maybe other predators. We have to find cover.”

 
“How do you know that?”

  “Animal Planet.”

  “But you’re a . . . ” Even though she was clearly fine with poking holes into other realities, Ren couldn’t seem to say it.

  This was neither the time nor the place for denial.

  “Vampire. Nightwalker. Member of the bloodsucking undead.” Vicki frowned, trying to remember the rest and coming up blank. Three would have to do. “I have cable. And I’m your best bet if you want to survive this little adventure.” Hand on the girl’s shoulder, Vicki could feel her trembling but whether it was from Cameron’s grizzly death or the proximately to one of Humanity’s ancient terrors there was no way to be sure. Unfortunately, Vicki had no time for kindness that didn’t involve keeping these three kids alive.

  No time to give into fear of her own.

  She studied the area, for the first time able to look beyond the immediate need to kill. This wasn’t the night she knew. The portal had opened on a broad street that looked a bit like University Avenue by way of a hell dimension, the paving cracked and buckled. The closest stone buildings were ruins but some offered more shelter than others. The solidest of the lot was on the other side of the corpse—not worth the risk—but about two hundred meters away, where the road began a long sweeping arc to the left, was a structure that still had a second and third floor even though the actual roof was long gone. Better still, it looked as the though the colonnaded entrance had partially collapsed leaving an opening too small to admit Cameron’s killer—or more specifically, under the circumstances, its friends and family.

  “There.” She pointed with her free hand, giving Ren a little shake to focus her. “We need to get those two up and moving and into that building. What are their names?”

  “I don’t . . . ”

  “What? You don’t know?”

  “Of course I know!” A hint of the girl who’d faced them in the tomb emerged in response to Vicki’s mocking tone. Vicki gave herself a mental high five; anger wouldn’t hobble the way fear would. “Their names are Gavin and Star.”

  “Star? Seriously?”

  “What’s wrong with Star?” Ren demanded, jerking her shoulder out from under Vicki’s hand. “It’s her name and it’s better than the dumbass name her mother gave her!”

  Vicki didn’t care who gave her the name, as long as she answered to it.

  Gavin had a long, oozing cut along the top of his forehead and she let the scent of fresh blood block the stink coming from the creature’s corpse as unfamiliar internal organs were exposed. The kid’s eyes were squeezed shut and he had both arms wrapped around Star. Star’s eyes were open, her pupils so dilated the blue was no more than a pale halo around the black. Calling their names had little effect.

  Vicki could feel terror rising off them like smoke.

  Given what a joy this place had been so far, if she could feel it, so could other things.

  She could work with terror if she had to. When she snarled, Star blinked and focused on her face. Gavin opened his eyes. As she pulled her lips back off her teeth, she could hear their hearts begin to pound faster and faster as adrenaline flooded their system. She was a terror they understood. Hauling them onto their feet, she pointed them the right way and growled, “Run.”

  Hindbrains took over.

  Stumbling and crying, they ran.

  Ren shot her a look that promised retribution, and raced to catch up.

  “So a teenage girl opened a portal to another reality on the wall of a mausoleum, went through with her friends and Vicki followed them then the portal closed—is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Are you bullshitting me?”

  “Why the fuck would I joke about something like that,” Mike growled into his phone.

  Thousands of kilometers away in Vancouver, Tony Foster sighed. “Yeah. Good point. Okay, it’s eleven now, if I can get on the first plane out in the morning, I won’t be there until around three in the afternoon, given the time difference, so . . . ”

  “Too long.” Over the years, Mike had heard more screaming than he was happy admitting to. The kid on the other side of the portal had been screaming in pain, not fear. Not under threat; under attack. And Vicki had landed right into the middle of it. “You need to reopen that thing, now.”

  “Over the phone?”

  “Now,” Mike repeated. Years ago, Tony Foster had been Vicki’s best set of eyes and ears on the street then Henry fucking Fitzroy had gotten his bloodsucking undead self wrapped up in the kid’s life and Tony’d headed out west with them while Henry taught Vicki how to handle the change. After Vicki’d come home, Tony’d stayed with Henry. Next thing Mike knew, Tony’d actually had the balls to walk away and make a life for himself—a life that included a job, a relationship, and magic. Real magic. Not rabbits out of a hat magic, that much Mike knew but not much more. In all honesty, he hadn’t asked too many questions. Vicki was about all the it’s a weird new wonderful world he could cope with.

  Tonight, his ability to cope with the fact Tony had gone all Harry Potter was moot. He needed to get Vicki and the kids back. Tony was the only one he knew who might be able to do it.

  Who could do it.

  “All right.” On the other end of the phone, Tony took a deep breath. “Was one of them a sixty year old Asian dude?”

  “No, I told you . . . ”

  “I know what you told me but I had to check. That means the girl who opened the portal wasn’t actually a wizard; she just found a spell and had enough will power and need to make it work. So all you have to do is repeat exactly what she did.”

  Mike glanced around the mausoleum at the bowl and the candles and the chalked circles. “All I have to do?”

  “Send me pictures of everything she used. As much detail as you can. Doesn’t matter how small or insignificant. I’ll run it through my database and see if I can identify the verbal portion.”

  “You have a database for this sort of shit?”

  “Yeah, well, I like my shit organized.”

  “She burned a dead mouse.”

  “She probably killed it first. Send me the pictures then go looking for a mouse of your own.”

  A mouse of his own? “Tony, where the fuck am I going to find a live mouse in Toronto at one in the morning?”

  “No idea. You may have to use your badge and go all fake official business on a pet store owner.”

  “I can’t . . . ” He rubbed at his temples and sighed. “Yeah. Maybe. Pictures are on their way . . . ”

  The ruins were dry and didn’t smell too bad and if something skittered away while Vicki checked the first floor, well, it was skittering away. Good enough. She let Ren maneuver her friends through the partially blocked entrance while she kept watch then slipped in behind them.

  The gaping windows threw patches of grey against the marble floor. Ren tucked the other two at the angle where the grey met a pile of fallen masonry. Hands clasped, knees drawn up to their chests, they stared out into the darkness and shuddered at every sound.

  As Vicki moved past her, Ren grabbed her arm and snarled, “Leave them alone!”

  The scent of blood was still too strong for Vicki to push the Hunger completely back but she damped it down as far as she could before she turned. Not quite far enough if Ren’s reaction was any indication but, in spite of a surge of fear so intense Vicki could all but taste it, the girl maintained her grip and repeated, “Leave them alone!”

  “I’m not going to hurt them.”

  Ren snorted. “Yeah, right.” She tipped her head to one side, exposing her throat. “Come on then. If you’re going to do it, do me.”

  Tempting.

  “Let’s table that offer until I have to feed,” Vicki sighed. If she hadn’t fed before meeting Mike at the cemetery, she doubted she’d have been able to tear her gaze away from the pulse-throbbing humming bird fast under the pale—and slightly grubby—skin. As it was, she glanced down at the fingers still clutching her arm and said, “Let go; I’m only g
oing to put them to sleep. Give them a bit of a break from this place.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because I’m asking you to, when I could be telling you to.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  When Ren released her, Vicki ignored the way the girl’s fingers trembled, nodded once, and moved to deal with the other two. A command to Sleep. Dream of pleasant things wasn’t the way she’d been trained to deal with shock but hey, whatever worked. Star’s hoodie was back in the mausoleum so she shrugged out of her jacket and spread it over them before straightening and returning to Ren’s side.

  “So how was it supposed to be?” she asked from just behind the girl’s left shoulder.

  Ren flinched but kept her gaze locked on the road outside the entrance to their shelter. “How was what supposed to be?”

  “This. You told me that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. So . . . ?”

  “It was supposed to be . . . ” She swiped at her cheek with the palm of her left hand. “I thought it said, it was the home we always wanted.”

  Vicki waited.

  “My grandma died,” Ren continued after a moment. “I hadn’t seen her since we moved to Toronto, like four years ago but she wanted me to have her bible. My mom, she checked to make sure there wasn’t any money in it but totally missed this piece of stuff like leather that had writing on it. Probably because it was in Greek and my mom never learned to read Greek. My grandma taught me when I was little.” She paused to swallow a sob and rub her nose against her sleeve before repeating, “I thought it said this was the home we always wanted.”

  “What was wrong with the homes you had?” The look Ren shot her suggested she not be an idiot as clearly as if the girl had said the words out loud. “So no one cared that you were sneaking out at night?” None of the kids looked like they’d been starved or beaten but Vicki knew that didn’t have to mean anything as far as indicators of abuse went. “And no one’s going to care if you never make it back?”

  Ren snorted. “You really don’t get it do you?”