Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance

by Dougherty, Christine

  “Scary, huh?” Lea said, looking over Promise’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you were in there with them. I can’t believe we’re all still here today, actually. I keep thinking how that one almost got into the bedroom with us.” She shuddered.

  “It was close,” Promise said without enthusiasm. “We’ll do better tonight, though.”

  “Are you okay?” Lea asked.

  Promise nodded without looking up. “Yeah, just thinking.”

  “Okay, well, if you’re sure you’re okay…I’m going to help Mark in the basement. He has an idea for the doors.”

  Promise nodded again and threw Lea a small, reassuring smile. She didn’t want to let on that she was on the verge of calling it off. The question of what Chance might do to himself once he was trapped was becoming too big to ignore. Gathering her courage, she stepped inside the laundry room.

  She forced herself to imagine it–Chance being held in this room, consumed by bloodlust, willing to do anything to set himself free. She put a hand on the plywood wall and tilted her head into the crook of her arm. She felt the exhaustion of the last three days falling over her like a cold and stinking quilt. She pictured Chance at the lake, tipping sand out of a bucket, running to get more water, laughing–always laughing. What would he be like now as a vampire? Did he still laugh? Did he feel love?

  A hand descended on her shoulder.

  She turned and gasped, but it was only Peter. She put a hand to her heart and breathed. “Geez, you scared me. I was just…checking the damage in here.” She reached out and rapped her knuckles on the plywood. “Solid,” she said and smiled a hard smile.

  He gazed at her steadily, his expression unchanging, and the smile melted off her face showing her true feelings: unhappy and conflicted.

  “I’m scared he’ll hurt himself,” she said, the admission almost a whisper. “And I feel terrible that we’ve gone through all this and I’m about to call it off. This whole time, I kept thinking ‘just get to the next part, just get there, things will get better’, but they don’t; they just get worse.” Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. “I’m also afraid that…that he won’t be…that he won’t be himself anymore; he won’t be Chance.”

  Peter nodded his understanding. “Some part of him will be. Some part won’t,” he said. “We have to catch him first to know how much of each we’ll find. Worst case: we catch him and then have to let him go again. But you have to be willing to see him as he is. You have to be sure.”

  She shook her head in confusion. “Sure of what?”

  “Sure that it won’t break you. Change you to see him changed. If there is no discernible flicker of your brother left, then what? What do you do from there?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t considered that…that possibility.” Her voice was faint, verging on panicked, and her eyes were grief-stricken.

  “It’s what you have to ask yourself, Promise. Are you willing to let him go? Is there something more for you in the world? Something else to live for, work for, if Chance just isn’t there anymore.”

  She looked at him, stunned. He’d just articulated the way she’d been feeling since losing her parents. It was the reason she’d set her sights on finding Chance in the first place, back when she had decided it was her job to put an end to his miserable existence as a vampire. Because she didn’t know if there was anything more for her. She didn’t know, couldn’t see, what came…after.

  She shook her head, and the tears finally broke over her lower lashes and streamed down her face. He pulled her to him, and she laid her head on his shoulder as his arms went around her. His voice was soft in her ear.

  “It’s important that you decide for yourself. It’s also important that you know that there is life beyond grief. But it can be hard to face. Especially on your own.” He pulled back enough to be able to see her eyes. “You’re so young.” It seemed a statement more of regret than fact. He hugged her again and then stepped away. “When I was bitten, for the first week after, I was different. I don’t remember a lot of that time. It was all very…red. But as I got better, as I recovered bits of myself, I became aware enough to realize it was the normalcy of my surroundings that was keeping me tethered. Once I understood that, I struggled even harder to reorient myself. I think when we find Chance, if you’re patient and persistent, he might start to come back even before he gets any kind of vaccine.” He shrugged. “That would be my guess, anyway.”

  Promise nodded and ran her hands over her face, wiping away the tears. “Okay, that’s good enough. I can live with that. Even if I have to give up on him, at least I’ll have tried. That’s all I want.”

  “Then let’s get to work,” Peter said and held out his hand.

  The reinforced doors that would drop down were the main priority, and Mark and Lea worked on those with occasional consultation from Peter. Promise worked on giving herself a sightline to the sliding glass door and beyond to the backyard. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She made a hole in the laundry room wall, kind of a castle-defense slit, and then reinforced the sides of it with trim scraps. She could see Peter as he worked on a brace for the slider that would keep the opening to twelve inches–just enough for a small vampire to slide through.

  As she watched him work, his hands competent and resourceful, she wondered again about his motivations. He’d come to Wereburg because he heard there was a horse. What would cause him to want another horse when he already had Snow? To Promise, it didn’t make sense. And why was he helping someone he barely knew? She had the oddest suspicion that it had to do at least in part with Chance. But Peter had never met him, so her suspicion didn’t make any sense. She thought back to the cafeteria when she’d first told him about Chance, about her intention to stake her baby brother. His eyes had taken on a strange look, intense and full of feeling. Once again, she was overwhelmed with the sense that there were things he wasn’t saying and things she was too inexperienced to understand. She didn’t know how to feel about that.

  She watched as he tried to struggle his way through the opening, testing it. He was rough, shoving against the door, pushing himself halfway through the opening. He had taken off his coat as he worked and under it were two long-sleeved Henleys. She watched the muscles work in his shoulders and back as he pushed and pulled, trying to get through, testing the strength of the door. Something seemed to turn over slowly, low in her stomach, like a soft but muscular creature coming awake.

  Promise had had boyfriends in high school, but by her junior year, the collective thoughts of her community had gone to the vampires, and during the time she might normally have been discovering her sexuality, she’d been discovering her combatant strengths, instead. In the year since she’d lost her parents, she’d had to struggle with questions of survival, and her schoolgirl crushes had come to seem astonishingly trite by comparison; almost embarrassing when she thought back on them. What she felt now…it didn’t seem like those dizzy, goofy crushes she and her friends all giggled about back then. The feeling she had now was almost the antithesis of those feelings; something to be talked of in tones of somber revelation only. Her mind turned to Lea and Mark. They looked at each other differently now, seemed to hold each other in a more serious regard. Was that the fundamental difference? Did having sex make you more serious?

  Peter’s head was stuck in the door.

  He flailed his arms, struggling, and almost fell over. He braced himself awkwardly against the frame. “Shit! Uh…help? Little help over here!”

  Promise flew from the laundry room and put her hands under his back, bracing him as he turned sideways and slid free, stumbling across the patio outside. Promise covered her mouth with both hands as Peter rubbed the sides of his head. He had red dents in his temples. He glanced up, grimacing as he rubbed.

  “I think I need to close it up by two more inches,” he said.

  “Gosh, you…you were really stuck in there!” She bit her lips to keep from laughing, and was surprised to note that the creature
that had awakened inside herself hadn’t slunk away at his show of stooge-like ineptitude; if anything, it had gotten stronger. Why would that be? Was sex serious or not? She wished again for her mother, and that thought quelled the last bit of humor. “Are you okay?”

  “Besides feeling like a jackass, yeah, I’m okay,” he said and glanced at the horses. He was obviously embarrassed. Then he grinned at her. “Pretty awesome display of my manliness, huh?”

  She smiled back and nodded, and her heart squeezed in her chest, and she turned to fiddle with the braces holding the door in place. She liked him so much. She guessed maybe she loved him?

  Promise slid the door open, and he stepped back into the family room. She saw that he was shivering slightly. “Do you want your coat?” she asked and turned from him to reach for it.

  “No,” he said and his voice was a soft rumble. “Promise?”

  She turned to him, drawn by his tone, her hands forgetting the coat as it slipped to the floor. “Yeah?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, and his eyes were deep, deep gray, almost black in the dim light of the family room. He considered her for so long that she began to feel an awkward giggle building in her throat. She opened her mouth to say something, anything to break the tension.

  He kissed her.

  Everything disappeared under the insistence of his lips. The two of them could have been standing anywhere, at any time. Promise felt her body relax, and his hands gripped her shoulders tighter, almost holding her up, then they went to her neck and slid up under her hair, loosening her ponytail and cupping her head. She put her arms around his waist, bracing her knees against their quaking. He shivered again, and she knew instinctively that, this time, it was not from the cold.

  His lips pressed against hers, warm and demanding, forcing her mouth open with firm, gentle pressure. She sighed and pressed herself tighter against him. His arms went around her, crushing and lifting, and she realized her feet weren’t on the floor. She gasped and held him tighter. With an inarticulate groan, he placed her back on the ground and stood back, holding her at arm’s length. She blinked up at him, all traces of the giggle leached from her body. She felt as though she might never giggle again.

  He reached for the scrunchie in her hair…it had fallen halfway down her loose ponytail. He pulled it toward him, and her hair fell in a cascade over her shoulder. He turned her until her back was to him, and she shivered. “It’s okay, Promise,” he said, and his voice rumbled down her sensitive spine. His hand worked to gather her hair back into a ponytail, and he slipped the scrunchie around it, doubling it so that it would hold. How had he known to do that? Promise wondered. Then he turned her again and smiled, pushing a few errant strands behind her ears.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said. He bent to kiss her again, a quick brush of his lips over her forehead, eyes, nose, and landing on her mouth. He broke the kiss quickly this time and smiled at her. “You okay?”

  She nodded and smiled, and then Mark and Lea were banging up the basement steps, obviously carrying something cumbersome. Lea laughingly called out for help.

  Promise stood swiftly on tiptoe and kissed Peter, then hurried toward the basement stairs to help Mark and Lea.

  Turned away as she was, she missed the sudden, almost desperate swell of pain in Peter’s eyes.

  Chapter 10

  “Come on, we better get upstairs,” Lea said and pulled Mark away from the rigged slider. She stopped to look gravely at Promise. “You ready? No panicking this time?”

  Promise laughed. “I promise to do my best, how’s that?”

  “I’ll take it,” Lea said and leaned forward to kiss Promise’s cheek.

  Mark gripped Promise up in a one-armed hug, not letting Lea’s hand go. “Hang in there,” he said and winked. She winked back and laughed, but her smile faded as they mounted the stairs to the second floor.

  “Ready?” Peter asked. He’d been standing at the back of the family room, but now he came forward.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Promise said, smiling nervously.

  “This is for luck,” he said and kissed her on the forehead.

  “This is for us,” she said and kissed him on the lips, lingering.

  He grinned in surprise, and she tilted her head, smiling. “I’m not a total innocent, you know.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and his hand went to the back of her neck and squeezed. She felt the soft, muscular creature shift below her bellybutton again.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked, and the teasing had left his voice.

  She nodded, just as gravely.

  He kissed her again. “Remember to hold on. Remember that I’ve got you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ll remember.”

  Lea called from upstairs, reminding them of sunset, now mere minutes away.

  The family room had become very dark, and Promise thought she saw a glimmer in Peter’s eyes, like banked embers.

  He stepped back and turned toward the stairs then turned to her again, his foot on the first riser. “See you soon,” he said.

  She nodded and then, because it seemed he might never leave as long as he could see her, she turned into the laundry room. She heard him climb the stairs behind her.

  She leaned against the back wall and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her heart. She smiled up at Lea who huddled silently over the hole, watching her intently. Then Promise turned to the slit she’d made and watched as the last light seeped slowly from the sky.

  She had a clear view of the backyard. The moon was bright, and the sky must have been clear because she could see all the way to the shed. It looked sadly run down. The doors had been ripped off, and the opening seemed to yawn like a terrified mouth under the two little windows. She remembered her dad building that shed the year before Chance was born. She’d been allowed to carefully hand over the tools as her dad had called for them: hammer, flathead screwdriver, Phillips head…they’d laughed together over the last one because her mom had a brother named Philip, and daddy said what a coincidence because Uncle Philip had a screw loose. Promise hadn’t understood, but she’d laughed at the silliness in her dad’s voice.

  In the dark laundry room, she hitched in a breath.

  “Are you okay?” Lea asked, whispering, leaning as low into the opening as she could.

  Promise glanced up and nodded. She gave Lea a thumbs up. Then turned her attention back to the slit.

  A shadow flitted behind the fence at the back of the yard, and she took a quick, involuntary step back. It could have been anything. A bird or an owl, maybe even a deer…she’d only caught the barest glimpse of it.

  Then she heard the buzzing.

  The buzz cycled up and up, almost like a cicada, and then it became a gobbling scream. The hair rose on Promise’s arms, and she glanced up once more at Lea. Lea’s face was drawn in tight lines of dread. She shook her head at Promise.

  “It’s okay…” Promise whispered and then vowed to not look up again. She had to keep her eyes on the yard. She looked out the slit in time to see something jump the back corner of the fence and run fleetly along it until it was out of sight at the side of the house. The shadows were such that Promise couldn’t even tell which side of the fence the form was on…but she knew it was close.

  Then another form appeared from behind the shed, seeming to materialize out of the darkness. It stood near the front corner of the shed, swaying. Then the scream came again–full of furious hunger–from somewhere at the side of the house, outside of her sight line. Not far, really, from where she stood. Promise felt the compulsive need to check on Lea again, make sure she was there, but she controlled the urge. Lea was there, she reassured herself. Peter and Mark were there. They were all ready. She took another shuddering breath.

  A face popped up at the slider, and she nearly screamed.

  It was not Chance, it was too big, an adult. This must be the one that had gone to the side of the ho
use. It was hideous in its transformation. Long white teeth and a shredded lower lip as if it had repeatedly bitten itself. Its skin was whitish gray with cheeks sunken under protruding cheekbones. Its chin seemed elongated, and its hair hung in dirty hanks to its shoulders. Promise couldn’t even tell if it was male or female.

  The worst were its eyes. They stared into the family room with hungry stupidity, vacant of all thought save the need to feed, the irises seeming to burn from within. It brought up its white, emaciated hands and scratched slowly at the glass, its nails screeing. Promise had a physical sensation of nausea at the noise, coupled with the vampire’s softly rotted appearance. She swallowed, trying to control her stomach. Then she realized she could smell it, she could smell the semi-rottedness of the creature at the door–and hot bile filled the back of her throat.

  It smelled like gone-over meat, hot road kill, feces, and blood.

  Its searching hands found the opening in the door. It pressed its face between the glass and the trim and sniffed like a dog, big gulps of air that widened its shrunken chest. Then it began to pant in excitement, mewling.

  Promise realized that it could smell her. Then its dreadful eyes found hers through the small slit, and Promise felt the blood leave her face. Her heart tripped and stumbled painfully, and she gasped. The vampire came to sudden, violent life, trying to wrestle itself through the gap. It shrieked, and the sound hurt Promise’s ears, and she wanted to look away, but she couldn’t; she had to keep an eye on it as it struggled not fifteen feet from her.

  “Promise?” Lea’s voice was a terrified whisper.

  Without looking up, Promise reassured her: “It’s okay. It’s too big to get in. But, oh god, it stinks…it…just be ready…be ready, Lea.”

  The vampire struggled its arms through, grasping and flailing, its long fingers wiggling and flashing whitely in the moonlight. Then it removed its arms and tried to jam its head through the opening, stretching the skin of its face until Promise thought it might sacrifice its face for entry. Then it repeated the process with its arms. Then its head again.