“Yes, lets. Ladies and Gentlemen, Esteemed representatives of the Senate,” he said, spinning slowly to make eye contact with various members of the audience.
Senate? I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Okay, I didn’t have a fucking clue to be honest, but it sounded important. I tried to focus on the other faces a bit more closely now.
“I am formally accepting the Rite of Challenge from this man,” he said pointing towards me. “A fight to the death, for the prize of my own childe, with a mortal man. I’ve gathered you here, as is tradition, to bear witness,” Adam turned towards me. “I promise, it will be over soon and the party can begin.”
“A speech. Really?”
He shrugged, and just like that he was in front of me. I didn’t even register I had been hit until I saw my blood spray across Adam’s face. Lines of fire lit up my chest, a sheet of warmth rolling over my skin. Reflexively, I started to curl my body to cover up and shield myself. Adam grabbed me by the back of the hair and launched me through the air. I collided with the marble floor, my head bouncing off the unyielding surface with a thud. Stars and pain clouded my head, the taste of blood welling up in my mouth.
I fought to my feet, and he was on me almost instantly. He hit the back of my knee in a quick roundhouse kick, knocking me flat on my back. His foot fell on my chest, pinning me to the floor. It felt like someone had just put a Buick on top of me. I tried to breathe, to suck in air, and his foot just pushed harder. It felt like any second he was simply going to step through me, crushing me that quick.
I was an idiot. I didn’t stand a chance against Adam. I could see him, casual and collected staring down at me. The look on his face was one of almost boredom, a sardonic little twitch to his lips every time I tried to struggle. He was playing with me, mocking my attempts at saving Lucy from whatever future he had already no doubt laid out for her in his diseased little mind.
“Oh, this is no fun,” he said, and took a step back. “Jack, seriously now. Can you, perhaps, do something to try and save a little face before I kill you?”
I rolled onto my side, sucking in massive lung-fulls of air, each one stretching the lacerations he’d cut into my chest. Hardly the dignified offensive I’m sure he was expecting.
“As I said,” Adam proclaimed, “Over quickly.”
I rolled over, rising to my hands and knees. I could see him, pacing around me in slow circles. I was able to brace myself before he kicked me in the stomach, lifting me from the floor only to send me back down once more, about twenty feet from where I started, to crash in a heap in front of Lucy. She tried her damnedest to ignore me, to maintain her strong facade. I caught her eyes though, caught them dart towards me and then back up. I saw the look that crossed her face for a span of a breath. I was doing worse than killing her. If I couldn’t get up, couldn’t keep going, she was going to be end up being everything Adam wanted.
There wasn’t any hate in her eyes, no malice towards me. It was just hope that was rapidly fading away into resignation of her fate.
I growled, pushing myself to my feet. Adam swung again. I sidestepped, backing up, putting a bit of distance between us. Twice more he swung, and twice more no dice, the wind from the punches blowing the hair back from my face. I started to feel a bit of the familiar Zen calm wash over me as I once again surrendered to instinct. The sound of flesh against flesh echoed throughout the banquet hall, each punch met on either side by a quick dodge, or a light slap to redirect it. Adam’s talons whistled, coming within a hairs width of taking my eyes out. I slapped his wrist aside as his hand went past, throwing him off balance.
I took my shot, followed through on the opening I had presented myself. I drove my foot down, at an angle aiming for Adam’s knee. It wouldn’t do much more than slow him down, but at this pace, that would at least close the gap between us a little.
I realized an instant too soon, that I’d been baited. Adam kept the momentum behind my parry going and hit the floor, rolling on his shoulder and springing back up to his feet, my foot passing where his knee had been by nanoseconds. My boot hit the marble floor hard enough to send a spider web of cracks out from beneath my heel.
Four spikes of pain hit my left side, just under the ribs. Heat and agony radiated across my entire chest, sucking my breath away, causing my heart to skip a beat. I let out a small choking sound, an internal pressure settling into my chest with every breath. I could feel blood, a veritable geyser erupt from my mouth in a wet hacking cough. He held me like that, the knife-like talons tipping his fingers buried just under my ribs, forcing me up onto my tip toes.
“As you can see, my dear guests, a promise is kept,” he said, his voice radiating amusement and mirth.
“God, you’re an asshole,” I muttered through gritted teeth.
He snaked one hand into my hair, jerking my head back. I gasped, my throat filling again with the coppery taste of blood, making me gag. He forced me to my knees, wrenching my head around so I could see Lucy. She didn’t move, didn’t even blink. She just stared at me, her eyes empty of any emotion.
I felt Adam’s lips against my ear, feathery, almost like a lover’s.
“Truth be told, Jack,” he whispered, “I never had any intention of killing you. I could have gotten you in prison with just a phone call. Had some two-bit gangster put a sharpened spike in your neck, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to make it special.”
He held me like that, talons wedged under my ribs, pushed into my lung and looked towards the four vampires surrounding Lucy. He nodded once, and they fell on her like jackals. One at each side grabbed her wrist, the other hand pushing against her shoulder, wrenching back. The one behind her slid a hand under chin, jerking her head back exposing her throat. The last one, smaller than the others, withdrew a simple knife with a fixed blade and drug it across her throat. A thin line opened in her flesh, shockingly red against her pale skin. A moment later, blood cascaded like a miniature waterfall.
“So I’ve decided I’m going to let her do it,” he said grinning down at me. “It was what I wanted from the start, to make sure she was nice and hungry, and then laugh at you while you try to fight back, broken and beaten as you are.”
Adam kicked me over onto my side, and I could see them holding Lucy, bleeding her out. I watched her face, watch the change come over her. Surprise gave way to panic, panic finally falling to hunger. The same kind of hunger you see on the face of a hardcore drug addict needing a fix. That look that lets you know they have no bones against killing you, killing everyone you know, as long as they can have one more hit. It just so happened, in this case bleeding from several wounds, I was the only crack-pipe around.
Adam pushed me to the floor. Despite the circumstances, all I could think about was how soothing the cold marble felt against my cheek, how wonderful it finally felt to lie down. I looked up at Lucy from the floor, saw the empty blank stare in her eyes, the hunger radiating from her taut muscles as she pulled in on herself, preparing to launch herself towards me. The guards around her, the ones that had bled her, stepped back. For a long moment, I saw her trying to fight past it, to catch the last footfalls of rational thought before succumbing whole stock to the hunger.
“Get up, Jack,” Alice said.
She stood next to my head, looking down at me. Her normally blank expression was contorted with quiet desperation. Her voice held a pleading note.
“You have to get up,” she said again. “It’s not time.”
I pushed myself upwards, fighting to stand. I felt weak, the exertion sending a sheet of fire through my body as I fought to choke in oxygen. The room swam, tilting dangerously as I stumble-stepped towards Adam.
“I will give the boy this, he is persistent,” Adam said.
He was laughing, a sound that was surprisingly rich and melodic echoing off the walls of the ballroom. He took a step back, hands clasped behind his back. I looked towards Lucy, meeting her eyes, my own pleading with her without words, begging for forgiveness without apolo
gies.
She didn’t so much pounce on me as hit me like a projectile launched from a cannon. My head snapped forward, body folding around her, the breath I had fought so hard for exploding out of my mouth with a spray of blood. Another molten wave of agony tore through me when we slid across the floor. She had me pinned, her tiny frame deceptively strong. She straddled my waist. I fought to keep her back, my hands on her shoulders. She hissed, jaws snapping like a steel trap at my throat.
“Lucy, damn it!” I gasped. My vision clouded, doubling before narrowing into a thin tunnel. “Don’t do this.”
She ignored me, beyond hearing me. I could talk until I was blue in the face and I wouldn’t break through the wall of hunger that had settled over her senses. She was beyond rationale. Honestly, at this point, I was pretty sure that I literally was blue in the face. Breathing was difficult, the whole side of my chest where Adam had impaled me on his nails felt full to bursting. I was too broken to fight back for much longer.
“Parasite,” Alice said, voice dripping with scorn and ringing with that weird bell-like tone again. “Filthy, pathetic, little parasite.”
It was like Alice had slapped the vampire in the face. Her head snapped up, eyes searching. Alice watched from the corner, head lowered, peering through the bangs that had fallen over her eyes.
“Parasite,” she said it again, and Lucy bolted off of me as quickly as she had hit me, moving so fast she was little more than a blur and a rustle of wind.
“Well, that’s unexpected,” Adam said, confused.
Alice vanished as Lucy got within inches of her, appearing on the other side of the room. Lucy skidded to a stop, eyes searching, and once they spotted her, she darted towards her again. She had given me a chance, playing on the fact that Lucy’s gifts of speaking to the dead allowed her to see Alice, who looked to her in her current state as a weak, helpless child, nowhere near strong enough to defend herself and a more appealing target than even wounded prey.
The crowd watched, a mixture of curiosity and amusement portrayed on faces scattered through the crowd. Some whispered, pointing at Adam, others mocked Lucy. The whole thing was playing out like a high school melodrama. The nerdy kid had just done something stupid or embarrassing and the rest of the class was trying to figure out how to react.
It was something, but it still didn’t solve the problem of Adam. He watched, mildly curious as Lucy and Alice continued their game. Alice kept vanishing, only to reappear in a different location, causing Lucy to bolt there in pursuit. I looked around, trying to find something, some way out of this situation I had put myself in.
Then I saw it, standing against the wall, eyes locked on Lucy.
I fought through the pain, pulling myself to my feet through a combination of will and pure pissed-off. Adam was at best, twenty feet away, his back to me his attention focused on Lucy.
“Enough of this, childe. Finish him!” He growled.
My one chance stood to my right at half that distance. I pushed off, leaping with as much push as I could get behind me, using my body as a projectile. I hit the group of four guards in a pro wrestling styled splash. It didn't hurt anyone, well except for me, but it sent us all to the floor in a tangled heap. I thrashed wildly, throwing random punches, my hands grasping at bodies blindly searching.
Adam was on me the same instant my hand fell on what I had been searching for. He growled, throwing me to the floor, sending me skidding across the marble like a hockey puck. I kept my body pulled tight, balled up so as to keep my game changer hidden. He leapt, landing over top of me and grabbed my shirt. His jaws snapped towards my neck. I wedged the gun under his chin a second before he’d have torn my throat out. I grabbed his wrist, holding him there, pulling his weight against the gun’s barrel. He stared for a brief moment, a look of confusion painted on his face. It was like it just didn’t register that he was royally screwed.
I smiled.
Then I pulled the trigger. Over and over again.
The result was instantaneous, the barking of the semi auto muffled by its close proximity to flesh. I put five rounds into Adam’s skull at point blank range. Ichor sprayed into my face, splattering my clothes, falling into my eyes. Around us, a stunned silence had settled over the crowd. I lay there, Adam on top of me, unmoving, most of his head now residing on the wall behind me.
When I finally pushed him off, the crowd seemed to instinctively take a step back. I stood and Alice vanished. Lucy’s eyes once more settled on me. She charged. I stumbled out of the way of her charge and drove the handle of the pistol into the side of her head, knocking her unconscious. Apparently, she wasn't strong enough to stand up to the classic pistol whipping. I threw her over my shoulder, heading towards the door, gun held at the ready and trying to stay on two feet long enough to get us out of there.
“Tell Adam, when and if he wakes up, our account is settled. Tell him I chose mercy, and to remember that,” I said to the room. A few actually nodded.
A few actually seemed okay with that, which was a plus. A few others looked like they took offense. Once they managed to shove past their counterparts who held differing view, it wouldn't be long before they decided to show me how offended they really were. Unfortunately, I had bigger problems to sort through at the moment. Like what I was going to do with Lucy when she woke up.
Chapter 27
I managed to get as far as outside when I felt Lucy stirring. She groaned, her whole body becoming tense. I set her down against a tree. She opened her eyes, almost sleepily. I knelt in front of her, keeping a bit of distance between us, the gun still in my hand. The ragged cut over her throat still oozed blood. A heavy itching radiated over my side where Adam had damn near torn my lung out. I could feel the pressure slowly relaxing, the weight on my chest feeling like it was very gradually beginning to subside. I still hurt like hell. It would take me days to heal back to a hundred percent, but at the moment anything was a small blessing.
“Jack?” she asked, her voice slurred.
“I’m right here,” I choked out.
“What happened? I'm so hungry. I'm starving. It hurts, Jack.”
“Long story,” I said, trying to keep my statements as short as possible.
“I’m hungry... God I’m so hungry,” she said, whining. Her eyes locked on the dripping wound in my side. I tucked my arm in closer, trying to keep it hidden from sight as best I could.
“I know, I know,” I followed her eyes, and realized my best shot out of this whole mess without having to fight off a wounded, hungry vampire.
“Hey, Hey. Look at me,” I said, snapping my fingers in her face to get her attention. She slowly tore her eyes from the blood on my side, eyes focusing on my face. “I need your hand, okay?”
She stared from me, to the blood on my side, then back up to my face again. She gave a tiny nod.
I stood and paced towards her slowly, my movements cautious and deliberate. I reached down and took her hand, the nails black, shiny, and viciously sharp. Very slowly, I brought it to my wrist, dragging one of the nails across the flesh. A line of fire followed it, and the slow well of blood.
“Tilt your head back,” I said.
She leaned her head back and I squeezed my fist as hard as I possibly could, clenching and unclenching it. Blood ran out in a thin, steady stream, pouring over her lips. She shuddered, a motion that made interesting motions run through certain parts of her anatomy. The wound in her neck slowly began to knit itself shut, leaving a thick pink scar. It would take more blood than I could give to heal her back to normal, but it was something. If it would maybe buy me an hour or so before she started getting too hungry for rational thought, I could live with that.
I pulled back, clasping a hand over my wrist. She looked almost stoned, eyes bleary and wide. A small whine slipped past her lips. I shivered, more from the cold than anything. I’d left my shirt inside on the floor.
“We need to get moving. The shock of what happened to Adam isn’t going to last long amongst th
e less than charitable guests. Can you walk?”
She nodded and pulled herself to her feet. I couldn’t help but notice how she looked like a jungle cat rising up from its hiding place.
“We’re going to walk the whole way?” she asked.
“No. We’re going to run like hell the whole way. Big difference.”
She looked back in the direction we had come and then back towards me and nodded.
We ran for the edge of the property, back towards the street. Every step was a nice little firework of pain in my chest. I did the best I could to ignore them as I ran. Adam’s lawn was expansive, a rolling plain of perfect grass and trees. It had the feel of the pictures one sees in books showing medieval European forests, dark and foreboding, riddled with fog. With the light crusting of sleet, it shone under the night sky, small sparks of color flashing here and there like diamond reflections. It crunched underfoot as we moved, keeping to the shadows.
Behind us, I could hear the yelling as Adam’s loyals began their pursuit. We weren’t going to be hard to track, our footsteps were going to serve essentially the same purpose as a road map. We went from moving and hiding to moving at a full-out sprint. The vampires in the house would be on us in a matter of minutes, more likely seconds. Still injured and fighting for every breath I ran on pure adrenaline, struggling to keep pace with Lucy. Even weakened, she was putting a distance between her and me that was becoming nearly impossible to close.
The first vampire leapt past us, easily clearing several tens of feet to land in front of us with all the grace of an Olympic gymnast. He was dressed in a simple black suit, his greying hair tied back in a ponytail. I didn’t slow down. I pointed the gun, firing two rounds. The first hit him in the stomach, the second the shoulder and he spun to the ground howling in pain and rage. I shot past him, running for dear life. The fence came into view, Lucy jumping just before she would have plowed through it. She cleared it with room to spare.
Another vampire, the woman who had been watching the goings-on by herself, burst from behind one of the thicker trees at my right. Her claws whistled, sinking into my arm, catching on bone. Flesh ripped, the force of the blow spinning me, putting me down in the sleet. She dropped on top of me, eyes gleaming. She held me down by the throat. Her taloned hand rose, ready for the blow that would rip my face to ribbons.
Demon Jack Page 20
