Golden Vampire

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “Yeah,” Stan agreed. “Just about as absurd as believing a bunch of vampires are holding Elizabeth Jorgensen in a remote village where no one lives anymore, except for them.”

  “Shit,” Jesse whispered, not daring to think about the other body parts feeling Lance’s presence, like the untouched recesses of a messed-up virgin cop’s womb.

  “Shit? You got that right,” Stan said. “And we seem to be stuck knee-deep in it.”

  Jesse swiped at her lip as if the speck of blood still clung there. The accompanying scent of aluminum resisted removal. The chopper seemed to be filled with blood-laced air. She easily smelled Stan’s excitement, too. Beneath his hooded parka, he had started to perspire. Moonlight, smelling like clouds and storms and stardust, reflected off her portion of the windshield.

  “Theoretically, if there were vampires in that village, how many soldiers do you think we’d need to get Elizabeth out?” she asked, resting her head against her window to cool her cheeks.

  “Your hundred ought to do it.”

  “I doubt if there are a hundred cops in the city.”

  “And not that many silver bullets on the planet,” Stan said. “So, how else can you get the drop on a vampire?”

  “Expose them to sunlight,” Jesse said, wondering if that was true. Lance had walked into an alley in the daylight. He had stood in his front yard that afternoon, facing her, and hadn’t been burned.

  Again, she was unsettled to note how she’d registered the differences between Lance and the term freak.

  Not a lover, damn it! More like a parasite!

  “Cut off their heads,” she added to the list. “But who’d actually be able to do such a thing?”

  “Stake through the heart,” Stan contributed, then sighed. “Like sharp wooden stakes are available at every hardware store in Slovenia in the middle of the night.”

  Jesse entertained the same notion Stan had been about to add to his comment. Beneath a blood moon, were all bets off? With those unspoken words, and the light bouncing off her window, her head took on an uncomfortable fuzziness. Luckily, some reasoning made it through.

  “All of those things, including dousing them with holy water, may be fiction,” she said. “Yet there has to be a trip switch. Some way to turn them off. Why are vampires allowed to exist when they’re so difficult to get rid of, and mortals are so easily taken down?”

  “Vampires were taken down once,” Stan reminded her. “They were born people, right? Maybe a second life is charmed by tougher skin.”

  “Except they are no longer alive, so the word life doesn’t apply. Still, they move around and talk, how? What animates them? It isn’t right.”

  Neither was it plausible for a human to sustain vampire blood in their veins and live to find out about it.

  “No one said life was fair, or even easy, did they?” Stan suggested, going philosophical.

  Indeed, Jesse wanted to agree, no one had ever said that, because everyone knew better once they got into the rhythm of it. Cops especially had this figured out.

  “We’re talking about vampires, Stan.”

  Stan nodded. “I didn’t get to see the fangs. I’m assuming you did. And you aren’t prone to lying.”

  Not until now, by making you think you’re sitting next to a regular human being. Someone like yourself.

  “So, we’re confronted with a fresh ball game here. A new slate. The world has gone mysterious, and we have to adapt,” Stan concluded. “Like in an X-Files script.”

  Jesse wasn’t so out of it that she didn’t notice he’d said we. She wanted to hug Stan for that, and planned to do so if they made it out of this alive. Even if the odds of that happening weren’t astronomical.

  “Boss?”

  She turned her pounding head.

  “You said you were doing this for someone you loved. What exactly did you mean by that, if you don’t mind me asking? I mean, we’ve drifted way beyond anything being too bad to talk about, haven’t we?”

  Maybe Stan was right, but was it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Already she tasted

  the residue of darkness on her tongue that was connected to her secrets.

  Test the waters.

  Tr y.

  “Vampires killed my family,” Jesse heard herself say, “then almost killed me. I’ve met these monsters before, Stan. I’ve seen what they can do.”

  Although Stan didn’t immediately respond to her confidence, his hands threatened to break the controls in his grip.

  Chapter 16

  Stan dropped the helicopter lower. The moonlight dis appeared behind a grove of trees.

  “This is it,” he announced, buzzing in a wide arc around the edges of that grove. “I told you it was odder than hell.”

  The first thing Jesse saw was what looked like an outline of thick white paint surrounding the buildings beneath them.

  “That’s not paint,” Stan said. “Here’s the crazy part. The entire place is surrounded by crosses, graveyard-style. Except that this village isn’t big enough to house all those bodies, if people are buried under those things.”

  Jesse refocused her eyes, though she didn’t actually have to. The crosses stood out brightly against the dimmer landscape. Row after row of them lined the road in and out of the village. Seen from above, they resembled a strangely assembled fence of prison bars, sealing off the village’s buildings from the forest. Seal ing off its occupants.

  There were too many crosses to count. Jesse smelled the wood they were composed of, as if the chopper’s windows were open. She tasted their purpose. If the crosses didn’t actually succeed in holding back the occupants of this place, they’d been placed here as a hindrance.

  “No one is coming out to greet us,” Stan observed. “Maybe those crosses work a little. Shall we make that call?”

  “Wait a second. Let’s take a closer look, do a little recon. I can smell them down there.”

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Stan said, follow ing her orders. “And hope they can’t actually fly. Or jump.”

  “Twelve,” Jesse said. “He told me there were twelve vampires, and that some of them would be en route to his castle, hearing the chopper, scenting me.”

  Stan gave her a sideways look she didn’t have to see. “I’m changing my original assessment to two hundred cops or soldiers,” he said. “Maybe five hundred. This place gives me the creeps.”

  What he didn’t say, Jesse knew, was: You didn’t really just say you smelled those things down there. As in, with your nose.

  “No one visible before you came back to get me, either?” she asked.

  “The only things moving between here and Dracula’s castle that I saw were the wolves.”

  “Hungry wolves, I hope.”

  “As a matter of fact, they looked hungry to me.”

  Jesse stared down, not too sure any of this was real. She should have been screaming, and darting off to the city where she’d have a modicum of protection from things like this. Here she was, eyeing a village of immortal mutants, scenting their presence as effortlessly as she smelled Stan.

  Was this new strength part of Lance’s gift to her? He’d said she would be able to sense them, just as they did her. If so, these creatures knew who, and more importantly what, floated above them.

  Come and get it, freaks!

  She was the lure for calling vampires out of their hiding places. If they left the village, she and Stan might possibly find the missing girl.

  It takes one to know one? Blood to blood?

  “He said something about traps,” she told Stan, shivers replacing the erotic intimacy of Lance Van Baaren’s invisible caress.

  “Maybe your vampire put those crosses here,” Stan suggested. “Oh, wait. If he’s one of them, he can’t touch those things either, right?”

  Stan was a quick convert to the paranormal world, thankfully. And Lance had touched the crosses. Jesse knew this.

  “I’d be willing to bet he can touch a cross.” She h
ad been out of breath one too many times lately when dealing with this immortal, and sounded winded now. Lance Van Baaren was like a magnet to an affection-starved loner like herself. His warmth was unexpected. She wasn’t free of the influence of those pheromones he exuded. There was no way to shake herself loose from his touch while she remained this close.

  Is that why you told me to go back to the States, vampire?

  Why then would he want to send her away, if he was as evil as the rest? When he could twitch a finger and watch her run back to him? He’d copped to that sort of power, admitted it earnestly, then told her to run away.

  Are you a good guy?

  The final picture of this puzzle remained maddeningly elusive.

  “There’s nothing in the books about someone like him, Stan. I’d bet everything I own on that.”

  Stan nodded warily. “So, is this guy like the head vampire? A master vamp? Jeez, I can’t believe I just asked you that.”

  “Different, yes. He is different.” And he was thinking of her right then. Haunting her. The muscles around her scar contracted with the attention, as if wanting his mouth close to the old wound. Her mind rebelled firmly against such a thing.

  “Then maybe he’ll get here and get the girl, like he said,” Stan concluded. “Fight fire with fire.”

  Jesse averted her face so that Stan wouldn’t see the blood drain from it while she focused on the next set of questions. Did a vampire have to honor a promise? Was honor a part of their makeup, at all?

  The crosses were here, all lined up. For reasons unknown to her, they preserved the suggestion of his tampering, and had captured some of his light. If Lance Van Baaren hadn’t put the crosses here, he’d at least touched them, as surely as he had touched her.

  “Can we take that chance?” she asked. “That he will help?”

  “I just don’t know. This is …” Stan faltered.

  “Then let’s make that call,” Jesse said, stopping her pilot from straining for the unreachable. “Even if my conscience kills me for bringing others here.”

  The village had been closed off years ago, having become synonymous with death and suffering. All mention of it had been removed from maps of the area. Because no one in their right mind traveled through this part of Slovenia these days, it had become a no-man’s-land. A dead man’s haven for holed-up vampires.

  Lance sprinted through the trees, toward that evil place, seeing new malice ahead, needing to exert himself and desiring time to think. A cold wind pressed against his face. An ill wind, bringing to mind the times of the black plague in England. This was another plague, just as deadly.

  The moon reddened his path, infecting his pale flesh with a dull red sheen. An omen? Bad things would happen if Jesse’s helicopter landed anywhere near that accursed town.

  He had chased the monsters out of there long ago, after their initial killing spree. He’d then tried to seal them off. With Nadia’s help, he had built and placed the crosses enclosing the evil, and for a while the crosses had done the trick. Although vampires could exist for a long time without blood, it seemed they weren’t exempt from rustling up some creativity when the thirst finally overwhelmed.

  Unless someone or something else had helped them.

  He had recognized the gaunt drifter in the city that morning as it emerged from the shadows, sick and starving. Tonight, just moments ago, more familiar faces had slipped their cage, heading for his home, breaking free of this village he’d been keeping an eye on.

  Nadia and her kin would be waiting for them. She and her wolves—riled up with the full moon and a hunger of their own, born of the night the vampires arrived in their village forty years ago to destroy a peaceful human-Were population.

  “Jesse? Do you hear me?” Lance covered ground with his hair streaming out behind him. “Do not go there. Do not touch down. Some new thing has taken up residence in that village. I’d been near there when I first saw you up in the sky. I’ve been distracted from seeking it.”

  More than a thirsty vampire, Jesse.

  The scent is of blood, with intellect behind it.

  Different.

  If he called Jesse back, she’d be hurt one way or another. But between the two things—himself, and what roamed that village—he was by far the safer bet.

  “Jesse! Listen to me. I know you hear. Stop!”

  Jolted in her seat, Jesse reacted with a swift “No!” that caused Stan to shift uncomfortably beside her.

  “No, what, Jesse? Don’t make the call?”

  She put a hand to her head, wondering if a good slap to her temple might chase away Lance’s voice. “I can feel him calling to me. I’m not crazy. Not … crazy.”

  “Never thought you were,” Stan said. “No matter what the other guys we know might have said.” He glanced sideways. “Sorry. Bad time for a joke.”

  “You do believe me, Stan?”

  “I do,” he grumbled.

  “Then you won’t argue when I ask you to set this chopper down?”

  “Okay, maybe just a little crazy,” Stan amended, eyeing her cautiously.

  “I want to go down there.”

  “My two cents would go something like this: No way.”

  “He’s coming, Stan. I have to meet him.”

  “Like hell you do. How do you know he is coming?”

  “I told you. He calls me. His voice is in my mind right now.”

  “Telling you to go down there?”

  “Asking me not to.”

  “So, you’re ignoring that advice because …?”

  “He’s a vampire.” And so am I, partly.

  “Maybe more than a little crazy, then, for going to that castle in the first place, alone,” Stan mumbled. “He didn’t bite you or anything while you were there?”

  Another joke? A real question this time? Jesse moved her fingers over her forehead to find a light layer of perspiration gathering on her brow. It was becoming more difficult to ignore him. She wanted to tear off her jacket to get rid of the lingering hint of their close ness.

  “He didn’t bite me there.” The truth, if flawed. He had bitten her long ago, seemingly in another lifetime. His little blood donation, appropriate or not and under such dire circumstances, and quite possibly saving her life, had brought her to this very moment in time. To a place teeming with bloodsuckers.

  “Where?” Stan asked.

  Jesse looked to Stan for clarification. Was he asking where she’d been bitten when she was a kid? Did Stan know about that? Her fingers dropped to her neck, to the continually throbbing scar.

  “Where do I set this tin can down?” he said.

  The wolves were all around, some of them on Lance’s heels. Their menacing growls were the only sounds in the meadow, other than the crush of grass and snow beneath their paws. Nine black coats glistened like polished alabaster.

  The scent of the new intruder, stronger as he neared the village, filled him with foreboding. It was red, dangerous and female.

  Was he perceiving Jesse’s anger? No, something else. And damn it five ways to Sunday, Jesse had already touched down.

  He felt the halting effect of the planted crosses as he rounded the northern edge of the forest. Their holy presence pounded at him like a web of invisible warriors. Nevertheless, holy relics were a hindrance to those with dark intentions.

  He had already passed this particular test, once wearing a crucifix to remind himself of how far he’d come. He had endured years of monastic life in order to master the wretched torture of no longer being one of God’s living children who were chosen to live and die peacefully, with an invitation to heaven.

  But he wasn’t sure about that conclusion by the time he’d parted from the monks. His existence had been honorable, nearly always, since his creation. Just maybe, he decided, he was a force for good. One of God’s legion

  Like Jesse’s angel.

  In the most distant of his lifetimes, in the beginning, he had protected the Holy Grail as one of its champions, he reme
mbered as he ran. He had been one of seven brothers-in-arms set up to keep safe the mother of all holy relics that was rumored to restore peace and tranquillity to a ravaged, war-torn land. It was a task that he and the six others who had taken the blood oath of immortality had pledged to accomplish. A shining quest. A task at which they ultimately failed, leaving the Seven to fend for themselves as time passed everyone else by, in a world that had forgotten about them and their secrets.

  He had persevered for centuries in the shadows until strong enough to take some of the lost sunlight back. He had lived long enough to outdistance most threats, and no longer cared about them.

  Except for one very real threat. A female with amber-flecked brown eyes and a scarred neck, who hosted the purest blood of the Seven in her delicate veins. A female, after all this time, reminding him of the things he had given up in favor of higher pursuits.

  Jesse.

  His last chance at what? Normality? Setting things straight? Making things right? There was no going back. He’d explained this to Jesse. Had they met centuries too late?

  The anguish of possibly losing her was brutal.

  Fate, the mysterious phenomenon that was ongoing, ever present and not to be overlooked or underestimated, had him by the throat. A vampire’s ultimate irony.

  The presence of the vampires hit Jesse in wave after wave of goose bumps that erupted from her insides, out. The whir and steady hum of the blades overhead was the only sound amid the darkness of this gigantic sinkhole of hell on earth. Jesse held her breath for as long as she could, so she wouldn’t say something stupid, or scream.

  “Use the spotlight?” Stan asked. “It’s too frigging dark out there. I can’t see anything beyond the paint on those crosses. Closer up, those crosses are downright eerie.”

  “They’re here for a reason.”

  “Maybe nobody bothered to tell them that, if they’ve gotten out long enough to snatch the senator’s daughter.”

  Stan, Jesse noted, appeared to be waiting for some thing. He’d been glancing over his shoulder repeatedly. Jesse studied him closely.