by J. R. Rain
“Sure you can,” I said. “But I would suggest you liberally use the words, ‘defective piece of glass’ throughout your report.”
He sat back and studied me. After twenty seconds, he said, “How did you do it, Ms. Moon?”
There are very few who know my secret. The warden here wouldn’t be one of them. I held his gaze steadily as I spoke.
“Adrenaline. Anger. We’ve all heard stories of mothers lifting crashed cars off their children.”
“So, you’re going with ‘anger’ and ‘adrenaline’, huh?”
“What other explanation can there be?” I asked. “Am I free to go?”
“You almost killed one of my inmates,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Finis
Bonus Scene 2: Hospital
(Deleted from Vampire Moon)
Author’s Note: I had a few problems with the scene below. Mostly, I felt it showed a very calculating and very dark side to Samantha Moon. Perhaps too dark and calculating and, well, murderous, to boot. But I still liked it, and I want to share it with you now. I do hope you enjoy it.
***
I landed on the hospital roof.
A moment later, closing my eyes and seeing myself in my human form, I found myself standing naked, high above the prison below. As usual, I didn’t feel myself transform. It just happened, and it happened instantly and painlessly. A true metamorphosis.
Feeling vulnerable—being naked does that to you—I trotted over to a door, the roof’s access point. The doorknob was locked, so locked that it didn’t even jiggle. I gripped the knob again and turned with a little added strength. With a groan, the mechanisms in the lock snapped apart and I pulled the door open.
The dark stairwell was lit by only a dusty, mesh-covered light bulb. I moved quickly down the metal staircase, padding lightly on bare feet, careful not touch anything.
I paused at the third floor, the prison hospital’s ICU. Although I hadn’t worked long as a federal agent for HUD, I had certainly worked long enough to get acquainted with most of the local prisons. More than a few times, I had interviewed prisoners. And one or two times, I had even interviewed prisoners in this very hospital.
Granted, I had never done so stark naked in the middle of the night.
Tonight, though, it wasn’t going to be an interview.
The door onto the floor wasn’t locked. As is the case for many prison hospitals, the building wasn’t quite as tight as the prison itself, which accounted for why most prison breakouts occurred here, in the hospitals.
It was late, and the hospital should be quiet. There would be plenty of guards, certainly, at least one in each room, and definitely a few on each floor. There would also be plenty of cameras, too.
Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about cameras.
I stood behind the metal door, away from the glass window, and listened. A few seconds later, and I was certain there was no one outside the door, or anywhere close, for that matter. Not to mention, my sixth sense would have alerted me to danger. I think. I hoped so, at least.
Anyway, all of my senses, both physical and non-physical, were telling me the coast was clear. So, I used my middle knuckle to gently push down on the lever, and used my shoulder to push open the door. I may be a vampire, but I still had prints.
I peeked out into the hallway.
***
You want surreal? Try standing in a prison hospital hallway naked.
Above me, yes, was a camera. I knew from experience that I would not show up on film, either digital or celluloid. But I did very much show up live and in person and so I kept an eye out for anything living. So far, I was alone. To either side of me were elevators. To my left was a sort of cage that I thought might have been the pharmacy. To my right was a long corridor that led to some activity and brighter lights.
I slipped down the hall, as naked as the day I was born.
There was what appeared to be a nurse’s station at the far end of the hallway. I could see a security guard leaning against the wall directly ahead of me. If he would look to his left, he would see a very naked vampire.
I did my best to keep to the shadows and that was when I found what I was looking for. It was a storage room. The door was locked. I took care of that with a quick twist of my wrist. I slipped inside and flicked on the light. It was, in fact, a big storage room, filled with shelves of everything from cleaning agents to nursing smocks. It was the smocks that I was after.
In a blink, I was wearing one. A baggy one, granted, but it would do the trick. I also grabbed a rag. I exited the storage room and looked for my next target.
I found it easily enough.
It was a fire alarm near a door a few yards away. With my hand wrapped in the rag, I yanked down on it hard, and the building erupted nicely into chaos.
***
Most of the armed guards had stepped out of the room and were conferring with each other. Many were on radios. The alarm screamed, rattling the old building. Doctors and nurses were running to and fro.
One nurse wasn’t running. One nurse was methodically checking each of the rooms until she found the one she wanted. No one noticed me or cared. I was just another nurse checking on her precious wards. Except this nurse had anything but benevolence on her mind.
Ira Lang had a room to himself. It even looked like he had a view. Granted, it wasn’t much of a view. More of a dirty, mesh-covered window set high on the wall, barely big enough to shoot arrows from had this been a medieval fortress instead. Still, the small window would have afforded sunlight, and when one is on Death Row, even sunlight is a rare luxury.
Ira was awake and looking around, blinking. No doubt he had been asleep just moments earlier. His face, I saw, was still mostly bandaged. Even from here, looking through the door, I could see the dozens of dark stitches that crisscrossed the sections of his face that weren’t covered in bandages.
The guard was a big guy with a heavily muscled chest. At least, it was heavily muscled in my imagination. I slipped inside and he barely looked at me.
I kept my face turned away from Ira as I walked around his head, pretending to examine some equipment.
“Hey, babe,” he said. “What’s going on? We got some kind of fire.”
“Something like that,” I said. I was next to his bed, looking away, running my hands over some tubes. I could feel his eyes on me.
“You guys gonna get me out of here or something?”
“Or something,” I said. My heart, which generally beat slowly and deliberately, pushing my supernatural blood throughout my undead body, had picked up. I heard it pounding in my ears.
I would love to tell you that my heart picked up because I was nervous. Because I was about to do something I had never done before. I would like to tell you that what I was about to do caused me so much guilt and regret that I nearly turned back.
I would like to. But I can’t.
The truth is, I was more excited than I had been in a long, long time. Something was coming over me. Something raw and primal, something alive and dark. And it pushed me forward recklessly.
I could see the guard clearly through the window. He was supposed to stand in the prisoner’s room at all times. However, apparently, that all changed when the fire alarm sounded. Now, he was out in the hall, hand on his weapon, apparently waiting for orders. He glanced inside at me and I made sure to look busy. He looked away again as his walkie-talkie crackled. As he unclipped it and spoke into it, I turned around quickly and faced Ira Lang.
He had been looking out the window, at the guard, but now he looked back at me. His face was heavily bruised and misshapen. He looked very little like the man who had taunted me a week earlier. His eyes seemed slightly glazed. No doubt he was on a lot of painkillers, not to mention he had just been roused from sleep.
He seemed about to ask me something pedestrian—perhaps if I could get him some water, or help him relieve his bowels—but then something crossed his damaged and battered face. More accurately
, it crossed his eyes. That something was recognition.
“You!” he started to say.
I don’t think he even finished the word. I lunged forward and clapped my hand over his mouth, careful not to let him bite me. Next, I pulled the pillow out from behind his head, and in one swift motion, replaced my hand with the pillow, covering his face completely.
I looked out the window. The guard was still on the walkie-talkie. A nurse ran by. Another guard ran by. The sirens continued to wail.
Ira kicked and fought me. I put my weight on him, binding his arms to his side, careful that nothing flailing could scratch me and inadvertently collect any evidence.
My head was pounding. My own blood was veritably surging through me. I had an image of a lioness pinning down a gazelle, her ferocious jaws clamped around her prey’s throat, catching her breath even while she waited for her meal to perish.
My stomach growled ridiculously loud. I fought an overwhelming desire to rip out his throat and drink his foul blood. I fought and fought and fought the feeling. A dozen different times, I nearly gave in. A dozen different times, I reminded myself that Ira absolutely must appear to have died naturally.
Finally, the kicking stopped. His body convulsed beneath me a half-dozen times. As it did so, I watched the guard. He was still talking heatedly into the walkie-talkie, glancing left and right, but never in the room.
I lay on Ira’s body as his life left him. In the moment that it did, it sort of sagged and deflated and the energy in the room instantly dissipated. I was clearly alone with a corpse.
At that moment, his various life-monitoring machines went nuts. There was a lot of blaring and beeping, and I quickly tucked the pillow back under his head, relieved that his eyes hadn’t bulged out. As they were, he was staring at me blankly. I glanced inside his open mouth. He’d bitten his tongue, but not too badly. A random heart attack could result in a similar injury. I wasn’t worried. The blaring of the various monitors did not, at first, get the guard’s attention, as they were mostly lost in the screeching sounds of the fire alarm.
But he must have caught my movement, because he was now in the room asking what had happened. I brushed past him and told him I had to find a doctor, ASAP.
He nodded and let me go.
I went down the hallway, made a right, passed a half-dozen sprinting nurses going in the opposite direction, and then made a beeline to the storage room.
Once inside, I removed all clothing, folded them nicely where I found them, and emerged from the room naked once more. I was at the far end of the hallway, away from the commotion. I peeked out and I kept peeking out until the coast appeared clear. When it was, I dashed down the hall as fast as I possibly could. It must have been pretty fast. Perhaps that was something else I should look into.
Just how fast could I run?
In a blink, I was at the stairway door. I used my knuckle to depress the lever, and the back of my thumb to open it. Once through the door, I flew up the stairs faster than I had ever run up any stairs in all my life. Never did my legs tire. I could have run up a thousand flights.
Maybe. I didn’t know.
On the roof, I used gravel and dirt and debris to rub my fingerprints off the broken doorknob. With any luck, no one would check the doorknob for many days to come, or perhaps even months. After all, it was just a false fire alarm, and Ira’s death would hopefully be ruled natural.
The only question was: would they report a mysterious dark-haired nurse that night? Undoubtedly. There were a lot of nurses on duty tonight. I could fit the description of any number of them.
Sure, there might be an investigation. Then again, Ira was a slimeball. I knew cops. They didn’t work very hard investigating curious deaths of slimeballs, even if there were unusual circumstances involved.
Cops let slimeballs disappear into oblivion.
On the roof, with the sound of the alarm still blaring around me, as a multitude of emergency vehicles descended upon the prison hospital, I held in my thoughts the image of the beast in the flame. The dark creature seemed to study me back, even tilting its head curiously at me.
And when I opened my eyes again, I was transformed and standing on the corner of the prison hospital roof, my thick talons curled over. I was a living gargoyle.
I leaped high into the air and caught a draft. I flapped my wings hard, gaining altitude, higher and higher, into the night sky.
Finis
Bonus Scene 3: Hanner
(Deleted from Vampire Dawn)
Author’s Note: I had a hard time finishing Vampire Dawn. I wrote, I believe, six different endings before settling on one. Below is my favorite of the endings that didn’t make the cut. I liked the scene below. A lot. I liked the set-up: Sam saving her kidnapped sister. Except, of course, I had never had her sister kidnapped (although I would use elements of her kidnapping in Moon River, two books later), or even involved in the Vampire Dawn storyline.
So, to make the kidnapping angle work, I would have had to go back and layer her sister into the storyline, and I just wasn’t sure that would work. Plus, I didn’t really like the idea of using her sister as a plot ploy. So, the idea got scrapped, and the scene cut... until now. Please note, this alternate ending was never finished, but I think you’ll still enjoy it.
***
At the base of the stairway, an amorphous entity materialized before me. It kept materializing and soon took on the shape of a young woman—a young woman with a deep gash across her throat. She appeared to be hovering in mid-air, as ghosts are wont to do.
As I stepped forward, she blocked my path. She lifted what was supposed to be a hand, but was really just a blurred stump. I tried to step around her, but she blocked my path again. Each time she moved, her mostly shapeless body lost what shape it had, until it swarmed again and reformed. She shook what was left of her head.
I paused in this lower-level hallway, a level that was far colder than the floor just above. A level that smelled of death.
“I’m okay,” I whispered. “But thank you.”
She shook her head again, and kept on shaking it even as I stepped through her, scattering her glowing filaments like so many frightened fish.
Shivering, I moved forward again, toward a door at the far end of the hallway. Behind that door, hiding behind a pillar of some sort, was a man waiting to kill me. Of that I was sure.
And behind him, in a room that was filled with light, was my sister.
I was sure of it.
Suddenly pissed beyond control, I marched down the hallway, and gave the killer what he was waiting for.
Me.
With one raised foot and a lot of rage, I kicked the door open so hard that the whole damn thing collapsed forward, including some of the doorframe.
***
The sound was deafening.
I was here. They knew I was here. Enough with the charade. Besides, I wasn’t standing in the doorway. I was off to the side, standing behind the mangled doorframe as dust billowed everywhere.
I doubted these guys were trained killers. Not like the vampire hunter I’d met last year, a man who systematically hunted down the world’s vampires. No, these guys were punks. Sickos. I imagined they lured and deceived their victims. At least, that was the impression I’d had when I touched the walls. Women were lured, and, in the case of Brian Meeks, people who worked here as well.
How they captured and killed vampires, I didn’t know, but I was beginning to get some ideas, especially if my hunch proved to be true.
For now, though, I had a bastard with a crossbow to deal with.
Of course, what I should do next was still up in the air. I hadn’t really thought things through much further than kicking down the door.
Whoever he was, I knew he was alone. Only one set of excited lungs were breathing at the far end of the hall. How many more were beyond this hall, I didn’t know. How many people it took to run a blood ring, I didn’t know that either. The fewer, the better. In fact, I doubted the w
orkers I had seen in the theater were truly privy to what was going on behind these closed doors.
Whoever they were, human life meant little. Blood was all that mattered. They were nothing more than butchers.
As I peered around the doorframe and through the settling dust, I could see bright light issuing out from under the door. I could also see shadows moving under the door. I had gotten someone’s attention.
As I waited, knowing that a man at the far end of the hallway was holding the one weapon that could actually kill me, the same ghost girl materialized before me. But this time, she didn’t look so staticky. This time, I suspected, anyone could see her. Anyone, as in the guy standing at the far end of the hallway.
As she turned her head and looked at me sadly, her eyes round and dark, the deep gash in her neck somehow deepened, revealing the ghostly hint of her mortally damaged neck. And as she continued to stare at me, I saw what she was doing.
Acting as a decoy.
In that instant, a shiny-tipped arrow swept through her, to thunk deep into the wall behind her. She never took her eyes off me. Instead, she smiled and dematerialized.
I yanked the bolt out of the wall—and was moving.
I swept low over the ground, moving impossibly fast. I doubted the shooter had another bolt cocked and ready to fire.
I was right, he hadn’t. Instead, he had something else.
Another crossbow.
Already armed with a silver-tipped arrow.
He raised it now as I hurled down the black hallway. I’d had some experience with silver. It wasn’t fun. It was hell, in fact.
Rarely have I moved so fast. I was surprised to see I clawed the ground with my hands like a wild animal, hurling myself forward, covering the space in the long hallway in a blink of an eye.
He had just raised the crossbow, and had just started squeezing the trigger when one moment, he was alive, and the next, he was twitching at my feet, the crossbow bolt lodged deep into his chest. As his legs kicked and he fought for breath that would not come, I looked away and pressed an ear against the door. Voices. Movement. The sounds of water dripping.
