“Slow down!” Bobby yelled suddenly.
I slammed on the brakes in reaction, even though I wasn’t about to hit that hydrant. Really. I swear.
“That’s Kelly Swinter’s car,” he said in explanation, pointing at a little blue hatchback.
“How do you know?”
Bobby looked at me in disbelief. “I read the file.”
“Oh, well … sure.”
The police already had the street around the house blocked off and the firefighters were firing up their hoses. But we couldn’t wait for the flames to be subdued. Not if Mrs. R might be burning up on the inside, along with any evidence needed to track down the firestarters.
I double-parked, blocking Kelly’s car into its spot, and Bobby and I were out within milliseconds and racing toward the house. A police officer saw and tried to stop us, but we were too fast for him.
“My aunt!” I yelled as cover. Not that it mattered. We were getting into that house and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Bobby kicked in the front door and the flames roared out at us, hungry for the inrushing oxygen, but he didn’t even stop. He dashed right through and I followed behind him, the heat so bad I was instantly flush with blood sweat. It dripped into my eyes, and I wiped it away with my sleeve. My white shirt would never be the same again, but I didn’t count that as much of a loss.
“Which way?” Bobby asked, when we were immediately faced with a staircase and several pathways off the foyer—one that led to a sunken living room, the rug already aflame, the kitchen beyond that, and a hallway off to the right.
“You go up, I’ll go back,” I ordered.
He nodded and ran, and I loved him for it. He respected my auth-or-it-TAY, as Cartman would say.
I dashed for the back of the house through the living room, which was empty of life. I hit the kitchen, thankful I didn’t need to breathe. The smoke was thick like lowlying fog, but I pushed my way through it, and … stopped dead in the kitchen entry. There was a body, but it was still breathing, and held upright by a teenaged guy. Dion, aka Nelson Ricci, in the flesh. All five feet eight inches of monobrow menace and Roman nose (roamin’ all over his face, my mother would say). I sensed it would all work for him when he grew into it, but I wasn’t inclined to give him that chance. Right now he was accessorizing with a barely breathing body. It wasn’t doing anything for him.
Bobby, kitchen! I called mentally.
“I know that look,” Dion said, voice gravelly beyond his years. From the smoke? “But he won’t reach you in time, Gina.”
I didn’t know which to process first—the threat, the way he’d guessed about the mind-speak, or the fact that he knew my real name.
Then I heard the movement behind me. I ducked and whirled, one leg out to sweep anyone sneaking up on me straight off their feet. I almost didn’t recognize the girl jumping my outswept leg like she was skipping rope. She came down hard, a manic gleam in her eye, clearly hoping to land all her weight on the leg, but I was already up and launching myself at her with my fingers together, hand bladed, aiming straight for the soft spot on her neck between the collar bones. One powerful blow there and she’d drop like a stone, with about as much breath. Big blue eyes widened above her button nose as she saw me coming and stumbled back.
Just as I made contact, something hard and heavy hit me in the back of the head. My blow still fell on the girl—Kelly Swinter—but it lost something in the execution as my skull cracked and pain shot through me.
I caught sight of my sneak attacker, Elise, just as my vision blacked, and another blow caught me as I was still reeling from the first. I fell to my hands and knees, but my pain sensors were already on overload and I didn’t even feel myself hit the floor.
“We’ve got to get out of here now,” Kelly choked out, her attempt at speech causing a coughing fit.
“Grab the girl,” Dion ordered.
Behind me, something hit the ground hard, but I couldn’t see who or what. My world narrowed to darkness and pain and threatened to wink out altogether. But I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I lashed out a hand to grab … something … to pull myself upright. Whatever I caught cried out. Kelly? Elise? Definitely female. Flesh gave under my fingers, and whatever I held buckled under them. I collapsed back onto the floor with my failure, losing my grip.
“Gina!” someone called. The sound ricocheted through my head like a bullet, ripping through my brain, blowing apart what was left of my mind. Bobby. He’d come at my call. Must have been the cause of whatever had fallen beside me.
I blinked frantically to clear away the dark veil over my vision. I needed to see what was going on. To help Bobby and … someone. It was all so hard to think. Too many blows to the head. The scene wouldn’t resolve itself into any more than a blur of shadows. I saw someone tall and broad-shouldered—had to be Bobby—and a blur of bleached blond hair sailing at him like a guided missile. When Bobby knocked her away with ease, Dion launched Mrs. R’s unresisting body at him, only it fell on me instead of him, blotting out my world.
There was blood everywhere. I could smell it, even if I couldn’t see. My teeth extended, and before I’d even formed a thought, I rolled, trying to throw off Mrs. R’s body. I wouldn’t drink from her, but all the others were fair game … anyone I could reach. My hands became claws, scrabbling at the kitchen floor to propel me forward, toward the nearest blood-scent. Something flew past me and landed with an oomph, teeth clacking together—a sound I knew well from recent experience. I didn’t hesitate or wait to see who I had. I struck blindly, my bloodlust leading the way. My teeth sank into flesh. A thigh? A calf? Either way, not hairy enough to be Dion’s. It didn’t matter. Blood flowed just the same, hot and tangy. Life itself. I lost myself in the release of blood flooding my mouth with a rush that was equal parts pain and euphoria—the pain as my body came back online, my bones reknit, and the bleeding into my brain reversed itself.
I’d have passed out or spontaneously combusted or just died from the overload of pleasure/pain to my system if I hadn’t been tethered to life by, literally, the skin of my teeth. It was only when I realized that the flood had slowed to a sluggish stream that my fangs retracted. Horrified, I blinked my vision clear, but now the storm clouds of smoke inside the house were making that difficult. I could barely make out paling skin and scads of hair, beneath which I sought a pulse point. Someone grabbed me under the arms suddenly and hauled me away before I could find it.
“I’ve got you, Gina.” It was Bobby. Thank God.
“But—”
“We’ve got to get out. The place is fully engulfed.”
“But the body!” I said, my tongue barely cooperating.
“Mrs. Radner is out. I took care of her first.” He sounded ashamed of that, like I should have been his first concern, even though I was a vampire and could handle everything better than poor Mrs. R. It was kind of sweet.
A zing of fear went through me at the thought. Had I killed? I remembered not being too concerned as I fed in my haze of hurt, but now …
“The others?” I asked.
I had a horrible feeling about all this. If I hadn’t killed my victim, the fire would. I’d surely left her too weak to escape. I couldn’t live with that, especially not for all eternity.
“There’s no time!”
As if to punctuate his sentence, a beam or railing fell somewhere in the house with a great crack. Bobby pulled me toward the exit. Despite the fact that I was recovering, I didn’t have the strength to resist.
“We’ve got to talk to the police,” Bobby said.
“Turn myself in, you mean?”
Bobby turned so that he could look into my eyes. “What? Gina, anyone left in there is there because of the choices they made, not because of you.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I saw. You fed. It’s what we do. You wouldn’t have taken so much if they hadn’t ambushed and hurt you, right?”
I nodded, not truly
believing but lacking the will to argue.
“So it was self-defense. Someone was going down. It was either her or you.”
It made sense; I just didn’t buy it. I’d needed to feed, but so much?
“Look, I’ve got to get Mrs. Radner to the paramedics. We’ll talk more later.”
He hefted Mrs. R from the ground outside, where he’d laid her to go after me, and carried her cradled against his chest in a honeymoon hold. I didn’t want to talk more. I wanted a do-over on the night. I followed after Bobby, barely remembering to cough and wheeze as if I’d inhaled all that thick smoke. The EMTs came forward right away, one shoving an oxygen mask over my face and another grabbing a gurney for Mrs. R and getting straight to work on her. I was relieved that the mask meant I didn’t have to talk to anyone yet. I wasn’t ready. The way I was feeling right now, I’d confess to murder. That wouldn’t help anyone, and I had a personal score to settle with Dion. He was going down.
Bobby gave our statement. I saw him flash credentials, something I didn’t have on me. Then he waved toward our car, probably describing the Swinter vehicle beside it. In another minute and he and his officer friend were coming toward me.
“Ma’am, I’m going to need your statement as well,” the officer said when they reached me.
I cringed and removed my mask. The oxygen continued to hiss out, with the weird plastic smell it had picked up going through the tubing.
“Agent Crandall here says you got a tip that led to this house.”
I licked my lips and prepared to lie through my teeth as Agent Crandall had done. “The tip said Mrs. Radner was in there, but it turned out to be an ambush. When we ran in, they were waiting for us. I can’t tell you much more than that. I got clipped in the head and blacked out. When I came to, Agent Crandall was pulling me out of the burning house.”
He nodded. “Have the paramedics checked you out?”
“I’ve got a very hard head.”
He nodded again and I tried not to picture him as a bobblehead, but it was tough. I think my mind was desperately trying for some comic relief. “Anything you can remember would be a help.”
I described Dion in all his monobrowed menace and as much as I could remember about Elise and Kelly. I’d seen the latter’s picture during our initial briefing, but the psycho eyes she’d been sporting had turned her all but unrecognizable. They didn’t really go with the button nose and bright blue eyes. Elise hadn’t changed a bit, except for the absence of her cat’s-eye contacts.
My cell phone interrupted the questioning, and I grabbed it out of my pocket to check the readout. Hunter. Crap, I’d forgotten all about him.
“I’ve got to take this,” I told the officer. “Confidential informant.”
He nodded like he understood and courteously turned away, but he didn’t go far. He was talking to the EMTs about Mrs. R. The firefighters were still battling the blaze, but it didn’t look like much of the house would be saved. Poor Mrs. R.
“Hello,” I said, answering just before it kicked over to voicemail.
“Where are you? We said ten o’clock, right?”
I pulled the phone away from my ear to look at the time. Almost ten thirty. Crap again.
“Sorry! I ran into some … trouble. Can you hang tight another half hour? Bar tab’s on me.”
He didn’t answer for a second and I was afraid I was losing him, but finally he said, “Okay, but if you’re not here by eleven, I’m gone.”
I hung up and Officer Bobblehead met my eyes. “We have to go,” I said. “My informant’s not going to wait all night.”
He … wait for it … nodded. “I know where to find you if I have any more questions.” That was news to me, but I supposed Bobby must have given him a card or something.
I didn’t want to go to a wine bar … or anywhere but bed. It had been a busy night. I wasn’t just tired, I was completely drained. This spy stuff sucked. Death sucked. Destruction sucked. And I sucked most of all. The girl I’d fed from—I wasn’t going to think about it. I could beat myself up later, when I had time and privacy. For now, I had to pull myself together.
Luckily or unluckily, my very scent was a distraction. For the second night in a row, I was doomed to smell like a smokehouse. I wished I had the superpower of clean. “Got a brush and some wipes?” I asked Bobby, flashing back to the night I’d dug my way out of the grave.
“Glove compartment,” he said with a smile.
I dug around and did the best I could with what I could find. I rolled my sleeves up to cover the blood I’d wiped from my forehead, unbuttoned an extra button on the blouse to distract from anything I missed and figured I was as ready as I was going to get.
“You going for an interview or a date?” Bobby asked.
“Date,” I answered, poking at him. “Want to come along? I might need backup.”
“The guy’s a dentist,” Bobby scoffed.
“Ever seen Little Shop of Horrors?”
He huffed. “I’m already your chauffeur. I might as well be your muscle too. Nothing I like better than watching you make eyes at some other guy.”
“You know I only have eyes for you,” I answered as he started up the car. It scared me because it was very nearly true.
I looked away from him so he’d break eye contact and focus on pulling out onto the road … and because I didn’t want him to know I was sincere. I had to keep him on his toes. Guys get comfy and all of the sudden they’re taking you for granted, showing up empty-handed for dates—no flowers or candies or, better yet, sparklies, or missing dates altogether for brews and bromance with their buds …
We hit the wine bar at 10:59, and I jumped out before the car even shut off to make sure I got to Hunter in time. He sat at a corner booth, back to the wall so he could watch the whole room, just like Bobby had the night before. On the table in front of him was a nearly empty bottle and a wine glass the size of a small fishbowl, with about an inch of something that looked like blood but probably wasn’t. A hostess tried to seat me as I entered, but I waved her off and made a beeline for Hunter.
Behind me, I heard Bobby come in and chat with the hostess, who needed to see some ID before she’d seat him. Sometimes I forgot we were still supposed to be teens … were teens, except that I totally felt so much older than my old, pre-vamp self. Maybe it was even showing on my face, since the hostess hadn’t carded me. Spy games, death, and destruction will do that to a girl. The double D’s—death and destruction—made me think of the Radner place, and that made me think of … I immediately pushed it out of my head again. I could self-destruct later.
I pasted on a smile and stood beside Hunter’s booth. “Is this seat taken?”
He’d been watching me since I entered, but it took him a beat to focus on my face, either because of the booze or because he’d seen something he liked below the neckline.
“No, please sit.”
He was clearly expecting me to take the seat across from him, but I’d been jumped from behind once that night, and it was enough. I scooted him in and sat close enough to feel his heat. It was one thing I missed about being human—that warmth. Not that the cold really affected me anymore, but that roasty toasty feeling, like when you just wake up from a good sleep, all bundled under the covers … gone.
Hunter took a sip of his blood-red wine and swirled it around in his mouth for a second before swallowing.
“Look,” he said when he wouldn’t dribble, “I’ve already been through this conversation about six times on my own while I was waiting for you. What do you say we cut right to the chase?”
“Works for me.” Especially given my level of exhaustion and my absolute commitment to getting the bastards responsible as soon as inhumanly possible.
“Good. What is it you want?” he asked.
“All the dirt you have on Dion, his associates, and the vampires behind the Tower.”
His eyes widened. “But you’re one of them.”
“Yes and no.”
H
e studied me, wary now. “What do I get in return?”
I studied him back. “What do you want?”
“Eternal life. I want you to bite me and do … whatever it is you do so that I’ll become one of you when I die.”
I drew back from him despite his warmth. “Let’s say that’s even possible. Have you really thought about it? You won’t be able to walk in the light. It’d kill your practice, because even if you cater to the night owls, you can’t risk infecting your patients all unknowing if you nick yourself on something. How will you get by?”
“I’ll worry about that later, after I’m dead. But I’ll live a normal life until then, right? Knowing I’ll rise again, I can plan—smart investments, a living will, that sort of thing. By the time I die, making a living won’t be a problem.”
“No, you’ll have all-new problems, like sunlight and stakes.”
“You did it,” he said, eyes flashing.
“No, it was done to me.” And look where I was now. Federal flunky—kicking butts and leaving them to burn in a fiery inferno. No, no, no, I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe she’d gotten out. Maybe—
His eyes lost some of their burn. “I’m sorry you got turned against your will.”
I shrugged, letting him buy that explanation for my pain. “Not your fault. But why ask me? Why not go to the devils you know?”
He looked away. “They won’t do it. They won’t even hear me out. Rules, they say. Maybe after a lifetime of service … ”
“Seems a small price to pay for eternity.”
“But, like you say, I have a life.”
“So you want to have your cake and eat it too. Why didn’t you join Dion’s group, then? Aren’t they promising a path to eternity?” That was totally the theory, anyway, given the cult of Dionysus and that whole life-from-death discussion.
“You know what they say—the road to hell is paved with large intestines.” He stopped at the look on my face. “Sorry, bad joke. What I’m trying to say is that their path seems to involve a blood war.”
“Go on.”
He sat back in the booth and crossed his arms. “You haven’t made me any promises yet. I’m not saying another word until we have a deal.”
Fangtastic Page 9
