Hell on Heels - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  I hung up on Ren’s assurances that he would handle everything, and looked over to where Rebecca was waiting for a main elevator going down. I took a couple of steps in her direction, then started to run. I passed her at a full sprint heading for the stairs.

  “Come on!” I yelled at her.

  She didn’t hesitate, just drew her sidearm and ran after me. “Why are we taking the stairs?” she shouted at my back.

  “Remember that whole super-hearing thing?” I asked over my shoulder. I got to the fire stairs and almost ripped the door off the hinges.

  “Yeah, I remember. You hear something?”

  I nodded, starting down the stairs. “Yeah, the screaming’s already started.”

  The screaming was going on in earnest by the time I made it to the morgue, having left Flynn a couple of floors above me on the stairs. I kicked in the Plexiglas quarantine doors, silver stake in hand, and froze. Instead of there being one newborn, starving vampire in the room, there were at least two, and from the looks of the shaking bag on the exam table to my right, about to be more.

  I didn’t waste time, just jammed the silver stake through the bag and in the rough area of the heart of the creature trying to get out of the bag. Silver covers a lot of sins when dealing with supernatural creatures. With vampires in particular, it lets you miss the heart by a couple of inches and still kill the thing. The bag went still, and I pulled the other stake from my belt. One vampire was stalking a human across the room, who I assumed was the coroner. He wasn’t moving, and the vampire wasn’t in a hurry, so obviously this one had already learned how to mesmerize its prey.

  Fast learners. That’s never good. The other vampire was standing in the center of the room, smiling at me. It had none of the hallmarks of a newborn. No red eyes, no confusion on its features, no blood running down its mouth from the first time the fangs break through the skin. Apparently that’s painful and involved some pretty significant restructuring of the jawline. I don’t have fangs, and I’ve never spent enough time close to a vampire’s mouth to notice.

  Flynn burst into the room just about the time realization dawned on me. “Becks, get out of here!”

  “Oh fuck, Harker, I just got here,” she panted. I forget that normal humans, even slightly magically enhanced humans, get a little winded after four flights of stairs at a dead run. “Can’t I just shoot one of these bastards before I go?”

  The answer was obviously “no” since as soon as she got the words out, the vamp in the center of the room flew into action. Not quite literally, but almost. He moved with inhuman speed, vaulting over the exam table and sprinting at Flynn. This put him headed right past me, and he apparently hadn’t heard of me, or what I can do.

  Like match him almost speed-for-speed. He was headed past me for Flynn at a dead run, faster than a human eye could follow. Lucky for Rebecca Gail Flynn, I’m a little more than human. I stuck my right arm out and delivered a clothesline that would have made Nikita Koloff proud. The vampire turned completely over in midair before landing on his belly in the middle of the morgue. I jabbed down with my other stake, but he rolled out of the way and sprang to his feet before I could strike. This put my face at the unfortunate level of his knees, and he took a second to introduce me to his right knee with extreme prejudice.

  I flopped flat onto my back, then nipped up onto my feet in a move I’d perfected watching Sunday afternoon Kung-Fu Theatre as a child. Okay, as a seventy-year-old, but a very spry septuagenarian. Vamp threw a punch that was intended to cave in my face, but I sidestepped and swung an elbow that would have crushed his throat if it had connected. He grabbed my arm and flipped me. I used my superhuman agility to land on my feet and kick at his balls. He slipped out of the way and slammed down on my knee with both fists. There was no way I could ever beat him fair and square, so it was probably good for me my moral compass broke in the 1920s.

  Becks, you got silver in your pistol? I asked over the mental link that Flynn and I shared. I tried to stay out of her head as much as possible to give her privacy. She tried to stay out of my head even more because my head is a very disturbing place. But this time I needed backup, and she was all I had. Well, her, her marksmanship medals, and sixteen rounds of silver-tipped ammunition.

  Yeah, I swapped out mags on the stairs.

  Good. Wait for the opening.

  The vamp and I exchanged punches, blocks, parries, and kicks for what felt like at least half an hour, which probably meant a minute and a half, then I overextended with one punch. It was an error of a millimeter or less, but it was all he needed. He leaned back out of the way of a devastating right cross, then grabbed my arm and pulled me past him onto a nearby exam table.

  Now! I shouted to Flynn mentally as I switched targets for a second and turned my dive into a roll, flipping over the table onto my feet and throwing my second and last silver stake across the room at the third vamp. The foot-long hunk of sharpened silver went into the vampire’s head right behind and below the right ear, crunching through the skull and burying itself into the monster’s brain and severing the spinal cord. It dropped like a stone at the coroner’s feet, who took a good look at the critter before him, threw up, and fainted dead away.

  With two less vampires and one less human to worry about, I spun around and saw Flynn locked in a contest of wills with the last vampire. He had her gaze; you could almost feel the force of her will struggling not to be overcome by the powerful vampire’s suggestion. I decided that while Flynn had a hellacious amount of willpower, this wasn’t the night to make her go toe-to-toe with the varsity squad of monsters. I picked up a metal bowl from a nearby table and smashed it into the side of the vampire’s head with a loud bong.

  The vampire turned to me and smiled. “Is that the best you could do, human?”

  “Boy, do you have the wrong city,” I said with a grin. “All I needed to do was distract you. She’s gonna—”

  I never got a chance to tell him what Flynn was going to do because she commenced to doing it the second the vamp’s eyes swung back in her direction. She put three in the creature’s chest, dropping it to the ground instantly. Then she took a few steps forward, lowered her weapon to the ground, and put two more in the vampire’s head.

  She looked up at me with a shaky smile. “Thanks for the save.”

  “No problem. You know I got your back.”

  “Yeah, but what was all this?” She gestured around the room at the three dead vampires.

  “I don’t know. They shouldn’t have turned this quickly. Not all of them, anyway. Something weird is going on here, and I think we might have a bigger problem than just a pissed-off Renfield on our hands.”

  Chapter 3

  “I’ll have to give you an A-Plus for understatement on that one, Harker.” Agent John Smith’s voice came from the doorway to the morgue. He looked like every federal agent in every cop movie, except his suit had razor-sharp creases, and his salute was snappy and tight. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed close to his scalp, and the wrinkles around his eyes would have been called smile lines on anyone else, but on Smith you could tell those were lines caused by a man who’s stood on many a hill surveying the forces arrayed against him.

  “You know something I don’t know, Agent Johnny?” I asked. I kept playing with different variations on his fake name, but he never cracked, no matter what I called him.

  “I know a great many things you don’t know, Harker, but I don’t know shit about these guys. As far as I knew, they were human a couple of days ago. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”

  “Obviously,” I agreed. I turned to the coroner, who was just getting to his feet. “Are you okay to be in here? Because a lot the things we deal with can seriously fuck with your worldview.”

  The white-haired man just laughed at me. “Son, I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of man’s ill treatment of other men for thirty years. If there’s anything left under heaven that can shock me, I can’t wait to see it.”

  “I’m a
fraid that will have to wait another day or two, sir,” Smith said. He flashed his badge at the coroner, who gave it a once-over and nodded. “I’m John Smith with Homeland Security, and this is my scene now.”

  “It can be your scene all you like, Agent Smith,” the doc said, wiping his wire-rimmed glasses on his lab coat. “But this is my morgue, and these are my dead bodies.” He gestured at the vampires, who were now scattered all over his morgue. Unlike on television, real vampires don’t turn to dust when they’re killed, unless they’re really, really old. Or burned by the sun. Massive sunlight exposure will cause them to burn up and turn to dust, but it’s not instant, and it’s very smelly. Not something you want to be around.

  “Fair enough, Doctor…?” Smith raised an eyebrow.

  “Strunin. Doctor Jacob Strunin, Chief Medical Examiner.” He extended a hand, and Smith shook it.

  “Okay, Doctor Strunin. You are hereby deputized into the Department of Homeland Security, Paranormal Division, under my direct supervision. Please understand that revealing any information that we uncover as part of our work here will result in your immediate arrest for treason, which I will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Do you understand me?”

  I watched the little doctor’s face pale, then he stood up straight, nodded his head and said, “I understand. Now can we get down to the business of figuring out why these dead people just tried to kill me?”

  I laughed and walked over to clap the little doctor on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit, doc. But these aren’t dead people. Hell, they’re not even people!”

  “What are you trying to say, Mr.- um, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Harker. Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter, at your service.” I gave him my most florid bow, but my courtly manners left something to be desired, and I had to grab onto an exam table to keep from falling on my ass in the middle of the morgue.

  “Well, Mr. Harker,” the doctor said, obviously holding back a laugh at my expense. “What are these bodies if not people?”

  “Doc, these are vampires.” I waited for the inevitable, but it didn’t come. He just knelt by the nearest corpse and peeled back the top lip.

  “Hmmm… There are definitely extended canines. That seems to validate your theory.” He pried open an eyelid and poked at the eyeball. “The vitreous fluid seems thick, almost viscous. I can’t prove that they are vampires without a more complete workup, but there’s also nothing proving they are not vampires. So, we have vampires in North Carolina. Who knew?”

  I raised my hand, but that’s as much because I’m a huge smartass than as anything else. “I was pretty much aware of it.”

  The doc shot me a dirty look. I ignored it because that’s what I do. He knelt down again and started poking at the vampire corpses. “What are the odds that these guys are going to get up and come after me again?” he asked, not moving back at all.

  “Zero,” I assured the man. “We staked them with silver. Destroying the heart gets rid of the blood reservoir, and silver is supremely poisonous to vamps, so it’s kind of a double-whammy.”

  “Hmmm…” Strunin murmured. “So that old wives’ tale is true, what about the others?” He looked at Smith, who jerked a thumb at me as if to say I was the resident expert. Which I suppose I was, living most of my life with a vampire.

  “Running water, not a thing. Scattering rice in front of one, not a thing. Garlic—there’s actually an interesting story there, but let’s just say that Bram Stoker had a thing against Italian cooking and we’ll leave it at that. Garlic does nothing. Holy Symbols can burn, but it’s because they’re usually made of silver. They don’t reflect in old mirrors because mirrors used silver backing. New mirrors aren’t a problem. What else? Oh yeah, sunlight is definitely a thing; it’ll crisp a vamp in seconds. They can get drunk off drinking blood from a drunk person, but most drugs don’t affect them, oddly enough. They don’t eat or drink, and they can’t really turn into a bat or fog. But as you saw, they can bespell you, so don’t look one in the eyes unless it’s a vampire you know and trust. And let’s face it, unless you’re me, there probably aren’t very many vampires you know and trust.”

  “And this rule doesn’t apply to you because?” It was almost funny, watching him put two and two together and get five. I saw him think back to the introduction, then back to the first time he read Dracula, either in Classic Comics or the whole novel. Or worse, saw one of the movies. But I saw him recognize the Harker name, try to rationalize it with the age of the man in front of him, and eventually give up.

  “Jonathan Harker is a character in Dracula,” the stunned doctor said.

  “I called him Dad,” I said. “My parents were fairly important to that book.”

  “But…how old are you?”

  “Older than I look, and let’s leave it at that. I’m not immortal, like Uncle Lu-, like Dracula. But I age very slowly. And I know a few things about vampires, and one of those things is that these vampires are real-dead. Like forever dead. Almost like human dead, except without all that annoying bleeding.”

  “So we know what killed them, which is to say you,” Strunin said. “And we know that they were vampires, so what am I looking for in my examination.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You’re not doing the examination. I am.”

  “Excuse me?” The doctor took off his glasses and polished them furiously on his lab coat. If he polished those lenses any more, he’d wear a hole in them.

  “We aren’t doing a medical examination, Doc. We’re looking for other clues. Like you said, we know what killed them. Silver poisoning. Now we need to learn as much about them as possible.” I reached down and hefted the nearest vamp onto a nearby exam table.

  “Like this guy,” I said. “We know he’s European from his hair gel. I can smell it, and it’s a kind only found in France. They don’t even ship to the US because they’re French, and ‘fuck you’ is the motto of France. His nails are done, so he comes from money or is old enough to have learned to appreciate a good manicure. His shoes are recently shined, so I would guess he flew in within the past week.”

  “And you know this because?” Flynn asked.

  “I’ve lived in this town a long time, and the only place I’ve found to get a good shoeshine is the airport. And this shine is just a few days old.” I pried open the dead vampire’s mouth and peered inside. I pulled a tiny flashlight out of my pocket and shined it inside the mouth.

  “Well, we know he’s old,” I said, closing the mouth.

  “How do we know that?” Doc Strunin asked.

  “He’s got most of his teeth, which means that he lived probably no earlier than the eighteenth century, but his dental work is friggin’ terrible, so he was turned no later than 1850.”

  “So you’re saying that my twenty-first century murder victim is actually an eighteenth century vampire?” Flynn asked.

  “That’s what it looks like, detective,” I replied. “Seems that these were decoys Gus sent in to lure Uncle Luke out into the open by making him think there was a new vampire in town. Now, where would we find a bunch of eighteenth-century relics in Charlotte?”

  “I have no idea,” Flynn replied. “I thought we bulldozed anything over thirty years old.”

  Just then Flynn’s cell rang. She answered it at the same time that Smith reached into his jacket and pulled out a vibrating phone. The phone on the coroner’s desk lit up, and I felt left out because nobody was calling me. I had the mental connection between Flynn and me locked down as much as I could, but I still felt the spike of anxiety, excitement, and fear at whatever she was hearing. Everyone hung up at about the same time, and I looked at each one in turn. Flynn looked a little flushed, and I could feel the blood rushing in her veins. Smith looked like a rock with salt-and-pepper five o’clock shadow, and Strunin was pale, with a couple of little beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.

  “Let me guess, another corpse?” I asked.

  “Looks like a vampire attack,�
� Smith confirmed. “Parking deck at The Green downtown.”

  “The one under the hot dog place? I know it. What level?” I asked. I checked the magazine in my Glock and made sure I’d returned my silver stakes to my sheaths.

  “Bottom floor,” Flynn said. “I’ll drive.” She started for the door, keys in hand.

  “No way,” I said, not moving.

  She froze in mid-stride and spun back to me on one heel. “What?”

  “You’re not going,” I said. I watched the red start at her neck and creep upwards and knew there was an explosion coming.

  “Why in the ever-loving fuck would you think I’d let you go by yourself?” She bit off each word with an almost audible click of her teeth.

  “If this is Gus, you can’t hang with him. You do pretty well against regular vamps, and if it’s a fledgling, I’m not worried at all unless you come down with a terminal case of the stupid. But Gus is a badass. He’s shared blood with every old vampire he can find for over a century, and he gets a little bit stronger each time. He’s faster than me, smarter than me, and so much stronger than me it’s not even funny.”

  “So what makes you think you can beat him?”

  I held out my right hand, palm up, a little over waist high, and focused my will. “Solis Ortus!” I shouted, and a ball of light coalesced in the air above my hand, growing brighter and brighter until we all had to look away.

  “Eclipsis!” I said, and the light dispersed. “I have a few other tricks at my disposal that might make vampires uncomfortable,” I said. But I can only focus on two or three things at a time. I can fight Gus and cast spells at the same time, but I can’t pay attention to keeping you alive while I do it, and Gus will know it. So please, just stay here and let me do the heavy lifting.”

  “Can I at least go to the safe house and wait with Ren and Luke?” Flynn asked.

  “You can. He can’t.” I gestured at Smith. “No offense, but Uncle Luke still kinda thinks he’s a sovereign government. He doesn’t like being reminded that there are people who outrank him in this country.”