Hell on Heels - A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella

by John G. Hartness

  “He’s mine,” came a voice from the balcony, and I looked up to see Gus swooping down from fifty feet away. That bastard always knew how to make an entrance. He glided down to the stage, an honest-to-God cape billowing out behind him, landing on one knee about ten feet in front of me. His vampire minions backed away, leaving an alley for him to approach me. He stood and swept his cape back off his shoulders, letting it flutter behind him like a black velvet banner. He walked toward me, almost stalking, his polished black riding boots echoing across the stage.

  Everything stopped in that surreal moment. All the other fighting stopped as his henchmen watched our confrontation. He was playing the role of the Master Vampire to the hilt, and I knew exactly where he learned it, He had Uncle Luke’s shtick down cold, from the cold glare, to the shoes polished to a mirror gloss, all the way to his hair plastered tight to his skull with more product than a Lady Gaga concert. He stopped in front of me and looked at me, a little smirk curling up one corner of his mouth.

  “Did you actually think you could beard the lion in its den, little man? In what world are you strong enough or smart enough to best me?”

  I kept my voice low but looked him straight in his cold gray eyes. I wasn’t afraid of his mind control powers; I’d been training with the OG boss vampire for a hundred years. I locked gazes with him and said, “If you leave Charlotte right now, I won’t hunt you and you can keep your pitiful little pseudo-life for as long as you like. But if we throw down, I’m not going to stop until you’re true dead and I’ve scattered your remains at sunrise over Freedom Park. You got me?”

  He snarled and reached out with his left hand, grabbing me around the throat and picking me up one-handed. “You insolent fool, you dare to threaten me? I should snap your neck right now!” His face grew mottled with rage and his grip tightened. Just like I’d planned.

  The problem with picking someone up by the throat is that you have to lock your elbow to do it with any touch of aplomb. And with your elbows locked and held straight out in front of you, your elbows become vulnerable to all sorts of nasty things. Like people smashing you in the elbows and dislocating both of them in one sharp blow.

  So that’s exactly what I did to Gus. I reached up and punched him on the back sides of his fully extended elbows. There were two loud snap sounds, and he dropped me, screeching in pain. I hit the floor and rolled, coming up with my pistol back in my hand and putting silver-tipped hollowpoints in the chest of the three nearest vampires. My gun clicked empty, so I drew a pair of silver stakes from the back of my belt and went to work.

  I was a whirlwind of silver and smartass comments, taking out half a dozen vampires in half a minute. The vampires covering Flynn, Van Helsing, and Smith all turned to look at the carnage I was creating, and all became part of carnage. Flynn and Van Helsing took out two vampires each, and when I turned to see how Smith was doing, I watched him pull his hand back through a gaping hole in a vampire’s chest. I gaped at him, but he just held a single bloody finger to his lips. He spun on his heels and grappled at another vampire, and my attention returned to the undead murderer at hand.

  I looked down at Gus, who was still working on getting his elbows back into alignment. I stepped forward and put a foot on one of Gus’ ankles. “Stay still, asshole,” I growled down at him.

  He looked up at me and said, “I’ll have your soul for breakfast for this insult, H—”

  I cut him off, still trying to avoid Van Helsing figuring out my name. “You won’t do shit, Gus. You’ll either run now with your tail tucked between your legs like the good little butler you really are, or I’ll rip those useless arms off your body and beat you to death with them.”

  He glared at me. “You don’t have the stones, boy.” His voice was low and dangerous, and I could feel the hate rolling off him like steam. He bent over, stomped on the fingers of one hand, then pulled until his elbow popped back into place. He swapped arms, repeated the process, then stood up, flexing his newly-restored arms. I could see the pain in the beads of sweat dotting his forehead, but he never let it touch his face.

  “I believe the question is, is that the best you’ve got?” he asked as he charged me. I dove to my left, landing in a roll and coming up with my hands already spinning a warding spell. “Murus!” I said, pouring my will into the words.

  Gus slammed into my hastily drawn circle, then pounded on it as he howled in rage. “You cannot defeat me, Quincy Harker! I will never let you leave this place alive!”

  He was looking more and more correct as Smith’s flare continued to burn and catch more segments of the audience seating on fire. I looked out to see most of the audience chamber engulfed in flames and smoke roiling across the entire building. The vampires didn’t care, of course, but my human companions and I were starting to have a rough time breathing.

  I looked up at the ceiling and the fly grid, some eighty feet above the stage. All old wood, it was ripe to catch fire and come down on all of us in a heap of burning wood and death. I focused my will, opened a tiny hole in the top of my dome, thrust out my hand and yelled, “Foenestra!” I unleashed my magic in a tight beam, focused down to a two-foot circle, and blasted a hole through the grid, all the rigging, and the roof of the theatre. All the debris flew up, and so did the smoke.

  The air cleared almost instantly, but what goes up, must come down, in this case in the form of chunks of four by four and nails.

  “Heads up!” I yelled, running full tilt for the side of the stage out of the drop zone. I watched Smith reach up and bat a chunk of wood out of the air, then turn right back to beating a vampire’s face in, and saw a two-foot length of lumber pin one vampire to the floor, coming down straight through its neck and knocking him flat. The wood missed his heart, brain, and spine, so he just lay there writhing like a bug in a kid’s science project.

  I heard a scream and turned to see Van Helsing lose her footing and go down in the center of a circle of vamps. Flynn tried to get to the fallen slayer but found herself surrounded. I turned to run across the stage to help the women, but Gus was on me in an instant. He grabbed the back of my coat and pulled me back to him, wrapping me up in a full nelson and effectively immobilizing me.

  “Watch, Harker,” he hissed into my ear. “Watch as my minions tear your friends limb from limb. Watch as we destroy even the faerie, with all his strength and magic.” He turned me to look at Smith, who was hard-pressed by a cluster of four vampires.

  Faerie? Smith? It made a certain amount of sense, but I couldn’t think about that just then. I had to come up with something, and fast, or all my friends, and Van Helsing, were going to be a vampire buffet. I struggled against Gus’s grip, but he held me tight. I thrashed and heard a sharp hiss as a beam of sunlight from the hole in the ceiling danced across the back of his hand. A thin tendril of smoke climbed from the back of Gus’s hand, and I saw my out.

  I looked up, focused my will, and shouted, “FOENESTRA!” at the top of my lungs. Power flew from me, scattered without the focus of a gesture, and blasted through the wooden grid and the rest of the ceiling. Wood, brick, and steel flew upward from the roof, falling outward onto the surrounding streets and alleys, but that couldn’t be helped. As the dust cleared, sunlight streamed into the theatre from the new twenty-foot skylight I’d created, and vampires burst into flames all around the stage. Gus dropped me like a hot potato and ran for the shadows, but most of his minions weren’t so lucky. The four around Van Helsing died almost instantly, and three of the ones surrounding Flynn met the same fate. The few survivors scattered to the shadows and the dark places under the theatre, but we were in no shape to pursue.

  Gus stopped in front of a stairwell leading down into the bowels of the building, glared at me across the stage and shouted, “This isn’t over, Quincy Harker! I’m not done with you, or your ‘Uncle’ Vlad, either!” Then he turned and ran down into the safety of the theatre’s catacombs.

  I turned to see Gabriella Van Helsing standing less than ten feet away fro
m me, a nickel-plated Colt 1911 pistol leveled at my head and a scowl on her face. “Just what did he call you?”

  Chapter 11

  “Go ahead, Agent Harper,” Van Helsing said. “Tell me your name again.” The Colt didn’t waver, not even a little. Pretty impressive for a slight woman who had been getting the shit beat out of her by vampires less than two minutes before.

  I sighed and took the gun from her. It was a lot harder than it should have been because she’s really strong and fast. For a human. But since I’m not exactly human, it still wasn’t that hard. I ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber, and handed it back to her.

  “Point that thing at me again and I’ll slap the taste out of your mouth,” I said. “I usually don’t hit women, but you’re better armed and a better fighter than most men, so I’ll make an exception if I have to.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Quincy Holmwood Harker. Yes, I am that Quincy, born from that Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray. I am the apparently immortal or at least stupidly long-lived son of two parents that Dracula fed on, shared blood with, but didn’t turn. That does something to your DNA, we’re not exactly sure what.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “About a hundred-twenty,” I said. “And yes, I knew your great-grandfather. He was very nice to me when I was a little boy. He let me pull on his beard and gave me sweets when my parents weren’t looking. Visiting with him was one of the bright spots of my childhood.”

  “What kind of monster are you?” she asked. At least she put the gun away.

  “I don’t think I am a monster,” I said. “I’m not a vampire, a were of any flavor, or a demon. I guess you could call me a wizard if you felt the need, but I guess I’d prefer the term magic-user.”

  “You lied to me,” she said, and the betrayal in her eyes hurt more than the bruises Gus had left.

  I tried to weasel out of it, but I knew it was useless. “Technically, I didn’t lie to you. My ID badge was misprinted, and I just didn’t correct you.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she hissed.

  “No arguments there,” Flynn chimed in.

  “Not helping,” I said.

  “Not trying to,” Flynn said, and I could feel her grin through our mental connection. Having a hitchhiker in your head pretty much always sucks, but it sucks worse when the hitchhiker is an insufferable smartass.

  “You’re a monster,” Van Helsing growled, and I could feel the situation slipping away from me.

  “I’m not a monster, I’m a guy. We’re all assholes, and we all lie, but that doesn’t mean you have to do something stupid.” I held out my hands, palms out, trying to calm her down. I had my usual level of success in calming down angry women, which is to say none.

  “You lied to me to keep me from know what you were, and now I find out that not only are you part vampire, but the bloodsucker that my great-grandfather thought he’d killed all those years ago is alive? What am I supposed to do about that?”

  “That’s really two questions,” I stalled, trying to come up with one, much less two, valid answers. “About the me lying to you thing, I’ve always been a big fan of forgiving and forgetting, personally.”

  Flynn barked out a laugh. “You’re still mad at your uncle for bespelling the 1919 White Sox into throwing the World Series, and that was almost a hundred years ago!”

  “Not helping,” I said. “Besides, there are forgivable sins, and then there’s baseball. You don’t mess with baseball. Anyway, you can forgive me or not; that’s your call. But about the other thing—about Count Vlad Dracula still being alive regardless of what Stoker put in his little bedtime story? That’s nobody’s fault but Stoker’s. Not even your grandfather.”

  “Great-grandfather,” she corrected.

  “I know, but I feel old enough already, so we’re going to skip that part if it’s quite all right with you. Look, Abraham knew that Luke wasn’t dead. He even knew that Luke was there when he died.”

  Her eyes widened briefly at that, then narrowed in suspicion. “How would you know that?”

  “Because I was standing at the foot of his bed when he waved out the window at him. Your grandfather, Abraham’s son this time, would never invite Luke in, so he stood out in the snow and watched through the night as we kept vigil. They were never friends, but there was an understanding at the end between hunter and vampire.”

  “And what if I think you’re full of shit? What if I decide to go after your uncle anyway?”

  “That would be a very bad choice,” I said.

  “What, you think he’d turn me? I’m not afraid of living forever.”

  “Says everyone who’s never tried it,” I said. “Get back to me in seventy years or so and let me know how it’s going. But that’s not the point. I’m not the least bit afraid of Luke turning you. He hasn’t turned anyone since my mom’s best friend Lucy. Nowadays he’d just kill you.”

  “Others have tried,” she shot back.

  “Fine, then. Don’t forgive me and work with us to take down the vampire that’s an actual threat to the people of this city. Stay pissed and go after Luke, you know, the vampire that the whole genre is based off of. He’s taken down more vampire hunters than I’ve gotten lap dances, and let me tell you, that’s a pretty big number.”

  “Fuck this, I’m going after him.” Van Helsing started to storm out the door, but Flynn got in front of her.

  “Look, Gabriella, let’s all just take a minute to dial it down…” Flynn took her by the arm, and the vampire hunter shook free and gave Flynn a hard shove.

  “Bitch, don’t you put your monster-loving hands on me!”

  “You’d better think twice about calling a police officer a bitch in this town, or you’ll find yourself brought up on charges for impersonating an FBI agent, bitch. I checked your backstory, and it’s thinner than Harker’s last excuse for being late.”

  “Hey! Whose side are you on?” I asked.

  “Shut your pie hole, Harker,” Flynn snapped. “And you, miss high-and-mighty vampire hunter, I’m telling you as the local law enforcement that any harassment of our citizens, including Mr. Lucas Card, major donor to the Policeman’s Charity Ball and the funds for families of fallen officers, will be handled with extreme prejudice.”

  “I’m feeling pretty damned prejudiced right now, why don’t we just settle this shit? I kick your ass, I’m free to do whatever I like to Dracula. You kick my ass, I leave town and forget I ever heard about Lucas Card.” She assumed a fighting stance.

  Flynn mirrored her and nodded. In a matter of seconds, the whole mess had escalated from me pissing off another pretty girl to a pair of badass women about to throw down in the middle of a theatre full of recently-ashed vampires. I was looking around for the popcorn vendor when Smith stepped between them.

  “Cut this shit out, NOW,” he said, in a voice that was a cross between a drill sergeant and middle school principal. He held out one arm to each woman, muscles bulging beneath his tactical uniform. But nobody was looking at his arms. We were all focused on his eyes, which had flashed to a deep yellow, like a big cat’s. His pupils were vertical and oval, and his eyes seemed to glow with an inner light. Flynn took a step back, as did Van Helsing.

  “What the fuck are you?” Van Helsing asked the question that was hanging in the air.

  “Pissed off is what I am,” Smith replied. “I’m pissed off that my squad can’t get along for the time it takes to clear one building and make sure that there are no more vampires running around. I’m pissed off that there was a vampire nest in the middle of my city, and I’m pissed that the so-called Master of the Vampires either didn’t know about it or didn’t care enough to do anything about it. You got any other questions?” He turned his full attention to Van Helsing, but she didn’t flinch.

  “Yeah,” she said, right up in Smith’s face. “What. The. Fuck. Are. You? Did I say it slow enough for you that time?”

  “I heard you the first time. I just ignored you because it’s none of y
our fucking business. Is that clear enough?”

  “Yeah, it’s clear that this whole team has been infiltrated by monsters, so you won’t be any fucking good at stopping them. I’m better off on my own.” She turned to go. I cut her off at the door.

  “Don’t do this,” I said. “Hang with us. We’re not monsters. Okay, I’m not. I don’t know what the hell Smith is, but whatever it is he turns into, it can’t be much worse than mid-level government functionary, can it?”

  She laughed at that, and I reached out and touched her arm. “Look, I’m sorry we lied to you about some stuff, but I’ve got some people to protect, so I can’t go telling all their secrets, you know?”

  “I get it,” she said. “I understand why you did what you did. I’ve just gotta go process. I mean, it’s not every day that you find out a whole branch of the government is run by monsters.” She pushed past me to the door and walked out into the daylight.

  Smith stepped up beside me. “Wait ’til she finds out about the Supreme Court.” I gaped at him, but he just gave me a smile.

  Chapter 12

  Despite blowing most of the roof off of the old theatre and letting the sunshine in, as the song goes, there were still a lot of places for vampires to hide in the Carolina Theatre. And after hearing the ruckus we caused upstairs, none of them were very eager to come out and tangle with us. Which is usually fine, because I’m a live-and-let-unlive kinda guy most of the time, but in this case, we spent the rest of the day combing the theatre for stragglers and clues as to where Gus would go to hide or what he had planned next.

  It was early evening when Smith, Flynn, and I reconvened on the stage to go over what we’d learned. We sent all the other agents home and gathered around a table I dragged out from some backstage office. I dropped the few clues I’d picked up throughout the day onto the table, but it didn’t amount to much. I had a couple of takeout menus, a listing of upcoming Broadway and Symphony shows coming to town, and a course catalog for Central Piedmont Community College. I was pretty sure most of that stuff had been left by the last people to rent the theatre, since I didn’t see Gus as the type to take night classes in Japanese or try the best new place for Pad Thai, especially since vampires can’t process normal food.