Emma and I figured out how to light the Coleman stove and put together two huge pots of oatmeal. It was strangely generic, with no sugar or cinnamon or milk.
It vanished almost immediately. We filled the pots four times before people stopped coming back for additional servings.
As evening turned into night, people began to settle into their bunks and pass out into surprisingly deep sleep. We shut off half the lights, and left the rest on, as Wash had once instructed me. Some people sat up and played cards, or read books they’d grabbed from Wash’s library. A few sat and talked, pitching their voices low to avoid waking up their fellow residents.
Even in the low buzz of voices and snores, however, I could still sense it. Fear.
I wasn’t sure what told me it was fear I smelled. I heard slow hearts and deep breathing. The sounds of the exhausted.
But…there was something else, too. Some sort of chemical mixture telling me everyone in that room had stored an adrenaline shot in their body. One that would wake them up in a split second if they sensed danger.
The night edged on into the wee hours of morning while I sat at the front desk, listening to the last strains of conversation and page-flipping became soft, slow breathing. Around 4:00 AM I went into the back.
Emma sat, playing with her phone again while towels rotated their way through the washing and drying cycles.
I jerked my chin at Wash’s hidden chamber. “How bad are things?”
Emma set her phone down on the table, which might have been a first. “It seems that Wash has been here for years and this shelter has been his only food source.”
Mentally, I let my ears open up a bit more. That was always the moment in horror movies when the good guy discovered the world was infested with vampires. Lucky for us, we weren’t in a movie. “And?”
Emma waited for a moment before answering. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I shrugged. “Well, there’s no one in here right now that needs our services.” It was both a statement and a guess.
“It wouldn’t matter if someone here did. This city is on high alert. Anything out of the ordinary is going to be examined under the largest, most powerful microscope available. If a homeless man dies in here, even if it looks like natural causes, they’re going to autopsy him. They’ll go, oh, he appears to be missing an awful lot of blood. Then Wash is under investigation and that’s bad. He’ll have to skip town.”
“Really?” I said.
“Vampires don’t take chances.” Her eyebrows pulled together. “Except for the vamp we’re hunting.”
“How did Wash make it so long eating here?”
“Just lucky.”
“I assume you have a plan of some sort?”
“What makes you say that?”
I pointed at the table. “You set down your phone.”
One side of Emma’s mouth slid up into a smile. “Observant.”
“Vampire powers. You know how it is.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Emma. “As it turns out, you’re right. Which doesn’t mean it was easy. I texted nearly all my contacts, told them where I was, and that I needed food. All of them either told me to come here or gave me Wash’s contact information. Except one. Same guy who told me about the assisted living place in Denver. I guess those are just his thing because he sent me the address of another one here.”
“So when does Wash need to leave?”
Emma looked at her phone, pressing her fingers to the screen. “Well, that’s just the problem. Visiting hours start at 7:00 AM, the caregivers and nurses start prepping medication, food, tables, and all that around six. If Wash walks in and keeps quiet, which vampires are pretty good at, he’ll get in and out without being seen.”
“Sounds easy enough.” I thought for a moment. “Assuming there’s someone there who needs what Wash has to offer.”
“You’re getting good at double-talk.”
“Thanks.”
“And you picked up on the bigger problem, too. Wash has had a lot of time to learn how to deal with starvation but not as much as I have. If I send him alone and there’s a problem, he’s got no one to talk him out of doing something desperate.
“There’s another wrinkle, too. The sun is coming up a little after 7:00 AM. That means he’s got to find someone, ask their permission, feed, and get out of the building and back home in about an hour. It’s doable but it’s not even close to what I’d call ideal.”
“Why not go with him?” I said.
Emma pulled lightly at her earlobe, and I realized I hadn’t felt like I needed to scratch anything since I’d become a member of the living dead. I wondered idly if it was possible for vampires to get itchy.
“You do remember the reason you’re here is so I can keep an eye on you,” said Emma.
“I do. Take me along.”
“Who’s going to mind the store, then?” said Emma.
“Dude out front,” I said. “Just tell him there’s a family emergency or something. Tell him we’ll be back in an hour.”
“You think we look like a family?”
“The only one I’ve got now,” I said. It came off flippant but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Emma looked at her phone again, rereading the message there. I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. Whatever she did was a risk, and a big one. “I’ll send him alone,” she said.
I grimaced. I felt like I was being grounded.
“It’s not you,” said Emma. Then she burst out laughing. She covered her mouth and was under control in a matter of seconds. “I do sound like a mom, don’t I? ‘It’s not you, sweetheart, it’s all those other kids I don’t trust.’”
“What other kids?”
“John Smith,” said Emma. “He’s old. And with no modesty at all, I can tell you that when you’re an old vampire, it’s because you’re smart. Some people think two moves ahead. Smith has had 150 years to get his revenge on Wash. He’s had two thousand to plan for my demise. He’s probably forty-two moves ahead by now.”
“Wait. Revenge?”
“On me. On Wash. And on you.”
I tried to piece things together but I couldn’t get it all to add up. Like a giant puzzle with no edges, I couldn’t see where to get started. “He wants revenge on me?”
Emma’s eyebrows shot up. “You didn’t realize?”
Then it hit me. “Grandpa.”
“You’ll live a long time,” said Emma. “Your grandfather got away. He was one of a handful of humans who knew about vampires. And John Smith doesn’t like loose ends.”
“Like you?”
Emma laughed once, a dark, throaty, heh. “Yes. Me especially. He didn’t even know I was around for the longest time. The minute he found out I existed, he wanted me gone. We’ve been in a slow-motion chase on every corner of the globe since.”
“How did he find you?”
“I’ll tell you another time. The fact is, he wants you, and me, and Wash dead. We’re all loose ends. Wash humiliated him, I’m almost as old as he is, and he seems bent on wiping out your family line. I guess that makes us a family, too.”
I barely heard her. My heart had thumped. Blood had sung in my ears.
Smith wanted to eliminate my family line.
And my mother and father were still alive.
CHAPTER 57
Without even thinking, I pulled out my phone and started dialing my home number. Emma, faster than a human could have made out, pulled the phone from my hand.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, turning the phone off as she did so.
“I need to call my family.”
Emma shook her head. “No. Here’s what needs to happen. I need to get Wash up and moving, and I need to send him in the direction of the assisted living community.
“Then, you and I need to finish washing and drying these towels, and get everyone up and out the door. Wash will be back by then, and we’ll all sit down and very rationally plan our next move.”
“But
my parents could be in danger.”
Emma sighed. “If they’re in danger, then they’re in danger. If they’re dead, they’re dead. You’re a vampire now, and you need to face the fact that as far as the world is concerned, you’re not human anymore. You’re something else. And if your parents are lying on the floor of your old house in a pool of their own blood, well, so be it.
“Someday, your parents will be dead, and your best friend will be dead, and everyone living on this planet right now will have died, but you will endure. You will be here, a part of living undead history. You can’t prevent that.”
By the time she was done talking, my shot of adrenaline had already ceased. Emma was right.
“I don’t have to like it,” I said.
Emma nodded. “No. You don’t.”
I stood guard while Emma opened up Wash’s room and woke him up. Instead of talking, texted him directions to the place where he might get a bite to eat.
Then she walked him to the front door, explaining to the cop out front that Wash had gotten a sore throat, and was going to get something for it. Wash swallowed in front of the cop. To him, I’m sure it sounded like the dry click of a man with a bad cold.
To me, it was like putting your hand between two pieces of sandpaper and letting someone rub vigorously.
We put the last of the towels in the dryer as a few of our guests woke up, in need of an early morning toilet visit. A couple asked to leave before the sun came up, and we told them that for their safety they needed to stay indoors just a little longer.
We made more oatmeal.
As the pot began to heat, Emma’s phone buzzed. She picked it up, looked at the screen, and I heard her heart thump, just once.
She showed me the screen. It said, “John Smith is here.”
CHAPTER 58
After days of debate and discussion and being told I was just a baby, I have to admit what happened next was a little shocking.
Emma grabbed my arm and we ran full-tilt for the front door.
Outside, Emma offered up the words, “Family emergency!”
And then we ran.
Vampire style.
In the world of pop culture, vampire style running is fueled by magic, as near as I can tell.
But that ain’t the way it really works.
Humans who spend high school and college playing sports tend to develop joint issues later in life, often in their knees. That’s because running puts a strain on them that their body can’t quite repair.
But you can if you’re a vampire.
The catch, of course, is that if you’re running at top speed, you’re no different than a car running at top speed. You’re sucking up your fuel store in a very quick manner. So you might be able to run sixty miles an hour but it’ll drain you.
And sometimes it’ll drain you at the worst possible time.
I was a few steps behind Emma because I didn’t know exactly where she was headed. It was a few minutes after six, which meant it had taken Wash a while to walk to his destination.
We got there much quicker than he did.
We didn’t get there soon enough.
Wash and John Smith were already fighting. Punching. Kicking. Biting. And John had a long knife he was using to stab Wash at every opportunity.
Unfortunately, Wash had no more fuel to burn. His body was a collection of deep lacerations, and there was no way to close them.
Emma pulled a gun out of her waistband and it took me a moment to realize she had stolen it from the cop in front of the shelter.
She fired five times and hit John twice. Once in the head and once in what I thought was his heart. But luck was, as always, on John’s side. The bullet glanced off a rib, leaving two holes in John’s shirt.
The holes in his body, however, closed almost in the blink of an eye.
If you’re trying to kill a vampire, the legends have it more or less right. Take out the head or the heart. Get the right part of the head and the part of the brain that says take this blood and fix stuff gets shut down. Take out the heart, and I mean really take it out, and it will stop the repair process as well.
Human or vampire, the heart pumps the blood.
Emma kept running at John Smith, firing the entire time. Vampires might be fast but they aren’t dodge bullets fast.
The gun clicked. There were more holes in John Smith’s head and torso.
They closed.
Emma dropped the gun and now it was a two-on-one fight. Well, more like one-on-one-and-a-half, since Wash wasn’t really up to fighting anymore.
I had stopped running towards Smith and Wash and Emma about twenty feet from the melee. I wanted to join in, to put a hurt on John Smith, but it was the whole baby thing all over again. I had no idea what I was doing.
I was watching three black-belt ninja-style fight experts throwing down at top speed. I didn’t even know how to punch someone correctly.
So I hovered.
It seemed like I watched the three of them fight for hours but it was probably a minute or two. It stopped when John Smith ran away.
The three of us gave chase, and it turned into a high-speed game of cat and mouse.
John would take a defensive position, and Emma and Wash would circle it, while I stood back and waited for further orders.
We started out in a decent part of town.
We ended up in a not-good part of town.
And unfortunately, three out of the four of us didn’t realize the sun was coming up.
CHAPTER 59
In one of my favorite books (it later was turned into a pretty great movie) there’s a moment where the narrator informs us that the bad guys get away at the end.
I’m not going to tell you that. You’ll have to keep reading to find out what happens next.
What I can tell you is that things got bad. Really bad.
And then they got so much worse.
Vampires repair. But you have to have something to repair in the first place. We aren’t human but we aren’t fairy tale creatures, either.
Some hurts just can’t be fixed.
That’s what I was about to learn.
John Smith ran into a blind alley. Buildings on three sides, all of them too tall to get around.
By then, I was shocked that Wash was even moving. He was covered in wounds.
Emma wasn’t in great shape, either. She hadn’t fed that long ago but John’s knife had given her hundreds of cuts, all of which had to heal, one after another, after another.
When it came down to it, she was still five-foot-nothing and petite, while John was long limbs of corded muscle and a surprising-for-his-age six-foot-two.
It wasn’t even a contest.
My two mentors, my two friends, were going to lose, and I felt like there was nothing I could do about it. I was small like Emma and had no idea how best to use my abilities.
I thought that the alley might have been our saving grace.
I thought wrong.
We were standing in the mouth of the alley staring at John. I was waiting for Emma to shout something like, “Get him!” Or, “Now!”
You know. The classics.
Instead, she simply stopped moving. Her body went into total stillness. She was letting herself heal completely.
I did the same.
Wash didn’t bother.
I felt all the little injuries twitch ever so slightly, as they repaired themselves.
I got ready to run.
And I felt a prick of heat on my neck. The sun had come up.
Emma didn’t need to shout because we realized that we were all in trouble. We ran into the alley.
John Smith braced himself.
Emma leapt for him first and John performed a roundhouse kick that sent her into the wall on his left.
I came up next and John smashed his forearm into me so hard that I flew into the wall opposite Emma, turning some of the decrepit bricks into powder.
And then?
Then John grabbed Wash a
round the torso and climbed up the wall.
That’s not saying it right.
There’s this thing called parkour, where people do amazing jumps and flips and all manner of seemingly impossible tricks that should kill them doesn’t.
That’s what John did.
The walls of the alley were maybe twelve feet apart. A regular human couldn’t use them for parkour.
But a vampire? Whole different story.
John bounced off the walls, one, two, three, four, five times. And then he crashed through a window at the top of one of the buildings, taking Wash with him.
I got back up. I was recovering quickly, despite what I suspected were a few broken bones. I had no idea how to get to Wash.
Emma also stood. I watched her as she dusted herself off, and saw that her damage was still fixing itself. She wasn’t totally drained of blood yet.
And then I looked up. John was holding Wash’s hand out the broken window.
The hand was on fire. Charring. I could hear Wash’s dry throat passing air, trying to scream.
With no blood to repair the hand, it burned away in a matter of seconds.
John pushed against Wash, shoving Wash’s head out the window.
Smoke appeared.
Funny thing, though. It’s hard to hold onto a wrist when there’s no hand to serve as a stopping point.
Wash pulled his arm free and punched John in the face with his raw stump.
John flinched.
Wash kicked away and fell out of the window. Halfway down, he was out of the sun and into the shadows.
I felt a massive push against me, like a tree being swung into my torso.
That was Emma, kicking me through the wall.
Bricks smashed as I flew backwards, landing with no grace whatsoever on a cement floor. I was in a warehouse.
Emma caught Wash and dashed inside. She set Wash down on the ground like he was a baby and picked up a large, heavy piece of metal sheeting, awkwardly placing it against the hole she’d just used my body to create.
She eased back two steps from the metal wall she’d just made.
Much to my shock, my body had fixed itself just after being rammed through a wall. I got up and moved towards Emma.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 16
