Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1)

by Patterson, Joshua Grover-David

  She held up a hand to stop me. “Wash,” she said.

  I went to Wash instead.

  It was bad.

  His hand was gone and in its place was a raw stump. It wasn’t bleeding because he had no blood. But I could see all the parts that hold your arm to your hand and that was less than pleasant.

  His face was charred and all his exposed skin was damaged as well, from the second or two he spent plummeting in the sunlight.

  I had no idea what to do.

  I thought he might be in shock so I uncurled him from the ball he was in and placed a folded tarp under his head. All this took maybe two minutes.

  I finally knew why vampire emotions (lack of emotions) were A Good Thing. Dialed down, they could help you deal with revulsion. You couldn’t get upset enough to cry. Not for long, anyway.

  And revenge, anger, those things that make you dead through carelessness, those aren’t a huge issue either.

  I walked to Emma, who was watching the metal sheet like her afterlife depended on it. Which I supposed it did.

  “Game plan?” said Emma.

  My eyebrows twitched. Surprise? Amusement? A little of both? “Are you kidding me?”

  Emma shook her head. “If he tries to come through that hole, I can push him back. I don’t know how drained he is, so I’m counting on the fact that he’s running out of blood and can’t make a different hole. Unfortunately, he has other options.”

  Emma pointed up in the air at a window. It was almost exactly parallel to the window on the other side of the alley. Apparently, all of us vampires were hanging out in warehouses today.

  “You think he can make the jump?” I asked.

  Emma shrugged. “I know I don’t want to find out.” She held up the hand she hadn’t been pointing with. There was a scrape on it.

  She wasn’t healing, either. “If you’ve got plans, I’m listening,” she said. “Because you, my little bitty baby, are now our last, best hope.”

  CHAPTER 60

  I thought about pacing and then decided to save whatever energy and blood I had left.

  I was it. I was the only one of us capable of stopping John Smith.

  “Do I get, like, a ceremonial sword now, or something?” I said.

  Emma smiled. “Here’s the dilemma. John Smith is hurt right now, and hurt bad. You don’t take a bunch of bullets and sail through it. He was running just as hard as we were.

  “That means he’s got to be running on empty. And he never runs on empty. He kills nightly, whether he needs it or not. He doesn’t help people die. He’s been a murderer since the day I met him and he’s a murderer now.”

  “You’re rambling,” I said. “If you’re trying to tell me something important, now’s the time.”

  “I’m saying that I’ve been around a very long time, and this is the best chance anyone has had to put an end to him. Ever. Wash can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

  “So that leaves me.”

  Emma nodded.

  “One problem,” I said. “How am I going to get over there? I’m pretty new to this whole thing but I’m betting I can’t climb the walls.”

  Emma’s lips twisted. “No,” she said, after a moment. Then her eyes flicked back up to the window. “But I’m betting I could throw you from our window to his window. Minimal sun exposure.”

  I felt my head moving up and down, indicating an understanding that wasn’t really there. “Can you teach me some fighting techniques or something? Hints? Tips?”

  “I’d rather not. If I teach you how to do something, you won’t be able to use it well enough to be effective. There’s no time to practice. You’re better off trusting your instincts at this point.”

  “My instincts are telling me we should all hole up, run away, and try this when we’re not all nearly dead.”

  “That might work if we didn’t have to drag Wash out of here. He’s done. I don’t even know how we’re going to feed him. Vampires kind of thrive on looking kindly and beatific, not like a house fire got the better of them.”

  I took a deep breath. Force of habit really, since I didn’t actually feel what you’d call nervous. My course was set. It didn’t mean that I had to like it.

  “Okay, so, let’s get this done,” I said, heading off towards the stairs that would allow me to climb up to the window.

  “Just a second,” said Emma. Her eyes flicked to Wash.

  Wash’s head moved the slightest fraction of an inch. I heard the sound of his throat grinding, like a rusted hinge. “Tell.”

  “You sure?” said Emma.

  “Yes.”

  “This is a little morbid, Wash. You want me to tell her your story because you think we’re not getting out of this. But we are. We’re walking out of this and we’re all going to live a long, long, long time. You remember that when I get a detail wrong and you can’t correct me.”

  Wash tried to smile but I could tell it was too painful for him.

  “Fine, have it your way.” Emma paused, pointing at me and then up at the window.

  I started up the stairway and just behind me I heard Emma’s voice.

  “This is the story of how John Smith, Bounty Hunter, sired Washington Lincoln, Slave.”

  What could I say? Emma knew how to start a story. So I kept my mouth shut, walked up the stairs, and let her talk.

  WASH’S STORY

  Wash was born sometime before the Civil War. He doesn’t know when and he doesn’t know to whom. He never met his mother and he suspects he was fathered by a plantation owner due to certain physical characteristics he has. It wasn’t uncommon for slave owners to sell their own children. After all, a black child had no value as a person.

  And so Wash grew up on a plantation in Maryland. There are probably a hundred unique and fascinating details to tell about his time as a slave and I’m sure there are a thousand historians who would kill to sit down for a long conversation with him.

  But those details aren’t important to this story.

  The most important part of this story is, young Wash didn’t want to be a slave. He wanted to be free.

  One night, he and a bunch of fellow slaves made a run for it.

  When you’ve lived more than two thousand years, you get the chance to live a lot of different lives. John Smith has had dozens. And at that point in time, he was the best known and best paid bounty hunter in the country.

  Smith’s modus operandi was simple. Listen for news about escaped slaves and travel to that plantation. Ask for a place to sleep and a fair price for each piece of property returned.

  Slaves, in general, couldn’t get very far right after an escape attempt. They would work all day and run once it was dark. Many of them had never set foot off the plantation. Running was a brave thing but it was fraught with so many perils it was a miracle any of them ever made it to freedom.

  Imagine you ran a marathon that lasted all day, then ate one meal, and then were blindfolded and dropped in an unfamiliar town. Someone told you to run towards the North Star. It was just like that.

  John Smith, of course, could run three or four or five times faster than a malnourished slave. He’d ride a horse into the woods, stop once it was out of sight of the roads, and then head out and locate the lost merchandise.

  If five slaves were on the run, he’d take four back and eat the fifth.

  Wash and his eight companions originally had planned to hide out in a home that was part of the Underground Railroad but they had missed an important marker in the dark of the night and had spent most of the day wandering through the woods.

  Their exhaustion was nearly unbearable. As the sun started to fall, they decided to take a rest. Wash offered to keep the first watch.

  He tells this story differently than I do. He feels, in many ways, that what happened next was his fault. But he was, at the time, only human. One suffering from thirty-six hours with no sleep, little food, and hours of walking and running.

  The spirit was willing. The flesh was weak. He fell
asleep. When he woke up, it was because one of his companions screamed.

  Screamed isn’t entirely accurate. What happened was, John grabbed his friend around the chest and squeezed the air out of him. Wash’s friend huffed and Wash woke up.

  Because John could move silently, he would sneak up behind his victims and squeeze all their air out so they couldn’t scream. Then he’d take his large hands, grab his prey around the neck, and cut off the blood flow to the head. Most of his victims would pass out in short order.

  Wash didn’t think. He reached down between his legs, lifted up a branch the size and density of a baseball bat, and swung it at John’s head. The branch connected, snapping John’s head to the side.

  John didn’t hesitate. He dropped his current victim and leapt towards Wash. Wash took a step back and stumbled and fell on the ground with John on top of him.

  John’s hand was near Wash’s mouth and Wash didn’t waste a second. He bit down, hard, on the soft skin of John’s hand. Blood flooded his mouth.

  Then John slammed Wash’s head down. Hard. On a jagged rock. Instant death.

  Did John know that Wash bit him? It’s impossible to say. But we’ll play let’s pretend and imagine what happened.

  Wash died. There was a nearby rustle in the underbrush as John’s friend got up and tried to run away. John gave chase.

  And then John forgot about Wash.

  Wash lay there and woke up hours later, his body repaired. The sun rose and burned him, so he found refuge in a nearby cave.

  The next night he discovered he could see in the dark and followed the directions to his first location on the Underground Railroad. He slept during the day, ran during the night.

  And one night, he felt hunger and helped the elderly master of the house pass into the next world. And he finally knew what he was.

  He met Harriet Tubman and with her help, went back to Maryland and helped more slaves to escape. After all, he was uniquely suited to the task.

  Then he wandered through history, just like I have. And just like you will. He met me. We shared stories of John Smith. We talked about just how long Smith had been around, about how much damage he’d been doing, and about how we felt it was kind of up to us to stop him.

  We spent almost a century trying to pull it off. And now, here we are.

  CHAPTER 62

  Emma looked up at the window in front of us. “It’s time to end this.”

  I had no idea what I was going to do.

  I didn’t know how I was going to get into the other building. I didn’t know what I would do once I got there.

  All I knew was that I was the last, best hope of the homeless people in this city who in no way deserved to be eaten.

  Also, I wanted to get my vengeance on for my grandma. And my grandpa. And Smitty. And Smitty’s friends. And a whole bunch of other people who were dead who didn’t deserve to be dead. And I wanted to protect my mom and dad.

  Still, no idea what I was doing.

  Emma and I looked out the window. It was either tinted or just really dusty, so that we could make out the other window, but light wasn’t pouring through it, injuring the two of us.

  We could see the window on the other building, which was a little below ours and off at a not-too-sharp angle.

  Here was the plan. I would run down the shelf as fast as I could. I would jump at Emma. She would whirl me around like an acrobat and fling me out the window and through the other window.

  She was sure she could do that. She was also sure that I would make it with only minor burning. And that it wouldn’t kill her, even though she was tapped out of blood and going to do herself bodily harm.

  So I ran. And she spun me. And flung me. And I crashed through the window and felt a shock of pain from dozens of tiny cuts, the burning of the sun, and then more cuts as I flew through the remains of the window of the other warehouse.

  I bounced off the shelf, still in full flight, and fell three stories, from the shelf all the way to the ground floor, where I landed in a large pool of sunlight.

  John had taken the time to break part of the roof, so there was a huge pool of sun on the floor. When I landed, I cracked several ribs and fractured a couple of other bones. I was also on fire.

  If you want to know what that feels like, feel free to let someone hit you with a baseball bat for thirty minutes, then throw gasoline on you and light a match.

  I looked up. John stood about a foot away from the pool of sunlight. He had his knife in hand and he had taken a defensive stance. I knew his plan immediately.

  He didn’t want to engage me. He just wanted to keep pushing me into the sun until I burned up.

  It was a brilliant strategy. All defense. No offense.

  If I tried to run around him, he easily could catch me. I was too far away from his position to get past him.

  I lost before the game even started.

  For the first time since becoming a vampire, my heart started to race, desperate to keep my body in repair mode. I actually felt panic. And anger. Full-on anger.

  I wanted John Smith’s ashes spread across the floor. I wanted it now.

  I jumped up and ran towards Smith as fast as I could go. I saw him move. A human would have seen a flicker. I saw him prepping to give me a roundhouse kick.

  I fell to the floor and pulled a full-on sliding-into-home move.

  I slid under John’s legs, stopping only when I hit the wall. Hard. I wrapped my hands, and then my head, into my shirt to put out the flames.

  I could hear my bones creak as they repaired themselves. I needed maybe ten seconds to get myself back into fighting shape.

  I got one.

  Since I managed to avoid his kick-me-into-the-sunlight gambit, John had his knife ready to go. I hopped up, which was extremely painful, and waited for him to stab me.

  Okay, not really. I waited for him to get close to me and then I dodged him again. And again. And again.

  My one advantage over John was that he was huge. Over six feet tall and heavily muscled. That meant he could put a lot of power into his kicks, punches, and stabbing attempts.

  The thing was, he was a train. To get his limbs in motion took time.

  I was a car. As long as my motor was running, and man, was it ever running, I could get out of the way faster than he could land a blow.

  So now our positions were reversed. I was all defense and he was all offense.

  I saw an old movie once where some karate master told this kid that the best block was not to be there and I had to agree with him. My healing was slow but it still was happening and all I had to do was keep out of the way of Smith’s limbs.

  And so it went. He’d slash, I’d move. He’d kick, I’d dodge. He’d attempt a backhand and I wouldn’t be there when his hand arrived.

  With each dodge, I’d take the tiniest little step back.

  While edging away from a kick, I saw that I was moving slowly towards a corner. So I course-corrected. Ducked. Dodged. Stepped back.

  Until I realized the flaw in my plan. We were headed towards the pool of sunlight again.

  I dodged. Stepped. Moved.

  I was in trouble. I could turn again, angle towards the other wall, but that would only delay my imminent demise. Sooner or later, I either was going to run into a wall or step into a pool of what might as well have been flaming lava.

  In the midst of all this, I started thinking about sumo wrestling.

  There wasn’t much to sumo wrestling, really. Two big guys got into a ring, the match began, and then the wrestlers had two choices. They can push the other guy out of the ring or they can make their opponent put any part of their body that was not the bottom of their foot on the floor.

  It was all about balance.

  I took a slight step back, moving to my left. John slashed at me from that side.

  A plan started to form.

  I took another step back and to the left. He attacked from the same angle.

  I moved to my right and he reve
rsed his attempted slicing motion.

  I took two quick steps and he lunged.

  He wasn’t trying to hit me. He just wanted to drive me back into the sunlight.

  I allowed myself to really look at him.

  The cuts in his clothes. His face. His hands.

  There it was. On his right hand. A little burn. Almost healed. But not quite.

  I could do this. It was going to hurt a lot. I might not come out of it intact. But I could do it.

  My heart had been operating at a low-level thrum as it finished up the healing process. I was now more or less in one piece.

  Did I have any reserve blood? No idea. But I didn’t have to live forever.

  I just had to live longer than John Smith.

  I slowed my backwards motion, letting John get closer to me with his attacks. At first, I’d made him miss by inches. Then, an inch. Then less.

  I felt the heat of the sunlight behind me coming closer. And closer.

  I took two huge steps back. John lunged. I fell and wrapped all of my limbs around his, tumbling backwards as hard as I could.

  We landed, hard, and I held on with every ounce of vampire strength I had.

  John’s head was in the sun. There was ash, then smoke, then flame.

  The quarter inch of my own head edged into the sun as he struggled and I could smell my hair char, and feel my skin blistering.

  Unable to free his arms, John turned the knife’s edge against me, cutting me every time he struggled.

  He wrenched his other hand free and pushed up, then dropped his body on me, trying to shake me loose. Again. Again.

  My heart raced, trying to keep up with the repair process of my injuries. My nose and eyes and mouth were full of ash.

  John pulled his knife hand free. He overbalanced us, placing me on top of him. He raised his knife to strike.

  The top of his head burned away. His brain burst into flame and turned to ash.

  His body went limp.

  I held on, feeling stray hairs charring as they moved around, and still he didn’t move.

  I felt warmth near the top of my head. I pushed myself backwards, out of the sun.