Dead and Everything (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 2)

by P. S. Power

  If he was actually worried about Zack getting there, and doing anything to him, it didn’t show on his still round face. Actually, Eve realized, he was cool and nearly sinister seeming, in that moment.

  “Heh. How much of the stuff was you? The attacks on the club? Why go after Troy though?”

  There was silence for a bit, as the Greater Demon smiled at her. Then a shrug came.

  “Ah. Good questions. You won’t get all of it. You can’t, lacking too much information, so that isn’t really your fault, let’s see then. The closest thing I can tell you that will make sense is that I needed to keep Finias off my behind for a few weeks, and making him worry that he was under attack did that. You handled that one well. Really, Eve, you did better than most of us expected the whole time. I made some money, betting with the others that you’d be the one to actually stand in our way. They all got confused, thinking you too young, and raw, to be of use.” He winked, and then gave a tiny chuckle. “So, knowing you so well, I managed to use you rather nicely. Just to shorthand it all, the goal is to start a war, between the Vampires and the Humans. The other groups will be held back for now, but the fear generated by the undead attacking them at random will cause most of humanity to wake up, and see what actually exists. Then I’ll take control, with some help from my compatriots, and lead my army of willing Human servants to total control of the world.”

  She sneered at him, not having a lot else to do.

  “Why? I mean, the way things have been has worked, hasn’t it? Plus, why go after Vampires? We’re all so cute, and cuddly. Plus we have these awesome teeth, which you have to admit, is pretty incredible.” She was trying for flip sounding, but it came out slightly wet and muddled. That was thanks to the damage done to her mouth and throat. Her lungs felt fine, since she hadn’t been burned there, not breathing for the entire fight.

  Fram patted his ample tummy, his light brown button front sweater straining just the tiniest bit over it.

  “The Line Walker runs the Vampires now. You can’t tell that’s the case, but it’s the truth. He’s a mere child though, so he can’t really be allowed to do that kind of thing. I came here to take him down a peg or two. I was going to simply challenge him, but The Mistress of Souls taught me a lesson, in regards to that, didn’t she? Taking me as a slave, stripping my will away like she did… She also told me how to win. To be intelligent and take my own desires out of the equation, at least enough to see that I’m not getting reality as clearly as I should in some regards. So far, I have to say, that it’s working.”

  She didn’t get it, and was about to ask him to clarify a few things when he turned and moved toward the back door.

  “Sorry honey, I have to leave now. Make sure you give the Council that message from Maggie? I’ll see you soon. When you’re better?” Then, because it made total sense, he blew her a kiss, and vanished into the air.

  Zack ran into the space, holding a glowing purple knife, which he put away without waiting, even as he looked at her. There was no sense of shock, but he’d seen what had happened to her already. She was about to be a bit put out that he hadn’t helped her out, when he took a deep breath.

  “You smell like barbeque. It’s making me hungry. Can I get something to eat here, do you think?” Then, as if she’d said yes, he turned and moved to the other room, fixing himself more than one or two things to eat.

  She didn’t bother to yell, just speaking normally. The mall might be noisy, but she kind of thought that Greater Demons could pretty much do what they wanted when it came to understanding other people. He’d know what she wanted to say, even if he couldn’t hear it. She wasn’t totally certain he couldn’t do that too.

  “It was Fram, which you know by now, or you wouldn’t have come in carrying a knife like that. He mentioned something about a giant war between Humans and Vampires, so that he can get his insane Greater Demon groove on? You know about that too though, and that it isn’t just him, or he wouldn’t have told me about it.” That just made sense. Plus, she had to start using her head, since it was almost all she had left. That, and her kidneys.

  Zack came back, carrying two large containers of froth and caramel. They were made perfectly, since he knew how to run the shop out front.

  “Yeah. It’s been shaping up for a while now. It isn’t really about him. He’s too stupid to get the idea that he isn’t really in control of it all. A brilliant idiot, being pulled and pushed into place by his weaknesses. We… Darla and I, mainly, but Keeley, too, we’ve been trying to protect all of you from this. I should have dumped Fram in a demon trap when I first found him here. That was, two or three years ago now.” He ate several tidy bites of food, doing it efficiently, and not wincing from brain freeze. “I know, it’s amazing, but I’m actually not that easily fooled. That he thought I would be… Well, I’d be insulted, but I killed that part of my personality off a while back. Feeling like that almost always gets in the way of clear thinking.”

  Eve could see that one.

  “Great, so you let me and the others be raped by Warren, so that you wouldn’t give away that you knew Mark, Fram, was behind it all? Then you didn’t tell me about Maggie for the same reason? Why not help me though, when we were fighting? You had to know that Fram would figure out that you’d draw a line straight to him. I mean, I did, and if the slow girl can get it, the smart kids all can.” She was trying to be funny, but Zack nodded.

  She wanted to glare back, but didn’t. It was just too hard, in the moment.

  “If it had been just about him, or even other Greater Demons, I would have. The fact is that you nearly won out there, Eve. Alone, against an ancient and powerful force. Now we just need for you to get back on your feet, and finish the job. How are you planning to do that?”

  “Um, excuse, me, but I think I’ll start by cursing your name. Asshole. You let me be crippled for… What? So that you wouldn’t piss off the Council or some stupid shit like that? I swear, if you try to claim this was just some kind of advanced training, I’ll kick your ass.” She lifted her head, sending pain down her middle, and looked where her right leg should have been. “Just as soon as I grow a foot, I mean.”

  Zack laughed, but looked at the leg too. Where there wasn’t one.

  “No, this isn’t training anymore. It hasn’t been for a while now. This is the real deal, and you have to stand on your own, and be seen to be able to. If I’d tried to save you, then a dozen Greater Demons would all be taking turns trying to kill you tonight, in order to force me into a position where I might be taken out. This way, they know that trying to take you won’t gain them anything with me, and will possibly cost them a lot. Still you need a plan. Healing up, increasing your energy stores, and working on your telekinesis, but also, who your target is going to be. I’ll warn you, you probably won’t be allowed to kill Fram. Not forever. Trapping him won’t free Maggie either. If you want to break her out of it, he has to die, but you’ll need to be able to bring him back.”

  Taking a deep breath, she looked down at her body again. It was ruined. Even if she could manage to heal, it seemed a bit rich to be lying there in the moment, pretending like she had any power in the situation at all.

  “That’s hardly fair, setting me against a Greater Demon like that.” She felt a slight sense of despair, since it was pretty close to an impossible thing to do, wasn’t it?

  Zack, her pal, smiled at her.

  “Well, he’s not a very good Greater Demon, and you are a decently kick ass Vampire, so if you do it right, and use the resources you have… I think you can take him out. The real trick there is that we really don’t want him to be gone forever. He’s insane, but it’s kind of a gentle thing with him. We don’t want him to be replaced with something worse.”

  Zack kept eating, and just sat there, while she thought for a bit. No one else came in, so finally, she looked up, and took a breath that didn’t really hurt, compared to the rest of her.

  “Can you call Lenore for me? We should have this place s
taffed. I don’t know what happened to Barb and Becky…”

  He ate more of the food, and shook his head.

  “Nope. It’s only a phone, you can get it yourself. Barb and Becky are fine. They took off in the rental that Becky has. No one followed them or anything, I made sure of that. It would work a bit too well, for a minor actress to be killed right now. Especially by Vampires. You should set Barb up as her bodyguard while she’s in town.”

  Eve nodded, since it made sense that she, the newest little Vamp girl, would be doing any of that. Focusing she tried to find the phone in its cradle in the other room, and float it carefully to herself. She heard it thump against the wall, feeling heavier to her mind, as she threw more energy at it, just to keep it in the air. When it was in front of her, Zack snatched it from the air, and held it away from her.

  “Don’t just throw power at it like that! Increase your attention on it. You can move a hundred times more than you have been, with very little more energy, if you do it right. Now, pull it from my hand.”

  “Fucker.”

  The Greater Demon that had pretended to be her friend for years nodded.

  “Damn straight. I actually want you to be alive in a few weeks time, so we can’t really play around anymore, Eve. If you’re going to fix this, you have to be a lot more than you have been. I was hoping that you had time, or that someone else would fix it all for you, but now it’s clear that you need to step up. To do that you’re going to need legs, and the ability to move. So, for now, take the phone from me, then we’ll work on the rest of it. Flying, and all that.” The grip he had on the cream colored hand piece looked pretty tight, at least to her eyes.

  “Is this the best use of our time? We really should have someone else in here.”

  He wiggled the phone a bit, taunting her with it.

  “Then call? One hundred pounds of force is all that you have to come up with. Without using too much energy. Go. It’s all in the concentration.”

  It was, she found, about more than just that, since she had to see and bend the faint lines of energy in the air, the pink stuff of life reaching out in tendrils like they were. It was? She had to wrap the thing up totally, then using a hundred little threads take it from Zack, moving his body first.

  After only two hours of trying, she had it though.

  The Greater Demon got up to make himself another snack, as if they hadn’t just done anything impressive.

  Leaving her to try to push the buttons with her mind. That was a different adventure, but she figured out how to wrap each of the buttons and move them, one by one.

  On the third ring, Lenore answered, her voice relaxed sounding. She was probably kicking back and doing needlepoint, or whatever people as old as her did to unwind.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Lenore… We have an emergency here at the mall.”

  “Oh? Is it anything you can’t handle?”

  “Eh… Yeah? The East side is gone. Princess Pretty Nail was blown up, and part of the power lifting Gym is gone, I think. I didn’t get a good look at it. Um… It was Maggie Sims. She’s been turned into a slave, by Fram. She probably has been for a while. We kind of fought, and uh, she has some pretty awesome fire based powers? So, the long and short of it is that I have no arms or legs. No one is really watching the embassy here either. I can answer the phones, but not a lot else yet.”

  There was a sound of movement, and two gasped words.

  “I’m coming!”

  Eve hung up, using a lot of focus, and then just had to wait. It occurred to her, a few minutes later, that she should be filling her time trying to heal faster. Fram had mentioned that working, and if she applied what Zack had just made her figure out, maybe she could improve the speed of things a bit? The trick would be doing it without crippling her energy links. The poor cows. She needed more lines coming in, somehow.

  For the time being though, she just tried to heal, using what she had.

  It took twenty minutes for Lenore to get in, but Edom was right behind her, with Bey. They all gathered around her, to get the full report. It was nice of them not to make her do it a bunch of times. Zack stayed too, eating the whole time, smiling a bit. It was a grim thing, but still, not a frown. Bey looked troubled though.

  Horribly so.

  “She is, Jasmine, Maggie Sims, as you know her, is my maker. It saddens me that we will have to destroy her.” There was real remorse in the words.

  The Greater Demon shrugged.

  “Don’t worry. Eve is all over this one. All she has to do is find Fram, The Bold, kill him and bring him back to life. That will break the links and save Maggie.”

  The very funny thing, Eve thought it was humorous anyway, was that he didn’t seem to be joking. She knew that he wasn’t, but that kind of thing wasn’t just tossed out lightly, was it? Not most days.

  Edom glared at the Greater Demon, which might not be the wisest thing ever, but was appreciated.

  “You’re sending her up against one of your own kind? Why don’t you deal with it? Isn’t that your job?”

  There was a quick flash of red plastic spoon, and vanilla base product disappearing before he replied.

  “Yep. Normally that would just be the case. It might end up being one of us that does it, but Eve might pull it off, and really, I can’t think of a better way to keep her safe.”

  The others all looked away, so she ignored the stupidity of that statement, and went back to healing. She had real work to do, and no matter what Zack, or her other friends, if she could call them that, had planned, she wanted limbs for it. Go figure, but she missed them already.

  There was much staring and a bit of muttering, until a laughing Demon left the room, and the others went to do various things. Ed manned the front of the embassy, while The Bey and Lenore both went to see who all had died.

  Focusing, and trying not to kill any cows, Eve pushed herself. She didn’t really know if it was going to be enough, but she had to try to do something, and just lying there, worrying about what was coming next, that wasn’t going to help anyone. The least of which would be her.

  So, for the next hours she tried to make her broken and battered crispy corpse heal up. She really did smell like barbeque, as it turned out, but there was no way she was going to take a shower yet. So, instead, Eve stayed in place and tried her best.

  Then, once she knew that it was going to work, she called the Council and passed the message. It wasn’t her job not to deliver it, after all.

  The thing there, was that they were all polite to her, including Gene.

  Which meant what? That he was in on it? Or that they all felt bad for her being beaten up like she was? None of them really explained it to her, so she didn’t know for certain.

  After that, well, for a while she probably wasn’t going to be expected to do much by anyone else, but it occurred to her that being able to get up in a few days and take care of business was going to work a lot better than dying, or taking years to heal up would. She might even get something like the element of surprise back that way.

  Setting herself, she did it, knowing that Zack, even if he was being a prick at the moment, had been right. Not about her killing Fram and leaving him alive. That wasn’t her responsibility. If he wanted something that complex done, he could do it himself. Darla could do it, too, if it was a thing that anyone really cared about. Really, she wasn’t even going to plan to save either of them.

  Maggie had betrayed her. Oh, she might not be able to help herself, but that didn’t make it sting any less. Fram was even worse, since he could have come up with a dozen ways to do the same thing that didn’t bother her at all, much less make the mess that his orders had created.

  As far as she was concerned, they were both dead.

  That it was insane to even think that wasn’t lost on her in the slightest, but that would just have to do for the moment. As soon as she could get up, and start, those two were both going down.

  The idea didn’t thrill her, since
the most likely outcome was her own death. She looked down at her right arm, the stump pink at the end, a full inch showing that hadn’t been there before, even a few hours earlier. Taking her arms and legs like that, it had been pointed, and done on purpose. Not just to keep her from being too dangerous either, but to make her feel helpless.

  That had Fram written all over it. He’d taken that information from her and used it to mess with her head. It had worked too, she knew. Even if it wasn’t showing on the outside, she was afraid. Terrified really.

  That wasn’t going to get the job done though, so she made a point of not thinking about it, while she got back to work.

  First she would make herself better. Then stronger. After that, well, then she was probably going to end up dead, but even if that was the case, it would be on her terms, not anyone else’s.

  Forcing a smile, she got back to it.

  There was too much to do now, to be left sitting around.

  Other Books by P.S. Power from Orange Cat Publishing:

  If you enjoyed these books, why not find out the rest of the story? It’s more than worth the time, and there’s more to it than anyone could possibly imagine.