The walking mountain came at me again. I tried to stand, but I was too tangled in table parts. He helped me to my feet, if by helped one could refer to picking me up, table and all, over his head, and throwing me twenty feet into the swimming pool. I sank to the bottom instantly and would have drowned in seconds except for my one little advantage—I breathed out of habit, not necessity. I felt a little like Br'er Rabbit in the middle of the briar patch down where it was cooler and no one was trying to crush my head. I took a few seconds to disengage from the mangled table and looked around for my pistol while I was down there. No luck. I figured it had been sucked into a drain or something. I made my way as stealthily as possible to a ladder and climbed out of the pool on the side away from the fracas.
Greg seemed to be holding his own, swatting glassware out of the air like Luke Skywalker in Lightsaber 101. Every once in a while, one of the minions would get brave and dart in for a punch, but Greg always smacked them back with the flat of his blade.
I was actually impressed, which might explain how I missed the dripping wet minx in the miniskirt aiming my gun at my best friend’s back and pulling the trigger half a dozen times. Before I could react, Greg was down with a tight grouping of new orifices in his back, and the mesmerized woman had turned the gun in my direction. There was most of a patio and a swimming pool separating us, but I covered the entire distance in one very pissed-off leap. I landed in front of her and knocked the gun out of her hand before she got off a round. I punched her in the jaw and had the small satisfaction of seeing her eyes roll back into her head as she collapsed to the deck.
The noise of the gunshots had shaken the mojo out of some of the revelers, and they were looking around in bewilderment. Then one guy looked down at Greg, saw the bullet holes, and screamed like a seventh-grade girl at a Justin Bieber concert. That sparked a stampede for the elevators, and I found myself swimming upstream trying to get to my partner’s side.
I finally reached him, but about two seconds too late. Krysta had Greg by the throat, and I was even more impressed by her strength when she casually lifted his bulk into the air with one hand. She was a tall woman, so getting him off the ground wasn’t an issue, but Greg had never been what anyone would call svelte. She smiled at me, then looked over at King, who was just now regaining consciousness, albeit in human form.
“Now, dear son of mine,” Krysta said, with a smile that made my blood run cold. Or maybe that was just from my dip in the pool. Either way, it was getting chilly. “Whatever shall I do with this sack of meat? He’s no good for a plaything. He’s much too homely. You were bad enough, but I took pity on you and shared of myself. But this?” She gave Greg’s limp body a shake. “This thing isn’t even worth keeping around.” She finished insulting my manhood and my friend, then casually tossed my partner over the side of the patio to the sidewalk some sixteen stories below.
I ran to the edge and looked over, seeing just the last second of his fall before Greg hit the unforgiving concrete with a wet thwack.
I spun around, my vision completely red, but Krysta and Tiram were nowhere to be seen. I was alone on a patio with a half-dressed, semi-conscious werewolf, five comatose partygoers, and one very nervous security guard, who had just gotten off the elevator. I threw King over my shoulder, nodded to the guard, and got in the elevator.
I pushed the L button, while the guard stared at me, dismayed. “Lightweight,” I said, nodding to King’s incoherent, and very heavy, carcass. Then, the doors slid shut, and I went down to try and scrape my partner off the sidewalk before the cops showed up.
Chapter 13
Through a combination of insults and slaps to the head, I managed to get King ambulatory by the time we reached the lobby. We walked quickly toward the doors, ignoring the frightened looks we got from the humans. A crowd had started to gather around Greg’s inert form by the time I got there, and I had to push my way to his side. It was tough going for the first few feet before people noticed I had a giant wolf-guy in tow. Then the crowd parted like grease in a Dawn commercial.
I knelt by Greg’s side and pretended to feel for a pulse, while I tried to inconspicuously shake him awake. “Play dead,” I whispered.
“I am dead,” I heard him mutter back.
A huge weight lifted off my shoulders when I realized that “being thrown off a building” had moved onto the Will-Not-Kill-Vampires list, and I went ahead with my plan. I reached down and grabbed one arm, pulling him carelessly to his feet.
“Hey, watch out!” I heard somebody yell from the crowd. A few other onlookers shouted concern for his well-being, and I turned to address the crowd.
“What? Don’t you people read the paper? This is a stunt dummy. A prop. See, I can poke my finger inside the fake bullet holes.” That was nasty. “We’re shooting outtakes for the new Will Smith movie. The cameras are in the van over there.” I pointed at a parking lot across the street. “This isn’t even a person. Here, feel the skin. Cold as the grave, right?” I held Greg’s arm out to the nearest old lady, and she shrieked appropriately.
I hefted Greg into a fireman’s carry across my shoulders and started making my slow way to the car. The crowd parted, disappointed no one had died. Three guys slipped me business cards and told me they were stuntmen or extras. I thought about telling them King was really Vin Diesel, but decided we didn’t need autograph seekers.
King backed his truck out of its parking space, and I tossed Greg into the back, then hopped in beside him. King pulled onto the street, his tires barking and laying a stinking strip of rubber behind us. Greg let out a feeble groan when we hit a set of railroad tracks, and I grabbed his head to hold it steady. I wasn’t sure if he’d broken his neck, or if we could live through that. I banged on the cab. “Slow down.”
King slowed as we headed out of town toward our cemetery. I pulled out my pocketknife and opened up my wrist. I held Greg’s head higher and pressed my wrist to his mouth so he could regain a little strength.
He latched onto my arm like a drowning man grabbing for a rubber ducky, and I felt the blood flow from my wrist into his mouth. I let him feed for a minute or two before I felt my strength start to ebb, then I pried him off. He’d gotten a bit of color back and was able to sit up a little.
I looked down into his moon face and blinked back a tear. After all we’d been through, there was no way that bitch was going to get away with throwing my best friend off a building. We’d gone through puberty together, died together, fought demons together, gone to Faerieland together and laughed our way through all the Twilight movies together. Even with Abby on the scene, with whatever was happening with Sabrina, with Mike getting sick, with all that, Greg was my constant. He was my best friend, and Krysta was going to answer for this.
He coughed a little and spit out a mouthful of blood.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Now I know how that coyote felt in the cartoons.”
“I would hit you for that, but I’m afraid it might kill you.”
“Yeah, me too.” He closed his eyes and leaned back against the cab of the truck. “I thought I was done for, man. I thought she was going to break my neck right there and twist my head off. I haven’t been that scared in a long time.” He kept his eyes closed, but even in the flickering streetlights I saw a hint of moisture around the lids.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Me too, bro. Me too. I’m just glad you’ve got a little bounce to you. I’d hate to train a new partner after all these years.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Abby’s ready for the pistol range just yet.” He chuckled softly, and I felt him pull back from the edge. Greg’s always taken things a lot harder than me. Even back in middle school when the jocks shoved us in lockers and flew our underwear up the flagpole, he took it to heart. Me, I just shrugged it off and put sugar in their gas tanks.
We got clear of downtown, and I banged on the cab again to get King to pull over.
He pulled into a fast-food restaurant parking lot and got out
of the truck. “Look, bloodsucker, if you dent my cab, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”
He’d shifted back into human form, but apparently whatever magic made him change didn’t make his clothes change, too. The only things that had survived the shift were his boxer briefs, and it looked like he’d stretched some of the elastic to the limit, judging by how he held them up with one hand. I smirked a little, and he reached behind the seat for a suitcase.
“Congratulations, King, you really are a redneck.” I complimented the baffled werewolf as he unpacked a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a tattered pair of jeans.
“We went to Clemson. He knows a redneck when he sees one,” Greg affirmed.
“Good, you’re not dead,” King said to my battered partner.
“Well, technically . . . ,” I started, but gave up. “I need to get something to eat. Wait here with Greg ’til I get back.” I started walking, but stopped short when I realized King was following me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m hungry, too. I burned a lot of calories shifting, and getting the crap knocked out of me didn’t help.”
“I’m not exactly going in to order off the dollar menu. I gotta get my nutrients a little closer to the source, if you get my drift. I’ll just top off the tank, then you can go get a Happy Meal. Cool?”
King nodded and stayed by the truck while I headed off in search of dinner.
I took a position beside the kitchen door and only had to wait about five minutes before a grumpy Latino kid came out for a smoke break. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack from his shirt pocket, and then almost jumped out of his Reeboks as I spoke up behind him.
“You know that stuff’ll stunt your growth.”
“Dios mio! What the hell are you doing there, man? You trying to scare somebody to death?” The kid picked his lit cigarette up off the ground and looked up at me.
Our eyes locked, and I pushed my will into his head, taking him over in the blink of an eye.
“Stand up.” He did. “When this is over, you will remember nothing. You went out for a smoke, it wasn’t very good and you decided to quit. You will never smoke again. You’ll finish school and go to college. You will study hard and work hard and make a good career for yourself.”
I tried to lay as much positive reinforcement on him as possible in the few seconds I had, then I grabbed the kid by the shirt and pulled him close to me. I bent his head to the side and bit deep into his neck. I felt his blood against the back of my throat like a hot crimson fountain. I could almost taste his heartbeat through the rush of blood into my mouth. My body gulped it down, starving to replace what I’d given Greg and what I’d burned up in the fight.
The kid moaned a little as I drank, and I heard my own throat echo him. He sagged, and I put my other arm around his back to support him. I drank deeper than I’d intended and felt his heart falter a touch before I gave myself a mental shake and pulled back from him. I held him gently as he collapsed to the ground, then I leaned him up against the wall in a seated position. I ran a finger over his throat and used the tail of my T-shirt to wipe away the blood seeping from the already closed wounds.
I stood up, a little dizzy from the influx of new blood and the nicotine in the kid’s system, and made my wobbly way back to the truck. King was sitting on the tailgate eating a sack full of cheeseburgers, and Greg shot me a disappointed look as I hopped into the bed of the truck.
I said nothing, just reached over and took a long slurp of King’s super-sized coke. “Too much cola’s bad for you,” I said as he snatched his drink away from me.
“Yeah, and drinking my cola’s bad for you,” he snarled, setting the drink well out of my reach. He wiped at the straw where I’d left a little red stain behind and looked at me quizzically.
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“Then I already know.”
“Then you don’t need to ask, so same difference. We can go whenever you’re ready.”
“And where are we going, exactly?” King asked, finishing off the last of what looked like a dozen cheeseburgers. He walked a few feet to throw the bag in a nearby garbage can.
“Home. We need to plan some more before we go after Krysta and her boyfriend. And Greg needs a place to heal up. And I could use a beer. Or seven.”
“Sounds good enough. Let’s roll.” King hopped back behind the wheel, and Greg grabbed shotgun, then promptly passed out cold. I was stuck in the backseat trying to find a comfortable place to put my feet among several weeks’ worth of fast-food wrappers, soda bottles and dirty clothes.
Chapter 14
All thoughts of our housekeeping skills went out the window the second we pulled into the cemetery, because it was pretty obvious we wouldn’t be keeping house there anymore. A pillar of black smoke reached for the sky, and flames leapt a good twenty feet into the air as we parked in front of what used to be our caretaker’s cottage and underground lair. I jumped out of the truck and ran toward the house, but King grabbed me before I covered any real ground.
“It’s gone, man.” He held me off the ground, my feet churning like a cartoon character. “There’s nothing in there that survived.”
I relaxed in his arms with the realization that he was right. Everything we owned was gone. Just as I was starting to mourn the loss of my comic collection, I heard a girl’s voice rising above the flames in a tortured scream.
“Abby!” I twisted free of King’s grasp and fell to the turf. My hands and feet clawed the ground uselessly for a couple of precious seconds as I tried frantically to get everything working together. Finally, I heaved myself off the grass and bolted into the burning house, yelling for Abby the whole way.
For the second time in one night, it was very handy that I only needed to breathe to make my vocal chords work, because the smoke poured from our underground apartment in thick black tendrils. I leapt down the stairs, crashing through the last few and gashing open my left leg. I fell face-first with my hands in a puddle of blue-tinged flame, then hastily beat out my burning sleeves as I fought to disengage from the splintered wood. I took a quick look around at an apartment fully engulfed in fire. Our furniture had been piled together in the center of the den to make a pyre, and something had obviously been poured around the whole room to make it burn like that.
I pulled myself loose from the steps with a sick sound of tearing flesh, and yelled again for Abby. I doubled over coughing as I drew in smoky air to shout again, but I was able to get low enough to see her feet dangling from the far wall.
I got down on my hands and knees and pulled open the door to the coat closet at the bottom of the stairs. I yanked my leather duster off a hanger and covered my head and shoulders with it so my hair wouldn’t catch fire. I blew out as much foul smoke as I could get from my scalded lungs and commando-crawled across the floor to where I had seen Abby’s feet. I got to her with vamp-speed, but lost a few precious seconds trying to figure out how she was floating on the wall. By the time I got to my feet, the fire had surrounded us, and I had no clear path back to the stairs.
I turned back to Abby, and it finally sank in why she was still in the apartment with all that fire—she’d been nailed to the wall and couldn’t pull herself free. Thick silver stakes pierced her forearms just behind the wrist. They had been driven into the wall, holding her a good foot off the ground. Over her head, left as an unmistakable message for me, were spray-painted the same three Greek letters I had seen on the vamp lair. I decided in a heartbeat that I was going to kill a whole mess of frat boys before this was all over.
Abby moaned and tried to pull away when I shook her shoulder to bring her around. I grabbed one of the stakes and tried to pull it from the wall, but it only wiggled between the bones of her arm, making her scream in agony. I yelled a little too because the hot silver burned my hand, then yelled again when I noticed the back of my duster coated with flames. I ripped off the coat and beat out the fire in a semicircle a few feet around us, then reached back u
p to grab the stake again.
“Abby,” I said, trying to get her attention on my face instead of the pain in her arm. “We’re gonna do this on three, okay?”
She nodded weakly, and I started to count.
“One, two,” and on “two” I yanked with every ounce of strength in me.
The stake came free, and Abby sagged onto me, howling. She screamed and thrashed around, clawing my arm and shoulder to ribbons where I tried to hold her up and beat back the fire at the same time. I reached over and yanked her other arm free, but this time the spike stayed stuck in her arm as they both came free from the wall. I’ll take what I can get, I thought as I turned back to where my stairs used to be.
There was nothing there, just a pillar of fire reaching out into the cemetery. Abby was fighting like a crazed animal, so I set her down on her feet. She whirled on me and went for my throat, fangs out, but I was ready. I put one wrist in her mouth, effectively blocking her, then punched her in the side of the head with enough force to crush a human’s skull like an egg. Fortunately, vampires don’t get concussions, and with her stake wounds and burns, I didn’t think she’d even notice when she woke up. I tossed her over my shoulder and turned for the exit.
I stomped out the last shreds of my duster and covered Abby’s face with it, then ran and jumped my way across the minefield my apartment had become. I reached the hole under where the stairs used to be and gathered all my strength for a vertical leap.
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