by Night, H. T.
What’s happening to me? My gut instinct has never been wrong before.
And the possibility was right there before me: Parker really was a demoness and had brought me under her dark influence. That disturbed me. I always wanted to be the dark, brooding one in my relationships.
I ran a hand over my face. “Do you know where she is?” I asked Lilith.
“Yes, but you don’t want to go there.”
“It’s the only place I want to go,” I said.
“You’ll never return. Nobody ever returns.”
No matter how this turned out, the kid was going to have major psychological baggage for the rest of her life. But dying here would be even worse. At least away from Cloudland, she’d have a chance. “I’m going to get you out of here,” I said.
“A knight in shining armor, huh? Well, Daddy is a dragon. A big, fire-breathing dragon who’ll cook your ass and eat you for dinner.”
I hoped she meant that figuratively instead of literally. “So, how well do you know Parker?”
She rolled her stoned eyes. “How well does any girl know her father’s mistress?”
I didn’t want to go there, and I had no way of knowing whether Erasmus was truly engaged in sexual relations with Parker, or whether she was merely a sidekick to help build up the cult. One thing was for sure, though: Parker was flesh and blood, not a demon. Because I’d smelled her blood, and it had been very, very tempting.
“Do you trust me?” I said, realizing I’d asked Parker a similar question not that long ago.
“I don’t trust anybody,” she said.
I opened my mouth to explain why I was different, that I was one of the good guys, but I didn’t really have any hard evidence of that. Instead, I just said, “Good answer.”
I slipped out the door, leaving the lights off and hopefully allowing Lilith to catch up on her beauty sleep. I locked the latch before I pulled the door closed behind me. Maybe if she was too stoned to wander, she’d be safe for a little while, but I knew creepy old Erasmus probably had a master key to the place.
Now that my senses weren’t clouded by Lilith, I expanded my perceptions outward. Then downward.
I could feel the anxiety, pain, and misery rising up from below. I wasn’t much for religion, but there was a lot of symbolism in the idea that hell was a hot place and it was always below. I came to the end of the hall, where apparently a maid was inside cleaning a room. There was a laundry hamper there, and I fished out a robe that wasn’t too rumpled, slipped it on, and hurried away. My boots and the legs of my blue jeans were visible, but I didn’t waste the time to stop and undress.
I found the stairs and clattered down four stories, but the stairs kept going. I hadn’t encountered anyone, so I guess the cultists were all in their rooms reading Cloudland pamphlets. The lucky ones, anyway.
The others...
I heard a couple of moans and groans, and I half-floated, half scrambled down the remaining two flights, living up to my name. At the concrete landing was a metal door, which I tried. Locked.
I pressed my ear to it, because even my acute hearing has its limits. At the same time, I penetrated the room with my senses, discerning the veiled outlines of a few of the older gentlemen, the big wigs. I also picked up the plaintive whining of several teen girls. From what I could tell, the real debauchery hadn’t begun, but things were getting hot and heavy...and sickening.
Rage fueled me as I grabbed the door handle and twisted hard, snapping the hasp.
Chapter Twenty
The door swung open with a rusty creak, and dim light from the stairwell joined with the few candles to reveal that the teens were nude, huddled in the center of the room on a large mat. Behind them was a miniature, Styrofoam-looking version of the big, bitching demon statue outside.
The big wigs were gathered around them in various states of undress, and I couldn’t help but notice that the Democratic senator who looked sharp in a suit should never, ever allow himself to be photographed in a Speedo if he ever wanted to carry another election. The movie star, too, was half-naked, and he held a mean-looking leather whip.
“No boys allowed,” the actor said, apparently spying my boots.
I flipped my hood back and grinned, showing my fangs. “I ain’t no boy,” I said.
His eyes grew wide as one of the girls shrieked, and the actor’s whip undulated, then snapped toward me. I ducked back and let it wrap around my arm, surprising him when I tugged it toward me. He fell forward before he had enough sense to let go, and I grabbed him and raked my fangs across his throat. Not enough to pierce and turn him, but enough to put the fear of God in him.
“Play with people your own age,” I whispered in his ear.
I pushed him away and swept the whip around the senator’s ankles as he tried to run, yanking so that he sprawled face first, his fat belly making a slapping sound as it hit the concrete.
“Look out!” one of the girls yelled, but she could have saved herself the trouble. Because I sensed the third person, a tall black guy sporting kinky sports attire emerging from the shadows, a baseball bat raised over his head. Hell of a prop.
I dodged his swing, but he was fast and clipped my knee with the wooden tip. “I hate vampires,” he said, swinging and smashing the bat on the floor so hard that it shattered.
He held up the splintered end, dancing around in just his jock strap and those funny leggings ballplayers wear. He poked it at me a couple of times, but I skipped away, saving my best moves and letting him gain confidence.
The girls were whispering and squealing a little, but they were not seriously freaking out yet. They were probably drugged like Lilith, flying on Erasmus Cole’s Cloudland Kool-Aid.
“Run,” I yelled at them, waving toward the door.
“But....” one of them said, and I glanced at her. She was cute and blonde, the Cloudland prototype, barely sixteen if that.
“But what?” I said, turning my full attention back to the menacing wooden stake.
“You’re a vampire,” she finished, and I realized my fangs were still protruding, aroused by the scant taste of blood.
And I realized what I was really afraid of: that I wasn’t that much different from these perverse human predators, and if the girls were around when my hunger kicked in, I’d have no problem ripping open their pretty, tender throats and draining them dry.
When you got right down to it, I was no better than Erasmus Cole. And that realization pissed me off even more.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, turning an awkward backflip as the ballplayer jabbed at me. I landed on my feet, curled my fingers as if they were claws, and gave the girls my best Bela Lugosi. “And if you don’t get out right this second, I’m draining you all right after this joker strikes out.”
That got them moving, and I heard their bare feet slapping up the stairs as the sicko Babe Ruth and I got down to business.
“So, you’re familiar with vampires,” I said to the freaky ballplayer, getting into fighting stance.
“Sure,” he said, “this is Cloudland.”
Parker’s words came back to me: This ain’t my first rodeo.
Behind me, the senator had recovered and was crawling toward the stairs. I let him go. The actor, however, must have confused his action scripts with reality, because he reached down and picked up the fat end of the broken bat and thwacked it against his open palm. Both actor and ballplayer faced me.
“I haven’t killed one of you in a long time,” said the actor. He might have been more menacing if he wasn’t wearing assless chaps. “Months, at least.”
“The demoness is going to love this,” the ballplayer said.
They closed in, apparently used to stalking my kind, and they stayed with me as I leapt away. The ceiling was too low for serious acrobatics, but I clung above them long enough for them to stab only air.
Then I dropped back down and grabbed their heads, knocking their skulls together with a sound like castanets clacking.
“Double play,” I said, as they dropped unconscious at my feet. If I was going to hang around actors, I might as well deliver a few lame one-liners.
Besides, “I got lucky” wasn’t appropriate to the situation.
The temptation to stick a couple of holes in their necks was too great. Besides, I reasoned, hadn’t they just tried to kill me? Indeed they had, and in my world of already shaky ethics, that made them fair game.
A moment later, after dropping to my knees and pushing aside the actor’s mop of hair, I was drinking deeply from his jugular vein.
God, was it good!
Blood rushed into my mouth and it was all I could do to keep up with the furious flow.
Sated, I eased him back down to the floor. I watched as the two puncture wounds in his neck closed supernaturally. No, vampire wounds do not leave a mark; instead, we leave our victims groggy and weak for days. It is one of the reasons we have remained hidden for so long.
That is, of course, if we let them live at all.
The pervert would live. For now, I had bigger fish to fry.
Parker and Erasmus.
Chapter Twenty-one
Feeling stronger than I had in days—after all, there’s nothing so revitalizing as fresh human blood—I made my way back up the stairs and to the common room.
As I surveyed the quiet room—which was much quieter than it had been just fifteen minutes earlier—I was all too aware of the growing alarm sounding within me. Such alarms are common for me. They help keep me alive. They help me recognize when real danger is around. Danger that could possibly even kill me again. Over the decades, I’ve come to pay attention to such alarms.
But for the moment I was mostly alone in the common room. So where had everyone gone? And why were my spider-senses jangling off the hook?
Leave, I thought. Get the hell out of here.
Sage advice. After all, I didn’t have a dog in this fight. If I had any sense, I would listen to the warning bells that sounded just inside my head. Parker, it seemed, wasn’t who she claimed she was. And who was Lilith to me? Just another lost soul in this screwed-up place, and with her genetics, she was bad news anyway.
Maybe. But something wasn’t making sense. The cult members down below hadn’t been surprised to see me. The girls had been. But not the elite members.
The demoness would be pleased, he had said. Pleased about what? Killing me?
Come to think of it, the bungling buffoons hadn’t tried very hard to kill me. It was almost as if they had been waiting for me. Waiting for me to do what? Kill them? Drink from them? Perhaps it had all been designed to distract me.
Sure. Maybe. But that still didn’t account for the fact that seeing a vampire in their midst was commonplace.
There were, as far as I could tell, no other vampires present. Vampires know other vampires. We sense them, feel them. I hadn’t felt anything.
Only my own warning senses ringing loud and clear, and they were practically begging me to get the hell out of Dodge. Or the hell out of Cloudland.
But I didn’t leave. I continued standing there like an immortal idiot, cudgeling my sluggish brain to make sense of it all. My brain wasn’t normally sluggish. In fact, my brain, especially after a feeding, was generally razor sharp.
What was happening to me? And where was everyone?
I listened and soon picked up the sound of a vacuum somewhere. I also heard talking from somewhere, too. I turned. And at the far end of the hallway, I saw a small group of young women exit through a side door.
If my sense of direction was right, they were heading back to the open field and to the stone demon.
I sensed there would be a sacrifice in the immediate future and, dog or no dog, I wasn’t going to let that creepy bastard hurt his daughter.
And with that thought, I dashed back up the four flights of stairs to her bedroom. Or cell. Or whatever it really was. The door was open. I looked inside. Empty. The far window was still open, and the curtains billowed in on a breeze. I went to it and looked out.
Sure enough, the cultists were gathering around the stone demon and there was Erasmus on the platform with his daughter, Lilith.
I leaped from the window.
* * *
I landed hard. Too hard.
In fact, something popped painfully in my knee. What the hell? I couldn’t remember the last time I had hurt myself.
I frowned as I stood. I waited briefly for my body to repair itself and it did...although not as fast as I would have liked. And not as fast as I was accustomed to.
Something’s wrong with me.
With my knee mostly repaired, I set out, moving quickly through the grassy slopes that led up to the compound. I picked up speed, virtually flying over the grass. Sometimes I can run so fast that it appears my feet don’t touch the ground.
But not this time. This time I felt every thudding footfall.
And, amazingly, I was running out of breath, too—or at least what passed for breath in my undead condition.
At the edge of the clearing, hidden within a copse of evergreens, I watched as young women filled the open space. Most sat on their knees and stared ahead. Most were, I assumed, drugged out of their freakin’ minds.
And there was Erasmus with Lilith, who sat in a chair. Her arms hung limply at her sides. Her head lolled forward, chin resting on her sternum.
I debated. The girl didn’t have much time. Not to mention I didn’t have much time, either. I’ve seen some weird shit in my time, but I’ve never seen an actual, honest-to-God demon summoned.
I could leave. I could turn and run and get the hell out of there. Whether or not a demon would really make an appearance, I didn’t know. What the demon’s agenda was, I really didn’t care. Whatever happened in Cloudland was none of my business.
Run, and don’t look back.
Except I didn’t run. I continued standing behind a tree, watching, debating, wondering what I should do. Indecisive. Almost nervous.
And all the while I felt weaker and weaker.
What the hell was going on?
I took in some air, kick-starting lungs that I rarely used. Years ago, I had learned that I really didn’t need to breathe. I did it for show, sometimes. To keep folks from asking questions.
But I need to breathe now.
Yeah, something was very, very wrong.
It was now or never.
I took in some more air and dashed forward, speeding through the tall grass and between sitting bodies. Although I was not going anywhere near as fast as I could, I was still pretty damn fast. Just a blur to those sitting there, watching the scene before them.
Erasmus seemed to spy me. He had stepped behind his daughter, holding something in his hand. His gaze, I was certain, was locked onto me.
Interestingly, no security guards leaped to his defense, and the closer I got, the more I realized I had stepped into an elaborate trap.
No. Not stepped. Flew headlong.
Screw it. Weakened or not, I was taking Lilith with me. At the very least, I would save her.
And as I bounded onto the raised dirt platform, with the massive stone demon rising high into the shadows behind Erasmus, Lilith looked up.
Only she wasn’t Lilith.
At least, not anymore.
It was Parker. And she was smiling demonically.
Chapter Twenty-two
I haven’t been human in a very long time.
But I can almost remember what it was like to be slow, limited, and vulnerable. That’s how I felt now, and the surge of energy that would have passed for adrenalin in a human was fading fast.
And the shock of seeing that Parker had been disguised as Lilith all along really made me feel like a sucker.
Of course, I was a sucker, and despite having just fed, I was a weak sucker.
“Where’s Lilith?” I said to them both.
The cultists gathered around made no move to attack me. That also fueled my suspicions.
“I’m right here,
Spider,” she said. “Didn’t you wonder why you never saw both of us at the same time?”
My first question was “Why?” but there was no reason to even ask. I couldn’t trust anything this woman—if indeed she was even a female and a human—would say. She’d obviously been lying to me ever since the night she’d followed me to my car.
“The drained body...” I wobbled a little, feeling woozy. The moon was bright against Mount Shasta, and the whole scene had a foggy, magical feel to it.
Had they drugged me somehow? I’d avoided their purple Kool-Aid, and I hadn’t taken anything that I—
Shit. The cult guy in the basement.
My expression must have shown that the truth had dawned on me.
Parker smiled, with none of her earlier seductive sweetness. Now it was a vile thing, a raw gash of jagged teeth, lips bright and full. Erasmus smirked beneath his hood, apparently pleased to see his plan was working out perfectly.
“You set me up,” I said to her.
She shrugged. “We need your immortal power. Nothing personal.”
“So all your games were just to test me, to see if I was really a vampire.”
I could barely stand now, and the air seemed thick and heavy, filling my lungs as if I were trapped in a buried coffin. Something was very wrong. I knew I was in danger, yet I couldn’t muster the strength to take a flying leap away from the stage.
Parker rose from her chair and stepped beside Erasmus. “I had to be sure,” she said. “But, really, who did you think you were fooling? Only comes out at night, doesn’t eat or drink anything, super strong, likes to play hero. That trick with the Bloody Mary? Lame. And that name ‘Spider’? Yeah, real subtle.”
I hadn’t noticed the crowd moving, but it seemed they were closer to the stage, as if the ground had simply slid forward about thirty feet. They were making a low sound, a rhythmic chant that was almost a hum.
