Including the fact that Jackson was impervious to crosses.
Claremont had seen that Jackson didn’t have a reflection—that was enough to make her think he was a real vampire. But there is no Nightfallen race that isn’t affected by crosses. The Kings would know that—and that meant they’d also know the truth about Jackson.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, grabbing Jackson’s arm. He shook me off, probably wanting to see what an undead race war looked like. I drew close, whispering in his ear: “They know you’re not one of us.”
Jackson’s face darkened like a brewing storm. Outside, light snow continued to drift down steadily.
“They have my mother,” Caleb muttered to Verena. “Please make them let her go.”
Verena raised a hand, dismissing him, then addressed the Kings. “You have come for the glass.” Her anger was hidden, but not particularly well, a molten fury beginning to melt through her stony coldness.
Through rictus smiles, the three Kings spoke. “We were going to, Enmerkar,” they said in unison, calling Verena by what I guessed was her class’s Sumerian name. “And we were going to use this woman to do so. But she had seen your thieves, those we had once hoped to turn against you, and she has told us what she has seen.”
“Why should I care?” Verena asked. “Whatever you promised them, they did not betray me. Anything else about them is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Now leave my home.”
“My mother,” Caleb said to Verena, his eyes pleading with her. “Please, whatever they want, give it to them so they’ll release her.”
Verena gave him what to her must have been a light slap. But it was enough to bloody Caleb’s bottom lip and drop him to the ground. The large, shuttered lantern fell from his hands. The snow covering the pavement was packed enough it rolled toward Jackson and me, the light still shining through its seams..
With Caleb’s blood on the air, I felt myself stiffen. I saw the Kings stare at him too, barely able to return their attention to Verena.
I wanted to take advantage of the pause. “We need to get out of here,” I said to Jackson again.
“Where would we run to?” He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t have to.
With his cover blown, word would circulate through all the vampire classes. I knew what they were capable of. Even if Sergeant Jackson Wheel lived out the rest of his days in a Pentagon subbasement with crosses on every door and air duct and showered with holy water, his family wouldn’t survive the week.
Jackson’s superiors wouldn’t try to save me. I’d be on my own, and once I was found, they’d kill me. Then it was hellfire forever.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
Jackson bent down, picked up the waning lantern. Upright in his hand, its flame glowed hotly again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, leaving the doorway and walking toward Verena and the Kings.
“If you have some quarrel with the ones I employed, you may address them off my property. As for the woman you brought, you may keep her, so long as you leave now,” Verena said.
“No!” Caleb screamed, whatever he felt for his mom shaking loose Verena’s hold on him.
The Stoker-class vampire turned to stare at her slave, genuinely surprised to hear him address her the way a man might.
The Kings, uncaring of human cues, ignored the fact that Verena was distracted as they pressed their case. “The one called Wheel is not a—”
Jackson had already lobbed the lantern at them. It skipped across the snowy pavement, coming to rest right before them. Its glass was broken, but the flame continued to flicker.
Jackson’s 1911 was in his hand. The lantern couldn’t have been closer than sixty feet, but he managed to place a bullet square in it. The oil inside burst into flames, splashing on the Kings, who dissolved into the fog with a hiss.
Verena turned to us, the outrage obvious on her face. The bones in her cheeks seemed to shift, becoming sharper, pressing against her otherwise perfect skin. Her voice had an animal’s growl beneath it. “What did you do?”
“They were making a move,” Jackson said, a lie that would have been obvious had the Kings not now been swirling around like angry bees. Their claws and fanged faces faded in and out of the fog.
The fog rose in a wave above us, and one of the Kings materialized quickly, flying down toward Jackson. But it was angry, hissing, insane, and Verena was between it and its target. It brushed past Verena while she was still looking at us, its clawed hand catching the edge of her wedding gown as it did.
“You tore it!” She grabbed the King before it could reach Jackson.
It turned back into mist, but not before another, seeing the attack, faded in long enough to rake its claws across Verena’s back. Her blood stained the dress.
“No,” she screamed, her voice barely human now. She swung wildly, her arm catching only fog.
The buttons that had held the gown closed at the back were gone, making it that much easier for her to shuck out of it.
Verena was naked, a Valkyrie’s body. Her polished skin began to darken as the bones beneath it snapped and extended, changing her body’s form. Her blond hair turned brown and coarse, matching the coat that began to spring from her body. Her mouth extended from her skull, into a hideous muzzle. No more perfectly aligned teeth, just jagged rows of fangs.
I’d never see anything like it, and for a second, Jackson and I stood transfixed, watching beauty devolve into horror.
One of the male Kings appeared from the fog behind Jackson, its claws raised like a scythe.
“Look out,” I shouted, flinging myself at it.
The thing’s claws cut into my chest, which was just barely healed from last night’s .357s. Then, with its other hand, it grabbed me by the neck, and slammed me into the pavement.
I felt the back of my skull fracture, and the asphalt under it cracked. The pain lanced from the bone to my mind, and then from there it seemed to radiate out to the rest of my body.
Jackson fired two rounds, into either of its shoulders. The shots would have broken bone had it been a Matheson class. The rounds passed through the King as though it had been made of ink.
I strained to talk as my voice box began to collapse. “Bullets don’t work, remember?”
The thing’s eyes were hot coals suspended above its dead smile. I could feel its animal hate fully on me. It didn’t even care about Jackson now, didn’t care he’d just been shooting at it. All it wanted to do was to kill me.
At the edges of my vision, I saw not darkness but flames coming in.
Then I felt a sharp shudder run from its body into mine. Then another, and another, all in rapid succession. Its grip slackened as its head fell from its jagged neck, and the head rolled into the snow. Its body fell to the side, and I saw Jackson, the .45 still in his right hand and his bloodied tomahawk in his left.
“Sharp objects seem to work,” he said.
By now, Verena had fully transformed into some grotesque hybrid of human and bat. Seven feet tall, her hands and arms were now the muscle-covered superstructure for a powerful set of leathery wings.
Her roar echoed across the mountain. There was a terrific gust as her wings powered her into the snowy sky, dispersing the fog and the monsters composing it for a few precious seconds.
I wasn’t strong enough to stand, but Jackson stood guard over me, his head swiveling, looking for the next attack. We saw Caleb running toward his mother.
Claremont remained entranced in the fog, her face unchanged despite the battle.
“Mom,” Caleb yelled to her, seemingly completely free of Verena’s hold, even stripping off his high-collared frock coat. “Mom, it’s Cale.”
Her eyes looked on as he approached, seeing everything, comprehending nothing. Then she reached into her lab-coat pocket. She pulled out her .357.
“Dammit, no,” Jackson said, dropping the tomahawk so he could get a double-handed grip on his 1911.
Caleb stopped as his mother leveled he
r revolver at him. She pulled back the hammer.
There was a gunshot, and Caleb instinctively looked down to make sure he hadn’t been hit.
But it was his mother who spun around, as Jackson’s shot caught her in the shoulder. Her gun flew from her hands as she fell to the ground.
Claremont screamed, tears in her eyes. There was emotion in them, and human intellect, the pain shaking loose the Kings from her mind.
The fog was reforming, though not as dense, for the Kings had lost one of their number.
One of them—the female—materialized right in front of Jackson, slashing the gun from his hands and tackling him.
I tried to pull myself off the ground, but the damage to my skull was too severe, and I tumbled back to my knees.
The female spoke to him through that same damnable rictus grin: “You’re going to die, pretender.”
It took all Jackson’s strength to hold her claws away from him, but it was a losing battle.
A piercing shriek came from the sky, and I looked up dizzily. Verena’s monstrous form was diving down. Her slobbering jaws slammed shut on the female King’s back, the momentum pulling it off Jackson.
As Verena glided to a stop at the other side the parking lot, the King in her jaws began to slip into mist. Before it did, Verena reset her jaws’ purchase, capturing it this time by the head, and twisted with a quick, wet jerk. The female King’s headless body fell to the ground. Verena tossed the grinning head away, and it bounced across the snowy pavement.
The final King appeared behind Verena, sinking its claws and teeth deep into her back. She tried to bite at it and throw it off, but neither her jaws nor her wings could reach the thing as it dug in like a tick. She took to the sky, but the thing still held on.
The fog was no longer around us, but it was up in the sky, following wherever Verena flew. Even obscured by the mist and snow, the King was obviously weakening her, her flight becoming less frenetic.
Jackson picked up his tomahawk, and waved his arms like he was signaling a plane to land. “Bring him down here! Bring him to me!”
“She’s too far away,” I said, weakly. “She won’t be able to hear you.”
But I was wrong. She came down in a wide arc, skimming over Claremont and Caleb holding each other by the Volvo. Verena glided in fast and low, the coarse hair of her body practically touching the snow—straight for Jackson.
“Come on, come on, come on. Bring it here, I’m going to swing for the fences,” Jackson said, with a grin.
The thing was oblivious to everything except its feeding, and didn’t see as Jackson wound up with the tomahawk. Verena came in so low, the top of the King’s head was level with Jackson’s shoulder.
Verena tucked her wings tightly against her body so that she wouldn’t strike Jackson as she flew by. Jackson whipped the tomahawk around, catching the thing in the center of its crown. The King fell from Verena as she skidded across the parking lot.
Jackson raced up to it before it could dissolve into mist, and hacked at its neck. It took five hard strikes, but eventually, Jackson had his trophy.
7
Negotiating Severance
Later, Verena appeared as a human again, holding her ruined wedding gown in her hands like it was a dead child. She was naked, indifferent to the snow, and there was still a wound on her back from the final King.
She walked to us as Jackson helped me up. It still took some effort for me to stand, my cracked skull making the world feel as though it were swaying beneath my feet. I felt sick, and would have fallen over again if Jackson hadn’t had his arm around me.
“You are both quite the fighters,” Verena said, her voice having returned to its detached coolness.
“Thanks,” Jackson said. “Sorry your dress got ruined.”
“The nature of this world is to take those things we treasure most,” she said. She looked over at Claremont and Caleb. “Ms. Weston should feed on them. The blood will help heal her injuries.”
“I like the sound of that idea,” I said, my voice a croak.
“You’re not going to keep Caleb?” Jackson asked.
“I think not. I am too disappointed in him. The only question now is, how to dispose of his body once I kill him. And his mother as well. She has seen too much.”
The snow continued to fall. We watched Claremont and Caleb crying in each other’s arms.
“Look at all that emotion,” Jackson said. “So real. Ever feel anything like that?”
“Long ago,” Verena said.
“Once we kill them, it’ll be lost forever. Ruined. Like your wedding dress, I guess.”
Verena said nothing for a long while. Then, “Perhaps something like that should be left in the world. But what of everything they have seen?”
“People want to protect the ones they love, right? I don’t think either of them would say anything, since a word uttered by either of them would cost not just their life but the other’s too,” he said.
“For the feelings they remind me of when I look at them, I can see myself sparing them. Why would you and your partner though?” Verena asked.
There was a pause. Jackson was having difficulty finding the appropriate Nightfallen answer.
“Because,” I spoke up, “they’ll feel gratitude to us for sparing them. Having someone to help during the day will come in handy for me and my partner if we get more jobs like this one.”
“Ah, self-interest. That I understand,” Verena said. “There remains a question. My hearing in this form is merely human. But it is heightened in my alternate form. That is how I was able to hear you calling for me from the ground. I also heard one of the Kings call you a pretender. What did it mean by that?”
Jackson said nothing, and I didn’t have an answer either. I could feel Jackson’s body tense, preparing for another fight.
Before he made a move, Verena spoke again. “Perhaps it does not matter. Everyone has secrets, and tonight, at least, you earned the right to keep yours. In any event, I may need you both again.”
Driving back into Echo Valley, I huddled under Jackson’s coat. He’d put on the jeep’s soft top before we left the foundry. I was grateful to be warm.
“I’ve got blood packets at my place,” Jackson said, driving slower as the snow began falling in earnest. “The benefits of being a government agent. I’ll let you suck on a few, fix you right up.”
So I’d finally get to see his bunker. Guess getting my skull busted was worth it. “You’re too kind,” I said.
“You know how it is, self-interest and all. I may need you later.”
I laughed. “Not too soon, I hope. I may need a few nights to rest up from all this.”
“You earned it. We managed to kill some monsters, get paid, and save two people’s lives. I’d call that a pretty good day.”
The killing and Nazi gold I didn’t mind, but that last thing he mentioned? Too saccharine for me. “Maybe we should have taken a look at the glass again before we left. The bad side of it. To see if any of those gashes on you had healed.”
Jackson sighed. “Doubt it, but at least today there wouldn’t have been any new ones.”
• • •
Night Hunted
(Nightfallen #3)
1
The Scene of the Crime
Except for her fangs, the remains of Mimi Breck appeared to belong to an ordinary 20-year-old.
“She’s in there.” Mansfield led Jackson Wheel and me to the body. Mansfield’s hand shook holding his cigarette. “I’ll wait out here for you,” he said, between drags into his undead lungs.
Her dirty blonde hair spilled across the expanse of the bed like a flaring sunset. Her eyes were open but unseeing, staring at the ceiling. Her lips were full and red. In life—or more accurately, when she’d been animate—those lips would have been quite generous in sharing first affection, and then pleasure. All of which would have been a prelude for inflicting pain on others, perhaps even death.
I knew this because
I was the same way.
A foot-long piece of wood jutted from her chest, just right of her sternum. Blood had dried around the wound, right through her Alpha Psi sweatshirt.
“Maybe she killed herself?” I said.
“Don’t be a bitch, Ginny,” Jackson said.
“We’re monsters, Jackson. Poor taste is the least I’m capable of.”
Except for an absence of mirrors and blackout curtains, Mimi’s room was done in sorority girl chic. Clean, white furniture. Enough silk pillows for a maharajah, enough stuffed animals for a daycare.
Framed photos of formals and parties lined the shelves and dresser. Mostly printed cell pics, some had been made into collages with taglines like “Friends” and “Spring Break” beneath them. All the shots had been taken at night.
The pictures themselves were mostly of beautiful girls smiling while holding red party cups.
I’d never had the chance to do anything like that when I was alive. I’d gone Nightfallen before graduating high school. But really, I don’t think I’d missed anything other than pissing away my youth on one drunken asshole after another. The girls in the photos thought these were the best years of their lives, but they were wrong. It was the best years for the guys that got to use them as playgrounds.
In all her photos, Mimi herself was noticeably absent.
“I’m guessing she made herself the designated photographer,” Jackson said. “It’s not like she was going to show up in a shot anyway.”
“It was a big risk being this social with the living,” I said. “What if your BFFs start wondering why your course load doesn’t include any day classes, or some frat boy asks why you’re cold to the touch? What if people notice you never actually drink the beer in your party cup, or someone takes a cell pic while you’re not looking and you’re nowhere to be seen in it? Her sorority sisters must have been idiots.”
“Or she was just was really good at masking it all,” he said.
“Being that good at hiding a secret that big is a rare talent,” I said with a smile. “Sometimes, it even requires help.”
Nightfallen (Vol. 1): Books 1-4 Page 9
