“Silver bullets will also kill them, right?” Jim asked excitedly. “Or is that a werewolf?”
Alison chuckled. “You definitely have a lot to learn.”
* * *
LEESBURG, VIRGINIA. Thirty-five miles west of Washington. A suburban town on the fringe of the region’s urban sprawl. It offered the vampires a poor hunting ground, and so had never been prowled. Until tonight.
Toni sought a special prey that required special bait. In this case, knee-high stiletto boots, a leather miniskirt, and a tight black tank top. The hunting ground was a motorcycle bar. Not just any motorcycle bar, but the Roadhouse Café, an establishment known for its particularly rowdy clientele. The sign hanging in the front window succinctly characterized the type of patrons—Better here than across the street—a reference to the county courthouse located opposite the square.
As Toni approached, the glow from a green neon sign bearing the bar’s name and the accompanying Harley Davidson logo reflected off her face. Straightening her tank top, Toni pushed open the door and stepped inside. Travis Tritt’s “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” blared from a series of speakers mounted along the wall, attempting to drown out the twin televisions mounted above each end of the bar and the raucous conversations. The lighting came mostly from a series of fluorescent lamps hanging over each of the half dozen pool tables and the small lamps on each of the tables arranged along the rear wall. Eddies of cigarette smoke churned by ceiling fans swirled around the pool tables. An ideal, seedy environment filled with bikers, rednecks, and good ole boys. The perfect marketplace for Toni.
The door had barely swung shut behind Toni when she suddenly became the center of attention. The pool players near the front noticed her first. Then, like a wave through the bar, others began turning in her direction. Toni strolled through the billiard tables with a gait honed by hundreds of years of seduction. Her gaze met that of several men, trying to find just the right one.
“Hey, sweet thing.” A scrawny man just over five feet in height with a three-day growth of beard and uncombed hair blocked her path. A cigarette with ash still attached hung from his lips. He reeked of second-hand smoke and beer. The word repulsive came to Toni’s mind.
“I’m Big Eddy. Remember that name. You’ll be screaming it later tonight.”
Toni fought back the urge to rip open this maggot’s throat and watch him die. She could not even stomach the idea of feeding off of this human.
Fortunately, fate intervened. A behemoth of a biker walked up behind Big Eddy. Over six feet in height and weighing more than three hundred pounds, the biker’s chest and beer belly strained against his T-shirt and black leather vest emblazoned with the Harley Davidson logo. He still held a pool cue in one hand, grasping it in such a way that it could easily be turned into a weapon if necessary. Not that anyone in this bar would be crazy enough to pick a fight with him.
The biker grabbed Big Eddy by the back of his neck, lifting the runt so he had to stand on his toes, then turned Big Eddy to face him.
“Jesus, Mike. What are you doing?” Big Eddy thrashed about, trying to break free.
“What have I told you about bothering me?”
“T-to never get in your way i-if I knew what was good for me.”
Mike squeezed Big Eddy’s neck, evoking a yelp of pain. “So why are you bothering me?”
“I-I’m not. I’m t-talking to her.”
“Well, she’s with me.” Mike squeezed Big Eddy’s neck again. “Understand?”
Big Eddy nodded furiously, so Mike released his grip. The runt scurried out of arm’s length, nervously looking over his shoulder, then headed for the front door.
Toni looked at Mike and smiled seductively. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. Eddy’s an obnoxious little shit who hits on every broad who comes in here. A lady like you deserves a real man.”
“Like you?”
Mike stepped forward, wrapped an arm around her waist, and puller her closer. “Damn straight.”
“You’re wrong about one thing, though.”
Mike scowled. “You better not be teasing.”
“I’m not.” Toni wrapped her fingers around the pool cue and began to stroke the shaft. “You’re wrong when you referred to me as a lady.”
“Damn,” Mike drawled. “I’m buying you a drink.”
“Why waste time on a drink when I’m ready for the main event.” Toni pulled the cue toward her lips and gently blew on the tip.
“Hot damn.” Mike tossed the pool cue to a friend. “Take this. I’m going back to the apartment.”
The friend grabbed the pool cue in mid-air. “I guess you want me to make myself scarce for an hour?”
“Make it two.” Toni wrapped an arm around Mike’s arm and ushered him toward the parking lot out back.
Mike had parked his Harley in the far corner of the lot among several other motorcycles, all of them hidden behind a van. He mounted the Harley and started the engine, then patted the seat behind him. Toni straddled the seat. She ran her hands up and down his arms.
“You ready, baby?”
Toni nodded.
“Good. You’re about to have a night you’ll never forget.”
“So will you.”
Mike did not see Toni morph into a vampire. His first indication that his life was almost over came when Toni plunged her fangs into his neck. Mike struggled to break loose, but could do nothing more than flail around. She sucked deeply, drinking his blood until he had been drained enough to stop fighting. Toni tore a huge chunk of flesh from Mike’s throat, then spit it into the grass. It took only a few minutes before the life completely drained from his body.
4.
TONI TRUDGED THROUGH the muck of the Washington sewers. The collected waste from hundreds of thousand of humans soiled her stiletto boots while the stench of excrement invaded her nostrils, sickening her. Of all the vile habits of these filthy creatures, feeding off of animal flesh had to be the most disgusting. Rather than thrive on something as pure in essence as blood, they preferred dead flesh. The odor of decay oozed from their pores and tainted their blood. It was why she preferred to feed on the young, whose bodies had not yet been tainted. These creatures deserved to be hunted.
Toni despised having to travel through the sewers like vermin, a demeaning but necessary evil. Hundreds of years ago, she and Ion had roamed the Balkan countryside at will, feeding on humans like the cattle they were. Now vampires needed to show caution less they become the hunted. In order to maintain the coven’s security, its members had to enter and leave the row house through a slanted passage dug by hand through the ground that connected the basement with the sewer underneath the foundation.
Upon reaching the passageway, Toni scanned both ends of the sewer for humans. Seeing no one around, she sprang up to the opening in the ceiling and scrambled the fifteen feet to the basement. Sailing out of the passageway, she landed on the floor with a thud. Startled, a large sewer rat scurried for cover under the desiccated body of a sanitation worker who inadvertently had stumbled across the coven several months earlier. Toni ignored the rat and made her way upstairs.
Upon entering the master bedroom, Toni discovered the corpse of a young black man drained of blood and thrown into the corner like a discarded blanket. From the scraggly hair and soiled clothes, she surmised he had been a straggler. From the bruises on his shoulders and back, Toni knew he had been brutalized before being drained.
Toni shuddered as the nightmare images of her own turning flooded back into her consciousness.
Ion was a sadist. He always had been, even before his transformation into a vampire. As the undead, Ion terrorized entire villages and in some cases entire countries. Many of the masters Ion sired had gone insane during their turning, themselves then becoming scourges of Europe. But none ever compared even minutely to Ion’s viciousness and decadence. A few centuries ago, Toni had met the vampire who had sired Ion and heard the truth about Ion, for the first time becoming aware of just how deep t
he well of depravity was sunk into Ion’s soul.
Ion had been born in the late thirteenth century as the youngest of seven sons of a Romanian nobleman. With six heirs ahead of him, he had no decent prospects for his future other than the priesthood, which provided a measure of prestige and limited authority, but at the price of morality and celibacy. Instead, Ion traveled to Jerusalem and joined the Knights Templars, the order of religious warriors who renounced their worldly possessions and lived in the Holy Land to protect Christian pilgrims and the local crusader kingdoms. He had readily adapted to his new profession, thriving on the Papacy-sanctioned slaughter of Muslims, and soon built a reputation as a brave and particularly fierce defender of the faith. Rome and Jerusalem paid him accolades, while Damascus and Cairo issued fatwahs for his death. There even had been talk of nominating Ion as the next Grand Master of the Templars.
Despite the greatness that lay before him, Ion balked against the limits, few as they were, that had been placed upon him in his cleansing of the Holy Land and quickly wearied of his vows of virtue, celibacy, and poverty. Renouncing his pledge to the order, he assembled a group of local bandits and set out to raid the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem. At first the raids were no more than a nuisance to the crusader kingdoms, robbing pilgrims of their wealth and a few women of their virtue. Possessed by a growing obsession for violence, however, Ion soon abandoned all restraint. The raids plummeted into an orgy of brutality. All men over the age of twelve, the elderly, and the infirm were massacred or left in the desert to die from dehydration. Women and young boys were sold into slavery, but not before many of them experienced sexual perversions they could not ever have conceived of. When the Templars attempted to stop Ion and bring him to justice, he shifted his raiding to the east, preying on the caravans leading to Mecca, and showed the Muslim pilgrims even less mercy then he did Christians. Within two years of his arrival in the Holy Land, Ion had become the most hated and wanted man alive.
Things fell apart for Ion in 1289. After almost two centuries of Christian occupation of the Holy Land, Cairo and Damascus raised an invincible army and launched the final campaign to push the infidels back into the sea. One by one the cities of the crusader kingdoms fell to the Muslim forces until only the Templar citadel at Ashlit remained. Ion managed to evade the rampaging armies and sneak into the city before the last Christian ship departed, but because of his renunciation of his vows and his crimes against Christians, the Grand Master refused him passage to safety. Instead, the Templars chained Ion to the main gate of the city and left him for the Muslim conquerors.
Ion could not even conceive of the horrors the Muslims had in store for him. Sworn to bring Ion back to Damascus alive, his captors inflicted on him every indecency they could imagine short of death. By day his hands would be bound and tied to a horse’s tail, forcing him to walk through the beast’s urine and dung until he collapsed from exhaustion, and then would be dragged along for the remainder of the day. By night he would be repeatedly sodomized by as many as thirty of his captors. It took three weeks to reach Damascus, by which time Ion longed for the execution he expected would put him out of his misery.
The caliph of Damascus had lost an aunt and three nieces on one of Ion’s raids against Mecca-bound pilgrims, and lusted for revenge. First, he ordered Ion’s anus seared with a red-hot poker to punish him for the sin of sodomy. Next, the caliph had Ion lashed to the tallest minaret in the city and his head covered with honey, then left alone until his face swarmed with bugs that infested his mouth and nose. This torture was repeated daily for a week until the incessant buzzing and gagging drove Ion insane. Only then satisfied that Ion had suffered enough, the caliph banished him to a dungeon beneath the city’s garrison where his jailors took turns sodomizing and humiliating him. One of Ion’s jailor-rapists had been a master who, over the course of several violations, sired Ion into the legion of the undead. Soon after, the master arranged Ion’s escape. Yet by now the damage to Ion’s psyche had been irreparable, and his victims would greatly suffer for it. Toni among them.
The images of that nightmarish evening still haunted her even after all these centuries. A peasant girl from the southeast Austro-Hungarian Empire, Toni’s destiny became entwined with Ion’s during the Muslim assault against Budapest in the mid-fifteenth century. Ion rode with the Saracen hordes as a jihadist warrior so he could hide his feeding amidst the pillaging. Toni’s village had fallen in an orgy of slaughter. She tried to hide in her family’s pasture, and might have survived had not Ion been in search of prey. Ion had smelled her fear and tracked her down. She had braced herself to be raped. It would not have been the first time. But nothing this side of hell could have prepared her for that night.
Dragging her to a nearby barn, Ion molested her repeatedly over the course of a week, feeding off her blood with each violation, slowing draining her of life while preparing her to be a master. The true depravity occurred during her feedings on Ion as part of the siring process. Ion forced her to perform oral sex on him. She could still remember the feel of his cold, dead flesh between her lips. The way Ion clutched her hair and held her head in place as he raped her mouth. The sperm that filled her throat, its flavor that of rancid death. The taste of blood as Ion forced her to bite his cock and feed. And the degradingly erotic thrill from being violently seduced. Such humiliation was actually a sign of his affectation for Toni, for Ion treated in this manner only those he intended to sire.
The unlucky ones, like the corpse discarded in the corner, were brutalized and drained of blood.
Toni started undressing when Ion walked in. He wore only a red satin robe that hung open at the front. Dried blood caked around his mouth and encrusted his pubic hair. Upon seeing her, his eyes narrowed into menacing slits. “I’m glad to see you finally decided to come home.”
“I had something to take care of.”
“I don’t suppose it involved killing the hunter?”
“Be patient.” Toni barely disguised her disdain. “He’ll be taken care of in due time.”
“I hope so.” Ion crossed to the other side of the bed. He used his foot to push the corpse out of the way, then flopped onto the mattress. “For your sake.”
Toni felt her insides clench. Do not argue with Ion, she warned herself. Concentrate your energy on killing the hunter.
Hoping to change the subject, she turned and pointed to the corpse. “Who was that?”
Ion shrugged. “Some junkie. He hit me up for a fix. Must have thought I was a dealer.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Nothing. I’ve already drained him.”
“What are you going to do with the body?”
“Throw it into the basement with the others.”
This was Ion’s way of pawning off unpleasant tasks on her. At times like this it did no good to argue. As Ion slid deeper into decadence and irresponsibility, he became more aloof and demanding, and had slowly pushed Toni to the periphery of the coven. Only when she brought down the hunter would she be able to regain some of her lost authority. Until then, taking care of this menial task would give her an excuse not to share her bed with Ion.
* * *
STANDING BY THE DOOR to the back office, Jim looked around the work area and mentally patted himself on the back. Yesterday this area sat empty except for a few stray pieces of furniture. After a dozen phone calls and a trip to Best Buy and Home Depot, and a shopping spree at a gun store in northern Virginia, he had stocked the room with almost everything he would need. An ammunition reloading press. A woodworking lathe. A miter saw. A table saw.
Now he needed a warm meal, a hot shower, and good night’s sleep.
Jim entered the small bathroom off of the office. He turned on the shower and set the faucet to hot, and while the water heated he stripped out of his clothes. His gaze fell upon his reflection in the mirror. In particular, the mottled red scar tissue across his right shoulder and chest. His hand involuntarily came up to touch the dead skin, reco
iling at the leathery texture. Revulsion welled up inside of him. Not from the scar, but from the circumstances surrounding how he obtained it. It served as a constant reminder of what he had been. Or more accurately, what he had become.
Jim disrobed and stepped into the shower. He adjusted the nozzle to pulsate mode, then increased the flow. The pulsating stream from the showerhead pounded into his skin, soothing tired muscles. He slowly rotated his shoulders from side to side, letting the jets massage his back. It felt good against his skin, except for the disfigured tissue. How could a lack of sensation carry so much emotion? He had hoped to wash away the memories, but the events that led up to this were as deeply etched in his memories as the scars on his body.
Orphaned at the age of ten by a drunk driver, and with no other family who could—or wanted—to take care of him, Jim had wound up in a foster home in New London, Connecticut. His foster parents were kind enough, and were far from abusive or neglectful, but the entire clan could have been the poster family for dysfunctional. Being a lawyer, his foster father worked sixteen hours a day seven days a week, and rarely came home. His foster mother, however, doted on Jim. Smothered would have been a more appropriate word. She craved the attention because her biological son, David, was spoiled and self-centered. A nearly perfect GPA. Captain of the hockey team. Acceptance to Harvard Law School. And an engagement to the most beautiful and popular girl at school. David had it all. Even worse, he felt entitled to it. David treated his mother like one of the servants, and because of that she focused her attention on Jim. At first Jim had not minded, for the attention partially filled the emotional void left by the loss of his own parents.
David took issue with this. Despite treating his mother like dirt, his selfish streak would not allow him to share her affections. David grew resentful of Jim, and as a result began bullying him. It began as minor stuff. Name calling. Stealing things from his room. An occasional punch in the arm. Egged on by his friends, David’s behavior soon escalated into full fledged harassment until, before long, half the hockey team hunted down Jim in the halls. On one occasion, a few of David’s friends beat him up in shop class. Jim refused to rat them out, and for a while David treated him decently. Jim had hoped that the bullying had finally come to an end, and that David had realized he had gone too far and had backed off.
The Vampire Hunters: Book I of The Vampire Hunters Trilogy Page 7
