Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (28 page)

And yet. There was no logical reason behind
his thinking. He had no evidence that there was any danger. But his
brain had been forcibly rewired from life in that cage. There was
always danger.
Everything
was danger. He knew he was in a
bad place. Pig had practically confirmed it with his parting
words.

He kept watching. He kept listening. There
were noises somewhere. Maybe people. He kept his back against the
wall and his body crouched so low that his knees were tight against
his chest.

This is stupid
, he thought to himself.
Just go. Run if you have to. No one can touch you that way, if
you’re really concerned
.

But he didn’t. And that was when he started
to hear whispers.

For all the other abilities that came with
his subhuman state, he sometimes thought super senses should have
come with the package, but they didn’t. His eyesight might have
been ever so slightly better in the dark (and conversely worse off
in too much light), but he still had the same level of hearing that
he always had. He strained to listen to what the voices were
saying, but they were so faint that at first he wondered if they
were just an auditory hallucination, another phantom sensation that
he couldn’t trust. But after several more seconds he decided they
really were there, and they were moving closer. Then they stopped
as though they had never been there at all. Once again he was alone
with nothing more than the hush of drizzling rain in the night.

Come on, stand up
, he thought.
No
more time to stay here. Something horrible is coming. It will show
up just down the path any second now
.

Then he clearly heard the footsteps. Just a
few of them, not moving very far. They’d gone a distance of maybe a
couple feet.

No joking this time. Time to go
.

He was in the process of standing up when the
gunshot went off. As fast as he was, even he couldn’t completely
and totally defy the laws of physics by outrunning a bullet. He
felt something slam into him from his right side, the direction of
the back of the pizza place. He would have darted out of the narrow
alley if he hadn’t been so surprised and suddenly off balance. He
tripped and fell just as he felt the intense burning in his side.
The sound of the shot still echoed as he hit the ground. Cory knew
he should have just been able to pick himself up and go but for
once he was the one moving slow while it seemed all of time around
him had inexplicably sped up. He knew that something, other than
the wound suddenly seeping in his side, was not as it should be but
events moved too quickly for his already muddled thoughts to keep
up.

“Got him!” someone screamed. Despite the
volume the person sounded like he might be some distance away. “I
got that fucking son of a bitch.”

“Oh shit,” someone else said. “Are you sure?
Are you sure that was one of them?”

“Does it really fucking matter?”

“Of course it matters! We can’t just go
around shooting everyday people right now.”

The voices sounded like they were coming
closer. Cory could tell that they were both male, and from the
pitch of their voices he guessed that they were both young, likely
somewhere in their late teens. He tried to stand up and again run
for it, but the full brunt of the pain in his side hit him and he
had to fight not to scream. They were coming his way and he knew he
had to be gone before they got here, but something was preventing
him from doing what he knew his body should do.

“He’s skulking around in a dark alley at
night. Of course he’s one of them. Who else would do that?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, us.”

“Huh. Whatever. Just fuck off. Let’s go
finish him.”

Cory concentrated on the pain, trying to get
his body to work around it and just run. He’d never in his entire
life been shot before, but on some strange level this pain felt
familiar. It wasn’t just the intense and brain-numbing sting of
something inside his body that shouldn’t be. It was a burning. He
even thought he could just barely smell smoking flesh, like it
wasn’t a bullet inside but the end of a red hot poker.

That was a pain he knew. Up until a year ago
he’d felt it on a daily basis every time he had moved too close to
the sides of his cage and accidentally touched the bars. The bullet
was either silver or had been coated in garlic. Cory honestly
didn’t know if there was a difference in the pain from the two
things because he had never felt them separately.

But the one thing he did know was that
everyday ordinary people didn’t just go walking around at night
with silver and garlic bullets. Someone would only do that if they
were specifically expecting vampires.

Theoretically he could turn on his two
attackers and kill them before they could do anything else to him.
They might still try to shoot, but despite the bullet keeping him
from his full strength and speed he thought he could take them.
That wasn’t his first instinct, though. He’d never been a
particularly strong person (or at least he thought he hadn’t) and
he was on the smaller side of the human size spectrum. His natural
inclination to anything was to run, especially since he had no
desire whatsoever to hurt anyone, even an attacker. And despite his
superior strength and speed, he was still afraid. That was his
default emotion. He literally couldn’t remember the last time he
hadn’t been afraid. It was probably some time before he’d been
forced into his current state.

So running felt like the only logical option
in a mind that didn’t do logical very well at all.

He managed to get to his feet, although the
intense burning inside him threatened to drop him back to the
ground. Cory stumbled a couple steps to the front of the building,
testing his own ability to walk before he could even try
running.

“Shit, he’s getting up.”

“Wait, don’t put another in him.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Didn’t you listen to orders? We need one
alive this time.”

Although Cory heard everything they said he
didn’t stop and take the time to consider the meaning of their
words. He took a deep breath and ran, but he only got a couple feet
before his muscles gave out on him and he tumbled. The speed with
which he’d been trying to move sent him shooting right out into the
street. He hit the pavement expecting a car to run him over any
second, but at this time of night the roads were mostly empty. He
could see headlights much farther down on Main Street and coming
toward him, but he would be able to get across the street and onto
the sidewalk before the car would even come close. Briefly he
wondered if he even
wanted
to get out of the car’s way. Fond
du Lac wasn’t the kind of place where gunfire could just go off and
no one would have noticed or cared. Someone would have heard it.
Even if people stayed inside to keep out of the way of whatever was
happening, the cops would have been called. These two guys wouldn’t
dare come after him in the open. All Cory needed was to wait where
others could find him. If he stayed in the open and forced the car
to stop then there would have been someone else as a witness.

Of course, that whole line of thought went
against everything his ragged instincts told him. The open was
dangerous. The open was where unwelcome forces could find him. And
he most certainly didn’t want to wait for the police to find him.
They would take one look at his teeth and instantly think of Vlad
the Mystery.

Cory got to his feet long enough to try
running again. He managed to take maybe one more step this time
before faceplanting into the lawn of a house across the street. The
bullet inside jabbed at his guts with every movement and he had to
force himself not to scream. It was like the devil’s sharp-nailed
finger was slipped inside and probing around looking for something
interesting to pull out. He was able to concentrate just enough to
realize that if he really wanted to get out of here before his
attackers got him he would need the bullet out.

He put his fingers on the wound, thinking
maybe he could dig in and pull it out easily like in the movies.
The bullet never seemed to be that far in, usually requiring little
more than a large pair of tweezers or something, but as soon as he
touched the bullet hole the pain increased to screaming intensity.
He may have been a vampire with all the increased strength, speed
and immortality, but he still had a normal human’s relationship
with pain. Trying to pry out the bullet by itself just wasn’t going
to happen.

The car went by in the street, not even
slowing down as it passed him. Whoever was driving either hadn’t
seen him in the road moments earlier or truly didn’t care. None of
the doors on the houses in front of him were opening up to see what
the fuss was about either. Cory was alone.

He looked back at the pizza place and saw the
two attackers just at the edge of the shadows, hiding beyond the
reach of the streetlights. One was taller while the other was short
and heavyset, but beyond that Cory couldn’t see many details. He
did clearly see the silhouette of the gun in the taller one’s hand,
though. They could have just come out into the open, considering
the street’s current emptiness, but they both appeared to hesitate.
If ever there was a chance for Cory to get away, this was it.

“Over here!” someone said. Cory was so
startled he physically jumped as he was trying to stand up again, a
sudden movement that resulted in him nearly tipping over. He turned
to the sound of the voice and saw someone on the lawn between two
of the houses. She, just like the two guys across the street, was
far enough from the street lights that most of her features were
hidden in shadows, but there was no doubt at least that she was a
woman. She was about his height with long light hair, and although
she wore a shapeless coat against the rain he could still see that
she had a trim figure.

Cory’s initial reaction was to run back the
way he had come. After all, his previous encounter with someone out
here in the middle of the night hadn’t been pleasant. His first
thoughts were that she was with the other two, although she didn’t
appear to be armed. But she was crouched in such a way that she
didn’t look like she wanted to be seen by the two across the
street, if she herself could see them at all.

He looked back again. The two attackers
looked like they were in a heated but quiet argument. The one with
the gun was waving it wildly in Cory’s direction. Cory had no idea
if the guy would be able to hit him from all the way across the
street, but Cory really didn’t want to stick around long enough to
test his marksmanship.

“Over here,” the woman said again. “Hurry,
before they see me.”

Following the orders of a stranger went
against every survival instinct Cory had. But when faced with the
dueling desperate need to get away from the two men with the gun,
going to the woman was the stronger compulsion.

He moved across the lawn as quickly as he
could, which unfortunately was slower and slower by the second. It
occurred to him that the gunshot wound could very well be fatal,
even to him. Everything he knew about his kind, which was
unfortunately very little (and much of it had come from the
somewhat unreliable source that was Pig), suggested that he hadn’t
been a vampire anywhere near long enough to be truly immortal.
However, he had no idea just what exactly it would take to kill
him. Maybe a normal gunshot to the stomach still would have been
enough even on its own. One that was intentionally laced with
things that were practically poison to him was even more likely to
do him in. And he had no idea what the long-term effects might be.
This damage to his speed and strength could be permanent even if he
survived, for all he knew. He was surprisingly okay with most of
that. What he wasn’t okay with was the idea of being in this
terrible pain all the way up to his end. He’d had pain enough in
what little of his life he could remember.

The woman grabbed him by the shoulder and
pulled him toward the back of the house. Even in his weakened state
he tried to shrug her touch off, but either the move was so slight
that she didn’t feel it or else she didn’t care. Cory heard shouts
from across the street as his attackers realized that he’d
disappeared, but the noises didn’t sound like they were getting
closer. They might have been bold enough to consider shooting him
in the middle of the street, but it didn’t seem like they were
willing to follow their ambitions all the way in some family’s back
yard. Even so, Cory and the woman kept moving, running from one
yard to the next. He noticed the way she kept them both far away
from any possible source of stray light. He apparently was not the
only one well-versed in hiding.

He stumbled again and fell to his knees after
about the third yard, and the woman had no choice but to stop and
take a look at him. “Oh shit,” she said. “You’re bleeding. Did they
actually shoot you?”

He didn’t answer—the massive red pool
staining his ragged shirt was answer enough for her.

She laid him down in a patch of grass under a
tree where the rain hadn’t quite soaked the ground yet. There was
still a grimy patch of snow nearby, and some of the blood seeped
close enough to turn some of it dirty pink. She pulled away the
edge of his coat to get a closer look at the wound, but she didn’t
look too certain about what to do about it.

Although there was still practically no light
to see by Cory was finally close enough to get a good look at her.
She would have been petite by normal standards, but considering
Cory’s own stunted height she wasn’t short by much. Her hair was
the sort of strikingly pale blond that he didn’t even need light to
tell the color, and it hung in her pinched, worried face. The way
it clumped together Cory thought she hadn’t washed it in some time,
making him wonder at first if she was just as homeless as him, but
her clothing seemed to deny that. Although she didn’t wear anything
fancy and everything was strangely inappropriate for the current
weather— she wore a jacket decidedly too light for the current
temperature and a thin, tight shirt that showed through just enough
for Cory to realize she wasn’t wearing a bra—her clothes were at
least clean. Cory wanted to ask who she was and why she was
sneaking around in yards that obviously weren’t hers, but when he
tried to open his mouth all he could manage was a pained moan.