Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (46 page)

“I told you to stay back,” Lynn said. “You
don’t understand just what kind of gift you have. You don’t deserve
it. I swear that if I shoot you it will be for your own good.”

Every ounce of his being told him to run.
There was nothing he could accomplish here, and at this range there
was no chance of her missing him. And the bullet would not end up
in his side this time or anywhere else that he might be able to
move it. She would go for his heart or a head shot and hit her
target dead on.

The voice of Gramma might have disappeared,
but he had a good idea what she would have said about turning his
back and leaving this unfinished.

There were only two steps up to the altar.
Cory took the first one.

Lynn cocked the hammer. “I mean it. Don’t be
selfish and make me do this to you.”

Cory allowed his eyes to flicker up just
enough to catch what might have been movement near the ceiling.
Wait
, he thought.
I don’t know if you can hear me but
wait just a second longer. I need to do this
.

He took the next step. Cory was close enough
now to see the way her hands shook as she held the gun. Had her
hands shaken for anyone else she had killed, or was this unique to
him? He decided it didn’t matter. None of this was about her
emotions anymore. This was all about him.

Cory placed his hand on the altar, the barrel
of the gun only inches away from his forehead. In his mind he took
the handle of that misshapen door at the end of the cave and opened
it.

And all he saw on the other side was this
woman, sad, lonely, unbalanced. She was not a monster any more than
he was. She was just desperate and pathetic.

Now
, he thought.

It dropped from its impossible hiding place
somewhere along the ceiling with a sound like wings whipping in the
wind even though Vlad possessed no such thing. As it landed behind
her Lynn spun around with her inhuman vampire speed and tried to
shoot it.

It was so much faster.

It grabbed her arm before it could come all
the way around, and moments before the gun went off and shot a
bullet straight through the nearest stained glass window Cory heard
a crack as the bones in her arm snapped. Her scream was blocked out
by the tinkle of shattered glass as the window broke and showered
all three of them in Technicolor shards. The streetlights from
outside shone through more clearly now, finally giving Cory a clear
view of Vlad the Mystery.

Cory had been sure it would be a vampire. In
fact, from the rows of razor teeth he guessed that it still was
after a fashion. But it took him a moment to realize that those
teeth were in more than one place. He found one mouth right where
he would have expected it to be. Then there was the second mouth.
And the third mouth.

Lynn saw it all at the same time as Cory,
except where he was speechless Lynn let loose a long piercing
scream. Vlad didn’t seem to mind. Two of the three mouths actually
smiled.

Three mouths, three noses, three sets of
eyes. One set was more or less where it should have been on the
head. Halfway down its cheek though was the second set of eyes,
with the second mouth in a lopsided place in its throat. The third
of both was on its exposed stomach next to what might have once
been a fourth face. The last one was more of an impression rather
than anything that worked, but Cory thought that face looked
remarkably similar to the Duster they had left back in the alley.
One side of its chest looked like it belonged to a male while the
other had the proportions of a woman. Under the long dark coat it
wore Cory saw at least three extra arms, one just as strong and
muscular as the ones that should have been there while the other
two were atrophied and malformed. An extra foot, with claws
nonetheless, stuck out from one leg of its ragged pants.

It looked, Cory realized, like a combination
of people that had been mashed together, a mad sculptor’s poor and
disturbed attempt at mimicking the human form.

A combination
, he thought again.
A
mish-mash
. Just like Pig had described the thing behind the
door. Only Cory had the impression that the combination wasn’t even
close to the same thing as the creature standing before him right
now.

Vlad turned to Cory and raised several right
eyebrows as though silently asking him a question. Although Cory
didn’t hear anything in his head like telepathy he instinctively
understood what Vlad wanted to know. At first he thought that he
couldn’t possibly tell Vlad yes. That was too horrible a fate even
for Lynn. Then Cory remembered life in the cage and how Lynn had
been about to commit that same crime upon others. He remembered
what life she had been about to give herself even, a life that
wouldn’t have been much worse than this.

Most of all he remembered the look on that
girl’s face downstairs. Then he imagined what he himself had looked
like in that same situation once upon a time.

Cory nodded, then he turned away. As much as
he knew he should, he just couldn’t make himself watch.

Instead he listened. The crack of her arm
breaking had been nothing compared to the sounds her other bones
made. Cory thought at first that the sound was Lynn trying
desperately again to shoot it, but these noises were even louder
than gunshots. Every bone in her body snapped and shattered, and
underneath it all there was a sound like something thick and wet
oozing around, an organic noise like a hungry dog licking up raw
ground meat.

Through it all she screamed. High pitched,
absolutely full of terror for her mortal soul, if she could be said
to have one. That was the sound that was too much, and Cory tried
to remember the moans and cries in the darkness of the cave.
This is a fair trade
, he tried to tell himself.
It is. I
have to believe it if I ever hope to live with it
.

It would just have to be one more horror that
came to him in the night when he couldn’t sleep. He had so many of
those already. He thought he would be able to accept at least this
one more.

The screaming cut off all at once, but Cory
waited for the other noises to subside before he made himself turn
around again. Vlad had mercifully pulled the coat back around
itself, although it seemed to be even less able to contain its bulk
than before. There was movement below the coat, though, as though
whatever had happened was still going on beneath.

Something bulged out of Vlad’s side like a
hand trying for one last desperate grasp at the outside world. Then
it receded and the movement stopped.

It’s going to take me now as well
,
Cory thought. Rather than filling him with horror the thought
turned into an odd sort of resignation. All that he had gone
through and survived would be for nothing. He didn’t want to share
Lynn’s fate. He finally thought he had something to live for, a
general direction to his life that would be more meaningful than
hiding in dumpsters and scavenging rats from the gutters. He had
friends that could help him. He could accept what had happened to
him perhaps and learn to live. But he had just witnessed what Vlad
could do. There would be no stopping it if it decided Cory should
join Lynn.

It felt like they stood there staring at each
other for a long time. Vlad’s grotesque upper face showed no
emotion other than curiosity.

Then it was gone. Like so many of Vlad’s
other movements Cory could only barely see it as it went out the
shattered window and into the night. Cory had no way to be sure but
he had the suspicion that the murders throughout the city would
stop now.

He turned and went back down the aisle,
heading for the basement, heading for FancyDancer and the victims
that he could still help, heading for a life that he was anxious to
start living.

We do not
leave that night as we had originally planned. We have seen just
enough interesting things that we want to have an idea of the
course they will take in the future, and therefore we watch the
trio for three more nights.

They send those who would have been the
gardener’s new seeds back where they came from. The boy especially
takes interest in their well-being and goes around for the first
two nights to check on them. The boy is a fascinating one and we
don’t think he realizes it. He has potential to be many things. He
can be just another fruit that has grown wild. He can yet become
one of the gardener’s tools. And he can become a gardener himself
right along with the other two.

For that is the part we don’t think any of
them realize yet. They are not finished growing—things like our
kind never are. The gardener may have a definition of ripe that it
uses for its own needs, but that is so limited. It is as this point
that the entire gardening metaphor no longer properly fits. A
better metaphor would be that of insects. These three are larval
creatures. At some point they will transform and grow their wings
and become something else entirely.

They could become a gardener.

They could become like us and many of the
others that are out there roaming the world.

They could become something completely
different and unpredictable.

For now though we are comfortable leaving
them alone. We will move on and find other sights. One day we think
we will come back to this odd little city at the foot of the lake
and look in on them, see what they are becoming. The gardener will
still be around, we are sure. It might try to prune its plants
grown wild again, or it might try something else. It might leave
them alone. But I don’t think this group will need us anymore to
prevent any of that. They will do it on their own.

One last time we take to the night air over
Fond du Lac. We head east then, off to see whatever we may see.

D.J. Goodman is the pen name of Kelly
Goodman, a transgender writer living in Wisconsin. In addition to
the Blood Harvest Series, she is also the author of the
Z7
series,
The One-Stop Apocalypse Shop
series, and
Red
Carbon
.