Bloodrush (5 page)

Oops
.

Mind reader. Right. He was really going to have to stay cognizant of that. “Um…”

She shook her head. “Never mind that now. You were saying how it bothers you that you keep thinking of the cunt you’d been wasting your time with.”

“Well…I don’t think I phrased it quite that way, but…yeah.”

She was staring at him very intently now. It was hard not to squirm under the power of that gaze. It took every shred of nerve he possessed not to look away. “There is a solution to this problem.”

The Timberlands were a more acceptable fit. Still loose around the toes, but better. He stood up. “And what would that be?”

She smiled. “We cut out the problem at its root. We go see this cunt and…” The smile broadened. “We tear her to pieces and drink her blood together.”

“I see.”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“I…” David fidgeted, shifted his weight from one leg to another. She would know if he lied. That was the problem. He sighed. “I honestly don’t know.”

Narcisa moved a few steps closer to him. “This does not make me happy, David. You may require further discipline. Would you care to spend more time in chains?”

He was trembling now. As much as the thought of killing Janine troubled him—and he was surprised to discover it troubled him immensely—the thought of being deprived of blood again bothered him more. “No. I’ll do whatever you say. Whatever’s…necessary. I trust you. If you think this is how I’ll get past this problem, then that’s what we’ll do.”

She laughed. “Of course we’ll kill her, David. I wasn’t seeking your approval. Killing the cunt has been on the agenda from the beginning. Of course, I could’ve done it already, but it’s important to me that we kill her together. It’s the only way we can bond in the way I want. And it’s the only way I could come to truly trust you.”

David nodded. “I understand.”

The fucked up thing was that he did understand.

Completely.

8: OLD TIMES THERE ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

On the freeway now, heading into the suburbs of Atlanta. It was past midnight and the traffic heading out of the city wasn’t too heavy. Narcisa sat behind the wheel of the BMW Z4 convertible, one hand on the wheel with the stiff wind blowing her midnight-black hair straight back. The car belonged to the blonde woman they had killed. The blonde woman
he
had killed, David reminded himself. That one was solely on him. It was still hard to think of himself that way. As a killer. But the oddness of it didn’t make it any less true. He’d spent a few moments riffling through the dead woman’s purse prior to their departure from the house. Her name had been Anna Cooper. According to her Georgia driver’s license, she’d been barely twenty six years old at the time of her death, having had a birthday just a week earlier.

Her license photo showed a young woman with a radiant smile. A winning smile. He’d never seen anyone look so good in their driver’s license photo. It was almost kind of nauseating. Not enough so to confirm her as deserving of a horrible death, of course, but it did make him feel somewhat better about it, albeit in a really twisted way.

“Humans don’t deserve your sympathy.”

David flinched. He’d been lost in his own thoughts, but now he glanced over at Narcisa. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes locked on the road.

“It’s not sympathy. Not exactly.”

“Oh?”

He shrugged. “What do you expect? I’m new to this whole killing thing.” He recalled the sense of sick exhilaration he’d felt as he’d played with the dying woman’s broken wrist. “It’s definitely not sympathy, at least not more than a mild echo of it. I enjoyed killing her. I can’t deny that. And yet there’s this nagging little trace of a conscience now and then. It’s that remnant of humanity that makes me curious, that makes me need to understand what I’ve taken out of the world.”

Narcisa’s head inclined slightly forward, a noncommittal half-nod. “I vaguely recall similar feelings when I was turned, but that’s been so long ago now.”

He stared at her for a long, silent moment, “So…how long ago, exactly, was that?”

“Too long ago to make sense to you, David. So long ago we are almost literally from different worlds.”

David frowned. “Then why—”

She eased the BMW into the right lane and hit the blinker switch. David glanced to his right and saw a green exit sign looming just ahead.

“Um…what are we doing?”

“Stopping. Obviously.”

He watched the green exit sign whiz by, his brow furrowing as the BMW’s speed began to decrease. “Reason?”

She smiled without looking at him. “There’s an all-night diner near here. Quaint little place. I…” She chuckled. “…dined there some time ago.”

The car slowed some more, leaving the highway as its tires kissed the exit ramp, a gray loop that curled around behind a stand of tall trees. David saw bright neon through the trees. The diner, he assumed. “When you say you ‘dined’ there…”

“I slaughtered a half-dozen so-called innocents. This was before your time, back in the 1970s. I haven’t been back since.”

“And you’re returning now…why?”

She smiled and shrugged. “Nostalgia. A wistful desire to revisit the site of fond memories. We’re in a little suburb called Alpharetta. Unimaginative press types dubbed my previous visit here ‘The Alpharetta Diner Massacre’.”

David grunted. “I suppose you’re planning a belated encore performance.”

“Of course.”

“How many people are we gonna kill tonight?”

“Many. Very, very many.” She glanced at him. “Does that trouble you?”

“Killing doesn’t trouble me. Possibly getting caught does. Surely we’ve each had enough blood tonight to last us a while. Doesn’t it make sense to strike fast one time, like we did back there at that house, then lie low for a while?”

A broad smile spread across Narcisa’s face as she tossed her head back and laughed without any of her usual reservation. Then she looked at David, a big smile still stretched across her face (though he noticed there was no hint of mirth in her pitiless eyes). “You’re still thinking like a human. Getting caught isn’t a concern.” She reached out and touched his face, her fingertips tracking a cool path along his jawline. “New vampires are so adorable.”

David frowned. “Do you make new ones often?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘often’. I am surpassingly old. I last turned a human a decade ago. She was a disaster. An unruly, rebellious, insolent child.”

“What happened to her?”

“I destroyed her.”

David drew in a slow, shuddery breath and carefully released it. “Oh. I see.”

The BMW pulled into the diner’s mostly empty lot. Narcisa parked the car behind a big Ford F-150. She turned the engine off, twirled the keyring around a finger, and patted him once on the cheek. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re nothing like her. You’re far more mature, for one thing. That’s why I watched you for so long before drawing you in. I needed to be certain you were the one for me.”

David felt uncomfortable again. He shifted in his seat, stealing quick glances at the brightly lit diner as he fidgeted beneath Narcisa’s steady gaze. “How did you…”

“Choose you?”

“Yeah.”

“Fate. You caught my eye one day several months ago while I was out people-hunting in the same mall where you were shopping for the cunt’s engagement ring. That day you were engaged in something marginally more sensible.”

David frowned and scratched his chin. “I was?”

She nodded. “You purchased a large television from an electronics store.”

“Huh. Funny. I remember having the strangest feeling that day, as if someone was watching me. I kept looking around, trying to figure out who it was eyeballing me.” He laughed once, a humorless sound. “I chalked it up to paranoia. I guess I should’ve trusted my instincts.”

Narcisa shrugged. “Sometimes they really are out to get you, as the saying goes. The people I track only see me if I wish them to. That day I elected to stay invisible. So I could study you. And that’s what I did, David. I followed you everywhere. Saw how you lived your life. Came to know all the things you cared about. By the time I decided to draw you in, I knew you inside and out. And I liked what I’d discovered. I knew I had to have you, had to make you mine. Forever.”

Hearing all this was more than a little creepy. It wasn’t every day you learned that a mysterious supernatural creature had been stalking you for the better part of a year. He supposed it didn’t matter much anymore. She’d drawn him in, as she put it. She had turned him. It was done and there was no going back. It was best to just accept it and let her show him the way from this moment forward.

After all, he didn’t want to wind up like that “insolent child.”

She patted him on the cheek again. “Smart boy.”

This time David didn’t even cringe. The thoughts she’d read would reassure her that she’d made a good choice. And that felt really, really important at the moment. Right now he was her prized new pet, but she had him on a short leash. He sensed it wouldn’t take too many mistakes to cause her to reassess her choice.

So don’t make any mistakes, motherfucker
.

And yet…

There was one more thing he had to know. “You remember at the mall, when you told me it was my choice, whether to go with you or not?”

Her eyes glittered with amusement. “Yes.”

He forced himself to say it. “That was a lie. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Well, that pretty much said it all. It was what he’d suspected. And given the circumstances, pursuing it was less than useless.

She elaborated a bit anyway. “It’s fun to play with helpless things.”

“Okay.”

“You learned that for yourself tonight, didn’t you?”

He grimaced. “Right. Yeah. I guess I did.”

“Good. Now then—let’s eat.”

They got out of the car and started across the parking lot toward the bright lights of the diner. It was a cool night, a fact emphasized by the stiff breeze that roughly brushed his face before shifting direction. He shivered and noted a chill was beginning to prickle his flesh again. It was disconcerting to realize how short-lived the warmth provided by draining out a human body was. Narcisa was “surpassingly” old. It was little wonder her secret place doubled as a mass grave that could rival any other in history.

Thinking of that wretched place prompted another question. “Why are we driving anywhere? Couldn’t you just magic us to wherever we need to be?”

“I find driving soothing. I like the feel of the wind in my face. And I like the throb of the engine vibrating through my body. I like the sound of tires on the open highway. It’s all so very…mmm…
sexy
. Few things are more sensually satisfying than driving a finely tuned automobile.”

David said, “Huh.”

A doorbell jingled as Narcisa banged through the diner’s front entrance. Heads turned at the counter as they came strutting inside. Well, Narcisa strutted. David followed stiffly in her wake, his eyes darting in every direction, his nerves buzzing even though he knew there was virtually no chance anyone here could harm him. On the plus side, there weren’t many people in the diner at this hour. A pudgy, gray-haired woman sat on a stool behind the counter near the cash register. She was reading a paperback romance novel and didn’t look up as they entered. David guessed she was in her fifties. A younger man dressed in white was visible in the open kitchen area behind the counter. The cook, presumably. A skinny Mexican janitor moved a wet mop in slow circles over the tiled floor at the far end of the dining space. A waitress in a short skirt was bussing tables as they came in, loading dishes onto a black tray. The waitress was a slender woman with tired, red-rimmed eyes and the kind of blonde hair that came from a bottle, age probably just a shade south of forty. The only customers present were the three at the counter, all of whom were grossly overweight. Their massive bottoms overlapped both sides of the stools upon which they were sitting. Their bulging bodies strained the cheap Wal-Mart clothes they wore. Two were jowly, red-faced men, and the other was perhaps the single least attractive woman David had ever had the displeasure of setting eyes on. It was obvious the trio were all related somehow.

He couldn’t suppress a smirk.

The family that dines together, dies together
.

The gray-haired woman behind the register glanced up from the romance paperback as they approached the counter. She squinted at Narcisa for a moment, then her eyes went wide with shock. She dropped the book and hopped off the stool, instinct propelling her backward until her back met the partition separating the counter area from the kitchen. The stool toppled over and struck the floor with a clatter.

Narcisa beamed at the terrified woman. “Well, hello. We meet again. Long time, no see.”

The woman opened her mouth wide and screamed with everything she had.

David cringed.

Murder and the joys of sadism were things he’d come to appreciate, but all the screaming that went along with those simple pleasures was a thing he could see tiring of in a hurry.

Narcisa glanced at him. “I didn’t kill them all that night back in the ’70s. This caterwauling hag was barely out of her teens then. Back then she was a hard-working young waitress. But now, apparently, she’s paid her dues and gets to sit on her fat ass all night. It warms the heart to know she made the most out of the second chance I gave her back then. And all she had to do to earn that chance was slit her manager’s throat.” She smiled at the gray-haired woman again. “I suppose you left that part out of your account of the incident to the police, eh?”

The woman screamed throughout this speech.

David glanced around, becoming decidedly nervous again. Everyone in the place was watching them warily now, eyes shaded with confusion and heaping helpings of mistrust. One of the obese trio, the woman, shoved another thick strip of bacon into her mouth as she watched them. David had a sudden urge to seize her and fill her throat with every scrap of food in the place, just keep shoving it all in until she choked on it.

The waitress shot glares at each of them as she hurried to the counter and tried to engage the screaming woman. “Martha! Martha! What’s wrong? Who are these people?”

Martha pointed a shaky finger at Narcisa. “It’s her. The murdering bitch who killed all my friends in the ’70s.”

The waitress’s eyes narrowed with obvious skepticism as she appraised Narcisa again. “Martha…this girl’s barely more than twenty. She can’t be the—”

Martha resumed her screeching: “
IT’S HER!
”

The two fat men at the counter glanced at each other. One of them wiped grease from his fingers with a well-soiled napkin and said, “Somethin’ funny’s happening here.”

The other one answered, “Uh huh.”

David guessed the trio’s combined IQ
might
just reach the triple digits.

The waitress managed a strained smile as she addressed Narcisa. “Ma’am, maybe you and your friend should just go. Martha’s overworked and tired and needs to calm down. We’re awfully sorry for the inconvenience.”

Narcisa giggled. “Oh no, we’re not leaving. You see, she’s one-hundred percent right. I killed Martha’s friends way back when, with a little assistance from her, and now I’m back to further reduce the moron population.”

The cook emerged from behind the partition. He clutched a large caliber revolver in a meaty hand. “Get out before I call the police.”

Narcisa rolled her eyes. She leapt cat-like onto the counter, then dropped down on the floor behind it. This happened faster than anyone could blink. She pried the pistol from the cook’s big hand, pointed the barrel at his face, and squeezed the trigger.

BAM!

The bullet blew a big hole through the center of the man’s face and a bigger one out the back of his head. A spray of blood and bone fragments sailed over the partition and splashed on the sizzling oven on the other side. His big body dropped like a rock, toppling backward against a sink and knocking over stacks of just-cleaned glasses, which rolled off and shattered on the floor. Suddenly everything was chaos and noise. The Mexican janitor dropped his mop and made a run for the door. David intercepted him before he could get there. The man fought hard at first, landing a solid, hammering punch to the side of David’s head that would have turned his lights out if he’d still been human. But David the vampire was unfazed. He grabbed the man’s wrist and spun him around. The man continued to struggle as David drove him down to the floor. He took the feisty janitor out of the equation by breaking his legs. The loud snapping of bones was very satisfying. He then left the broken man squalling on the floor to deal with the waitress, who was the next to try for the door.