H.T. Night's 8-Book Vampire Box Set (132 page)

“Play with people your own age,” I whispered
in his ear.

I pushed him away and swept the whip around
the senator’s ankles as he tried to run, yanking so that he
sprawled face first, his fat belly making a slapping sound as it
hit the concrete.

“Look out!” one of the girls yelled, but she
could have saved herself the trouble. Because I sensed the third
person, a tall black guy sporting kinky sports attire emerging from
the shadows, a baseball bat raised over his head. Hell of a
prop.

I dodged his swing, but he was fast and
clipped my knee with the wooden tip. “I hate vampires,” he said,
swinging and smashing the bat on the floor so hard that it
shattered.

He held up the splintered end, dancing
around in just his jock strap and those funny leggings ballplayers
wear. He poked it at me a couple of times, but I skipped away,
saving my best moves and letting him gain confidence.

The girls were whispering and squealing a
little, but they were not seriously freaking out yet. They were
probably drugged like Lilith, flying on Erasmus Cole’s Cloudland
Kool-Aid.

“Run,” I yelled at them, waving toward the
door.

“But....” one of them said, and I glanced at
her. She was cute and blonde, the Cloudland prototype, barely
sixteen if that.

“But what?” I said, turning my full
attention back to the menacing wooden stake.

“You’re a vampire,” she finished, and I
realized my fangs were still protruding, aroused by the scant taste
of blood.

And I realized what I was really afraid of:
that I wasn’t that much different from these perverse human
predators, and if the girls were around when my hunger kicked in,
I’d have no problem ripping open their pretty, tender throats and
draining them dry.

When you got right down to it, I was no
better than Erasmus Cole. And that realization pissed me off even
more.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, turning an
awkward backflip as the ballplayer jabbed at me. I landed on my
feet, curled my fingers as if they were claws, and gave the girls
my best Bela Lugosi. “And if you don’t get out right this second,
I’m draining you all right after this joker strikes out.”

That got them moving, and I heard their bare
feet slapping up the stairs as the sicko Babe Ruth and I got down
to business.

“So, you’re familiar with vampires,” I said
to the freaky ballplayer, getting into fighting stance.

“Sure,” he said, “this is Cloudland.”

Parker’s words came back to me: This ain’t
my first rodeo.

Behind me, the senator had recovered and was
crawling toward the stairs. I let him go. The actor, however, must
have confused his action scripts with reality, because he reached
down and picked up the fat end of the broken bat and thwacked it
against his open palm. Both actor and ballplayer faced me.

“I haven’t killed one of you in a long
time,” said the actor. He might have been more menacing if he
wasn’t wearing assless chaps. “Months, at least.”

“The demoness is going to love this,” the
ballplayer said.

They closed in, apparently used to stalking
my kind, and they stayed with me as I leapt away. The ceiling was
too low for serious acrobatics, but I clung above them long enough
for them to stab only air.

Then I dropped back down and grabbed their
heads, knocking their skulls together with a sound like castanets
clacking.

“Double play,” I said, as they dropped
unconscious at my feet. If I was going to hang around actors, I
might as well deliver a few lame one-liners.

Besides, “I got lucky” wasn’t appropriate to
the situation.

The temptation to stick a couple of holes in
their necks was too great. Besides, I reasoned, hadn’t they just
tried to kill me? Indeed they had, and in my world of already shaky
ethics, that made them fair game.

A moment later, after dropping to my knees
and pushing aside the actor’s mop of hair, I was drinking deeply
from his jugular vein.

God, was it good!

Blood rushed into my mouth and it was all I
could do to keep up with the furious flow.

Sated, I eased him back down to the floor. I
watched as the two puncture wounds in his neck closed
supernaturally. No, vampire wounds do not leave a mark; instead, we
leave our victims groggy and weak for days. It is one of the
reasons we have remained hidden for so long.

That is, of course, if we let them live at
all.

The pervert would live. For now, I had
bigger fish to fry.

Parker and Erasmus.

Chapter Twenty-one

Feeling stronger than I had in days—after
all, there’s nothing so revitalizing as fresh human blood—I made my
way back up the stairs and to the common room.

As I surveyed the quiet room—which was much
quieter than it had been just fifteen minutes earlier—I was all too
aware of the growing alarm sounding within me. Such alarms are
common for me. They help keep me alive. They help me recognize when
real danger is around. Danger that could possibly even kill me
again. Over the decades, I’ve come to pay attention to such
alarms.

But for the moment I was mostly alone in the
common room. So where had everyone gone? And why were my
spider-senses jangling off the hook?

Leave, I thought. Get the hell out of
here.

Sage advice. After all, I didn’t have a dog
in this fight. If I had any sense, I would listen to the warning
bells that sounded just inside my head. Parker, it seemed, wasn’t
who she claimed she was. And who was Lilith to me? Just another
lost soul in this screwed-up place, and with her genetics, she was
bad news anyway.

Maybe. But something wasn’t making sense.
The cult members down below hadn’t been surprised to see me. The
girls had been. But not the elite members.

The demoness would be pleased, he had said.
Pleased about what? Killing me?

Come to think of it, the bungling buffoons
hadn’t tried very hard to kill me. It was almost as if they had
been waiting for me. Waiting for me to do what? Kill them? Drink
from them? Perhaps it had all been designed to distract me.

Sure. Maybe. But that still didn’t account
for the fact that seeing a vampire in their midst was
commonplace.

There were, as far as I could tell, no other
vampires present. Vampires know other vampires. We sense them, feel
them. I hadn’t felt anything.

Only my own warning senses ringing loud and
clear, and they were practically begging me to get the hell out of
Dodge. Or the hell out of Cloudland.

But I didn’t leave. I continued standing
there like an immortal idiot, cudgeling my sluggish brain to make
sense of it all. My brain wasn’t normally sluggish. In fact, my
brain, especially after a feeding, was generally razor sharp.

What was happening to me? And where was
everyone?

I listened and soon picked up the sound of a
vacuum somewhere. I also heard talking from somewhere, too. I
turned. And at the far end of the hallway, I saw a small group of
young women exit through a side door.

If my sense of direction was right, they
were heading back to the open field and to the stone demon.

I sensed there would be a sacrifice in the
immediate future and, dog or no dog, I wasn’t going to let that
creepy bastard hurt his daughter.

And with that thought, I dashed back up the
four flights of stairs to her bedroom. Or cell. Or whatever it
really was. The door was open. I looked inside. Empty. The far
window was still open, and the curtains billowed in on a breeze. I
went to it and looked out.

Sure enough, the cultists were gathering
around the stone demon and there was Erasmus on the platform with
his daughter, Lilith.

I leaped from the window.

* * *

I landed hard. Too hard.

In fact, something popped painfully in my
knee. What the hell? I couldn’t remember the last time I had hurt
myself.

I frowned as I stood. I waited briefly for
my body to repair itself and it did...although not as fast as I
would have liked. And not as fast as I was accustomed to.

Something’s wrong with me.

With my knee mostly repaired, I set out,
moving quickly through the grassy slopes that led up to the
compound. I picked up speed, virtually flying over the grass.
Sometimes I can run so fast that it appears my feet don’t touch the
ground.

But not this time. This time I felt every
thudding footfall.

And, amazingly, I was running out of breath,
too—or at least what passed for breath in my undead condition.

At the edge of the clearing, hidden within a
copse of evergreens, I watched as young women filled the open
space. Most sat on their knees and stared ahead. Most were, I
assumed, drugged out of their freakin’ minds.

And there was Erasmus with Lilith, who sat
in a chair. Her arms hung limply at her sides. Her head lolled
forward, chin resting on her sternum.

I debated. The girl didn’t have much time.
Not to mention I didn’t have much time, either. I’ve seen some
weird shit in my time, but I’ve never seen an actual, honest-to-God
demon summoned.

I could leave. I could turn and run and get
the hell out of there. Whether or not a demon would really make an
appearance, I didn’t know. What the demon’s agenda was, I really
didn’t care. Whatever happened in Cloudland was none of my
business.

Run, and don’t look back.

Except I didn’t run. I continued standing
behind a tree, watching, debating, wondering what I should do.
Indecisive. Almost nervous.

And all the while I felt weaker and
weaker.

What the hell was going on?

I took in some air, kick-starting lungs that
I rarely used. Years ago, I had learned that I really didn’t need
to breathe. I did it for show, sometimes. To keep folks from asking
questions.

But I need to breathe now.

Yeah, something was very, very wrong.

It was now or never.

I took in some more air and dashed forward,
speeding through the tall grass and between sitting bodies.
Although I was not going anywhere near as fast as I could, I was
still pretty damn fast. Just a blur to those sitting there,
watching the scene before them.

Erasmus seemed to spy me. He had stepped
behind his daughter, holding something in his hand. His gaze, I was
certain, was locked onto me.

Interestingly, no security guards leaped to
his defense, and the closer I got, the more I realized I had
stepped into an elaborate trap.

No. Not stepped. Flew headlong.

Screw it. Weakened or not, I was taking
Lilith with me. At the very least, I would save her.

And as I bounded onto the raised dirt
platform, with the massive stone demon rising high into the shadows
behind Erasmus, Lilith looked up.

Only she wasn’t Lilith.

At least, not anymore.

It was Parker. And she was smiling
demonically.

Chapter Twenty-two

I haven’t been human in a very long
time.

But I can almost remember what it was like
to be slow, limited, and vulnerable. That’s how I felt now, and the
surge of energy that would have passed for adrenalin in a human was
fading fast.

And the shock of seeing that Parker had been
disguised as Lilith all along really made me feel like a
sucker.

Of course, I was a sucker, and despite
having just fed, I was a weak sucker.

“Where’s Lilith?” I said to them both.

The cultists gathered around made no move to
attack me. That also fueled my suspicions.

“I’m right here, Spider,” she said. “Didn’t
you wonder why you never saw both of us at the same time?”

My first question was “Why?” but there was
no reason to even ask. I couldn’t trust anything this woman—if
indeed she was even a female and a human—would say. She’d obviously
been lying to me ever since the night she’d followed me to my
car.

“The drained body...” I wobbled a little,
feeling woozy. The moon was bright against Mount Shasta, and the
whole scene had a foggy, magical feel to it.

Had they drugged me somehow? I’d avoided
their purple Kool-Aid, and I hadn’t taken anything that I—

Shit. The cult guy in the basement.

My expression must have shown that the truth
had dawned on me.

Parker smiled, with none of her earlier
seductive sweetness. Now it was a vile thing, a raw gash of jagged
teeth, lips bright and full. Erasmus smirked beneath his hood,
apparently pleased to see his plan was working out perfectly.

“You set me up,” I said to her.

She shrugged. “We need your immortal power.
Nothing personal.”

“So all your games were just to test me, to
see if I was really a vampire.”

I could barely stand now, and the air seemed
thick and heavy, filling my lungs as if I were trapped in a buried
coffin. Something was very wrong. I knew I was in danger, yet I
couldn’t muster the strength to take a flying leap away from the
stage.

Parker rose from her chair and stepped
beside Erasmus. “I had to be sure,” she said. “But, really, who did
you think you were fooling? Only comes out at night, doesn’t eat or
drink anything, super strong, likes to play hero. That trick with
the Bloody Mary? Lame. And that name ‘Spider’? Yeah, real
subtle.”

I hadn’t noticed the crowd moving, but it
seemed they were closer to the stage, as if the ground had simply
slid forward about thirty feet. They were making a low sound, a
rhythmic chant that was almost a hum.

“But you want to know what really gave away
that you’re a vampire?”

She must have broken into my apartment and
found the blood hidden in my refrigerator, or maybe she’d figured
out what the secret compartment in my trunk was for. And if I had
my usual powers, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I would have
punched, ripped, and bitten my way through the crowd. Now that
there was no Lilith to save, I had lost my direction.