Night Runner (23 page)

Luna started running down the front steps. I moved to follow, but as soon as I reached the bottom of the porch I saw the body. It had been stuffed under the stairs. Blood was everywhere. The sight of it and the smell stopped me dead. I'd never fed on human blood, but for eight years it was what my body had been craving, every day, day after day. It brought on a hunger so intense it was a kind of pain. Sharp and nasty. Maybe I'd have felt differently if I'd had a transfusion at the ward just before my escape, or if I'd just finished a brain cocktail or killed another deer, but that's not the way it was.

And so I did exactly what I shouldn't have done. I slipped under the shadow of the stairs to feed.

I recognized the body. It belonged to one of the twins. The blond. His brown eyes were glazed over in death. Blood ran in red ribbons down his neck, which I could see had been snapped and torn open. The flesh there was marked by dark bruises, and all of the vessels were exposed. The person who did this must have been a powerhouse.

I should have felt sorry for the twin, but all I could think about was the blood. How wasteful it was. And how angry it made me to see that it had been sprayed everywhere when I wanted it all for myself. So without a second thought, I drank every drop that was left in his body.

Blood for a vampire is life. Another day. Another week. Another month. Another year. You can't imagine how this felt, to drink life. I was undead, and then for a moment I was more than alive. Let's leave it at that. And that was when the police arrived.

 

 

Most vampires fear bright lights, which makes perfect sense. Nothing is more dangerous to us than the sun. So when that police boat appeared out of nowhere and turned its lights on me, I felt as if I were staring death straight in the face.

I am told that when people panic they have one of two responses: fight or flight. They either dig in like a wolverine and take on all comers, or they bolt like a gutless chicken. I discovered a third response that night, which is to stand still like a total idiot and not move a muscle.

Someone started shouting through a megaphone. He said they were the police and not to move. Well, I don't think they could have moved me with a battering ram. Other voices joined in. Some were coming from the porch behind me. Others were coming from the boat. I couldn't pay attention to what they were saying. I was too busy trying to hide my face from the light, so I remember only fragments. Things like “What's going on here?” and “Good God . . .” and “It's him” and “We're too late” and “Get them back inside.”

Suddenly men were all around me with guns and lights and loud voices. Only when I felt someone grab me did I struggle. Then my whole body went stiff with pain. I found out later that they had used a Taser on me, like my father used when hunting vampires. It's a weapon that delivers a very powerful electric shock. Had I been Count Dracula or the Baron Vrolok, or even that vampire from the cereal box, I might have put up a better fight, but I had been raised on animal blood. “Bovine crap,” as Mr. Entwistle would have said. Not the real stuff. It is human blood that takes a vampire to the next level. I had tasted it for the first time just moments before, and it might have done wonders for me, but I couldn't overcome so many full-grown men. Not when they had that Taser. Every time I moved, I felt the burn of electricity shoot through my body, paralyzing me with pain.

And so they chained my arms and ankles and stowed me away.

The boat ride was terrifying. There were so many lights trained on me, I don't think I could have blinked without the whole world seeing. All the time I heard two officers talking. One kept insisting that they “do it now,” another that they “wait.” I think they meant to kill me.

The same two officers lifted me out of the boat and onto the dock when we arrived at the marina. Each had a hold of one arm. They shocked me before we got out onto the wharf and again as soon as my feet touched the wooden planks. I was so scared, I think if they'd let go of me I might have turned into a puddle of goo and dribbled back into the water. I couldn't move. I couldn't run. There was only pain. Pain and bright lights, so I couldn't even see where they were taking me. I remember staring down at the gravel parking lot and at the feet of the police officers. It was easier than looking up at the lights. The stones made crunching noises under their shiny black shoes. And I remember when they stopped. A man was standing in front of us. He was leaning on a cane and had a long, pink scar under one eye. It was Everett Johansson.

When he saw me he grunted. There were bright headlights behind him so I couldn't see the expression on his face.

“Has he fed?” he asked.

One of the officers must have nodded, because I didn't hear them answer.

“Well, don't take any chances with him,” Johansson continued. “If he moves, shock him.”

Then he stepped to the side and opened the back door of a cruiser. I was pushed in, then the door was closed and locked. I was feeling very sick, as if someone had been kicking my stomach.

“What are you going to do?” I rasped. The men were still outside the car talking to Johansson, so I didn't get an answer. Then Johansson walked off towards the water and the other two climbed in the front seat of the car. I heard the engine turn over. Then we lurched forward to the sound of tires on gravel.

“Where are my friends?” I asked.

I was worried they were still back there with whoever had killed that boy. My instincts told me it was Vrolok. What chance would they have against him? A creature from a nightmare . . .

“Where are they?”

The two officers looked at each other. I got my answer when one of them reached back with the Taser. It looked like an electric shaver. Purple sparks crackled from the end of it. Pain followed, and for a few minutes I couldn't talk, so I just sat back against the seat.

As my strength returned, I tried to break my cuffs. It was no use. I was too weak. At least in the arms. But my legs were strong enough to snap the chain that bound my ankles. So I did. Then I turned sideways to try to kick the back door off its hinges, but the officer with the Taser reached back and jolted me again. He said something to me, but I couldn't make it out.

I realized a second later that he wasn't talking to me at all. He was swearing. Two bright lights were coming up behind us. They lit up the interior of the car so that everything looked white. The seat covers, the dashboard, the rear-view mirror. Everything. The officer who was driving stepped on the gas, but it didn't matter. Something slammed into the side of the car just behind the back wheel. My head nearly snapped from my neck as the back of the car skidded sideways towards the ditch. I could hear the tires screech. Then the car started to roll. I've never been on a roller coaster, but it couldn't possibly be as frightening. Or as fast. A car flips so quickly that you barely have time to panic.

In an instant, broken glass was everywhere. The top of the car smashed down against my head. My arms, which were still handcuffed behind my back, were practically wrenched from their sockets. Had I not been so strong, I think they would have ripped clean off. Fortunately we landed upright. I could feel my cheek swelling under my right eye. I think it had slammed into the door. And I must have had a cut on the top of my head, because blood was dripping down past my left ear. A loud noise was coming from the front of the car. It was the horn, which must have been broken, because it didn't stop. The driver's forehead was pressed against an airbag. I was
guessing that he was unconscious. The officer beside him looked like he was out of it, too. His head kept shaking back and forth as though he was going to vomit.

Then I heard the sound of feet crunching on gravel. It stopped, and the door beside me began to groan. Metal was being bent. An instant later the door opened.

And there he was. My Uncle Max. He had come to save me.

M
y uncle was holding a crowbar in his hand. He was dressed all in black. There was a belt around his waist with a whole slew of gadgets hanging from it. One of them was a gun. He looked like a commando. I wondered for a brief moment if my father had ever dressed that way when he was hunting vampires. It was like something out of a comic book.

He set the crowbar on the ground, then reached in to pull me out of the police car. When he leaned across my torso, for just an instant his neck was exposed. In the movies, that was where vampires did most of their biting. I'd never really thought about why, but after seeing that boy under the porch, I understood. The neck is the highway to the brain, and the brain needs blood, buckets of it. And unlike the brain, which is surrounded by a hard layer of bone, the vessels in the neck aren't protected at all. Blood there runs very close to the surface, so it's pretty much a bull's eye. When Uncle Max leaned past me, I was
tempted to stretch out my teeth and chomp away. I was bleeding and bruised. My body wanted the good stuff so that it could start to heal. But I resisted. It helped to remember what he'd told me—that even vampires have a choice: to be good, or to be something that is less than good. I wanted to do what was right. I wanted to be good.

“Are you all right?” he asked me. “Is anything broken? Are you hurt?”

“I have a cut on my head,” I told him.

He took me by the elbow and helped me carefully from the car. Then he inspected my scalp closely and made certain I wasn't cut anywhere else.

“We'd better get something on that. It's bleeding heavily,” he said.

He took my elbow to steady me while he led me to his car.

“We'd better get those off of you first,” he said. He was talking about my handcuffs. “Can you break them?”

I strained. My arms were aching, but I tested myself, just as Mr. Entwistle said I should. Still, I wasn't quite strong enough.

Maximilian reached down to his belt and removed a canister of something. I heard a hissing noise.

“Try again,” he said.

I didn't have to work too hard this time. There was a loud crack and my arms jerked apart. The cuffs were still circling my wrists, but the chain between them was now broken.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Liquid nitrogen,” he replied. “When the metal's frozen, it's easier to break. Now wait here.” He stepped quickly behind his trunk, opened it up, pulled out a red case and removed a wad of small, white squares. They were pieces of gauze.

“Hold these against your head,” he told me. Then he motioned for me to get in the car while he walked around to the driver's side. “We've got to hurry.”

And so I got in, and it was like stepping straight into a spy movie.
The car was unreal. I'd never been in an airplane cockpit before, but I'd seen them in movies, and I'll bet you this car had more dials, buttons and screens than a space shuttle. And it had two steering wheels. I knew this was a little weird. What kind of car had two steering wheels? And they weren't even wheels, really. They were like wheels with the tops cut off so that your hands fit on either side, like the controls for an arcade game, the kind you sit in.

There was no window behind me, just a solid wall of black. I wondered how he saw out the back. Then I noticed that in place of a rear-view mirror there was a small video screen. There must have been cameras in the back of the car, because you could see the road behind us. It was all tinted green.

In front of me on the dashboard was a screen covered with white lines. I figured out straight off that these were roads. A red light appeared on one of the lines. It was beeping and flashing and it moved quickly towards another light, a blue one that was sitting in the middle of the map.

“What's that?” I asked.

“That's either a police car or a car with a police radio,” my uncle said. “Either way, we're getting out of here. Now buckle up.”

I put the seat belt on. It was padded. Then he stepped on the gas, and the car whined like a jet engine.

“Will they catch us?” I asked.

My uncle smiled, then shook his head. “Not in this car.” He coughed a few times into his sleeve, then pushed the pedal to the floor.

My head was forced back against the seat like I'd been shot from a bazooka. I'd driven a few times with Nurse Ophelia when she'd taken me out to the movies, or to bowl or whatever, but she never liked to break the speed limit. Uncle Max didn't break it either. He shattered it to bits. The road was winding, and I kept thinking we were going to fly off into the woods, but somehow he kept us from wiping out.

“Don't worry,” he said. “The car has a vacuum in the bottom. The
faster we go, the more firmly the car is held in place.” Then he asked me how my head was.

I checked the bandages. That was when I noticed for the first time that my burnt hand was better. It must have healed when I drank the boy's blood. But my head wasn't doing quite so well. There was a long, red blotch on the bottom of the bandages. The blood had soaked right through.