The Eye of the Moon (51 page)

‘Oh God, are you a sight for sore eyes,’ she called down the hallway to him. He was a good thirty yards away, but that distance could be covered in a matter of seconds. Lowering the pistol to her side she began to walk towards him. She felt a little weaker than she had done only seconds earlier, simply because the adrenalin brought on by Swann’s fearful attack was now subsiding. Everything was going to be okay. Dante began jogging towards her with a big smile on his face. ‘C’mon, let’s get you the fuck outta here,’ he yelled.

Kacy tucked the gun into the back of her jeans and opened her arms wide. ‘Come and get me, honey!’ she beamed. Dante began to run a little faster, ready for an over-the-top embrace like the kind one sees enacted on a beach in a cheesy movie.

Then, BAM! Just as he passed a side corridor a figure dressed in a leopard-skin catsuit flew out from it and slammed him into the opposite wall. It was Roxanne Valdez, and she was in full-on bloodsucking mode. To Kacy, everything seemed to move in slow motion as she looked on aghast as the events
unfolded. She watched Dante’s expression change from one of joy to one of surprise and utter horror. Valdez had hit him with the speed of an express train. His head was slammed into the wall of the hallway with such force that it was a wonder he hadn’t been knocked cold straight away. The vampire-agent’s strength was clearly phenomenal, and the fact that she had taken him completely by surprise meant that Dante’s attempts to fight her off were futile.

Kacy stared in stunned bewilderment as Valdez opened her mouth wide, revealing a set of fangs which she sank deep into the side of Dante’s neck. A horrible crunching sound followed, and Kacy saw fresh blood spurt from her lover’s wound. His whole body was pressed up against the wall so that he could muster little of his strength or leverage from his arms to fight back. Worse, by the time Valdez had pulled her head back to allow his blood to trickle down her throat he looked incapable fighting any more. The blood slowly drained from his face, and his knees began to buckle as he stared blankly down the hallway at Kacy with an almost apologetic look.

Kacy finally screamed. ‘DANTE!’ It felt as if she had been watching this action unfold for an age before her mouth had allowed her to make her inevitable despairing cry.

The scream drew the attention of the blood-crazed Valdez, who released her grip on her latest victim and turned her evil glare on Kacy. Dante’s battered and bloodied body slid towards the floor, leaving a thick stain of blood on the wall as he collapsed on the carpet, like an unwanted rag doll.

Valdez took a step towards Kacy and eyed what she probably classed as vampire’s dessert. Streaks of Dante’s blood were dripping down from her mouth onto her leopard-skin catsuit. Kacy froze, and for a second the two females eyeballed each other. Then the vampire made her move, charging at the wide-eyed innocent before her.

The movement finally brought Kacy to her senses. Reacting instinctively, she pulled the pistol back out from the waistband of her jeans. She fumbled for a solid grip on it as, with trembling hands, she pointed it in the direction of the
onrushing bloodsucker. Then for reasons even she herself didn’t know, she closed her eyes, looked away and fired blindly.

BANG!

For a few seconds a deafening silence followed the echo of the report. Then Kacy, wincing like someone expecting a custard pie in the face, opened one eye, then the other. Lying on the carpet less than a yard in front of here was a bloodied, smoking mess of a corpse, the remains of Special Agent Roxanne Valdez.

Dante was still in a heap on the floor up against the wall fifteen yards down the hallway. He was looking at Kacy with puppy-dog eyes, but his head was resting on the floor in a pool of blood. The pool was getting bigger and spreading slowly across the carpet. There was blood dribbling from his mouth, but the main cause of the ever-expanding pool was pumping out from the gaping wound in his neck.

In spite of the numbness that she felt, Kacy’s mind was racing. She dropped Swann’s gun on the floor by the now burning remains of Valdez and ran over to Dante with all the strength her legs could muster in their current turned-to-jelly state. Kneeling, she placed one hand over the hole in his neck to try to stem the flow of blood. Then she used her other hand to lift his head and turn it to face her.

‘Baby, don’t leave me,’ she blurted out. Just saying those words was enough to bring on the tears that had been inevitable from the moment he fell. For the next two minutes she knelt beside him, cradling his head and begging him not to go. Not to leave her all alone in a world full of hatred, spite and evil. But Dante could not respond. His voice had already gone by the time she had got to him. All he could do was stare helplessly back up at her, hoping she could read in his eyes that he was sorry for messing things up right at the end. He had fallen at the final hurdle, after he had made it through the whole ordeal of being undercover in a coven of vampires for the last three nights.

Kacy sobbed as she watched his eyes roll back in his head, signalling that his fight for life was over, but she continued to
stroke his hair and wipe the blood away from his face. If he was on his way to the next life, she wanted him to look his best, and create a good impression. Desolate as she felt, as she smartened him up she began remembering all the fun times they had shared. She thought back to some of the dumbass things he had done since she’d met him. Turning up at her door one day with a truckload of
Captain Hook
DVDs, grinning like he’d won the lottery. Embarrassing her by calling Professor Cromwell a cunt. Stealing a yellow Cadillac to impress her when they already had half the city trying to kill them. Dragging her to safety in the middle of a shootout in the Tapioca during last year’s eclipse, when he’d been dressed as the Terminator. Most of all, she remembered the way he had proposed to her less than a week earlier. He was the best thing in her life, ever.

Dante had been dead for a good minute before she was distracted. ‘You fuckin’ bitch!’ called a voice from the end of the hallway. It was Agent Swann, and he was bending down to pick up his pistol from the floor where she had dropped it.

‘Now you’re really gonna be sorry.’

As the hooded man walked up another step towards him, Anvil found himself staring down at his shoes in the hope that this would make him invisible. No sense in engaging in a staring contest with the Bourbon Kid. Why rile the fellow up? It wasn’t as if this guy needed an excuse to kill anyone. If the rumours about him were true, he’d kill Anvil just for looking at him funny. Unless, of course, he’d recently undergone some sort of epiphany and had decided to give up killing. Either way, someone, at least one person, was about to be blown away. Of that Anvil was sure.

As the Kid stepped past him, his robe brushing lightly against him, Anvil managed to sidle down a step on the staircase, enough to get just a little out of the way of the action that was no doubt about to unfold.

Bull and his men turned just in time to see the hooded figure step up onto the landing they were on. He was no more than twenty feet away, and as soon as he saw them spin round with their weapons aimed in his direction he reached inside his dark robe for a weapon. With uncanny speed he pulled out one of his semi-automatic handguns (a 9mm Beretta, no less), and aimed it down the hallway in the direction of Bull and his three comrades. He managed to get off one shot.

The Shadow Company boys were no slouches. Bull, in particular, hadn’t come this far only to blow his best opportunity of revenge. He unloaded on sight, his heavy automatic rifle blasting off at his enemy, peppering him in the chest with a barrage of rounds in the space of a few seconds.

Anvil had just enough time to see that the Kid’s solitary
shot had missed Bull and his men. Instead, it flew with lethal accuracy through the open door of Apartment 24 and lodged itself dead centre in the forehead of the wretched creature hanging from the ceiling. Kione had been tortured so mercilessly for so long that he would no doubt have been greatly relieved to be so swiftly put out of his misery. Hell would be a walk in the park compared to the suffering inflicted upon him for the last eighteen years. And Hell was where he was headed. The pitiful remnant of a being was finally dead.

Once Bull and his men opened fire, Anvil was smart enough to duck down on the stairs and cover his ears. The three other members of Shadow Company had instantly followed their commander’s lead and also opened fire, blasting their target mercilessly. Crouched on the stairs, Anvil watched the hooded figure stagger backwards, each step back only adding to the certainty that he was about to fall at any second. In fact, Anvil thought, if the soldiers would only stop firing their target would slump to the ground much sooner, rather than being jerked upright by each new bullet that slammed into him. Eventually, though, he did fall, and the firing ceased. He’d been shot at least thirty times. There was a great deal of smoke drifting up from the muzzles of the soldiers’ guns, and a great deal of blood from the wounds on Anvil’s former next-door neighbour.

The silence after the gunfire was wasted on Anvil, who couldn’t hear anything beyond the ringing in his ears (despite having clamped his hands over them) from the deafening barrage of gunfire.

Bull gestured to one of his men to approach the lifeless corpse lying in front of them near the head of the staircase. ‘Check him,’ he ordered.

The big unshaven one with the horrific scar across his face (Razor, had Anvil known any of their names) did as he was told, placing his fingers on their victim’s neck to check for a pulse. He looked back up at Bull after a few seconds and shook his head. ‘Yeah, he’s dead,’ he said.

Bull breathed a sigh of relief. At last. After all these years,
he had finally gained the revenge he had craved. ‘Hold him up,’ he snarled, pulling a machete from a sheath on his left trouser leg. ‘I want his head.’

Razor, who, like all of them, was incredibly strong, lifted the corpse up as best he could. He managed to get the body up on its knees, then took a handful of the cloth of the hood and used it to hold the head up so that his boss could get a clean swing.

In a manner not unlike Jessica’s recent execution of Peto, Bull swung his blade. A second later his colleague was holding nothing more than an empty hood as the head it had concealed dropped from the corpse’s shoulders and rolled across the floor, coming to a stop when it hit the wall by Bull’s feet. It was caked in blood and the back of it appeared to have been blown off, possibly from a shot that had gone in through one of the eye sockets.

Bull picked the head up by its hair and held it up before him. ‘Not so fuckin’ tough now, are ya, huh? Told you I’d get you, you sonofabitch.’ He tossed the head back to the pink-haired soldier standing behind him in the hallway.

‘Pack that thing away in some ice and let’s get the fuck out of here.’