Thirst No. 3 (8 page)

The waiting seconds are hard on me, and I wonder if I’ve grown soft in my old age. I keep flashing back to Teri and Matt. If I die tonight, I’ll never have a chance to get to know them, and they’ll never know what became of me. I’ve no doubt my foe is anxious to collect my body and my blood.

He’s two hundred yards from my previous position when he stops. I note how he slows his breath. He’s probably trying to scan the woods with a similar infrared scope. I wish I had more water to soak in. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s stopped along the way and drenched his entire body in a stream. He’s still not showing up in my scope.

But I can still hear him. I know when he starts to move again. To my surprise, he’s now heading directly toward me! Chances are he has better heat-sensing equipment than I do. He must have caught a glimpse of me in the tree. Very slowly, I turn in his direction, trying to catch even a flicker of him in my scope. All I need is one shot. . . .

I catch a glimpse of his foot, but it quickly disappears behind a tree before I can take aim. The move reassures me. He’s moving like a hunter who knows approximately where his prey is, but I doubt he’s seen me in the tree. I have chosen my spot well. The damp compactness of the branches is also dispersing my heat signature.

I make a bold decision. I turn off the laser sighting on my scope. I can aim better with it on—like most people—but I fear he’ll spot the laser even at its lowest setting.

For a long time, he stands behind a tree, then he suddenly leaps behind another. He moves too fast for me to get off a shot. I continue to follow his movements more with my ears than my eyes. I assume he knows in which direction I wait, because he’s careful not to let a vulnerable limb stick out. Still, there’s a huge difference between knowing my general direction and knowing my actual position.

He continues to head straight toward me!

The gap between us shrinks. A hundred yards, fifty yards, twenty yards . . . He stops thirty feet from my tree, and it’s obvious he still doesn’t know where I’m hiding. But I can’t see him! I can’t get off a shot!

However, his close proximity makes me rethink my strategy. From the start I’ve only been interested in killing him and surviving. Unfortunately, his death will tell me nothing about who sent him. But if I could disarm him, take him alive, question him, I might learn a great deal. I need information; I especially need to know who he’s working for.

My knives. I love knives, and I applaud my wisdom in removing three sharp ones from my vault and tucking them in my belt. If my foe truly does not know where I am and he steps from behind the tree where he’s standing, then I’ll have a clear shot at him. I can easily take his head off with my rifle. But to use my knives, to have full use of my arms, I’ll have to stand.

He’s so damn close he’ll probably hear me.

The decision weighs on me. Should I just kill him and survive the night, or should I risk dying but maybe find out how to survive the next year? It’s really a question of how quietly I can move and how sensitive his ears are.

I decide to risk it. Slowly standing, I jam my rifle against a nearby branch. I’ll reach for it the instant I release the knives. Of course, if the knives don’t stop him, the rifle will do me no good. There’s no question his reflexes are as good as mine. He’ll shoot me before I can reach for the gun.

I hold a knife in either palm. Right-handed, left-handed—both hands work the same for me. My goal is to cut the nerves between his shoulders and his arms. If I’m successful, he’ll lose control of his hands and be helpless. The armor-piercing bullets in my rifle are too powerful for such delicate surgery. A hit with one round would blow off his arm. The knives it must be.

Quietly, I suck in a breath and raise my arms over my head.

I stand still as a statue.

A minute later he tries slipping between two trees.

I let the knives fly. He hears me move, there’s no question, and I’m pretty sure he hears the knives approaching. But he hesitates a fraction of a second, and that’s all it takes. The knives catch him on the front side of both shoulders. The blades are long, eight inches each, and I’ve thrown them with such force that they sink all the way through his body and poke out his back.

But he’s a fighter, this guy, I have to admire that. Even with the knives cutting off his nerves, he tries to twist his body so his rifle’s
pointed at me. He almost succeeds, but before he can fire, I have my rifle in hand and blow out his left knee. The bullet almost amputates his leg. The combination of wounds, to his upper and lower body, sucks the life out of him, and he drops his rifle and falls to the ground. Still, he reaches for a weapon in his belt.

“Stop!” I shout from the tree. “Move and I’ll take off your head!”

He freezes. Quickly I climb down, but I’m not in such a hurry that I relax my aim. He’s clearly an experienced killer; he’s still dangerous. Once on the ground, I circle cautiously, my rifle held ready, keeping a distance of ten yards.

He’s tall, extremely well muscled, with bronze skin and dark hair cut close to the scalp. His thick black eyebrows and eyelashes remind me of someone from another time and place. He’s dressed completely in black. He sits on the ground with a hand pressed over his wounded leg. He’ll have to possess my rejuvenating powers not to lose his leg.

His expression’s difficult to read. He breathes heavily; he must be in terrible pain. Never mind his leg, the knives piercing the nerve bundles in his shoulders must be agonizing. Yet he doesn’t moan or whimper. He shows almost no emotion. He’s spent half the night trying to kill me, but to my surprise I feel a wave of sympathy for him. I admire a worthy adversary, and he’s one of the finest I’ve come up against.

“Who are you?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. I notice an unusual watch on his left wrist. At first I assumed he was trying to stop the flow of blood with his left hand, but now I realize he’s trying to keep the dial of the watch pointed at me. Could it be a weapon?

“Raise your arms, now!” I snap.

He tries to follow my order, but his arms flap uselessly. Still, his odd watch is no longer pointed at me. I move closer and sniff the air. The shock I experience right then forces me to take a step back.

He’s not a vampire!

How do I know? He doesn’t smell like one. All vampires—even the disgusting Eddie Fender—have a faint smell of our creator, Yaksha. This man smells more human than anything else.

There’s another reason I know he’s not a vampire. This close, I can hear the subtleties of his heartbeat, things I could not hear at a distance. A vampire’s pulse, even under stress, is extremely regular. One might say the sine wave never wavers. This man’s heartbeat is slightly erratic. True, his heart pounds with a strength much greater than an ordinary mortal’s, but the rhythm is more akin to a human’s. The same with his breathing. It’s not as smooth as it should be.

“What are you?” I ask.

He glares at me. “Kill me.”

“Are you so anxious to die?”

“Kill me.”

“No. I want to talk. You owe me that.”

He sneers. “I owe you nothing.”

I cannot place his accent. His English is perfect—the majority of people would assume he’s from England. But I hear other lands in his words.

“Why the hostility?” I ask. “You attacked me.”

“With good reason.”

“What have I ever done to you?”

“I know what you are.”

“Maybe you do. But whoever you are, I mean you no harm.”

“Liar!”

“I speak the truth. You can hear the truth, can’t you, when it’s spoken? I honestly don’t know who you are.”

My remark surprises him. He chews on it a moment.

“Can I rest my arms?” he asks.

“Yes. But keep your watch pointed away from me.”

His arms drop to his lap. “Can you pull out the knives?”

“I will if you answer a few of my questions. Agreed?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not allowed.”

“Allowed? You say that like you report to someone. Who?”

He shakes his head. He won’t answer.

I move closer. “Look, I’m serious when I say I mean you no harm. But someone sent you here to kill me, and frankly, that pisses me off. If you don’t start cooperating, I’m going to do things to you that will hurt a lot worse than that leg and those knives.”

He lowers his gaze, his eyes focus on his watch.

“I’s toad bein, jar?”
he whispers softly.

I recognize the language, but only because I spent time in ancient Egypt. That was back in the days of Suzama. I doubt my attacker and whoever he’s talking to know that. My foe just said, “It is her, is it not?”

A voice replies via the watch, in the same forgotten dialect.

“There’s no doubt. You’ve done well.”

“Can I end it?”

“Yes. Now return to the Eternal Goddess.”

“All glory to the Eternal Goddess.”

The words are no sooner out of my assailant’s mouth than he twists his jaw to the right side and bites down. I hear a tooth inside his mouth—it can’t be a normal tooth—explode. Instantly I catch a whiff of something acidic in the air and leap back. A glowing cloud of red gas expands around his body as he exhales. The fumes are extremely corrosive. Within seconds his face melts away, his clothes catch fire, and his body begins to burn with a ferocity I’ve never seen before.

The blaze is as short as it is fierce. A minute later it’s gone, and so is the man. All that’s left is a pile of ash. Whatever he used to kill himself belongs to a technology more advanced than anything I’ve encountered.

Yet somehow he’s connected to ancient Egypt. The clue gives me small comfort. I still don’t know who or what these creatures are and why they want me dead.

Four days later I wait for Teri and Matt to visit my new home. For obvious reasons, I rented it in a hurry. The place is closer to town and lacks the security system my original home had. But since the system proved useless in the last attack, I don’t fret over its absence.

I have learned little about my assailant since he burned to death. I was able to retrace his steps and find his Gatling gun, and from there I was able to follow his path back to a van parked at the end of a road that lay about three miles from my home. A search of the van turned up nothing: no ID, fake or otherwise, no money, no hotel keys, no maps, not even a round of ammunition. Yet it’s clear the van was a rental, and I’ve passed its license plates on to the same FBI agents and detectives that are working on the IIC mystery.

I feel the two mysteries must be connected. They entered
my life at the same time—the same day—a remarkable coincidence, and I have never believed in coincidences. So far everything Lisa Fetch and Jeff Stephens told me about IIC has proven to be accurate. Although my sources have been unable to discover how the firm excels in the market, they have uncovered proof linking it to other investment companies. It appears IIC and its partners are quietly accumulating a trillion dollars without anyone knowing about it.

Lisa had spoken of the disappearance of an old boyfriend, Randy Clifford, who vanished into thin air while hacking into IIC’s computer system. My friends in the FBI have been able to determine that a certain “Marko” visited him the night he vanished. Marko is known to the FBI to be a highly paid hit man with Mob connections. My people tell me his price is high for the best of assassins—a million even. It seems he can charge so much because he has the ability to make his “marks” disappear without a trace. I can only assume that’s how he earned his nickname.

I plan to visit Marko soon.

After all the noise on my property, I had to act fast to keep the local police and a stream of higher authorities from investigating too closely. I managed to keep my privacy the old-fashioned way—by paying exorbitant bribes through my East Coast attorneys. The money has worked so well, not a single person in town has asked why my house just happened to explode.

But even people who have been paid to remain silent inevitably talk, and I fear such talk will get back to Teri and Matt.
But since I never gave them my address in the countryside, they have no reason to connect me to the rumors going around town about the “house that got hit by the meteor.”

I sort of like that rumor.

I wonder who started it?

My new home is a single story, a spacious rectangle, also located in the woods but hidden in the trees, with no view of a lake. It already possesses a lead-lined vault, which I have stocked with enough weapons to repel a small army. By coincidence, I now own a Gatling gun that is identical to the one that destroyed my original home.

Sigh. That was one toy I could not bear to let the police take.

Teri and Matt arrive on time, at three, on a Tuesday afternoon. We have a late lunch of swordfish, which I grill out back beside my Olympic-size pool. Now that I no longer have a lake to leap into, I enjoy the pool. Swimming is my favorite exercise. Naturally, my liver and leg wounds have totally healed. I don’t feel so much as a twinge when I do my hundred laps each morning.

I have told Teri and Matt to bring their bathing suits, and it turns out Matt is every bit the athlete his girlfriend is. He could never compete against me, of course, but I note how hard he has to swim to get out of breath. He is competitive when it comes to Teri. The two race before we eat, and he makes a point of winning each lap. Teri sees it all as good fun, but I notice he doesn’t. The guy does not like to lose.

I soon find that to be true when it comes to arguments.

Teri’s eyes often stray to his well-muscled body, and I must say I find myself looking at him longer, and more often, than I should. There are no two ways about it—the guy is hot.

I’m careful not to let Teri catch me looking.

After we swim and eat, Teri tries talking Matt into singing a new song he’s working on. He refuses; he won’t play without an instrument. But when I just so happen to find a guitar in my closet, he has no excuse. He tunes the instrument with his feet in the water but then stops.

“I didn’t know you played,” he says to me.