vampire for hire 10.5 - vampire requiem (2 page)

Instead, through superhuman effort—or, perhaps, supernatural effort—I pulled away from her torn throat, wiping my mouth like the ghoul I am. Then I licked the back of my hand.

Yeah, definitely a monster.

Kill her,
chanted a voice in my head, a voice way, way,
way
down deep. A voice I never, ever trusted. Until now, I had done such a damn good job of ignoring her, too. So good that I almost,
almost
,
thought I was normal. Especially with the two rings I now wore: one that helped me to eat normal food, and one that helped me to live in the light of day. Both rings, of course, were created and forged in an alchemical process that few on Earth would ever know.

I had made a valiant attempt to not feed from humans over these past few months—or to even feast from anything living. My sole source of sustenance had been my bloody packets of filth delivered from a slaughterhouse.

Now, as I sat back, I watched Nancy sort of come back to her senses. I had seen this before. Victims slipped into a catatonic state of shock, I assumed. Allison never had, though, when I’d fed from her each week. Perhaps a friendly bite to eat was much different than a full-fledged vampire attack.

And I had attacked Nancy, too. Criminal charges could be pressed against me.
Hell, I should be in jail for what I just did to her.

Except that no jail could hold me.

She blinked and I saw the tears roll down her cheeks. She came back to her senses slowly. Jesus, had I put her under a sort of spell?
The way a dolphin stuns its prey with a sonic blast.
She rolled her head in my direction. More tears streamed out. The wound in her neck had already coagulated, although it still seeped some blood.

I tried to feel really bad about what I had done.

The old me would have been mortified. The old me would have hated herself for attacking this woman. The old me would have feared that such an attack would prompt more such attacks, that it would, in fact, signal the end of my humanity.

The old me was a wuss.

Besides, humanity was overrated.

Yes, I knew that was
her
talking, the demon within. But sometimes, she made sense. And sometimes, people just deserved what they got. And sometimes, I just needed to feed.

All good points,
I thought.

I knew I was slipping. I knew the demon within me was gaining a stronger foothold, gaining more and more access to my thoughts...and to my actions. There was a war raging within me, and I was losing ground. The enemy was advancing.

And I didn’t care.

***

“Are you okay, Sam?”

I had erased her memory of the attack, of course. Under the circumstances, it seemed the prudent thing to do. With a few well-placed words and a suggestion that the past few minutes had never happened, I was in the clear. There was some blood on her shirt, but I’d suggested to her that the blood was from an old scratch that had since healed.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, my thoughts shielded deep behind an impregnable wall.

“Okay, good. You sort of got this funny look on your face...” Nancy said.

“And then?”

“And then, I asked how you were doing.” She laughed. “Look, I’m sorry if I pushed any buttons. I never thought we would be friends, either. It just sort of fell into our laps...and felt, well, it felt comfortable. All that other stuff...we were different people then. I didn’t know you. You didn’t know me. Danny was playing us both. I’m glad we can see past all that and be friends.”

I tried to smile and might have even succeeded. I took in a lot of useless air and, with the guilt setting in, thought,
Yeah, some friend I am.

***

“You attacked her?”

“A little bit,” I underreported to my psychic friend, Allison. We were having lunch at Lazy Dog in Brea, a place that allowed customers to bring their dogs on the patio. I didn’t own a dog, which was probably a good thing. We didn’t want Fido to go missing like my neighbor’s cat. “And could you say that a little louder?”

“I’m Latina,” she said. “We’re loud, deal with it.”

“I’d rather not.”

Allison shrugged and shoved a forkful of her iceberg wedge salad in her mouth. I might not be much of a salad expert—especially after not eating the stuff for over seven years—but iceberg wedge salad looked like a lazy-man’s version of a regular salad.

“It’s all about presentation,” said Allison, picking up on my thoughts, which, nowadays, just about anyone seemed to do—at least, anyone with any kind of connection to me. Allison’s connection just happened to be stronger than just about anyone’s, since, well, up to a few months ago, I’d been ingesting her blood on a regular basis. Consensually, of course. Her willingness to provide me with small snacks of human blood had a happy side effect of enhancing her psychic abilities. So, our give-and-take arrangement was quite symbiotic.

“It’s all about marketing,” I said, not impressed with the presentation of the salad.

“Or that, too. But I’m confused, Sam—”

“Confused about why you paid ten bucks for a side salad?”

“Never mind that, and this is much more than a side salad...it’s an experience.”

I snorted. Damn loudly, too.

“Anyway,” said Allison, with tons of emphasis on the ‘any’ part. “I thought you had, you know, kicked the fresh blood habit.” She looked at me hopefully. She was more than willing to go back to our old arrangement, but feeding the beast within me fresh blood had only created a bigger problem for me. A nearly uncontrollable problem.

“I don’t think I can kick the habit. I can only deny myself. Anyway, this attack on Nancy wasn’t so much about a need to feed, but to...”

“Hurt her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to hurt her. To lash out at her. To finally...”

I let my voice trail off. No matter. Allison was there to pick up on my thoughts, as surely as if I had spoken them.

“To finally hurt the woman who had hurt you.”

I nodded, and felt like crap. Allison, of course, had only been a willing participant for my blood hunger. I had never attacked her or torn her up. When I had fed from Allison, it was more like…sipping a fine wine. It was never…violent.

“I think,” I said, as I worked through my feelings about Nancy, “that it was going to happen, one way or another, eventually.”

“I’m not following.”

“I had imagined doing just that to her—so many times, so many hundreds and hundreds of times. Maybe even a thousand or two. There was a lot of momentum behind those feelings. I’m not sure if I could have stopped myself. It was almost as if I had to act it out, just to get it out of my system.”

“Okay, I think I’m following,” said Allison, nodding. “Like you attracted it or something? What do those hippy-dippies call it...manifested? You manifested it.”

“I guess,” I said. “But on the bright side, I didn’t tear her head off and punt it over my back fence into the Pep Boys parking lot, which I had been imagining, too.”

Allison cocked an eyebrow at me. “Well, hopefully, it’s out of your system now.”

“Hopefully.”

“Sam...”

“How the hell am I supposed to know how this works? One minute she’s giving me sass, and the next I’m tearing through her throat and gorging on her blood so fast that it almost came out my nose. I didn’t exactly plan on doing it, you know. It was impulsive.”

“I know, Sam. But remember last time...”

I nodded. The last time I had fed from something living, I had torn it to pieces. The aforementioned neighbor’s cat. My hunger had been fueled by the entity within me, an entity I had permitted to grow stronger by doing just that: giving her fresh blood.

I knew better now, which was why I fed from clear plastic packets of filthy cow and pig blood. And I didn’t feed as often, or as much. Just enough to sustain myself. Just enough to keep my energy up, but not so much that it empowered her.

It was a fine balance, but one I had been straddling successfully for the past few months, despite my urges, my hungers.

“You’re going to have to be careful, Sam. Keep her dormant. Keep her weak.”

“I know,” I said, knowing that Allison was talking about the entity inside of me. “Now, can we quit making me feel like shit and get back to why you hate money?” I pointed at her salad.

“Hate money, how? Never mind. I get it. I hate money because I overspent on my salad...”

“Boy, did you ever.”

***

I was thirty minutes into some heavy traffic when my business appointment canceled on me. Via text.

I briefly considered going over there anyway and canceling my prospective client’s face, until I realized that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Still, it was a nice thought, whatever it was.

No,
I thought.
That’s
her
thinking.

I had let the genie out of the bottle, so to speak. Or, in this case, the demonic bitch. I had fed her human blood, and not from a willing and calm participant. With my violent attack on Nancy, I had given the dark bitch inside of me a renewed strength and hope and life...and that was never, ever a good thing. I had fed…
evil.

Now, as I sat in traffic, I briefly considered how I could have gone about things differently with Nancy. The anger I had felt had risen up quickly. Had I even had time to talk myself down? I didn’t know. It had all happened so quickly. A sudden rage. A vicious attack. A gluttonous feeding from a pulsing throat.

Get up,
I told myself now,
and walk away. Better than attacking. Better than losing it all. And better than giving the entity within any life at all.

There was a tiny break in the traffic as people bailed off the nearest ramp, even crowding the dirt shoulder in their eagerness to get off this tedious stop-and-go parade of exhaust-belching cars. There was no way I was getting off into that neighborhood. I inched my car forward, maybe five feet.

Oh, joy
, I thought.

I idly considered abandoning my vehicle on the side of the road and taking flight...except that I had never taken flight with Talos during the day. Would he even come? Could I transform? Did I need the silent magic of night to make the transition? I didn’t know, but I figured that someday I would find out.

I looked down at my phone and really wasn’t very surprised to see a restricted call. Who the restricted call was from was anybody’s guess...but I had my suspicions.

“Moon Investigations,” I said, making the effort to use my hands-free headset to answer so I wouldn’t get a ticket.

“Samantha, it’s Ted with the California State Parks.”

“Ranger Ted,” I said, my suspicions confirmed. We had met in the ranger station just outside Arrowhead. They now kept me on speed dial, ever since I had helped to bring home a sheriff’s missing wife a few months ago, a wife who wasn’t so much missing as she’d been held captive by a pack of werewolves. Long story. Ranger Ted, of course, didn’t know about the werewolf part, which was how I intended to keep it. Anyway, I’d also helped find a missing camp counselor and an arsonist.

My phone vibrated with another text. I looked down and saw that it was Nancy Pearson. Okay, maybe I was getting a little too close to my deceased ex-husband’s mistress. Chatting once or twice every few months seemed perfectly reasonable. But now, we were text message buddies? I ignored her text.

“Are they still keeping you hopping over there?” I said into the headset.

“Hopping? Yeah, that, too,” Ted said. “Got a minute?”

“I’m stuck on the 91 Freeway, what do you think?”

“Even on a Saturday?”

“Even on a Saturday,” I said.

“You see, this is why I work in the woods. No traffic in the woods, other than a few drunken yahoos and...”

“And what?”

“Poachers,” he said.

“Poachers?” I repeated.

“Right.”

“On the king’s land?” I asked, shocked.

He didn’t laugh at my sarcasm. “No, in the forest. We’ve found two dead bucks, field-dressed, and with their heads removed. They’re trophy hunters—for the antlers—and apparently, they wanted the meat, too, and might be coming back for it.”

“Are you telling me this to make me vomit up my Mango-A-Go-Go Jamba Juice?” I said, to try to sound as normal as possible. Truth was, I found his description very intriguing.
Too intriguing.

It’s the bitch in me. Such a sicko
.

“Sorry about the mango-whatever-you-just-said, but we need a good man—or woman—working the case. I’m stretched too thin with the forest fires on the north side. You interested?”

“Usual pay?” I asked.

“Another year,” he said, referring to my free national park pass.

“And how many am I at, now?”

“Four, I think. Non-transferable, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll swing by tomorrow morning.”

“On a Sunday?” He sounded impressed.

“The poachers,” I told Ted. “That’s when they’ll come back for the meat. If they field-dressed the carcass, they’ll be back before the flies lay eggs in it.”

“You’re right,” he said.

Now that I knew I had the day off, thanks to my canceling potential client, I wanted to be with the kids today.

“See you then.”

Traffic inched forward.

It was about ten minutes after we clicked off that I remembered Nancy Pearson’s text message. It was another two minutes before I decided to actually read it while traffic was at a complete standstill.

He’s going to kill me, Sam. At working house. Please help...anything. He’s here now. Shit, don’t call

Don’t call
. She was hiding. She was hiding right now. Or possibly hurt. Right now. Or even dead. Right now. All because I was too pissy to pick up my cell and look at her message.

The working house.

Yeah, I knew the place. It was a small home around the corner from my dead hubby’s strip club, a house where some of the girls serviced some of the customers...the high-roller customers. Nancy had described it to me. I had a vague idea of where it was. Vague was all I needed.