God Touched - 01 (2 page)

     The people around him paid no attention to the thing in their midst.
Most standing with their backs to the most dangerous creature I knew.

      Shoving my way through the crowd by the rail, I moved to the stairs.  Movement near me caught my eye.  Sometimes Hellbourne travel in pairs and it wouldn’t do to get blindsided.  It was just the waitress, watching me with a puzzled look on her face.  I snapped my attention back to the bland man, panicking when I didn’t get a visual on him immediately.  But he was still there, watching the show from the bar.  A support post gave me a place to lean, pretending to watch the awesome display on the dance floor, while I kept my attention squarely on him.  Much harder to do than it sounds, because I felt a real compulsion to watch the brunette dance, but looking away could be disastrous.  A Helbourne in Albany had almost gutted me once when I let my attention drift in a bar.  That scar was still on my stomach, a reminder to pay attention.

The dance ended almost as suddenly as it had begun, and the bland man moved from the bar in a fast jerky manner that was inhuman and went unnoticed by the people around him.  Hellbourne have a powerful ability to cloak themselves, forcing people to forget them on sight.
  Except me…I always see them.  Part of the tool kit of talents that for some Godforsaken reason I was born with.  Yeah me.

  The demon moved toward the back of the stage area, and ahead of it I spotted the
beautiful
brunette leaving through a metal door.  The Hellbourne followed her
, walking
right past several large bouncer types and I hurried to catch up, knowing that the demon’s bubble of forgetfulness could cloak me too.  The bland man opened the door and followed the dancer.  I slid through just a whisper behind him.  The door opened into a long institutional corridor, stacked on the sides with cartons and crates of supplies, the lighting white florescent. The air was musty and cool.  Footsteps pattered ahead of me and I ran to catch up.  A sharp left brought me to another metal door, this one just closing.  Instinct made me rush through
…
right into my vision. 

     A split-second glance laid it all out.  The girl was backed up to the cinderblock wall, pinned in place by a silver bolt through each shoulder.  A strange two-barreled gun was clattering to the floor as the Hellbourne drew a long silver blade from the back of his plain tan jacket.  I was unarmed, but my vision had given me an advanced sight of the fighting area. My right hand fell on an empty crate that I knew would be there. I swung it at the man shape as it spun to face me.  I missed the torso, but hit my target – the
demon’s
knife hand -- knocking the blade flying.

      Hellbourne have blinding fast reactions. The demon snapped a wicked roundhouse kick at my head without any pause.  Despite the slim build of the body that housed it, it was stronger than I.  That kick would break my neck if it landed, but again, fore-Sight gave my reactions a boost, allowing me to block the kick
in time
.  Its force knocked me into the wall and before I could recover, the demon had turned and run down the hallway, slamming through a crash b
ar- equipped door.  It was gone – but
the girl needed my attention.

  She was thrashing like a feral cat caught in a trap, her fast jerky spasms ripping huge wounds in her chest and shoulders. Her reaction wasn’t remotely normal
, at least human normal
.

“Whoa, easy, easy, you have to stop so I can get these out.” I tried to calm her, at least so I could pull the bolts.  She was injuring herself so much trying to get free that she would bleed out long before help got there. 

     Her motions slowed a bit, those blue eyes locked on mine.  I moved closer, grabbing the bolt in her left shoulder with my right hand, yanking it hard and fast. As it came out, I grabbed the other bolt with my left hand. That one was deeper in the wall and it took a few tugs to get it free.  She had been hissing in pain, but as the bolt slid from her chest, she stopped
, frozen in place
.  I was thinking that she would die in the next few seconds. The blood was gushing down her front
in crimson waves
, staining her white dress red.  I reached
out
to steady her, but she
just suddenly
moved.
She sort of blurred, the
n I felt a sledgehammer hit my left arm
. S
he was biting my wrist
, a sharp pain lancing up my arm
.  The force was stunning, like getting an arm caught in an industrial machine. I tried to pull away, but she didn’t budge.  Not even an inch.  She couldn’t weigh over one-twenty, but I couldn’t move her.

     It took a second to realize that she was
sucking
my wrist.  I could feel blood spurting into her mouth in great gushes.   Her heart, which I could see in the hole still in her chest, didn’t seem to be beating. 
The rest of her wounds were healing so fast that most were gone in seconds
.

     I was getting dizzy, but the big wound
over
her heart wasn’t healing and when I peered close a bit of silver gleamed.
A tiny part of my brain offered up a tally of current events.  I was in a night club that was supposed to be run by vampires, a demon had tried to kill the most beautiful girl on the planet and said girl was now draining my body of blood, through my wrist, killing me with her mouth.
  And she had a big hole in her chest.

I don’t know why I did it.  By all rights, I should have just jammed that silver bolt right through her still heart as hard as I could.  It
’s possible that part of me considered
the fact that the Hellbourne wanted her dead.  Doing anything that screwed up their plans was generally a good idea.  It could have been that she was trying so hard to live.
I’ve always admired survivors.

It may have been that I’d never had a hot girl suck on my arm, or any other bo
dy part for that matter, before
and I just wasn’t gonna ruin the experience. It would be a hell of a way to die, I decided.  I could hear the boys at the Precinct talking about it. “
Hey did ya hear about Gordon?  Sucked to death by a super hottie!”

     “Really?  And here I always thought he was gay!”

      Dropping the bolt, I reached my thumb and forefinger into her wound.  The blood made it almost impossible to grip the chunk o
f silver that was left in there and I was getting dizzier by the second,
but I got it.  My
index
finger actually touched her still heart, and a shock jumped between us. Her heart beat once, hard.  Her eyes, which had been shut, snapped open and met my own as I pulled the piece of metal from her body.
It pinge
d on the floor when my jittery
fingers dropped it.
The wound began to close instantly. Then my vision started to swim
, swirling around two blue pools of light
. 

     But the shock had snapped her frenzy and she raised her head from my arm, watching me. When I started to fall,
her
arm slipped around my waist, holding me up
without effort.  It felt like rubber covered steel
.
  She looked at me for a moment
, her head tilted to the right, like she was listening to something. She
then leaned toward my wrist and
licked
it.  She lapped it daintily, like a cat with a saucer of milk, cleaning the blood from it, revealing two pink dots, healing shut
as I watched
.  Over the coppery stink of
blood, I could smell her scent, jasmine and lilac.

     I leaned woozily against a stack of crates behind me, while she continued to watch me.  After a moment, she wiped some
her own
blood from her front with a finger. Be
fore I could react, she stuck the gore covered digit
in my mouth,
depositing the load of cool blood on my tongue
then pulled
her finger free. She
clapped her
other
hand over my lips, stopping me from spitting it out. 

     “Sssswallow!” she ordered.  Dizzy, cold and confused, I did as she commanded, gulpin
g to clear my mouth and throat, even as the thought of AIDs and other diseases crossed my mind.
Laying her finger across her lips in the universal sign for silence she turned her head to look at the metal door from the Club.  For a second, nothing happened, and then the door slammed free from its hinges, rocketed across the hallway and crunched into the wall. 

     The corridor was suddenly filled with a large number of very serious vampires.

      Vampires.  That’s what they were,
it was
all
that
they could be.
Part of my brain had already added up the individual parts of the equation and arrived at that conclusion
  And the beautiful young girl in front of me was most certainly one as well. Gramps was right.
Damn! He was so going to say he told me so…if I lived.

  My sight centered on the big bouncer leading the pack, Vadim.  His right arm was cocked back in a punching
position, his hand stiff and
flat in a spear hand.  Dizzy and confused, I idly noted that his fingernails glittered like they were razor sharp. 
I’ll bet he can jam his hand right through me
. 

     He started forward, but a sharp “Nyet!” sounded from the girl
in the crimson stained dress
and everyone froze.  They were all watching her, with varying degrees of astonishment.  The blonde girl in red pushed through along with the waitress, Lydia.  The
n the
whole
group parted down the middle and
a brown-haired female walked through, taking charge with her presence.  She spoke, in what sounded like Russian, to Vadim and the blonde, but it was my black haired friend who answered in the same language, speaking haltingly at first, then faster.  Now it was the newcomer’s turn to look shocked, but as the dark haired dancer spoke, some of the males blurred down the hall to the door.  The blonde moved up to look at me, stopping a few feet away.  I just sat back on the crates, shivering, trying to
stay upright.  “He’s lost a lot of blood.  He needs fluids,
like now!” the blonde said.                               

     My vampire stopped her narrative in mid-sentence and spoke again
, speech still not smooth.

“Lydi
ii
a?”

“I’m on it.” Lydia replied, zipping out of the corridor. 

“Who
are you?” questioned the leader, staring holes in me with blue eyes that were much lighter than the dancer’s.

“Chris….Chris Gordon.” I answered, once I was able to remember my name.

“He’s a cop.” Lydia supplied as she reappeared, handing me an open bottle of Gatorade.  It was the red kind, which struck me as funny.
  Oops, did I just chuckle out loud?

“He’s here with some cop friends.  I watched him follow some guy who was following Tanya.”

I sipped my Gatorade, thinking about what to tell them while the blonde watched me.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.  Demons and vampires…what next?  Zombies?
How much should I tell them, what would they believe?
They probably thought I had attacked the girl.
What if vampires don’t believe in ghosts and demons? A sudden image of me arguing with blood suckers over proof of the demonic while they fanged me to death.  
The demons could obviously cloud vampire senses as easily as human senses.
Tired, I was so tired.  Maybe getting bled out would be a good thing.  I wouldn’t have to fight anymore and it wouldn’t be like I was giving up the demon hunting business.
The blonde’s eyes widened as I was thinking this and it was suddenly her turn to start speaking in Russian.  That was getting really annoying.
I’ve always hated when people speak other languages arou
nd me.  A French-Canadian father and son vet team
back home used to do it
to me all the time
.
  Assholes.

“Well you people don’t need me for your private conversations, so I’ll just be going.”

     I stood up, wobbled a bit, and then started for the door.  One of the males moved to block me, snarling. “
You go nowhere human blood bag,” he growled.
 

     His fangs were two inches long, his eyes were black from rim to rim. He scared me.  I don’t do well with being scared.
  I started my career in being scared pretty early in life and now it just pisses me off.  The memory popped up unbidden.

I was jammed in the hiding space that Marcus had built in the back of his closet.  He had shoved me into that space when the stranger had attacked mom and dad downstairs.  “Don’t you move Christian!  You stay here till it’s clear!  No matter what!”  He shook me to make his point, the same way he had shaken me when he caught me in his room leafing through his comics.  With one last look, my twelve year old big brother picked up his baseball bat from the closet corner, shoved the panel shut and rushed from the room. Huddled on the floor, my hands over my ears to block the awful sounds, I tried not to breathe, not make a sound. Too scared to move.