I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (11 page)

But that time was not now.

Her Master wore his hat even indoors. His
gaze burned out from under it, fixed on the television. He longed
to be home in the Balkans, running amuck. For the time being he was
stuck here, in a warehouse in a city ripe with vermin. She had felt
his frustration before and had cried for him, because Kreshnik
would not weep. He could not cry. He could not bleed. He had been
raised and perfected in the secret places of eastern Europe. Unlike
others of his kind, he did not fear the sun. He
despised
it.

As his body evolved, each day he could
withstand it that much more. Soon, she knew, her Master would be
able to walk openly in the day.

The humans didn’t know what they were in for
then.

In the meantime, he sat watching the news,
brooding.

She was his bride. One of three. Kreshnik’s
appetites were enormous. Her two counterparts were nearby in the
dark, recuperating. The sodomy had been especially brutal this
morning.

There had been a fourth. They had abandoned
her corpse when they’d uprooted and come here. An anal fissure had
become infected and given way to septic shock. Kreshnik had
pleasured himself in her and on her and drank from her until her
last day, and when that had arrived he had drained her. She met her
end in delirium, semi-conscious, a wan smile on her face.

There would be another, this bride knew. She
would be used up in his service. The thought, as she filed
Kreshnik’s nails, caused her no concern. Her fate, one she accepted
willingly, was to serve him as all others who had come before her
had. When she was finished, ruined, she would be cast aside. As had
been the fourth, as had been others she did not know.

She refused to cling to any false hopes that
the Master would deign to convert her, to turn her to the ranks of
the children of the night. His mother, for one, would be against
it. His mother, the vampire that had converted Kreshnik long before
the scientists and technicians had gotten a hold of him. Kreshnik’s
mother, who looked with disdain on her misbegotten son.

Kreshnik’s mother was far off, and this
pleased the bride.

As costly as the bride’s dedication was and
would be, it was not without reward. For her commitment, Kreshnik
gave her a pleasure she had never known or imagined possible. The
elation of a thousand blows upon her body. The transient pleasure
accompanying asphyxiation, Kreshnik’s gloved hands crushing her
neck. The glory of blood shed, of writhing, covered in someone’s
remains—as earlier today. Beyond these temporary pleasures,
Kreshnik’s existence had given her a purpose unmatched.

In the short term there was this human, the
one they called Boone. He would be found. He would be made to
suffer. Scantily clad in her wimple and latex bondage gear, she
wore her
sai
. She had been instructed in their use by the
masters of the East, the Thuggee and Shinobi in the employ of her
Master’s clan. She was more than adept in their implementation. She
would partake in the elimination of this Boone.

Then to Kosovo, to chase down and destroy the
accursed Serbs, to return her Master’s people to their rightful
home. And, finally, back to America, to deal with Rainford and
those few like him. She still felt young and strong. She hoped to
participate in it all at Kreshnik’s side. She imagined the sex that
would accompany these events.

Blood and slaughter sent Kreshnik into a
conjugal fury. She suspected he had lost all physical pleasure in
the sexual act. For him, sex was purely about power, about exerting
his strength of body and will over others. He was easily lost in
the frenzy of flesh upon flesh. He had strangled the life out of
men and women in her presence during coitus. His needs were
tremendous.

One of his other brides stepped into the glow
of the television behind the Master, draping his cloak over his
shoulders. He barely turned his head, disinterested, fixated on the
screen. His cloak was a brilliant red with two black eagles, back
to back. The flag of his homeland. The flag of his peoples.

Kreshnik, the bride knew, had not been a
vampire long. Perhaps a century. He still clung to a rudimentary
sense of nationalism. To a people, to a land. Time, she had been
led to understand, would diminish this attachment.

The other woman stepped back into the dark.
As she finished shaping and sharpening the nails of his one hand,
the bride thought how service to her Master had allowed her to
transcend mere human emotions. She felt no jealousy for the two
other women who doted on Kreshnik. They were his brides. They were
her sisters. She had felt nothing for the fourth they’d left
behind, knowing that that one would be replaced, as would she when
her service had drawn to a close.

It was a certainty that did not concern her.
It was as it should be. It was at it had been. She would live in
the moment and, when the time came, die in it. She could ask for
nothing more. She longed for nothing more than dying by her
Master’s hand or dying for him. She was an extension of her Master,
and he would slough her off just as she clipped and shaped dead
nail from his claws.

The bride polished his nails as the Master
waited anxiously before his television.

“Okay…”

“Light weight, baby. All you.”

“Okay, let’s do this.”

“On your three, B.”

At 6’4” and three hundred and thirty five
pounds, Father Mark was one of the largest men of the cloth the
archdiocese of Rome had ever slapped a collar on. A former college
football player turned divinity student, he loomed over the rear of
the flat bench on which Boone lay.

“One,” Boone grunted, his hands affixed to
the Olympic bar above him.

“It’s you, B, it’s you—”

As a boy, one of Mark’s favorite stories had
been biblical, that of Samson and his immense strength. The priest
had just finished his fourth set on the bench, knocking off six
smooth reps with 455 on the Olympic bar. He and Boone had been
trading places and pyramiding up in weight, from their earliest
warm-ups with one forty five pound plate on each side of the bar to
two and three and then four with a quarter thrown on each end to
bring it up to more than four hundred and fifty pounds.

“Two—”

“You baby! You!”

Boone had stripped the twenty-five pounder
off his side of the bar and slapped another forty five on, bringing
the total to five forty-five pound plates on that end. Father Mark
had raised an eyebrow but didn’t bother to ask.

Mark had the strength of a beast in the
field, but Boone, though shorter and leaner than the priest, was
stronger. Boone had retard strength. Mark had seen Boone lift some
insane iron in the years they’d trained together, and if the guy
had it in his head that he could bench five hundred today, well
then, Mark would be there for a lift off. And he’d be there to pull
the weight off Boone’s chest if he had to.

So Mark had slapped another wheel on his side
of the bar and Boone had sat down on the end of the bench.

“This ain’t shit—” Boone had sputtered,
psyching himself up.

“This weight ain’t shit, B!” Father Mark had
yelled back at him. “This weight is your bitch! Do this shit B! Do
this!”

“Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck—” Boone had banged
his fist against the side of his head a few times, arched his back,
got under the bar and secured his grip.

“Three!” Boone grunted and Father Mark heaved
the cambered bar from the supports, using his elbows to brace it.
He drew back and Boone steadied the weight above his chest for a
moment before lowering the iron to his chest, touching the light
flannel shirt he wore, then exhaling and pressing.

“Light weight!” Father Mark spat as Boone
locked out the first rep. When they benched they saved the locking
out for their heavier sets. Their reps with 135, 225, and 315 had
been short and choppy, seemingly effortless. Mark had
felt
405 and the six with 455 had taken everything from him that he was
going to be able to give it today.

Boone lowered the bar for a second time to
his flannel, open over a sleeveless t-shirt. Mark watched him
carefully. A few times in the past he’d had to pull the bar off the
guy’s chest. Boone was never scared of the weight. When Boone got
it in his mind that he was going to war with the iron he went to
war and he took no prisoners, even if his body failed him.

The bar went up again, slower this time.

“Mine!” Boone sputtered, his face beat red,
his back arching, his work boots driving into the rubber mats on
the floor.

“Yours!” At the bench next to theirs, the
group of Italian kids in their wife beater t-shirts had stopped
lifting and were watching, wide-eyed.

“One more—” Boone gasped and lowered the bar
a third time to his chest and Mark wondered if he was going to
clear the nipple line or if the weight would stall on his friends’
torso.

Sure enough, the bar started to rise. Boone
grunted and heaved, his booted feet pushing through the floor, his
lower back arching more, his upper arms inching up to parallel with
the floor.

“Come on!” Father Mark roared down at him.
“Do this! Do this!”

The bar wavered on its ascent and a couple of
the Italian kids yelled some kind of encouragement but Boone and
Father Mark were in their own little world, a man against five
hundred pounds and the forces of gravity and another man watching
over him.

The bar inched up but Mark
knew
and he
reached down and gripped it and just like that Boone thrust it the
remaining few inches to a complete lockout. Mark guided it back to
the supports and the bar slammed home, the plates clanging against
one another.

Boone sat up on the bench, breathing hard.
The flannel shirt had dark circles under his armpits from the
sweat, and this had been their first exercise of the workout
routine. The Italian kids were talking to one another and one of
them was flexing his pecs and looking down the cleavage.

“Good set,” apprised Father Mark. He wore a
boat top over a string tank top and the blood had suffused his
pectorals, his upper chest flooded bright red.

“How much did you help me?”

“I just touched the bar. Honest.”

“Priest wouldn’t lie, right?”

“Priests lie,” said Father Mark. “But I
wouldn’t lie to you, Boone.”

“Priests lie? No shit.” Boone shook his head
and beads of sweat flew off to the black rubber mats on the
floor.

“Yeah, lying’s only a venial sin.” Mark
started to pull the forty fives off one end of the bar and sliding
them onto a weight tree next to the bench.

“Remind me, why’d you get into the priesthood
again?” Boone stood and stretched his arms out, his chest tight
already, pumped with blood.

“The boys,” quipped Mark, nodding over to the
Italian kids. “The boys.”

“Sick bastard.” Boone laughed and yanked a
plate off the other end of the bar. “What d’ya want to do
next?”

“Inclines. Dumbbells.”

“This gym only goes up to one-eighties.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we benched first
then, right?”

“When’s that GH from China coming in, B?”
Father Mark asked in the locker room.

“The Jintropin? Next week. Why, you
interested?”

“Fuck no. Just want to know when I can start
looking for side effects in your ass is all. Acromegaly, that kind
of shit.”

“How’s my hand look to you?” Boone took his
hand off the syringe long enough to flip the priest the bird.

Both men were exhausted, spent from an
intense workout. Father Mark spooned some rice and chicken from a
Tupperware container into his mouth. He was ravenous after every
workout. Boone rarely ate right after a workout and Mark wondered
how the guy did it.

Nothing was normal about Boone though,
thought the priest. They’d known each other since they were both
kids, lost in the city’s group- and foster-home systems. At least
Boone had had a foster family, tried to take him in, make him feel
like one of them. Mark hadn’t had that.

“You still doing a thousand milligrams a
week?” the priest asked, referring to the vial of testosterone
Boone was filling his syringe from.

“Nah,” Boone answered matter-of-factly. “I’m
up to two fifty a day.”

“Two fifty? That means you’re running, what,
seventeen hundred a week?”

“Seventeen fifty,” corrected Boone.

“Well,” Mark chewed his chicken and rice.
“That’s some bullshit there.”

“I heard Yates does five
thousand
a
week,” said Boone, and it sounded like he admired the idea. Dorian
Yates was the six-time Mr. Olympia.

“Yates never did that kind of shit. Plus he’s
retired. Where’d you hear that?”

“I didn’t. I just made it up.” Boone removed
the needle from the rubber stopper and put down the vial. He held
the syringe up and tapped the side of it. Both men watched the
bubbles in the oil-based liquid float to the top.

One thousand seven hundred and fifty
milligrams a week, on top of who knew what else Boone was popping
into his system. Father Mark worried about his friend, but it
wasn’t the steroids or growth hormone or any other muscle-building
substance he used or might use that worried him. Those took their
time to kill, if they could really kill you at all. Mark worried
more about the recreational drugs he knew Boone indulged in.

If Boone thought nothing of ingesting
thousands of milligrams of androgens and anabolics a week, god knew
how much booze and blow he could consume. Father Mark didn’t know
much about his birth mother but he knew she was Irish and he liked
to think this and his sheer size explained how he could hold his
liquor, but there was no way he could fathom how Boone held
his.