Nightlord: Sunset (9 page)

I stepped up to her and put my arms around her, reaching behind.  She looked at me with half-lidded eyes and whispered, inhumanly low, “Wilt thou taste me, my lord?”

“Aye,” I whispered back.

Maybe because my hearing was keyed down to hear her, I heard the clicking.

I lifted my gaze to sweep the front yard.  There’s a big circle drive, a large expanse of lawn inside it, and a hedge along the inside edge of the circle.

I don’t think I’d have seen anything with normal eyes.  They were dressed in dark, matte colors.  They had been perfectly still, waiting.  The one had only moved enough to bring his weapon to bear and click the safety off.

He fired almost immediately.

I pushed Sasha, hard, to one side, using the momentum to propel myself the opposite direction.  I was mildly lucky; the rocket impacted on Sasha’s side of the door, missing us both, but flames bloomed like an incandescent flower on the front wall.  Incendiary warheads made it instantly to the #2 spot on my fecal roster.

I got bathed in a wash of flame.  My hair singed and burned, and my clothes caught.  I threw myself off the porch—it seemed to take forever to reach the ground—and rolled like a panicked log until I didn’t feel on fire.  I was in a lot of pain, and not just from the blast of fire; I accidentally bit my tongue with these inconvenient fangs—they tend to pop out when I’m overexcited, day or night.  They punched a hole right through my tongue and it almost hurt worse than the burns.

The high-pitched feminine screaming, however, did nothing to improve my mood.  I was up again as soon as I was extinguished.

Vision: Sasha on fire, screaming and writhing.  The three men were on their feet, pouring streams of bullets into her. 

First things first, after all.

This was their main mistake; they chose to finish off Sasha, or try to.  The guns were chattering, some sort of submachine guns.  Bullets were popping when they hit her, blowing chunks out.  If they’d known what a job of killing it would be, they might have focused on me and we would have been in trouble.  I can only assume
they
assumed Sasha to be the one I created, instead of the other way around.  I suppose they felt she would be easy to finish off, and then they could focus on me.  That’s the only explanation I can think of, anyway.  I’ll never know for sure.

I did not consciously think of killing them; I simply moved to do it.  Extinguishing Sasha, nursing my hurts, running away—these were all considerations after the fact.  At the moment, there was just a heavy pulse, a sort of throbbing in my blood that had nothing to do with a heartbeat.

I plowed into the trio at full tilt.  I don’t know how fast that is, but I do know I left accelerating footprints deep in the lawn the whole way. 

The guys I ran between and clipped spun away like pins from a wrecking ball.  The third one I slammed square into; he didn’t so much bounce away as crunch, like he’d been hit by a car.  He did a nice job of helping me come to a halt, though, and I was grabbing for his weapon even as I hammered into him.  I could feel a stinging, burning ache on both shoulders and all along my front—a different, nastier burning sensation, like my skin was trying to flake and peel.  Possibly what acid would feel like.  I don’t know.

I ripped the gun out of his dying hand and sprayed the remainder of the clip into the one who was closest to regaining his feet.  The explosions blasted chunks out of his hip, chest, and head—and were much more effective on humans than on people who don’t necessarily need most of their internal organs.  A vampire isn’t alive—well, not at night, certainly—and is really just a corpse that doesn’t care to sit still.  We can soak up appalling amounts of damage without really feeling it.

Shooting him turned out to be a mistake; a white light blazed out of the wounds as he staggered back and fell.  The light blinded me for a second.  Meanwhile, the guy still on the ground wasn’t trying to get up.  He just aimed at me and let fly with what was left in his magazine.

I took four of the bullets.  Each one dug a hole about two inches or so into me—one in the leg, one in the abdomen, one in the lower lung, one in the upper chest, all along the right side.  Each exploded and took with it a sizable bite of me.  Explosive bullets made it to #3 on the roster.

I snarled.  No, I didn’t just snarl, I
growled
.  The throbbing increased to a pulsing thud in my body and mind; a reddish stain crept into my vision.  The bullets hurt more than anything I ever felt before.  I was not just hurt, I was
wounded
—I
felt
hurt, even if I didn’t really suffer from it.   It was worse than breaking a leg on a summer job; that had been an accident.  This was deliberate.  It was worse than the agony of falling down concrete steps in the rain and cold because a migraine gave me momentary vertigo.  It hurt because I’d been shot, for God’s sake!  Being shot is supposed to hurt!  It was an assault upon my person, and the hurt went deeper than the flesh.

But vampires don’t understand the meaning of “shock” unless it involves lightning—and now he needed to reload.

I threw the gun I had in hand, hitting him in the upper arm; I’d been hoping for his head, but my eyes were still blinking away bright spots.  It hurt his arm without breaking it.  It still slowed him in his attempt to reload.  I approached as quickly as I could.  I was feeling a lot less chipper now, but the rage in my blood allowed only thoughts of attack.  He remained prone and slammed a fresh clip into the gun.  He raised the folding stock to his shoulder, brought the gun into line…

… and I was close enough to grab it by the barrel.  I squeezed.  I wasn’t in a mood to consider the effects.  I have wondered, since, if I chose the best course of action.  As with so many things in life, the answer was both yes and no.

The gun blew up.  The bullet in the barrel exploded, rupturing it and sending bits of jagged metal around indiscriminately.  This I could stand, but I got the brunt of it.  Shrapnel bothered me slightly, like bee stings bother a normal person.  He took some shrapnel, but not anything lethal.

When the magazine took the shock of the explosion and self-detonated… well, he was the one holding
that
end.  He wound up missing both hands and part of his face.  I planted a boot in the remains of his face—literally; my heel wound up kissing the back of his sinuses—before I considered the screaming still coming from Sasha.  The whole fight had lasted less than four seconds.

I hurried over to her.  She was still on fire; charring had set in all over her body.  She had no hair left and apparently no clothes.  She was rolling on the ground, but her flesh was combusting.  I didn’t waste time wondering at the fact that human flesh wouldn’t ignite at such temperatures.  We aren’t exactly human.

I grabbed her, ignoring the way my hands sizzled and bubbled in the heat.  I ran with her, rounding the house in record time, hindered slightly by the slowly-closing hole in my right thigh.  We both splashed into the wading pool, submerging completely.  The flames sizzled and steam boiled up, but the Sasha-consuming fire went out.  The throbbing in my body began to slow.  This let me think of other things.

I was up and out of the water again immediately.  Sasha would be fine there while I attended to details.  What was she going to do?  Drown?

As I zipped around to the front, my first order of business was to use one of their guns to make sure each of the assassins was really dead.  I didn’t want to find a stream of bullets stitching my spinal column.  Head shots are sure shots.

Then I grabbed a hose and started putting out the front of the house.  It was touch and go, but whatever they used had obviously been intended to start fires on readily-flammable things—like vampires, maybe?—not as a materiel destruction device.  Witness the low-power explosion and the huge initial wash of fire.

I did succeed in putting the front façade of the house out.

When everything was dark and silent except for the drip of water, I turned off the hose.  I felt tired.  No, more than tired—bone-weary.  I don’t know if what’s-his-name ever did an experiment to determine if a vampire has an adrenalin high or not, but I believe there’s something similar, at least.  I was coming down from one to prove it.  I sat on the wet porch and started to shake, both from exhaustion and from what I’d just done.

I’d killed three men.  That was okay—they had been trying to kill Sasha and myself.  That squared up.  Fine.

I hadn’t thought about it.  I just fought.  Everything I did was by reflex and by impulse.  As before, I hadn’t considered any portion of the fight.  My conscious mind had been an observer—one lost in the performance.  But this time… I had been angry.  Enraged.  It was a level of fury I’d never felt before.  I’d killed, in any fashion it took.  Bare hands.  Bullets.  I would have torn them limb from limb if that was the most direct route to their deaths.

It scared me.

I sat there for a while before I realized I was getting hungry.  My wounds were visibly healing, but slowly—and my hunger was getting stronger.  I didn’t have time to sit and brood; I had other problems.

I headed around back to get Sasha.  The pool had a floating layer of black ashes and oily scum; I stepped down into the water.  Sasha was right where I’d left her.  I carried her to the edge and set her on the side.  Her skin was black where she still had skin; a lot of her body showed naked, cooked muscles and charred patches of bone.  She opened her eyes.  One was cloudy white, burned a bit, but the other focused on me.

“We live?” she asked, voice rough and cracked.

“We do,” I replied, and sat down on the edge of the pool next to her.  “They don’t.”

She nodded, slightly, and closed her eyes.  “Blood,” she rasped. 

I rose slowly, still tired, but there was more to do.  I lifted her; she seemed incredibly heavy.  I staggered as I carried her into the kitchen.  There, I broke out what blood we had in the house and we had a drink or twelve.

FRIDAY, JUNE 17
TH

I
t was well after midnight before we finished off the stocked blood.  I don’t know how many gallons we drank, but it was a lot.  Sasha got the lion’s share—not because she wanted it, necessarily, but because I insisted.  I was hideously hungry—or is that “thirsty”?  My body was trying to pull itself together and was apparently consuming the last of my reserves in the process.  I felt like something was clawing its way out of my stomach.  But I realized, as bad as that was, Sasha must have it worse.  So I held her down and poured blood down her throat.  She lay there and swallowed when I sat on her and upended a bottle in her mouth.

The blood of humans is a more powerful than cattle, just as their life-essences are.  I think three human beings would have been enough to put us back to rights.  Maybe it has something to do with sentience, as well as size.  I resolved to check out a whale and a dolphin for comparison, sometime.  Or maybe it’s just because human blood is so nearly identical to ours.  It has everything we need and in the right proportions.  I dunno—yet.  Someday.

I also discovered a useful fact:  pouring blood directly into a wound works wonders.  I’m glad the hole in my tongue had a lot of blood poured on it.  My fangs make wounds that don’t want to close.  A handy thing when you’re a blood-drinking fiend, I guess.  I got to watch—and feel!—the bullet-craters in my flesh fill in.  It was like the cosmetic effect of Sasha’s burned skin, but the open wounds let blood get inside.  A burn has damaged flesh underneath an outer layer, too deep for that sort of treatment.  I suppose we could peel back a layer of burned skin and pour blood under it as well as on it, but it’s a lot less painful just to drink!

As for the regeneration… I don’t know how to describe how it felt.  You know the itching feeling you sometimes have under a scab when it’s getting better?  Imagine that magnified a thousand times—so powerful that the flesh feels like it’s squirming.  Like it’s alive and moving and not entirely
you.

I also wondered where all the blood went.  Think about it.  I know I slugged back about four gallons.  That’s not an insignificant amount of anything.  Yet I was not swollen like a bloated tick; I was as slim as ever, undistorted.  Sasha sucked down at least twice that, not counting what I poured on her.  She didn’t gain a hundred pounds of weight.

Maybe it’s just magic and I should quit wondering.

Anyway, like I said, we finished off the entire blood supply in the house.  We were both feeling pretty close to normal—well, as normal as a dayblood can feel at night—but still weaker than usual and tired.  We cleaned up and dressed again.  Then we went out front with a couple of tarps, gathered up the remains—salvaging undamaged equipment—and drove the bodies out into the hills. 

The bodies weren’t too difficult to move.  A pruning hook was all it took to slide or roll one onto a tarp, then we would drag the tarp.  I didn’t bother checking for the marks the Fist puts on their people; we could feel the effects of it just by standing near.  Their garments had been thoroughly covering, complete with ninja hoods.  The holes I’d made shone white from the light within.

It’s good to know who your enemies are.  Sort of.

Sasha had a nice, deep chasm in mind for a garbage dump.  It was far back in a cave—more of a cleft in a hillside—concealed almost totally by the overgrowth around it.  I didn’t ask how many bodies were down there; I could just barely smell old rot and mold.  We disposed of the bodies, tarps and all, by shoving them under the brush until they cleared the lip of a drop.  I heard them thud more than once on their way down.

Then it was time for lunch.

Sasha drove us into town while I went through the stuff we’d collected.  Two working submachine guns and two loaded magazines, three pistols, three silver fighting knives, and something I presumed was a bazooka.  It looked like something from a World War Two movie, and I found spots where serial numbers and other identifying information had been scratched off.  No ammunition for it, though.

And that was
all
.  I thought that weirder than anything else.

Well… okay, one of the weirder things about these guys.

I mean they didn’t even have wallets.  Not even a picture in a breast pocket of a loved one.  No loose change.  No lucky rabbit’s foot.  No car keys. 
Nothing
.  It was like they’d deliberately divested themselves of everything but what was mission-oriented.  Or just sprang into existence on our lawn.  Hell, if I’d seen a parachute harness I would have felt a lot better; it would have meant they were just people, real people, not aliens beaming down just to shoot at us!

I picked up one of the knives.  It tingled slightly as I held it.

“Silver bothers us?” I asked.

“No.”

I touched the flat of the blade, gingerly, as though it might be hot.  It tingled strongly, as if a mild current was going through it… but it was fading even as I sat there.  I could feel it.  I put it away.

“So where are we going?”

“To eat.  We may need our strength.”

“I can’t argue that.  But at this hour?  The clubs are closed and the all-night supermarkets will look at us funny when the customers start falling down.”

“There are ways,” she replied, darkly.

I didn’t argue, just went along.

In short order, we were in one of the local hospitals.  She parked and we both got out.  As we walked through the parking lot, I cleared my throat.

“We’re going to raid the blood supply?”

“No.  We are going to do our job.”

“Our job?”

“Yes.  And I am going to teach you something, as well.”

I was too tired to argue.  We went inside and the nurse at the front desk looked up.  I could feel Sasha touching her with dark lines of force, twisting them inside her.  The nurse looked blank for a moment, then shrugged to herself and looked back down to her magazine.

Sasha led me past reception and into an elevator.

“What was that?” I asked.

She smiled, slightly.  “With practice, you can learn to sense things within the spirit.  One may pick and choose what to drain.  I took from her the… concept of our being.  Not her memory, exactly… but she was unable to see us and will be unable to even conceive that we exist for a while.”

I tried to keep the horrified look off my face.  Sasha had just
eaten a piece of someone’s
mind
.  Maybe I’m being hypocritical, but that just pushes all the wrong buttons with me.  My mind is
me
.  Nobody fools with it.  It’s
wrong
to mess with someone’s head, to
change
them!  Kill me if you must, shoot me if you feel like it—I’ll return the favor.  But mess with my
head?
  That’s where I keep all my most important stuff! 

I tried not to shudder.

“How long does it last?” I asked, trying to keep my voice quiet, to act like it was a clinical question.  If this was a permanent thing, we were going to have a long, long talk right there in the elevator.

“It depends on how hard you draw on it.  It is… like… squeezing your wrist to put your hand to sleep.  Squeeze for a little while and it merely fades a bit.  Squeeze harder and it will go completely numb.  Squeeze hard enough and long enough and it will go completely limp.  Do that even more and it will die forever.”

“We can do that?” I asked, feeling queasy.  I don’t like the idea of reaching into someone’s mind and… and…
altering
it.  Drinking down their whole being?  Swallowing their blood?  Devouring their life-force?  Eating their soul?  No problem.  But to reach in and
tweak
their selves… It’s one thing to kill a man.  It’s another thing to break his mind.

That shudder finally escaped.

“Oh, yes,” she went on, not noticing.  “You can learn to eliminate many things from a human’s heart.  Fear, joy, sorrow, love… almost anything.  But you devour it, make no mistake; you will feel some small portion of it.  I am somewhat self-conscious right now, and I am very aware you are with me.” She took my hand and held it tightly.  “And I am glad you are.”

“I am pleased to be here,” I replied, trying to shake the nauseous feeling in my soul.

She nodded and leaned close to me; I put my arm around her and held her.

The elevator stopped; the doors opened.  We stepped out and went down the hall to a waiting area.  A few people were there, even at this hour.  Two men and three women, obviously not all together.  One of the women looked like she hadn’t slept for some time.  The men both needed to shave.

“What now?” I asked, quietly.

“Sit.”

We sat.  Sasha still held my hand and I could feel the slow uncoiling of her spirit into mine.  I welcomed it in and touched hers.  That was a huge act of trust on my part, especially after what she’d just told me.  My mind is
mine
and I’d sooner share my underwear.  We spoke then with intimate feelings and urgings, but without words.  It was a touching of our inner selves, a joining of her soul and mine, if you will.  If we were to put it into words…

Come with me.

Where are we going?

Walk with me and feed.

On who?

Those who long for us.

So I felt her uncoiling, and I stretched my dark reach out, coiling out with her through walls and plastic plants and hard chairs.  Tendrils touched on people—nurses, a doctor, the visitors…

A sick man. 
Ill unto death, struggling to live.

A hurt woman.  Broken and bloodied inside, held together with thread and glue and staples, supported somewhat by machines and even more by her will to live.

A child.  Sick and wasted, but awake and delighting in cartoons.

A man—ah… tendrils coiled into him, searching.  He was in the final stages of his cancer… it had metastasized, rogue cells circulating in his blood, latching on everywhere, spreading like a fungus in a cellar.  Everywhere was in pain, a whole world of it, but especially the places he had been opened to have cancers cut away.  He was more than just tired, he was exhausted.  The drugs to kill the pain could not do so without killing him; they could only dull his pain and his intellect with it.  He was waiting to die.

Sasha drew his life out, slowly, gently.  I could see how she touched him… the parts that thought, first.  They leaked away down the channels she laid out, flowing to her like bright water.  I could see it didn’t hurt; it looked like he was falling asleep.  Then she worked her way down from the highest places, draining each in turn, carefully, until she reached the root, the life-spark itself, flickering dim and wan in the depths of his husk.  She took it and consumed it and he was gone.

I found I was blinking back bloody tears.  I blotted at my eyes with a tissue—the waiting area had lots—and kept it hidden.  Reddish stains cause talk.

It made me think, too.  I’d killed people recently.  More than one, and on more than one occasion.  Did that bother me?  The first one was somebody I never even knew—but knew him in the moment of his passing.  Then there were the men at Travis’ place… and, tonight, three men who were trying to kill Sasha and me.  Did these bother me?

No, I decided.  I remembered the man I had devoured, and I hated the men who had hurt my friend, and the men that had tried to kill my Sasha.  No remorse, and only a little regret.

But this… this was not something I
had
to do.  It was something I felt, very intently, I was
supposed
to do.  This was how someone was supposed to die when I came near them.  To die peacefully and without pain—indeed, to have pain taken from them. 

That was the purpose of my kind: to be the doorway out of life when it was time to go.

Do you know
your
function?  How many people do, I wonder?  But at that moment, I saw what I was.  A vampire, yes… and one that understood what vampires are for.  Wolves bring down the weak of the herd to keep it strong.  Vampires do that for humans, too… but, having once been human, we have souls.  We are more than just predators; we also have compassion and pity—and, yes, love for our prey.

Sasha was still linked with me as I realized this, listening and feeling, and she smiled, eyes brimming redly.  I could feel her understanding and her love for me.  I think I really accepted, right then, that she
did
love me, not just some long-dead man in the mountains of southern France. And I loved her.

You can reach everywhere.