Rule of Vampire (2 page)

“You better get his nose out of the sand,” the shorter cop said. He hurried over and turned Stuart over. There was blood all over his neck and down his chest. She’d bitten the artery, as she’d been taught, and the blood began spurting up toward the policeman, who cursed and fell backward. The boy was going to bleed out in seconds. All that wonderful sweet blood going to waste.

“What the…?” the tall cop cried. “What’s going on here?”

Jamie was backing away. She could try to explain, but what was the point? They weren’t carrying firearms; there was nothing they could do to stop her.

She turned and ran, and she knew that to the two cops, it would look as if she had disappeared into the darkness.

Chapter 2

“Terrill has been found,” Hargraves intoned as if it was gospel. He had the appearance of a 10-year-old boy, and it was always slightly humorous that he was so serious. “Horsham is dead.”

Fitzsimmons met this news with a kind of glee. Council meetings had been entirely too tame and routine lately, as far as he was concerned. They were meeting in an old, staid financial firm in London, but it was still a far more modern meeting place than the drafty castles they’d been meeting in for most of their history, much less the bare caves of their first meetings. As far as Fitzsimmons was concerned, this was the first bit of interesting news to be brought for their review in what seemed like centuries.

He was about to say “Good!” when Southern beat him to it. Southern could always be counted on to react first, without thinking. He was a tall, aristocratic man who had added gray streaks to his beard and hair, though his face and hands were without blemish. He was one of the richest men in England and in the news often, so he’d taken the trouble to create the façade that he was aging like a normal human.

Fitzsimmons preferred to stay in the shadows. He looked ordinary in every way: brown hair, slightly overweight, medium height, a forgettable face. It wasn’t by accident. He’d cultivated that look for millennia.

“That’s good news,” Southern said. “Horsham dead and Terrill found. I presume the two items are related?”

Everyone knew that Horsham had hated Terrill and had been searching for him for years to exact revenge.

“It appears so,” Hargraves said.

“Then Terrill did us a favor,” Fitzsimmons said. “We were going to have to take care of Horsham one of these days anyway. He was culling the humans a little too vigorously for our safety.”

“Yet,” interjected Peterson, ever the legal scholar. He was the rare vampire who had been bitten when he was an old man, and he’d never totally lost his fussy-old-man ways. “Horsham wasn’t doing anything illegal.”

Fitzsimmons turned to his colleague and raised his eyebrows slightly, as if to say,
When has that ever stopped us from doing what is necessary?

There was barely a quorum for this meeting: five members out of the ten total. Even that many attendees was rare these days. Yes, it had been entirely too boring for entirely too long.

But a quorum is a quorum,
Fitzsimmons thought,
and that means decisions can be made.

“I vote that we approach Terrill for membership in the Council,” he said. “I believe Partridge has wanted out for some time now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time he attended a meeting.”

“Terrill won’t come,” Susan Clarkson said. The four male vampires turned toward her, surprised she had spoken. It was ever so enlightened of them to have voted in a female vampire, but they didn’t really expect her to contribute.

“And why is that?” Fitzsimmons asked, though he already knew.
Better it comes from her,
he thought.

“Terrill refuses to feed on humans,” she said. Her face was blank, and it was hard to get a read on what she thought of this remarkable fact. She was a Nordic blonde, classically good-looking, but she was so cold that her looks could only be admired from a distance.

“How very odd,” Hargraves intoned, and the rest of them laughed.

“Nevertheless,” Fitzsimmons said, “he is among the oldest of us, and we could perhaps benefit from an alternative viewpoint.”

“Is it true that Michael was his Maker?” Peterson asked. Though he appeared older than the rest of them, he was barely more than a baby vampire himself. He’d been voted onto the Council because he was so much more conversant with modern ways than the rest of them.

“So it’s said,” Fitzsimmons answered.
Hogwash,
he thought.
Michael is a myth.
“If so, imagine how wise his advice will be.”

“What? That we should become cow lickers?” Southern scoffed. “I’d rather you drove me out into the middle of the desert and left me there to burn. Nevertheless, I second the motion. We need some new blood, so to speak. All those in favor?”

All of them raised their hands but Peterson, which was more or less meaningless because he pretty much voted against everything, for reasons no one could discern.

“What if he won’t come?” Clarkson asked.

“I move that we appoint Clarkson to bring him back, by any means necessary,” Fitzsimmons quickly followed up. Good for her. She was following his instructions exactly, though she wouldn’t be expecting this last bit of inspiration.

“Wait,” she began to object, but it was already too late. The others were raising their hands, even Peterson, and she fell silent. For once, her countenance took on some emotion as she shot Fitzsimmons a poisonous look.

“Terrill must learn that he is one of us,” Hargraves said. “He has been free too long.”

They all nodded in agreement, and again Fitzsimmons felt a moment of giddiness.

This was going to be fun.

“Shall we eat?” Hargraves asked.

Though they were meeting in an office of a reputable bank, it was a back room where few, if any, employees ever wandered. If they had, they would have seen an odd table in the middle of the room, with a concave surface, narrowing at one end, where there was a drainage hole. A medical student might have recognized it as an autopsy table, if he was observant enough to look past the polished oak and the carvings of what appeared to be gargoyles on the thick legs.

At the center of the concave depression, there was a bundled-up object that occasionally, throughout the meeting, had twitched. Now Hargraves removed the covering to reveal the vampire beneath, naked, her mouth covered with duct tape, her hands and feet bound. She was short and blonde, and a little chubby. Fitzsimmons was pretty sure he’d seen her around the offices.

“What did she do?” he asked idly.

Peterson picked up the mallet and the wooden stake in front of him and said, “Rule number one, I think. Consorting with a human.” It really didn’t matter. The Rules were just an excuse, and most everyone knew it. Certainly no one on the Council had any illusions.

Peterson shrugged and put the point of the stake over the captive vampire’s heart. She was screaming at the top of her lungs through the gag, but they’d gotten so good at this that it came out as no more than a loud hum.

Peterson brought the mallet down without fanfare. The stake had been sharpened so that it slid easily between the vampire’s ribs and into her heart. The Council members watched as the life went out of her eyes. Blue blood welled up around the wooden stake and started to drain away.

They leaned over and sank their fangs into her soft body, tearing away mouthfuls of her flesh. Their faces took on a blue glow as the vampire blood covered them. Human blood was great, but vampire blood was addicting.

In the back of Fitzsimmons’s mind, he knew that they had gone over the edge, that vampires were intent on consuming each other. The Rules of Vampire, which had been created by Terrill to save their kind, were instead going to be their downfall.

Chapter 3

Bend, Oregon, was becoming a city––or so the residents told themselves. But to Terrill, it was still a quaint little town. It wasn’t so big that he could fail to notice the three black Cadillac Escalades that had begun following him around. They had windows with just enough tinting to allow a vampire to survive in the daylight.

But why would they be following him? As far as he knew, Horsham had been his last enemy, and Horsham was gone forever: finally and most definitely gone.

Terrill sighed. He’d been enjoying himself for the first time in ages. Sylvie really seemed to like him, though neither of them was brave enough to use the word “love” just yet. The word had almost slipped out of him a couple of times as they luxuriated on the grass in the afternoon sun, holding hands, her head on his chest where the silver cross was fused to his skin.

The wounds had healed around the cross, and it was simply part of him now. Occasionally, Father Harry would ask him to stand up and show his cross to the congregation, as if he was a prize bull. The congregation liked Father Harry enough that they were overlooking his increasingly bizarre sermons about demons and hellfire. After all, Father Harry was a bit of a miracle himself, as he’d been shot in the belly but survived the carnage that that maniac Horsham had inflicted on the police station.

The townsfolk accepted Terrill as an odd but likeable eccentric. He volunteered at the Catholic soup kitchen most days and had become a trusted friend and confidant to many of the homeless. Crazy or addled or drug addicted, it didn’t matter: he embraced them all.

He was loving life. Because it
was
life. He was alive, his heart was beating, and who would’ve ever thought that would happen? When the sun beat down on his head, at worst, it gave him a sunburn. He sometimes missed his old strength and speed, but he didn’t need it. He certainly didn’t need his ability to see in the dark, because most nights he was home in bed, with Sylvie.

He’d once been vampire, but no more. He was immortal no longer. He could die tomorrow, and it didn’t bother him in the least. He was content.

So why were they following him?

Terrill approached one of the Escalades at a stoplight, but the SUV sped away.
Well, that’s fair,
he thought. Throwing open the door wouldn’t have been healthy for the vampires inside. He’d wait until evening and see if they’d talk to him then.

He walked home most days. St. Francis, one of local Catholic churches, was downtown, and he and Sylvie had settled into a home on the west side. It was an outrageously expensive house for being so tiny, and it was a long stretch to call it a Craftsman-style cottage, but Sylvie loved it and that’s all that mattered to him. Terrill was wealthy beyond anyone’s imaginings––but even Sylvie only had clues about that.

He was ready to give all that wealth away. He was just trying to figure out how to go about it. Turned out that giving away money effectively was almost as complicated as earning it in the first place––not that he’d really had to work at it. Time had been on his side. “Compound interest is a vampire’s best friend” was the phrase that was often used, and Terrill believed he’d probably coined it himself, long ago, so long ago that he could barely remember it.

His memory of the long, bloody centuries was fading, thankfully. He was feeling more the age of his human body, in his mid-thirties, tall, lanky, and dark, and slowly gaining a potbelly from all the home-cooked meals. He’d noticed his first genuine gray hair a few weeks ago, and wrinkles and spots were appearing in strange places for no apparent reason.

Sylvie was teaching him modern ways. She was barely old enough to drink, though her working life had mostly been spent in one brewpub or bar after another. Her hair was glossy black and thick and curling, her eyes were wide and dark, her nose was long and narrow, and when you took her in parts, she should have been ugly, but she was gorgeous in an oddly put-together way.

She greeted him at the door, and he could tell from the look in her eyes that she’d been thinking about her sister and that she was going to ask him The Question. One thing about Sylvie: you never had to wait for her to get to the point.

“Have you found Jamie yet?” she said without preamble.

He wasn’t sure why she had such faith in him, faith that he could find her sister. Jamie was a vampire and he’d once been a vampire, and that was connection enough for Sylvie. But even more importantly, he was Jamie’s Maker. And it was true that he could probably guess some of her moves: she’d go somewhere that was mostly cloudy and overcast, she’d want to blend in, and she probably wouldn’t have taken public transportation, so she couldn’t have gone far.

Of course, she could’ve stolen a car and be all the way across the country for all Terrill knew, but he sensed that she was near––probably in Oregon or one of the neighboring states. She was a baby vampire, without a mentor, and she’d want to stay close to home.

But his real ace in the hole was his connection to the street people who passed through town. They had a tendency to keep moving and to be aware of all the hiding places. They went unnoticed and yet were everywhere, observing everything.

Grime had mumbled something about “I… ge… er…,” which Terrill had translated as “I’ll get her.” And that was good enough for Terrill.

Meanwhile, old Perry had made it his job to ask every transient who passed through St. Francis about Jamie, and they answered him when they wouldn’t have answered Terrill or Father Harry. No matter how much the two of them were respected, they weren’t of the brotherhood. Perry was a lifelong hobo and knew everyone.

Jamie’s looks––red-haired, freckled, and gorgeous––were unusual enough that Terrill thought there was at least a chance she’d be noticed, especially if she was trying to hole up in less-reputable places––and she was probably going to gravitate toward many of the same places where the homeless congregated.

Terrill snapped out of his reverie, aware that Sylvie was staring at him, waiting for his answer. “Not yet,” he told her. “The last time anyone saw her, she was heading south, so I’ve been asking a lot of questions about areas to the south of us. I don’t think she’d go
too
far south, though, because she’ll want to stay in the shade.”