Charming (42 page)

H
unting monsters isn’t that much different from hunting anything else. Patience and good aim and the ability to be quiet are all good things, but what separates an excellent hunter from a competent one is the ability to put yourself in your target’s place.

For example, pretend you’re leading a vampire hive. Most of your members have been destroyed, and there are only a few of you left. Some burnout you don’t trust delivered your enemies into your hands because, he says, he wants them to suffer, but you tried to turn on him and kill him because, after all, where’s the advantage in having some backstabbing wack job running around knowing who and where you are? Only the wack job got away, and he took a sniper and the enemy you were most concerned about with him, back into the sunlight where you couldn’t follow.

How secure are you going to feel? Not very.

Now fast-forward a few hours.

You’ve been stuck in your lair all day with a few human prisoners, and you’re planning on getting the hell out of there as
soon as darkness falls. Maybe you’ll start making another lair somewhere else, or maybe you’ll try something different, or maybe you’ll concentrate on locating the blood bag who’s been causing you problems before you make any more long-term plans, but either way your first priority is going to be finding a new crib because you’re a planner, and the one thing that’s for sure is that you’re going to need shelter in twelve hours. Are you going to kill the prisoners? Not yet. You might play with them and drink from them and take your frustrations out on them and maybe even begin the process of turning them, but you don’t know what’s going to happen or which one of them is the most important to the people who might be coming after you, and they’re the only leverage you’ve got.

Take it a step further.

Now the sun has set. It’s dark and you can go outside now, but you don’t know what’s waiting out there for you. You’re a merciless predator and you’re not naturally suited to feeling like prey and it pisses you off. What are you going to do?

You’re going to send out some scouts, that’s what.

That’s why I was driving a stolen white pickup truck around in circles in a clearing at night, a beer in my hand, a baseball cap pulled over my head, and my CD player blaring. I wasn’t surprised when two vampires came walking toward me out of the darkness. One of them was a female with long stringy black hair and the other was a tall thin male with yellow peach fuzz on the top of his head. Both of them were dressed like vampire stereotypes, the male in a black trench coat and leather pants, the female in a sleeveless red top and black jeans and long dangling earrings that caught the truck’s headlights.

Two of Anne Marie’s Internet recruits.

What did surprise me was that I could feel something shifting behind my eyes. It felt like a puzzle was being pieced
together out of my optic nerves, or the world’s most complicated muscle spasm. And suddenly everything changed. I could still see colors, but the world wasn’t only distinguished by them anymore. A red glow suffused everything, but to varying degrees of brightness and intensity. The two vampires were lit up like a hand covering a flashlight bulb.

I was seeing in infrared. My God, I really was a full werewolf. I started to panic, but I reined it in. There were two predators right the hell there; I didn’t have time to freak out again. More than half a century of clamping a lid down on emotions that were threatening to boil over came to my aid then.

One thought in particular focused me: I had used infrared gear before, and the only time vampires show up in infrared is when they’ve been feeding on humans recently; otherwise their body temperature is corpse-cold. I had to struggle to let the surge of rage that followed that realization pass through me.

I turned as if I were going to slowly pull my pickup truck next to the vampires, then readjusted the steering wheel at the last moment and gunned the accelerator, aiming right toward them. There was no way I was going to hit them—their reflexes were way too fast for that—but I did scatter them. The tall male leaped over the pickup, pulling a rifle out from under his trench coat. He fired continuously and one-handed while in midair, but I don’t know where his shots went. I’m sure he had human memories of slow-motion Hollywood sequences in his mind, but trying to shoot a rifle one-handed while you’re jumping around like a kangaroo on crack takes practice, vampire or not.

The female simply stepped to the side of the truck like a matador dodging a bull, but I had been expecting this and opened the driver’s side door, putting my shoulder and the truck’s speed behind it. The door slammed into the vampire
and sent her rolling backward on the ground. Something went flying out of her hand, a gun probably, but I didn’t stop to see. I pressed the accelerator and saw the male vampire coming up behind me in my rearview mirror, first trying to aim his rifle at me with both hands while running and then tossing it aside. He’d probably used up his ammo and didn’t want to stop to reload.

I was only going forty miles an hour, and as soon as the male vampire caught up and jumped for the truck bed, I slammed on the brakes. The truck stopped and the vampire continued forward through the air. The lower half of his body smashed into the back of the truck cab and he flipped over it, tumbling onto the hood.

The vampire kept himself from falling off the truck by actually driving his fingers through the hood and stopping his skid. The last thing he saw when he looked up to snarl at me was the sawed-off shotgun I’d picked up off the passenger seat. I blew his head off through the windshield.

I threw the truck door open and jumped out, but I could see in the side-view mirror that I wasn’t going to make it. The female vampire hadn’t bothered trying to find her weapon but was coming straight at my back, fast. I pivoted, and her hands were still reaching to stop or grab the shotgun barrels she thought I was bringing around to point at her when the shotgun’s butt slammed into the side of her jaw. She was knocked sideways and went charging past me, rebounding off the truck door behind me and half tearing it off its hinges. She fell to the ground. She wasn’t knocked out, but she was disoriented enough that I was able to point the sawed-off at the back of her skull and end her right there. There wasn’t enough left of her head to send regeneration signals down her spinal column.

I tossed the shotgun back in the truck and climbed behind
the wheel. Then I drove to the edge of the clearing, where I would at least have the cover of trees while I prepared for the next step. Stepping out of the truck again, I pushed the front of the seat up enough to get to the secret weapon I had stashed behind the truck seats.

The huge canvas carryall was still thrashing and rocking when I unzipped it. Andrej was inside, battered and concussed, bound and gagged in one of the half dozen straitjackets I had found while surveying Dvornik’s storage room for useful supplies. The hatred in the eye that wasn’t swollen shut was so tangible that it felt like he was trying to push me back with a giant physical hand. I could smell his rage on the pheromones he was dumping out of his pores, and it made me want to snap his neck right there. He and his were to blame for what I’d become.

“Let’s go, sugarplum,” I told him.

36

T
racking the vampires’ scent trail back to their new escape tunnel wasn’t difficult. They hadn’t even bothered to disguise the exit point. Unfortunately the tunnel wasn’t as wide or high as the others had been. There wouldn’t be room to swing a sword if it came to that, or to throw myself anywhere but down.

A gentle air current pushed a multitude of smells my way—Sig, undead stink, decaying Cahill, the perfume I’d smelled at Steve Ellison’s, cigarette smoke, motor oil, deodorant, bleach, blood, infection, pus, urine, and fainter traces that I associated with Molly and Choo. One of the vampires I smelled was Anne Marie.

I slapped a pair of night-vision goggles on Andrej and pulled my own on over my head. His mouth was sealed with duct tape and he was still bound in a straitjacket, carrying a beige knapsack strapped on his shoulders.

For my part I had my wakizashi strapped to my back, one of Choo’s Glocks in my hand, and a silver steel knife sheathed
on my left hip. There was also a silver cross pendant hanging beneath my shirt.

I had been tempted to use Andrej as a human shield, but I needed him for later, so he was shuffling behind me. His feet were chained together just far enough apart that he could scuttle but not run, and while an escape artist could have gotten out of the straitjacket he was wearing, he or she couldn’t have done it without me hearing. I had told Andrej that I wasn’t leaving him behind—not alive, anyhow—and he had believed me enough that I wasn’t having to slow down.

There weren’t any traps, or if there were, I didn’t find them and they didn’t work. It was still maddening, forcing myself to move slowly in spite of the urgency that was making my blood surge. The cramped passage was lit in an eerie green, and it felt like I was forcing myself down some kind of bodily tract or canal so that I could be shit out or given birth to in hell.

Eventually I made my way to a bend where I could hear occasional shuffling movements. Dim multicolored pinpricks of light were cast on the tunnel wall before me as if a rainbow had vomited on it.

The moment I stopped and pulled Andrej toward me, a female voice echoed from around the bend. It was young and female and slightly nasal, with a North Carolina accent. “YOU’RE THE WEREWOLF WHO HUNTS VAMPIRES, RIGHT?”

I guess there were crosscurrents carrying my smell forward as well.

“I hunt a lot of things,” I said. “But I’m not the one who shot one of your vampires outside the tunnel a few days ago. You know the old guy who looks like he’s on steroids? He made that up so you’d go along with him.”

At the sound of my voice there was a slurred sound. It could have been vague recognition or protest, but it was Sig.

“SO YOU’RE JUST A BIG OLD PEACE-LOVING VAMPIRE FAN, I GUESS.” The voice reverberated with sarcasm. “THIS MORNING YOU SLIPPED WHILE YOU WERE SHAVING AND CUT THREE VAMPIRES’ HEADS OFF.”

“No, when I kill you, it’ll be on purpose,” I promised. “But I’m not a liar, and I’m not a maniac, and unless you made a very stupid mistake, you’ve got some people I want.”

“SO I GUESS YOU KILLED THAT OLD SON OF A BITCH WHO HATED YOU SO MUCH.” The voice was encouraging and amused. “I CAN SMELL HIS BLOOD ON YOU.”

Oh good. We were going to be friends after all.

“I’m going to send you something,” I said, readjusting the straps on Andrej’s straitjacket. “The guy carrying it is one of the other people who betrayed us, so I really don’t care if you shoot him or kill him or what, but you’re going to want to see what he’s got first.”

“MEET HIM HALFWAY, JANICE,” the voice commanded, then resumed addressing me. “AND I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW, MR. WEREWOLF, THAT MY TEETH ARE RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S NECK, AND IF ANYTHING HAPPENS THAT I DON’T LIKE, I’M TEARING IT UP.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. It wasn’t like Sig to keep her mouth shut this long.

“THAT OLD MAN GAVE JANICE SOME STUFF TO KEEP HER DOPED UP.” The voice was full of that fake sugary friendliness again. “SHE HASN’T COME DOWN OFF OF IT YET. TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, I’M JEALOUS.”

“Go ahead and try some,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

“I DID,” the voice said flatly. “IT DIDN’T DO ANYTHING. I’VE TRIED BEER, METH, COKE, HEROIN, HASH, SHROOMS… NOTHING DOES ANYTHING. EXCEPT BLOOD.”

“Yeah, that’s tough. Can we get on with this?” I said, and shoved Andrej forward so hard he almost fell.

“THAT DEPENDS ON WHAT WE’RE GETTING ON WITH.”

“We can try to kill each other later,” I said.

Andrej halted. I pointed the Glock at him. “You’re useful or you’re dead, Andrej.”

He waited two seconds before deciding not to test me. He shambled forward.

When he disappeared around the bend, I heard a different female voice say, “Stop right there.” Then I heard the sound of Andrej being shoved about, the backpack being unzipped, and then silence. Dead silence. No pun intended.