Staked Read online

  Actually the real reason I wasn’t turning to mist is that I couldn’t, didn’t know anyone who could. Animals, yes. Mist, no. I’d tried it once and instead of turning into a cloud, I’d gone translucent blue like Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Empire Strikes Back. It had felt like dying, all the life-force draining out of me, the world changing colors, blurring. Turning back had been hard, too. It had taken the better part of an hour, and once my body finally re-formed, I promised myself never to screw around with it again.

  Roger was the only one who’d seen me do it and we’d both agreed that I shouldn’t try it again. “It looked like you almost died, Eric,” Roger had told me. “I’d be scared of getting stuck that way.”

  I shuddered at the memory and came back to the present. Eight pairs of eyes stared at me from unconvincing giant Harryhausen-esque wolf heads.

  I tried talking again, but this time I spoke slowly and clearly. “Will you take me to your Alpha? Maybe we can work something out.” I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head.

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” I asked angrily.

  Two more whacks and my vision blurred; out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stake. It wasn’t one of those fancy things with a real weapon grip like proper vampire hunters use. A long jagged splinter jutted out from a mahogany spindle with a dark finish, like someone had snapped the stretcher off of an old rocking chair. Either these guys didn’t usually hunt vampires, or they weren’t used to taking prisoners. As the stake arced toward my chest, I tried to transform.

  I didn’t care what I turned into: bat, cat, snake, rat, frog, wolf, or raven. I can do them all, which is unusual. I even managed a flea once. The problem is that changing into anything takes concentration, and I didn’t have any to spare.

  My other option was to just give in to my anger and let myself go berserk. But going berserk would mean more dead werewolves and I needed to keep the body count down if I was going to find a way to make peace with the Alpha.

  Before I could think up Plan C, someone hit me again. My vision stretched and the lights went out as I felt the stake slide home. You learn something new every day. My lesson for today was: If you knock a vampire out before you stake him, you can drag him around in the back of your new pickup truck and he won’t know what’s happening.

  Even in my unconscious state, letting them beat me grated on my nerves. I should have been able to take them. It’s not like there was a full moon or anything. I know myths and legends talk about werewolves going crazy and eating people during the full moon, but as far as I can tell all the full moon does is make them bigger and meaner. I can’t ever remember which one is waxing or waning, but the moon looked like a sideways grin, so I figured these boys were at about half power.

  I decided to enjoy the nap. My night was fucked anyway. I’d already lost my Mustang. I didn’t want to lose anything else. Fighting werewolves isn’t like dealing with vampires. They travel in packs. The idea of two dozen werewolves tearing through the Demon Heart wasn’t pretty. If they had me, then they’d leave the club alone; they’d leave Marilyn and Roger and Tabitha alone.

  If I was lucky, they’d do what I was hoping and actually take me to their Alpha. Maybe we could work this out. I’d probably killed his son; he’d definitely killed my Mustang. It was an even trade from my perspective.

  I don’t know how long I was out, but my world came back in a sudden rush of pain. I swear stakes hurt worse coming out than they do going in. I was in a bag that smelled kind of like feathers, but there was flannel and something synthetic there, too. A sleeping bag. Cute. A ragged hole gaped in the bag over my chest where someone, one of my captors, I guessed, had ripped it open to remove the stake. I wasn’t on fire, which meant it was either still night out or I was in a covered area someplace.

  I fumbled with my watch, finally managing to hit the right button. A soft blue glow showed the time as 03:03, just after three in the morning. Still dark.

  Fangs and claws at the ready, I ripped my way out of the sleeping bag and looked around. Pickup truck. Parking lot. Woods. The smell of water filled my nostrils. It smelled clean…untainted…no chlorine. There was no sign of whoever had unstaked me.

  It was extremely dark…a real look-out-behind-you kind of dark, perfect for vampire vision. I took a few minutes to explore my surroundings. Crickets chirped loudly, a distant frog splashed down into lake water, and somewhere out in the night an owl hooted. The gravel lot was almost full of cars and trucks. A small building off to one side smelled like it contained a couple of poorly maintained restrooms. A concrete boat launch sloped gently down to the lake, and a set of concrete steps led down to a little marina where thirty or forty boat slips served as a waterside parking lot. There were only a few boats parked at the moment: a couple of pontoon boats, a speedboat, and a rickety-looking fishing boat made of aluminum.

  Dense woods covered the lakeshore opposite the marina and I could only make out one house, old but in good repair, its short wooden dock poking out into the lake, a moored pontoon boat bobbing gently with the natural rise and fall of the water.

  I remembered this place. It was called Orchard Lake. My family used to come out here when I was a kid. It was part of the county water supply, not exactly a state park, but a public lake. The homes were only accessible from the water; the absence of boats at the marina meant most of the residents were home.

  Far to the left of the marina, Orchard Dam kept the lake fat and happy. It also kept all that water from destroying the expensive developments that had sprung up downstream. Below the dam, only a little creek tumbled away through the woods, while the lake itself ran some fifteen miles in the other direction.

  Orchard Lake was old, a sprawling gem tucked away in a pocket of forest and mountains, slowly being encroached upon by overpriced suburbia. Sable Oaks, Greymont, and Harvest Estates bordered the Orchard Lake area, but none of them came within a mile of the lake itself. The lake homes were older houses, passed down through the families of blue collar workers, real salt of the earth folks.

  Back when we were alive, every time we’d get a little plastered, Roger would talk about how he was going to be rich one day and buy up Orchard Lake. He wanted to turn it into a hoity-toity community for rich old farts and politicians. A lot of people had the same idea. Over the years, countless developers had tried to purchase the land, but nobody would sell. The news always seemed to show the same old guy claiming, “My grandpa built this house with his own two hands,” and refusing to give in even at outlandish prices.

  I shook my head to clear it, wondering where the werewolf variety pack had gone. It was three in the morning. I’d been out for six hours or more, and Orchard Lake was only an hour or so from town.

  “Hello?” I called out. Silence.

  Why go through all the trouble of ambushing me only to unstake me in an abandoned marina and run away? Clearly, I did not understand the modern werewolf. All four trucks could be accounted for amid the other vehicles. Gravel crunching under my feet, I scouted the place a little more.

  As I followed the drive down to the boat launch, the scent of gunpowder and blood drifted over to me from the nearby woods. Werewolf blood. I followed the smell up and over the half of the mountain that the parking lot hadn’t claimed and found the werewolves easily enough.

  They’d been cut to ribbons, dead for at least an hour. It was worse than what I’d done to the werewolf in the alley the night before. I was pretty sure there were enough pieces to make most of eight werewolves.

  Just to check, I sifted through the bodies, stacking the heads in a neat little row. Two of them had obvious bullet holes. One shot had been close range to the temple; the fur was badly powder burned. Not the most pleasant of smells. The second one had been shot through the back of the head, and I didn’t see an exit wound.

  Morbid curiosity got the better of me and I cracked the skull open. The bullet wasn’t hard to find; I just followed the trail of blackened gray matter from the back of the skull to whe
re the bullet had lodged in the side of the frontal bone, above the nasal cavity and between the eyes.

  I’m not a big gun person, but the bullet looked weird even to me. On CSI when they pull the bullet out of a dead guy it looks like a little metal rock, but this one looked whole, casing included.

  My brain was fuzzy and my head hurt. Concentrate, I told myself. Each werewolf’s body had long jagged claw marks, and one had had his heart ripped out. Aside from the bullet wounds, the werewolves looked like they’d been torn apart by a vampire. It would look even more gruesome in daylight, when the remains reverted from wolf form to human.

  I leaned in closer, examining the wounds. They looked familiar. Damn. Resting my hand atop one of the ragged cuts, I extended my claws. They weren’t quite a match, but they were close, and now the whole area probably smelled like me, too.

  If not for the bullet holes, someone might have convinced me that I’d blacked out and done it, but I don’t own a pistol and these boys hadn’t been killed with vampire claws. Now that I was suspicious, I could find bullet holes in several other body parts. No more bullets, though.

  I’d been framed.

  Unable to discern anything more from the bodies, I walked back down to the boat launch. Brains and blood washed off of the single silver bullet I’d retrieved, leaving it looking bright and new. It was warm to the touch even after I cleaned it off in the cool lake water. Little markings glowed faintly in the dark.

  Magic bullet. Bodies cut up to look like I did it…. But why go through all the trouble to dig out the other bullets and leave this one behind—unless I was supposed to find it? I put the bullet in the pocket of my jeans and knelt by the water. Somebody doesn’t want me and the Alpha werewolf to kiss and make up, but they don’t have the nerve to kill me themselves.

  It didn’t particularly bother me that the variety pack had been killed, but something in the back of my head (my brain, maybe) was telling me that I’d been outsmarted. Someone had figured out that I would go with them to try to see Willard or Wilbur, or whatever his name was, and had arranged this mess to ensure that didn’t happen, taking a fucked-up set of circumstances and boosting them to a whole new level of suckage.

  That meant it was political and possibly out of my league. But I did know a guy who might know a guy. Roger knew all the bigwigs in town, the annoying seedy little assholes who pretended to be royalty.

  I reached for my cell phone before I remembered it was littering the street back in Void City. By my watch, I’d wasted forty minutes wandering around the parking lot. For once, I remembered the sun. I did not want to be caught hiding in the restrooms here if the pack managed to locate their buddies, and it was over an hour’s drive back to Void City.

  There were no keys in the truck and I’ve never learned how to hot-wire a vehicle. Unless I absolutely had to do it, I didn’t relish the idea of breaking into one of the lake homes; too many windows, no basements. There had to be a gas station around here somewhere. I might be able to make it to a pay phone. Maybe Talbot could drive out here and pick me up before dawn. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was the best I had.

  I made it halfway up the mountain before I realized I’d make better time flying than I would on foot. Orchard Dam Road was a winding curving thing and the shortest distance between two points…I concentrated on what it was like to be a bat. To the observer, it’s pretty quick, but to the vampire doing it, transforming into something that small is painful. It’s like having cold-water shrinkage so bad your testicles retract, taking refuge in the pelvis.

  Some vampires leave their clothes behind when they change. My daughter is one of them. I’m not. My clothes folded in with me as I sprouted leathery wings and launched skyward.

  Bat radar gives me headaches, so I rely mostly on my bat vision. Bats have good eyesight at long distances, so it wasn’t too bad. I felt very cold, though. A smaller body meant the cold went to my core faster, and even though it was a sultry summer evening at ground level, it’s always colder in the air.

  The trees stretched out below me as I flew, heading south to avoid crossing too close to Sable Oaks. County Road 58 was hard to miss, but every time I tried to cross it, something interfered with my senses, making everything hazy and wavering. I don’t know if it was residual heat from the asphalt or what, but it was bad enough that I stuck to the forest edge.

  A few miles down the road, I had a thought, and if I’d had a human throat, I’d have cursed. As it was, I made a little squeaky irate bat sound. Who the hell had unstaked me and where had he gone? How had he gotten far enough away to escape my notice in the time it took me to rip my way out of a sleeping bag? It didn’t seem to make sense.

  6

  TABITHA:

  VAMPIRE 101

  Halfway through the lesson, I was having a hard time listening to Talbot. We were over in the Pollux Theater across from the club, alone. I loved every inch of its elaborately detailed elegance, from the real velvet of the curtains to the leather-covered seats to the sweeping balconies and carved balustrades.

  There was no orchestra pit. I sat in the front row only a few feet from the wooden stage, a massive structure that appeared to be about three feet high, though I knew there was a whole basement underneath, still filled with props and pieces of scenery, and a little room where the pipe organ was stored when it wasn’t onstage.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know how the whole vampire thing worked; it was more that I couldn’t get a handle on Talbot and it was driving me crazy. I’m a focused girl. I set a goal for myself, a man I want or a dress or whatever, and I go out and do what it takes to get it.

  Talbot was driving me nuts by refusing to do one simple thing. He was leaning casually against the stage in front of me, and I knew he must have had a good view from there, but no matter what I did, I could not get him to stare at my breasts. I’d never tried when I was alive because I didn’t want to lead him on, but now that I was a vampire, it was like my brain had been restructured. My thoughts were still mine, I hadn’t exactly stopped being me, but there was a predatory urge coloring everything.

  I’d assumed it would be hard getting used to people as food, but it wasn’t. The best way I can describe it is that it’s like dreaming. You’re in the center of a little make-believe universe. Everything around you is for your amusement, pleasure, or dismay. Nothing you do in a dream has any real consequences. For me, that was how being undead felt.

  The red tones in the Pollux’s velvet curtains were vibrant even though I knew there was a layer of dust covering them. The wind blew through the air ducts with a musical tone so distinct that I would recognize it anywhere. Talbot droned on, but his words weren’t important. I watched his eyes, his skin, his pulse, and inhaled his scent.

  Finally, he stopped trying to explain whatever it was he had been talking about, stalked up to my seat, and put his big hands right over my breasts. “If I stare at these will it make you pay attention to what I’m saying?” He jiggled them briefly as he spoke and then let go.

  I was mortified. Had I really been that obvious? “Because,” he continued, “I could do that, but I want you to know right now that neither you nor any other human is of any interest to me in that way.”

  So he was a pervert, a real pervert. I wondered what exactly he did like. Sheep? “Wait a minute,” I protested. “You were really excited back in the bedroom. That wasn’t fake. I could smell it, not to mention the way you were poking me with that thing.”

  Talbot laughed. It wasn’t a mean laugh, more like he’d just heard a hilarious joke, but it felt mean anyway. I don’t like to be laughed at. My fangs came out. It was only the third time, but it already felt natural. There was the same stretching jaw-popping feeling, but it was a good sort of hurt. I hissed at him, and he grinned crookedly at me. “Let’s just say that it’s a dominance thing. You were trying to get away and you couldn’t. I like that. It’s perfectly natural for one of my kind.”

  “Are you a were-something?” I asked. I
t was hard to believe he wasn’t human. Then again, it wasn’t like I paid close attention to any of the guys here, other than Eric.

  “No,” he answered. “Now listen; we aren’t here to learn about me. We are here to learn about your new lifestyle. Your unlifestyle. You with me?”

  I nodded. I knew that I could get him to tell me what he was eventually, or maybe get Eric to tell me. It was simply a matter of time.

  “What,” asked Talbot, “is the last thing you remember?”

  “You told me about the whole mirror thing, which I’d pretty much figured out. You said I should stay out of sunlight, which I already knew. You covered the garlic thing and holy symbols, blessed weapons, and not getting my heart or head ripped out, off, destroyed, or whatever. That pretty much covers what I heard. I don’t remember what was last. It all ran together.”

  “Okay,” Talbot said. He slipped back into lecture mode, and I tried to pay attention this time. “The number one thing to remember about being a vampire is that the biggest threat that you have is yourself. When you feed, try not to kill anyone. The best way to do that is to eat before you get too hungry. The more ravenous you are, the harder it will be for you to control yourself. If you don’t want to act like you did earlier, when you were totally out of control, don’t skip meals.

  “If you do kill someone, then remove the head or the heart to keep them from rising as bloodsucking zombies. Eric calls them wampyres because he’s read too much crap on the Internet, but they’re just zombies.

  “Don’t get sloppy. When you kill a human, you have to dispose of the body or have it done for you. It costs twice as much if the city has to take care of it.”

  “Costs more?”

  “Void City is vampire owned and operated. The Council of High Magic makes them use guild mages for most disposal services, so they get a nice tidy kickback every month. It drives the prices up.