I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (16 page)

“Me and you just gonna stand around and watch
this?” Big Duke remarked to Damian, who shrugged.

“
He
won’t let you—”

“Yeah, right.” Boone had let go of the meat
hook and was pulling on the vampire’s leg, trying to dislodge it
from the doorframe. “Come on, motherfucker, get back out—”

“This doesn’t bother you?” Big Duke looked at
Damian, the long-haired blonde splashed with blood. “Not one
bit?

Damian asked, “You got a match?”

“They were my friends—hear me? My
friends!”

“He’s not dead!” Desperation colored
Enfermo’s voice. “Frank isn’t dead!”

“Oh yeah?
Yeah
? Yeah, you know
what—nice try. Get the fuck back out here—”

“I can tell you where—I can tell you!”

“Tell me shit, motherfucker! Try—”

Damian was passing them, heading back into
the house, the near empty gas can and a book of matches in one
hand, meat cleaver in the other.

“—try telling me how the fuck you found us in
the first place.”

“Ask
him
! Ask
him
!”

“Ask who?”

Enfermo took one hand from the doorframe to
point. Damian brought the cleaver down and took the vampire’s hand
off at its wrist. The beast started to shake and scream, frustrated
and hopeless.

Boone ripped Enfermo from the doorframe and
tossed it into the street. “How’s it feel?” He planted his booted
foot in the vampire’s chest and pinned it to the pavement. “How’s
it feel?” The creature screeched and clawed at Boone’s leg—“Feel
good to you, fuck?
Huh
?”—but he ignored the gashes it tore
through his jeans and flesh. “
Burn
.” The vampire was
bubbling in the light of day, boiling around Boone’s boot. “Burn
you piece of shit.” Boone hocked and spat into the liquefying mass
under his foot.

Placing the spliff on the roof of the car,
Big Duke broke the shotgun open. He withdrew the two shells in
place. “How’d that feel?” The cowboy asked Boone. A skeletonized,
blackened forearm and hand sunk to the ground under Boone,
crumbling to to ash.

“Pretty satisfying actually.”

“Feel better?” Big Duke thumbed two new
shells he’s taken from the belt into the barrels. He snapped the
shotgun closed.

“This shit is just getting started,” Boone
reached down into the stain that was Enfermo and picked up his meat
hook. “Can’t wait to get this into that Rainford fuck.”

“Oh, you’re warming up. Is that it?”

“
He
warmed up.” Boone looked down on
what was left of Enfermo.

“
He
warmed
up
,” Big Duke
repeated. Boone had begun to walk off, away from the house, away
from the car and Big Duke and Damian. “Hey,” Big Duke called after
him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I got some work to put in,” Boone called
over his shoulder. He tried to clear his mind of the faces
there.

“Like hell.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Boone halted in the
street and turned to confront the man in the cowboy hat, “and steer
clear—hear me Big Dookey?”

“I figured it’d go down this way.” Big Duke
let him have it with one barrel, the shotgun exploding in his
hands. Boone was knocked off his feet and flopped on the street,
gasping, breathless.

Damian came out of the house and looked Boone
over.

The man lay there incapacitated and in a
great deal of pain, but alive.

“What’d you hit him with?”

“Rock salt.” Big Duke laid the shotgun on the
roof of the car next to the spliff and the shells. He approached
Boone, a taser in his hand. “I got a feeling you’re gonna,
but
—” he stood over the downed man, extending the arm with
the taser, “—don’t take this personally.”

“…
nnnnn
…” Boone attempted, but no
words would come out.

“What’s that?”

Fuckin’
nigger
!

“You know what? Take it personally.” Big Duke
zapped him. Boone shook uncontrollably on the street, his body
wracked by electricity. Big Duke hit him again to make sure before
turning to Damian. “Give me a hand getting this guy into the
car?”

Smoke was starting to pour out of the house.
A battered woman with her eye popping out of her head was crawling
through the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Damian hefted the
bloody cleaver.

As Damian went to finish his business, Big
Duke stood in the street over Boone’s inert form. The black man in
the cowboy boots and cowboy hat looked down on the loud mouth,
suddenly quiet.

The guy lying in his own piss.

Big Duke thought about the spliff back on the
roof of the car. He could drag him back to the vehicle himself.

“Look. It’s like this.”

Boone was stretched vertically on the rack,
spread eagled, with Big Duke standing there in his cowboy hat,
talking to him. A television was showing the original
Highlander
.

“You got under my skin out there.” Big Duke
smoked a joint. “I shouldn’t have let you.”

“You saying you sorry?” Contempt colored
Boone’s words.

“No.”

“Good. ‘Cause I’m not accepting
apologies.”

Big Duke held his tongue, thought about what
he was going to say before he said it.

“You have the manners of a goat.” Ramirez was
chastising MacLeod on the screen. “And you have no knowledge
whatsoever of your potential!”

“What I’m saying—” Big Duke was starting to
say something conciliatory until Boone cut him off with, “You’re on
my shit list now, motherfucker.”

“—is I just want you to know it wasn’t
personal,” Big Duke managed to finish his sentence.

“Bet your black ass its personal
now
motherfucker.”

“Why do you make this more difficult than
it’s got to be? I’m just doing what I got to do. Like we all
are.”

“And like I said. It’s personal
now
,
Big Doofy. I’m tryin’ to watch the movie.”

Big Duke gestured with the joint, like he
wanted to share it.

“When I want your weed,” Boone told him,
“I’ll take it.”

“So it’s going to be that way?”

“Yeah, it’s gonna’ be that way. First chance
I get, I’m gonna’ kill you motherfucker. Now get—I’m tryin’ to
watch this.”

“Ah, I see you are awake,” the dark Lord had
entered the chamber silently, “and apparently none the worse for
wear.”

“You too motherfucker. Soon as I get the
chance, I’m going to off your dead ass too.”

“
Tch
,
tch
, tch.” Rainford stood
there considering Boone. Big Duke took a step back, away from the
vampire lord. “You’ve so little in common with the rest of your
own, isn’t that so, Boone? As I have with mine. Perhaps in this, we
share some common ground.”

The vampire looked at the movie on the
screen. “A magnificent film, and one of the best uses of a song in
the cinema.” Rainford hummed a line from Queen’s
Who
Wants
to
Live
Forever
, then spoke to
Big Duke: “Leave us now.”

“Hey, Big Doofy,” Boone called after the
departing man. “That hat? It sucks.”

Nigger
-
nigger
-
nigger
-
nigger

The other man left without reply.

“I was told of your performance with Enfermo.
Bravo, Boone, bravo.”

“My
performance
? What, you gonna clap?
That son of a bitch got what was coming to him.”

“And I was told that you attemped to walk off
at the end of the mission. That,” Rainford turned the television
off, Christopher Lambert walking out of the lake towards Sean
Connery, “just will not do.”

“The job was done. And I was watching
that.”

“
That
job. Perhaps we can view it
together at a later time.”

“I had things to do. And, no, I don’t think
so.”

“Yes, your family, I know.”

“That black mother—”

“Please Boone, the racism? It’s so
antiquated.”

“Oh, now I’m
really
going to kill that
fuck.”

“You thought I somehow did not know of the
existence of your sister and her family?” Rainford waved his hand.
“Quite the contare, Boone. They have been under my surveillance for
some time now.”

“Why you—”

“There are those who would mean them harm,
Boone. Not I, I assure you.”

“You’re—”

“I am protecting them, Boone.
Protecting
them.”

“From yourself?”

“From
her
.”

Boone quieted, sober.

“If you wish to ensure their continued
safety, you will comply with my requests. You are listening now.
Would you like to know who turned Enfermo? He is tied—however
indirectly—to Kreshnik’s mother.”

“You gonna give me a shot at her?”

“That is
precisely
what I intend.”

“Why? What’s in it for you?”

The dark Lord looked away, and when it spoke
its words were wistful. “I have seen those I have loved…I have
outlived those I have loved.” When Boone did not reply, the vampire
hummed the same song it had before, then asked, “Do you have any
idea what that is like?”

Again, Boone forced himself not to
answer.

“When I have sought to bestow what I
conceived as the ultimate gift, my name and my person were
cursed.”

“Fuck you, Rainford.” Boone lost his internal
battle.

“You see?”

Pomeroy came into the room behind Rainford,
lugging its dictaphone. Boone saw the device and sighed. “Fuck.
You’re going to tell me one of those long-ass stories now, aren’t
you?
Fuck
! Why me?”

“Because there was more to tell and you are a
captive audience. So, where were we then? Ah yes, my love was gone
away from me, and I was alone…”

My love was gone away from me, and I was
alone. Nights I continued to roam the streets of our city,
Petersburg’s stately palaces and ornate bridges more the lonesome
for me without Elizaveta at my side. Many were the evenings I
longed to visit the home to the west of the city in which she had
lived. At first I swore I would refrain from going anywhere near
her grandmother’s estate. And such was my resolve, adamantine, that
I would never have ventured forth to said destination .

However, longing for my Elizaveta—even if
only to stand in the empty room where she had once slept—took hold
of me, and I soon came to visit the house. First, to her room, bare
save for the faintest of scents on the air.

Shortly thereafter, her grandmother.

I will not attempt to conceal the fact that I
imbibed from the old woman’s veins. The blood that had been
coursing through her veins for eighty-some years bore the slightest
hint of my longed for. The slightest but sweetest resemblance.
Feeding from one her age soon left the grandmother wan and her
doctors much concerned. I made no attempt to conceal my presence
from the woman—in fact, I bore her some measure of ill will
regarding the suitors she had pressed upon my departed.
Nevertheless, I concealed from her my relationship with her
grandchild. What she said to her doctors I could only imagine
humorously; no one would think to believe the ramblings of an
ancient dowager.

Elizaveta was gone from me ten years.
Ten
years
. A moment in time to one such as I, yes.
But my love for her made me feel the acute passage of each of those
days in such a way as I had not experienced for some ages.

Not that those years were without event that
did not occupy me.

In rapid succession three figures from my
past reappeared in my life, casting the die in ways I could not
then foresee.

My Master, Vinci, was fond of Petersburg. The
Neva’s numerous distributaries and canals reminded him, perhaps, of
his own Venice. His return bore quite a shock, as he had aged in
his time gone, returning to me on the cusp of his senescence. He
looked older, and I became aware first hand of the mortality of our
kind. You see, we spend a majority of our existence appearing the
age at which we were converted. But our kind are not—as
superstition would hold—immortal, and as our ends approach ageing
resumes with a ferocity unmatched, draining us of vitality and
withering us as it would any mortal.

Even then there was a fluidity of his motion
and his hands, his terrible hands so out of place with the rest of
him.

Vinci, as I believe I have expressed before,
was a compound of characteristics: urbane, genteel and, when
necessity dictated, brutal.

When he had first appeared to my siblings and
I so many years prior his mien bespoke a sophisticated nobility. In
the various capitals and backwaters of the continents we visited
together he bore the air of a man about town, confident and at home
wherever our temporary home might be. He returned to me in
Petersburg as I had never seen him, the quiet assurance he normally
exhibited replaced with…fear is too strong a word. Vinci understood
that his end drew nigh, that in less than half a century he would
no longer be extant.

He returned to Petersburg, but never to stay.
Instead, he urged me to leave the metropolis at once. In his
company. To the west, Napoleon had installed himself First Consul.
In due time the stunted Corsican would be emperor and visit his
imperial ambitions upon Russian soil. Rumors of our existence—not
perhaps, those of mine and Vinci’s own, but of those like us—had
begun to spread. The vampire was hunted in the eighteenth century
throughout eastern Europe, most notably in East Prussia and the
domain of the Hapsburgs. Even so recognized an august man of god as
Dom Augustin Calmet countenanced our existence in his 1746
treatise,
Traite
sur
les
apparitions
des
Esprits
,
et
sur
les
vampires
ou
les
revenans
de
Hungary and Moravia, a work not unknown to me at the time.