Legally Undead (27 page)

“Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”

“Not really. Malcolm said he may have drugged these guys, too.”

“Okay. As long as you’re sure,” I said.

“I’m not sure,” Nick said, “but I don’t think there’s anything sure in this game. Let’s just keep going and not look this particular gift horse in the mouth.”

So I went back to staking vamps. Thump, thwack, sigh, pop-splurt. My stomach heaved, and I hoped that I would get used to the noise soon.

Our ragged little line of vampire assassins had moved about a quarter of the way into the room when I first noticed the sound underlying the rhythm of our kills. I pulled my knife out of a vampire and stood still, listening.

First Malcolm, then Nick, then John and Dom and Tony all stopped, as well. In the silence left behind, I could hear a sibilant noise rising, like a wind picking up a speed. It came from the shadows in the back of the room.

Almost simultaneously, the six of us shined our flashlights toward the back wall. The light beams picked out the pale faces of vampires, all staring at us, all hissing softly, fangs bared.

“Oh, shit,” I heard one of the guys whisper.

And then the vampires charged.

Actually, “charged” isn’t really the right word, because that implies some sort of force behind the motion. And vampires don’t really move with force. They flow. They slide. They dance across the room with an inhuman animal grace.

These vampires did all of that, but they did it directly toward us. And they kept hissing.

I felt my knife-wielding hand start to shake. I dropped the flashlight and it rolled around on the floor, bouncing light off the mirrors and across the vampires’ faces as they circled around us. The knife felt slippery in my suddenly sweaty palms, and I redoubled my grip on it, then pulled the stun baton out of my belt.

I have no idea how many there were. All I know is that I was cut off from Nick and the others, fighting for my life. I backed up against the mirrored wall, hoping to keep them from circling around behind me. I could see Nick a couple of yards away, reloading his crossbow and firing shots into the darkness. One of the vampires sidled in closer to me, her blonde hair billowing around her shoulders as she bared her teeth and growled at me.

I slammed the end of the Taser into her stomach, hitting the button with my thumb just as Dominick had shown me.

For an instant, I thought it wasn’t going to work. Then her mouth stretched out into a rictus grin, and she collapsed. She wasn’t dead, but she sure wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The rest of the vampires backed off a bit, keeping enough distance between themselves and me that I couldn’t reach them with the Taser.

“Hey, guys!” I yelled across the room, “Tasers work!”

In reply, a crossbow bolt shot out of the darkness and thumped into a vampire standing in front of me. He staggered backwards and fell to the ground. I didn’t know if that crossbow bolt was an answer to my comment, precisely, but it sure made me feel better.

And then I was in the midst of it. I found myself kicking and whirling, hitting vampires with the Taser, stopping to stake them whenever I had a moment free from immediate attack. One after another, I Tasered the four other vampires who had surrounded me. It was a lot easier to fight vampires when I only had to touch them with a Taser to bring them down. I didn’t have to aim at all, I discovered—I just had to make contact with the weapon, and they fell.

With a few seconds to spare before any other vampires were upon me, I knelt down to stake the first who had attacked me. These vampires were harder to stake, I discovered. It took more power, even with the sharp edges of my knife, to get to the heart, almost as if something pushed back against me. But I managed it anyway.

Another crossbow bolt flew out of the darkness, and I spun around in time to see the vampire who had been sneaking up on me drop to his knees.

“Thanks!” I yelled. I saw John give me an acknowledging wave and turn to fire again in the other direction.

That’s when Greg wrapped his arms around me from behind.

“Hello again, sweetheart,” he said. His breath wisped across my ear. “I missed you.”

And then he stuck his tongue in my ear.

I’ve never been a big fan of the tongue-in-ear action, even when the tonguer was someone I liked. And I most emphatically did not like Greg anymore.

He had my arms pinned against my side, presumably to keep me from staking him. So I did the next best thing.

I Tasered him.

It was easy, too. I just spun the little baton thingy in my hand so that it was touching his thigh and I pressed the button. Greg went down hard, completely out for the count.

I could have staked him then. But he just looked so vulnerable, so defenseless—so much like he had always looked when he was alive and I was planning our wedding while he was planning to become a bloodsucking monster—that I just had to Taser him again.

The second jolt made him flop around on the ground like a fish. Watching him gave me a warm feeling inside. So I did it again.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But watching Greg’s body twitch and jerk on the ground distracted me so much that before I knew it, I had another group of rabid vampires to deal with. So I went back to fighting before I had the chance to properly disembowel him.

I know, I know. Disemboweling doesn’t kill vampires. But I bet it hurts like hell.

And quite frankly, after all that Greg had done to me—from becoming a creature of the night who sucked blood to actually sucking
my
blood—I felt like a little payback was in order. I’m sure that says something unfortunate about my character—and maybe about my mental health, as well—but that’s the truth. I wanted to see him suffer a little bit before he died.

I should have just staked him right then and there.

I have a lot to atone for.

Chapter 23

It seemed like there were vampires everywhere. Part of the problem was that the vampires I had jolted with my stun baton earlier were beginning to wake up and re-join the fight. I needed a better system of Tasering and staking—one that would ensure that the stunned vamps stayed down longer. Preferably forever.

I backed up against the mirrored wall again, avoiding the spot where a stray crossbow bolt had shattered the glass. I didn’t want to slice myself on someone’s seven years of bad luck, but I didn’t want anyone else grabbing me from behind, either.

Two vampires, a male dressed all in black and a female in some sort of white shimmery negligee, approached me slowly, slithering across the marble floor in that special vampy way. They stopped just out of reach. I would have to step away from the wall to get either of them. One of them hissed at me.

“Bitch,” he said.

The other one used that instant of distraction to slide up and kick me in the stomach.

“Oof,” I grunted, bending over and clutching my abdomen. They both grabbed at me, one catching an arm, the other my hair. The one holding my hair wrapped her hand around the strands and pulled at it, forcing me to stumble away from the wall.

Okay. That did it. I’d been hit, punched, kicked, and ear-licked all in the past fifteen minutes. But pulling my hair was just beyond the pale. This was not supposed to turn into some sort of cat-fight. I spun the Taser baton into the one holding my arm and flipped the switch. It’s what he got for making the mistake of grabbing that arm in the first place.

I love my Taser baton stun gun thingy. It makes vampires flop.

Unfortunately, this guy’s other involuntary reaction was to tighten his grip on my arm. Dammit. I wanted to Taser the bitch yanking my hair out of my scalp. Oh, well. A simple, straightforward stake knifing would just have to do.

I was still bent forward, my torso hiding my other hand, so she never even saw my free hand coming toward her.

I was learning to love that surprised look almost as much as I loved the flopping about on the floor business.

It was only a matter of seconds before I staked the other guy, too. He was still twitching when I shoved the knife through his chest.

I took the opportunity of a few moments’ breather to scan the rest of the room. A lot more vamps were down, either dead or twitching from an electric Taser shock, than were up and fighting. And none of those were headed my direction.

I began systematically staking the other vampires I had stunned. But when I turned around to deal with Greg, I discovered that he was gone. I didn’t know how he could have possibly gotten up and walked away after a triple dose of the Taser, but his body was no longer lying on the floor twitching in that beautifully amusing way.

I let out a steady stream of low curses.

“Wow. That’s a pretty impressive vocabulary you’ve got there.”

I spun around to see who had spoken, knife and Taser up in front of me and ready to attack. Dom put both his hands in the air in front of him.

“Whoa! Just me, Elle.”

I lowered my weapons.

“I had him. I had him and I didn’t stake him. Dammit!”

“Had who?” Dom asked.

“That son-of-a-bitch ex of mine. He was right here, and I didn’t stake him when I had the chance.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll find him. It’s not like he can go very far while the sun’s still up, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, then. I think we’ve just about cleared this den out.”

I looked around. Dom was right. None of the vampires were fighting any more. Some of them were still alive, but the rest of the guys were walking through the piles of bodies, punching stakes through the hearts of any still-quivering bodies. None of the humans had woken up.

“Want to go back upstairs and help me scout for any survivors?” Dom asked.

“Sure.”

We left the room and headed back up the stairs. Dom went first, loaded crossbow in front of him, ready to fire. I trailed behind him, keeping an eye out over my shoulder for anything behind us. Especially anything that resembled my ex. I was getting tired of his penchant for grabbing me from behind every chance he got.

The rooms on the next floor up were still empty. I wondered if Deirdre and crew reserved those for special occasions. The main floor was empty, as well.

The top floor, the one where I had changed clothes for Deirdre’s party, was not empty. The rooms up there were full of sleeping humans, maybe twenty-five in all. The curtains upstairs, unlike the ones on the other floors, were thrown wide. The fading sunlight streamed in across the floors. I was surprised to see that so much time had passed. We’d come into the building sometime in the late afternoon. Now the sun was setting.

The sun was setting. Oh, hell.

“Dom,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know if anyone downstairs actually saw Deirdre?”

“I don’t know. You and Malcolm are the only ones who know what she looks like. I saw a lot of blonde vamps, though.”

“You need to get back downstairs. The sun’s setting. If Deirdre’s not dead, she’ll be able to escape as soon as it’s dark. I’m going to stay up here and search through these rooms. You get Malcolm to check the bodies down there, see if Deirdre’s among them.”

Dom didn’t even bother to answer before racing back down the stairs.

I stopped by the dressing room I’d been in the week before. My clothes were still in a pile on a shelf. They even looked like they’d been laundered. I decided to come back and pick those up on my way out—if Nick burned too many more outfits of mine, I’d soon run out of clothes altogether.

That wasn’t why I went into the dressing room in the first place, though. I picked up a hand mirror from the makeup table and carried it back into the first of the bedrooms. I didn’t think any vampire could withstand the sunlight shining in through the windows, but I wanted to be sure. I held the mirror in one hand and my knife in the other as I checked the people one by one, holding up a hand or a foot or a few strands of hair to see if the mirror reflected them back at me. So far, so good, I thought as I closed one door behind me and stepped across the hall to the next room.

By the time I had searched most of the rooms on the floor, the sun was sinking into the horizon, its last red-orange rays turning the clouds a rosy pink. Two rooms left. I chose the one closest to me, and swung the door open.

Unlike the other rooms, this one was dark; heavy curtains shaded the windows. A small square of sunlight shined in from the hallway and lit up the floor in front of me. The few pieces of furniture in the room—a bed, a lamp, and what looked like a desk—were just shadowy forms, slightly darker than the space around them. I blinked a few times to adjust my eyes.

The light behind me faded, and I saw a shadow on the bed shift. Slowly, the shadow resolved itself into the figure of a woman sitting up in the bed. Reflected light glinted off her golden hair. I dropped the mirror to the floor. I wouldn’t be needing it in here.

“Hello, Deirdre,” I said.

She turned to me and I could see the white oval of her face, though I couldn’t make out her features.

“I thought you might come back,” she said. Her voice was still low and rich, and I shivered involuntarily. “Did you bring your army boys with you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But they’re all downstairs. It’s just the two of us right now.”

She laughed, a sweet, resonant sound in the darkness. “Oh, good. I was hoping for some time alone with you.” I saw her swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand up.

And then she was beside me. I never saw her move, but she was pressed up against my side, her breasts brushing against my arm as she leaned in close to my ear.

“Did you miss me?” she whispered.

A deep, ragged moan escaped me.

I’ve never been addicted to anything. I tried cigarettes a few times as a teenager, but they made me cough and want to vomit. I drank alcohol occasionally—at least until I found out about vampires—but I’d never even tried drugs; I like to be in control, thank you very much. So I didn’t have anything to compare this feeling to.

All I knew was that I wanted to feel Deirdre bite me. I craved the feel of her mouth on my skin like I’ve never wanted anything else, before or since. She terrified me. She made my heart race and my skin crawl, and all I wanted was for her to slide her fangs into my neck, my arm, anywhere.