Angel of Vengeance (17 page)

“I wouldn’t, but you can’t talk to cops. They have a guy they think can put me at the scene and they’ve arranged a lineup for him to do it.”

“Who?”

“Some insurance salesman—Tom something. He says some guy busted his nose at Dallas’s place the night she died and he’s on his way over here now to see if it was me. I was hoping maybe you knew a lawyer—a good one—who might be able to get down here quick and help me out.”

“Of course. I’ll make a call,” she says.

“I’d appreciate it.”

She tells me to be careful. She tells me to come see her when I get out. I tell her I will and get off.

Maybe it’s because I’m feeling so blood-sick, or maybe it’s because I have so damn much on my mind, but it isn’t until the flatfoot puts me back in my pen that I realize I never told her Dallas’s real name.

Handcuffed to the table, I sit and wait.

Time passes like a ticking bomb.

I can only assume I’ve been set up, but I can’t figure out why. I try to think it through, but I don’t get anywhere. The need has become so bad it’s impossible for me to think straight. The cramping has worked its way past the joints in my arms and legs. My aching head feels like it’s been packed full with gauze. My brain cells are too starved of blood to do anything but drone out a steady busy signal. I only know two things. One, I’ve been betrayed by a woman I care about. Again. And two, I need to get the hell out of here but fast.

I shouldn’t have come in the first place. I should have known better. Dumb. But there’s nothing for it now. I decide to wait for my best opportunity. Probably after the lineup when they take me for booking and processing. Then I’ll snap the cuffs and take one of the detectives hostage before they know what’s hit them. I’ll drag him along using him as a shield as I fight my way out past bars and guns and guards. With a little luck I won’t take a bullet in the head or the spine. It doesn’t seem too much to ask. Problem with that is, the odds are always with the house.

Knowing I’m being watched on camera, I rest my throbbing head on the table and try not to think about blood or betrayal.

I wind up thinking about both.

19

1946

W
ith Brasher out of the way, Coraline and I took up residence in that big old drafty house of his. She had already figured out how to get her hands on the money in his various bank accounts. So we moved on in, and spent his money and lived as if we didn’t have a care in the world. As if there never was a Brasher and he had never told me that the woman I loved was going to betray me.

I couldn’t forget his warning, but as time passed I found I could dismiss it. Because he was wrong. Coraline and I loved each other. Lots had changed. Almost everything. But not that. Never that. Some things you just have to take on faith.

While we were planning the murder Coraline had done all the hunting for us so as not to distract me from the task at hand. After we moved into the house though, she decided it was time I learned to hunt for myself. At first, I put her off. The whole idea of hunting people sickened me. I wanted no part in it. But she kept at me about it. She viewed my reluctance as a weakness. We fought.

“You’re being silly. You’re not human, you’re something greater now. A vampire. There aren’t any rules for us any more,” she said.

“Maybe there should be.”

“Don’t be silly. We’re the top of the food chain. Humans are just take-out food to us.”

“Well maybe I don’t like what’s on the menu.”

Coraline sneered now. She had always been a good sneerer and death hadn’t changed that any. “Don’t be a hypocrite. You like it. You like it just swell when I do the hunting and all you have to do is feed, when you don’t have to think about where the blood came from.”

I realized she was right. I was a hypocrite. I did like it. A lot. And after all, just because you let the butcher slaughter the pig for you doesn’t mean you don’t have a hand in its death.

She wanted me to go on a hunt with her and in the end I went. We drove to the outskirts of the city where small developments of cheap tract houses were being bought up by G.I.s returning home from the war.

We ended up at a modest two-story with a wide front porch in an unfinished cul-de-sac. Other houses on the block were being built, but so far this was the only one finished. Coraline thought it was just right.

The lights were on in the family room and we watched in silence through a large front porch window as a young man, tie undone and legs up on the coffee table, and his pretty wife cozied up on a couch and looked at the T.V. together.

Seeing them, seeing how safe and content they seemed, how in love and happy, I wanted to go somewhere else and told Coraline so, but she refused.

“No. We’re going in here,” she said.

“Coraline, I’ll do this, okay? I’ll hunt, but not here. Not them.”

“You’re weak, Mick, you know that?” she said, her eyes ugly and derisive. “It’s embarrassing.”

I tried to grab and hold her, but she broke away and marched to the door and rang the bell. When the man answered, she pretended her car had broken down just up the road and asked if she could use a phone to call for help. He invited her in. Folks were more trusting in those days. Knowing I was out there watching, Coraline smiled at me out the window as he lead her into the family room to introduce her to his wife.

A sick, tight feeling in my stomach, I watched her break the man’s neck. Turning, Coraline looked at the wife still trying to make sense of it all on the couch and allowed her fangs to distend. I listened to the wife’s pitiful scream as she stood and for the first time I saw she was pregnant. Filled with horror, the woman ran for the stairs, arms cradled around her bulging belly. Frozen in place, stunned by the awful spectacle unfolding on the other side of the thin pane of glass, I watched Coraline smile hungrily as she transformed and gave chase.

I moved then. I ran to the door, flung it open, and raced up the stairs and down a long hall toward the master bedroom where I could hear sounds of a struggle. It was too late by the time I got there. Too goddamn late. The woman was already dead, her neck snapped backward. If that had been the worst of it, it would have been bad enough, but it wasn’t. On the floor by the four-post bed, her face covered in gore, Coraline sat feeding on the unborn child she had ripped from the dead woman’s belly.

She looked up when she sensed me standing in the doorway, strings of blood hanging from her fangs. She smiled and held the child out to me.

“Hungry, baby?”

For the first time I saw behind the mask. Really saw. Sure, I’d caught glimpses in the past—like when she murdered Roy—but I had always been able to explain it away. I told myself with all she had been through growing up she had good reason to do what she’d done to him, at least in her own mind. Now I realized she was a broken thing and always had been and I had just seen what she showed me; what she wanted me to see. Hard as it was to accept, I suddenly realized the girl I loved didn’t really exist and never had. She was just smoke and lies and mirrors.

Coraline’s laughter chased me back the way I’d come; up the hall and down the stairs. I made it as far as the porch railing before throwing up in the landscaped bushes that ran along the front of the house. The same bushes no one would come out in the morning on their way to work and decide needed a trim.

Hunched there, smelling the sour fumes of my own sick, I realized that Coraline was wrong. There had to be rules. Even for vampires. Rules gave meaning to an otherwise mindless existence. Without them, thinking beings were reduced to feeding, fighting, and fucking just because it was in their nature. If there was any point to any of this, then there had to be an attempt to rise above one’s nature; to be better than one’s basest needs and desires. Otherwise we were no better than animals.

None of us.

As it turned out, that night was a test. One we both failed. In my eyes Coraline was a monster and in hers I was weak and unworthy.

I knew for sure that everything had changed when I awakened two nights later to find Coraline looming silently over my opened coffin.

“What are you doing, Coraline?” I asked her, trying to keep the cold terror that was creeping into my guts out of my voice.

“Just watching you sleep, baby,” she said with an emotionless smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “You know how I’ve always liked to watch you sleep.”

After she had disappeared in darkness and gone to hunt, I lay there thinking for a long time. Brasher had been right. Whether or not she had planned to before, I knew now that the woman I loved intended to kill me and the only way I could stop her was by killing her first.

Problems just don’t get much worse than that.

I felt like Brasher; old and disappointed and too worn out to care. I’d given up everything for the love of a woman and found it was nothing more substantial than a morning mist that burns away with the first light of day. She was the reason I’d done it all; the reason I’d become this thing I hated.

I considered taking my own life then. Just ending it. I had died for her before, I could do it again. One final gift. It would have been the easy way out, but if I did it I knew that Coraline would only go on committing atrocities. If I went that route—if I didn’t do anything to stop her—every innocent life she took from that point on would be on my shoulders. I couldn’t have that. Whether it was a murder or a murder/suicide, she had to go. After that I could decide if I wanted to live on without her or not, but on that one point I was clear. Coraline needed to be put down.

My mind made up, I went and waited for the woman I loved to come home so I could kill her.

Of course, in the end it wasn’t as simple as that.

Things with Coraline never were.

20

CORALINE

T
hings with Coraline ended like they started. With a bullet.

I was waiting in the darkened study when she returned from her hunt. Coraline was as surprised to see me sitting there alone in the dark as I was to see the child in her arms. A lovely blonde-haired girl of about six in a black crushed velvet dress and shiny black metal-buckled shoes.

“Look what I found,” she said merrily, holding the petrified child up for me to see. It made me feel sick to see the building terror in those sweet young eyes. “Doesn’t she look positively scrumptious, Mick?”

“Put her down,” I said.

“I will. Just as soon as I have a little taste.”

“You’re not going to hurt that child.”

Coraline laughed her windchime laugh as if she found me both ridiculous and amusing. She always did like to laugh at me. When she sobered she smiled circumspectly. “Now Mick, let’s don’t fight. You don’t have to join in, but don’t go telling me my business. I do what I want. You know that.”

“Put her down,” I said again, showing her the .38 now. Coraline stared at it. For a moment I thought I saw fear flicker in her eyes. Her fingers tightened slightly, leaving imprints on the little girl’s soft pink flesh.

“If I didn’t know better I’d think you were threatening me.”

“I am.”

“That’s a mistake, lover.”

“Well, we all make ’em,” I said. “Just like you made one when you sent me to kill Brasher.”

“How was that a mistake?”

“Because he told me things.”

“Like what?”

“Like how you used me,” I said. “You needed me to kill him because you couldn’t do it yourself and turned me into a monster to do it.”

“No. I saved you. They were going to execute you.”

“They did execute me, baby,” I said. “But if you’d really wanted you could’ve gotten me outa there before they did it. You could have gotten me off the row any number of ways, but you didn’t. You traded on my feelings for you and you turned me.”

“Is that what this is about?”

I smiled bitterly. “It’s about a lot of things.”

“So what now, lover? You gonna kill me?”

I looked at her, taking in those glamour-girl features I used to like so much before I glimpsed what lurked behind them, and shrugged. “I guess maybe I am.”

Coraline shook her head at me. “You can’t do it.”

“You sure about that?”

She nodded. “You can’t do it because you and I—we were made for each other, baby.”

I snorted. “Yeah we’ve got something real special.”

“What do you want? You want me to stop feeding on women and children. I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want.”

Coraline bent and set the terrified child gently on the floor at her feet. “There, you see?”

“Too late for that,” I said.

“It’s not. It can’t be,” she said, moving like the shadow of death across the floor to me.

“Stay back, Coraline.”

“No. I won’t. It can’t end this way. I won’t let it. Not after all we’ve meant to each other. I may have made mistakes, Mick—I know I have—but I always loved you.”

“Too late for that too.”

“Stop saying that. It’s not too late. I could have killed you in your sleep earlier and I didn’t. I didn’t because we’ve stepped through a door together. We’re on the yellow brick road and there’s no going back. Not ever. We need each other. That’s what I realized.”

She was right about one thing. This was Oz and I was the idiot Scarecrow and the sleeve-hearted Tin Man and the yellowbelly Lion all rolled into one. Even knowing all I knew, my heart was telling me one thing and my brain another and I was too damn scared to pick between them. Pathetic.

“Fine.” A defiant look in her eye, Coraline took hold of the barrel of the gun and placed it dead center between her breasts. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me then shoot me, Mick. Kill me. I want you to. None of this is worth a damn thing to me if you don’t.”

My head spun like a Kansas twister as I focused on the gun, trying to get right about what I needed to do. It was so clear before, but now it was no good. I was just as under her spell as I had always been.

“You have to change,” I said. “You have to.”

“I will, baby. I will. You’ll see.”