Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (34 page)

Before he knew what he was doing Cory
jaywalked across the street, ignoring the honk of cars slowing down
not to hit him. He had no idea why he needed to go there, not after
what had happened, but he felt compelled to look at the cross that
had been spray painted in the alley. Maybe he just needed to look
at it and make sure that it didn’t hold any power of fear over him.
Maybe he needed to wipe it away. Or perhaps he just wanted to
confirm that it had really been there and hadn’t just been part of
his imagination.

The trip was barely worth it. The only sign
in the alley that anything had even happened there was—and he was
aware this shouldn’t have been there given the amount of rain and
snow that had been dumped on the city in the last few days—the
nasty shit smell that Pig had left behind. Even the cross was gone,
although not because anybody had cleaned it off. Instead of the
yellow cross someone had gone over it in dull gray spray paint,
creating a willy-nilly scribble with red dots just over the center.
Someone else, probably later, had sprayed “ALL HALE THE FLYING
SPAGETTI MONSTER, FOR HE HAS TOCHED ME WITH HIS NOODLEY APENDIGES!”
Although, to Cory, it didn’t look at all like the Flying Spaghetti
Monster. It looked like, well, something else, something he
couldn’t describe, something reaching out to him through the
darkness that he couldn’t define.

He left the alley quickly and continued on
down Main Street, not daring to look back.

Cory was surprised by the speed with which he
made it back to the tunnel by the Retlaw. The sluggishness he’d had
in the apartment seemed to slip further and further away with every
step he took, although he still didn’t dare try running for fear
that he’d end up flat on his face again, and that was something he
didn’t want to risk around so many people. They might try to ignore
the homeless teen as much as possible, but most people weren’t
cruel—if they saw him fall someone would inevitably try to help
him, and he didn’t think he could accept any more help. The simple
fact that he had and still was accepting it from Lynn was already
pushing the boundaries of his comfort zone, and that was enough for
one week.

As usual the tunnel and the alley beyond had
a softening effect on the hustle and bustle noises of Main Street,
and more and more he felt his comfort returning as he ducked into
its shadowed length and came out behind the Retlaw. There were a
couple people walking from the hotel’s back door to the parking
ramp, so Cory instead took a left and headed farther down the
alley. Here it was the quietest of all, and he finally allowed
himself to stop and sit on the concrete. A rat passed nearby and he
tried to grab it, but it slipped through his fingers. He shrugged
it off, chalking it up to his continued sluggishness. He didn’t
need the rat anyway. There was still plenty of the richer blood in
Lynn’s fridge at home. He wouldn’t go hungry tonight one way or the
other.

Cory was crouched low, sniffing out another
rat he thought he had heard in a pile of nearby litter, when he
heard something else above him. There was a whoosh of air behind
him and Cory instinctively spun around, his fingers up in claws and
ready to slash at the face of anyone who tried to attack. He was
still too slow, though, and the person was on him, grabbing him,
holding him tight before he could react further. He struggled, sure
that the two who had previously attacked him, or at least someone
with their same mindset, had followed him and laid in an ambush. He
even tried to scream, for all the good that would do him. In his
panic he lifted both legs in the air and kicked at his attacker,
but she had a tight grip and he wasn’t in the right position for
the kick to land properly.

“Meateater, wait, stop! I’m sorry, I
just…”

At the sound of his nickname Cory stopped
struggling, but as soon as the woman let him go he scrambled back a
few steps, his base fears outweighing what he was just now
realizing. This was not an enemy at all.

Dancer held up her hands in a halting
gesture, or maybe it was more intended to mean
I’m unarmed and I
don’t mean to hurt you
. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.
I should have known better with you. Just… calm down.”

Cory stayed several steps away from her, his
muscles remaining tense and ready to run. He knew he shouldn’t have
wanted to run from her, but the sudden shock of being touched had
triggered something in him.

“Why did you just…?” Cory didn’t finish the
sentence. His voice quavered and he realized he was shaking.

“I’m sorry. We’ve been worried. I just wanted
to give you a hug.”

Cory blinked at her, unsure if he had just
heard her right. A hug? At no point in any of his memories did he
actually recall hugging anyone. He couldn’t even remember the last
time he had liked someone enough to
want
to hug them, unless
he counted the occasional but quickly pushed away carnal thoughts
he had given to Lynn in the last few days. He was attracted to her
but not enough to overcome any of his fears of closeness. Still,
despite its lack of welcome, Cory couldn’t help but feel a measure
of pleasure that Dancer had cared that much.

“You were worried?” Cory asked. Rather than
respond Dancer looked up and called to the sky.

“I found him! He’s here!”

There was a slight rattling of metal, less
than there should have been from something the size of a human, and
when he looked up he saw Fancy overhead and perched precariously on
the rusted railing of a fire escape.

“You’re okay,” Fancy said.

“You just vanished,” Dancer said.

“We’ve been worried sick that they got you
too.”

Even before he asked Cory thought he knew the
answer they would give, but he had to be sure. “Worried that who
got me?”

“The Dusters,” they both said at once. Fancy
dropped from her perch and landed with complete grace next to
Dancer.

“You mean you haven’t heard?” Fancy
asked.

“Where have you even been? We checked all of
your usual haunts,” Dance said.

Cory felt himself relaxing with their every
concerned word. Although he had considered them the closest thing
he had to friends, it was a new feeling to realize how upset his
sudden disappearance had made them.

“They tried to get me, but… I’ve been hiding.
Heard what?”

“Wait, they almost got you?” Dancer asked.
“Are you okay?”

This whole exchange felt weird to Cory. Even
though the two were inseparable and had the disturbing knack for
mimicking each other, they were still two distinct personalities
that Cory had grown accustomed to. If either of them were going to
show concern, Cory would have expected it to be Fancy. Dancer was
much more likely to blow something off with a smartass comment. To
have Dancer be the one acting worried for him wasn’t at all what he
was used to.

“I was hurt. I…” He almost told them about
Lynn and the building farther down Main Street. It couldn’t
possibly hurt to tell them. But he was still rattled from Dancer’s
surprise hug, and that initial shock to his system had his defenses
up. Paranoia that they might be out to get him, no matter how
illogical he knew that idea to be, kept him from saying anything.
Although the building had given him horrible, uncontrollable
flashbacks, he still felt a desperate need to keep Lynn safe and,
above all, hidden from anyone and everyone who might turn on
him.

“I found a new place to hide while I
recovered,” he finished.

“But how could you be hurt?” Fancy asked.

“You didn’t heal?” Dancer asked.

“The Dusters had bullets with silver and
garlic,” Cory said. Each word felt a little easier than the last to
say. These two really did care at least somewhat, although he was
still at a loss as to how that could be.

Both Fancy and Dancer exchanged a look with
each other that Cory was incapable of reading. He had no idea what
that look meant, but it gave him a fresh way of fear.

Oh for crap’s sake
, he thought to
himself. Despite the words that went through his mind they sounded
almost soothing, female, elderly. It was a voice he had been
hearing more recently, recognized from somewhere deep within the
recesses of the memories he had lost, and although it chastised him
it still had a calming effect.
Your mind is going all over the
place. You need to focus. You need to trust. And you need to do it
with the right people. These are the right people
.

He didn’t want to trust that voice—he wasn’t
sure who it was supposed to be—but there was no fighting it. It
brought back sensations—the smell of menthol cigarettes in his
nostrils, the tweeting of birds, a gentle wind on his face—all of
which somehow naturally disarmed him.

Good. That’s good
, the voice said. But
it gave no indication of who it was supposed to belong to.

FancyDancer didn’t appear to notice any of
this inner exchange. It all happened in the few portions of a
second in which they exchanged the look, and then they were looking
back at him with the same concern.

“Is there something you’re not telling us?”
Dancer asked.

“Someone you might have met?” Fancy
asked.

Go ahead, tell them
, the voice said.
But before he could speak Dancer asked something else.

“Did you see Pig?”

Cory was at a loss for a moment. Why would
that matter? Of course he had seen Pig. Everyone ran into Pig from
time to time, didn’t they? At least that was what Pig would tell
him on the rare occasion when he showed up. The voice was silent
about what he should say, but he figured the voice’s previous
advice worked just as well for Pig as it did any trivial
information about Lynn.

“Yes. I did.”

FancyDancer finally broke their eerily
synchronous expressions. Dancer bit her lip in what Corey assumed
was worry while Fancy gave a grimace that he supposed would have
been fearsome on someone more physically imposing.

“Son of a bitch,” Fancy said. “Son of a
fucking bitch!”

“I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,” Dancer
said.

“Like shit it doesn’t,” Fancy said.

“I don’t understand,” Corey said. “What’s so
bad about that?” Other than the fact that Pig’s mere presence had
been disturbing and frightening even before his disappearing act
and the attack that had followed, that was.

“Meateater, haven’t you figured it out yet?”
Dancer asked. “Pig’s…”

“Wait, don’t,” Fancy said. “Remember what
happened when we talked with Pale Lorie.”

Even though he wanted to listen to that
mystery voice in his head and trust these two completely, their
crypticness did little to set him at ease. “What is it?”

“Look, I guess just forget about Pig right
now,” Dancer said. “That’s not the important thing you need to
know.” She shot Fancy another look as though asking silently if she
was sure that she was telling the truth, and Fancy nodded. “It’s
the other stuff you need to worry about right now.”

“Can you please just tell me what it is?”
Cory asked.

“It’s the other vampires,” Fancy said. “And
Vlad the Mystery. And the Dusters.”

“Vlad killed again the night you went
missing,” Dancer said.

“And it set the Dusters off,” Fancy said.

“They’ve gone outside their territory.”

“And they’ve killed five other vampires.”

“What?” Cory asked. “Are you sure about
this?”

“Pretty sure,” Dancer said.

“Completely sure,” Fancy said. “One hundred
percent.”

“I’ll go get the newspaper and show you,”
Dancer said. Before Cory could ask where it was she had jumped
straight in the air, landed effortlessly on the fire escape above,
then jumped again and disappeared out of sight over the edge of the
roof.

“What is even up there?” Cory asked Fancy.
She just shrugged.

“Roofs.”

Dancer didn’t need to use the fire escape at
all this time, instead jumping right over it and landing next to
Fancy. She held a soggy copy of the Fond du Lac
Reporter
out
to Cory. He took it from her without any words and read the
headline: “Vlad Strikes Again.”

FancyDancer stood patiently as Cory read what
he could from the article. It had obviously been exposed to the
elements over the last few days, much of it falling apart in his
hands if he wasn’t careful and a number of words smeared out in the
dampness. There was enough there that he got the gist of it. In all
honesty he didn’t need to read that much. It was pretty much the
same headline and article that had been appearing every few weeks
ever since a whole coven of vampires had come erupting out of that
sinkhole by Lake Winnebago.

The first murder had been about two weeks
after Cory’s escape, but he had been so lost and out of it that he
hadn’t heard anything about it until a couple months later when the
second and third bodies had been found. It hadn’t taken long for
some op-ed columnist to make the obvious connections between the
state of the bodies and folklore, and he had rather tastelessly
started referring to the unknown killer as Vlad the Impaler. These
days that had been shortened by most of the media to simply Vlad,
but to the vampire community he or she was Vlad the Mystery.
Because there was no other way they could possibly describe him or
her. The victims displayed the textbook example of a vampire attack
that everyone in society would recognize even if they refused to
admit it to themselves.

Except not once besides the Mystery had Cory
ever seen or heard of a vampire doing such a thing. He’d seen,
talked to, and heard about many in the Fond du Lac area over the
last year, and not a one of them really wanted to kill anybody.
He’d heard rumors that the Lakeside Park group did indeed use their
limited hypnosis powers to convince the occasional human to bear
their skin, but those attacks were never reported because the
vampires left them alive and well when they were finished, maybe a
little woozy but otherwise healthy and completely lacking any
memory of the event. All the others kept to themselves, drained
animals, some even refusing to do that and starving themselves
rather than hurt anything. Unless there were vampires in Fond du
Lac that had come from somewhere other than that hole, then every
creature of the night in this city was hurt, scarred, and in many
cases broken. They just wanted to be left alone, and they did the
same to everyone else.