Immortal Coil: A Novel (Immortal Trilogy Book 1) (10 page)

“Yes, please let me do this. I know it could work. I want—I need to be in your life. Please, I’m begging you. Take me in…or…’

“‘What I said next almost ruined my chances to go with Antony.

“‘Make me like you. Make me a vampire. We can hunt together, as equals.’

Antony flinched. Or perhaps he had jumped to his feet but sat back down again so fast that it only seemed like he flinched.

“I have since learned about his trouble with a human named Bane who was then sired, turned evil and then killed by Antony. It left him scared and tormented. He’d never consider turning me.

“But he did take me in. Turns out, he was lonely and looking for company. He wanted me to join him. It was why he let me see him in the first place.

“Ralph found me when the diamond ring showed up in a police raid on a pawn shop in the neighborhood where I was working for Michael. It didn’t take him long to track me down after that. Years after Ralph’s death my mother remarried, I had learned. I found that out in the same article I learned my mother had declared me dead in absentia. She had taken out a life insurance policy on me when I was young, and the only way she could collect is if I was legally dead. I just hope she’s doing something productive with the money.

“I think about her sometimes, but I don’t miss her. She hadn’t been a very good mother and I can’t seem to bring myself to really care what she’s doing with her life. Someday I might forgive her for what she has done to me, but right now I’m better off without her and she’s better off without me. I’ll leave it at that.”

              Maggie stared at David for a long time. There were tears in her eyes threatening to spill down her cheeks. She wanted to reach out and hug him or do something to comfort him.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she said when the lump in her throat had passed.

              Sarah Winston drove home from work around 5:15 p.m., stopping once to gas up her Jeep Cherokee. She pulled into her driveway and casually locked her S.U.V. using the automatic key fob. She used her house key to unlock the front door and stepped inside. She looked around the living room, admiring and cherishing its cleanliness and beauty before the rush. Soon her husband or her kids would burst through the door, destroying everything in their path. She rushed to the kitchen and started pulling ingredients out of the fridge to make dinner. As she kneaded the eggs, panko breadcrumbs and raw hamburger into meatloaf, she thought of how she might approach the subject to her husband that her boss planned on giving her a promotion. Should have been good news, except the promotion was for a position in Texas and they would have to move. She was sure her husband would be okay with this news, but the kids would be furious. She was elbow deep in the bloody ground beef when she heard the door swing abruptly open then closed again. She heard the book-laden knapsack hit the floor, and then the Converse high-tops being kicked off and crashing into the wall. Moments later her bouncing baby boy scampered into the kitchen.

              Randal Winston scuffed along the floor in stocking feet to the fridge and opened the door. He stared into the cool interior of the appliance for several seconds before deciding to ask, “What do we have to snack on?”

              “Apples, carrots, kiwi...”

              Randal slammed the refrigerator door shut. “Mom.”

              “Okay, there are hot pockets in the freezer.”

              “Make them for me?”

              Sarah showed him her meat covered hands, but he had already scampered away. She listened as the boy stomped his way up the stairs. Sarah thought:
he’s only one child and yet he sounds like a herd of Clydesdales thundering through my clean house.
Sarah smiled; of course she would cook Hot Pockets for him.

              Randal was 13 with his mother’s jet black hair and blue eyes. He had a peppering of small brown freckles across his cheeks and his nose. As his mother entered his room with two hot pockets on a paper plate, she wrinkled up her own freckled nose.

              “Smells like a locker room in here. Put those dirty socks in the laundry chute. Don’t fill up on this junk. Dinner will be ready at seven.”

              It was fall, and the sun was due to set at 6:43 pm.

              Cindy, Randal’s sister, came home next. She breezed into the house, ran up the stairs and closed the door to her room down the hall. Randal barely registered her presence as he continued dodging zombies on the Xbox 360, waving the controller in an effort to force it to his will. His father walked into the house not long after his sister and before he had even made it off the seventh level, his mother was calling him down to dinner.

              He pressed “pause” on the game controller and rushed down the stairs. He was the first one at the dinner table. After a bit of coaxing from her mother, and much protesting from Cindy, the 17-year-old girl staggered out of her room, stomped down the stairs and plopped down at the dining table in a boneless heap.

She huffed.

              “I’m not even hungry,” she said.

              Her father glared at her from the head of the table.

              As Sarah made the first cut into the steaming meatloaf, the front door burst open with a crash. Sarah screamed, and her husband popped up from his chair. He turned toward the intrusion. Sarah dropped the knife she was holding and pulled Randal closer to her in a protective stance. Everyone stared dumbly at the stranger standing in their doorway.

              The man standing there was six and a half feet tall, wearing a ratty old gray trench coat, black trousers and black cowboy boots. In his huge fist he held a cane—no, not a cane—a staff: a wooden rod almost as tall as the man with a knob of ivory at the top as big as a baseball. The intruder entered the house and closed the door behind him.

              “What the hell!” Thomas Winston rushed to confront the intruder and force him out of his house. Thomas reached for the collar of the trench coat, intending to throw this man out, but before he could make contact with the man, there was a flutter of heavy fabric; and with a speed much too fast for the human eye to see, Thomas was knocked to the floor with the ivory head of the staff in the intruder’s hand. He fell to the floor unconscious and bleeding.

              The family at the table screamed in unison.

              The intruder was too fast for the family to outrun. The woman was pushed down into her chair, and with a hemp rope pulled from the intruder’s coat, her hands were tied to the arms of the chair. Next was the girl. She was tied to the chair at her mother’s left.

              The hemp rope was tied around the boy’s neck and then attached to the intruder’s belt. Choking and crying, Randal was dragged through the room to where Thomas had fallen. The intruder glanced at the two females and smiled. They gasped when they saw his eyes turn a filmy red. The boy, having been driven face first to the floor, could not see what was going on. Near him, however, a framed family picture had fallen from its stand and the glass had smashed out. The boy reached out and pulled the picture from the frame and crammed it into his pocket.

              “Ah, you are all going to taste so good.” The intruder moaned as he looked into each pair of terrified eyes; and then he sank his fangs into the man’s neck. The stricken man came back from the realm of unconsciousness just in time to feel the piercing bite to his neck and hear the wild screams of his family. He struggled against his attacker, but his blows were as useless as wind. He was pinned down so tightly that he couldn’t even turn his head. The dying man could feel his heartbeat slowing as he looked at the floor and saw his own life’s blood seeping into the carpet around his head. His last thought was of his family and his inability to protect them.

              The intruder stood, lifting the dying man in his arms, still sucking at the neck wound. Then, with an exhalation of satisfaction, the intruder released his prize and the limp man dropped like a sack of laundry to the floor.

              The intruder turned to the frantic women and smiled. With the back of his hand he wiped the blood from his mouth. “Good stuff,” he said.

              The boy, still pinned to the intruder, was forced dragged as the attacker sped to the dining room table and the frightened girls. From his kneeling position, he was able to see what had happened to his father through the legs of the table. Pulling his eyes away from the crumpled heap that was his father, the boy then watched as his sister Cindy was targeted.

              The girl’s cries were halted as the intruder dragged a sharpened fingernail across her throat. Holding the girl’s head up by her hair, the intruder leaned over and commenced drinking from the wound as if drinking from a water fountain. He caught as much of the flowing blood as he could, but much of it spilled down his face. As the blood flow slowed, the girl’s eyes lost any sign of life. The intruder released his grip on her hair and the lifeless head dropped to the table. Her head rolled to the side and landed on her arm, making her seem as though she were merely tired, and had laid her head down to rest. The only thing that disrupted that illusion was the puddle of blood seeping onto the table around her head and dripping to the floor.

              The intruder straightened, pulling the boy onto his feet by the rope. He hefted the boy under his arm like a football and moved with preternatural speed to the woman. She barely had time to register the movement before the intruder was straddling her, sitting on her lap with his knees pointing behind her, and they were facing each other. He was much too heavy for her and she screamed out in pain. The intruder dropped the boy next to him and lifted the woman’s chin in order to look into her eyes.

              The man looked slowly down at the boy. The woman’s tear-filled, horror stricken eyes followed his gaze to her son. She tried to scream out, but the man’s powerful grip was squeezing her jaw and she couldn’t move her mouth.

              The man looked back at her, and Sarah’s eyes focused back on him. He smiled weakly with mock sympathy. The woman panted frantically.

              “I’m going to keep him,” the man said. “It makes me happy to look at him so I think I’m going to keep him as a pet. I’m going to give him the gift.”

              The woman grew angry now. She didn’t know what the gift was, but she didn’t want it for her son, nor did he deserve it. He was only a child, she begged silently still unable to speak with the intruder’s rough hand on her jaw.
Please let my son live
. She struggled against the intruder on her lap with a fierceness that gave the man pause. She had almost managed to throw him off. Spittle flew from her lips as she struggled to say, “Over my dead body!”

              The man was amused. He clasped his hands together, holding them up like a champion. The woman pounded her head into his torso with a fury unmatched by any of his previous victims. She was a fighter. It was a fruitless attempt, but she would fight anyway.

              “That’s exactly how it will be,” the stranger said. “Over your dead body.” He then bit into her neck and drained her. She struggled valiantly at first, but her struggles soon weakened, and then ended altogether as she gave her final breath.

He sat back when he was finished. He had not wasted a drop of her blood. He turned his attention back to the boy. It was his turn. The man had saved the best for last. He smiled.

              Although the boy was facing the very real possibility of the end of his short life, he couldn’t stop looking at his mother. Her head hung limply to the side. Her milky white, dead eyes were open and looking at him--looking through him. The boy was in such a state of shock that when the man began speaking, the boy barely understood the words.

              Pointing behind him at the carnage in the room, the man said, “I don’t want them to come back so I’m going to destroy them. I’m going to cut off their heads and then burn the house down around them.

              “But you I will not destroy. I’m going to keep you. I will drain you and you will die, but then you will return. We will roam the night looking for fresh blood, you and me. We will live together forever, or until I grow bored of you. Would you like that?”

              The boy showed no reaction to the words. He was still looking at his mother. He was concentrating on her face, not wanting to forget what she looked like.

              He gave the boy a loving smile exposing his fangs and, with a large rough hand, he caressed the boy’s cheek. A bloody thumb left a smear of crimson on the boy’s face. Closing his eyes, the man leaned over and bit into the tender flesh of the boy’s neck.

              Maggie sat up in the queen-sized bed, gasping. She was having trouble catching her breath after such a terrible vision. She felt as though she had been the woman who was killed. Both David and Antony, who had been sitting at the dining table going over their plan to locate and eliminate the dark vampire, turned in her direction. Though she had only been sleeping for about two hours, she joined them at the table.

              “He’s close,” she said. “He has killed another family. Only this time he has a…a hostage.”

              “A hostage?” David asked, not sure if he heard her correctly.

              “Well, not really a hostage. His exact words were ‘a pet’. He had drained this small boy and allowed him to return. He has a rope tied around the boy’s neck like a leash.”

              Antony closed his eyes and calmed that inner voice screaming out at this injustice. “The boy will have to be euthanized,” he said calmly. “By the time this beast is stopped, the boy will have gone mad and will be extremely dangerous.”

              Maggie, saddened by this news but unclear how else to proceed, said nothing.

              Antony saw the anguish in Maggie’s eyes, so he continued. “Please understand, even if he were not insane, he would not have the strength or the ability to hunt. Child vampires do not have the same abilities and advantages an adult vampire has, and his canines would not grow in for another year or so.

              “Vampire canines do not just magically appear, nor can they be summoned at will. They grow in after the change—sometimes within six months, but typically it takes up to a year. Until then, vampires use razors or needles. Biting through flesh with flat teeth just makes a mess.” Antony noted that Maggie was nodding her head as if she had made up her mind about something.

              “I’m going to save that boy,” she announced.

              Antony looked at Maggie curiously, wondering if she had heard anything he had just said. She clarified.

              “I understand that the boy will be dangerous, but until we know that he is beyond hope I want to try and save him. Promise me you won’t destroy him unless there is no other choice,” she said firmly.

              “He may not survive the encounter, anyway,” David said. “When we go after the vampire,
we
may not survive the encounter.”

              “Promise me,” she said again, and this time she was talking to both of them.

They promised.

Antony said, “Do you know when he attacked this latest family? And can you pinpoint where?”

“It just happened,” she said. She pulled a map out of a drawer and circled the vicinity where the attack occurred.

Antony studied the circle she had drawn on the map. It was quite a big area. “Can you narrow it down more?’ he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Just follow the fire trucks.”