InsistentHunger (7 page)

The force of hitting the ground made bits of dust and ash
puff up into the air and float on the breeze while vapor rose from the
unrecognizable remains. Something cold ran through Paige, like when she was a
kid and she’d get those shivers that her mom would call someone walking over
her grave. But this time, the shiver pulled at her, making her fall back a
step.

Paige stared at the ground, her mouth open, her gun and her
cell phone hanging at her side. With her heart pounding rabbit-fast, she
couldn’t even seem to get her brain in gear, even though some distant part of
her training screamed about having an armed suspect still on scene. The soldier
turned toward the house and started moving again and Paige brought her weapon
up.

“Freeze!” she ordered. He looked over at her, almost amused.

“If you’re going to shoot me, do it now and get it over
with. After dark, neither one of us will stand a chance in hell if one of those
things smells that much blood.” Without showing any sign of concern, he started
moving toward the porch again, his gun held up. The regs said that you didn’t
shoot a suspect in the back, but Paige was tempted. This asshole was ignoring
her and Paige never handled that well.

“Freeze or I will call this in and arrest your ass,” she
warned.

“Great, another arrest. My mother would be so proud. Go
arrest someone who’s breaking a law and leave me the hell alone,” he snapped
and then he jumped up onto the rotting porch, swearing when one of his feet
went through a board. Pulling it loose, he headed for the door, yanking it open
and aiming his weapon into the dark.

Paige glanced back at her car. She’d promised Brady she
wouldn’t go in the house without backup, but this guy had killed one of the
monsters and he’d passed over a chance to kill Paige. The shock of seeing the
monster turned to dust and vapor had pretty much left her vulnerable for long
seconds when he could have easily put a bullet in her brain. Her chance to get
answers was in that house.

Her mind made up, Paige headed up the front steps, careful
to clear the area as she slowly entered the house.

Wild animals had nested in the ceiling and bits of straw
hung like moss. However, animals hadn’t left the long streak of blood that
trailed from the front door to what used to be the formal parlor. Paige headed
through the wood frame of what had once been a grand arch. The blood still had
a reddish tint to the brown, so it couldn’t be too old, and Paige’s stomach
turned at the thought that this might be Brady’s blood.

In the parlor, the weather-pitted wood floor had designs
painted in blood—a plus sign with strange curling C’s at the corner, unfamiliar
letters and a large figure that looked like stylized eyes with two lines rising
up from the center to make odd eyebrows. A shiver ran through Paige, and she
backed out of the room and looked around to see if she could figure out where
the soldier-guy had gone.

When a board creaked, Paige turned and pointed her weapon up
the stairs. The soldier guy stood there with his own gun holstered. This close
she could see that the bulky thing around his neck was a huge strand of whole
garlic heads woven into the world’s ugliest necklace. “That was the only one,
but it looks like they were making more here.” He started coming down the
stairs. “So, from your reaction, I take it that’s the first vampire you’ve
watched die.”

Paige backed up to the open door. “Vampire?” Sure, she’s
suspected she might find a vampire here, but having the word said out loud
still made her feel edgy, like a psychiatrist with a straitjacket might jump
out from behind a corner.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and shrugged. “That’s
what I call them.”

“You? Just you? I don’t suppose there’s a chance other
people call them psychotics with delusion of vampirism?” she asked hopefully.

He looked at her oddly. “Do delusions make someone vanish like
mist?” he asked.

Paige lowered her weapon without holstering it or putting
the safety back on. “Hey, meth makes all sorts of impossible things happen.
Meth, LSD, some of the pharms. And then there’s the increasing possibility that
I’m having delusions.”

He pursed his lips in a twisted version of a smile and
shrugged. “Then feel free to keep pretending it’s all a dream.” With that, he
turned and headed down the hall that led farther into the house.

“Wait!” Paige called after him. “I have a few questions.”
She took a step farther into the house and wondered if she wasn’t the world’s
biggest idiot. She really should be running for the hills, not calling after
this guy.

He turned and looked at her. “I thought you wanted to
pretend none of this was real.”

“I do,” Paige said. “But I also want to be six inches
taller. I’ve learned to deal with disappointment.”

He smiled and looked her up and down as though evaluating
her. “A sense of humor. Good. You’ll need it. They were trying to make new
vampires here—that’s probably why that one was willing to fight over the lair.
Usually, they run away unless they have a stronger vamp ordering them into
battle.”

“So they aren’t all….” Paige stopped and swallowed even
though her mouth had gotten uncomfortably dry.

“Pathetically easy to kill? Terrifying? Ugly? You have to
give me a hint where you’re going with that.”

Paige had to consider that for a second. “I expected
something more impressive.”

He leaned against the wall, his loose limbs arranged so that
he could launch himself off the wall at a moment’s notice. Definitely military.
“Some are impressive. Some are damn near impossible to kill. The new vampires
they were making here—who knows how strong they are. If we’re lucky, we have a
few more foot soldiers like that one I killed out there.”

“So you’re hunting them?”

“Someone has to,” he agreed. “Name’s Jim. Retirement got
boring, so I took up hunting.”

“You hunt vampires.” Paige said it out loud just to see how
the words sounded. They sounded insane.

“Vampires aren’t as common as you’d think given the number
of dumbass television shows and books that try to make them out to be undead
heroes, but you get nests and clusters like the one you folks have going around
here. And given the mess in that room, we have more now.”

“I’m—”

“Paige Silver. I know. You had your partner go missing last
night.”

Paige tightened her hand on her gun and glared at him. “No
offense,” Jim said, raising his hands. “I just keep an eye on the locals when
the vamps go making a nuisance of themselves. Most times they’re quiet as
church mice, but grabbing a cop is not exactly quiet. That’s assuming the vamps
were the ones that snatched him up. So, what are the odds that the ceremony in
there included your partner?” Jim watched her without a single emotion showing
through his impassive face. He had to be about her age or a little older, so if
he was retired already, that suggested military. Active duty soldiers could
take retirement around forty.

Paige glanced at the symbols painted onto the old floors.
“This is how you make vampires? I thought there would be more biting and less
with the magic symbols.”

Jim watched her for a second and Paige was afraid she’d
given too much away. Too late she realized that her uniform top still had the
bloodstain on the arm that the captain had noticed. However, Jim didn’t seem to
spend any time staring at it.

“If biting made vampires, I would have been dead a long time
ago. Or undead. See this?” He pulled one sleeve up to show a nasty semicircle
scar. “A vamp bit nearly down to the bone. Another one caught me here.” He
turned and pulled up the bottom of his sweater to show her an even more vicious
one low down on his side. The ragged white edges of the scar looked like a
tangled mass of tiny railroad tracks. “This one was a bugger to kill,” he said,
twisting so that Paige could get a better view of the mark. “He was so young
that when I staked him, he left a rotting corpse behind. Let me tell you, I
prefer the older ones, the ones that just vanish into dust.”

Paige leaned back against the rotting wall and tried to get
her brain to actually sort through all the information. She should call for
backup and get Forensics over here to see if there was evidence of Brady in the
room. Drops of blood decorated the center of the floor between the strange
symbols and her gut said that a good number probably came from Brady.

These assholes had tied him, dragged him in here when he was
dead or dying and then turned him into something demonic. But bring Forensics
in here and they were going to get it all wrong. They were going to start
blaming gangs or Satanists or something that wasn’t a vampire.

Jim cleared his throat and Paige looked up, her heart
pounding with panic at the thought that she’d stopped watching him for so long.
“Look, if you don’t want to get dragged any farther into this, you should just
walk away now,” Jim said in a gentle voice. “Trust me, one more hunter won’t
make any difference and this is…” He looked around at the ratty old room. “This
is just business as usual. They’ll make a few vamps to reinforce their numbers,
eat a few homeless folks and then wander away. You don’t need to get involved.”

“Yes, I do,” Paige said without explaining that she had a
vampire in her basement at home.

“No, you don’t,” he disagreed. “This is more than you
bargained for, so do yourself a favor and walk away.”

Paige stood up straight and holstered her weapon since she
was pretty sure they were on the same side. That’s when she realized she’d
dropped her cell phone at some point. Great. “I need to know what happened
here,” she said in the no-nonsense tone of voice that always warned the guys at
the station to stop screwing with her.

“They made vamps. They probably meant to make more, but then
we just killed the sentry.”

“And?”

“And you don’t need to know any more.” Jim’s tone warned her
off, but Paige wasn’t used to letting other people stop her from doing what she
wanted. A therapist would probably say she had authority issues. And she did.
She liked her own authority, but she got twitchy when someone she didn’t know
or trust tried keeping information from her. That was just the way she was
built. If this guy tried hiding information, he was going to find out how much
of a bitch Paige could be.

“I’m already in this. I’m a cop and that probably was my
partner in there last night. So either start talking to me or I’ll run you in.”
Reaching down, she rested her hand on her gun, aware that she didn’t have
backup, and this wasn’t some helpless drunk she’d picked up on a sweep. This
man was used to hunting vampires, and while vampires were a little less
impressive than she’d thought, it meant he was used to resorting to violence to
get his way.

Instead he grinned. “On what charges?”

“Threatening a police officer with a weapon and sounding
like a fruitcake. The first might not be true, but trust me, the second one
is.” In twelve years, Paige had never threatened anyone with false charges, but
unusual circumstances called for a little more creativity. She figured her
ethics were intact unless she actually did charge him.

Instead of looking threatened, he had the nerve to grin at
her. “Are you really sure you—”

“Talk.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. “He
was more than a partner, wasn’t he?”

“Not your business.”

Jim nodded. “He’ll kill you if you find him. Vampires aren’t
human anymore. The blood—it’s only one part of the ceremony. They tie the
victim down in the center of a magical circle and use an incantation to remove
the last lingering bits of soul from the body. It’s the same type of magic some
shamans use to go on spirit quests. If you can catch them at this point, the
spell will eventually fade and the soul and body will reunite.”

“He was alive?” Paige asked.

“They like to feed on the victims right before the ceremony,
that way the body is still twitching.”

“I found the blood in his apartment,” Paige said.

Jim frowned. “They didn’t drink it?”

She shook her head, the memory of Brady’s apartment still
raw in her mind.

“Huh.” He seemed to just think about that.

“What does that mean?”

“Look, lady, vampire hunting doesn’t come with an
instruction manual. I have no idea why they’d waste all that blood. Most times
they feed on the victims and then drop them into the circle.”

“What happens after that?” Paige asked. She needed to
understand what happened to Brady. She needed to understand and then she needed
to find someone to kill.

He hesitated. “Knowing isn’t going to make it hurt any
less.”

“I don’t expect it to. However, if you don’t tell me, I
might make myself feel better by pressing charges against you.”

“How do you know I’ll tell you the truth?”

“If you don’t, I will eventually figure it out. And state
law says that the criminally insane can get locked up for life. I saw an
ex-military man shooting at an unarmed man who disappeared before I could offer
assistance. That’d hold you on a seventy-two hour for sure and you might land
in even more trouble if they caught wind that you believed in vampires.”

That threat seemed to finally cut through some of Jim’s
calm. “Fine,” he growled out. “They force infected blood into the victim
through cuts…runes carved into the flesh. It’s like baiting the water when
you’re shark fishing, but the sharks are a hell of a lot bigger. The last step
is to slit open reality and let demons through. The demons will sometimes fight
over the bodies, making them flop around like ragdolls. The worst is when the
victim is still alive and making these cries of pain. The soul might be gone,
but the body still…” Jim stopped and pressed his lips together as his gaze
drifted back toward the symbols on the floor.