Vamp-Hire (31 page)

“And what, we let you go or something?” Dolph
seemed surprisingly cool at hearing Phoebe and Randy had been taken
while Nick’s blood had turned to ice.

“No,” he said. “I’m an exercise in power and
faith and abject obedience. And I’m a gift.”

Cameron sprang to his feet from his sitting
position, his hands suddenly in front of him despite the handcuffs
that were supposed to be binding them, reaching for Dolph. The old
man took a step backward, planted a foot and thrust his hands into
Cameron’s chest, stopping his forward motion. Dolph chopped his
arms downward and in a blur of speed that belied his age, grabbed
at the young vamp’s face.

Cameron screamed, his hands going up, but
Dolph’s hands had already moved, one flashing straight into
Cameron’s throat, whose wounded eyes bulged as his throat crunched
audibly. He fell and popped up to his feet again just as quickly.
Nobody moved, or everyone moved much slower than the two
combatants. There was only terror in the younger man’s eyes as
Dolph swiftly advanced on him.

He slashed the air with a taloned hand and
Dolph easily ducked, twisting his whole upper body as he brought a
massive uppercut into the vamp’s solar plexus. Cameron’s legs
turned to water again. He rolled back up onto his feet quickly and
slashed at Dolph again, only this time the old man stepped toward
the blow, blocking it with his forearm, grabbing it and smashing
the elbow over his knee like kindling.

Cameron made a sound like a steam whistle.
Dolph chose the opportunity to give him a massive boot in the chest
and simultaneously yank on the injured appendage. The young vamp
made his broken version of a scream again and telegraphed a slash
with his free hand.

Big mistake.

Dolph moved in another blur of motion and did
something Nick could only have described as Segal-esque. He
shuddered as the old man broke what they would later learn were a
total of eleven bones in Cameron’s arm, ribs, knees, and shin. The
vamp fell and tried to get up, a pained look on his face as if he
were walking on shards of hot glass.

Dolph didn’t charge him again, taking a
defensive stance and waiting. Cameron flopped around until settling
on dragging himself away from the fight.

“What?” Dolph said.

Nick looked around and saw everyone was
staring at him with their mouths open, the two police officers and
the security guard included. Nick checked and saw his was hanging
open too.

The cops wrangled Cameron again, pressing him
into the floor despite his severe injuries and tying his wrists
with several zip ties.

“You’re gonna have to let us in there,” a
woman in scrubs said. Two men in lab coats flanked her, all three
looking to Dolph, not the cops, for permission. “It sounds like his
windpipe has been crushed. He may suffocate.” One of the men took a
step back under the weight of Dolph’s intense gaze. He nodded and
they moved.

“So what are we going to do?” Nick asked.

Dolph had folded his arms, his attention
solely on the crowd of people around Cameron. He sprung a knotty
finger up as if to tell Nick ‘not now’. He waited about four beats
before strolling over to the nearly unconscious vamp and pulling
two of the medical staffers away. Nick followed, hoping Dolph
wasn’t looking to finish him off. Someone had cut a slit in
Cameron’s neck below the smashed knot of his throat.

He bent and seized the young vamp by that
knot and Cameron’s still red eyes bugged in their sockets.

“Where is my family?” Dolph said. “You will
tell me.” If it hadn’t been apparent before, the low growl of the
old man’s voice told Nick exactly how angry he was. He didn’t ever
want that voice turned on him. Tears spilled from Cameron’s eyes
and he did his best to nod.

Dolph eased his grip and Cameron opened his
mouth.

“He can’t talk,” the woman said. “You crushed
his larynx. He could die!”

“He dies if he can’t tell me what I want to
know.”

The woman opened her mouth to complain, then
shut it. Nick noticed the slit they’d made had begun to close.

“Mall.”

Nick grimaced at the sound of Cameron’s
voice. It was the vocal equivalent of a car driving on bare
rims.

“Which one—Oakland or Somerset?”

“Somer…set.” Dolph narrowed his eyes, veins
popping out on his arm all the way up to his shoulder. “Somerset,”
Cameron said again, the remnants of his voice sounding pinched.

“Make sure you sedate him. Heavily. He isn’t
human.” Dolph let go and headed down the hall toward the elevators.
The doctors began working on Cameron again as Nick, the other
vamps, medical staff, and patients who’d stepped into the hall
parted for the old man like the Red Sea.

“We have to have some kind of game plan,
Dolph.” Nick put a hand on his arm. It was like touching stone. How
old was this guy again?

“I already have a game plan. I’m going to
give you to him.”

* * *

Despite the superior numbers of Nick’s group,
nobody had moved, as though in their entirety they still couldn’t
have taken Dolph. Luckily, the old man had had an actual plan other
than just handing Nick over.

He’d explained while they moved that the plan
was actually in three parts. Nick and Dolph potentially had the
much more dangerous of the three, driving to meet Leonard. Clip,
Pearlanne, and a few others were headed back to the facility. The
boy was certain he could get inside again and the intention was to
find weapons. Ray, Vince, and the rest were going to try to find
the old man. Ray’s Skill was locating and, although it was a
longshot, he was going to try to find the doctor.

Someone, probably Phoebe, had brought the big
Hummer to the hospital and there Dolph was, a massive man behind
the wheel of the massive vehicle. The engine roared to life and the
three parties split off. No matter how long he and Dolph took,
everyone else was going to make it to Somerset before the other two
could meet up with them. They had too far to drive and too far to
drive back.

So they needed to take it slower. Dolph was
the one who’d said it and even though he understood, the only thing
Nick could think about was going to where they were. They had
somewhere to go to kill some time.

It was near impossible to believe this man
had almost choked to death a mere few days ago. Then again, that
made sense in a way. Nick wasn’t sure that anything other than
Dolph could kill Dolph. He’d just faced down an uber vamp and had
broken him like dropped dinner plates.

“How did you do that?” Nick asked as they
drove. “To Cameron, I mean.”

Dolph glanced at him. “He might have been
souped up on rabisu juice, but he’s still a boy. He’s counting on
everybody to be a mortal version of him.”

“I don’t understand,” Nick said.

“If the average person gets into a fight,
even if he wins he probably gets hurt because he doesn’t know how
to handle himself. He pulls a muscle or breaks his hand or
hesitates a second too long and allows the other guy to get a punch
in. That kid got used to being the biggest bully in the yard, but
he’s still a kid. No training. I went at him hard and fast and
overwhelmed him. Simple as that.”

It couldn’t have been that simple. Or Dolph
really couldn’t have thought of it that simply. He couldn’t have
known that would have worked. Okay, Cameron wasn’t a trained
killer, only a monster. Was there really that much of a difference?
There seemed so much more there to learn.

“That won’t work on Leonard,” Nick said.

“No.”

Nick waited for Dolph to elaborate; he didn’t
say anything more. It frustrated him that the man was so
matter-of-fact. It made Nick paranoid that Plan B might have
actually involved giving him to Leonard or a bomb landing on
them.

He didn’t want to lose. He also didn’t want
to die. There were degrees of win, he realized. They could go in,
kill Leonard somehow, and take Phoebe and Randy home. They could
win and Nick could die in the process. Or maybe he could be
horribly disfigured or injured. Or Dolph could say ‘here you go’
and let Leonard take him.

Nick wasn’t exactly comfortable with their
plan working. There were too many moving parts. So much to go
wrong. What if the others couldn’t find the old man? What if he and
Dolph got there too early? He didn’t see how they’d be able to
stall. The Hummer pulled into the lot of a plaza. A home
improvement store that had taken up residence at an old Lowe’s was
ahead and Dolph went up the first aisle and swung into a handicap
space. They hopped out and once again, Nick was half jogging to
keep up with Dolph.

How did someone his age have so much
energy?

“Hey, could I ask you something?” Nick
figured it was dumb to wait for a response. He’d just asked
something. “How old are you?”

Dolph looked at him over his shoulder, not
shortening his long stride. “Sixty-seven.”

A short, skinny Asian vamp who was trying to
pass with a pair of sunglasses asked, “Could I help you find
anything?”

Dolph said, “Chainsaws,” sounding as if he
were doing an impression of one.

There must have been something menacing in
his look because the kid dropped his head and pointed behind him.
If the situation hadn’t been as dire as it was Nick might have
asked Dolph to ease up. As it was, he was just as eager to get this
over and done with. The idea was to have a chainsaw apiece for the
remaining two or three vamps Leonard had. He could have been wrong
and there might have been thirty of them waiting by the time the
two of them made it there, but Nick sensed Leonard, or Cain as
Cameron had called him, hadn’t had enough time to enlist that many
qualified vamps. Brandon had told him they couldn’t take every
vamp, there had to be something more, something special.

Dolph had lent credence to the idea that some
vamps were more unique than others. Already it was known that vamps
tended to have Skills, though not all of them. Other than their
minor physical differences (and yes, Dolph had seen plenty of vamps
that looked decidedly less human than average) some vamps were for
all intents and purposes, human. Most of the ones with some type of
Skill had it only to a small degree, having the ability to count
how many steps a person would take from a table where he was
sitting to the door when he left or something else as equally
unnatural as it was mundane.

Nick fell into that last category, although
he couldn’t quite put his finger on what his Skill was. He didn’t
know if the relationship thing was an actual Skill or if he was
just naturally perceptive. He didn’t think it was something
impossible for a human to do, like the vamp he’d known at the
Center who could smell lies. There were people who’d been trained
to notice facial tics, changes, and other nervous behaviors in
breathing who could do much the same thing by sight. By what
mechanism he could suss out such things really didn’t make a
difference, he could do it, and he was a vamp. Nobody would bother
devising a test to determine why, it would simply be supposed his
vamp-ness was the reason.

They found the chainsaws and Dolph went to
the very end of the displays. He ran his hand over a few and
scanned the descriptions.

“What we want is something lighter,
anti-vibration. Cuts down on user fatigue.”

“I don’t think we’ll be cutting anything for
too long,” Nick said.

“Probably not. I still want to be as ready as
possible.”

The chainsaws still didn’t solve the problem
of how to get Phoebe and Randy away from the bad guys before they
could kill them. Hopefully Team Beta, as Clip had declared them,
would be able to help with that.

At first, everyone thought the solution was
to simply kill the old man in the lab coat. Dolph had quickly
schooled them all in the lobby of the hospital. The rabisu jumped
from body to body, and while it couldn’t be killed, its host could
die. It needed to stay in close proximity to its host, venturing
out sparingly. Like within a few dozen feet. So Team Beta had gone
back to the military facility on the off-chance he had stayed there
and to grab any weaponry they could find. When Nick had told them
about the tight security, the young vamp had it already figured
out: they would just go back in the emergency exit door. He’d begun
explaining it to Nick, who had simply waved him off, trusting he
could do what he’d said.

An employee in a gray smock came over and
gave Dolph a lazy, two-fingered salute.

“Afternoon, gentlemen, can I help you?” He
had an easy smile and crinkles at the corner of his eyes. Nick
would have guessed him to be mid-forties.

“We’ll take two of these,” Dolph said,
gesturing to an Echo chainsaw on display.

“Now that’s a lot of chainsaw there. What do
you have to cut down in such a hurry?” His smile was cigarette
yellow and Nick could smell that he’d had a smoke not that long
ago. There was something off about this man and even though he
hadn’t done anything to offend him, Nick felt a surge of hate
bubbling out of the pit of him.

“Me and my boyfriend like saw-play,” Nick
said. “If you don’t mind we’d like to get to it sooner than
later.”

“Oh, uhh, well, let me get those for you.” He
pulled the keys attached to a retractable cord on his belt and
unlocked the cage beneath the display. ‘Doug’, as his nametag
indicated, had a bruise along the edge of his hand disappearing up
his sleeve. Nick watched him fish out the two chainsaws,
contemplating chopping him in the throat when he stood up.

“If you guys want the scabbards and cases
with these—”

“We’re fine with these,” Dolph said, plucking
his out of Doug’s cradled arm. Nick took the other one. “You sell
gas here?” Dolph was putting extra growl into his tone and the
salesman looked on the verge of letting fly out of every lower body
orifice.