Vampire Uprising (42 page)

Ned waited long enough for his partner to get situated and then stomped toward the front door while bellowing, “Who the hell is it?”

“I need to talk to you,” the visitor replied.

Instead of blinds, the windows of the front bedroom were
covered with a thick set of drapes that were yellowed by the sun and stained by rainwater that had gotten in through cheap insulation. Rico eased the edge of one curtain aside just enough to place the girl who stood on the front step as one of the students attacked at that party. She’d made herself scarce after those people turned up dead at the hospital. Paige, he suddenly recalled. That was her name.

The Nymar were still out there as well, but too far away to be on the front stoop. Ned was probably thinking the same thing when he pulled the door open and asked, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Following you,” she replied.

“I gave you my damn card. You could’ve just called.”

“I did call. Remember those messages about the sightings of that missing girl?”

“Yeah.”

“That was me,” she explained. “I told you to show up at those places and waited for you to show up and you did.”

“I also got some strange messages from cops,” Ned told her. “Was that you too?”

“Anonymous tip along with your phone number. All I needed was for you to show up to meet one of them and I was able to follow you all the way here.”

“When I gave you that card, it was ‘cause I wanted to work with you. No need for all this other bullshit.”

“Would you have invited me back to your house?”

“No,” Ned reluctantly told her. The older man didn’t like being the one steered through a conversation, and it showed. Rico had to smirk at the sound of that.

“What if I told you I knew where to find Wes?” she offered.

“Do you?”

Now it was the girl’s turn to pause. Rico had seen her tailing Ned at least three different times, but getting all the way to the house was impressive. At least, for a beginner.

She shifted on her feet, but not out of nervousness. There was something else, and it was tough for Rico to pin it down given only his partial view through the hairline slit he’d created between the window frame and curtain. Before he could study her any further, he caught a hint of movement
to his left along the next door neighbor’s roofline. A figure hung from the gutters of that house; too slim to pull the rusted metal down and too fast to send more than a metallic creak through the air.

“Let me in and I’ll tell you where Wes is,” Paige said.

The figure was no longer hanging from the gutter, and Rico was unable to figure out where the hell it had gone. As he pulled the curtains aside to get a better look, he knew he might be spotted by the girl on his doorstep. But some things were more important than trying to get the drop on a single, albeit crafty, college girl.

“Why do you want to get inside so damn bad?” Ned asked in a tone that made Rico certain the older man was reaching for his weapon. Always one for practicality, and hiding in plain sight, Ned’s club was about the size and shape of a stickball bat or possibly a broken broom handle. More than likely he was just prepping the bat for use and making sure the girl saw he was ready for trouble. It would be a while before the spikes came out.

The dark figure launched itself from the neighbor’s gutters, to land softly on the lawn directly in front of Rico’s window. At that moment, Paige took her hand from her pocket to point a little .32 revolver at Ned’s face. “Tara told me all about you guys. Step back before I shoot you.”

As that simple threat drifted through the air, the figure on the lawn stood up and drove her hand straight through the pane of glass in front of Rico’s face. He knew it was Tara because Ned had made a point of describing her to him in detail. Tara’s dirty blond hair may have been a little stringy and dirty, but went along with the wear and tear on her slightly rounded face. What Ned hadn’t told him about was the Nymar tendrils that traced paths up along both of her cheeks like skinny black fingers reaching up to massage her temples. When Tara bared all three sets of her fangs, it seemed more like an inexperienced gunner pulling all of her triggers at once simply because she hadn’t figured out which weapon in her arsenal was best for the job. Despite her lack of finesse, Rico was barely fast enough to jump away from the window before getting his head torn off.

Tara jumped straight through the broken glass head first, hit the floor and crumpled into an awkward, off-balance roll. Her hands were scratched from hanging onto the gutters and left smears of oily blood on the floor as she rushed to stand back up. Venom dripped from her fangs and dribbled down her chin while trickling into her throat, where she quickly coughed it up again.

Rico had never seen so many markings on what was obviously a freshly turned Nymar. That, however, didn’t stop him from throwing himself at her with just as much enthusiasm as he would show to any other bloodsucker out there.

Ned backed away from the door, allowing Paige to step inside and kick it shut behind her. She was obviously nervous, but not enough to make her hands shake. Neither of them seemed concerned about anyone else seeing what was going. If the neighbors were that friendly, Ned wouldn’t have rented the house in the first place.

“What are you doing here, girl?” he asked.

“Keeping you away from me and my friends.”

“I take it that’s your friend who just busted into my place and attacked my partner?”

The sounds of struggle rattled down the hallway from the bedroom. Neither of the two in the front room so much as glanced in that direction.

“You and your partner are killers,” Paige said. “I’ve seen it. I saw what you did to Hector.”

“What did you see?”

“It was the night after Tara and I left the hospital.”

Ned was quick to point out, “You mean the night Tara killed those four good folks who worked at that hospital? Those folks who I knew, by the way.”

“The night we got out,” Paige continued as her eyes twitched with the effort of holding back all the emotions broiling beneath her surface, “we went to a safe place and that psycho came after us.”

Just then something heavy slammed against another wall in the house. That was followed by a distinctly male grunt and an animal snarl. When Ned took a look toward the
bedroom, Paige said, “Not that psycho. The one who killed Amy. Hector followed us, so I made sure Karen got away.”

“She’s the short one with the glasses?”

“Yes. After she went home, I helped Tara get what she needed.”

“She shouldn’t have needed anything after all the feeding she did in that hospital room.” Watching her carefully to measure her reaction to every word, Ned told her, “The only thing she left of those doctors was what was splattered on the walls. I got a look before the cops showed up. There was a spot in a corner where she was either licking up more blood or slopping it up with her fingers.”

“Tara’s sick,” Paige said.

“You’re damn right she is. So was that vicious little creep Hector. You should be thankin’ us for putting that one down.” When he didn’t get a response to that, Ned added, “Sounds like your sick friend is still hungry.”

“Once you and him are out of here, Wes and Hope will leave town. They’ll pack up and move along so we can do the same.”

“And then what? If you’re looking for a clinic to help folks like Tara, you ain’t gonna find any. All you’ll find is more vampires who will either turn you into one of them or eat you.” Since the fight in the bedroom was amping up, Ned jumped on the first sign that he’d hit a sensitive spot with Paige. “That’s right,” he snapped. “I said vampires. That’s what they are, girl. By helping them, you ain’t nothing more than a ghoul. Or if you’d rather put it in legal terms, you’d be an accessory.”

“Better that than a murderer,” Paige replied while holding out the .32 in a stiff firing pose.

Ned lowered the bat so the end touched the floor and the rest of it dropped across his foot when he let go. Holding out his hands to show his bloodied palms, he winced as if those wounds still registered. “So what now?” he asked. “What was your big plan? You shoot me while Tara feeds?”

She shook her head but was too rattled to say a word. It was then that Ned knew she didn’t have any intention of pulling the trigger. All she’d wanted was to find the Skinners and keep them occupied until backup came.

“They’re coming, aren’t they?” he asked.

Paige blinked, took half a step to one side and turned to glance at the front door. That was all the opening Ned needed to lean to one side while snapping up his foot to pop the wooden bat up to his waist level. The .32 went off once, sending its round past his face and into the cheap plaster behind him. Ned snatched the bat from the air and drove the handle’s thorns into his palm. Although Paige was surprised that she’d been able to pull the trigger, she was doubly shocked when the side of the bat caught her just below the knee.

With one of her feet swept completely out from under her, she fell over and twisted around to try and keep Ned in her sight. Her shoulder hit the floor hard, driving the wind from her lungs and causing her finger to tighten desperately around the revolver’s trigger. The gun jerked in her hand, to blast a hole into the ceiling and send a dirty, chunky rain of plaster down on them both. None of that debris had a chance to settle before Ned was standing directly over her with his bat poised for a strong, chopping blow.

The bedroom looked as if it had been rammed by a small car. Glass from the window lay scattered among broken pieces of the frame on a scuffed floor. What little furniture there was had been destroyed, and blood from both combatants stained the walls like streaks of cast-off paint.

Rico had tagged her several times with the wooden weapon wrapped around his fist. The spikes on either end were slick with Nymar blood, but the wounds they’d created had already closed. What bothered him even more was Tara’s speed. Despite the fact that her movements were clumsy and poorly timed, she could still get at least three blows in before he could follow through with one. He slashed at her with the weapon’s top spike, catching nothing but air. Swinging that hand back along the same path, he watched her pull her head away before the weapon got anywhere close to her. Rather than try for a third swing, he waited until his knuckles were in position and then snapped his fist straight into her mouth.

That one stung.

Thin black filaments spewed from her lip. No matter how quickly the tendrils moved to repair the damage, they weren’t able to save the fangs that Rico’s powerful jab had just knocked out. Within seconds after reeling from that, she came at him again.

The .45 had been knocked from his grasp early in the
fight. Tara’s initial flurry was so fast and powerful that Rico didn’t know how the gun had been taken from him or where it had gone. He just knew he had to find it again. She’d already buried her remaining fangs into his chest and was frantically drawing whatever blood she could from the meat under his shirt.

He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled. All that did was convince Tara to wrap her arms around his torso and mash her face against him even harder. From there his only option was to snake an arm between his body and hers, hoping the weapon on that fist tore into her more than it did him. He realized how bad a plan that was when his fist became wedged in place between their two bodies, harmless as a dried flower pressed between the pages of an old book.

“Son of a bitch,” he snarled.

It was the first time he’d ever felt a Nymar’s heartbeat. To the Nymar spore, the human heart was barely more than a piece of hijacked equipment. It squeezed the muscles, manually circulating fluids to speed the process of conversion and churning blood however it saw fit. The older ones even knew how to play it like an instrument to mimic a human rhythm. With just a bit of attention focused in the right direction, he should have been able to pinpoint which side of the heart the spore was on. This time he felt two separate and distinct patterns.

Suddenly, he understood.

Even for a Nymar that had recently fed, Tara was too fast and too strong. More than that, she showed no signs of letting up.

The markings on her face were too symmetrical compared to the random patterns formed by a creature stretching out wherever it liked within its human shell.

She healed too quickly and was too hungry.

Tara had been multiseeded.

It was a rare thing for a very good reason: Nymar spore were hungry and selfish. They preferred to be the sole inhabitants of their feeding grounds and didn’t play well with others. On those rare occasions when two did latch onto the same heart, they turned their carrier into a genuine nightmare.
Nearly every physical attribute was doubled, but they burned out in a quarter of the time. Some say the Nymar could have stayed hidden forever if not for the actions of a few multiseeded members of the species who created a mess that was too big to ignore. If he didn’t turn this fight around real quick, he was in danger of finding himself in the middle of one such mess.

Once Tara saw the error in trying to draw blood from solid muscle, she pulled her teeth out and tried to sink them into his jugular. Rico’s grip on her hair was the only thing preventing her from accomplishing that goal. Her face wound up less than an inch from his neck, giving the moment a somewhat intimate flavor as her quickening breaths created a warm spot on his skin. If he could get his trapped arm loose and turn it even a few degrees, he could open her up like a garment bag. It would be a messy way to end the fight, but very effective.

He managed to pull his hand up an inch or so before the sound of another gunshot from the living room caused her to twitch. Every one of Rico’s muscles strained to keep her fangs away from him. That wouldn’t help for much longer since Tara was now pulling hard enough to rip her own hair out at the roots.

“What’d they do to you, kid?” he asked once he’d dragged enough breath into his lungs.

Her eyes were disappearing beneath the thin tendrils that competed for every millimeter of space within her slight frame. She pushed her body down while twisting her head so she could clamp a hand around his neck to hold him steady as she fed.