Vampires Rule (3 page)

Jack patted his shirt pocket. “You got a
cigarette, man?”

He had taken up smoking ten years ago. The
smoke deadened their acute sense of smell for a while, and he liked
that.

Cowboy drew a pack from his jacket while he
continued to drive with the other hand. He pulled a tobacco stick
out with his mouth and lit it with the car’s built-in lighter. Then
he turned, put it between Jack’s lips. Jack half-dragged on it. The
smoke filled his lungs, giving him a small burst of energy. He
straightened his spine.

Summer rubbed his shoulder. “Please change
your mind and come with us.”

“Crank up the tunes, man,” Jack said, feeling
a little like his old self again.

“You got it, buddy.” Cowboy turned up the
volume on the radio. The rock music throbbed through Jack’s body,
and it drowned Summer’s annoying voice. He closed his eyes and let
the music own him. For the moment his happiness returned to
him.

****

A few minutes later he was back at the
farmhouse. When they left him in front of his childhood home,
Cowboy flashed him a backwards peace sign. “Vampires rule,
buddy.”

Jack nodded but didn’t flash the sign back.
He didn’t feel particularly grateful to be a vampire at the moment.
Pain radiated throughout his entire body. He wasn’t sure he could
make it up the porch to the front door without help. His friends
had abandoned him, but they had to hide from the sun.

He struggled up the porch stairs. Grabbing
the wood railing, he lifted a foot and searched for the first step.
A splinter caught his pinky, tearing the skin open. Compared to the
agony the rest of his body was in, the pain in his finger barely
registered. Every breath he took sent razor-blades slicing through
his lungs. He was dying again, and he was alone.

Then he wasn’t alone anymore. Like a tiny
miracle, he felt her before seeing her. Silver stood behind him,
her hand pressed against his back. Her soft voice soothed his
senses and drove some of the pain away. “Billy isn’t here,” she
said. “I’m taking you home with me.”

“How did you know where I was?” He turned his
head and stared at her. The outer edges of his vision blurred. Her
entire form seemed to shimmer with an incandescent light. His mind
drifted to a surreal place. “Are you an angel?”

“Not exactly.”

Water dripped down the sides of Jack’s face.
The wet rag slid halfway off his forehead to cover one eye, and he
didn’t have the strength to push it aside. Unfortunately Silver got
lost in his blind spot. Since sneaking him up to her bedroom, she’d
been moving around non-stop, looking at everything but him. Jack
shifted his weight, uncomfortable. The pillow slipped. He turned on
his elbow and reached back with the other hand to fix it.

Pain ripped through his gut. He bit his lower
lip to stifle a groan. Maybe it would be better if he didn’t move
anymore. He relaxed against the sagging pillow with an exhausted
sigh.

Silver fluttered from one task to the next.
She fed her hamster, refolded clothes and rearranged the collection
of law books on her desk. The picture of Sandra Day O’Connor
hanging over the desk made his lips twitch. Silver had lofty ideas.
She wasn’t like anyone he’d met before, but he wasn’t sure yet if
that was a good thing.

Jack struggled to sit up again and set off
another wave of pain. It radiated from the center of his abdomen to
the outer edges of his body. He gritted his teeth and kept going
until his spine rested against the headboard. The rag tumbled to
his lap. Completely exhausted, he let it go. His gaze dropped to
the other towel, the bloody one on his bare abdomen. Curiosity
tempted him to lift it, but he was afraid of what he’d see if he
did.

Breathing became a chore.

“Why did you bring me here?” Jack blurted out
the question as soon as it entered his head.

Silver jumped. The book she was holding flew
through the air. She tried to grab it. It spun around, hit the
desk, bounced off and landed on the floor.

“You’re nervous,” he said, faking a
smile.

“Do you blame me?” She glared at him. “I’m
alone in my bedroom with a boy. My mom would freak and my dad would
grab his shotgun if they had any idea you were here. On top of
that, you’re a vampire.”

“Why are you helping me then?”

“Dumb question.” She stepped closer to the
bed after retrieving her book. She clutched it between her hands
like a shield. “You were attacked by a werewolf while trying to
save me. It was brave, what you did. No one’s ever done anything
like that for me. Well, maybe my parents, but that’s it.”

Contemplating in silence, he thought about
how she’d killed the werewolf in the cemetery. In the last ten
years he’d seen some amazing things, but never anything like that.
Werewolves were notoriously hard to terminate. This girl had done
it without breaking a sweat.

“How did you do it?” he asked. “In the
cemetery, when you took care of the werewolf, how did you kill it
without a weapon?”

Silver pursed her lips together. She let the
silence draw out until it was beyond awkward, and he started to
think she wouldn’t answer him. Her shoulders finally lifted a bit
and she admitted, “I sucked its soul out.”

He gaped at her. Forget cute; this girl was
scary as hell. He sat up straighter, focused on how great it would
be to have that power. “Is it something I could learn to do?”

“No.” She walked around the bed and sat next
to him. “Nobody taught me how to do it. I was born with the
ability. I was born to kill werewolves.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a hunter.”

A hunter? “How old are you?”

“I swear you sound just like my parents. They
think I’m too young to handle the life.” Her jaw tightened. “I’m
almost eighteen. Okay? Age is irrelevant anyway. I killed my first
werewolf when I was twelve.”

A disturbing thought sprang to mind. “You
just hunt werewolves, right?”

“No. My parents and I also hunt vampires,
evil spirits, all dark creatures.”

Nervous, Jack took a mental inventory of his
body. The bleeding had slowed but hadn’t stopped. His limbs felt
heavy, weak. He wasn’t in any shape to take a hunter on.

Of course she hadn’t attacked him, not yet.
Maybe she was waiting for the werewolf venom to do its job. She
would sit with him and make small talk until he died. It wasn’t the
ideal situation, but he preferred it in contrast to the other
possibility. He certainly didn’t want to get his soul sucked
out.

There was a rumor that vamps didn’t have
souls. Not true. Also, there was a myth saying vampires didn’t have
blood of their own. Ridiculous. Their blood was tainted, diseased,
but they had plenty of it. Jack didn’t quite understand it. Cowboy
had tried to explain it once, something about their blood turning
black before being eaten away by bacteria. Vampires needed fresh
blood to keep the disease from totally taking over and destroying
them. According to Cowboy it was a slow, horrible death worse than
anything.

“So your parents decided to make you into
this great hunter and take away your choices? That hardly seems
fair.”

“They didn’t have a choice either,” she said.
“Do you know where vampires and werewolves come from?”

Deadpan expression, he said, “Well, first
their mommies and daddies have to be in love. Then they...”

An explosive sigh cut him off. “I’m being
serious here.”

“Sorry. Go ahead.” Maybe he could keep her
talking until his strength returned. “Tell me everything.”

“Okay.” A happy smile transformed her face as
she told him the story. She settled next to him on the bed, eyes
sparkling, eager to share her biggest secret. “This might come as a
shock to you, but we aren’t alone in the universe. There are other
realms, other worlds out there, and about three thousand years ago
a visitor from one of those places got banished to our world.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because of Lovely’s diary.”

He shook his head, totally confused. “What is
a Lovely?”

Silver laughed. “I know. Her name is crazy,
right? She picked it herself.” When he wrinkled his nose and
frowned, she explained, “Lovely said her real name is not easily
pronounced by humans. The first human boy she met told her she was
lovely, so she used that as her name.”

“Humans? She wasn’t human?”

“No. She was a faerie.”

Jack burst out laughing, certain the
werewolf-killer was messing with his head. He couldn’t hold the
laughter in, not even when sharp pain ripped into his gut. His hand
pressed against his torn abdomen in the hope of keeping his insides
inside. “Are you kidding me? Tinkerbell started all this? Is that
what you’re saying?”

“I’m not talking about tiny girls with wings
and a handful of pixie dust.” It was obvious that Silver wanted to
yell at him, but she managed to keep her voice down. “Faeries come
in all sizes just like us and they have awesome powers beyond
anything you’ve ever seen.”

The last word caught his attention, wiped the
smile off his face and made him sit up straighter. “Powers?”

“That’s right. I don’t know about everything
she could do, but I know this much. She created the first werewolf
and the first vampire. I also know that she handed down her diary
and this.”

Silver reached under the neck of her t-shirt
and pulled out a chain with a silver dagger charm dangling from it,
three tiny blue stones in the center. They twinkled like colored
diamonds. She held the charm a few inches from his face and said,
“For centuries, every time a girl was born into my family the
parents would hold this over the baby’s head. Nothing happened
until my father held it over me. It began to glow because I’m the
one Lovely spoke about in the book. I’m the one with the power to
stop the head werewolf. So my parents reluctantly trained me. I
come from a long line of hunters. It’s in my blood.”

He scoffed. “You expect me to buy any of
this?”

“You’ll believe... in time.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Ignoring the question, she said, “Let’s see
how you’re doing.”

Silver gently lifted the towel from his
wound. She probed the area with her fingers, causing Jack to suck
in a painful breath. If anything, it burned worse than before. He
bit the inside of his lip to keep from crying out.

She said, “Sorry. Good news. Looks like the
bleeding has stopped. Your body is beginning to heal itself.”

“I’m not going to heal.”

She frowned at him. “Of course you are.”

“If you know as much about werewolves as you
claim, then you know a small scratch can kill a vampire.” He
gestured to the bloody towel. “That’s a lot deeper than a
scratch.”

“Not all vampires die after a werewolf
attack.”

He rolled his eyes. “Now you sound like
Summer.”

“Who?”

“She’s a vampire friend, one of the people
you saw at the cemetery.”

“Which one? The tall girl with the long curls
or the one my size?”

Jack hesitated in answering. There was
something in her tone, something that warned him the question was
not as casual as it sounded. Yet the smile remained fixed to her
face. It seemed genuine. She was probably making small talk to eat
up the time until he was dead. Besides, how could giving her a name
hurt anyone?

“Summer has short hair,” he said. “Lily is
the tall girl, and Cowboy is the name of the guy you saw with
them.”

“I can’t believe you laughed at my name when
you hang out with people called Cowboy and Summer.”

“They’re nicknames.” On the defensive now, he
said, “They call
me
Jackpot. It was Cowboy’s idea to change
our names when we were reborn as vampires. He thought it would be
easier to release our old selves that way.”

Cowboy had also desperately wanted matching
tattoos, but when they’d tried they found out vampire skin didn’t
hold the ink. As soon as they were pierced with the needle their
flesh healed, driving the dye out. Cowboy had tried a few more
times with the same result. It made him crazy knowing he couldn’t
have something he wanted.

Silver leaned closer, her eyes wide and she
spoke in a soft whisper. “Did it work? Were you able to forget you
were human? Did you become a monster?”

He could smell the blood in her veins. Was
she provoking him on purpose, trying to get him to attack her? Did
she want him to lose control so she could kill him without remorse?
He closed his eyes, silently fighting the beast within. He couldn’t
allow himself to attack her. She was a hunter, and he was
abnormally weak at the moment.

On cue, a surge of dark energy zapped through
him and his eyes popped open.

Silver gasped. She leaped up and back at the
same time, a look of pure panic on her face. He didn’t have to ask
what was wrong. His eyes had turned solid black as the vampire
inside floated to the surface. Silver moved to the other side of
the room, lifted the hem of her trousers and removed a wooden stake
from what appeared to be a home-made leather sheath.

Jack snarled, revealing his fangs. The smell
of her blood drove him over the edge. He couldn’t fight the
inevitable, couldn't resist, so he gave into it with an eager sense
of anticipation. Time to teach her a lesson: girls shouldn't bring
vampires home with them.

In the blink of an eye he was out of bed and
across the room, his face an inch from hers. Before she could
react, he grabbed her wrist. With a quick twist, he removed the
stake from her hand. It fell to the floor, useless. Hands on her
shoulders, he drove her into the nearest corner. They stumbled into
a tall white bookshelf and several items got knocked off. In all
his years as a vampire he hadn’t attacked a human, choosing to feed
off animals instead, but he’d never been this injured before. His
desperate need for blood overwhelmed his senses. His mind shut
down.