Vicious (22 page)

He kissed on my neck a little more and breathed gently on my ear.

“That is not a prophecy, is it?”

“No, I was just thinking I can think of nothing better than to spend my last day on earth wrapped up in bed with you.”

That was all I needed to hear. I turned to him and kissed his exhilarated face with all of the passion I had been repressing, and his body responded right away as we fell into bed together. We were a tangle of limbs and bodies. I held him and he moved with me in a way that was purely ours. It was for us and only us. I could never feel this way with anyone else.

What was it about danger that made everything so much more inviting and sexy? It was as if it added exhilaration to even the most mundane of feelings. And those feelings that were not so mundane were skyrocketed to euphoria.

It was a wonderful day, and I decided I could die happy if it came to that. I remembered falling asleep thinking that kindred spirits were real, even when the spirits were as different as we.

Chapter Twenty Four

Grant

We left the rest of them hidden in their respective vehicles as we approached the entrance to the Saint Lawrence Correctional Facility the next day. Despite the danger we were about to face, I felt blissful and almost eager to get inside. I chalked that up to a mixture of adrenaline and the afterglow of the incredible time I had spent with Anna the night before. I turned to look at her face for traces of the same glow, but all I got was a half-smile when she noticed me looking. Otherwise, she looked stoic and focused. That’s probably how I should be acting instead of getting distracted over my own emotions.

Luckily, the guards seemed to read my antsy demeanor as that of an anxious visitor on his first trip to a prison. Anna was obviously my reluctantly supportive girlfriend or wife who showed her support by quietly being by my side but disapproving of the whole thing. It worked for us.

The guards escorted us and a few other late visitors down the main hallway where we could view several long rows of barred cells. At first, I thought all of the prisoners were out in the yard or somewhere else in the prison because the only noise we heard was the rhythmic tapping of our own shoes on the cement floor.

Then I noticed faces peering out from behind the bars as they quietly observed us passing through their halls. Their faces were gaunt and terrified, and the looks in their eyes sent cold shivers down my spine. Even a monastery full of monks who had pledged a vow of silence would have been noisier than this. The additional knowledge that there were people in those cells watching us made the silence palpable and thick feeling.

I looked at Anna to see if she’d noticed them too. She had noticed them, and I felt the muscles in her back tense. She had once been the reason for the same look on prisoners’ faces, and it ate away at her noticeably. However, if you didn’t know Anna the way I did, you would never know it by looking at her. She looked so light and delicately graceful in the little sundress covered in pastel swatches, so very unlike my Anna. This Anna looked like an Easter egg basket with sunglasses skipping her way silently down the hall.

As we neared the end of the hall, we noticed two ominous-looking double doors positioned where the hall seemed to dead end. Even though the guards steered us sharply to the right and through a different set of doors, Anna stopped abruptly and tensed all over as she stared at the dead-end doors. She inhaled slowly and lowered her sunglasses, which no one seemed to notice she was still wearing indoors, to the bridge of her nose in order to glare at the doors. I was holding her hand, so I had to stop too, which caught the attention of the guard nearest to us.

“Let’s keep moving, miss. The visitor’s center is this way,” stated the surly guard by our side.

Anna didn’t move at first.

“What’s through there, officer?” she asked.

He looked at her for a moment curiously and then at the dead-end doors. I was afraid the guard might sense Anna’s otherness for a moment since he so obviously worked in a prison that held vampires. However, he just regarded Anna as an annoying but pretty girl with too many questions.

“It leads to the kitchen, miss. That’s all. Not part of the tour for civilians though, so we had better keep moving.”

“Oh, okay,” she said nonchalantly and shrugged before pressing on with the group through the other doors and to the visitor’s center. She swung my arm back and forth with the carefree attitude of the newly in love, which in a way, I guess we were.

As soon as the guard was out of earshot, I asked as low as I could manage, “Is that where they are?”

She nodded only slightly as we entered the brightly lit lobby of the visitor’s center with its cheerful murals painted of skies of blue and white fluffy clouds and cartoon characters. I assumed this was for the benefit of any children that might be visiting their relatives in such a scary place. We signed in and sat at our assigned table to wait for Leroy McCoy to arrive.

Leroy McCoy was a five-time loser I’d found who had no family, virtually no friends and was currently doing a long stint for armed robbery and resisting arrest. When he came around the corner, he looked a million years older than the mug shots I had seen online. I squinted at the man’s face, but it was him all right. The pictures I had found were of a tough and angry white man with tanned skin and scraggly hair that fell in his face trying to cover his cold, grey eyes. He had rough, deep lines all over his face that gave him the appearance of a human topography map. The man that walked in was a paler version with a short buzz cut and a greatly minimized physique that displayed a number of homemade jail tattoos.

His eyes darted around wildly with a look of sheer terror. The guard escorted him to us and sat him down on the other side of the table. All around us, other prisoners who matched Leroy in both haircut and demeanor were sitting down at tables with their loved ones and whispering relieved greetings. Leroy just stared at us wide-eyed and confused.

“Mr. McCoy?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Leroy McCoy,” I repeated.

“Yes,” he replied again, seeming unsure.

“I’m afraid we made a mistake,” I said, trying to sound disappointed like we had practiced.

“What do you mean?” He was beginning to sound upset.

“I’m afraid that we have the wrong Leroy McCoy. You see, my wife and I are looking for the Leroy McCoy who killed our father in a bar fight, and I’m afraid that you are just not that man. We wanted to confront him, you see. Get some closure. Sorry to trouble you. We got the wrong guy.”

“The wrong guy?” He didn’t seem to understand.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry for the trouble.”

We started to stand, but he grabbed my hand quickly, and I was compelled to sit back down so as to not draw attention from the guards.

“Is this a test?” he asked earnestly. He was petrified.

“A test? No. No, we just made a mistake.”

“If it is a test, I’ll react however you want. I can take the blame for the other Leroy if closure is what you want. No problem. I’ll be good. I’ll cooperate.”

He said all of this with a look of panic and desperation in his eyes, and I looked disbelieving at the man who used to look so defiant and angry now reduced to blind subordination. I had seen Leroy’s rap sheet, and the terms “lack of respect for authority” and “lack of regret for his crimes” had come up a lot.

Just then, Anna took his hand gently, lowered her glasses and looked into his eyes. He started at the intensity of hers.

“No test here, Leroy. Just a mistake, friend. Although, if you hear some sirens in the near future, I would run and hide as fast as you can. You’ll be okay if you just hide.”

He gaped at her. I did too. I thought surely this man would freak out now and run off to tell the guards what she had told him in order to prove what a good little prisoner he was, but he didn’t. He just sat there very calm and still. Something about Anna made him keep quiet. I don’t know if he recognized her as someone who was trying to help, or if he was just too terrified to react. Either way worked for me, because he nodded and kept silently calm as we rose and exited the visitor’s center after logging out with the front desk. The warning was a last-minute addition to the plan. But I could see how Anna wanted at least one prisoner in the hopes that the message would spread to run and hide and stay out of the way. Once the killing began, the blood lust might take over some of the vampires, and it would be difficult not to get confused about who was innocent or enemy. They had all fed the night before in their own ways, but I hoped for Leroy McCoy’s sake that Anna’s warning hit home.

My heart began to beat faster as we neared the front entrance with an escort guard hot on our heels. Anna’s hand squeezed mine, probably because she could hear my pulse race and feel my blood pumping faster. Calm was what she was trying to convey to me. I needed to calm myself.

I steadied myself against the surge of adrenaline as the guard opened the first gated door. We walked up to the steel door and could hear arguing on the other side. The guard hastily punched in a code. The door beeped and swung open to reveal Lulu and Marshall arguing with the front-entrance guards over a visitation appointment they had never actually made. Marshall was acting indignant he couldn’t see his uncle Drew, and the guards had all clamored around him in an effort to pacify the large man as Lulu stood undetected by the front door. She was so small no one noticed her holding the door ajar and just as our door was opening, Lea and the other sunglass-wearing vampires began to pour into the open door.

“Hey! What the hell!” exclaimed our escort guard.

Anna promptly turned toward the guard and kicked him in his chest so hard it sent him flying backwards through the gated doors we had just passed through. The man hit the cement floor hard and slid across it limp and unconscious. Lea and the others began to pummel the remaining guards with a speed that baffled my eyes. Within seconds, they had them all unarmed and unconscious. Lea went over to one unconscious guard and grabbed his head when Anna grabbed her arm to stop her.

“We don’t kill if we don’t have to. They are disabled. Let them be.”

Everyone stopped to look at Anna’s intense eyes, which had inked over black now. Lea’s eyes inked over then and her fangs elongated as she glared at Anna. She resigned and nodded.

“I need you now, Lea. Come on. I’ve found the place.”

I looked at the others and saw they all had black eyes. Cat tossed me the long wooden spear with the silver tip they had made for me. I caught it and realized there was no turning back just as the sirens began to screech in an awful patterned rhythm that was easily recognizable.

We stormed through the shattered gates like a crusading army. I was feeling pretty confident surrounded by vampires and with a giant spear in my hands until about a dozen guards converged on us. They lifted their firearms and pointed them at our heads and demanded we halt our progress. We stopped, but the vampires didn’t alter their determined stare with their blackened eyes. The guards looked terrified as I would have been in their shoes. Another half-dozen guards lined the second-floor balconies on either side of us and promptly pointed their guns at us to back up their comrades.

“Halt now! Drop your weapons!”

Since I was the only one who even had a weapon, no one moved. In fact, the vampires were so still, it was eerie and unnerving. I don’t think they so much as blinked or exhaled for the next few seconds.

Anna was to the left of me, and she turned her head only slightly in my direction.

“Get down and behind me when we move, Grant.”

I wasn’t going to argue, nor did I have time to. Without any warning or signal, all of the vampires crouched in a defensive stance and began growling at the guards on all sides. I crouched on the floor behind Anna and Lulu got on the other side of me as they bared their fangs at the now horrified guards.

Before any of them could react, the vampires made their move. Marshall and Lea attacked the front group of guards with a lightning speed that took them so off-guard they couldn’t get any shots off. Bridgette and Jackson leapt to attack one set of guards on the second story while Cat and Gabriel attacked the guards on the other side. When I say leapt, I mean they jumped with insane speeds to the second story in one bound. Some of these guards, upon seeing the massacre down below, managed to react quicker and a few shots were fired off before the vampires seized them.

I watched one bullet hit the floor very near to where I was crouching in between the two vampire women, and then there was silence. Anna and Lulu moved away from their protective stances around me, and I got to my feet. I saw the vampires regroup around us, and some of them had blood around their mouths. Much to Cat’s visible disappointment, Gabriel was one of them. The boy had tasted human blood for the first time in a fit of violence and blood lust. I watched her move closer to the boy and gently guide him farther away from me. I appreciated the gesture.

When Jackson joined us, I saw he had some deep gashes in his shoulder, and Lea was sporting some nasty scratches across her face. They began healing right in front of my eyes. I was mesmerized until I turned to see that Anna, my sweet Anna, had been shot in the shoulder.

“Oh God,” I exclaimed as I ran to her and put my hand over the wound. She looked at me curiously and then looked at her shoulder.