Dave Carver (Book 1): Thicker Than Blood (13 page)

There were three of them—all big and wearing bulky black jackets. Whoever they were, they were good. You don’t last as long as I have in the monster hunting business without developing good senses about sneak attacks, and these guys had managed to get in close behind me before I knew they were there. A shadow stirred near the old jungle gym—a fourth man in black stood watching the scene, but he made no move to approach. Probably the ringleader, content to let the flunkies do the dirty work.

Two of my assailants had handguns pointed at me. At this range, even a couple of rounds would be enough to turn my body into frozen chopped meat. I stood still.

The third guy stood in front of the other two and in the middle, like the lead plane in a fighter squadron. He took another step forward, but stayed well out of range of the knife.

“Right there’s good,” I said, pointing the knife at the guy’s throat. “Who the hell are you guys.”

“We’re the ones with the guns,” he said. He had a trace of an Eastern European accent. Russian, maybe. “Drop the knife.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna do that,” I said. “Who are you? And who’s your friend in the shadows?”

The big Russian smiled. “He wants you alive, but that does not mean we can’t shoot you in the kneecaps.”

“Well, Ivan,” I said, “better tell Boris and Natasha to shoot. I’m not gonna come quietly.”

“Pity,” the man said. The other mercenaries raised their guns and tightened their fingers on the triggers.

I threw myself to the side and flung my knife at one of the gunmen. It hit him in the chest, handle-first but hard enough to set him back on his heels. I sprinted for the parking lot. The cold, thin air made my lungs hurt, but I pushed everything from my mind but reaching the lone Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot and getting behind the truck. Gunfire split the air behind me. Bullets whizzed by. I reached the parking lot and leaped onto the hood of the Jeep, sliding across like one of the Duke boys, and came down in cover.

I was maybe ten feet from the Toyota now. The fourth man was standing directly in front of my borrowed car.
What the hell?
He’d been easily fifty feet away. How had he gotten there so fast? My heart sped up as I realized the answer to the question: He was a vampire.

I’d have to run for it. If I could make it out of the school grounds and down to the highway, I might have a chance at flagging down a passing truck.

The gunfire stopped—time to reload, I guessed—and I ran, pushing myself as hard as I could. The cold air made my lungs scream, but I ran. My heart, amped by the exertion and the adrenaline, pounded in my chest, but I ran.

A pained scream echoed in the schoolyard, followed by a crack-a-crack-crack burst of gunfire. The sound was subtly different this time, fainter, like it was aiming in a different direction. Like it was aiming away from me. I looked back. One of the gunmen was lying facedown on the ground. Something long and thin rose out of his back, looking like a joystick on a video game controller. The other two mercs were facing away from me, scanning the shadows around the school with their guns trained. The vampire was nowhere to be seen.

I watched the show with great interest. I recognized the design of the spear sticking out of the man’s back, of course, but I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

And then he stepped out of the shadows, his janitor’s coveralls black in the night. In his left hand, Addy held a short, sharpened stone, and in his right, he held a small bag. From the bag he dropped a pebble and he charged towards the gunmen, followed by another pebble. It took me a moment to determine what he was doing, but then I got it: He was leaving a trail. There was no trace of the slowness I’d seen ten minutes earlier in the goblin’s movement. He ran with a mountain goat’s surety, and his war cry echoed loudly against the walls of the building and rolled out into the night sky.

Addy tackled Boris and the two of them went down in a rolling, snarling, huddled heap. The goblin slapped the gun out of the mercenary’s hand and slashed at his neck with his rock-knife. The Russian cried out in surprise, a pained sound that gradually deteriorated into something wet and gurgling, and clutched at his bleeding throat. He fell silent. He lay still. Addy leapt up again, as fast as if he were on a spring. He sailed towards Ivan, the leader of the mercenaries. As he went by, Addy’s blade flashed and he landed in a somersault. For a moment, Ivan stood blinking, facing me. Then the cut in his abdomen opened, and blood rushed out, followed by soft gray, ropy entrails. The mercenary fell over on his side, clearly dead.

Addy looked at me, his coppery eyes glowing in the night. His arms were covered with blood up to his elbows. I blinked. Holy crap—Addy was a warrior.

“Run, Carver!” he shouted.

I ran, but not the way he probably expected. I went towards Addy, stopping near the body of the merc with the spear in his back to pick up my knife, which I’d thrown at him before the shooting started.

“They had a friend,” I said when I joined Addy in the shadows of the school. “He might still be here.”

“He is,” Addy said. “I can smell him.” There was a kind of joy in the goblin’s rocky voice, such a powerful happiness that I couldn’t help but smile. He sounded like he was having more fun than he’d had in years. “You should go. I will deal with the threat.”

I shook my head. “Not leaving you, man. Let’s find the son of a bitch and get the hell out of here.”

Addy stepped out of the shadows, dropped another pebble, and headed to the south. Knife in hand, I crept towards the north. There was no sound as I moved through the darkness, save for the occasional gust of wind or the roar of a truck a half-mile away cruising up the Turnpike. A break in cloud-cover let the mostly full moon shine down, shedding a little light on the battlefield that had once been a schoolyard. The bodies of the three mercs were slaughtered and butchered. Blood was everywhere. So was ichor and worse.

“Mr. Carver,” a voice called into the silence. “I have your little friend. Please come and see me.”

I spun around and sprinted south, keeping the building on my right. The vampire stood on the stoop of the school. He was holding Addy’s stone knife in his left hand. In his right, he held Addy by the collar of his overalls. Addy slashed with his claws at the vampire’s face, but his arms were too short to reach. In the moonlight, I could see that the vamp had dispensed with his mask, and his curved fangs seemed to glow with a pale white light.

“I’m here,” I said. “Let him go.”

Addy looked at me and shouted, “
Kiriga
!” He bit the vampire’s wrist and fell to the ground. Almost before he touched pavement, he was moving to jump at the vamp’s throat, but the taller creature was faster. His hand, holding the knife flashed, and a line was drawn across Addy’s neck. The goblin coughed and hit the pavement, chartreuse blood spilling out of his throat. 

“NO!” I shouted.

I ran at the vampire, but something grabbed me from behind. I looked over my shoulder, and two more vamps had me by the shoulders. One of them knocked the knife from my hand, and the leader stalked over, confident as a leopard.

“I really don’t understand why he wants you alive so badly,” he said, “but I do as I told.”

I looked at Addy for some sign of movement, but I knew it was too late. That was his life’s blood pouring out onto the pavement. The lead vampire grabbed me by the collar and slammed me into the ground. My head hit cement. The last thing I saw before I faded into unconsciousness was the coppery, lifeless gaze of the last of the Adirondack goblins.

Chapter 18

I came to in darkness. It wasn’t pitch black, total darkness where I couldn’t see my hand a few feet in front of my face. This was more like a sense of overwhelming dimness. The air was stale and still, like being underground.

It reminded me of Guyana.

NO
! It couldn’t be! I was back in the pit. Or had I ever really left? Had the last nine months been nothing more than the fevered delusions of a tortured brain? I was still a prisoner, waiting for my captors to come in for my daily dose of torture. I wondered what it would be today. Stakes through the hands? Fire? Maybe the perennial favorite—straight-up bloodsucking. The scars on my neck prickled just thinking about it.

Wait a minute. The
scars
on my neck? The vampires fed on me at least a couple of times a week. The wounds never had time to heal—they never had time to form scar tissue. If I had scars on my neck, then some vampire wasn’t ripping open my throat every few days. And if a vamp wasn’t ripping open my throat every few days then I wasn’t still in Guyana.

So where was I?

It was coming back to me now: Addy’s
kiriga
, the three Russian bounty hunters, the fight, the vampires. I remembered now, at least a little bit: I was a vampire’s prisoner again. My heart pounded. My hands sweated. I wanted to throw up.
I was a vampire’s prisoner again!

I took a deep yoga breath to try and calm down a bit, and took a look around. My eyes were adjusting to the dark, and I could make out my surroundings. The room was big and spacious. I was lying on the ground in one corner, as far as I possibly could be from the only door that I could see. A couple of cars were parked at the far end of the room. One of them was the Jeep Cherokee I’d seen outside of the school. The other was Earl James’s Toyota. In the corner opposite them, nearest the door, two humanoid shapes were hunched over something with their backs towards me. They were making animalistic, hungry sounds.

My hands were chained behind my back. I rose unsteadily to my feet, and the chains rattled noisily. The vampires looked up at the sound. Their black eyes caught whatever light there was in this dark, cavernous room, and reflected it back at me. As one, the vampire rose and started in my direction.

One of the vampires, a female, strutted towards me. She smiled with her fanged mouth. As she stared at me, her vampire features melted away, revealing a beautiful-looking woman. God help me, but she had a nice body, and I hated myself for noticing. She wore a well tailored black pantsuit with a deep-cut blouse underneath. She had a deep, Mediterranean tan; strong cheekbones; dark eyes and hair; and a powerful, hawkish nose. Over her ensemble she wore a Red Lobster bib that was covered with a yellow-green liquid. She smiled, and it would have been sexy except for the fact that her lips were smeared with that same chartreuse fluid. I recognized it immediately as goblin blood.

“I must look quite the mess,” she said. “I do apologize, but it’s been so long since I’ve had goblin.”

I snarled and lunged to my feet. My chain was attached to the wall. I got a couple of feet.

The other vamp was a male, and he looked to be in his forties, which was unusual for a vampire—they typically make themselves look young and sexy. Short and round, he was balding and wore a pair of nerd-chic black-framed glasses. He was wiping at his mouth with a handkerchief. He looked like somebody’s accountant that had wandered way off the beaten path. His eyes kept drifting to my face, then darting away.

Accountant-Vamp put a hand on the female’s shoulder. “Come on, El,” he said. “Let’s go tell your brother that our guest is awake.”

The vampire called El licked her lips hungrily as the accountant led her away, her eyes never leaving my throat. I looked down at the ground, afraid to make eye contact. The two vampires squeezed between the two cars. A door opened, then slammed shut, and I was alone again.

Only for a moment, though, because the door opened again, and another vampire, this one male, strode between the cars and walked across the floor. He hit a switch as he approached and cheap electric light flickered to life. We were in a garage—a big one, like the kind you’d see in a car dealership. The walls were filthy, covered with dust, black mold, and oil stains. The garage had been cleared of any tools, at least as far as I could see, but someone had set up a wooden picnic table over near the cars. A tarp covered a lumpy something in the corner where the two vampires had been feeding. In another corner of the garage, near where I was chained, were the rusted-out hulks of a bunch of cars. Within this automotive graveyard someone had set up a pair of metal-framed camping cots. The vampire sat down on the nearer of the cots and gave me a genial smile.

He was skinny as a rail, but a good deal taller than me. There was obvious power in those thin limbs. He was dressed in a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His cheekbones were immaculate and he had the same nose as the female vampire outside. He was tanned as if he’d just spent a week on a boat out at sea. His hair was dark, just long enough to be scandalous in polite society, and artfully disheveled. All together, he looked like somebody’s rich European cousin.

“Mr. Carver,” he said. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

I glared at his nose. “You killed Addy.”

He blinked, frowned like he had no idea what I was talking about. “Ah. You mean the goblin? Yes, I did. Really, though, I should have thanked him. I was going to have to remove those dreadful mercenaries eventually, anyway, and he saved me the trouble.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

He laughed politely, as if I’d made some clever quip at a cocktail party. “On the contrary, Mr. Carver, in the coming weeks you and I are going to become good friends.”

“You know,” I said, “you’re the second vampire to say that to me recently.”

“Indeed? And how has that worked out so far?”

“Tough to say. I killed one of Flavian’s goons, so I don’t think we’re as close as he wants us to be.”

“Truly? You struck a blow against the ambassador?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you know that? Aren’t you all working together?”

“The ambassador and my superiors are...not on the friendliest of terms.”

“Oh.” Score one for May. She’d been right that Flavian really wasn’t working with the other vampires. “So who do you work for?”

He sat up a little straighter, full of puffed up pride. “I am an agent of the Elders.”

Gulp
. If the Nomads were the dirty fighters of the Round Table, then agents were the Nomads of the vampire community. They were assassins and spies and officers. When the elders needed a dirty deed done, they sent in an agent. The undead James Bonds of the world, drinking blood martinis shaken not stirred. And one of them had just arranged my capture.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, trying to sound unimpressed. “Is that what I should call you: ‘agent of the Elders?’”

He smiled. “You can call me Bobby.”

“Bobby?”

His smile faded. “I like Bobby. Would you prefer Roberto?”

Ah. So this was Roberto. The guy that had sent those vampires after me outside of the safe house. What did he want? And why did he name himself after a character from
The Brady Bunch
?

“Whatever you want, man.” I rattled my chains. “Can you let me out of these.”

“Of course,” he said. “How rude of me—I just wanted to be sure you weren’t going to try and escape.” He glided across the floor, pulling a keychain out of his pocket, and he uncuffed me.

And I punched him in the face. The blow wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but it was enough to rock Roberto back on his feet. I bolted for the door.

Roberto’s hand closed on my shoulder. He spun me around, and grabbed me by the throat. The vampire was good—he knew exactly where to apply pressure to cut off the air to my brain. His eyes were black.

“Whatever you think of my people,” Roberto said, wiping too-dark blood from his nose, “the time when you could assault us is over.” He threw me, hard, to the ground.

Looking up at him, I said, “What are you doing with me?”

“Don’t fear, Mr. Carver. You’ll see soon enough.”

And then he was gone. The door slammed shut and the lock clicked. And I was trapped in the garage. Alone

The metal leg of one of the cots scraped against the floor, and I screeched like a flamingo. I spun around. A young woman was climbing out from under the cot.

“Uh, sorry,” she said.

I took a deep breath and waited for my heart to slow down. “No problem. Who are you?”

“Jen,” she said. “Jen Carey.”

Jen Carey looked to be my age, or a little younger—about twenty-five. She had light brown skin, which made me think she was mixed-race. Her black hair was cut short, and she wore a black T-shirt and business-casual slacks—it looked like a waitress’s uniform. She’d sat down on the seat and pulled her knees against her chest. It made her look small and very young.

“I’m Dave,” I said. “I know this seems scary, but you’re gonna—”

The door opened again. The she-vamp appeared from between the parked cars. She advanced towards me, a smile creeping across her face. There was a strange hunger in her eyes. Normally, I’d have killed to have a beautiful woman look at me with eyes like that, but I didn’t think what she had in mind would be fun. For me, at least. The vampire would probably enjoy herself.

I put myself between Loretta and Jen. When the vampire was nearly within arm’s reach, she stopped. “Welcome to your new home, little knight. I just know we’re going to have so much fun together.”

“What did I tell you, Loretta?” Roberto had come into the garage so silently that I hadn’t heard him. He put his hand on the she-vamp’s arm. “Mr. Carver is our guest.”

I decided to twist the knife a little. “Yeah, Loretta, I’m a guest. Not a meal.”

“That’s true,” she said. “For now.”

My blood temperature dropped a few degrees.

“Enough,” Roberto said. “Loretta, go outside.”

“But Bobby...”

“Now.”

Without further argument, Loretta stalked out of the garage like a combination between a soldier and a scolded child.

Roberto shook his head with exaggerated patience. “I apologize for my sister. She’s been looking forward to meeting you in person.”

I shook my head. “Whatever. It’s not like this is the first time one of you people tried to take a bite out of me. What did she mean by my ‘new home?’”

“You’ll be remaining here for the duration of the war.” Roberto looked over my shoulder at Jen, who had crawled back under the cot. “Both of you. You will be safe here, you have my word on that. I realize it’s not the Saint Regis, but you will not be harmed. Which is more than I can say for the rest of this rat’s nest you call a city. In any event, you won’t be here long. A few days. A week at the most.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Why, the war will be finished by then, of course.”

Gulp again
. “And how do you plan on doing that so quickly?”

Roberto smiled. “Mr. Carver, you simply can’t wait for anything, can you?”

“What can I say? The anticipation’s killing me.”

“I can assure you,” Roberto said with a sinister grin, “that nothing, anticipation or otherwise, will kill you so long as you remain here.”