Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles (31 page)

“I believe your old clothes have been incinerated,” said the vampire with a frosty attitude.

He looked like Daniel Day Lewis in his prime.

“Those were the only shoes we could find in your size. Besides, they’re Betsey Johnson. You ought to be thankful.”

Poe shook her head. She waved the halfdead inside and hobbled dramatically like she needed help.

“I know you have impeccable taste, Sebastian. More than Joel or the others.” At this, Sebastian stood taller. “I want your advice.” She limped over to her side of the closet and slid open the door for him to see. “Do you know Quillon’s birthday?” she asked.

The daywalker shrugged. “I don’t think he’s ever celebrated it.”

“Well it’s tomorrow, and I want to wear something he’ll be proud of. He said I have no taste.”

Sebastian’s eyebrow rose in agreement. “So basically I need your help. Can you suggest which dress to wear and which shoes go along with it? I mean I’ll make sure to tell him how kind you were to help and all that.”

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Sebastian finally smiled. Kissing up to the boss was something he never tired of. He chose a purple Prada gown with sequins that made Poe inwardly shiver. “It’s between the black and the Marc Jacobs ash gray shoes, I think,” he said. He wanted the ensemble to look perfect.

“Why don’t you get them so I can try one shoe on?” The moment the sun-immune dead bent over to retrieve the shoes, Poe pulled Trench’s silver knife from her sleeves and buried it in the back of Sebastian’s neck. The dead choked from the long blade that penetrated his throat. Poe yanked the blade from side to side until she severed his head. Black blood spilled on Trench’s immaculate wood floors.

Quickly she unwrapped the linen from around her ankle and put on the gaudy sneakers. She turned Sebastian’s corpse over and found a 9mm Sig Sauer inside his suit jacket. Poe nearly cried at the feel of a gun in her hand. She had thirteen bullets, and she couldn’t waste a single one. She headed for the elevator. According to Frieda, Penny was held in the unused pantry next to the kitchen. Her usual guard wasn’t at the door to give her grief. Most of the henchmen were downstairs where she was about to go. It wasn’t always so in the beginning of her captivity when about two dozen well armed guards had waited at every corner.
They think I’m broken
and no threat to anyone
, Poe sadly thought.

Vamps didn’t bother the kitchen staff as the smell of meat cooking for janitors and cattle was distasteful to vampires. At least that was what Frieda said. It wasn’t hard to slink her way to the pantry.

She heard Penny whine before she saw her. The dog was leashed and tied up, and her coarse hair was 283

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extra-groomed. The dog had gained a few pounds from too much food and lack of exercise.
Trench is a
clean freak
.
Even my dog is fair game
.

Poe had never leashed Penny, but she was going to have to that night. Top Chefs would have been proud of the deep, gleaming kitchen she passed through. A staff of fifteen was busy cooking up a tsunami to feed the human cattle of the Hall. Trench kept thirty cattle on hand for entertaining purposes.

The multicultural staff in white aprons and chef hats looked at her with shock. She put the gun to her mouth to keep them from making unnecessarily loud noises.

“Are you going to take us with you?” asked an elderly African American woman who stopped stirring her vegetables.

Poe shook her head. “Sorry. Not tonight.”

“Why not tonight?” a Chinese American man asked. He wiped his hands on an immaculate apron.

“Because I can’t. There’s only one of me. Now, where’s Frieda?”

“Frieda’s at one of the farms, maybe one of the theaters on Broadway helping feed cattle,” someone answered. “They’re a little shorthanded there tonight.”

Poe took a nylon shopping bag from a hook on the wall and began filling it with as many small knives as she could find. “You wouldn’t happen to have garlic, would you?” Several shook their heads in the negative. “Didn’t think so. Could you tell Frieda I’m coming back for her and for you guys, too? But right now I gotta mosey.”

They showed her the back door which led to a roundabout way into the street. Poe would learn later 284

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that the entire kitchen staff was branded with a hot iron for assisting her.

The smell of freedom heated her blood. She hadn’t been outside on her own in weeks. Penny, who was as excited as her companion, pulled at the leash to hasten her on. The bright moon was both a bonus and a bane. It illuminated her way, but it also made her conspicuous. She looked up at the undulating metal structure, its beauty marred by guilt, shame, and anxiety, which had imprisoned her for nearly three months. With a deep breath for courage she turned away and ran.

Her platform tennis shoes lacking arches were hell. She felt like Herman Munster trying to jog. She made it as far as a parking structure across the street before the alarm sounded. Someone had discovered Sebastian’s body. With her heart thudding painfully Poe and her dog ran for it.

It was Liam who caught her scent first. Poe had never seen him because he spent most of his time in the old gift shop that had been converted into a guard post. Like most vampires, the half-black, half-Irish dead had his own special gift which was a heightened sense of smell. The moment the alarm blared he raised his nose in the air. He ran for Trench’s room.

He sniffed Sebastian’s decapitated body then the air.

Liam left the room, walked calmly to the elevator, and pressed the down button.

His nose led him to the kitchen which had nearly destroyed Julia Poe’s scent. He opened the back door.

He stared down the guilty-looking kitchen staff and took out his walkie-talkie. “The girl’s on the loose.

She’s only been gone five, ten minutes tops. She left through the kitchen.” He stepped out in the street and 285

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sniffed once more. “I’m guessing she’s heading toward the downhill parking lot. Oh, and she’s got her dog with her.”

“We’re on our way,” the other voice on the wave said. “Careful. She’s armed.”

Liam followed in a swift gait. He knew exactly where the girl was. Her unmistakable scent, which Trench had inculcated in him by handing him Julia Poe’s laundry items before they were washed every few days, honed his olfactory senses. Julia, the pretty human Trench was obsessed with, had a pleasant bouquet, a unique scent that if bottled would make women – human and vampire alike – gain instant sex appeal. No wonder vampires and humans desired her so.

He ran as her smell became more potent and led him to the edge of the parking structure bleeding down an incline. He could smell her dog as she had been groomed with No Tears baby shampoo. He was focusing on the dog’s scent when he actually saw the animal growling at him from across the street. The dog with the coarse, dirty white fur was almost comical. Liam’s preoccupation with the dog lost him footing, and the cattle rustler came out of nowhere to point her Sig Sauer at his head. Before he could say a word, Poe lodged a knife in his throat and twisted the neck meat counter-clockwise. He fell dead a few beats later.

Poe dropped the knife and wiped the black blood on her designer dress that made her look like a streetwalker. She picked up Liam’s weapon, a 9mm of an unfamiliar make, and held it with her left hand.

The bag of knives hung on her shoulder. She took Penny’s leash and ran. That was when the first 286

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flashlight bobbing in the dark descended. Unable to see nothing but flashlight bulbs but needing to shoot the pursuer in the head as he was most likely wearing a bulletproof vest, Poe breathed in and prayed. “I need help. Let me see in the dark, Mom.”

She raised Liam’s weapon and pointed at the light, letting the voice in her head guide her.
Now
, it said. She fired. A flashlight clanged to the floor, and a thud followed. Music to her ears. When she reached Olive Street, a well lit part of the city, Poe found herself surrounded by men in black suits holding various types of intimidating firepower. She grabbed her dog, hid behind a parking lot column, and peeked carefully out.

“Come out, Miss Julia. We won’t harm you,”

said one of the men. “Mr. Trench is on his way. Let’s not make this any worse.”

Poe blinked twice. She raised her Sig Sauer and fired at six heads in succession before anyone could react. “Let’s make it worse, asshole,” muttered Poe, feeling like her old self again. She spotted a figure hiding behind a painfully thin palm tree and aimed for the back of the head that peeped a few inches out.

The shot shattered his skull, and she stopped herself from laughing in glee at the fallen vamp. Three more and life would be fantastic again. They shot at her from different directions – one near a parked car, the second behind a steel post, and the third by a truck.

Poe unclasped Penny’s leash. “You gotta run, girl.

You hear me? We both gotta run like hell!”

She bolted and locked her eye on the parked car since it was the closest. Sure enough, the vamp showed himself. She took him down on the run and with her right hand fired at the dead by the post. She 287

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ducked as the farther combatant by the truck shot at her. Poe rolled to the street and shot at the vamp’s foot under the truck. The old trick worked again. He screamed like fire ants were grilling his nuts, which left Poe and Penny free and clear to keep running.

They didn’t scurry a block before Trench’s Town Car skidded to a halt in front of them. Like a deer caught in headlights, Poe paused and wasted precious moments. She screamed, “Get outta here, Penny!”

When the dog refused to budge, Poe kicked her viciously in the rump until she yelped and ran away.

Poe sprinted the opposite way toward the Museum of Contemporary Art which was a half-block away. When the driver, a balding vamp with a goatee, pursued her with superspeed, Poe glanced back and aimed for his head. The dead fell near her sneakers. Poe lost count of how many bullets she had left. The Sig Sauer was empty, and her other gun had two or three bullets at most.

She tripped on the sidewalk and painfully landed on her left wrist. Italian patent shoes that gleamed in the lamplight were inches from her hand. She looked up to find an irate Quillon Trench staring down at her and wearing no scarf to cover his displeasure. Poe’s nostrils flared and she lifted her gun to shoot him, but he was too quick. He wrenched the weapon from her hand and pulled her to her feet.

He looked at her searing, unapologetic face and slapped her. Poe’s head reeled, and the edge of her lower lip trickled with blood. “You killed my best men, Julia Poe,” he said quietly, wiping the blood from her mouth with a forefinger. “And you’re going to pay for it.” He licked the blood from his finger to illustrate his point.

288

HE WOULDN’T ALLOW THE other masters of the city to murder Poe. Trench said it was his men that were killed and Poe was his to intern as he pleased. He did grant concessions, concessions he regretted most bitterly, that would assuage the bigwigs of Downtown. Quillon sent for reinforcements from his many farms. He resisted the presence of boots-on-the ground LAPD thugs to mar his classy new digs, but in the end he had no choice. His brow furrowed at the thought of outfitting the undead cops with expensive suits that belonged to the truly dead.

He was considering such dire details while waiting for Poe to finish her bath. Trench had thrown her out of his room and back into her old one. He had tied her hands with rope while she lay face-down on her soft bed the past couple nights. He didn’t want to see her face while he and others lashed her back with a whip cut from stingray tail.

Trench loved her, or so he thought, but she’d killed too many men to be allowed to live like his pampered princess. Every lash hurt him more than it hurt her. When master vampires came to ladle her blood, he seethed inside. The fools believed that Poe’s blood was potent and gave them strength. He had no choice. Poe had tied his hands. This was the third day of her punishment. After she’d been bathed 289

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by Kawana and placed back on the freshly laundered sheets, he would supervise the roping of her hands.

When satisfied he would dismiss Kawana, his beautiful and loyal ex-lover. “Why can’t everyone be like her?” he muttered and looked to the bathroom.



“You’ve got to hold on, Poe,” said Kawana, carefully running warm water infused with Epson salt onto her back. When the feverish girl didn’t answer, she continued. “Help is on the way. I’ve been communicating with Ed. Remember Ed? The guy as strong as me? We’ll he’s been rounding up our old crew the past few weeks. They’re going to be here soon, so be strong, girl.”

Poe shrugged her eyes tearless as she held onto the slippery edge of the tub. If she didn’t breathe too hard, the pain in her back didn’t sting so much. “If they come, they’ll die,” said Poe, thinking about Maclemar and Michelle and feeling suddenly ill.

“I’m not worth it, Kawana.”

“Of course you’re worth it! You’re a symbol of hope to the resistance. We can’t let anything happen to you.”

“Everyone’s scattered around the Central Valley, and each site is secret,” Poe said, her voice huskier in hopelessness. She winced at the two days worth of lashes on her back. “Why would they want to risk their lives for me? And who’ll rescue me? Some poor ex-cattle with no powers?”

To this, Kawana had no answer, and she sloshed the bloody bath water pointlessly. “I don’t know who’ll come, Poe, but I do know that powerful 290

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vampires and special halfdead like Ed know where each batch is living. He’ll find a way to gather them all. I know it.”

“My dog is free. That’s enough for me,” was the last thing Poe said.
Sainvire is dead. I want to die,
too.



Trench pushed aside her hair that had grown long over the months and inspected her back. “Tsk tsk.

Your beautiful back. I’m so sorry, Poe. I have limited options in this matter.”