Depraved (Tales of a Vampire Hunter #2) (6 page)

“Yes!” Her nose scrunched up again. “I know we don’t want to
assume anything, but my guess would be there are vampires around here. Ones
powerful enough to make us have the same dreams, but far enough away so we
don’t sense them.”

“Or, blocking us somehow and closer than we think,” Oliver
said. “I’ve had a bad feeling all morning.”

“Me too. And it’s not just the dreams I had. It’s like at
the club in Paris when it turned out the place was full of vampires and hunters
we didn’t sense either until it was too late.” She shivered even though he’d
rolled up the windows, turning the little car into an oven.

“Let’s go deal with this. Think about ways you know to block
vampires from reading and putting thoughts into minds.” Not giving her time to
stew, Oliver climbed from the car after grabbing their bag and stuffing one of
the broken bottle tops in the side pocket.

The pawn shop could have been any pawn shop anywhere. Behind
a long counter sat a large man wearing a hula-girl covered Hawaiian shirt and a
straw cowboy hat.

“You buyin’ or sellin’?” he asked in a drawl that was more
Texan than Mexican.

“You must be Al. Shelly over at the
del sol
hostel told me this was the place to
come to buy unusual items.” Oliver leaned over the counter, checking out the
pistols displayed under glass in front of the shop owner. Not a price tag in
sight.

Miranda wandered around the store.

“Quality shit at amazing prices. That’s my slogan,” the big
man said, with a chuckle that shook his belly and made the hula-girls dance.
“You in the market for a sidearm?”

“Maybe. What’s the cheapest one you’ve got?” No sense
beating around the bush. Daylight was wasting. Oliver wanted to get this done
and get on the road. They didn’t have far to go, but had to travel through the
mountains again, and that would add time to their trip.

“That’d be this Raven .25 caliber. I could let you have it
for $75. I’ll even throw in a box of ammo.”

“Throw in two boxes of ammo and you’ve got a deal.”

“Done.” Al unlocked the case and put the pistol and boxes of
bullets on the counter. “Fires six shots. Want an extra magazine? I’ve got
hollow points too. Best thing for a gun like that.”

“How much?

“An extra $20.”

“Done.”

Miranda joined Oliver and pointed at a case on the far side
of the store. “Those daggers. The pair. Are they silver?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Fine Mexican grade, which means they’re not
worth squat. But they sure are pretty.” Al hefted himself off his stool and
showed her the knives.

“Cool. That means they should be inexpensive.” Miranda
grinned and picked one of the daggers up.

The handle was short and almost dainty looking, but the
blade was long and had a wicked curve to it.

Al chuckled. “I like you two, so I’ll make you a deal. You
make it an even $150 and you can take the whole lot.”

“$125. We’re on a budget,” Miranda countered.

“You drive a hard bargain, but it’s been a slow week, so
you’ve got yourself a deal.”

Al put their purchases in a bag.

“Thanks,” Oliver said.

“
De nada
.” Al smiled
and settled back on his stool. “You kids be careful now, you hear?”

“Will do,” Miranda said as Oliver pushed open the door.

They stopped in a little shop next door and bought some
water, a couple of protein bars and a notebook before they got back in the car
and started heading for the highway while Miranda loaded the pistol magazines
and found places to stash the daggers.

“All right. We’re armed and dangerous.” Miranda grinned.

“That’s a start. So, tell me how we’re going to stop these
fuckers from tracking us and putting their freaky shit in our heads.” Oliver
turned, following a sign pointing to Highway 175.

“You probably know more about stopping the mind reading
thing than I do. Don’t Vampire hunters do that when they’re stalking vamps?”

“Yeah. Vampires get all the credit for being seductive and
irresistible, but hunters are like catnip for a vamp. I wouldn’t call it a
spell like you do, but we do have the ability to sort of pull down our aura
over us, like a cloak. They can’t see through it, unless we slip up, so they
don’t know they’re the hunted, not the hunter until it’s too late.” Oliver took
the ramp putting them on the highway that would take them over the mountains.

“Do you think I could do that too since I’m part hunter?”
Miranda asked.

“I’m going to try to teach you. You said you couldn’t always
pick up my thoughts, and I know I can’t always pick up yours. We’ll try to read
each other and try different things to block the signal. Trial and error should
get us somewhere.”

“Where are we going today anyway?” Miranda had fished the
guidebook out of the glove box again and held it in her lap.

“Hualtulco. It’s over the mountains, only about 120 miles or
so. I read about it in a story once. Sounds pretty. I figure if we’ve got to be
on the run at least we should enjoy the scenery.” He grinned, his mood
lightening now that they were underway and armed.

Miranda fiddled with the radio. “Then let’s get some tunes
going and start playing mind games.”

“The guidebook said this is supposed
to be one of the prettiest drives in Mexico, but I want you to tear your eyes
away from the majesty and write down some of the things we’ve talked about
already or shelved for later. I’m losing track,” Oliver said.

So far, the road was just a flat incline cutting through a
landscape of scrubby bushes and rocks dotted with trees. The driving was easy
and Oliver figured this was a good time to talk through the things they’d
skimped on last night. The guidebook had also said the road would start to
twist and turn as it sliced through the mountain and down the other side.
Neither one of them would want to talk much then.

“One of the things we skipped last night was how vampires
and hunters locate their prey,” Miranda said. “I never hunted and never went
with a vampire when they did, so I can only tell you what I read in the Vladula
history books and what I gathered from the few conversations I heard about
stuff like that.”

She sat with her bare feet on the dash again, having shed
her socks and shoes despite Oliver’s protests. The notebook he’d bought lay in
her lap, a pen stuck to the front cover.

“Whatever you know, or
think
you
know, is fine,” Oliver said, winking at her.

She chuckled. “I think I don’t know a lot. But most of the
Vladula vamps seemed to prefer feeding on people no one would miss, the
homeless mostly. In Chicago, this wasn’t a problem. I remember one of them
talking about a new “hunting ground”, a bad part of town where gangs were going
crazy, shooting people in the streets. The people who had to live there were
scared to death. You might have seen stories about it on the news. Anyway,
people wanted it to stop, but they were too scared to tell the cops who was
doing all the killing. So, Spike Vladula bragged that he’d read a few minds,
figured out who the assholes were and took them out. At the time, I thought
that was pretty cool.”

“But, as far as you know, vampires don’t sense something
special in a person that draws them to a victim?”

She shook her head and propped her chin on her bent knees.
“Nope, other than the ones who can read minds. They always scan to make sure
the food doesn’t have attachments to anyone.”

“The food?” Oliver asked, with a sideways glance.

“That’s what a lot of vamps call people. It depersonalizes
them, and some vamps still care about stuff like that.”

“But not all?”

“No. Remember how I told you that some of them had started
killing anyone they wanted? Like Cire Vladula. She liked to hunt in clubs and
said the meat was fresher there.” Miranda wrinkled her nose.

“And no one stepped in to stop her? Wasn’t that sort of
behavior dangerous for everyone in the family?”

“Totally. Sage talked to her, told her to stop, but I don’t
think she had. She seemed high on the power it gave her. That’s why I was sort
of surprised when Sage and the rest of them made such a big stink about you
killing Cire. In a way, you did us all a favor.”

Oliver frowned. Again, they’d hit on something that didn’t
make sense. “Maybe Cire was disposable. A means to an end.”

“Like a trap for you, you mean?”

“And you. Did you question it much when the family sent you
out to hunt me down?”

Miranda shook her head. “No. I just went where they told me
to go.”

“And would have killed me if you could have gotten me away
from people.” Oliver wasn’t angry with her for it. He’d have done the same
thing had the situation not unfolded exactly the way it had.

She nodded, laying her hand on his arm. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

“I don’t think you had much choice. Jonathan took me to
Jaded on purpose. He said it was because you wouldn’t come after us there. They
gave us time to connect there, in the coffee shop, at the hotel, and on the
plane.”

“Maybe.” She frowned.

The road had started twisting and turning. In spots it had
been washed out. Pebbles and sand flowed down steep hills in streams that had
already covered whole sections of roadway, narrowing it to one lane. Oliver had
to swerve to avoid several car-sized potholes. He was glad for the distraction,
though the many blind corners and lack of guardrails were nerve-wracking.

“Could we pull over next time we see some of those people
selling stuff by the road? I saw bananas at the last one we passed, and I’m
getting hungry.” Miranda tossed the notebook onto the dash and put her socks
and shoes back on.

“Sure.” Oliver slowed to let a bus pass and wondered how the
bus drivers managed to navigate the roads without ending up sailing off the
side of the mountain.

Every so often, the road widened just enough to allow people
to set up little roadside stands, and they took full advantage of the traffic
on the scenic highway. So far, they’d seen people selling bananas, cashew nuts,
hammocks, and brightly colored wood carvings of dragons, lizards, and frogs.

“Okay, so we’ve decided they planned all of it, wanted us to
get together. We’re still not sure if they expected us to escape in Paris.” She
made notes in the notebook again.

“Right. We know that vampires don’t hunt their prey as much
as identify it. We know that some of them can read minds. We know some of them
can turn into wolves. Write down the stuff you told me yesterday in the “we
know this to be true” column. Start another page for things we’re not sure
about and another for things we definitely don’t know.”

She did as he told her to do, then turned to him again. “Do
you think any of this is going to help?”

“That would be in the ‘I don’t know’ section,” Oliver said,
giving her a wry smile. “But one thing that pisses me off when I watch movies
or read books is how sometimes people on the run just run from point to point
reacting to everything. They do stupid shit because they never even stop to
think.”

“Like run up stairs when the bad guy is chasing them or into
dark rooms when they hear a noise.” She laughed softly. “I hate that!”

“So, we’re not going to do that. Write this down. You said
vamps can hypnotize people to get them to forget things or to lull them into a
state where they don’t freak out or where they’re actually convinced the
vampire is sexy. They seduce their victim’s minds.”

“Sometimes.” She nodded. “I never saw one of them do it, but
Spike talked about doing that to some of the people in that bad neighborhood
when he took out the gangbangers. He convinced them they didn’t see anything.
Since they’d been saying for months they didn’t know anything, the cops didn’t
question it and neither did anyone else. I think Cire might have done that too
when she took down dudes in clubs. No one ever came knocking on the Vladula’s
door because someone said they’d seen her before she took some poor guy down in
a back alley.”

“Could they do it to everyone or is it like some of those
hypnotists in Vegas say about how people need to be open to it for it to work?
You know, like how they make people act like dogs or cluck like chickens?”

“I got the impression Spike and Cire never had any trouble
doing it, but the people they did it to had no idea what was going on. Spike
said the people who saw him were totally freaked out. Maybe they wanted to
forget.”

“Do another page. Call it ‘things to do’. First item on it
is play mind games. Reading minds, blocking reading, hypnosis, memory wiping. I
wanted to do that in the car, but this road’s a bitch. I don’t think I could
concentrate.”

“Me either. I don’t get car-sick, but I’m queasy from all
the up and down, bumps and turns.” Miranda’s voice was tight and she’d gone
pale under her fake tan.

“Drink some water. I’m pulling over.”

Oliver eased the car off the road, parking between a bus and
a van painted with flowers, avoiding the throng of people headed for the vendors
selling their wares.

“I have a question for you,” Miranda said as they strolled
up to a sun-dried little man selling bananas.

“Shoot,” Oliver said, thinking of the pistol they’d left in
the car.

His antsy feeling was back. Probably just because we’re not
moving, he thought. Still, he scanned the crowd for vampires or hunters and
didn’t sense any.

“Do you love me?” She caught his hand and swung their
entwined hands between them.

She looked up at him, her bottom lip caught in her teeth,
her blue eyes intent as her gaze met his.

Oliver eased his arms around her and held her close. “What
is it with girls needing to hear it all the time?” he said in a teasing tone.

“What is it with boys not wanting to say it all the time?”
she countered, looking up at him, her chin resting on his chest.