I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (39 page)

Kreshnik flexed the fingers of its hand, the
knuckles cracking.

The vampire leaped into the air, drawing back
its clawed hand, intending to land atop the man and finish him once
and for all.

Boone swung wildly with the curved kukri, the
blade slicing through the vampire’s bared wrist, the hand dropping
to the grass.

Kreshnik looked with incredulity at the
bloodless stump of its right arm. Boone snatched the clawed hand
from the grass and lashed out, slashing the Albanian across the
face with its own taloned fingers.

“Oh my…” Rainford’s voice died out under
Kreshnik’s agonized howl. A clawed finger had blinded it in one
eye.

Boone showed no mercy. He dived on the beast
and hacked at it with the kukri, driving it to its knees, then down
onto its back, its one hand reaching up futilely to fend off
blows.

He only stopped to fling Kreshnik’s hand at
Rainford. The dark Lord leaned his head to the side as the severed
hand flew past. Boone continued to chop up Kreshnik with the Gurkha
blade.

Rainford shook his head at what he was
seeing.

“Okay,” Boone finely sputtered, blood
drooling out of his mouth as he stood, the kukri held loosely in
one hand. Kreshnik lay unmoving, a tattered shadow on the dark
ground.

“You and me, old man.” Boone promised more
than he could deliver, tottering towards Rainford, looking like he
might collapse before he took another step.

Kreshnik took him from behind.

The vampire rose from the ground, wrapping
one handless arm around Boone’s neck, its other arm gripping
Boone’s cargo shorts, lifting him off his feet. Boone’s face
contorted, his breath and voice choked off.

The vampire dropped to one knee and when it
did it slammed Boone down across its other knee. Something in
Boone’s back audibly broke as his body bent backwards over
Kreshnik’s thigh.

Emmanuela grimaced.

“Well done, Kreshnik.” Rainford meant it. He
stepped forward to better watch the Albanian finish the man. “He
was like none other.”

Boone lay broken over Kreshnik’s knee. He was
still alive.

“fu-fu-fu…”

“What’s that you say?” Rainford asked, again
finding it outrageous that the man lived.

“…fuck you...” the Boone muttered weakly. His
head hung limply.

Using its one good hand, Kreshnik righted the
mortally wounded human being, Boone crumpling to his knees like a
rag doll. Kreshnik loomed behind him, sirens from approaching
police and fire vehicles filling the night.

As Emmanuela and Rainford watched, Kreshnik
lowered its mouth to Boone’s neck, latching onto the flesh there.
The vampire relished this meal, a foe vanquished, a man who had
cost him more than he expected, an enemy—

Kreshnik pulled away from Boone’s neck,
grasping its own throat.

“What is this?” Rainford asked aloud.

The tall vampire was making choking noises,
sputtering. It had let go of its hold on Boone, the man collapsing
listless to the grass.

“Kreshnik? Whatsoever is it?”

“Samos…” Kreshnik spoke the word clearly, its
hand and stump shooting up to the sides of its head. The vampire
looked like it was in enormous agony. Its head was vibrating.

As Emmanuela and Rainford watched, Kreshnik
looked to the sky in bewilderment, sputtered “Samothracian,” and
then its skull exploded, showering the woman and the dark Lord with
chunks of bone.

The headless corpse crumpled near the man it
had beaten and drank from.

“Now this…” pronounced Rainford. “…is beyond
words.”

“This complicates things,” stated
Emmanuela.

“Extraordinary. Don’t take your thumb from
that detonator.”

Emmanuela looked down at the device in her
hand.

Rainford spoke with conviction. “He must come
with me.”

“No.”

“Emmanuela, our own date with destiny will
have to wait. This is something that demands immediate
attention.”

“How do I know you won’t kill him?”

“Kill him? That’s the furthest thing from my
mind…”

Boone lay bleeding on the ground.

Emmanuela thought about it, looking towards
the conflagration that brightened the night.

“I’m going to let you take him, Rainford,”
she said. “But the next time you and I meet will be the last.”

“Agreed,” said Rainford. “But this…” The dark
Lord gestured to Boone’s inert form. “You must admit this is
remarkable.”

“Take him and go,” Emmanuela prodded the pile
of ash that had been Kreshnik with one booted foot.

Rainford bent and picked up Boone’s body. The
man was heavy, but Rainford was a child of the night. For the dark
Lord, the man’s weight was negligible. Boone was still breathing.
Rainford walked off the way he and Kreshnik had come, cradling
Boone like a broken rag doll.

There would be much to attend to. Emmanuela
and her sisters were back in the picture after a prolonged absence.
Kreshnik’s mother would need to be informed of her son’s demise and
her wraith assuaged. The man in his arms would take time to heal.
Only after Boone had recuperated could his training begin. Though
Rainford predicted the man would not be a willing pupil, the dark
Lord knew he would be his teacher.

“Where’s mom?”

His daughter, Carter thought, was thirteen
going on thirty. She came out of her room in the morning and that
was her greeting for a father she hadn’t seen in near to a decade,
Where’s
mom
? She’d been avoiding him when he got in
last night, in her room with the door closed, because she knew he
was going to have to talk to her.

Carter sipped from his mug of coffee before
he answered her.

“She took your brother to school.”

Deanna didn’t look like she liked that
answer.

“Which is good,” her father continued,
“because it’ll give us some time to talk.”

“Talk about what?” the way she said it. She
wanted a confrontation. Carter decided he was going to have to play
this one real cool.

“Well, for one, the school called yesterday.”
Before she could say something or dismiss it, Carter kept on.
“Yeah, I know you know. I know your mother already talked to you,
all right? And I know you’re probably looking at me sitting here,
saying to yourself, where was this guy the last nine years? And now
he wants to come back into our lives and tell us how we should live
‘em?”

Deanna had fixed herself a bowl of cereal and
before she could leave the kitchen to eat it in the living room in
front of the t.v. her father motioned to the chair—“Please”—at the
other end of the table he sat at.

“Your mother explained to me what happened.
How close are you to this girl? To those boys?”

Deanna had sat at the table and was eating
her Fruit Loops. “I used to think me and Jasmine was chill, but now
she can just stay away.” Carter looked at his daughter as she ate,
wondering where had his little baby gone. This girl that looked
like Tanji was obviously putting a lot of thought into her hair and
make up.

Between the phone call from the school dean
and talk with other mothers, Tanji had pieced together what had
happened and told Carter. A group of kids from Deanna’s school had
partied at one of the kid’s houses the weekend past. Kid’s parents
weren’t home. One of the girls, a kid Santa Anna knew Deanna had
been friends with since second grade, got drunk. They were all
drinking, smoking weed. When her friends left the room the girl
started getting romantic with her boyfriend, started giving him
oral in front of all
his
friends in the room. His friends
had lined up and she had done them all and when they were done they
had taken turns peeing on her.

Monday at school some of the girls were
talking, whispering “lemonade” when the girl walked past. The kid
had broken down and someone got her to the guidance counselor.
She’d explained the whole thing. These fucking kids, thought
Carter, only thirteen, fourteen. Where were they learning this
shit? Where was the parental supervision?
Christ
.

Deanna hadn’t been at the party, but she had
been one of those kids whispering.

“You know…” Carter thought carefully about
what he was going to say, because he wanted her to listen, he
didn’t want her to shut him out. “Something like that happens to a
person, she can’t be feeling too good about herself. You know that
right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I look at you and I think to myself, if
anyone ever hurt my baby…I don’t know what’d I’d do. I imagine your
friend, her parents must be feeling something like that right about
now.”

“Maybe they are,” Deanna admitted as she
poured herself more cereal. “Maybe Jasmine should have thought
about that before she did what she did.”

“Yeah, maybe she should’ve. But don’t lose
sight of something, Dee. Your friend was drunk. What those boys did
wasn’t right. Matter of fact, what they did was wrong, worse than
wrong.”

“And what I did?” Deanna gave her father the
look Tanji gave him, the look that could tip one of two ways.
“You’re gonna say what I did was wrong too, right?”

Carter decided not to treat it like a
question. “I know you know that. But there’s one thing I don’t want
you to forget, and that’s this: she’s still your friend, Dee. Don’t
forget that. I haven’t been here for you, almost ten years of your
life. She has. And if Jasmine ever needed you, she needs you
now.”

Deanna looked like she was holding down a
lump in her throat.

“I know how kids must be talking about your
friend at school. What she did, what happened to her. It’s
horrible. But you’re grown up enough to know, Dee, that the right
thing to do ain’t always the popular thing to do.”

“Mom always says that…” Deanna had tears in
her eyes.

“Because your mother,” Carter winked at his
daughter over his coffee mug, “is a very wise woman.

“’Nough of my sermon.” He passed some
brochures across the table to Deanna. “You too old for this
now?”

The girl took them and immediately her face
lit up. “Disney!” She wiped the tears out of her eyes.

“Yeah. We’re thinking of going, your mother,
brother and I.”

“What about me?” She looked like she couldn’t
believe he hadn’t included her.

“Well, I wanted to check with you first.
Eighth grades’ a big time in a girl’s—in a young lady’s—life. What
with graduation and high school and all next year…”

“No, daddy, this is so hot! When are we
going?”

“Been talkin’ to your mother about that.
You’ve got a couple of days off end of November for Thanksgiving.
We’re thinking maybe if you can keep your grades up and your mouth
closed, we take the whole week, head down before Turkey Day.”

“Oh daddy, mums the word, I swear!” Deanna
was beaming. “That would be so great!”

“Wanted us to stay in the new Animal Kingdom
Lodge, but that’s booked…” Carter drew it out for all it was worth.
“But your mom called and they’ve got a room for us in the Grand
Floridian. That’s this one here.” He indicated the resort in the
appropriate brochure.

The look on his little girl’s face…she could
dress and talk and carry the attitude of a woman twenty years her
senior, but Carter knew she was still his baby girl. Even after all
this time.

“What time does the bus pick you up?”

Deanna looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh,
dad, I gotta get going—it’ll be here…”

“You have a good day at school, today. Hey,
Dee—”

She stopped in the kitchen doorway with her
bookbag.

“Nothing. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye, dad.”

“Bye girl.”

Carter sat at the table for awhile. He
listened to Deanna finish up whatever her morning routine was
before she headed out for the bus, and then he listened to the bus
stop and pick her up. Tanji was going to do some food shopping
after she’d dropped little Carter off.

He had some errands of his own to run. Should
head into the city, see Hephaestus. Carter had decided that the
next night Enfermo came to visit, Enfermo died. Silver bullet would
be the easiest way, but Carter couldn’t be firing a gun out of his
house. That would bring the police. Maybe he could stick the beast,
if he could get a stake or knife close enough. But Enfermo was a
vampire, and as such was a lot faster and stronger than Carter.
Heph would have something he could use, something quiet.

Carter stood at his bureau in the bedroom he
shared with Tanji and looked in the mirror at his throat. The
puncture wounds were old, looked like scars. Most people wouldn’t
know what they were looking for, wouldn’t know what they were if
they saw them. Carter never forgot what they were, never forgot how
he’d gotten them.

Yeah, Enfermo was gonna have to die. The
vampire had promised him nothing bad would happen to Frank, that
they just wanted Boone. And now they were all gone, all missing.
Not just Boone, but Frank, Bowie, Madison, Hamilton, even Jay.

He pocketed his cash, his house and car keys,
and some quarters.

He locked the front door behind himself. He’d
be out a good part of the morning but Tanji had her keys.

Carter walked to the curb and waited as a car
passed in the street. Birds were chirping and darting around. He
looked both ways without thinking about it and walked across the
street towards his Honda Accord. He thumbed the alarm attached to
the key and the car chirped.

He opened the driver’s door and thought it
was going to be another hot day, though not yet. Carter settled
down behind the wheel and inserted the key in the ignition,
twisting, the engine catching. He reached across his body with his
right hand and pulled the seat belt over and down, clicking it into
place.