Blood Bath & Beyond (28 page)

“Trust me—I’m as unlucky as they come.” I twisted a nervous finger through my hair. “I met a woman recently who reminded me just how much I need someone to look after me and keep me out of trouble practically every waking hour of the day. She looks like me, too. And we’re really similar in so many ways. Without her husband, she was completely lost in the world.”

“You think you’re like that. Lost without your fiancé?”

“I—I don’t really know.”

“Just a weak little lamb lost in the woods.”

“That’s me. I’ll save my lamb impression for another time. It’s not that good.”

His gaze turned predatory. “Little lambs need to be aware of the monsters lurking in the shadows. The ones with the biggest appetites.”

I forced myself to laugh lightly. “Very dramatic. Yes, you’re quite the showman, aren’t you? I definitely want to catch your show before I leave Vegas. You’re on tonight, right? Aren’t you running a bit late now?”

“Kristopher goes on before me. Looks like I have time to take care of some last-minute problems.”

I really didn’t like the way he said that. I rubbed my lips together and looked at my phone. “Gee, I wonder where Thierry is. You know, he’s a master vampire. Very old, very powerful. Knows everybody. If you had any idea how much ass I’ve seen him kick over the months, you’d be amazed. Everybody’s terrified of him.”

“I’m sure. He sounds swell. So he takes care of you, Sarah? Like your little friend’s husband did for her?”

“He tries his best.”

“I guess he can’t always watch over you if you’re not with him. Who knows what danger you’re going to find yourself in at any given moment of the day, huh? It’s a dangerous world for a fledgling who doesn’t know any better than to go places she shouldn’t be.”

“Totally.” I kept my smile going as I jabbed my finger on my address book to call Thierry’s phone. I pressed it to my ear.

Answer. Please, please answer.

Thierry picked up on the second ring. “Sarah.”

“Hey, killer,” I said as breezily as possible, winking at Josh to let him know that was my special pet name for my very dangerous fiancé. “What’s taking you so long?”

“I’m almost finished.” He sounded a bit uncertain. I couldn’t blame him. Our nicknames for each other so far had usually been no more imaginative than “Sarah” and “Thierry.” If nothing else, they were easy to remember. “Are you…well?”

“Yeah, me? I’m fine. Just fine. Just hanging out with Josh, a good pal of mine. Just chatting away. No problem. How long are you going to be?”

There was a short hesitation. “Where are you? Is everything all right? You sound very unlike yourself.”

“Do I? No, I’m fine. Everything’s fine and dandy. Anyway, when you’re ready, you can find me at Blo—”

The phone was suddenly gone from my hand. Josh had moved toward me quickly and plucked it right out of my grip. He stared at the screen for a moment before he ended the call.

Terror gripped my chest. “I wasn’t finished.”

“Yeah, you were.”

“Can I have my phone back, please?” I held my now-shaking hand out and tried to look stern.

“This?” He held the device between his fingers.

“Yes, that.”

He bent over and placed it on the ground. Then he smashed it with the sole of his shoe. “Oops, sorry about that.”

I raced for the door, grabbed hold of the handle, and pulled hard. It was locked. I grappled to find the lock, but there wasn’t one. This was a door that needed a key on both sides. Before I could try to break the glass and get someone’s attention on the sidewalk, Josh grabbed hold of the back of my tank top and hauled me backward. I staggered six feet away before going over on my ankle and hitting the ground hard. Panic raced through me as I stared up at him.

“So here we are,” Josh said, spreading his hands.

“I want to leave.”

“Too late for that.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“Wrong, Sarah. You know, I’ve met many people over the years. Part of being a magician unable to do any real magic is acquiring the skill of reading faces. The eyes are the windows to the soul. I can see it—and I can get a sense of who somebody is when I meet them for the first time. It’s all in their eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“A lovely shade of hazel. Brown with flecks of green and amber. I studied them before—when you were in my blood bank. You’re sincere. I saw that easily. No guile. I hate guile.”

“Guile sucks,” I agreed as I began to slowly back up, crablike, away from him until my back hit a low shelf.

“You weren’t trying to trick me then, find out more about me, other than genuine curiosity. I liked you, Sarah.”

“Liked,” I repeated. “That’s past tense.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this, Josh. I thought we were friends.”

“No, we weren’t. But we were well on our way. See—like I said, I can read people. Before you had no agenda with me. But that changed tonight in an instant. I could see it in your face. In your eyes. Trust and friendliness shifted to doubt and suspicion.” His lips thinned. “You know, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything.” I put as much conviction as I could into my guileless hazel eyes.

“Yes, you do. I think you know more than people realize. They look at you and see a pretty but meaningless fledgling who might be connected to a powerful master.”

“That’s all I am,” I admitted. “And thank you for
calling me pretty. I’ve been having a really lousy hair day today, you have no idea.”

“This friend of yours, the woman who reminded you of yourself. Where is she now?”

“Lost,” I said. “Looking for a new path.”

“And you think you’re like her?”

“I don’t know what I’m like.”

He folded his arms over his otherwise friendly “Vampilicious” T-shirt. “There are two kinds of people, Sarah. There’s only one way to tell the difference—and that’s what they’re willing to do when their survival is at stake. Half will give up and accept their fate. The other half, however, will fight to keep breathing, fight to survive and protect those they care about, no matter how much the odds seem stacked against them. It sounds like your friend falls into the first category. Do you as well?”

Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling all that share-y. “I don’t know. What category do you put yourself in?”

“Forty years, bad luck all along. I’ve been in the first category for too long to count. One day I got sick of being pathetic and weak, so I decided to change. I decided to do whatever it took to survive and not sit back and let fate keep kicking me in the face.”

“You killed them,” I said quietly. “One a day for the last week. You left them out in the open, hoping that the news of the vampire attacks would cause some major publicity. So your business, your show, would be successful. So you could pay off your debt from your lousy business decisions and gambling. And you even set it up so if suspicion ever shone your way—if the Ring started sniffing around and putting the puzzle together—you could shift blame to Kristopher. After
all, he’s the crazy and tortured dark wizard with the sickle ring.”

Josh’s expression hadn’t changed as I said any of this. He moved toward a shelf, reached up high, and pulled down a large box. “Kristopher would have been a perfect suspect. I was still working out the details, but I think it would have worked out just fine. It still might, if I need him. Funny thing, he considers me a friend. I guess we are. I honestly think he’s a good person and would struggle with the thought of murdering innocents, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t look as if he has.”

“But you’re not struggling with that.”

His dark eyes met mine. “Nobody’s really all that innocent, Sarah. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. Everyone has secrets they try to hide. Darkness. There is no one without sin, especially not here in the City of Sin.”

I shook my head. “You’re better than this, Josh. You can stop this right now. I’ll help you. It’s not too late to change.”

“Vladimir,” he said. “Call me by my stage name now, Sarah: Vladimir Nosferatu. Josh is weak and pathetic, but Vlad is strong and fierce. He’s a real warrior who does what he needs to do.”

I shifted my gaze from my crushed cell phone back to his pasty face. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s a really stupid name.”

He gave me a very sinister smile. “Thank you for your opinion.”

I noticed with deep dismay that the box he was opening up contained a crossbow.

“This just went on sale,” he said. “It works, too. Some
might take it out hunting deer, but to give it the vampire edge necessary to be in this store, it’s got thin wooden stakes included. Very effective. I’ve tested it before on one of the owners of that rooftop-patio blood bank.” He was assembling it quickly, too. He cast another unpleasant smile in my direction. “I’ll give you a chance, Sarah. Go, hide. I could navigate this store with my eyes closed, but you can at least try to get away from me.”

My hands shook as I held them out in front of me. “Josh…don’t do this….”

“Consider it a chance to prove to yourself who you really are. Are you someone who accepts her fate and knows when to give up and die? If so, that will make this very simple for me. The problem you now present will be taken care of quickly. I might even make my show on time. Or will you fight to survive? Are you really the same as that friend of yours or are you your own person? Ten seconds, Sarah.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Ten…nine…eight…”

I wouldn’t be able to get past him to get to the locked door. It wouldn’t do me any good anyway, unless I managed to break it. I was stronger now compared with my previous human self, but I’d neglected to eat my spinach today to help me bust down a door right in front of a vampire with a crossbow aimed at me.

Instead, I was off the floor and tearing through the store in the opposite direction as fast as I could run. I banged my leg against a shelf and it hurt like hell. Although not nearly as much as one of those wooden stakes would hurt if it found its target.

I raced up the staircase to the second floor before he’d gotten to the count of four and I dove beneath an
animatronic
Addams Family
dinner table. I didn’t think this would be a good spot for very long. He’d find me. Also, it was very dusty. A sneeze felt imminent and I clamped my hands over my nose.

One good thing was that this place was huge and jam-packed full of merchandise. It was a veritable vampiric maze I could lose myself in for days and still not see everything. I had a decent view, although nothing higher than hip level from where I now crouched. A cold line of perspiration slid down my spine and I tried my best not to tremble in fear for my life.

It goes without saying, really, but this was bad. I didn’t need a memo to tell me that. I’d honestly not suspected Josh—
Vlad
—for a moment. I’d been looking for people who were shady, who acted suspicious. Not someone who seemed friendly, but unlucky. I’d sensed a whole lot of good in Josh. He had a blood bank. He wanted to help make things easier for the local vampires.

Still a business, though, wasn’t it? It wasn’t as if he was giving the red stuff away for free. And he wanted it to be successful, just like everything else.

Two other blood banks—the strip club and the rooftop patio—had both closed up due to tragedy. Fire and murder, respectively.

He’d all but blatantly admitted to killing one of the rooftop owners with a crossbow. Did I want to lay any further bets on who might be responsible for the ultimate demise of both places? And what might be the fate of the blood banks that had just opened up to take more business away from this one?

Josh was a bad businessman, an unlucky investor, and an unrepentant killer. Not necessarily in that
order. And I was currently stuck in a locked store with him on the hunt for me.

“Sarah!” I heard him on the first floor, the opposite side near the cash registers. “I’ll find you!”

Was he crazy, too? Did he have some sort of split personality—Josh the nice guy and Vlad the killer? I wasn’t so sure about that. I think he’d been pushed so far that he didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. This? This was wrong. In case there was any doubt in the matter.

I slowly eased out a little from under the table and looked up at Morticia Addams’s waxy face, but she had no words of wisdom for me. The plug to her display was pulled out from the wall socket and cast aside. She was out of commission for the day.

I really hoped only one of us got unplugged tonight.

Downstairs, when he’d talked about the two kinds of people in the world, it made me think immediately of Laura. We might look a lot alike and have been in similar situations with master vampires—on the surface, anyway. But we couldn’t be more different underneath. She relied on Bernard to support her, to protect her, and yet she didn’t need him for more than that. She’d had other lovers over the years. The man she’d chosen to marry was only a means to an end. A strategic decision that she’d hoped would lead to a better future as she continued on in her boat with no oars.

Bottom line, Laura didn’t know what she wanted—at least not until it was taken away from her.

If Laura were here, I had no doubt at all what she would do. She would beg for her life. She would bargain. She would flirt. And then, if all of that failed, she would accept that this was the end for her because she
was outmatched in strength and cunning. She would know there was no other choice for her but death.

If she’d gotten here and hidden under this table, this was where I knew she’d wait, shivering and crying, until Josh finally made his way up here, aimed his crossbow at her chest, and snuffed out a problem that had raised its tangled bed-head.

While I didn’t like the situation I’d found myself in, I appreciated that it had helped me see the truth with my own two eyes.

Laura and I were nothing alike. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to die here.

Well, maybe I was, but it wouldn’t be through lack of trying not to.

I needed to find an exit—and there had to be another one here other than the front door customers used. The last thing I wanted to do was go mano a mano with Vladimir Nosferatu.