Bloody Acquisitions (Fred Book 3) (5 page)

“That’s a unique way to plead for your life, I’ll give you that,” Colin replied. He flicked the lighter and a bright orange flame sputtered forth from the top. I took hold of the hook, feeling the sharp blades cut through my palms as I readied to try with all my might to snap it off. This move was a gamble, but it was the best one I could make. If I managed to get clear, there had to be a way to end this without anyone getting hurt. I just needed to think harder.

“You really don’t get it,” I told him. “It’s not my life I’m pleading for. If you do this, there’s no going back. And the people who’ll be coming for you don’t share my tendency to shy away from violence.”

“Why would I want to go back? Especially with such a bright, warm future ahead of me.” Colin reared back to toss the lighter, and I pushed down with all my might on the top of the hook. It bent down at a sharp angle, but refused to break, and in that instant, I knew I was dead.

As it turned out, however, Colin was no more successful with his toss than I with my escape attempt, as a sharp, sudden blow struck him across the back of the head. He crumpled to the ground, the lighter falling through the air for only a second before a pale, well-manicured hand snatched it up and snapped it shut.

“Wow, that guy seemed like a real asshole.” The voice of my savior was soft, with undercurrents of an accent that had long since been worn away by time. She had dark hair trimmed to just above her shoulders, sported a pantsuit that would have fit right in at any office in America, and was as pale as a sheet. If that weren’t enough, she flashed a small grin, just large enough for me to see an extended incisor at the top of her mouth.

For the first time since my own maker had tried to kill me, I was in the presence of another vampire.

6.

A slight groan broke the silent tension between this new vampire and me as Colin shifted on the ground. He was still unconscious, and given the amount of blood coming from his head, it would be some time before he was fully recovered. Actually, unless he had some sort of parahuman ability I hadn’t noticed, an attack like that would leave him with neck, if not brain, damage. It’s hard to understand just how fragile humans are until you stop technically being one.

“Sorry about that. Let’s finish this jackass all the way off.” The woman leaned down, mouth opening wider as her fangs began to extend even further.

“Stop!” I darted forward, spraying gasoline from my flailing limbs as I hurried to put myself between my savior and the hunter who had tried to kill me.

“Oh, my apologies. That was rude of me.” She stopped, still bent halfway toward his unconscious form, then began to rise once more. “You’re the one he attacked and stabbed, of course you should get to have the privilege. Not to mention, it looks like you could use the blood.”

She had me there; the hooked head of the harpoon was bent but still lodged in my chest, tethering me to the car. What’s more, my efforts to rip it off had re-opened the wound, which was slowly oozing a darker blood than normal. I mentioned before that vampires heal exceptionally well, but as I’d begun to learn, all magic came with a cost. For us, it was blood. Just like a human burned calories for energy, we burned blood, and the more strenuous the activity, the more it consumed. After racing around town and healing several gunshot wounds, I was feeling more than a bit peckish. A few nips from Colin’s neck and I’d be topped off, able to easily free myself and heal up.

“Neither of us is drinking from him.” The words were a little more forceful than I’d meant them to be, and the female vampire regarded me more carefully. I quickly tried to explain myself.

“I mean, we need to wait for the authorities. The agents. He’s obviously suffering from trauma or mental illness, and much as I might like to return the favor for this harpoon in my shoulder, I think it’s for the best all-around if we let due process handle this.”

She chuckled a little, a slightly higher pitch than I was expecting from her speaking voice. “Mind if I ask your name?”

“It’s Fredrick Fletcher. But most people call me Fred.”

“Fredrick, a classic name. I rather like those. I am Lillian.” Without warning, she dipped her head and did a small formal bow. From the way her eyes went wide and she quickly sprang back up, I had a feeling it was more out of habit than deference.

“Well, Fred,” Lillian continued. “This is the due process. This man, this human, tried to kill you. Have you committed any crime against him or his kin?”

“I . . . I don’t think so. Not that I’m at all aware of.”

“That doesn’t surprise me; I’ve heard tales of a lone hunter going after our ilk lately. It was on my to-do list, some ways after tonight’s meeting with the therians. At any rate, he tried to take your life, and as an Undead American, that means his life is yours to end. No muss, no fuss, no need for any
agents
.”

Lillian spat that last word out, which didn’t come as much of a surprise. Since I’d come to the parahuman world as an outsider, and my first friend in it was an agent, I hadn’t been given the indoctrination of fear that a lot of others had. Truthfully, at first, I hadn’t understood why everyone was so afraid of someone like Krystal. Then I saw Quinn, my maker, try to kill her. That sole experience had taught me that, if anything, people weren’t afraid enough of agents.

“So, Colin’s life is mine to take, right?” I asked, making sure I understood the minutia of what was happening. That’s the thing about living in a country partly founded by parahumans: we do have rules about how things go, and arbitrary as they often felt, I knew that they mattered. Because agents existed specifically to deal with those who broke those rules.

“Correct,” Lillian assured me.

“Then I choose not to take it. I spare him. And since he never even saw you, let alone fired a shot, I don’t see that you have any similar claim. If you kill him, it’s murder.”

Bathed in the glow from the taxi’s headlights, swaddled in the sounds of its still barely running engine, Lillian and I stared at each other for a long while. If she made this violent, I was done for. Even if I was normally a match for other vampires, which I wasn’t, an evening of getting the utter crap kicked out of me had left me battered and weary. Unless Lillian was somehow more averse to violence than myself, a notion which Colin’s bleeding head easily dispelled, she’d take me down in seconds. Hell, she was still holding the lighter, which meant she didn’t even really need to get her hands dirty.

“You surprise me,” Lillian said, speaking at last. “Not with your softness—you are far from the first doe someone has tried to turn into a wolf—but that you noticed that detail. I’m impressed. Most in your state wouldn’t be capable of keeping such a calm head. Unfortunately for you, and this hunter, there is one flaw in your argument. I am a vampire, and he is a criminal. That much I heard him confess myself. By the law, that means he is fair game for me to feed upon, and while I’ll certainly try not to kill him, accidents do happen. So tell me, how will you save the hunter this time, Fredrick?”

I’m not proud of how long it took, but that was when it finally dawned on me that Lillian didn’t actually care if Colin died or not. Somewhere in the discussion, he’d become inconsequential. What she was interested in was me, or rather, if I could stop her from killing him. This was a game to her. Brains or brawn, she wanted to see what I was made of. Knowing that, I realized I only had one move left. I needed to go for a high stakes gambit.

“I guess I can’t stop you,” I told her, but even as I spoke, I began to back away. “Just, give me a few seconds to get clear first. I really don’t want to be close enough to see what happens to you.”

Her brow creased. This was not a method she’d been anticipating, because why on earth would she? It didn’t really make sense, but if I shuffled the facts around fast enough, she might not notice that.

“What do you expect to happen? The hunter is down. I would easily sense if he’d awakened.”

“Oh yeah, Colin looks down for the count. In fact, I think he needs some serious medical attention. But see, nuts as that hunter is, he’s also shown himself to be really smart. He found out what I was by staking out my blood supply. He took away my car and communication before anything else. When I ran, he kept finding me, and I still have no idea how he pulled that off. Not to mention his weapons. Silver, fire, all the classics, plus some ingenious stuff of his own.” I tapped lightly on the hook sticking out of my chest to illustrate the point.

“I’m sure he was quite formidable, before I cracked him in the back of the head,” Lillian said. Her brow was still creased, but she was starting to grow impatient. She thought I was stalling for time, instead of building up to something.

“Formidable, and suicidal,” I corrected. “No concern for his own well-being what-so-ever. If I weren’t . . . me . . . then there were several chances I could have used to kill him tonight. Tell me, someone like that—someone cunning and informed, with very little sense of self-preservation—doesn’t that seem like the kind of man who would booby trap his own blood, just in case he lost? One last ‘screw you’ to the vampire that brought him down?”

That got her attention. She looked from me to Colin, to the blood slowly streaming from his forehead. “Silver is poisonous to humans as well.”

“Not right away. They can have a lot of it in their system before it does them in. There would be long-term side effects, but that only matters for someone who expects to live through the year. And it wouldn’t take much to hurt a vampire, especially from the inside.” It took everything I had not to fidget, or break our eye contact, or give any other indication of just how full of shit I was. I had no idea how long a human could last with silver in their body, or what amount of it would get to the blood, or how it would impact a vampire who drank it. This was all speculation and conjecture, which is a nicer way of saying a complete wild guess. It was all I had, though.

My only hope—actually, Colin’s only hope—was that Lillian didn’t know any more about the subject than I did. She contemplated him again for a while, then walked over to me, moving slowly until she was only inches away.

“Fredrick Fletcher, you are an interesting one.” Reaching out, she took the hook poking through my chest and snapped it clean off, almost effortlessly. I’d love to say the bend loosened it for her, but the implication was clear. She’d been partaking in more blood, probably even that of other parahumans, and was
much
stronger than I was. That’s the most dangerous thing about vampires—when we drink the blood of other parahumans, we absorb part of their ability. The strength and regeneration of therians is apparently a popular favorite, and the exact reason why so many of Richard’s staff look at me with distrust.

“Congratulations, Fredrick. You have saved this hunter’s life. I have no claim to kill him unless I am feeding, and you make the proposition of ingesting his blood a bit more than I’d like to gamble. That said, this sort of behavior cannot go unpunished.” Lillian walked back over to Colin, the hook of the harpoon clutched tightly in her hand. Her foot flipped him over, pointing his unconscious face toward the sky. Dragging the blade of the harpoon forcefully across her skin, she opened a small cut on her palm.

I realized what she was about to do only seconds before it happened, and by then, I was already too late. Lillian crouched down and pulled open Colin’s mouth, letting a few drops of her blood fall into his throat. That done, she carefully lowered his head back to the ground and looked up at me.

“Did . . . did you just make him a vampire?”

Lillian snorted, and as soon as she did, her eyes widened again. It was a brief moment, but it helped dispel a lot of the tension in the air. She’d slipped for a moment, letting me see that at least some of this “creature of the night” routine was for show. But the snort was gone, her face solemn again, and I chose to let the incident pass without comment.

“Fredrick, you really need to learn more about your own people. A vampire must drink a human’s blood, then give them some of their own in order for the change to occur. What I have offered is nothing more than a bit of magical booster, something to speed his healing along. Of course, if he does have silver in his system, that healing will be quite the painful experience. But he’ll survive, and be none the worse for wear. Eventually.”

Then she was up again, stepping over Colin and walking past me. From her pocket, she produced a small phone, one a bit sleeker than what I’d lost. Moving her thumb at exceptional speed, she clicked through several menus, tapped a few digital buttons, and offered the phone to me. “Something tells me you need this more than I do.”

“Thanks. Let me just look up the number and make a quick call—”

Lillian was already walking off though, shaking her head as she did. “Keep it; I’m due for an upgrade anyway. Plus, I wiped all the personal information. It’s yours now, for as long as you like.” She stopped, partway out of the alley, and looked out at the city of Winslow.

“You know, Fred, there are some interesting tales coming out of this city. Stories about one of our kind who’s like no other. They say he brokered a peace with the therians, courted an agent, and that even the King of the West calls him by name. Part of why my clan has come is to try and broker a meeting with him, if he even truly exists. Should we succeed, I’ll text that phone, perhaps even make an introduction. Someone like you could learn a lot from that sort of vampire.”