Death of an Immortal (28 page)

“Get away from me!” he shouted. “You’re dead. I saw your body!”

“No, Richard. I believe it’s called ‘undead,’” Jamie laughed. He was every bit as terrified as she had hoped. She realized that she’d been hoping for this chance for revenge since the moment she’d awoken in the morgue. No matter what happened from now on, she was satisfied.

From the suddenly crafty look in Richard’s eyes, it occurred to him that he was safely behind bars. He couldn’t get out, but she couldn’t get in. He took on a stubborn look. He’d always been a man who got his way by denying what he wanted to deny.

She let him think that for a few moments. Then, with every ounce of vampire strength she possessed, she began to pull on the door. She’d fed on dozens of men and women in the past hour; her body was vibrating with power. The door began to screech and bend outward, and then it came off its hinges.

She tossed it aside. Her smile was now a genuine smile, and no doubt all the more frightening for it.

She stalked him into the corner, until he couldn’t retreat any further. He tried to strike her. She could have let him, let him see that he couldn’t hurt her. Instead, she reached out and grabbed his hand and squeezed. His bones liquefied, mixed with his flesh, and splattered onto the floor.

It was so satisfying that she did it to his other hand, then his arms and legs. He was screaming at first, she could hear it somewhere in the background, but she was focused on his eyes as he realized he was going to die.

Finally, she raised her claws, making sure that he was looking at them, and then lowered them slowly toward his heart. She dug in, centimeter by centimeter, taking her time, his hoarse final breaths in her ears, until the tip of her sharp talons reached his beating heart. She snipped each of the connecting arteries, one by one.

The light faded slowly from his eyes, then blinked out.

Jamie sucked his blood for a moment, as if by habit, but her memories of him made it taste sour.

She sighed and dropped him.

She looked down at Richard’s body. She’d drunk some of his blood, but she was damned––double damned––if she’d eat him too. But she couldn’t risk the slightest chance that he would come back.

She reached down and twisted his head, first in one direction with a solid crack, breaking the spine, then back the other way, tearing the muscles and ligaments, and finally back again, peeling the head off along with the skin of the upper back.

She threw the head into the corner. It bounced off the toilet and rolled for a couple of feet.

#

After Jamie left, Horsham had eyes only for Terrill.

Terrill stood quietly, waiting for the inevitable. Horsham looked puzzled. The object of his obsessive searching for decades was nothing but a tired, pale man. He walked slowly toward Terrill.

“I imagined this would be a battle for the ages,” Horsham said, shaking his head in dismay. “That vampires would talk about it for centuries. I even brought a witness, though she seems to have inconveniently run off.”

Terrill waited until Horsham was standing in front of him. He had a wooden stake up his sleeve. He let it slip into his palm and whipped it around as fast as he could manage, directly toward Horsham’s heart.

The vampire easily snatched the stake from Terrill’s hand, faster than human eyes could perceive.

“How pathetic,” Horsham said. “You really have become human. How is this possible?”

“I asked for forgiveness,” Terrill said.

“As you should, at least from me. But why become human? Why give up this glorious existence?”

Terrill shook his head. “Look at yourself. Covered in blood and gore. Smelling like a charnel house. Hiding at night, never seeing the light of day. You find that glorious?”

“How quickly you forget. Humans and their short lives and short memories.” He stared down at Terrill.
When did he become so much taller than me?
Terrill wondered.

Horsham grimaced in disgust. “This doesn’t even feel satisfying.”

Nor should it,
Terrill thought. But he said nothing.

“Come on, Terrill. Is that it? Is that all the struggle you’re going to put up?”

“I’m sorry for what happened to Mary,” Terrill said.

“‘What happened to?’ Something just ‘happened?’”

“You’re right. Even now, I try to avoid responsibility. I’m sorry for what I did to Mary. I’m sorry for killing her.”

“People think that vampires have no heart. But they’re wrong. Mary was my heart.”

“I’m sorry,” Terrill repeated. “I should have understood that. I shouldn’t have killed her.”

“No, you did something much worse than kill her. You Turned her! Mary could never have been a vampire. She could never have followed your precious Rules. You took a saint and damned her.”

“You have to believe that she wasn’t damned, Horsham. She never became one of us. She never killed. She gave herself into God’s hands.”

Horsham paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. Then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone, and you took her from me.”

“I accept the consequences,” Terrill said. “But leave my friends alone. None of this is their fault.”

Horsham laughed, sounding delighted. “That’s what will make this worthwhile. Killing you right now wouldn’t mean a thing. But killing you
after
I have tortured your friends––that will make it all so much better.”

“Please, Horsham.”

“And you know what makes it even more gratifying? You didn’t even
have
any friends until a few days ago, and now you have a whole clutch of them!’

“I didn’t have any friends because I was vampire. It was only when I became human that anyone wanted to be friends with me. Horsham. I know you had begun to feel this way also––that you were starting to doubt––before I took Mary from you. Please. For Mary’s sake. It isn’t too late.”

“For Mary’s sake?” Horsham’s voice rose into a roar. “FOR MARY’S SAKE?”

He picked Terrill up as if he was a dried leaf and slammed him to the floor. Then he reached down and snapped one of Terrill’s legs. The femur poked jaggedly through his trousers. The pain seemed to tear through every cell of his body. Terrill screamed and nearly passed out.

“Don’t go anywhere while I go take care of your ‘friends,’” Horsham sneered. “You should be able to hear their screaming from here. I’ll tell you what: I’ll bring back their heads so you can say goodbye.” He sniffed the air. “I believe I smell them hiding,
that
way…” He walked over to the door to the corridor that led to Brosterhouse’s office.

Terrill was in so much pain that he couldn’t think. But something impelled him to start dragging himself after Horsham, inch by inch. He couldn’t use his legs and had to pull himself with his hands and arms.

He heard the screaming of his friends before he’d crawled more than a few yards.

Chapter 47

No one in the little office had anything to say after Terrill left. The only sounds were the splintering of wood and the huffs of exertion from Grime as he smashed the drawers.

Sylvie had realized she couldn’t stop Terrill from trying to protect them, though it was obvious there was little he could do. It was what he had become. For him to run, to hide behind his friends, would be to betray his very being. For him to avoid death would mean he was denying his humanness.

Brosterhouse sat in the chair behind the desk, gun in hand. Father Harry seemed almost happy to be confronted by real, concrete evil. He lifted the water bottle, and Sylvie could almost see an idea bloom behind his eyes. He went to the door and poured a little of the holy water along the bottom. Then he frowned and looked around, as if realizing how inadequate their defenses really were.

Sylvie walked over to the desk and picked up one of the stakes that Perry was laying out in a row. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

The jailer had been watching all this from the corner. Now he moved toward the door, and started moving aside the filing cabinet. “There’s a rear exit to this building. Who’s with me?”

Everyone looked at him without reaction. “You people are crazy!” he exclaimed, and ran out the door. Only seconds later, they heard his scream, cut off in the middle of its crescendo. They stood stock-still as the door began to move.

And then the door flew wide open, and he was there. Brosterhouse stood and shot twice, but the vampire was already leaping through the air toward him, the biggest target in the room. Brosterhouse fell backward against the wall, and Sylvie heard a loud splat, as if his head had split open. He dropped to the floor with a thud.

Father Harry was spraying his water bottle on the vampire, squeezing and waving it back and forth. The vampire screamed and his hands and face began to smoke, but he didn’t flee. Then the water was gone, and the priest was holding up his cross and chanting:

“Glorious Saint Michael, Prince of the Heavenly hosts, who fought with the Dragon, the Old Serpent, and cast him out of Heaven, I earnestly entreat you to assist me also, in the painful and dangerous conflict which I sustain against the same formidable foe. Be with me, O mighty Prince! That I may courageously fight and vanquish that proud spirit, whom you, by the Divine Power, gloriously overthrew…”

The vampire advanced on him, and retreated; advanced again, and again fell back. Then he picked Brosterhouse’s gun up off the floor and shot Father Harry in the stomach.

While this was happening, both Grime and Perry had leaped toward the vampire, each of them with stakes in both hands. Grime’s first stake missed, glancing off of the vampire’s coat, but the second sank into the fiend’s shoulder. Horsham grunted and smacked Grime across the face, and the man dropped where he stood.

Perry’s first stake was headed directly for Horsham’s heart, but the vampire turned in less than the blink of an eye, and Perry stumbled past him. The vampire snagged him, turned him around, and began to lower his fangs toward Perry’s neck.

Then Horsham, who had been moving so fast that Sylvie could barely take it all in, stood still. There was a moment of silence.

A stake quivered in the vampire’s heart, and Perry had a triumphant grin on his face. “Got you, bloodsucker!”

Horsham looked down and, seemingly without a care, plucked the stake from his chest and flung it aside. He struck Perry in the chest, and the homeless man stumbled backward, clutching his heart, and fell on his friend Grime, who was unconscious on the floor.

And then it was just Sylvie and the vampire.

She raised her cross and stake, knowing it was hopeless. She found herself praying out loud, not the martial prayers to ward off evil that Father Harry had been shouting, but comforting prayers about the deity she would soon meet.

Horsham was in no hurry. He seemed to understand that of all the humans, she was the one who mattered most to Terrill. Her pain, and her death, would hurt Terrill the most.

“I told you to leave Sylvie alone!” she heard someone scream. It sounded like her sister, but harsher, louder, and angrier than she’d ever heard Jamie sound.

Horsham turned his head slightly, and at that moment, Jamie wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. “Now, Sylvie! Stake him now!”

Sylvie plunged the stake into the vampire’s heart. He seemed to levitate, carrying both Jamie and himself upward and backward. Jamie landed on her back with Horsham on top of her, but she held onto him. The stake stayed in his heart.

But he was thrashing, and it was clear that even mortally wounded, he was stronger than Jamie, and that he’d soon break loose.

Grime and Perry, who had been slowly recovering, exchanged a glance and then threw themselves onto the vampire’s legs, holding them down. Sylvie jumped into the fight as well, adding her small strength to her sister’s, pinioning the vampire’s arms. She landed mere inches from his jaws, and she felt the splash of his drool and the heat of his breath.

But slowly, as their strength began to fade, so did the struggles of the vampire. He was getting hot, and now the humans were scrambling away. Jamie squirmed out from under her former Master, who was starting to glow the red and black of coals, and who was screaming an inhuman scream.

Horsham crumbled into glowing embers, and Perry, with a shout of triumph, kicked the blackening ash into the air.

As Sylvie moved back from the heat, she saw Terrill dragging himself into the room. Jamie was standing over him as if wondering what to do. Her sister took one last look back at Sylvie and smiled her old smile, her kind and wise smile. Then she was gone.

The fire sprinkler went off, raining cold water down on the dead and the living alike. The cloud of ash was washed to the floor, to mingle with the dirt and the dust.

Sylvie made her way to Terrill and nestled his head in her lap.

Together, we’ll find a way to save Jamie,
she thought.

After all, they had the rest of their lives ahead of them.

Terrill’s story continues in
Rule of Vampire,
the second book of the Vampire Evolution Trilogy.

About the Author:

Duncan McGeary is the owner of the bookstore Pegasus Books of Bend, located in downtown Bend, Oregon. He is the author of the fantasy novels Star Axe, Snowcastles, and Icetowers, and the author of several horror novels, including Led to the Slaughter and the Vampire Evolution Trilogy. His wife Linda is also a writer; together, they attend an Oregon writers’ group. Duncan has two children: Todd, an artist, and Toby, a chef.

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