Fang Girl (18 page)

“Lie low!” I pushed her back onto the bed. The place where the second spike had been was covered by Van’s
massive, prone form; I knelt to try to roll him out of the way. He stirred under my hands, groaning, and his eyes fluttered open.

“Watch out!” I ducked at Sarah’s shout, covering Van. Something flew past my head and crashed into the wall: Ebon, springing instantly to his feet. Four long, parallel cuts from Lilith’s fingernails gashed his cheek and nose, barely missing his eyes and covering his face in a mask of blood.

“How pathetic,” Lilith said. She sounded as languid as ever, but there was blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. An angry light filled her dark eyes. “This is what I’ve been running from all these years? If I’d known you were this slow, I’d have turned and squashed you long ago.”

Ebon shook his head, bright drops of his blood scattering over the white bed linens. His lips drew back in a snarl.

“What are you holding back for?” Lilith spread her arms in invitation, though her eyes never left Ebon’s. Down the Bloodline, I felt her muscles tense in anticipation. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

Help us,
I mouthed at Van as I grabbed the silver spike from underneath him.
In three. One—two—

Van’s eyes widened as he looked past me to Lilith. “No, wai—” he started, but I was already hurling myself forward. I caught Lilith completely off guard; before she could get out of the way, I’d crashed into her knees, knocking us both to the floor. I felt her leg start to dissolve under my hand, as if she was trying to turn into mist to get away. I slammed the spike randomly into her abdomen, and she went solid again.

“Ebon, hurry!” I yelled as Lilith twisted in my grip. I risked a glance at him, trying to see what was holding him up. He was just—standing there, the spike hanging from his hand as he stared at me. Under the blood, his face was twisted with indecision.
“Ebon!”

In one movement, he was next to me, his own weight bearing down on Lilith’s chest, his face only inches from mine. Lilith redoubled her efforts, but between us we pinned her to the ground. As Ebon raised the stake over her heart, his pale, guilt-stricken eyes met mine. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered—not to Lilith, but to me.

He drove the stake down.

“No!” I was thrown off Lilith as Van slammed between Ebon and myself, knocking us both aside. The stake skittered across the floor; with a shout of triumph, Lilith tore the other spike out of her side and erupted
into silver mist. I looked up just in time to see her streak toward the window, curling out into the night air. In seconds, she was gone.

Ebon sprang to his feet, sheer murder in his face, but was met with an uppercut from Van that was powerful enough to send him staggering. The vampire hunter sprang for him, and I caught the glint of another stake in his hand. Desperately, I snatched at his leg. I managed to throw him off balance enough that he missed his swipe and planted the stake in Ebon’s side rather than his heart.

“Van!” I clung with grim determination to his boot as he tried to shake me off. “Cut it out!”

Ebon staggered back, ripping the stake out of his flesh. With a last wild, stricken glance at me, he whirled, his body coming apart into dense gray vapor. The stake clattered to the ground. He poured out the same way Lilith had gone, instantly vanishing into the dark.

Van stopped trying to kick me, but I was so pissed off that I sank my teeth into his leg anyway. I instantly regretted it, both for the disgusting taste and for the fact that he booted me hard in the head. I let him go and rolled to my feet. “You
idiot
,” I screamed at him, spitting blood. “You let her get away!”

“I
know
,” he snapped, not looking any happier than I felt. He limped over to the bed, where Sarah had collapsed unconscious again. She moaned and stirred groggily at his touch. “You have to come with me,” he told her. He picked up Brains’s jar and shoved it into a pocket. “They’ll be back, and the normal authorities can’t handle them. I’m here to protect you—I’ll get you to safety.”

“Backpack,” she mumbled. She looked shell-shocked, barely aware of what was going on. “Can’t go without my backpack....”

Van slung the indicated bag over his shoulder. “I’ve got it. Come on now, we’ve got to hurry.” He lifted her up, cradling her in his arms. “And you have to come too,” he added sourly, glaring in my direction.

“What sort of a vampire hunter are you?” I demanded as he shouldered the window open.

“A real one,” he said, clambering over the sill. Sarah let out a muffled protest as he clipped her head against the window frame. “One that doesn’t let any human get hurt.”

“She was a
vampire
!”

“Yes,” he said grimly. “Your sire. And you’re effectively her sire.” He jerked his chin down to indicate Sarah. “And she is human.”

“Yes! So what?” I yelled. “What does that matter?”

“It matters, because”—he took a deep breath—“when you kill a vampire, its descendants die too.” He looked me in the eye, his face set. “All of them.”

Y
our call cannot be connected at the moment.” The pleasant, automated voice echoed tinnily in the close confines of the van. “Please try again later.”

“I
am
trying again later,” I yelled at Ebon’s iPhone in frustration. “I’ve been trying for hours! Mum, Dad, where
are
you?”

The only response was a shrill, continuous beep as the call automatically ended. I jabbed at the screen with my feet until I managed to hit the right button to shut the phone up. I was lucky that Ebon had picked a handset that could be operated with only my toes.

Of course, I wasn’t
very
lucky, considering that my entire family was mysteriously missing and unreachable,
while I myself was bound, hand and foot, in the back of a van being driven God-knew-where by a guy who hated my very nature.

When we’d finally escaped the hospital last night, we’d found Dad’s car right where we’d left it, but my family had been nowhere in sight. There hadn’t been time to work out where they’d gone, not with the alarms going off in the hospital and more police cars arriving; Van had shoved Sarah into the passenger seat of his white van, thrown me in the back, and taken off with his foot flat on the floor. I’d tried calling Dad on Ebon’s iPhone, but only got the voice mail message. No one had answered at home either, nor on any of the family mobiles. I’d still been trying to reach someone, anyone, when the sun had come up and laid me out like a brick to the back of the head.

And I awakened to find myself wrapped in approximately two metric tons of silver-plated steel chains. I was going to
slaughter
Van when I finally got free.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said to Brains, who was sulking at the bottom of its jar. Van had wrapped silver chains around that too and hung it from a ring set in the wall of the van. “Can you give me a hand?”

Brains pointedly swished its fins, looking about as sardonic as a fish could.

“Why couldn’t Mum have done her experiment on a useful animal, like a monkey?” I swore as the van bounced over another pothole, and I lost my grip on the iPhone. It skittered across the floor and disappeared amid the piles of boxes on the other side. I strained against my chains, trying without success to stretch a leg out to reach it. Something about the silver stopped me from misting; it made my skin feel tight and tingly, a bit like licking a battery. There was no way I could wiggle out of them either. Van obviously knew how to restrain a vampire.

My eyes widened, and I would have face-palmed if I could. Van knew how to restrain an
ordinary
vampire. I braced my feet against the floor of the van, pulling against the chains with all my weight. Nothing. Closing my eyes, I tried to visualize superstrength flowing into my muscles, then flung myself forward again. Metal screeched in protest as the bolts securing the chains to the van started to pull free. I gathered myself for another attempt, blood pounding in my chest—

The van grumbled to a halt. I heard the front doors open, followed by booted footsteps tramping round to the back. I quickly slumped back to hide the weakened bolts and let my head loll down to my chest, pretending to be asleep.

The back door grated open. “Don’t bother, vampire,” Van growled as he climbed in. “I know what time someone as young as you arises.” Then, in a much gentler tone that definitely wasn’t aimed at me: “Are you
sure
you want to stay back here? I could get some pillows to make the front seat more comfortable—”

“No, I need to lie down.” Sarah’s voice sounded faint with exhaustion. “Please.”

“I’ll arrange things for you.” Van’s boot prodded me. I smelled leather and sweat as he leaned over me to check my bindings. “Hm. And find some more chains.”

“You are such a dead man.” Giving up my attempt at subterfuge, I opened my eyes. Sarah was sitting on the back of the van, her bare feet dangling. Her crumpled, blood-splattered pajamas swamped her waifish body. With her wide almond eyes and overall tragic air, she closely resembled Bambi after his mother was shot.

Poor kid. It was hard to believe that this frail little girl was the Superluminal of online fame, creator of awesomely clever vids featuring the hottest TV vampires. She looked more like she should still be playing with Barbies. Why couldn’t Superluminal have turned out to be a kickass action heroine with her own combat boots?

“Hi, Sarah,” I said, trying to sound as calm and in control as I could given that I was swamped under ten tons of metal. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay.” I offered her a friendly smile. She dropped her gaze, avoiding my eyes. Oops. Possibly I shouldn’t have shown her my teeth. Giving up on the futile attempt at reassurance, I turned my attention on Van. “Hey, listen, you’ve got to let me go. I can’t reach any of my family on the phone—they could be in trouble. I’ve got to get back there.”

“I’ve been driving half the night. We’re miles away.” Van was busy shifting aside some of the boxes that lined the sides of the van, strapping them into new positions. “Though I’m not about to tell you exactly where, given that Elder Hakon could be listening in.”

What with all Ebon’s lies, I’d almost forgotten about Lilith’s initial claim that Hakon was my great-grandsire. “So I really am descended from Hakon’s Bloodline? Are you sure?”

“Of course.” Van sounded personally insulted, as if I’d questioned his ability to read. “I could taste it.”

“Huh. So Lilith was telling the truth about that.” I was starting to wonder if
everything
Ebon had said was flat-out lies. “If she’s descended from Hakon, I guess that means she isn’t really an ancient, evil vampire-goddess
either. Don’t suppose you could taste who she really is, could you?”

Van shot me a look suggesting that now I was just being silly. “No. I just know she’s your sire and Hakon’s descendant.” His surly expression smoothed into a slight, introspective frown as he folded down a long, narrow shelf, revealing it to be a simple bed with vampirically neat sheets. “I’m sure she’s not in any of our databases,” he muttered down at the covers, sounding like he was talking mainly to himself. “Odd. We’re supposed to have records on Hakon’s entire current Bloodline.”

“Whoever she is, she’ll be able to find me no matter where I am,” I said. “You can’t outrun her forever. But if you release me—”

“I
am
a fully trained vampire hunter,” Van said icily. “I’m aware of the problem. But I’m not about to free you to go off and slaughter innocents.”

“I want to
rescue
innocents, you moron. I thought you were all about protecting humans.”

“I am.” Van threw me his habitual glare, but I could see the worry lurking around the edges of his bravado. “I’ll go back to look for your family myself, if they’ve been captured.”

Okay, I had to admit, Van had his good points, and
they weren’t just his torso and arms. Of course, his major bad point of treating me like an evil monster did kind of outweigh any positives. “Thanks. I do actually appreciate the offer. But I’m by far the better choice for any rescue mission.”

“Right. You, the bloodthirsty, undead killer.” Van’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Give me three good reasons.”

“I’m superstrong, can’t be killed, and there is no one on this planet who cares more about my family’s safety than I do,” I said promptly.

Van blinked.

“Look,” I said, taking advantage of his momentary loss for words. “When are you going to get it through your thick head that I’m just your average girl, only dead? An all-liquid diet and serious lack of tan don’t make me a psychopath. You think I
wanted
to be a blood-drinking freak?”

Van looked at me oddly, as if seeing me for the first time. “Like me,” he said so quietly I barely heard it. For a second I thought he might actually start behaving like a rational human being—but then his jaw set. “No. Vampires can’t be trusted. I have to keep you secure and get you to a safe location.” He glanced at Sarah. “Both of you.”

“There are places that are safe from vampires?” Sarah sounded dubious. Even her voice was a weak, fluttery thing, like a butterfly.

“Many, in fact.” Van’s mouth quirked, which was the nearest he ever seemed to get to a smile. He helped Sarah up. She had to lean heavily on him to go the few steps to the bed. “It’s not that difficult to keep vampires out, once you know their weaknesses. All you need to do is scatter a lot of objects around. You can always tell a hunter’s house by the army of garden gnome statues covering the lawn.” His expression turned glum again. “But in order to take you to a hunters’ safe house, I’ll have to call my uncle. My leader,” he added at Sarah’s puzzled look. He squared his shoulders and pulled his phone out of his pocket, looking about as enthusiastic as a kid contemplating a trip to the dentist. “Best get it over—” The phone buzzed in his hand. Van glanced down at the screen, and his eyebrows rose. “Well now. That changes things.” He pocketed the phone again, looking much happier. “That was my employer—I texted her earlier to explain the situation. She’s offered us a safe house and, as it happens, it’s very near here.”