Fearless (The Blue Fire Saga) (26 page)

A mall
security guard arrived. He yank
ed his gun from his holster, but seemed unsure what to do. Leesa was pretty sure his training had never covered anything like this.

“You have to shoot them in the head,” she told him, in case his taste in movies had never led him to watch a zombie flick.

“What?” he asked, his face a mask of confusion and fear.

“Shoot ‘
em
in the
head. It’s the only way to stop
them. They’re zombies.”

The guard shook his shoulders and head, as if
trying to throw
off his fear. He raised his pistol and fired
into the clump of zombies. His
bullet struck one of them in
the back. The creature stumbled
momentarily, but was otherwise unharmed.

“In the head,” Leesa repeated.

The guard raised his aim,
holding his wrist with his left
hand to try to steady his shaking gun hand. It didn’t look like it was working, though. Outside, sirens began to wail as police cruisers screeched to a halt just beyond the doors. Red and blue lights flashed through the glass as uniformed officers rushed from the cars. Leesa hoped they would have more luck than the poor mall cop.

Leesa awoke before she could see how the vision ended. Darkness still shrouded her room, so she knew she couldn’t have slept for more than few hours, if that. It seemed as if she had closed her eyes only minutes ago, but she felt refreshed and alert, so she knew it had to have been longer than that.

As she replayed the dream in her head, a feeling of disappointment stole over her. She had been
trying to call forth a dream about Dominic, but all she had gotten was more zombies. Why did she keep dreaming about zombies? She had wizard magic in her, and a taint of
grafhym
blood as well. She wondered if perhaps she might have a bit of zombie energy somewhere inside her, too. She quickly shook the thought away.
That
was taking this whole supernatural thing a bit too far, even with all the other stuff that had been going on.

One positive thing about the dream was its clarity. Unlike some of her other dreams, she had seen the whole thing clearly and could recall every detail. She allowed herself a small smile. Even though she had failed to summon the vision she wanted, she was pretty sure this signaled improving control over her dreams.

She
thought back t
o the beginning of her dream. She had been standing in the parking lot, watching groups of shoppers head to the mall. Some of the men wore Ohio State sweatshirts, which meant this mall was probably located in Ohio. Something about that nagged at her. It took a moment, but then she had it. Ohio State was in Columbus! Dominic had called her from that city. This time, her smile was wider. Her vision had been closer to the one she had sought than she
’
d realized. It still wasn’t the one she wanted, but she couldn’t expect to succeed completely on her first try—especially since the dream power was so difficult to control even for skilled wizards.

She remembered her book saying that some dreams portrayed a possible future, while others showed things that had already happened. This dream had obviously been one of the former, because if zombies had attacked a mall in Ohio, it would have been all over the news and the internet. Leesa wondered what, if anything, she should do with her vision. She couldn’t just call every mall in Columbus and tell them to be
on the watch for zombies—the cops would
track her down and lock her
in the nuthouse. 

She wondered if the dream had anything more to do with Dominic than simply taking place in the last place she had heard from him. Was he going to be there? Would he try to stop it?
If such an attack did occur, t
here was little doubt the black waziri
would be behind it
. Dominic would know that, of course. She doubted he would use his magic again, not with his enemies so close on his trail.

So why had this particular vision come to her
, then
? She wished the dream had gone on longer. In any case, she had no way to contact Dominic, to warn him about something that
might
be about to happen, on some indefinite winter weekend.

More and more, she was beginning to understand what a tricky business this dream stuff was. In the end, she realized there was probably nothing
she could or should do about what she had seen
. She would have to view it for what it was—her first practice exercise at learning to use a very complex and difficult part of her magic.

Closing her eyes, she went back to sleep.

1
9
.
FIRST HUNT

F
orty some miles to the south and east of where Leesa
finally closed her
book of magic, K
risti
Brolen
could not believe
how different everything had suddenly become
.
Just a little while ago, she had been lying on her back, for who knows how long, unable to move anything more than her
eyes and
eyelids. All she could see were branches and the sky directly above her. The only thing she could remember hearing during all that time was the silver-haired woman’s voice. And her sense of smell had been even more useless.

Now here she was, racing through the trees at impossible speeds with seemingly no effort at all.
She ran half a step behind Marcio, with Dara and Genevieve following behind.
Her senses, so limited for so long,
had
heightened to a degree that was unimaginable. She k
new it was night
—she had never seen so many stars in the sky—but she could see details that previously would have been invisible to her on even the brightest
of
days. Her hearing had
also
become
unbelievably
acute, allowing her to hear every tiny animal crawling through the night for hundreds of feet in every direction, no matter how stealthily they tried
to
move. She heard insects flying and branches creaking. She thought that if there had been blossoms
blooming,
she w
ould have been able to hear them
, too.

Her sense of smell may
have been the most acute of all. Every tree
gave off a scent that was slightly different from its neighbors. She smelled rotting leaves and dirt—she had never know
n
there were so many different kinds of soil—in
a way she had never done before.
Even more
amazingly, she could smell every living creature for what seemed like miles. Wh
ile they all smelled different
, the overrid
ing scent was the same for each
of them, whether it
be
a mouse, a bird,
or a deer
.
Somehow,
she knew without being told
why that
was—she
was smelling
th
eir blood!
More than anything else, the blood called out to her.

Most wondrous of all, this barrage of incoming stimuli was not overwhelming in the least. Her brain easily organized and prioritized every single piece of information, making it available to her if she wanted it or storing it away if she did not.
The closest she could come to putting all the changes into words was that it was like a person who was blind since birth suddenly being able to see—but what had happened to her was much more amazing than even that.

Marcio reached over and grabbed her forearm, pulling her to a halt. His touch was cold and delicious.
Dara and Genevieve stopped as well.

“There are humans ahead,”
Marcio
said.

Kristi raised her face and breathed in deeply through her nose. The scent was
sweet and
tantalizing—
almost intoxicating. It seemed to reach down into the very core of her being, pulling at her. She could identify the individual scents of at least a dozen people, some closer than others, but all within a few hundred yards.

“My god,” she said. “Is it always like this?
”

“Not quite,” Marcio said.
“
Your thirst is magni
fied because this is your first
hunt, and your body needs the blood
to finalize your transformation.” He smiled. “But the scent of human blood is always inviting
. It’s too bad we must
control our thirst. It was not always thus.”

“Those were the good days,” Dara said. “Back when humans were not so numerous and their we
apons
not so dangerous.”

“And their communication so much less efficient,” Genevieve added.

“None of that matte
rs tonight, though,” Marcio told Kristi
. “You must feed, so feed you shall
.”

“And if we can do so without giving away our presence, we will feed as well,” Dara added with a smile.

They glided
silently forward until they reached the edge of a county park bordering a small lake. The parking area beside the lake was we
ll lit. An asphalt walkway skirting
the edge of the water was also lighted, but
much less brightly. A few people
—mostly young couples—strolled
along the path, but most remained in their cars. By
the fogged up windows, Kristi knew what at least some of them were busy doing.

The vampires edged
away from the parking area
and
headed
out
fa
rther along the walkway. When they w
ere far enough from the
lot, they moved closer to the path, stopping just outside the reach of the widely spaced lights. They were less than twenty feet from the walk now, a distance they could cover in little more than the blink of an eye.

Hidden in the blackness, each one pressed against a dark tree trunk, they watched a pair of college-aged kids stroll closer, hand in hand.
There were no other people within view. Snatching these two into the darkness would be child’s play.
Kristi could smell their sweet, hot blood. She licked her lips.