Night of the Vampires (6 page)

“How kind, sir. But I've been on many a battlefield.”

“I'm sure you have,” Cole said.

“Where is your actress–Amazon warrior friend, Sheriff?” Megan asked sweetly. “Wouldn't she have better directed us on this mission?”

“Miss Annalise is a superb actress and songstress, in the city to warm the hearts of the injured and those working on the home front, and even those just waiting, raising their children,” Cole said pleasantly. “She is otherwise occupied by her very important work.”

Megan tried to restrain from an unladylike snort. She did manage to suppress the sound to a barely audible sniff.

She didn't like Lisette Annalise. She was sure that the woman would happily propel enough bombs to obliterate the entire South, heedless that it would kill countless innocents and take out half the Northern troops, all in her determination to exterminate her enemies. Did Cole realize that? she wondered. It hadn't taken any great intellectual mind to realize that the woman was a Northern spy, working with the Pinkertons. Though Cody had not told her so directly during Cole's absence, he hadn't denied her query about the woman, either.

A soldier suddenly barred their way. “What business have you here?” the man demanded. “If you're seeking the body of your kin, you've passed the tent where the latest casualties lie.”

“I'm here under a matter of government concern,” Cody said, and Cole produced their letter of authority.

The soldier nodded, looking a little white. “Dr. Mansfield examined the bodies earlier. I shall conduct you
and remain with you throughout your own examination, sir.”

Megan knew that her part in the charade was at hand.

“Oh!” she whispered suddenly.

Making sure that she was far enough from the men, she brought the back of her hand to her eyes and pretended to waver.

“Miss!” the soldier cried, rushing forward to catch her before she could fall.

“Oh, thank you!” she cried, circling her arms around him. “I don't know what's come over me! I've nursed men on the fields…. I just need…perhaps a bit of water.”

“My poor dear sister!” Cody said, starting forward.

Cole caught him by the shoulder. “Dr. Fox, we've been asked to make a report as soon as possible on the condition of the poor family!”

“Indeed,” Cody said, distressed.

“I have the young lady,” the soldier said, now staring at Megan with something like puppy love in his eyes. “Be brief, please. I am ordered to watch over the corpses—God knows why. They are certainly not going to rise and fight the Union. And who would seek to steal a corpse—and besides there are thousands on the battlefields. There are sons in the family, but they are in the field. Oh, just hurry, sir, and do what examining it is that is necessary. I will see to the young lady. My officer's tent is just there….” He pointed.

“Oh!” Megan said again, clinging to him.

“Dear girl! Dear girl!” he said. And barely aware of the others, he helped her as she leaned hard against him, and they walked to the officer's tent. She glanced
back over her shoulder just once, smiling at the trio of men. She noticed Cole looking back at her, appearing amused.

 

T
HE OBVIOUS FACTOR
regarding the corpses was their color.

Or lack thereof.

“White” was the term used, and yet they weren't really white at all. They appeared to be a pale, opaque shade of yellow-pearl, and they seemed hollow, as if they had never been human at all.

Cole noted immediately that in addition to the massive trauma apparent on their necks, their throats had been neatly slit as well, though long after the blood had been drained. The perpetrators had been savage, making no tiny pinprick point in the throats of their victims, but tearing at them like rabid dogs. Young vampires, yes. And maybe an older one, hastily trying to cover their tracks.

Cody looked at the victims, laid out on the ground, covered in poor, unbleached cotton sheets, bearing the muddy look of the ground where they lay.

Cots would have been saved for the living.

Joshua Brandt had been a man of perhaps fifty or sixty years; even in death, he had a furrowed brow. His wife was thin, probably pale in life as well, her face portraying the wrinkled countenance of a life that had been long lived. Brandt's mother was long, excruciatingly thin, and probably soon for death even without the vampire's kiss. The servant girl was young and had been pretty; her hands were callused. There had been a male servant as well, an older man, bearing signs of stooped shoulders
from a long life of labor. The bodies had only received cursory inspections and thus remained fully clothed.

“The heads, or stakes?” Cole asked Cody with sadness in his voice.

“Stakes, beneath the shirts and bodices,” Cody said.

Cole hunkered down and reached into his coat for a long, narrow, honed stake and his mallet. He paused before looking down then discovered that he was poised above the body of the young servant girl. She looked peaceful, young and lovely.

To his surprise, her eyes opened. She looked at him and smiled, and he paused again. Then he saw that something in her eyes was registering cunning and evil intent.

He hammered the stake into her heart just as her lips drew back and saliva dripped off her fangs. He sat back, trembling slightly. She had changed quickly. And in daylight.

Cody had already dispatched Joshua Brandt and his mother; Brendan had made a quick, clean disposal of Mrs. Brandt. They both looked at him without words.

We all know that you never hesitate,
their silent glances seemed to say.

And, yes, he knew. But he also knew that in Victory, Texas, they had let some of the
changed
retain their strange new existences. But they
knew
those they had allowed this for. It might have been possible that someone as young as this girl would awaken and search for a way to appease her hunger without attacking humans, but that would have been an amazing rarity.

He nodded, and though he felt tremendous pain again, he pulled down on the worn shirt of the older male ser
vant and made quick work with his stake and mallet. A slight shudder seemed to escape the man.

There was no blood.

Cole pulled the man's shirt back into position.

They had completed their task.

The three of them rose, carefully seeing that the dead were covered again in their poor shrouds, and left them in peace. They headed for the helpful officer's tent. Orderlies, nurses, doctors and civilians who had come to see what comfort and aid they could possibly give patients were hurrying about in different directions bearing water, medical bags, alcohol, bandages and surgical instruments. As they walked, despite the stream of humanity, Cole heard someone crying out pathetically for help. He found himself pausing despite himself and the mission that still lay before them.

“Go on,” Cody said. “We'll get Megan.”

He followed the sound of the cries. They were coming from a tent that must have held at least thirty cots. There were four nurses or attendants, but they were all moving as quickly as possible. Men lay about in bloody bandages. Some had stumps for legs. Some were covered with sheets that quickly soaked blood from wounds that refused to completely mend.

He heard the cry again and passed by a wounded soldier who did nothing but stare blankly ahead. And then he found the victim crying so pitiably.

He looked about for a makeshift camp table and found a pitcher of water and a glass, poured some from the first to the latter and came down on one knee by the soldier's cot. He noted the man was still in uniform, a strange one at that.

“Where are you wounded, sir?” Cole asked, moving to lift the man's head.

The fellow's eyes took on a strange light. He smiled suddenly.

And opened his mouth.

Cole had never moved so quickly in his life, reaching into his coat, finding a stake. He couldn't bother with the mallet but had to depend upon his own strength and positioning between the ribs.

He laid himself hard against the man, trying to hide his deed with the mass of his shoulders and back.

The man's jaw locked in an open position. The eyes glazed slowly. The fangs retracted even more so.

Almost shaking, Cole withdrew slowly, secreting the stake back into the inner pockets of his coat. He realized he was still gripping the water in his free hand.

“Sir! What is happening there?” An orderly or doctor, standing behind him now, demanded.

He drew back, shaking his head. “I'm afraid I came too late, Doctor. This man is gone.”

Cole stood, rising to his full height, meeting the doctor's gaze. For a moment, he was afraid the man might to challenge him.

But the doctor just shook his head. “Cover the poor boy then. God knows, we can't save them all, try as we will.”

The doctor was too busy to tarry long. Cole hurried from the tent, scouring the faces and bodies of the others in the tent ward as he did so.

The
“
plague” here was bad.

Very bad.

No one else was crying out in the same way, though, and Cole moved on.

He should have known. He should have known from the sound of the cry that it had been a moan of an unnatural hunger.

He'd heard the cry often enough before.

And he had fallen for the plea of the hungry, thirsty, desperate new vampire despite all that he knew.

They needed to be doubly wary now.

He found Cody, Brendan and Megan still with the officer who had been charged to deal with the current, imminent danger.

He found himself looking at Megan, who was politely thanking the officer and apologizing for the time she had taken. The man was smitten, of course. The officer was young, and the war had probably taken him far from those he loved. Having a pretty young woman like Megan needing his attention was probably something he would remember and dream about in the long days and nights to come.

Poor boy. He didn't know.

Megan turned to look at Cole as he arrived among them. He felt a slight trembling in his length, a heat, a tension in his body.

She was a stunning woman with her perfect face and mesmerizing golden eyes. And she, perhaps more so than even Lisette Annalise, was quite an amazing actress.

That, he told himself, was something he was going to have to remember at all times. Especially now that she seemed to be doing such a superb job of joining in with them.

Especially now that it seemed Cody had accepted her, and even Brendan seemed to be falling for the beauty and sweetness of her spirit and…

Facade.

M
EGAN STOOD IN
the middle of the cemetery, feeling the faint stirring of the breeze and looking around, wondering where to begin. The cemetery was relatively new. And yet, it was new at a time when the death toll was staggering. Across the country—or both countries—women waited at railroad stations for the post to come in, to read the lists of newly fallen, and pray that their beloved husbands, sons and brothers were not on those lists.

Many injured returned home. And died.

Disease was rampant.

Prospect Hill had been created when the law had stated that new burials must take place beyond city boundaries for such reasons. Technically, it was owned by the Men's Evangelical Society of Concordia Church; it had been consecrated in 1858, and it officially opened the following year. It wasn't a soldier's cemetery, but since Washington had been the staging ground for the First Battle of Bull Run, as the Union called it, the First Manassas, as the Confederates called it, many local sons had died very early on.

Now graves were dug in expectation, but those who had been destined to reside within them might never do so. Exigencies meant that far too many men had to be buried where they fell. Some remains would be retrieved
at later dates; some would remain where they had fallen forever.

She was alone with Cole on the mission; the day was not long enough for their small party to cover the many places that came to mind after they had attended to the victims who had been murdered during the night. It had been Cole himself who finally realized that they needed to split up, and since it seemed most prudent that she and Cody be split—since they could easily endure the bite of a vampire and return to tell any tale—he had either begun to trust her, or he'd still rather risk himself than Brendan Vincent.

“Where do we begin,” Cole murmured at her side, looking out across the vast and lonely expanse of the grounds.

“I think we need to wait a moment. There are several families here—look, just behind that little hill. There are people at that grave.”

He nodded. “It's very new. No marker as yet.” She was startled when he suddenly took her arm. “Let's stroll. We'll appear to be seeking the grave of a father or brother.”

She nodded, surprised to feel a sensation of quickening within her, and aware of the warmth in his form, the strength of his hold.

“So,” he said. “Not long ago, I wouldn't have believed that I could ask such a thing, but…did you always know that you were a vampire?”

He asked the question lightly, as if it were casual conversation.

“To tell you the truth, I'm not sure exactly what we are, Cody and I,” she replied. “I can be injured, and I do age. I heal overnight when I am injured, that's true. And
I have survived when I should have died. But I have a heart that beats, I breathe.”

He paused, looking down at her, and she was surprised that he almost seemed to be smiling. “That's—wonderful. But it's not the answer to my question.”

She shrugged. “Well, I don't remember my infancy. I remember that I was always extremely fond of a rare steak, and that my mother always had me drink a strange concoction. I suppose the day she actually talked to me was when I was very young and had been punished at school.”

“For what?”

“Samuel Reeves.”

“You were punished because…”

“Samuel was a bully. He was always teasing my friend Sally, who limped. She'd been born with one leg a bit shorter than the other. Samuel teased her horribly. And he was cruel to her. He'd walk by and make her drop her books. He'd trip her.”

“Ah. Not at all a gentleman,” Cole noted.

“One day he sat behind her. He didn't just dip her hair in an inkwell—he managed to jump up and dump the entire thing all over her. He pretended it was all a massive mistake and he didn't even get in trouble. So, when we were out playing and he started calling her Blue Face, I charged him. He and I started to fight and there were kids all around us, cheering for one or the other of us. He started to take a real swing at me and I ducked and then…”

“And then?”

“I bit him.”

“And what happened? Children do bite when they're tussling on the school grounds.”

She shook her head, looking straight before her, and then meeting his eyes again.

“I liked it. I liked the flow of his blood into my mouth, and I didn't want to let him go. Our teacher had to get help to drag me off him, and when my mother came for me…she was horrified and upset, and she sat me down that afternoon and told me about my father, but she said that he was a good man, and that…I had to use my powers for good, as well.”

“You believe that your father is a good man—still?”

“You don't—do you? Nor does Cody. But I believe it with all my heart.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother was a good woman, and she wouldn't have lied to me.”

Cole lifted her chin, and his touch was gentle. He stood there, studying her eyes.

“You believe in Cody, don't you? I believed in him before I met him. When I read the articles in the papers about the outlaws in the West—I knew that Cody was the son my mother had told my father about.”

Cole laughed. “The name Cody Fox didn't tell you that?”

“Fox is a common enough name,” she said.

Cole still seemed to be wearing a dry half smile. “What happened to Samuel Reeves?” he asked.

“Nothing. He stayed home from school for a few days—sick. I was punished for the rest of the year—I wasn't allowed to play with the other children. But, Samuel never teased my friend Sally again. Ever.”

“And did you bite anyone else? Ever?”

“Only when I've had to—and only in self-defense, and only vampires.”

“They're leaving,” Cole said, pointing ahead. Visitors who had been praying at graves were heading for the gates.

“We'll have to split up and start walking fast,” Megan said. The ever-so-slightly-civil-almost-tender moment they had shared was gone. He had become all business. She could certainly do the same. “Look for disturbed earth.”

“I know what I'm doing. You head easterly, and I'll go west. Try to keep visual contact with me.”

“Of course. I won't let you get hurt,” she promised sweetly.

“You're Cody's sister. I'll look after
you,
” he responded over his shoulder.

“As you like, cowboy,” she said lightly, aware that her teasing response was patronizing but unable to help herself from making the statement. She didn't want anyone getting hurt looking after her; she was what she was.

She was alarmed to realize that the day was quickly waning. And it was disheartening to know that they had fought so hard the day before—and that at least one of the creatures had escaped.

She could see Cole at a distance, long strides taking him swiftly across the cemetery. She saw when he paused and reached into his coat for one of his slender honed stakes, then switched it backward to dig in the ground.

She waited to see if he had made a discovery.

He had.

She watched as he swiftly found the mallet in his inner coat pocket, and slammed the stake downward, honed side first. He drew out his bowie knife and she turned her head.

It seemed that he was quite competent at what he did.
He was seeing to it that for certain the creature would not come back. If diseased men had died, they were vampires, or would be soon, and they couldn't be given a chance to rise again.

There was a group of trees ahead of her and she continued walking toward them. As she neared the little copse, she felt her muscles suddenly stiffen, and it seemed that the breeze blew chill against her flesh.

She saw a shadow, something, like a wisp of movement through the trees, almost a trick of the eyes.

The sun had not yet fallen, though it was sinking low in the western sky. A sense of great unease filled her. She was suddenly certain that they hadn't taken down even the majority of the vampires in the prison; in fact, she wondered if the prison had been nothing more than a prelude to a huge infection about to overrun the entire capital city.

Then she wondered if something hadn't been acting on her to lure her into the trees….

She held her ground, dead still and waiting.

Shadows moved again.

She refused to be trapped. She wanted the creatures out in the open.

And so she stood. Dead still.

And waited.

And finally noticed the first of the shadows coming for her.

Young vampire. It approached as a shadow, slowly, but quickly turned. Her stomach became a knot. It was a young Rebel soldier. His uniform. His face. He barely had a beard. But he came at her, and she had no choice. She ducked and turned, grabbing him by the shoulders, and hitting his jugular—as he tried to do the same to her.

She had barely ripped at his throat before the next shadow fell upon her. She reached into her skirt pocket, then stabbed a stake into his heart. Before that one had even fallen, another was after her, this one in the uniform of a Union prison guard. She ripped the stake from the one body to strike into the heart of the other—

And saw more shadows and figures, bloody and gaunt, dressed well and in tatters, coming from the woods.

At least ten of them.

A chill at the back of her neck and she knew something was behind her. She spun to tend to the attack. Speed was everything; she had to be prepared to defend herself from those coming at her from the woods. She wanted to call for Cole, but with their speed and her breath seizing in rhythm with her movements, it was too much all at once.

The
thing
behind her was little but flesh and bone. He went down quickly, having used whatever fledgling strength it had to become shadow and slip behind her. She faced the trees again, with trepidation. There were so many of them. They had never imagined so many.

In a fleeting second, she saw that something more was in the copse of trees. A greater shadow, a darker shadow. Fear set a cold grip around her heart, and yet, even as she felt the terror, she realized that the shadow-thing, only noticeable because it was even darker than the rest of the blackening night sky—it was actually battling the creatures within the trees, preventing them from spilling out to assail her.

“Megan!”

She heard Cole's cry as she met the Union sergeant running toward her.

Cole ran past her and into the fray precisely prepared.
He held a stake in one hand, and a bottle of holy water in the other. When two of the beings fell upon her at once, she'd have to admit that only because one of them was stunned by the holy water did she survive. She struck out with her stake, and then struck again. Cole was moving expertly at her side. Despite the massive ebony wing of the giant shadow-thing in the trees, at least six more of the beings escaped the copse of trees and came at them.

But she wasn't fighting alone anymore.

One by one, they went down.

She was fighting with Cole. And the black shadow had saved them from the full force of the mismatched
army
in the woods.

Suddenly, there was nothing.

She and Cole had set their backs to each other, and together, they had fended off every assault; they had actually been an awesome force.

They remained still, tense and waiting. She could hear the thunder of his heart, and the heave of his breath as they waited.

That, and nothing more.

When she looked to the trees, there was nothing.

“It's over,” she whispered softly.

Around them lay a field of rotting dead. Blue uniforms, gray, butternut. They wore insignias that denoted them as militia, captains, privates, Army of the Potomac. The Southern boys were mostly in rags.

“Wait, keep an eye on the trees,” Cole warned.

“No. There is nothing more there.”

“How do you know that?”

She turned to look at him at last. “Because we weren't
alone, Cole. Someone was in among the creatures there, someone who helped us.”

He shook his head. His words sounded harsh. “No, Megan. Why do you think that Brendan Vincent went to find your brother in the first place? A staunch Federalist seeking the help of a Rebel doctor? You and Cody are anomalies. A vampire is a predator. A disease. A mass of infection. A parasite that must thieve blood to survive.”

“You're wrong. Some can be…nearly human,” she said.

Cole paused, and she knew that she had struck a chord with him. She didn't know what had really gone on in Victory, Texas, but she was pretty sure that Cole had seen infected people become
decent
vampires. He had to know it could happen.

“This thing could just have been some kind of a trick, or even a trick of your eyes,” he told her. “What exactly did you see?”

She wanted to explain, but when she opened her mouth, all she could think of to describe what she had seen was, “A shadow.”

“A shadow?”

She nodded.

“Megan, they come as shadows, they can move like the wind. You know that. You've done it, I'm sure.” She was surprised when he touched her arm, gently. “This is our battle,” he said. “It would be nice to think that others were helping, but it's doubtful. And we've got to get moving here—we have a bit of a problem.”

She looked around at the fallen. The corpses were far too new to have dissolved to ash.

“Good point. How do we explain all these dead?”

“And how long do we dare stay here without…without
reinforcements?” he asked. “The sun is falling. We have to make sure that we've completely dispatched all these men, and then we have to get out of here. I'll find Lisette and have her see that the burial detail that cleaned up at the prison gets here, too. We've got to get back to Cody and Brendan and find out what they discovered today. Hopefully we got a fair number of the loose vampires here.”