No Man's Land (7 page)

“I’m leaving soon. I just need to heal up a bit and I’ll be out of here,” she said, hurriedly backing up a safe distance from the truck.

He looked at her, a flash of sympathy in his eyes as he took in her bruised and battered face.

“That
soon
better be by nightfall, cause that’s when I’m telling the Alpha you’re here. Got it? And if so much as one human shows up with something bigger than a mosquito bite on em, I’m comin after you myself. Got it? ”

Yes, she “got it”. Kelly nodded and hastily headed back down the road toward Briar Lane. Things were going from bad to worse. All she needed now was a demon waiting at her trailer door and she’d know she was truly cursed.

7

I
t wasn’t a demon, but Jaq sitting on the step outside her trailer. The tall woman had a shotgun with her, held like it was permanently attached to her arm. She stood and followed Kelly into the trailer without saying a word. Inside, there was a large roll of what looked like sausage on the table and a bottle of blackberry wine.

“I brought you more food,” the woman said, still holding the shotgun. Kelly wondered what on earth she planned to shoot. Hopefully not her. In her current state, it would probably take her weeks to recover from a gunshot wound. “That’s some deer bologna from this fall.” Jaq indicated the sausage–like roll. “I also put some venison and beef in the fridge. It’s fresh, not the frozen stuff. I thought maybe it would help you heal quicker to have fresh.”

“Thanks.” Kelly looked intently at the woman, wishing she could read her mind. Jaq had been an odd combination of wary and kind from the moment she’d met her. Why was she being so generous? Was the endless supply of food to keep Kelly from attacking the neighbors, or something more altruistic?

Jaq shifted her weight, her expression closed as she held the shotgun against her thigh. “Do you like liver? I gave you some liver, and a heart. A lot of people don’t like that stuff nowadays, but I thought maybe you might. Everyone thinks I’m weird for eating it, but it reminds me of when I was a kid.”

Kelly stared. That was oddly personal, given their mutual state of distrust. Should she make some small confession from her childhood in return?

“Ran into a werewolf at that bar down the road — Dale’s. I take it this is their territory?” So much for offering a personal revelation. Oh well, she’d never been one for polite chit–chat or dancing around the issue, especially now that she felt the edge of starvation gnawing at her.

The blond woman sucked in a sharp breath. “Yes.” Her tone was resigned. “Our pack holds the entire state. I’m surprised he didn’t kill you.”

Kelly couldn’t help a sniff of contempt. A vampire killed by a werewolf. That would be the day. Although she was in no condition to take on a werewolf in a truck.
Or a woman holding a shotgun
, she thought, eyeing the weapon.

“He said he was going to tell the Alpha and that I should be gone by nightfall if I wanted to remain among the living.”

Now it was the other woman’s turn to sniff, her gray eyes turning to steel. “Not if I have anything to do with it,” she snarled. “How long do you need to heal–up? How long before you can go?”

“I don’t know.” Kelly stared at the woman, bemused. She’d said
their
pack. But Jaq didn’t smell at all like a werewolf. Could humans possibly be honorary members? Even so, she couldn’t imagine how this human was planning on defending her, a vampire, against a pack of werewolves — even with a shotgun.

Jaq sighed, rubbing a hand along her cheek and across the back of her neck, as if soothing a tense muscle. “Great. How about a ballpark? Days? A week? Never?”

Never. The thought chilled Kelly and she felt the empty fang sockets with a tentative tongue. Never might be about right.

“A month?” That might give her enough time to prove of service to her family and actually have somewhere to go. Of course, she’d need to live long enough to do that. An unlikely prospect with werewolves and this annoying woman breathing down her neck and keeping her from the human blood she so desperately need.

“That will be difficult.” Jaq’s expression turned grim, and she seemed to be thinking unpleasant thoughts. Hopefully they didn’t involve Kelly’s demise.

“If you’d let me take a human, it might be a lot sooner.” It was a lie. Kelly had no way of knowing when or if her family would ever allow her back across the border, but at least she’d be healed and strong enough to make a break for it. Maybe even strong enough to fight off a few of these werewolves.

“That’s not going to happen. You go killing a human and I won’t be able to stop them from ripping you limb from limb.”

Kelly felt a surge of irritation. She rarely killed humans anymore, although without her fangs and given her current state of hunger, she wasn’t making any promises. “I’m a vampire. I can certainly defend myself if I need to.”

Jaq snorted. “Right. You’re injured, and from your smell, you’re not very old. Plus there are thousands of us in the pack. We own this state, and we know every stone and tree root. Unless you’ve got an army of your own, you better swallow your pride and just accept the fact that you need to lay low and keep away from the humans until you can go back to your own kind.”

She didn’t have an army, and in spite of her bravado, Kelly was well aware she was in no condition to fight anything. Heck, she hadn’t even managed to catch a squirrel.

“Were you following me? Was it you in the bushes?”

Jaq’s eyes widened, and she laughed. “That was my brother, Mike. I asked him to keep an eye on you. Sheesh, I can’t believe you heard him. He must really be off his game.”

“And Mike is a werewolf?”

Jaq nodded. “A noisy one, evidently. I’ll have someone more quiet follow you next time.”

Great. She’d never be able to grab a human with the werewolf babysitters following her every move. She needed to get out of here, but how? She was trapped, and the walls seemed to be closing in faster every moment.

Silence stretched out between them, and, finally, Jaq shifted her gun upward and turned to leave. There was something in her eyes that bothered Kelly — frustration, and an odd disappointment. This woman had been kind, had done more for Kelly than most had. She deserved something in return, some expression of gratitude.

“I love liver,” Kelly blurted out, needing to clear the air before the other woman left. “Thank you.”

Jaq halted, turning her head to see Kelly over her shoulder. “You’re welcome.”

The woman hesitated, and Kelly found herself scrambling for words to make her stay. The sun wouldn’t set for hours, and although she should be sleeping, the vampire found herself slightly panicked at the thought of being alone. This weird–smelling human, or whatever Jaq was, was better than no one at all.

“Wait. I’m …uh …maybe you’d like to share some of this with me? Wine and liver, I mean. And stay for a bit? If you don’t have anything else to do. I mean, I’m sure you’re busy, so maybe some other time.”

Crap. She sounded like an idiot. Why was it so hard to talk to this woman? It had never been difficult before, but then she hadn’t really needed anyone before. Just delegate work, bark out some quick orders if they were one of her vampire staff, or bite first and ask permission later if they were a human. And here she was, alone, surrounded by these weird smelling
others
, asking one to hang out and have a drink with her. Good Lord, what
was
the world coming to?

All the tension seemed to fall from the tall, lanky woman as she turned to face Kelly and smiled. It transformed her thin face, turning her from serious to playful in an instant.

“I’ll pour the wine.”

Kelly went to get the liver from the fridge, her hands shaking slightly. She was so weak she was beginning to feel light headed. She’d expected to find the meat carefully packaged in the sealed plastic the butcher shops used, but instead they were in heavy–duty zip–lock bags. Pulling out the bag with the liver, she examined it in surprise. Usually meat packages only held the residual blood from the raw meat, but this liver was literally swimming in about a pint of blood. The heart was too. It was as if Jaq had added a large quantity of blood to the meat.

“Do you want some of this too?” She asked, pouring the blood into a large glass. It came right to the rim.

Jaq pulled two more glasses from the cabinet for the wine. “Nah. You drink it. I wasn’t sure you vampires ate solid food at all when I first found you.”

Kelly took a huge swig of the blood and hid a grimace. Cold cow blood. Ugh. At least it was reasonably fresh, though. “We do. It just doesn’t metabolize if we don’t have blood.” Everything would eventually shut down. Her body was probably already beginning to devour itself, and this cow blood would only delay the inevitable.

The other woman nodded, seemingly unbothered by Kelly’s beverage. “I don’t really know that much about you all. Hard to tell what’s myth and what’s real.”

Kelly watched Jaq pour the wine and dug a fry pan out of the bottom of the stove. She was tired of eating raw meat, and she assumed the other woman would want it cooked. It had been over a century since she’d actually prepared her own meal, but frying up a piece of liver couldn’t be all that hard.

“There’s a grain of truth in most of the myths. Don’t bother with the garlic, though. That’s complete bullshit.”

Jaq shot her a quick grin. “Werewolves don’t need the full moon to change form.”

“And I still wear my cross pendant,” Kelly continued. Well, she would have still worn it if it hadn’t been silver. The very thought made her cringe.

“Silver bullets,” the tall woman added as if she had read Kelly’s mind. “Those things burn like the fires of Hades. Grabbed a candlestick once when I was a kid and nearly wound up in the hospital. Hives everywhere, blisters all over my hands. Took me forever to heal. Me! It was bizarre.”

It was how the other woman smelled that was most bizarre. “Are you really a werewolf too, then? You don’t smell anything like the other guy — the one down at the bar.”

Jaq turned to jam the cork back into the wine bottle. “Yes, I’m a werewolf. We don’t all smell the same.”

Kelly got the odd feeling the woman was lying, although she had no experience with werewolves. Perhaps they did all smell different.

“So what happened that you got turned into a vampire?” the werewolf continued. “Accosted in a dark alley one night?”

More stereotypes. “Humans accosted in a dark alley find themselves dead, not turned. I chose this. We’re Candidates for a while and if everything works out, we get turned.”

“Can you guys change your minds?”

Yes. And wind up dead. Same with those who didn’t “work out”. It was another thing the vampires never told anyone, not even in the fine print.

“Of course. Once you’re Chosen, though, once you get the venom, it’s irreversible.”

Jaq took a big gulp of her wine. “How bad is it? The transformation, I mean?”

Kelly grimaced, glancing over at Jaq as she gave the frying pan a quick swipe with a towel and put it onto the stovetop. “Bad. It’s like having the flu with non–stop charley horses throughout your body. That’s the first couple of decades. You beg them to kill you, even try to take yourself out. It gets better about fifty years in, although the genetic change isn’t totally complete for a few thousand years.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the werewolf shift nervously. Kelly took a deep breath and dug through the fridge for butter, trying to appear nonchalant about the whole experience. It still shook her — so recent and raw in her memories. Another thing they didn’t disclose. The pain had gone on forever, more terrible then even her worst imaginings of hell.

“Why did you do it?”

Kelly turned around, still kneeling in front of the fridge. “Huh?”

Jaq’s gray eyes held a mix of sympathy and morbid fascination. “Why would you choose to become a vampire? What was appealing about …this?”

The question should have been insulting, but Kelly felt no anger. The glaring fluorescent light from the refrigerator warred in her vision with the soft golden sunlight streaming through the window. Why had she? Kelly couldn’t really put it into words.

Human life had always been a struggle, and her future had been …bleak. She had grown into a woman cleaning pots and chopping vegetables — the same thing she’d been doing her whole life. The only difference was the men who cornered her in the pantry, squeezing her budding breasts and pressing onion–laced kisses on her lips and skin. She would have become pregnant and been tossed into the streets, or if she was lucky, one of the delivery boys would have proposed to her. Then she would have spent her life working her hands raw and birthing children until one killed her on the way out. So many would have chosen the devil they knew, but Kelly couldn’t face that particular demon. Anything had to be better than what her future would have been as a human. Anything.

“I was fifteen,” she replied, her voice dry and hollow. “A bastard child, a girl. I worked in the kitchens for as long as I could remember. I didn’t want to live and die a nothing. I wanted to feel I had some control over my destiny, even if it was deciding to abandon my humanity.”

Kelly turned away, snatching the butter from the fridge and slicing a generous chunk into the hot fry pan. She could feel Jaq’s gaze on her back, sympathetic and kind. It was too much. The air was thick with emotion and memories of the past. Kelly rubbed her chest to loosen the knot there and searched for a way to lighten things up once more, to put all the horror and sorrow back into a little box in the back of her mind.

“How did you know that I was a vampire? Have you seen us before?” Her tone was brittle and forced, but it worked. A ghost of a smile crossed Jaq’s face.

“Y’all smell funny. And yes, I see far more of you vampires than I ever want to. If I catch them, they all wind up dead. Every one of them.”

Kelly shifted, uneasy. There had been an odd connection between them, like two friends chatting about their lives. It was strange to think that the woman she’d just bared her soul to had never said more than a word to another vampire before slicing their head off. It snapped her back to reality, and reminded her that as nice as this werewolf seemed, her loyalties were elsewhere.