Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (2 page)

Philip had found that people who perpetrated crimes like the one unfolding were usually gripped by an intense euphoria afterwards and a profound sense of invincibility that inspired them to go do more stupid, reckless things.  He could easily make one of them his evening meal.  That was how he operated.

Although he wasn’t a bleeding heart by any stretch of the imagination, he definitely preferred to feast on the bad guys.  He had gotten very, very good at finding them, not that they were difficult to pick out if somebody felt so inclined to do so.  If he couldn’t get a bad one he just didn’t eat a human at all.  He would go for a larger animal, which was very easy for him to do.

He had a massive amount of land and part of what he used it for was to keep cattle, horses, and other large game animals.  He could have fed himself for a long, long time without ever having to touch a human being. 

What that all boiled down to was that he didn’t need these men for anything.  All he needed to do was go about his business, maybe just head back home until he felt more level headed and in control.  He, like most creatures, had a habit of doing stupid things when he was riled up, which was exactly what he was after his brief conversation with Caroline.  Caroline, his best friend and the bane of his existence all at the same time.

He should just walk on and he knew it, but now the bad men were laughing and grunting and the woman they had cornered had lost all of her words.  She was reduced to muffled screaming and the sound of it made the hairs stand up on the back of Philip’s neck.  Ninety-nine out of one hundred times, he wouldn’t have cared.  He would have just gone home.  But this time, for some reason he would never understand, things were different.  This time instead of walking away he slunk forward, further into the alley where he could get a better view of what was going on. 

He had been right, there were three massive men who looked like they probably had a collective IQ of around one hundred and they had backed the girl up behind a bulky, overflowing dumpster. 

Philip rarely involved himself in the desperate times of humans, but something about this was worming its way beneath his skin.  Something about it was calling out to him and compelling him to
do
something.  He hadn’t done much of anything that wasn’t designed to help himself in some way in longer than he could remember. Now something was screaming at him to do something and before thinking it forward any further, he was walking briskly towards the closest of the three assailants. 

He moved silently and the ugly bastard never heard him coming.  With the element of surprise, he grabbed the man by the back of the shirt collar and lifted him into the air.  The guy had to weigh at least two hundred and fifty pounds but Philip lifted him as easily as if he were only a rag doll.

He let out a comically high pitched squeal of surprise and fright as Philip turned him around in mid-air so that the two of them were face to face.  The noise the man made got the attention of his buddies and they both stopped what they were doing to turn and look at Philip as well.  Good.  If all three men were looking at him, that meant none of them were attacking that girl.

He couldn’t see her from where she had been so casually tossed aside behind the piles of stinking trash, but he thought that if she had already been hurt it wasn’t that bad.  He should know.  If she had been really badly injured he would definitely have smelled the blood.

“Hey!  What the fuck, man?”

Philip grinned at him, allowing all of his inhumanly long, sharp teeth to be exposed.  Even suspended in the air, the loser cringed and flinched back, trying as hard as he could to get away.  It was beyond gratifying to watch him squirm.  His policy of not getting involved didn’t mean that he was a fan of bullies.

It was so easy for jacked up douchebags like these to play macho when they were messing with a girl half their size and totally outnumbered.  Philip couldn’t stand guys like these and he never had been able to.  When he was human, he had (according to his vague recollections) cared deeply for the feelings and plight of those less fortunate than him and even after a century of being a vampire, he would not kill a person who seemed decent unless he was totally out of options.

So even though there was still a part of him that was cursing his decision to get involved and risk his own exposure, the larger part of himself was starting to have a good time.  It seemed only right that these guys get a taste of their own medicine.  That way they would think twice before pulling a stunt like this again.  If he let them walk away, that was.

“Hey man!  I’d put him down if I were you, bro.”

“Would you?” Philip growled, his voice coming from deep in the back of his throat and hardly sounding human at all. 

The guy he was still holding up in the air started to whimper and his two friends exchanged quick, hesitant glances.  Those looks said that the men weren’t quite terrified yet, but they were on their way.  Good.  That was good.  He wanted them scared.  He wanted to smell it coming off of them in waves, to taste it in the warm night air.

“That’s right,” the third man said, shoving his shoulders back and puffing his chest out like he was going to be the one to start something physical, “put him down if you don’t want to get the shit kicked out of you.  You don’t know who you’re messing with.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Philip considered the man he had dangling in the air for a minute, letting the lot of them wait, letting the waiting feed their fear.  The guy was now white as a sheet and Philip noted with distaste that he had pissed himself.  He could have held him up like that for hours without getting tired but he was getting tired of his stench and so he dropped him with a loud thump.

The guy didn’t even bother getting back to his feet before moving back towards safety (like something like that could happen without Philip deciding to let it) and he didn’t stop moving until he was cowering behind his friends.  Philip took a slow, somehow careless, step towards them and the whole trio practically jumped back.  Their macho bravado seemed to be failing them, now that they had a real opponent to face.

“So, the three of you like to pick on women, is that right?”

“Hey, man, this shit doesn’t concern you.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t answer my question,” another casual step forward, another nervous jump backwards from the pack, “so I’ll ask you again.  Do you three enjoy picking on women?  Do you enjoy picking on people who won’t be able to stand up to you?”

No answer.  And really, what could they say?  If they said no, he would know that they were lying.  Talk was cheap and their actions made it painfully obvious that they did indeed like to mess with women who were outnumbered and out of their element.  On the other hand, if they said yes, wouldn’t that just make this freak angrier at them?  They were between a rock and a hard place, which was exactly where Philip wanted them to be.

He could have done this for hours.  He was thoroughly enjoying the game of cat and mouse.  He had forgotten how good it felt to allow himself out of the cage, to let himself be the predator he truly was.  He could have done it for a good long while if it hadn’t been for the men’s victim.  His steps forward hadn’t given him any clearer of a view of her but he could hear her labored breathing and he knew that she was still very much afraid. 

He was enjoying this exchange mightily but he could tell that she was absolutely not and it didn’t seem quite fair for him to prolong an already horrific situation for her.  He sighed theatrically and looked them up and down lazily, appraising them and deciding what it was he wanted to do with them.  After what he was sure felt like an eternity to everyone but him, he rolled his eyes and began to speak.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.  I want all three of you to listen very carefully, OK?  Do we all understand each other?”

The one he had held up above his head didn’t even register that he had heard.  He looked like he had pretty much checked out and if he was listening, it definitely didn't show.  He might as well have been rocking back and forth with his hands clamped over his ears.  The other two were nodding vigorously.  He could see the first signs of hope on their faces and had to fight back the urge to just rip them into pieces.  Men like this were shit.  He would have loved to teach them a real lesson, a lesson they wouldn’t forget, but it wasn’t the right time or the right place.

Something like that would be far too messy and it would draw a whole lot of attention.  That was the last thing he wanted.  He wasn’t in the mood to skip town again, which was always the best way to escape suspicion in unfortunate situations.  Trouble with the law was something vampires needed to avoid.

In most cases, they could just pay the officers off and go on about their business but there was always the risk of them dealing with that one all American boy scout type with plans to change the whole world.   That kind of cop could be a major headache and Philip didn’t want that.  This trash wasn’t worth all of that trouble, especially when he could fuck up their world quite nicely without creating a crime scene.

“Good.  Looks like everyone is paying attention.  Now, I want you to answer a question for me.  Do I strike you as a normal kind of a guy?”

Silence.  Not one of the three was eager to pipe up and tell this weirdo they didn’t know at all that he struck them as more of a freak than a normal man.  That meant they were too afraid to own up, which was a good start.  He wanted them to be so afraid that they didn’t ever forget the feeling.  He wanted them waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and having just the fleeting memory of his face as an explanation for why.

“Aw, I can see that you’re all feeling shy at the moment, so I’ll let you in on a little secret.  I’m not.  I’m not a normal guy.  If I wanted to, I could be your worst nightmare.”

He opened his mouth again, raising his face up towards the bright moonlight to let them catch a full on glance of his terrifying incisors.  He ran his tongue over them, drawing his own blood and letting it drip down his chin for a second before lapping it back up again.  Now the men looked both frightened
and
disgusted.  He knew that they wanted nothing more than to get out of this alive.  It was exactly how he wanted them to feel.

“Is that what you want, boys?  Do you want me to be your worst nightmare?”

“No!  No man, we don’t want that at all.  We just want to get out of here, OK?  That’s it, end of the story.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear it.  I think I’m going to let you do just that thing, too, but first I want you to understand something.”

“Sure, anything, man.  Just let us know and we’ll do it.  We’ll do whatever you say.”

“Well I’m glad, and lucky for you, it’s an easy concept to grasp.  I just want you to know, to be really and completely sure that I mean it when I say, that if you ever try something like this again I will know.  I’ll know, I’ll find you, and then I’ll rip you apart.  I’ll drain all of the blood out of you and by the time I’m done even your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.  Assuming that she’d want you, that is, and I don’t see why she would.”    

As he spoke, the men grew whiter and whiter and by the time he was quiet again it looked like he had already done the thing he had threatened to do.  He thought they might protest, that they could possibly convince themselves that fighting back was in their best interests, but it didn’t happen.  He had scared them well enough for them to stay as silent as the grave. 

“Do you understand?  Nod if you do.  I would tell you to say something but it looks like a cat’s got your tongues.”

They all nodded, their eyes glassy with a faraway look.  He thought there was a good chance that at least one of them had convinced himself that none of this was actually happening and if that were true, well then good luck to him.  If he decided there was no boogey man watching after all, he would be a dead man.

Philip would see to that because he wasn’t joking.  He was going to keep tabs on these guys.  He had lived in New Orleans on and off for a long, long time and he had enough connections to cover every inch of the city.  If he wanted to know everything about these guys, from when they ate their breakfast to when they fucked, to when they went to bed, he was going to know it.

“Alright, that’ll do.  And you believe I can do it, too.  Don’t you?  You know I
will
do it.”