The Vampire's Revenge (22 page)

He was at that awkward crab stage of righting himself, with his feet planted, trying to raise himself on his arms, when Connie launched herself off the top step like a flying she-devil, her sword pointed downward. Ulrich’s upward momentum only worked against him. His body met the sword in midair.

The blade entered his chest, piercing his heart with an awful sluicing sound, and came out the other side, pinning him to the earth like a bug in a specimen box. Ulrich had only a moment to register a look of utter surprise. This woman had bested him after a thousand mortal lifetimes of being the most savage killer on the face of the earth. Then he exploded into dust.

Ordinarily, a steel blade to the heart wouldn’t kill a vampire—only a wooden stake would. But this was no ordinary sword. It was a souped-up, slayerfied, vampire-killing sword. And in Connie’s hands it was magic.

Diana shrieked, but her instincts for self-preservation didn’t desert her. She shook off her shock and ran as Connie pulled the sword out of the ground and turned her way. Stunned by Connie’s display of killing power, I’d completely forgotten about Reedrek until I heard Sharona scream and Mole shout, “Behind you, Jack!”

He jumped on me from the top step. In the nanosecond between Mole’s warning and Reedrek’s leap, I had just enough time to dodge his fangs, which were aimed at my throat. He still connected with me hard enough to knock me to the ground. I twisted around to face him as he grappled for another strike at my neck.

Connie plucked him off of me like he was no more than a pesky skeeter and threw him back to the ground. Before you could say Jack Robinson, her fangs were at his throat and the point of her sword at his chest. He tried to shove her away, but she had a vise grip on his shoulder. Now she would close in for the kill.

“Wait,” I said, kneeling beside him.

“Why?” Connie demanded.

“I want to get some information out of him first.”

Connie grimaced, backed off, and sheathed her sword but not her fangs. “Whatever.”

“Oh, and thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I’m sorry Diana got away.”

“We’ll get her next time.”

“Hang on a second.” I looked at Sharona, who had come to the doorway and was working her mouth soundlessly like a beached guppy, in shock from what she’d witnessed.

Mole joined me at the barmaid’s side. “Are you going to be all right?” I asked him.

He was holding his hand over the wound in his chest. “I’ll be fine in a bit. What shall we do about poor Sharona? I put her under glamour, but I must confess I’ve never been too good at it.”

“I’ll take it from here,” I told him.

He looked at me skeptically. “But you’re a relative youngster. It takes hundreds of years of practice to use glamour effectively.”

“What can I tell you? I’m a quick study.” I shrugged and gently took Sharona’s chin in my hand. She looked in my direction with unfocused eyes, her beehive hairdo listing to one side and her lipstick smeared. Her ample chest rose and fell so fast I was afraid she might faint.

I looked her in the eye and said, “Sharona, you’ve had a nightmare. You didn’t really see any bad people in here tonight, and, uh, definitely nobody with fangs or anything. Everything’s fine. Mole, er, Velki here is going to take you back to work now.”

The barmaid blinked her mascara-coated eyelashes and focused in on me. “Oh, hello,” she said. “Can I get you another pitcher of margaritas?”

“Yeah. Sure,” I said.

“Extra salt?”

“How sweet. You remembered,” I said. “I’ll be in there in a minute.”

Mole gave me a look of astonished respect and helped me get Sharona to her feet. She tottered on her high heels for a moment before smoothing down her skirt and hair and following him back into the bar, oblivious to the rest of us. Holy crap, I
was
good.

Connie still had Reedrek pinned to the ground by his shoulders. “It looks like your little friend Ulrich threw you to the wolves,” Connie said, and executed a very convincing animalistic snarl.

In response, Reedrek quaked in her grip, but he still managed to curse the name of his sire. “Damned despotic demon,” he muttered. “I should have known I couldn’t trust him. I’m glad you killed him, my dear.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you are, Pops,” I observed. “Even Eleanor was savvy enough to figure out that they were going to screw you over in that Council promotion deal, and she was just a fledgling. Incidentally, it
was
Eleanor who blew up the boat you were on, not Mole. She had swapped bodies with him against his will.”

“I’ll kill her,” he spat. “I’ll kill Diana. And then I’ll kill that Eleanor for good measure.”

“I’m afraid I’ve robbed you of the pleasure of killing her,” Connie told him, and shrugged in mock apology. “Been there. Done that. Got blood all over the T-shirt. I cut her right in two with my trusty sword.” She reached behind her shoulder to tap the glittering hilt.

Reedrek stared at the Slayer with renewed awe and horror. “Well—well done,” he stammered.

I had to laugh. “You can’t toady up to the Slayer,” I said. “Your goose is as good as cooked. But I want that four-one-one I mentioned first.”

“Ah. Information,” he interpreted for himself. “By all means. What do you wish to know?”

“How did you survive the explosion?” I asked him, partially because I was curious and partially to give him more time to be psyched out by Connie’s menacing presence. His usual bluster was gone. As scared as he was of Connie, there was no telling what kind of knowledge we might drag out of him.

But I had to be careful here. If I was an expert at glamour, Reedrek was even better at intercepting the thoughts of his offspring, his offspring’s offspring, and so on. Call it the old Vulcan mind meld, vampire style. I concentrated really hard on closing my mind to my grandsire and locking the outgoing thoughts as tightly as I could.

“We—we were thrown into the water so forcibly by the explosion that the fire that ignited us was extinguished before we had time to burn,” he said. He licked his lips nervously and added, “I always knew you were special, my boy. You are indeed a prodigy at glamour.”

“Save it,” I replied. “Flattering me won’t work any better than sucking up to her.”

“Can I drink his blood?” Connie asked.

“Do you want to?” I asked, surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. She was half-vampire, after all.

“I think so,” she said. “Am I supposed to want to?”

“We’re in uncharted territory here, babe,” I said. “Say, Granddad, what do you know about vampire slayers?” I was tipping him off to our ignorance, but I figured we still held the upper hand. Besides, after we’d wrung out all the information he was good for, Connie could always just kill him. I couldn’t do it myself because a vampire couldn’t kill his sire without dying in the process. Killing a grandsire was almost as bad. Good thing Connie was chomping at the bit to do the job.

“I . . . um . . .” Reedrek hem-hawed. I could practically see the devious little wheels turning in his evil brain. Should he lie or tell us the truth? Eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Catch a vampire by the toe.

“Make yourself useful, old man, or I’ll turn her loose on you. She was just getting warmed up on Ulrich. She doesn’t even know her own strength yet, but we can find out real quick. You can be our guinea pig. Oh, and don’t even think about lying to me. You saw how I put glamour on that woman? That’s not the extent of my talents.”

Reedrek nodded. “Indeed. As I pointed out, it was an impressive display, my boy. I couldn’t have done better myself. In fact—”

“Stop blathering. I can smell a lie from anyone no matter how far off in my bloodline,” I bluffed, wondering if he could smell mine.

“What would you like to know?” he hedged, giving no indication that he didn’t believe me.

“Have you people figured out how to kill the Slayer yet?”

He looked back and forth from me to Connie. “It can only be done by decapitation,” he said quickly.

I made a show of leaning close to him and inhaling deeply. All I smelled was old, fetid vampire. Eau de Reedrek. “Why is that?”

“It has to do with the sword mythos,” he said. “She can be killed by any blade strong enough to decapitate her. The gods have a certain sense of symmetry. Since one sword is needed to activate the Slayer and serve as her personal weapon, only a sword or something similar can kill her.”

“Let me get this straight,” Connie said. “Any cutting weapon that can take my head could kill me.”

Connie and I exchanged looks. “So you’re saying that the other ways of killing regular old vampires don’t apply?” I asked.

“That is correct,” he said.

“No wooden stake to the heart?”

“No.”

“No flame thrower?”

“Not as such.”

“No getting caught out in the sun?”

“Negative.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” Connie asked.

Watching Reedrek’s face carefully, I said, “Yes.” Reedrek sighed in relief.

“How do you know this about the Slayer?” I asked him.

“From my communication with the Council. The old lords dusted off their ancient texts when they became convinced that the Slayer was among us. And they shared some of that information with me.”

“How do you communicate with the Council?” I demanded. All vampires had their own special powers. I knew Reedrek’s psychic ability was impressive. If he could communicate with the Council across the Atlantic, the implications were pretty scary.

“Um, we talk by cell phone,” he admitted sheepishly.

Oh, man, that was a relief. I was glad he hadn’t tried to bluff. Evidently he bought it when I said I could suddenly tell if he was lying. While I had him on the ropes I decided to test out my theory about what happened at Olivia’s. “What do you know about the vamp-on-vamp violence that just happened in London?”

“There was to be a raid on Olivia’s coven house,” he said. “The Council desired some old scrolls and tablets they were missing from their collection.”

“How did the Council’s goons know where to find the goods?”

“The information came from Mole—er, Eleanor. He, uh, she claimed to have come upon the knowledge by accident. We relayed it to the Council, who acted on it immediately.”

“What else did Eleanor tell the Council through you?” I asked.

“That was all. I swear it.”

“And have you heard back from them about any new information they might have found in those documents?”

“No, there hasn’t been time for them to interpret it yet. But if you keep me alive, perhaps I can find out what the material reveals.”

Reedrek had some nerve trying to strike a deal with us. Every time William had tried to bargain with his sire, the old bloodsucker had screwed him over. Did he think I didn’t know that? While wondering how stupid he thought I was, it occurred to me how gullible
he
was. I had him believing he couldn’t lie to me.

I was reminded of an old human buddy of mine, an underwriter who worked with insurance salesmen day in and day out for forty years. “They lie like rugs,” he said to me. “But liars are themselves the most gullible people in the world. They’ll believe anything you tell them.” Vampires, insurance salesmen—one bloodsucker was much like another, I decided.

I was suddenly struck with a new idea. “Come with us, Grandpa. This is your lucky day.” I looked at Reedrek with the satisfaction of knowing that I was going to be able to avenge his part in William’s death. “I’ve got plans for you.”

I let my guard down and allowed Reedrek to read my mind so that he’d know what I had in store for him. His face contorted into true terror. “No! Not that! Not again!”

Eighteen

I couldn’t help but congratulate myself on my fore-thought. I’d given Rennie an assignment and he had completed it to the letter. He’d reinstalled Reedrek’s concrete and steel tomb, the one that served as the cornerstone for the new hospital that William’s philanthropic foundation had built. All we had to do was stuff the old buzzard in the end of the box, weld it shut, and smear a couple of layers of cement over it. He would be trapped for eternity. I hoped.

On the way back from Tybee I had called Rennie to meet Connie, Mole, and me with the necessary equipment and supplies. We’d brought Mole back with us for his own protection and to help us ride herd on Reedrek for the drive back to Savannah.

We weren’t worried about Sharona since she’d been fine when we left her, and Mole had been careful not to show any affection toward her in front of the other vampires. As far as they knew, she was just a by-stander with bad taste and not the love of Mole’s evidently long life. So we didn’t have to worry about Diana taking her hostage to try and get to Mole.

Rennie was a little bit freaked out by Reedrek’s snarling and fang-baring, but he got over it. For years I’d managed not to involve Rennie in vampire business. But in recent months, I’d had to call on him more and more, and he’d responded like a real trouper. I was just sorry I had to bother him, what with him being sickly and all. He never complained, but he was clearly in pain from his ulcers again.

So we put Reedrek to bed. No muss, no fuss. Well, okay, there was quite a bit of fuss from the old bloodsucker himself, who cursed and struggled the whole way. With Connie and me controlling him, and with Rennie to wield the blowtorch—which came in really handy for forcing Reedrek into the box—the old bastard didn’t have a chance.

As Connie, Mole, and I were walking Rennie back to his truck I told them my idea for exploiting Reedrek’s in with the Council. “So, Rennie, do you think you could engineer a way for us to get a telephone to Grandpa?”

“I’ll think on it, Jack. It might be as simple as drilling a hole into his box and running a fiber-optic cable in there. I’ll talk to some telecom people and see what I can come up with.”

“Thanks, man. Take it easy with those ulcers, huh?”

Rennie tried to smile, and went back to his truck.

Once we were in William’s vault and out of Reedrek’s considerable earshot and mind-reading powers, I could finally let my guard down and think. I wanted to ask Mole some questions like we’d intended to do in the first place. We couldn’t get into all the issues in the car because Reedrek could overhear us. Now we could finally put our heads together.