Urban Fantasy Collection - Vampires (98 page)

Elizabeth maintains a stony demeanor. “The Control protects vampires.”

“By keeping us in line,” he says with a snarl, “by serving the goals of humans. We have a right to live in peace.”

“You call this peace?” She points at the ceiling. “Holding humans captive?”

“Our guests choose to be here,” he says.

“Because you've turned yourself into a cult leader, like Jim Jones or David Koresh.” She stops and shakes her head. “You have no idea who those men are. You have no idea how backward this all is, because you're still stuck in World War One. Which is why you and every other vampire need the Control.”

This undead
Crossfire
episode is getting us nowhere. I step forward, closer to the flames than any of the vampires will dare, and speak to Gideon again. “If you've been spying on us, you know how happy the DJs have been this summer. They're truly in the world. They're living.”

“Perhaps living at the price of survival,” he says.

“Isn't that their choice to make? You talk about freedom from the Control, but you'll never be free if you let
fear make all your choices.” I can hear my mom and dad speak through me, and in my mind the tiny room turns into a crowded tent full of lights and music and hallelujahs. “I saw people who couldn't walk because they were afraid to fall. I saw them rise out of their wheelchairs, throw away their crutches, and dance a jig, the moment they let go of that fear.”

“Your mind tricks may work on weak humans,” Gideon rumbles, “but vampires are not human.”

“You're wrong.” I point at the three DJs. “Humans still live inside them, whether they admit it or not.”

Gideon looks amused. “And how long have you known them?”

“Long enough to know they believe in things. They believe in the music with every scrap of their souls. They believe in finding a balance between today and yesterday. Hell, they even believe I'm a crappy poker player.”

“Why should that impress me?”

“Because believing is what being alive is all about.” Daddy would've liked that one. I move in for the close. “Gideon, just let go of that fear, tell it to pull its poisonous claws out of you.” I gesture to the fire. “It's fear keeping you crammed into that corner because you don't trust anyone with your back. Fear made your neighbors in Camp David build bombs so that they have to hide underground like moles from a hawk. And it's fear, in the end, that'll kill us all.”

Imaginary
amens
reverberate in my mind as I turn to Elizabeth. She nods slowly and smiles. I step to her side to create a united front. Yeah, sistah.

After a long moment, Gideon speaks. “You think you know all about fear, little girl?”

He holds out his hand to Lawrence, who slaps a stake into his palm. Gideon keeps his focus on me as his arm flicks back, then forward. The stake blurs through the air.

I look down to see my shirt dripping with blood. Holy shit, did he just stake me? I wish I'd answered my mom's e-mail.

My knees turn to gelatin as cries of dismay echo from a distance. Someone sobs the word “no” again and again.

My hands grab at my chest to pull out the stake, which, I realize, isn't there. The drops of blood all point from the same direction.

Elizabeth.

I turn to see her crumpled on the floor, head and shoulders in David's lap, legs skewed to the side. The bottom half of the stake protrudes from her chest, which is blanketed in blood. She clutches David's shirt.

“P-pull it out. Please.” She coughs a spurt of blood over her chin. “It hurts, it hurts so bad.”

David's face is soaked in tears. “I can't.”

“Please.” Her voice pitches up to a spine-grating octave. “Pull it out, oh God, make it stop, David.”

He leans over her and grips the stake. The muscles of his arm tighten, then release. “I can't do that.” He lowers his head. “Not to you.”

I kneel next to them and wrap my hands around the stake, covering his.

His grip tightens as he stares at me. “You don't understand.”

“David!” Elizabeth lets loose a gurgling scream. She tries to cough again, but only pulls more blood into her
lungs. Her eyes roll up to show pure white, and her hands flail at us, nails scratching my bare arms.

“David, she's in pain. We can stop it.” I plant my feet under myself for better leverage. “On three, okay?”

His gaze meets mine with agony, then returns to her face.

“One,” I whisper. She's looking at me instead of him. “Two.” Come on, Elizabeth, give him one last look. Don't waste your final sight on my silly mug.

Her eyes close, and when they open again, they focus on David.

“I love you,” he whispers.

“Three!”

I fall backward, the stake clutched in my fists. One of Gideon's door guards snatches the weapon from me. I sit up to see David cradling Elizabeth in his lap, stroking her hair. Blood gushes from the wound, but nothing else happens. Maybe Gideon missed her heart, or maybe she never was a vampire. Come to think of it, I've never seen her fangs.

Suddenly she begins to tremble, but it's not like any spasm I've ever seen. It's like every atom is vibrating, ready to trade places with another one at the opposite edge of her body. David lays her gently on the floor and backs away. He puts an arm around my shoulders and covers my eyes with the other palm. “Ciara, don't look.”

I swipe his hand from my face but don't push him away. The others, except for Travis and Gideon, have already turned their heads. I clutch David's arm with both hands and watch.

The blood runs back into the hole, trickling like rain
down a windshield. Maybe the wound is healing itself, the way the scratches on Shane's back disappeared.

But now her flesh is being drawn toward the hole, flesh from her chest, her stomach—oh God, from everywhere, muscles stretching, bones creaking and snapping, all moving toward that single two-inch circle in her heart. The speed of the disintegration builds, but not fast enough to keep me from seeing her face stretch and tear, pulled downward as if it's melting off her skull.

I don't know if Elizabeth's collapse makes a noise, because I can't hear anything over the siren of my own shrieks. David clamps my mouth shut, and only then do I remember not to scream around vampires.

Elizabeth's not screaming, because her throat is slipping into the void, followed by her teeth, then her nose, then her eyes, staring into nothingness with what I hope is relief. Her hair rasps as it slides against her blouse and into the hole. Finally, limbs flop and flail against the dirt floor, fingers scraping trails in the dust as they're dragged toward the vacuum.

When it's over, a soft pop, then silence. David lets me go, and I crawl to the other corner, stomach heaving.

Someone far stronger than David grabs me and closes my mouth. “There'll be no vomiting on Gideon's floor, understand? Swallow it or choke on it. Your choice.”

Tears squeeze from my eyes as I nod. One of the rat-faced guards lets me go, and I gulp the smoky air, hacking and belching.

“That,” Gideon points to the place Elizabeth died, “never happens to a human. Plane-crash victims might be pulverized to almost nothing, but if you look hard
enough, you can always find a tooth, a smear of entrails. Their bodies exist somewhere, even if they're fused with a hundred other bodies, or with concrete and steel. But Elizabeth is nowhere. She's nothing.”

I stare at the pile of clothing and jewelry left behind, and suddenly notice they bear no stains. I examine my own clothes—clean. A minute ago they were spattered in blood. Even my hands bear no trace of Elizabeth's fluids.

“Nothing,” Gideon repeats. He leans forward. “Now do you understand fear, Ciara?”

I clutch my knees, feeling a cold sweat trickle down my back. Shane's fangs, Regina's glare, even Travis's re-animation were one thing, but this—this is a whole other realm of wrongness.

Something can't just turn into nothing. Can't. Happen. But it just did. What else could happen? There are no rules, no boundaries, nothing for me to cling to. For a moment I feel like the panic will shatter me, and what's left of my body will soak into the soil a hundred feet below the ground.

“You may all go now,” Gideon says to David, then turns to me. “Except you.”

My heart goes cold. I whimper a wordless protest. I don't want to be livestock.

“No,” David says in a hoarse voice. “We won't leave her behind for you to drink.”

“I won't drink her.” He keeps his gaze on my neck as he says, “Not if you bring me proof that the campaign is over. At sunset tomorrow.” He regards Travis like an artist with a finished canvas. “Or I'll do more than drink her.”

I start to tremble all over. As much as I don't want to be livestock, I want even less to be a vampire.

“Absolutely not.” David crosses his arms over his chest, looking a lot less pathetic than he did a minute ago. “I'll stay instead.”

“You have important work to do back at the station,” Gideon says. “Besides, in your state, you'd be inclined to foolishness toward me. Just the girl.”

Jim pushes past David to stand next to me. “I'll stay with her.” He reaches down, takes my elbow, and helps me to my feet. I look at him, amazed and a little confused.

A smile slides over Gideon's face. “Yes, I think you could be useful.”

Lawrence jerks his chin toward the door. “Upstairs.”

I follow him and Jim into the hallway, then take a last look back at David's tearstained face. “Have Spencer drive you home,” I tell him. “You don't look so good.”

“Ciara—”

“I won't do anything stupid.” I consider the events of the last ten minutes. “Anything else stupid.”

Jim and I are being held in an empty “guest” room, the furnishings of which consist of a full-size bed with yellow-white posts and a matching nightstand. One wall is paneled with laminated wood and the rest painted a dusty pink.

Jim is sprawled across the bed, staring at the ceiling and tapping his fingers in a slow rhythm against his chest. I'm huddled on the floor in the far corner, every muscle taut. It's been ten minutes since Lawrence locked us in here, and we have yet to speak.

Jim starts humming a familiar tune. After a few bars, I realize it's “Norwegian Wood” by The Beatles.

“Get it?” he says finally. “There are no chairs in this room, like in the song.”

“Ha.” I stare at the white wooden door, as if I can hold it shut with my eyes.

“I wouldn't have let that chick laugh at me.”

“Who?”

“In the song. She leads him on and laughs at him.”

“Oh.” I blink for what feels like the first time in minutes. “I thought she was throwing herself at him and he turned her down.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because he sits on the rug instead of on the bed with her.”

“She's not on the bed, she's on the rug.”

“But she doesn't have any chairs because she wants him on the bed.”

“She doesn't have chairs because she lives in a cruddy flat with cheap pine board.” His voice drips with scorn. “That's what Norwegian wood is.”

“Oh.” I can't believe I'm having this conversation right now. “So it's just a song about a guy who didn't get laid? My version's more interesting.”

He scoffs. “Tell that to John Lennon.”

“John Lennon's dead,” I state, with emphasis. “You know that, right?”

Jim lets out a long sigh through his nose. “Yes. I know that.” He sits up suddenly. “You know what's interesting? What's interesting is why you interpreted the song that way, what it says about you.” He tilts his head. “Have you scared a lot of men with your sexuality, Ciara?”

“No.” I look away and rub my cold hands together. “Define ‘a lot.'”

From the corner of my eye I see him staring at me. “Gideon can probably hear your heartbeat from all the way down in his cave.”

“Great. Thanks for the info.”

“What I mean is,” he digs in his jeans pocket, “you need to calm down. And I've got just the thing.” He unfolds a plastic Baggie containing a pair of rolled joints.

“No thanks.” God only knows what those things are laced with. “I'd like to keep my wits about me.”

“So you can do what, make a break for it?” He lights one of the joints and takes a hit. “Sometimes, Ciara, one must accept when one has no control over a situation. This is one of those times.”

The door opens, and Gideon enters, as if to prove Jim's point. A chill breeze seems to precede him. Lawrence and the other two lackeys follow, one lugging an old-fashioned Baroque-looking radio, the kind that sat in everyone's living room back in the early fifties.

Without looking at Jim, Gideon crosses the room toward me, soft and deliberate as a lion. He takes my arm and leads me to the bed. His touch is cold, and though his fingers are well fleshed, I can feel the bones through them, as if they were talons. He sits on the edge of the bed with me and nods to his radio-carrying minion.

The guard sets the contraption on the floor with a thud. He adjusts one of the knobs until we hear the haunting strains of an early Cure song. The radio's single speaker turns the notes flat and hollow, making our surroundings feel more alien than ever.

“Whoa,” Jim says. “The station's signal is a lot stronger than it used to be.”

Plus we're on top of a hill, I realize but don't say
out loud. Gideon's touch makes my throat too tight to speak.

I hate this guy. Not just for killing Elizabeth; he may have had his own reasons for doing that. I hate him for killing Elizabeth as an answer to my words. If I had just kept my mouth shut, maybe this wouldn't have happened.