vampire for hire 02.5 - vampire nights (7 page)

She buried her face in her hands. “I thought you were...” But she couldn’t finish her words.

“Having an affair?”

He smiled warmly, and instead of defending himself or laughing off her insecurity, Mr. CS Shine went over to his wife and gave her a big, smothering hug, and I heard the intimate words he whispered softly into her ear, “Ah, my sweetheart. Don’t you know by now you’re my precious girl?”

“I’m so sorry—”

But he shushed her and held her, and his words hit me hard. I fought my own tears and mostly won.

Just then the young mechanic appeared in front of me. “Someone’s paying for my door and for this.” He pointed to the gash in his forehead.

I told him I would. I told him I would do anything he needed. I gave him my card and he nodded, and I could see the questioning look in his eyes, even though he didn’t voice his thoughts:

How the hell had we broken his door?

But I only smiled weakly at him, told him to send me any bills. Mr. and Mrs. Shine were pressed tightly in each other’s arms and the mechanic bled into a dew rag pressed tightly to his head.

Okay, I conceded.
Some
men weren’t assholes.

Some men were
angels
.

I slipped away from the embracing couple. Into the night. Where I belonged.

The End

Deleted Scene #1 from:

Vampire Moon

Chapter Forty-one

I landed on the hospital roof.

A moment later, closing my eyes and seeing myself in my human form, I found myself standing naked, high above the prison below. As usual, I didn’t feel myself transform. It just happened, and it happened instantly and painlessly. A true metamorphosis.

Feeling vulnerable—being naked does that to you—I trotted over to a door, the roof’s access point. The doorknob was locked, so locked that it didn’t even jiggle. I gripped the knob again and turned with a little added strength. With a groan, the mechanisms in the lock snapped apart and I pulled the door open.

The dark stairwell was lit by only a dusty, mesh-covered lightbulb. I moved quickly down the metal staircase, padding lightly on bare feet, careful not touch anything.

I paused at the third floor, the prison hospital’s ICU. Although I hadn’t worked long as a federal agent for HUD, I had certainly worked long enough to get acquainted with most of the local prisons. More than a few times, I interviewed prisoners. And one or two times I had even interviewed prisoners in this very hospital.

Granted, I had never done so stark naked in the middle of the night.

Tonight, though, it wasn’t going to be an interview.

The door onto the floor wasn’t locked. As is the case for many prison hospitals, the building wasn’t quite as tight as the prison itself, which accounted for why most prison break-outs occurred here, in the hospitals.

It was late, and the hospital should be quiet. There would be plenty of guards, certainly, at least one in each room, and definitely a few on each floor. There would also be plenty of cameras, too.

Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about cameras.

I stood behind the metal door, away from the glass window, and listened. A few seconds of this later, and I was certain there was no one outside the door, or anywhere close, for that matter. Not to mention, my sixth sense would have alerted me to danger. I think. I hoped so, at least.

Anyway, all of my senses, both physical and non-physical, were telling me the coast was clear. So I used my middle knuckle to gently push down on the lever, and used my shoulder to push open the door. I may be a vampire, but I still had prints.

I peaked out into the hallway.

* * *

You want surreal? Try standing in a prison hospital hallway naked.

Above me, yes, was a camera. I knew from experience that I would not show up on film, either digital or celluloid. But I do very much show up live and in person and so I kept an eye out for anything living. So far, I was alone. To either side of me were elevators. To my left was a sort of cage that I think might have been the pharmacy. To my right was a long corridor that led to some activity and brighter lights.

I slipped down the hall, as naked as the day I was born.

There was what appeared to be a nurse’s station at the far end of the hallway. I could see a security guard leaning against the wall directly ahead of me. If he would look to his left he would see a very naked vampire.

I did my best to keep to the shadows and that’s when I found what I was looking for. It was a storage room. The door was locked. I took care of that with a quick twist of my wrist. I slipped inside and flicked on the light. It was, in fact, a big storage room, filled with shelves of everything from cleaning agents to nursing smocks. It was the smocks that I was after.

In a blink, I was wearing one. A baggy one, granted, but it would do the trick. I also grabbed a rag which I sprayed with disinfectant. Vampires could still leave fingerprints, unfortunately.

I exited the storage room and looked for my next target.

I found it easily enough.

It was a fire alarm near a door a few yards away. With my hand wrapped in the rag, I yanked down on it hard, and the building erupted nicely into chaos.

Chapter Forty-three

Most of the armed guards had stepped out of the room and were conferring with each other. Many were on radios. The alarm screamed, rattling the old building. Doctors and nurses were running to and fro.

One nurse wasn’t running. One nurse was methodically checking each of the rooms until she found the one she wanted. No one noticed me or cared. I was just another nurse checking on her precious wards. Except this nurse had anything but benediction on her mind.

Ira Levin had a room to himself. It even looked like he had a view. Granted, it wasn’t much of a view. More of a dirty, mesh-covered window set high on the wall, barely big enough to shoot arrows from had this been a medieval fortress instead. Still, the small window would have afforded sunlight, and when one is on Death Row, even sunlight is a rare luxury.

Ira was awake and looking around, blinking. No doubt he had been asleep just moments earlier. His face, I saw, was still mostly bandaged. Even from here, looking through the door, I could see the dozens of dark stitches that criss-crossed the sections of his face that weren’t covered in bandages.

The guard barely looked at me. He was a big guy with a heavily muscles chest. At least, it was heavily muscled in my imagination. I slipped inside and he barely looked at me.

I kept my face turned away from Ira as I walked around his head, pretending to examine some equipment.

“Hey, babe,” he said. “What’s going on? We got some kind of fire.”

“Something like that,” I said. I was next to his bed, looking away, running my hands over some tubes. I could feel his eyes on me.

“You guys gonna get me out of here or something?”

“Or something,” I said. My heart, which generally beat slowly and deliberately, pushing my supernatural blood throughout my undead body, had picked up. I heard it pounding in my ears.

I would love to tell you that my heart picked up because I was nervous. Because I was about to do something I had never done before. I would like tot ell you that what I was about to do caused me so much guilt and regret that I nearly turned back.

I would like to. But I can’t.

The truth is, I was more excited than I had been in a long, long time. Something was coming over me. Something raw and primal, something alive and dark. And it pushed me forward recklessly.

I could see the guard clearly through the window. He was supposed to stand in the prisoner’s room at all times. But apparently that all changed when the fire alarm sounded. Now he was out in the hall, hand on his weapon, apparently waiting for orders. He glanced inside at me and I made sure to look busy. He looked away again as his walkie-talkie crackled. As he unclipped it and spoke into it, I turned around quickly and faced Ira Levin.

He had been looking out the window, at the guard, but now he looked back at me. His face was heavily bruised and misshapen. He looked very little like the man who had taunted me a week earlier. His eyes seemed slightly glazed. No doubt he was on a lot of pain killers, not to mention he had just been roused no doubt from a deep sleep.

He seemed about to ask me something pedestrian—perhaps if I could get him some water, or help him relieve his bowels—but then something crossed his damaged and battered face. More accurately, it crossed his eyes. That something was recognition.

“You!” he started to say.

I don’t think he even finished the word. I lunged forward and clapped my hand over his mouth, careful not to let him bite me. Next, I pulled the pillow out from behind his head, and in one swift motion replaced my hand with the pillow, covering his face completely.

I looked out the window. The guard was still on the walkie-talkie. A nurse ran by. Another guard ran by. The sirens continued to wail.

Ira kicked and fought me. I put my weight on him, binding his arms to his side, careful that nothing flailing could scratch me and inadvertently collect any evidence.

My head was pounding. My own blood was veritably surging through me. I had an image of a lioness pinning down a gazelle, her ferocious jaws clamped around her prey’s throat, catching her breath even while she waited for her meal to perish.

My stomach growled ridiculously loud. I fought an overwhelming desire to rip out his throat and drink his foul blood. I fought and fought and fought the feeling. A dozen different times I nearly gave in. A dozen different times I reminded myself that Ira absolutely must appear to have died naturally.

Finally the kicking stopped. His body convulsed beneath me a half dozen times. As it did so, I watched the guard. He was still talking heatedly into the walkie-talkie, glancing left and right, but never in the room.

I lay on Ira’s body as his life left him. In the moment that it did, it sort of sagged and deflated and the energy in the room instantly dissipated. I was clearly alone with a corpse.

In the moment, his various life-monitoring machines went nuts. There was a lot blaring and beeping, and I quickly tucked the pillow back under his head, relieved that his eyes hadn’t bulged out. As they were, he was staring at me blankly. I glanced inside his open mouth. He bit his tongue, but not too badly. A random heart attack could result in a similar injury. I wasn’t worried. The blaring of the various monitors did not at first get the guard’s attention, as they were mostly lost in the screeching sounds of the fire alarm.

But he must have caught my movement, because he was now in the room asking what happened. I brushed passed him and told him I had to find a doctor asap.

He nodded and let me go.

I went down the hallway, made a right, passed a half dozen sprinting nurses going the opposite direction, and then made a beeline to the storage room.

Once inside I removed all clothing, folded them nicely where I found them, and emerged from the room naked once more. I was at the far end of the hallway, away from the commotion. I peaked out and I kept peaking out until the coast appeared clear. When it was, I dashed down the hall as fast as I possibly could. It must have been pretty fast. Perhaps that was something else I should look into.

Just how fast can I run.

In a blink I was at the stairway door. I used my knuckle to depress the lever, and the back of my thumb to open it. Once through the door, I flew up the stairs fast than I had ever run up any stairs in all my life. Never did my legs tire. I could have run up a thousand flights.

Maybe. I didn’t know.

On the roof I used gravel and dirt and debris to rub my fingerprints off the broken doorknob. With any luck, no one would check the doorknob for many days to come, or perhaps even months. After all, it was just a false fire alarm, and Ira’s death will hopefully be ruled natural.

The only question was: would they report a mysterious dark-haired nurse that night? Undoubtedly. There were a lot of nurses on duty tonight. I could fit the description of any number of them.

Sure, there might be an investigation. Then again, Ira was a slimeball. I know cops. They don’t work very hard investigating curious deaths to slimeballs, even if there were unusual circumstances involved.

Cops let slimeballs disappear into oblivion.

On the roof, with the sound of the alarm still blaring around me, as a multitude of emergency vehicles descended upon the prison hospital, I held in my thoughts the image of the beast in the flame. The dark creature seemed to study me back, even tilting its head curiously at me.

And when I opened my eyes again, I was transformed and standing on the corner of the prison hospital roof, my thick talons curled over. I was a living gargoyle.

I leaped high into the air and caught a draft. I flapped my wings hard, gaining altitude, higher and higher, into the night sky.

Deleted Scene #2 from:

Vampire Moon

Kurt Jones, the Chino State Prison Warden, was an older man with a surprisingly gentle-looking face. He sat behind his plain desk, leaning back in a squeaky chair, steepling his thick fingers under his thick chin as he studied me. Just outside his office door stood two guards, watching us.

Or, rather, watching me.

The warden continued silently studying me with his kind eyes. Eyes that were, I suspected,
deceptively
kind. No doubt they could harden in a heartbeat. But they weren’t hardened now. No, if anything, they looked lost.

He looked lost. Confused.

As he kept watching me, I kept sitting in the small chair in front of him. He took a deep breath and seemed about to say something, then closed his mouth again, and somehow looked even more perplexed.