Throat (22 page)

“Wait a minute,” I said, slowly catching on to what they were saying. “You mean …”

Anton stood and clapped delightedly. “Good! We get to take you on your very first
Blutjagd.
”

“What’s that?” I said, feeling nervous.

“Blood Hunt.”

Anton took me by the arm. Again I noticed how strangely smooth his skin was.

“It’s so much better your first time if someone experienced goes with you,” he said. He was genuinely excited at the idea.

Donne got up as well. “I’m not looking forward to it, taking along someone new,” she said. She stared at me. “Nothing against you, Emma, only the risk factor goes way up when you’re out with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. But I don’t like thinking of you going alone. And besides, I need it myself.”

“You’re not … you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you?” I said.

“Of course!” Anton said. “The more the merrier. What about you, Lena, huh?”

“She’s still fasting,” Donne said.

“Oh, right,” Anton said. He looked at me as if to explain. “Lena is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who can go without it as long as she can.”

“Don’t be modest,” Lena said. She nodded at Anton. “We all fast at one time or another, Emma. It is part of our … way. I suppose you could put it like that. Part of life as a
Sonnen
. We control the hunger, not the other way around. We use our faith and our will. It takes practice, but in time it is manageable.” She glanced at Anton. “Don’t stay down there too long.… Daybreak.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be quick. Come on,” Anton said, taking my hand and pulling me along. “We’ll show you exactly how it’s done, okay? There are few things in life more thrilling than a
Blutjagd
with morning coming on.”

I let myself be tugged away from the Stone House, thoughts flying. The first thing I realized was that we weren’t heading in the direction of the road; we were starting down the mountainside through the woods. Within seconds I could no longer see Lena, only the stone blocks against the darker trees. In no time we were running.

This can’t be happening
, I thought. I was about to go down into Huntsville to drink some poor victim’s blood?

“Wait,” I said. “Stop, please. I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

Anton laughed. “Oh! You’re ready, all right. You should have seen me my first time. I don’t know what I would’ve done without Lena! I was terrified, if you want to know the truth.”

“But … how can I … I can’t,” I said.

“You can,” Donne said. Her eyes flashed at me. “If you won’t, then … well, we’ll know, won’t we?”

“Know what?”

“That you aren’t a friend. You might be afraid for us to watch how you feed. That could give you away.… You may even be a spy for the
Verloren.
”

“Nonsense,” Anton said with a laugh. “It’s painfully obvious, is it not, she is no spy.”

“Shut up, Anton,” Donne said.

They both took my hands this time and we flew down the mountainside. As we ran, I concocted ridiculous plans in my head, ways of ditching them. Or maybe even preventing them from killing.

All too soon the trees were thinning and the ground began to even out. Then we were passing houses built into the rocky foothills. I could see streetlights ahead, an older neighborhood. They let go of my hands and we slowed to a gentle speed, still much faster than human walking, moving like quicksilver along the roads. Everything dead still because of the hour. Windows dark, porch lights out.

“There’s a trick to maintaining a
Strecke,
” Donne said quietly. “The hunting is tougher at this time of night. There just aren’t that many people around. But that’s why we choose it. The people who are out and about after midnight tend to be a different kind. Most of the time they’re unattached. Young. Living by themselves.”

“Or they’re older, right?” Anton said. “Without many friends or no friends at all. Doing the lonely kind of night jobs people like that do. People who don’t want to be around people.”

“Or people who are so different—they don’t want people to see how different they are,” Donne said. “People like that are much less likely to give us away. And we spread it around. Different streets,
different neighborhoods. Parts of town where unexplained things can happen but are rarely questioned.”

I felt a little chill moving through me, listening to them talk about people … people we were about to attack. I thought about Sagan.… He was a late-night person, wasn’t he? And there was nothing strange or lonely about him. That was just the hours available to do the job he loved doing. What about his family? What if the vampires took someone, one of his sisters, say. What then?

“That’s why the
Verloren
always have to be on the move,” Anton said. “They don’t care how they do it.”

“Oh, they care,” Donne said. “They care about not getting caught. But Anton is right. The
Verloren
tend to be nomads, moving through the rural areas and from town to town, but in the city it’s always the darkest, most violent places where they tend to feed. Places where awful things are expected. We—the
Sonnen
—might even outnumber them. But it always takes more good people to handle the evil ones. Because the evil ones don’t live by any rules. Shhh!”

We saw movement up ahead. While they were talking, the older neighborhood had given way to small, funky businesses … used-book shops, health food stores, restaurants that served dishes made out of stuff like tofu and soy.

I could see the person Donne was watching now. An older guy filling a newspaper rack with the morning paper. Nobody else anywhere around, not a single light. He looked to be about as old as my principal, maybe late fifties. The man was wearing a blue jacket even though it wasn’t close to cold. We were still several hundred feet away, but I could hear him cough into his hand.

I tried to think of something to say, anything that might stop them. I was horrified at the thought of fighting them while they tried to attack the poor guy.

“But … what if the person … is sick or something? What if they have some deadly virus?” I said. “Won’t we catch it?”

This time both of the vampires laughed. “You truly are an
Unschuldig,
” Anton said. “I haven’t been on a hunt like this in a while. This is going to be fun!”

“They are the ones who have to worry about
Infektion
, don’t you think?” Donne said. “You think you’re the first person who has ever wondered about that? As if a human virus could do anything to us.”

I had to ask it. “You said you don’t know if we die of natural causes. Can we … be killed?”

“By the hundreds,” Anton said. “During the war—”

“Of course we can die,” Donne said, giving him a look. “We’re living beings, not the undead. That’s crap.”

“Take out the heart or other vital organs, chop off the head, sever the body in half, there are plenty of ways,” Anton said. “It’s tough to do, but it’s done all the time. But we should be concentrating. I’m hungry.”

He drew back his lips at the thought, but I didn’t see anything that looked like razor-sharp fangs.

I did what they were doing, studied the newspaper guy. He would open each rack, toss the leftover papers, stick in new ones, then let the whole thing bang shut. He was very focused, head down. An easy target. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of him escaping; I saw a car, a little white Toyota, sitting up the street a ways, smoke coming out of its tailpipe.
Too far away for him to reach it in time
, I thought. I could feel both Anton and Donne tensing up the closer we came.

“Wait, come on,” I said. “So we’re just going to rush him and rip his throat out? This is insane.…”

They were concentrating so hard, they didn’t seem to hear me.
A bunch of different thoughts crashed through my head … take them both on, they were smaller than me … yell something at the guy, tell him to get in his car … but I knew realistically he wouldn’t make it three steps.

Or—my least favorite option—just run away, take off. Anton and Donne would never catch me. Starting on equal terms, I was ten times the athlete either of them was. Besides, they were hungry, needed to eat.

Yet what was I supposed to do, just let the man die? But … they had to do this probably every day, right? If I saved one life … what then? They would just go after somebody else. Thinking this way was driving me crazy. And all the while we were getting closer and closer. The man was banging each box down, moving on to the next, completely oblivious.

When we were only about fifty feet away, Donne stopped, crouching behind the corner of a little diner. “Are you ready?” she said to Anton.

Anton reached into his pocket and pulled something out. A little gold and white squeeze tube.

“I wouldn’t forget. Not after last time,” he said.

It was Donne’s turn. She produced something I didn’t recognize that was small and thin and metallic, like a silver pencil. Also a square of folded white cloth and a small brown bottle with a rubber stopper and no label. She splashed a little of the liquid from the bottle onto the cloth and clenched it in her small fist. It gave off a pungent—yet somehow sweet—aroma.

“Hey, what are you—”

I was never able to finish. Both of the vampires sprang at the newspaper man.

*    *    *

I say sprang, but they moved so gracefully, so soundlessly, it was more like watching swans skimming a lake than tigers pouncing. I could only call their movements beautiful, not deadly or monstrous or even threatening. It didn’t feel like an attack; it felt like a dance.

Sagan, you would not believe this
, I thought.

I followed along. Anton and Donne flung their bodies out in opposite directions, springing and bounding, sailing ten feet or more in the air. Then they touched lightly down on one foot and sprang again, as if closing the last corner of a triangle.

The old newspaper guy never knew what hit him. He didn’t hear their approach and was leaning over jerking out a bunch of leftover papers when the vampires landed behind him. Anton took him first, pulling the man’s arms down and pinning them to his sides. I rushed toward them, bracing myself mentally for Donne’s attack, falling on the man’s throat with her teeth, tearing him apart.

It didn’t happen that way. Instead Donne reached around the man’s shoulders while Anton continued to hold him and placed the wet folded cloth over his face, covering his nose and mouth.

I couldn’t see the newspaper guy’s face, but I could imagine his eyes going wide with terror for a moment. I don’t believe he ever saw either of the vampires. His body jerked silently two or three times, and when Anton turned him around, the man’s body went slack and his eyes were already closed. The vampires gently lowered him to the pavement.

Anton cradled the newspaper man’s head in his lap as Donne pulled the guy’s right arm out of his jacket sleeve, then stretched the collar of his T-shirt over to reveal a pale, smooth neck and shoulder.
Here it comes
, I thought, standing over them, dumbstruck.

Now Donne took the little pencil-like object she had been
holding in her left hand and drew a two-inch line across the top of the man’s shoulder. Only it wasn’t a pencil or a pen. It was some kind of knife—an X-acto.

The man didn’t move or even groan as the warm blood welled up like red beads along the thin incision she had made. I actually saw Anton licking his lips. Donne let him go first. He lowered his head to the man’s shoulder and began to drink in a way that looked like a passionate kiss.

I was surprised that he only drank for maybe twenty seconds. Then it was Donne’s turn, and she drank in the same way, like a kiss. A way of feeding that was so delicate, so gentle, so completely the opposite of the brutal, violent way the monster Wirtz had torn at my leg. I was speechless. Donne saw me watching.

“This one is not for you, Fresh,” she said.

She also spent less than a minute drinking. Her eyes rolled back in her head and then she shut them. It was over almost as soon as it was beginning. She lifted her head away from the cut, and there wasn’t even a trace of blood on her mouth. She could have been giving the guy a hickey for all I could tell.

It was clear they were finished now. But instead of leaving the man and fleeing, Donne blotted the wound with a cloth and then Anton applied a little squirt of antiseptic from the white tube, which he rubbed in gently with his finger until the bleeding stopped. Anton replaced the man’s jacket and they carefully carried him over to the sidewalk and set him down easily with his arm crooked beneath his head.

I felt as if I had landed on an alien world … that I was seeing something that went on all over the earth with all of us humans completely unaware.

“Now what?” I said.

“We wait,” Donne said. “And watch.”

She and Anton pulled me around beside a small building. We watched the man as he lay motionless on the concrete. “What did you use to knock him out?” I whispered.

“Ether,” Donne said. “You can use chloroform too, but neither of them are easy to get unless you are close to a university.”

“But how do you know how much to give him?” I said.

“You do it a few hundred times, you’ll know,” Donne said, again acting like I was a little dense.

“So … what are we waiting for now?”

“To make sure he’s okay,” Donne said.

“You’re messing with me,” I said. “You just drank the guy’s blood … and now you’re going to hang around and see if he’s okay?”

“Yeah,” Donne said. “Sometimes there can be … a reaction. Also, he is defenseless.”

“What kind of creatures of darkness are you?” I said, almost wanting to smile.

“We’re human beings,” Donne said grimly. “Doing the best we can.”

The newspaper guy groaned and sat up. We slipped away into the shadows.

“Okay … now what?”

“Now we do it all over again.”

The next victim was a huge woman waddling out to the mostly empty parking lot at Walmart. We left her behind the wheel of her pickup and waited until she came to, coughing and looking dazed. “She must work in the bakery,” Anton said, smacking his lips. “She tastes of flour.” The third was a guy sitting alone playing on the Internet in a little guard shack out beside an industrial plant. They didn’t even have to move him from his seat.