First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella (3 page)

“Most likely that ain’t
happening. People don’t usually adopt kids that are, what,
fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” I
said.

“Sixteen, then. You’re in
for a rough few years and then you’ll be out on the street.” He
nodded at a cop passing by in the hallway. “They’ll do their best,
but they won’t be able to stop the vampires. If you come with
me…hell, I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be able to help.”

“I don’t know,” I
said.

“Look,” he said. “Either
way you’re probably looking at a short, unhappy life. This way, at
least you might be able to do some good. Besides, you might even be
able to dish out a little payback to the monster that killed your
mother.”

Something stirred deep in
my guts, an emotion I’d never before felt: rage. I wanted revenge.
I looked around the precinct. The cops all of a sudden looked
comical—like bumbling oafs from a fifties TV show. They weren’t
prepared for the brutality of my mother’s killer. Neither was I,
but I thought that this dirty, skinny, homeless kid
was
ready.

He smiled. I guess my decision showed
on my face. “Excellent, Dave. Welcome to the Family.”

“How am I gonna get out of
here?” I asked. “I don’t think they’ll just let me
leave.”

“Let me worry about that.
Stick close and it’ll be fine.”

He stood up and headed for the door. I
got up and followed, looking around cautiously. None of the cops
seemed to care. None of them seemed to notice.

“Hey,” I whispered.
“What’s your name?”

He spun around and slapped himself in
the forehead. “Sorry, I completely forgot. My name’s Nathan Labat.
Call me Nate.”

Chapter 4: Reason to Believe

Nate made sure I never got more than a
step behind him. I trailed in his wake, like a satellite orbiting a
heavenly body. This close, I could smell him—a powerful mixture of
sweat, dirt, and something that smelled coppery. I was scared that
one of the officers would look up from his paperwork and see me
making an escape, but it never happened. Nate showed no sign of
nerves, though his hand never left the stone on his watchband. The
hairs on his arms stood erected, as if some commander was
compelling them to attention.

We went out of the towering glass
doors and stood in the early evening, breathing cool air, and stood
on the sidewalk. A couple of uniformed officers were bringing in a
handcuffed man, who slurred and stumbled.

“Come on,” Nate said, and
he led me down the walk.

A few yards from the
station, we rounded a corner into an alley. A moment later, the
stone on Nate’s watch let out a spark of white light and a
crack
like a miniature
gunshot. He frowned at the thing and shook his arm. When nothing
happened he cursed and said, “Let’s go.”

We walked in silence for a moment.
“Stick close,” he said. “This isn’t a good place to be alone at
night.”

No kidding,
I thought. I stayed as close to Nate as I could
without stepping on his heels.

“So, what is that thing on
your watch?” I asked.

“Magic crystal,” he said.
“My mom gave it to me before she died. It makes you…well, not
invisible, exactly, but harder to notice. People’s eyes pass right
over you. The problem is, it only lasts a little while, and I used
it a lot today. The power’s completely drained. It’ll take a couple
days to recharge.”

I shook my head.
Magic crystal.
The idea
was unbelievable—everyone knew there was no such thing as magic.
For that matter there was no such thing as vampires. It suddenly
occurred to me that I had just escaped custody with a crazy person.
I was a fugitive. By now the cops would have noticed I was gone and
probably called in the marshals. They’d track me down—because this
guy Nate surely didn’t know how to evade a real manhunt—and toss me
in prison.

“Dave,” Nate said, “I need
you to focus right now, okay? I’m not crazy, whatever you may be
thinking. You made your choice and you’re in the brave new world.
You gotta stick with me.”

I hesitated, but he was
right. I had made my choice. The police station was a few hundred
feet behind me, but it might as well have been on the other side of
the globe. I was locked in and I might as well go with it. Besides,
if Nate
was
crazy
and I believed him—and god help me, but I did—then it stood to
reason that I was crazy, too. And if I was out of my mind, any
decision that I made would be correct, right?

Nate grinned. Without another word, he
disappeared down a smaller alley that jutted off the main one. I
followed, this time without so much as a moment’s pause.

“So your mom was, like a
witch?” I winced, realizing I might have said something
offensive.

Nate didn’t seem bothered. “Something
like that. She is—was—a hedge magician. She wasn’t officially a
part of the Magic Council, but she knew as much about sorcery as
any of those stuffed-robe wizards in Europe. She was trained in
Louisiana.” He said this last bit as if it should mean something to
me.

Louisiana; magic; his
name, Labat
. The combination of those
three things triggered some old bit of information I’d read
somewhere.

“Was she…was she a voodoo
lady?”

Now,
Nate sounded upset—not offended, but impatient, like it was a
question he was tired of answering. “She didn’t like that term. She
didn’t belong to any one school of magic, but yeah, she used some
voodoo in her work.”

“Oh,” I said. Nothing that
had happened since I got home to the bloody apartment had made
senses, and this was no exception. Magic Councils? Schools of
magic? What the hell was happening?

We were just a few blocks from the
apartment where my mother had died. I didn’t recognize the alley,
but I felt like I was seeing it more clearly than anyplace I’d ever
been. There were overflowing Dumpsters, bits of broken glass and
crumpled cans, spray-painted walls, and old rusted-shut doors. It
was dark, and the few light fixtures were either burned out, empty,
or broken. A few yards ahead I could see that the alley opened into
a wider space, like a stream entering a pond. Aluminum garbage cans
lined the walls, and the emergency doors of the various businesses
were shut. Most had padlocks and chains around them—new additions,
I was sure. With darkness falling on the neighborhood, everyone had
gotten a lot more paranoid.

Of course, if Nate was right, then
maybe everyone had a reason to be paranoid. The part of my brain
that still functioned normally was going on autopilot, idly
wondering if you could still consider something paranoia if it was
justified when I walked into Nate’s back.

He didn’t move. Skinny as he was, Nate
was a lot more solid than he looked. I was a couple inches taller,
and I outweighed him by thirty pounds, so I should have knocked him
right over. Instead, Nate stopped me as easily as if I’d walked
into a brick wall.

I wondered what could inspire such
rigidity.

I looked around Nate.

Two dark figures stood on
the other side of the urban hollow. They looked like big, powerful
men. Slowly, they stalked to either side, like lions in a nature
documentary. I’d been robbed before—it happens sometimes when you
live in a city. A year before, my first thought would have
been
muggers
.
Something about these two men, though, made me think thoughts that
were much darker.

“Vampires,” Nate
whispered.

The dark shapes stepped out of the
shadows, into the relative illumination of a single electric lamp
over the back door of a boarded-up liquor shop. Right then I knew
that Nate wasn’t crazy—or if he was, I was at least as
insane.

The two men were obviously
built on the frames of human males, but they were also obviously
not
human
. Their
skin was unnaturally pale, almost gray, like corpses. One opened
his mouth, and his jaw extended past the natural limits of a human
skull, unhinged like a snake’s mouth. His teeth reminded me even
more of a snake: they were long, curved, and wickedly sharp. Worst
of all, though, were the eyes. They shone in the darkness, again
calling to mind a big cat, but they were totally, completely black,
like pools of ink.

The second vampire—because
there was really nothing else to call them—
hissed
, a horrible sound that had no
business emerging from a human throat. This was a sound that
belonged to a biblical serpent, something from humanity’s dark and
recessed memories. This was the sound of a monster.

I expected them to, I don’t know, to
mock us. Maybe I’d watched too many cheesy movies or something, but
I really thought they’d toy with us, give us a chance to run. But a
lion doesn’t mock an antelope, a wolf doesn’t tease a buffalo, and
a hawk doesn’t give a mouse a chance to escape.

When they moved, they attacked in
earnest. They broke into a sprint, closing the distance with all
the feral intensity of an apex predator.

I shut my eyes and waited to
die.

A moment later, when I wasn’t dead, I
opened my eyes.

One of the vampires was on the ground,
clutching at his throat. Although the liquid that leaked from a
hole under his clawed hands was too dark, almost black, there was
no question that it was blood.

Nate was also down, grappling with the
other vampire. In his hand was something that glittered, even in
the weak light. I was never much for the gangster culture—my mom
would have killed me if she knew I was carrying a weapon—but I’d
seen my share of knives. The weapon in Nate’s hand was a
switchblade, about three inches long with an ornately carved
handle. The blade was a strange color, though: it looked
like…silver.

The vampire slammed Nate’s head into
the pavement, stunning him, if only for a moment. It leaned low
over the street kid, hissing. Thick droplets of clear liquid fell
from the fangs and landed on Nate’s forehead. Nate closed his eyes
against the saliva. Slowly, much more slowly than was necessary,
the vampire lowered its jaws towards Nate’s throat.

I moved on instinct: I grabbed an
empty tequila bottle and threw it. It didn’t break when it bounced
off the vampire’s shoulder, but it surprised him, just enough. For
a fraction of a second, it loosened its grip.

The silvery flash of the blade was
almost too fast to see. A line of that same black, blood-like fluid
appeared under the vampire’s face, and it fell to its side. It
looked up and whispered, in a dry, croaking voice,
“How?”

“Silver,” Nate said. “I
know how much you undead bastards love the stuff.”

The first vampire was climbing to its
feet. It looked shaky and weak, but it was slowly steadying itself
and recovering. Nate tackled it. They went to the filthy ground in
a heap. From somewhere in his backpack, Nate pulled a brick. He
slammed it into the vampire’s head. Again and again he brought down
onto the skull until there was nothing left but black blood, gray
brain matter, and powdered bone.

Nate returned to the other vampire,
which was still laying stunned, and slowly, almost clinically,
crushed its skull, too.

I watched in horror as the two bodies
changed. They decomposed at a horrifically advanced speed. In a few
moments there was nothing left but something that smelled horribly
like rotting meat and a few strips of clothing over a frame of
bones that looked disturbingly human.

“Come on,” Nate said. “We
gotta get outta here.”

When we reached the end of the alley
and headed down the block, he looked at me over his shoulder.
“Well,” he said, and then he smiled. “Do you believe me
now?”

Chapter 5: The Way Station

“
Those…those were vampires.”

Nate looked at me, an odd expression
on his face. “Sure were.”

We’d gotten a few blocks from the
scene of the battle and the air was starting to come to life with
the tortured wail of distant sirens.

“Won’t the cops track us
down?” I said. “I mean, we left two bodies back there. God, that’s
a
murder
scene.”

Nate shook his head and looked like
he’d tasted something bitter. “Nah. Vampire remains are different
from humans, so the cops won’t believe what they’re seeing. They’ll
write it off as a prank. I know from experience.”

He ducked into another alley. I
followed, hesitantly, but this one proved to be free of
vampires.

“Besides,” Nate continued,
“it wasn’t murder. Those two weren’t victims, Dave. They were
vampires. They’re casualties of war.”

I swallowed. My heart pounded so hard
I could feel it rattling my throat. “War?

“Yeah.” Nate didn’t look
over his shoulder. “We’re fighting a war for this neighborhood. And
we’re losing.”

It hung in the air for a
while, the dark thought that permeated those words. Nate walked in
silence for a moment, just long enough to me to begin to feel
nauseated. “Hopefully, the sun’ll come up before the cops find the
bodies, anyway. Sunlight has a powerful effect on vampires,
including their corpses. One good ray of light
and—
poof!
—they’re
dust.”