The Vampire's Revenge (19 page)

“You wanted to save your own miserable existence, you sorry piece of dead meat.”

“No. I swear I didn’t know she would spare me. She was in slayer mode. I thought she would kill me anyway. I just . . . didn’t want to die with her hating me.”

“So you told her you had her best interests at heart. Then she comes out of her
dhampir
trance and the two of you have supersonic slayer sex. Is that about it?” Seth punched me in the gut with such force it felt like his fist was going to go clean through me and come out the other side.

I doubled over and when I could talk again, I said, “That’s about it. But look on the bright side.”

He caught me with an uppercut that just about separated my head from my body. “What bright side?”

I shook my head to clear it of the stars I was seeing. “You won, didn’t you? She said it was over between her and me for good. Last night was—good-bye sex.”

Like he had before, Seth grabbed me and brought my face to his. I could see his eyes take on a decidedly unhuman shape, and his mouth gaped open to reveal daggerlike teeth. He was about to shift on me.

“Oh, yeah, I won. You fool! Do you have any idea what you might have done to me?” He changed without warning and with a speed I’d never witnessed before. The display of raw power stopped me in my tracks. When he’d finished shifting into animal form, he stood before me with hackles raised, ears back, and muzzle dripping. He was huge. A monster.

He flew at me, going for the throat as any good predator will. Even though I knew Seth was the injured party and that I deserved a beating—even a biting—the monster in
me
kicked in. Before I knew it I had a mouthful of his flesh in my fangs. I’d missed his throat, but I was close. So was he. A chunk of tissue from over my right eye came away in his teeth. We backed off, both bleeding badly, and circled each other.

I felt the bloodlust seep into me through whatever orifice my reason had just left by. The taste of the sweet, sticky, coppery juice was a turn-on when it came from a living thing. Blood stored in a bottle or plastic bag didn’t come close. Living blood came with an intoxicating kick. Life’s blood came with a heartbeat, but also with the promise of death. Werewolf blood was a wild vintage that fed my inner fiend.

We flew at each other again. This time our collision knocked us to the floor, and we locked in a death roll. I’d gotten closer to the jugular, but so had he. His fangs sank into my jaw and forced me to release my bite. When I wrenched away, some of the flesh under my chin was gone. I felt the ultimate primal fear. I was about to be devoured by a wild animal. There was no describing the terror.

I rolled away clutching at my jaw, trying to stanch the spurting blood. I managed to make it to my knees, readying for his next move—a killing bite to one of two spots favored by canines and cats both big and small. Either he’d go for my jugular or he’d try to sever my spinal cord at the back of the neck. I had to be quick enough to avoid him.

But then Seth’s body twitched and he began to change back into a human as blood trickled from underneath his neck. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath while he completed the transformation. When he was through he put both hands to his throat to stop the bleeding.

The sight of him with all that blood should have made me even crazier with bloodlust, but it didn’t. It returned me to my senses. I was not a monster anymore, but an ordinary man watching his best friend bleed. “Why did you change? You can heal better as a wolf.”

“I can’t hold this wound together with my paws, Sherlock,” he said.

Our wounds were bloody messes. Luckily, werewolves heal as fast as vampires do. As long as we didn’t do any more damage to each other we’d be all right.

“I can’t believe I did that to you,” I muttered, horrified.

“What? Take back the woman you gave me or try to tear my throat out?”

“Both,” I answered miserably. “Will we ever get past this, Seth?”

“Don’t you understand what you’ve done to me, Jack?” He looked at me in wonderment, like I should be getting something I wasn’t.

“Look, it’s not so bad,” I lied. “Just forget what happened between Connie and me, and take her away from here until I’m just a distant memory.”

“It’s not that easy. You don’t understand,” he said.

I didn’t understand. That’s what Connie had said. And she’d said she couldn’t explain. “What is it I don’t get, man?”

He took a deep, rattling breath and said, “Wolves mate for life. Once someone comes between a wolf and his mate, it can never be the same.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’ve been with lots of women.”

“Human women. They don’t count.”

“But you were in love with Connie when you thought she was human.”

“It’s like this,” he said. “Werewolves are supposed to mate for life with other werewolves. But we can mate for life with humans if we choose to. That usually doesn’t happen, because it’s bound to result in tragedy. The human only lives a fraction of the lifetime of a werewolf, so the werewolf is always left alone. Unless he’s killed before his mate dies.

“But Connie’s immortal, so you don’t have to worry about that,” I said.

“It’s different for me,” he said.

“How?”

“This is hard to explain. I need a drink.”

As we both staggered back to the bar, I noticed his wound had stopped bleeding. Mine was healing now, too. He poured us both a shot of Werm’s best bourbon, and started the hard explanation.

“In the werewolf world, I’m kind of like . . . royalty.”

“No shit,” I said, and downed the shot. “How did that happen?”

“It’s a long story. It has to do with werewolf legend going back to when the first man was cursed to walk on four legs and change during the full moon.”

“Why have you never told me this?”

“A man doesn’t like to brag. Besides, how would you have reacted?”

“I probably would have laughed my ass off,” I said honestly. But there was nothing funny about it now.

“Yeah. Just like I would have laughed at you if you’d told me you were king of the vampires.” Seth downed his own shot.

“So are you tougher than the other werewolves?”

Seth gave me a sidelong glance. “You knew that already.”

“What I mean is, are you tougher because you’re, like—what are you, a prince or something?”

“Yeah, I’m a prince or something, and long story short—yes, that’s
one
reason I’m tougher.”

“That’s why you were so sure of yourself in that fight with Thrasher awhile back.”

“Yep,” he said. He poured us each another shot.

“So what does your being a . . . prince among werewolves mean as far as you and Connie are concerned?”

Seth closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “In my heart and soul I bound myself to her for life. I felt it when the bond kicked in. It’s a physical thing you have to experience to understand. It happens to regular werewolves, but when somebody from my special lineage commits himself, it’s an even stronger bond.”

“How does that work?” I asked. I didn’t like how all this was shaping up. I felt guilty enough for doing the deed with Connie, but now things were getting really complicated.

“It’s like this,” Seth said. “If Connie was a werewolf, after she had sex with you, she would have been lost to me. As it is—” Seth abandoned the shot glass and took a swig of whiskey straight from the bottle.

“Since she’s the vampire Slayer and not a werewolf?” I prompted.

“She chose to come back to me. As far as I can tell, I am still bonded to her.”

“How do you know?”

“I can feel it.” Seth thumped himself on the chest. “In here.”

“Good,” I lied. “Then I guess there’s no harm done after all.”

Seth’s powerful hand was on my throat before I knew it. “Let me tell you something, hoss,” he hissed. “If your shenanigans had succeeded in breaking my bond with Connie, I would have been smart to let you kill me just now. Without the woman I’m bonded to I’d be only half a person, or half a wolf.”

I’d known he loved her. I’d counted on it. But I’d never realized how much until now. I opened my mouth to ask for forgiveness, but the words died on my lips. If he was going to forgive me I’d have to earn it. And I had no idea how to start. So all I said was, “I’m sorry, Seth. I’ll make it up to you. I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but as God is my witness, I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

Fifteen

“Where is everybody?” someone said.

I looked up to see Werm come through the door. He turned even whiter than normal when he saw Seth and me.

Seth glanced at me, but I couldn’t read his expression. “I’m taking the night off,” he announced. With as much whiskey as he’d just guzzled I was surprised he was able to walk a straight line, but he did—right out the door.

“We had to close up,” I said to Werm.

“What happened?”

“We fought over Connie. It’s a long story.”

Werm knew better than to ask me for details. He was getting pretty good at reading my moods. It was a good survival skill for a fledgling.

Werm went into the back room and returned with a mop and bucket. A goth couple walked in sporting spiky black hair and matching eyeliner. They took one look at the blood and busted walls and walked right out. “Come again,” Werm called out to them. He sighed and took the bucket to the sink behind the bar to fill it. “Whatever happened, at least it looks like you guys got it out of your systems.”

“For now.” I picked up the bottle Seth left behind and took a long drink.

Werm began mopping up the blood. “Oh, man, remind me not to piss you off—at least, any more than usual.” He looked at me closely for the first time. “Or Seth for that matter. You look like shit. Half your chin’s gone.”

“It’ll grow back. You should have seen the other guy.”

“I did. He wasn’t as bad.”

“I guess he was more motivated.” I finished off the bottle and gritted my teeth. “I thought I told you to lie low.”

“I was about to. I had to stock up on supplies first. I was low on blood. Um, without getting into what you guys fought about, can I ask you if your plan is still on the table?”

“Yeah, it’s coming along just dandy. Oh, incidentally, you don’t have to hide now. Connie snapped out of the slayer trance. She’s as sober as a judge.”

“Thank God,” Werm said.

I caught him up on all that had happened since I’d talked to him. Almost all, that is.

“Shit, Jack, that was close. Do you think Diana, Reedrek, and Ulrich are really dead?”

“It’s hard to say. We still have to keep our guard up.”

“And Eleanor’s really gone back to the underworld?”

“Yeah. That I’m sure of.”

Werm grinned as he mopped. “So if the double-deads and bad vamps are gone and the nuclear threat is over, maybe we can relax a little.”

“Knock wood when you say that, man.” I belched, propped my elbow on the bar, and rested the good side of my chin in my hand. Drinking too much sometimes made me melancholy. This would be one of those nights. “We can’t ever relax again.”

“Jack, I’ve been thinking.” Werm wrung out the mop and took a swipe at the last of the blood.

“Good on you. What about?”

“Tobey and Iban have a whole coven of vampires, but they’re too far away to help us.”

“You missed a spot.” I pointed out a bit of gore, probably part of my missing chunk of chin, that was stuck to the wall.

“Bro, are you listening?”

“Yeah, yeah, go on.”

Werm dabbed at the wall with a rag. “There’s a whole bunch of bad vampires in Europe just waiting for the old lords to decide how to come at us next, right?”

“Yeah. Right.” I could tell that Werm had been formulating what he thought was a cunning plan. “Go on,” I said.

“Um, well, don’t you think it’s time we reevaluate our policy of not making any more vampires?”

I sighed. I couldn’t honestly say that I hadn’t considered that myself, but I’d always been bound by William’s philosophy. “Werm, the whole point of being a good vampire is not to impose our undeath on human beings.”

“But what if a person
wanted
to be a vampire? Like me.” Werm put away his mop and bucket and came to sit beside me at the bar.

“I thought you were having second thoughts yourself. Not that they’ll do you any good. What’s done is done.”

“I do sometimes, but if I had it to do all over again, I’d still choose this life, er, existence.”

“What are you getting at, exactly?”

“I know people who—”

“Wait. Wait. Wait.” My head began to throb. Werm was giving me a hangover already and I was still drunk. “Don’t tell me you’ve been lining up volunteers. If I hear you’ve gone and revealed us to some of your goth pals I’m going to have to bite you.”

“No, Jack, I wouldn’t do that. But I do know three people who would make perfect vampires.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Werm’s idea of a perfect vampire was. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve got
skills,
” he said enthusiastically. “They’re good with computers; they know a lot about engineering, physics, all kinds of things that could come in handy.”

“I’m listening,” I said. “What else?”

“They don’t have any family. Nobody would delve into their business or question why they only come out at night. They’re looking for a place to
belong,
Jack.”

“Hmmm. Are they tough? Would they make good fighters?”

Werm looked at me for a moment and blinked. “They’re
really
smart.”

“Give me another drink,” I moaned. Werm’s statement was the equivalent of being told a girl had a good personality when you’d asked if she was pretty.

“You’ve overserved yourself already,” Werm stated. “Will you promise to at least think about what I’ve said? We need to build a team.”

“Listen, buddy, I know you mean well,” I began carefully. I would have to choose my words with caution so I wouldn’t hurt the little guy’s feelings. “I need people who are strong fighters. If we get attacked I want to be able to score some clean kills without having to look over my shoulder and worry about protecting people.”

“Is that how you feel about me, Jack? Do you think I’m someone who’s more of a liability than an asset?” Werm kept a stiff upper lip, but I knew he was wounded.