The Vampire's Revenge (2 page)

I took hold of her shoulders and gently pushed her away from me, breaking the suction lock she had on my neck. “Remember our agreement,” I muttered. “I help you with the demon killing, and you don’t eat me.”

“You’re going to get a nice bloodred hickey,” she teased, ignoring me.

I rubbed at the spot on my neck. It was difficult getting used to the new Connie. Before, she had been a no-nonsense woman. Oh, she had a great sense of humor and could be as playful and fun-loving as anyone, but when it came to matters of life and death—which it came to often because she’s a cop—she was as serious as a heart attack and always in control. But the way she went about catching demons as a slayer was altogether different from the way she went about catching regular bad guys as a detective.

When she was activated as the Slayer, she’d turned wild, unpredictable, and vicious. Travis Rubio, who was her father and one of the only vampires who had faced down slayers and lived to tell the tale, said she would achieve more self-control as she matured. But for now, to her way of thinking, the only good vampire was a dead vampire. I hoped that as time went on, she would develop some discrimination. I longed to be able to reason with her, to convince her to fight at our side against the evil ones. I only hoped I could keep her from killing me before we reached an agreement.

And I also hoped to keep my beloved Melaphia, the voodoo queen, from killing Connie to avenge William’s death. What was done was done. He was the first vampire whom Connie had slain, and nothing could bring him back now.

The whole situation really was a nightmare, but William would have been the first to approve of my strategy of convincing Connie to come over to our side. And he would have been the first to forgive her, too. An evil vampire named Damien, with the help of two other vampires, Eleanor and Reedrek, had manipulated the time and place of Connie’s official switchover into slayer mode, and William had been in that wrong place at the wrong time.

As I studied the predatory gleam in Connie’s eye and the way she licked the last drop of my blood from her ruby lips, I figured my efforts to keep her from killing me had at best a fifty-fifty chance. She made a little feint toward my neck and I dodged away.

“You’re no fun,” she said, thrusting out her bottom lip in the pretty pout that still drove me to distraction. “And you and Werm are not much help, either. The only demons we’ve killed are the ones I could have identified myself because they have scales and stuff. I thought you were going to help me sniff out the ones who aren’t so obvious, the ones who chose to take over human bodies.”

“Oh, yeah, that,” I began as if I’d forgotten our deal. “I’ll be doing plenty of that. But we have to get rid of the obvious ones first so the humans won’t panic.” I pointed to the pile of dirt that used to be a monster. “I mean, if this guy had decided to wander into Clary’s, sit down at the lunch counter, and order up a plate of humans on the half shell, it would have made the national news, and we can’t have that, can we?”

“No, I guess not,” Connie agreed reasonably. I wondered if her fellow cops had noticed the recent change in her. Maybe she went back to acting normal when she wasn’t in the presence of vampires.

“And don’t forget that Saint Patrick’s Day is in a few days. Tourists are already flocking in here from all over the country. Humans drunk on green beer and staggering around unfamiliar streets in the dark are going to be easy pickings for the demons. On the other hand, maybe you and the other cops can write off any demon sightings as the ravings of knee-walking-drunk tourists. Either way, we’ve got to work fast.”

“Is this fast enough for you?” In a move too quick for me to see, she grabbed the collar of my denim shirt and brought my face close to hers again. “Just make sure you’re ready to step up when the time is right. And be fast yourself or I’ll send you back to the underworld so quick your head will spin faster than that monster’s did,
lover boy.
”

I winced at her sarcastic tone. Technically, my heart stopped beating the night William made me a vampire on a Civil War battlefield, but it truly died the night Connie stopped loving me.

The police radio on her hip squawked and distracted her enough for me to slip out of her grasp. I don’t do cop-speak but the code the dispatcher announced made Connie frown. “I’m on duty, so I’ve got to take that call,” she said. “We’ll pick this up later. Keep your cell phone turned on or I’ll have to come looking for you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” This whole situation might have been a lot easier to deal with if I wasn’t so damned turned on by authoritative women. The closer Connie came to killing me, the hotter I was for her. As she turned to walk away, the sight of her handcuffs jingling against her hips gave me a thrill all the way down to my toes. Man, oh man.

It was harder to stick with
the plan
every day that passed, and a major part of it was to keep my hands—not to mention the rest of me—off Connie Jones. Because the plan was the only thing that might save her, the good vamps, my human family, and my unborn child. It was a good plan; unfortunately, it depended on elements that I couldn’t control as closely as I needed to.

That thought reminded me that I needed to check on the status of Seth Walker, because even though I was the man
with
the plan, Seth was the key to its success.

Seth was the werewolf I hoped would take Connie and my baby away to safety—and as far from me as he could get them. Every time I thought about that my chest felt like someone was twisting a stake in it. I guess you could say Seth Walker was both my best friend and my worst enemy.

From his usual place behind the bar, Werm mixed me a Bloody Mary without the celery but with real blood—my favorite kind. I saluted him with the glass. “Here’s blood in your eye,” I muttered.

As usual, my diminutive vampire pal was festooned with silver-colored piercings. His ears bristled with hoops. Bars with balls on the ends garlanded his lips and eyebrows. He’d had to give up the actual silver in favor of surgical steel because the sterling had started giving him hives. Silver’s not much better for vampires than it is for werewolves.

On top of that his hair was dyed goth black and spiked with enough gel to stop up the Savannah waterworks. He wore silver-studded black leather from head to toe.

“So, what are you hearing about the demon situation now that we offed that latest slimeball?” I asked. I’d agreed to invest in Werm’s bar, the Portal, in exchange for the information he could wheedle out of people from behind the bar. And I use the word
people
loosely.

The Portal attracted a diverse clientele composed of everyone from young art students from SCAD to tragically hip professionals to adventurous yuppies to the downright dangerous denizens of the dark like us. That is, folks who hid in plain sight by masquerading as human. Werm kept his ear to the ground, plying the shadow dwellers with the poisons of their choice to get them to cough up information that might prove useful.

Werm lowered his voice to a pitch only another vampire could hear. “I think you and Connie and I have destroyed almost all of the double-dead vampires who were careless enough to come up from the underworld in the forms that Satan cursed them with,” he said. “The ones who are left are the ones who had enough brains to take over human bodies.”

I drained the blood cocktail. “That’s good blood,” I said. “Bovine?”

“Equine,” Werm corrected. “You don’t seem surprised by my news.”

“Connie says the reports of obvious monsters have dwindled down to a trickle, thank the gods. She grabbed all those calls as they came in from dispatch, but they were getting really hard to explain away. That guy we just took care of not far from the historic district might have been the last of the easy pickings. At least that’s the way I’ve got it figured.”

“The historic district is too close to the tourists for comfort,” Werm said, wincing at the memory. “Especially with Saint Patrick’s Day only a few nights away.”

Saint Patrick’s Day in Savannah is quite a citywide party. We have a large community of Irish immigrants who have put on a legendary annual celebration for almost two hundred years. There is a real Mardi Gras atmosphere, complete with a parade, and pubs dye the beer green and make sure a good time is had by all. If you don’t have a good time, chances are you’d be too drunk to remember it.

“We’ve been really lucky that the existence of the demon world—us included—didn’t explode onto the front pages and lead stories of every news outlet in the country,” Werm said.

“Tell me about it.” The police department wrote off the public’s initial reports of monsters stalking the city as mass psychosis following the earthquake that had rocked Savannah less than a week ago. Unbeknownst to the humans, the trembler was the old lords’ attempt to open the gates of hell, freeing twice-killed vampires to rise again and wreak havoc on humanity. Mel had gotten the voodoo gods to close the portal but not before a couple dozen double-deads were freed and William was trapped in the underworld with no way to get back to us.

“So now the real work begins,” Werm speculated, pulling on a longneck beer. “The balance of the demons will have to be sniffed out one by one.”

I heard the slight break in Werm’s voice as he described the situation, and I tried hard not to grin. He was my second now, and although he wasn’t much of a fighter, he was learning and getting tougher by the day. Even more important, he was willing to do whatever I asked. “Things are going to be dicey all right,” I said. “As long as it takes, you, me, and Connie will work our way through the rest of them. Hopefully, though, Seth will take Connie away soon. Be prepared for you and me to soldier on by ourselves.”

“You’ve got so much on your shoulders, Jack. I want to be able to help more.” Werm slid a catalog onto the bar in front of me. “I’m going to order a pair of these sai. Aren’t they great?”

I looked at the picture of the sharp objects. They looked like rotisserie forks. “Son, how many times do I have to tell you? A vampire’s already got his weapons.” Glancing over my shoulder to make sure no humans were near, I unsheathed my fangs.

“But yours are so much bigger than mine,” Werm complained, fingering his own fangs.

“They’ll grow in. Meanwhile, you do what you can.” Werm had never been vampire material, but he’d realized that much too late. He’d been a wannabe, begging me to turn him, shadowing my every move until he’d come to the attention of William’s evil sire, Reedrek. Dear old Granddad Reedrek forced William to turn Werm and the rest is history. But the lad wasn’t entirely useless. What he lacked in muscle he often made up for in smarts. If I had to be honest, he’d saved my bacon a time or two.

Werm continued to look uneasy. “What is it?” I said, motioning him to hand me a longneck.

“Are you sure this plan of yours is going to work? I mean, what if Connie figures out she’s pregnant before Seth gets a chance to seduce her? Then she’ll know the baby isn’t his. And what even makes you think he can talk her into moving away with him when Connie knows she’s needed here in Savannah to fight the double-dead demons? She’s a really dedicated cop, ya know.”

“It’s gonna work,” I growled, “because it has to. Have you heard from Seth?”

Werm inclined his head toward the door. “Speak of the werewolf.”

Before I had a chance to turn around, the scent of shape shifter wafted to my sensitive nose. I glanced behind me to see a tall, broad-shouldered man wading through the crowd. When he saw me he scowled. I could hear the rumble in his throat from my bar stool.

Seth was the police chief of a small town in north Georgia. He had been on sabbatical in Savannah to straighten out a drug-dealing werewolf pack, but wound up becoming their new alpha after he’d had to dispatch their old leader to that big kennel in the sky. He volunteered to help the Savannah PD in the aftermath of the earthquake, then had briefly disappeared to take care of business back home. He and Connie had a history: he’d fallen in love with her when he was her firearms instructor at the police academy. I suspected she’d loved him back in those days.

When they met again here in Savannah, Connie and I were already involved; Seth, my best friend, had the decency to keep his distance. But it was a new ball game now, and Seth was more than willing to pick up where he left off.

“Hey, Seth, welcome back,” Werm said, handing the werewolf a cold longneck.

“Thanks,” he muttered, seating himself on the bar stool next to mine.

“Did you get things ready for you and Connie to move north?” I asked him as casually as I could.

“She didn’t tell you?” Seth asked.

“What?”

“Before I left she told me she wouldn’t move. I tried to reason with her. I told her that if she came with me to north Georgia I could protect her from those European vampires who are gunning for her now. But she says she has to track down all those vampires that came up from hell.”

“I can do that without her,” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. True, it would be easier with her help, but I could do the job myself one bloodsucker at a time. Especially if Werm pitched in now and then.

“She says she’s the Slayer and it’s her responsibility.” Seth held up his hand when I started to sputter out all the reasons he had to get Connie away
now.
“I know. I know. I tried. Remember we’re dealing with a force of nature here. Even more now than she was before.”

I ran my hand through my hair in frustration. This just wouldn’t do. William had been smuggling peace-loving European vampires into Savannah for the last couple of hundred years. They would come into port and be assigned a coven somewhere else on the Continent, but eventually the Council got wind of his activities. The old lords, a.k.a. the Council, targeted William as a warning to others not to try to escape their influence. Savannah became a hotbed of evil vampire attacks.

The Slayer had succeeded where the old lords failed, and her coming-out party would be old news to the Council by this time. Reedrek—through his contacts on the Continent—would have already warned them of the Slayer. They would come for her any day. Seth was the only person she trusted completely, and with good reason. He had to get her away.