Matters of the Blood Page 25

  Another flash of lightning silhouetted the pale hair of a figure standing near the porch swing. I scampered up the steps as quickly as I could.

  "Hey, there,” I said, as I stepped onto the porch. “Sorry about that last, I banged my knee.” I heard the person come closer. “Andrea?"

  Just as I realized I couldn't possibly be her, a big hand clamped over my mouth. A flash of pain seared the back of my skull and then I felt nothing.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  "You think you're so fucking smart, don't you?” The rough voice matched the gritty feel in my mouth, the pounding in my head. My knee still throbbed, the bloody scrape on my hand less so, but still uncomfortable.

  I was tied up, duct tape binding my hands behind me, my knees bent awkwardly. I was on the floorboards of a car, stuffed into the space in front of the passenger seat like a bag of old laundry. I winced, a bruise on my head making itself felt as I tried to ease the cramping in my knees. He must have used brute force to cram me in; I was too tall to fit into the small awkward space using anything less.

  Evan laughed, making me realize he was definitely no match for Adam. His voice, his laugh were no more powerful than mine. Maybe I did have some natural immunity or something. Or maybe my connection with Adam negated the natural vampire mojo. I didn't really care. I just hoped that Adam would soon find out where we were.

  "Don't play games with me, little girl,” Evan said. “I know you're awake. Felt you. Don't try to hide."

  "Not hiding,” I muttered, clenching my teeth to keep from screaming at him. “Just not wanting to look at you."

  He chortled again. “Whatever. Adam thinks he's the smart one. Taking up with a stupid human chick, not hunting, not living."

  I croaked out a laugh. “Last time I looked, you're not so much the living one yourself."

  "At least I'm still a vampire,” Evan said. “Not some poor excuse for one. Some king. He didn't even know your stupid cousin was selling pints of human blood right under his very nose."

  "You like that word, don't you?” I shifted my position a little.

  "What word?"

  "Stupid."

  He laughed again, this time I felt the car slowing. Were we there yet? Wherever the “there” was he was taking me. I somehow didn't think we were going on an outing to Sea World.

  Evan put the car into park and reached down toward me. His hand grabbed the back of my shirt and he heaved, forcing me out of the enclosed space and onto the passenger seat beside him.

  I grunted as my bruised head came into contact with the bottom of the dash on the way out.

  "Sorry,” he said, an evil grin crossing his face. “Well ... not really."

  He shifted back into gear and eased the car back onto the road. I looked around. No lights, just the jutting beams of the car's headlights stabbing through the darkness, illuminating the stretch of narrow Hill Country road. We could be anywhere in Rio Seco county, or anywhere else within a two hundred mile radius. There were so many quiet little back roads in the Hill Country, roads that rarely saw humans pass over them. Of course, not seeing that now, since neither of us were. But he didn't seem to know that part ... about me, that is. He'd called me human. Maybe I could use that to my advantage.

  "I repeat, why are we stupid?” I asked.

  "You, your cousin, those ridiculous brothers, all of you wandering around in your own little worlds, no one knowing the full truth of the others."

  "By that you mean—?"

  He laughed. “If I tell you, I'd have to kill you."

  Okay, not going there. Not that I had any doubts about this little road trip. I doubted he was taking me somewhere for my health. I was pretty sure he meant to drain me and dump me.

  I stared at him, trying to get a clue from his expression, but there was none. None at all. With humans, you can always tell something, even from professional killers whose faces don't reveal emotion. Vampires—most beings like us—can shut down, become blanks, emotion swallowed like so much light swallowed by a black hole. Evan wasn't leaking anything. Not fear, not even the glee of a criminal who'd gotten away with something. Of course, he probably didn't think of himself as a criminal. He really wasn't. He'd just taken advantage of a situation to provide himself with food. Jean Valjean of the vampire set. Well, maybe not. He'd killed Marty. Even though humans were prey to him, that was still unforgivable—at least in my book.

  "Where are we going?"

  He didn't answer, just kept driving in silence, the only sound a small under-breath hum that I doubted he even knew he was making.

  Some time later, we pulled off the main road and drove through what was once a gate. The quarry. We were at the old abandoned limestone quarry. Where Carlton had found the Albrights’ truck. Not good. I saw no sign of the truck, nor of any police activity. They were probably long gone. I didn't know how long I'd been unconscious, but if Evan had put me in the car directly and driven here without detouring, I'd estimate it to have been about an hour or so. Long enough for our dear Sheriff and his crew to have towed away the truck and gone away themselves. I wondered if Tucker had ever made it out to the scene. Not that it made any difference now. Now that ... shit. I should have called him when we found out about Evan. He might have ... Oh well, no use crying over calls not made. I'd have to figure this out on my own.

  Evan drove through the gate and onto the quarry grounds as far as he could without driving the car into the quarry itself.

  A raw hole in the ground, the pit reached nearly a hundred yards across and about fifty or more front to back, kind of like an unfinished football field. The place had been abandoned about twenty years earlier when the cement company declared bankruptcy and couldn't unload the business.

  No one ever came out here anymore, not even teens in search of a quiet place to neck. It was just a little too creepy, even for the I-dare-you types. Especially since that girl had died out here. Lots easier to trespass on Wild Moon grounds and hang out at the lake.

  He pulled me out of the car. “Walk,” he commanded, forcing me in front of him and poking me to get me started.

  "You really think you can get away with this?” I asked, trying to sound sure I'd get rescued. It didn't work. I wasn't even fooling myself. That didn't stop Mr. Macho Vampire Man from bragging, though. I guess there was a reason for the old clich?. Bad guys really did like to hear themselves talk. Egos are us.

  "You think you're so fucking smart. They all did. We were doing this right under your eyes, under Adam's eyes. Your greedy little cousin was selling us blood."

  "Blood? I thought he was helping you all hunt in secret. The animals?” Okay, so I already knew this but I figured the longer I kept talking, the more time I'd have for someone to come find me.

  "Hunt?” Evan laughed. “That wasn't my game. Why the hell would I want animal blood if I could get human? Newly dead. Almost as good as fresh from the living cow.” He licked his lips, an obscene gesture coming from him.

  "How much could that get you?” I snapped at him, too tired to watch my words anymore. “C'mon, a human body can only produce about five and half liters, not exactly much of a feast. Besides, it doesn't last long, does it? I mean, being dead and all."

  I lost my attitude as he returned my stare, an evil grin widening across his face. “Do you think we bothered to wait?"

  "Son of a bitch,” I whispered as the truth sank in. Why wait when you could provide your own supply, laundering it like the mob laundered drug money? In this case, laundered through the county's mortuary, the logical place for human bodies. So logical, in fact, that no one ever clued in to the recent upswing in deaths.

  "Yeah, it wasn't hard to convince those two that keeping a steady supply coming to us would be worth their while. They were getting tired of the whole animal scam. Too messy."

  The Albrights. Of course. It made sense: rope in two ex-cons as tired of Rio Seco's limitations as I was, but a hell of a lot more willing to cross the invisible lin
e. Poaching wasn't enough anymore.

  "But how? No one ever knew."

  He smiled, confident in his cleverness. “Your cousin sold a lot of those pre-need contracts. All Derek had to do was get the list. From there, it was easy to help them along on their way."

  So Marty's ability and salesmanship made it happen. This was too logical. That's how he hooked up with Evan's group in the first place. He'd gone out to the Wild Moon, hoping to increase his pre-need funeral services income, and Evan (via the missing Lise, no doubt) had latched onto a sure thing.

  Evan laughed again. “No one ever noticed. All those humans, so pleased that Uncle and Auntie didn't suffer anymore. Helped that we only chose the weak and already dying. Too easy."

  Culling the herd—just like Niko wanted to do with the deer. I suppose it made a creepy kind of sense, especially if you didn't consider yourself human. Evan was a predator, like my brothers, like my father, like me or even Adam. Except we'd chosen to keep our predatory habits humane.

  My family only hunted four-legged beasts, and only the natural way, chasing them, selecting the weakest ... Oh, god, he was right. It was the same thing. If you didn't consider yourself to be part of the same species, then what was the problem? I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry again. Was this what I would eventually become? Vampires were once human, but me, I wasn't, not one bit of me.

  No. No matter what, I thought of myself as equal to my human friends. They were people, not prey.

  "Did he know ... did my cousin know about this?” I had to know.

  Evan's laugh relaxed me a little. “No, he was as stupid as Adam. He thought that he'd just gotten lucky, all those people starting to die on cue. What an idiot."

  Well, yeah, he had a point there. Marty was—had been—the king of ostriches, ready to ignore evidence he didn't like, too easily swayed by promises of easy money, riches without effort.

  "C'mon.” Evan pushed me down the path, my feet sliding along the slick gravel as I tried to keep my balance. The way was steep, meant for strong work-booted men to travel in the bright sunshine of a dry Texas day, not for a still-bound non-human in the wet stillness of a dark night.

  When we reached bottom, I stumbled, staggering forward a few steps as I avoided falling and scraping my already bruised knees. Evan caught up to me, and caught me under my arms as I began to lose my balance.

  His kindness lasted only a few seconds. Leading me a few more steps, he shoved me to my knees, up against the west wall of the pit, directly across from where we'd descended, right next to a small white cross surrounded by plastic flowers.

  This was where Antonia Garcia had died more than fifteen years ago, a dare gone bad after a night of drinking too much Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill and smoking far too many joints. She'd tried to climb the wall of the pit, avoiding the footpath on the other side, avoiding the small road once used by the workers to get the heavy equipment to the quarry floor. A bet, a rite of passage of sorts, but she'd slipped near the top and had fallen more than thirty feet, her sixteen-year-old skull no match for the stony ground. The Garcia family planted the cross the next week. It remained there as a silent tribute to the stupidity of teenagers. That was the last night anyone had used the quarry as a trysting place.

  This was not where I was going to die. Not if I could help it.

  I groaned in pain and rolled onto my side, scrambling away from Evan and trying to sit up. There was a slight depression there, almost like the entrance to a natural cave, except this one was most definitely man-made, scooped out by equipment meant to dig the once-lucrative limestone out of the earth. I tried to scoot back against the wall, but something was in my way. Something soft, something that smelled.

  "Watch out for the garbage,” Evan sniggered.

  Garbage? That didn't feel like ... My bound hands brushed something behind me. Cloth, flannel, skin. Holy fuck. I craned my neck and strained to see. A large irregular blob, darker than the surrounding shadows resolved into two distinct shapes. Not Tucker. I'd have known. He hadn't come back from his earlier reconnaissance of the quarry, maybe he was still poking around. The whole area around the pit was undeveloped. A great place to hide evidence. Of course, I was here with the person that killed my cousin. Too bad I wasn't telepathic. The only thing I could hope was that Tucker would come back. If he were snooping around in wolf mode, he'd have had to leave his clothes and car somewhere hidden. I was hoping that “somewhere” was near here.

  "Who is it?” I whispered.

  "Who do you think?” I couldn't see the sneer that I could hear in his voice.

  "After your cousin died, the Albright brothers stopped being useful to me,” he said. “I couldn't let them just leave."

  "But the police were here earlier, my ... friend, the sheriff.” I'd almost said “my brother,” but stopped in time. I didn't want Evan to know that Tucker had anything to do with all of this.

  "Don't be any stupider than you already are,” he said. “I hid while they were here. Then I went back to get you."

  Clouds scudded across, revealing the moon. Not full, but close. The wind picked up a little. I could tell the weather was changing. I could see a smile beginning on Evan's face.

  "Okay,” I said. “So I'm here. What do you want with me?"

  "You're an inconvenience.” His words were calm, matter of fact.

  "I get that.” I tried to stay as calm as he was. “What do you plan to do with me?"

  "I thought about that a long time,” he said. “I could take you, drain you, turn you.” He licked his lips, a smacking sound both hungry and lustful all at the same time. His eyes glittered in the darkness. “But that would be a problem."

  I didn't say anything. I knew where this was going, but I wasn't about to put words in his mouth.

  "I won't turn you, but I can take you."

  Take. Did he mean ... ?

  "I bet your blood would be sweet. I haven't had living human blood for too many years to count. Your cousin only let Lise drink. Wasn't much of an equal opportunity whore."

  Again, I could see that, too. Sharing blood was too much like sex. Was sex for all intents and purposes. Marty didn't do same-sex partying. But I wasn't going to let out one of my smartass comments. No way. No point in tempting fate.

  "So why'd you kill him? Jealous?” I asked, my good intentions lasting long enough for my brain to make the words form on my tongue.

  "Are you crazy?” Evan screamed at me. “Whoever killed him totally fucked up my life.” He started toward me—and the unmistakable ringing whine of a ricochet echoed throughout the quarry pit, a split second before the pain of the bullet tore through my side. My bruised knee smashed into the dusty ground, making me scream in agony. As my head hit the gravel, another bullet ripped into my thigh...

  In a haze, I watched as Evan landed slightly in front of me, his body shielding me from whoever was firing.

  I doubted he was doing this out of the goodness of his shriveled vampire heart, especially since his head had hit the ground with an audible thump. He'd been shot, too.

  Can vampires die from a bullet wound? Bloody hell. This hadn't ever come up in any of my conversations with Adam. Not that I cared so much, considering that whoever shot Evan was bound to be on my side of things, but I needed to know if he could die because I didn't want to be stuck down here with a wounded vampire getting more and more pissed off. He'd already threatened to drain me, this would probably just make things worse.

  I was able to scoot around, gradually leaning my head out, still not allowing myself to get too close to him. I needed to see where the shots were coming from. My injuries throbbed, but I ignored them as best I could. They weren't life-threatening, at least not yet.

  Silence. No more shots. No. Wait. I could hear someone scrabbling down the side of the pit, loose gravel tumbling ahead of him or her. It wasn't Tucker. He didn't do guns. He'd just have shifted into wolf form and jumped Evan.

  I scooted back a little and then lay still, hoping whoever it was c
ouldn't see us in the pitch dark. The person kept moving, slowly, as if testing the ground ahead, a smart move, considering the slippery path.

  The smell of blood began to seep into my nose, rich, fresh, recently spilled. Not mine. Evan was bleeding. A lot, I hoped. If I were lucky, he'd bleed out and I'd be safe, at least from him. I tried to avoid the thought that I could bleed out, too. At least I was still conscious.

  A flash of light behind me made me cringe. I could barely move. Superior strength notwithstanding, I hurt and I could be hurting a heck of a lot more if my mystery savior turned out to be another bad guy. It was most definitely possible that Evan's enemies were not necessarily my friends.

  "Miss Keira.” The words slid quietly across the gravel, riding the air as lightly as a piece of down fluff escaping a battered jacket. “Miss Keira?” The whisper came again, almost too soft to hear.

  "Boris?” Thank goodness. He probably hadn't seen me when he was shooting.

  "Yes, it's me,” he answered.

  "Thank—” I started to say.

  "Is he the only one?"

  I nodded.

  "How did you find me?"

  "I followed you. I was at the ranch."

  Boris set his flashlight down, tucked his rifle under his arm, took something out of his pocket and leaned over Evan. A flash of metal, a swift jab and the hypodermic needle sank into Evan's exposed throat. The vampire convulsed once, twice. A tortured groaning sound escaped, shuddering past his lips, then all was still. He was dead. True death. I held my breath, waiting for the disintegration, the dusting. It didn't happen. He didn't conveniently vanish in a cloud of dust with special sound effects. He just lay there, just another corpse. But I could tell he was gone. The energy that had been there, unnoticed until it didn't exist, left an empty space. Whatever animated the vampire was missing.