"If any consolation, inside your head is much nicer than his."
"Thanks."
Lord Machado's memories.
A giant pyramid, deep in the jungle. The midnight moon fat and heavy over us. The climb to the top of the huge, ancient thing, covered in strange, faded carvings, leaving us sweat-soaked and exhausted beneath our armor. Far removed from the conquered city, nearly two weeks deep into the trackless wilderness, and this lone edifice was the only thing to be seen.
This was the Place of Power.
The sacrifice was prepared.
Tonight was the night. Tonight the ceremony would be comp—
The vision suddenly ended. I was sitting on the steps of the church. The Old Man jerked his hands back in surprise. His eyes widened behind his glasses.
"What happened? Why did the memory stop?" I felt as if I had been on the verge of learning something. I did not know what, but something important about stopping the Cursed One.
"Boy. You must go. Great danger comes!" He grabbed his cane, holding it in his frail hands like it was a weapon. The reaction seemed purely instinctual.
"What?" I jumped to my feet, but the imaginary world of the battle-damaged village was still as unnaturally quiet as ever. "What comes?"
"Go!" he shouted.
I woke with a start and flung the sheets aside. It was dark inside the little guest room, but I knew right where I had left my weapons. I reached down and grabbed Abomination, my finger flipped the selector down to semi auto, and I waited. The room was quiet except for my breathing and the pounding of blood in my head. I listened. The house itself was eerily silent.
"Owen."
I pointed the shotgun at the voice but froze before my finger moved to the trigger. Julie's form was silhouetted in the faint light coming from the window. I gasped and moved the muzzle aside.
"Julie? I almost shot you." I was surprised. I had not sensed her until she had spoken. She glided across the room toward me. In the dark, I could barely make out that she was wearing nothing but a small nightgown that stirred slightly in the breeze.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. It was a stupid question.
"Shh." She climbed onto the bed. She brushed the shotgun aside as she crawled over my legs, hiking up the flimsy nightgown as she went. Julie's lips sought mine, found them. She pushed me down, kissing me, running her face down my neck. Her hands pulled at my shirt, caressing the lines of scar tissue across my chest.
I responded. Clumsily I rubbed my hands over her body, feeling the silky gown slide about over her skin. I forgot about my dream, I forgot about the warning. Ever since I had met her I had wanted to be with her, but I had doubted that it would ever happen. I doubted, but apparently I had been wrong.
I was in love with Julie Shackleford, and she had come to me in the night. I did not care about anything other than that.
The breeze stung the sweat on my arms.
Breeze?
Why was my window open?
I froze. She did not stop moving against me. She licked my neck hungrily, excitedly. My throat was damp. I could not feel her breath.
She was not breathing.
Realization hit me like a ton of bricks. "NO!" I shouted as I twisted away.
Seemingly surprised at the interruption, she fought me, pushing herself down against my throat. I took my hands from her body and grabbed her by the hair. I tried to pull her head away from my neck. She was stronger than I was, impossibly strong. Using my weight and a whole lot of desperation, I rolled off of the bed and took her with me. We crashed to the floor.
Razor-white teeth flashed in the moonlight. She was still trying to bite me. I struggled, shouting for help, and she swatted me in the face. My cranium bounced off of the floorboards.
In the last minute, I had been asleep, surprised, confused, then horny, followed by terrified, but now I was just pissed off.
I hit her again and again. She jumped off of me with unnatural speed, landing on her feet. I kicked at her, but she caught my bare ankle, picked me up as if I was a child, and swung me violently into the wall. I impacted sideways, broke several boards and fell painfully to the floor.
She grabbed me by the back of my neck and jerked me to my feet. I grasped her much smaller hands and tried to pry them away; it was a futile effort. I might as well have been bending steel bars. The voice was definitely not Julie's.
"Quit fighting. You belong to me now."
The lights came on. She twisted me around so that I faced the door.
The real Julie Shackleford stood in the doorway, pistol in hand. I looked directly down the.45 caliber hole in the barrel as I heard the safety snick off. This Julie was dressed, armed, and she looked really mad.
"Stinking vamps. You heard him. No means no." She braced herself against the doorjamb, looking for a clear shot. The clamp-like grip around my neck moved me into position as a human shield. I felt another hand grab onto my shoulder as the vampire peered around me. The pain was incredible, and the threat was unspoken. If Julie shot, then the undead would snap my neck.
The grip on my neck intensified, cutting off some of the blood flow to my brain. The vampire spoke. The voice sounded almost like Julie with a more pronounced accent, but somehow dusty with age, as if not used to speaking often.
"Hi, honey… I'm home."
Julie's jaw dropped open in surprise. She blinked several times, and shook her head. It looked like she was about to pass out from shock. The muzzle of her 1911 dipped slightly as her shooting stance fell apart.
"Mom?"
Not good, I thought to myself.
"Julie. You're all grown up. Look at you."
"Mom?" Julie refocused, the gun moved back into position. "But, but you're dead."
The vampire moved me slightly as she conversed with her daughter. "I'm not dead, honey. I'm right here. Everything is going to be just fine."
Holly appeared in the doorway, she raised her rifle and pointed it at my head as well. Now that made me real nervous. Though she was training hard and getting better, she was still a pretty lousy shot. If I had to choose between the emotionally stunned sharpshooter or the Newbie, I knew which one I wanted to take the shot. I managed to grunt out one request.
"Hol… let… Julie… shoot… ugh." The vampire shook me like a rag doll.
"Shut it, blood bag," the creature hissed. "I'm having a conversation here."
"Let him go, bitch," Holly commanded. She tucked her face down tight against the stock and peered through the sights. "Or I'll blow your brains out."
"You can't be here. You haven't been invited," Julie said. She sounded rather confused.
"This is my home," she replied. "I don't need an invitation."
"Mom. Please. This can't be happening. You disappeared. We thought you were dead."
"Come on, honey. You had to have suspected this. You knew what I was working on when I left. You never found my body." I could hear the gentle smile creep into the creature's voice, trying to once again be the loving parent. "I'm just here for your daddy," the vampire said soothingly.
"Julie, you have one fucked up family," Holly stated.
"Ack… Ugh…" I agreed.
I heard rapid speaking in the hallway, a desperate call for help. Trip stepped quickly into the room behind Holly. He still had his cell phone in one hand. He moved off to the side as he raised his subgun. Now I had three weapons pointed at my head, and the triangulation of fire was giving the vampire less room to hide. She backed up, dragging my heavy bulk along easily. We were backed into a corner.
"Mom. How could you become… become one of them?" Julie asked plaintively.
"I didn't have much choice, dear. But once you get used to it, it is wonderful. I can do things that you can't even imagine. I can feel things that would stop your heart if you experienced them. I have eternal youth and beauty. Come with me… We can take your daddy. The change will be good for him. It will fix his mind. We can be a family again."
"Never," Julie said with determination. Her brown eyes narrowed as she concentrated on her front sight.
"Suit yourself, dear. But it beats being a rotting piece of meat… like your boyfriend here is going to be if you don't back the hell off of me." She picked me up off of the ground. I cringed as my vertebrae popped. All pretenses of motherly love vanished. "I didn't want to kill you, honey, but if you push me, then I don't have a choice. I'm taking your daddy back no matter what."
"You got three guns on you. Kind of stupid to be making demands," Holly said. The vampire hissed at her. "I hate vampires, sister, give me a reason."
"I'm a Master now. I'm a queen in my world. You can't even begin to understand what I can do. This is your last chance."
"You're too young to be a Master," Julie stated calmly. She stayed framed in the doorway. The other two slowly began to spread out even further. Holly looked angry. Trip looked scared but determined. Fingers moved onto triggers. Somebody was going to shoot at any second. I could feel it. I tried to make myself as small a target as possible. That is very difficult if you happen to look like me.
"Too young? Am I now? Poor kid. Just like your dad. Nose always in a book, thinking that you understand what's really going on. I was a Hunter once myself. I know what you know. And let me tell you, you're wrong. It isn't about time, honey, it's about the blood. The power is in the blood that makes you, and in the blood that you take. I was made by the strongest of them all, and I've taken so much blood and so many lives that you can't even begin to understand. I have swam in rivers of it. I've torn the life out of ten thousand beating hearts, and you will be next. Now give me your FATHER!" She shouted so loudly that dust shook from the ceiling and all of the humans in the room flinched.
Gretchen appeared in the hallway, short and cloaked in her burkha, armed only with what looked like a stick. She pointed at me and said a single word in a rumble almost as deep as her husbands'. "Pocket."
I reached down, cringing against the pressure on my neck, trying hard to focus and maintain consciousness, my hand touched my pants pocket. There was something inside. I reached in. My fingers felt the lumpy texture of poorly whittled wood. The Old Man's handmade toy.
It could not be there, but it was.
Without thinking, I pulled the impossible little carving out, and stuck it firmly against the hard fingers pressing into my neck. The toy disintegrated in a flash. The undead thing that used to be Susan Shackleford screamed when it touched her, an unbearable howl of burning agony. I was dropped to the ground as her hand burst into blue flames. I hit the floor and rolled away as the other three Hunters reacted and started pulling triggers.
It was the first time that I had seen more than a darkened silhouette of my midnight visitor. She really did look like Julie, but possibly even more hauntingly beautiful, ethereal, even stunning. Pale skin, dark hair, eyes that you could drown in, but then the resemblance stopped. For vampires were unnatural creatures, and right now this one was distracted by a burning hand, long fangs revealed in a frozen scream. A split-second snapshot of confusion and pain, and then the bullets hit.
Impact after impact tore into the creature, spraying black fluids across the room. Holes appeared in the wall behind as bullets passed through tissues and shattered bones. I scrambled for my shotgun as the uninhibited blasts assaulted and damaged my hearing. I grabbed Abomination, swung it around, and still sitting on the floor, fired a nine-round magazine of buckshot into the creature. One hundred and eight silver pellets struck her body in less than a second and a half, and at that limited range, most of them were still impacting as a solid penetrating mass.
The room was filled with drifting smoke from burning flesh and gunpowder. Brass tinkled, steel and plastic thumped on the floor as the four of us simultaneously dropped our spent magazines. I fumbled toward my armor and ammo pouches. Susan Shackleford was pressed solidly into the riddled corner, torn asunder, leaking black fluids, and broken by the carnage that we had unleashed. The flame on her hand gradually died down as she studied it through her shattered visage, seemingly in fascination. The creature stood upright. Her flesh had been pulverized and stripped from her bones.
She laughed at us. A long hard laugh, as if we had provided some serious entertainment. "Hunters are even more pathetic than I remember. I'm a Master now. Don't you understand what that means?" Almost instantly her flesh was whole and white. I blinked, trying to understand how exactly that worked according to the laws of physics. She smiled widely, fangs gleaming. "You can't kill me."
"But we can try," Julie answered as she dropped the slide on a fresh magazine. She snapped the pistol up and shot her mother right between the eyes. The creature's smiling face rocked back briefly. I locked in a fresh magazine of buckshot, but before I could fire, the vampire moved in a blur of speed, crossing the room in a split second, almost too fast to track. Holly was knocked easily aside. Julie's hands were jerked over her head as the vampire grabbed her.
"I offered you immortality, honey. That was not a choice. I'm going to give it to you whether you want it or not," the vampire said in her sweet Southern belle voice. I snapped my shotgun up, but stopped, fearful of striking Julie. Trip's UMP was reloaded, and he had a clean angle. He lifted the gun to fire, but it was torn out of his surprised hands. The vampire had moved so quickly that I had not even seen it strike. "You can either come back as a dimwitted slave, or you can partake of my blood and taste of my power."
Julie struggled to release herself. "Never!" she shouted.
A small black flash charged in from the hallway. Gretchen screamed some sort of battle cry. She shook a narrow stick above her head, complete with feathers, leather braids, and what looked like a shrunken head. The vampire hissed, let go of Julie, and retreated back into the room. Gretchen pursued, still shaking her totem and shouting in her strange gravel-voiced language. The vampire fell back, cringing and recoiling, until it struck the wall.
"Holy symbol!" Holly shouted as she aimed her Vepr and pulled the trigger. The roar of the.308 was tremendous in the enclosed space. If I lived through this I was probably going to be deaf. The bullet tore into the vampire's side. The rest of us followed suit, firing over and around Gretchen, who continued to wave the stick and hold the vampire back. I emptied my second magazine in a heartbeat, and grabbed another one. My hands were a blur as I reloaded. Our lives depended on putting some hurt into the evil thing, and I moved faster than I ever had before. Abomination barked again and again as I put solid silver slugs into the monster.
Susan Shackleford disappeared. More holes were torn into the already damaged wall before we realized and stopped shooting. One moment she had been there, the next she was gone. The shredded nightgown fell to the floor and lay in a puddle of black ooze. A thick gray mist spiraled slowly out of the open window.