I could smell him everywhere now. Couldn’t tell Bruiser that. “Gotta go,” I whispered. I hit the END button, the MUTE button to kill any ring, and closed the phone, tucking it back into the travel pack. I melted into a shadow, a vacant house’s wall at my back.
Beast’s and my skills and strengths are different. Usually, Beast found a lair; I came back by daylight, when vamps’ activity level was inhibited, going in human form for the kill. Her tracking skills were better than mine. My fighting skills were better than hers—only because I had hands to grip a stake and cross, as she often assured me.
No vamp had ever considered Beast’s spoor a threat, so I didn’t mind leaving her scent on vamp territory. But I was leaving human spoor on the vamp’s terrain. He could hunt me now, if he wanted. Follow me home. Unless I killed him, true-dead.
I stopped and shook out my arms, stretched my neck. Wished I was wearing boots. And clothes that covered more skin. Jeans. Leather. My mail collar. Crap. I was dressed all wrong. I unstrapped the vamp-killer and its sheath from beneath my skirts, reached between my legs and pulled the back hem of my skirt up and tucked it into my waistband in front, making trousers. The vamp-killer I strapped back over the fabric, on the outside of my thigh, the strap holding the skirt hem in place. Uncontrolled young vamps had one thing on their minds. Dinner. Though some preferred other sites to feed from, this vamp was a neck sucker, so the extra crosses went around my neck in plain sight. I was hoping the crosses would deter him for a single, crucial instant if he attacked me and went to feed.
I adjusted the two full-length stakes in my turban—one tacky with vamp blood—and tucked the collapsible ones into my jog bra. Holding the vamp-killer in my right hand and the cross in my left, I moved into shadow, following the scent.
The broken and pocked street had no streetlights; shattered glass littered the roadbed; spent cartridges had fallen here and there. Large housing units were dotted close together, chockablock, along the road. Some of the individual apartments had glass in the windows. Most of those had bars over the glass. Unpainted wood trim. No trees, no grass, stripped cars on blocks. The stench of mold was everywhere, maybe left over from Katrina—worse in the empty units that were damaged in the hurricane and never repaired. Not in this part of town. The smell of an old fire came from ahead. A house fire. Nothing else smelled quite so bad.
Music blasted from almost every occupied dwelling, a mismatched cacophony of bass and drums. Lights poured into the night. The smell of fried food. Humans. And everywhere the vamp. It had been here a while. Had hunted a while.
I stopped, nostrils flaring. I swiveled to the left. I smelled another vamp. Its mate, Beast thought. It has made itself a female. A stick snapped to my right. A faint rustle came from the left. The scent of female vamp shifted with the sound.
“Oh, crap,” I breathed. They had me surrounded, one to each side. They were hunting me.
I could take down one vamp alone. I had done it before. But not two attacking together. And like an idiot, I had given chase without proper equipment.
A door in one of the units just ahead opened and three young men left the light, stepping into the dark, closing the door and the music behind them. Black men, lightly clothed. Heavily armed. I smelled sweat and steel and gun oil and ammo and beer and marijuana. “You out there?” one called. “Lady huntin’ a vamp?”
“Mr. Leo said we was to come out and assist you,” another said. I heard the sound of steel hitting flesh, a kind of come-get-it taunt.
“What’s my name?” I asked.And quickly slipped through the shadows into the protection of an empty porch, away from where I had spoken. The position put the men and the male vamp in front of me, the female behind.
“Jane. Jane something stupid.”
I chuckled. “If you’re the center of the clock, and my voice is six o’clock, then we got a young male vamp at one and an even younger female coming up along seven, behind me. You know what ‘young’ means?”
“Wild. Bloody,” another one said. There was a tremor in his voice.
“You think you three can take the male?”
“We can do it,” the first one said.
“What you got?” I hated to ask, knowing that the vamps could hear anything I could. They were that close. But I needed to know what kind of weaponry my helpers had. I heard a faint crackle and knew the male vamp had turned his attention to my new pals.
“Crosses. Holy water from Father John. Concentrated garlic oil from Sister Selieah. She a voodoo root doctor.”
“We all got vamp-killers,” the first one said. “And I got a shotgun.”