Charming (43 page)

“WHAT IS IT, JANICE?” The voice that was probably Anne Marie’s was sharp.

“It’s some kind of bomb!” Janice snarled. “There’s all kinds of dynamite and some kind of plastic explosive and a timer with a bunch of red numbers on it. It only has ten minutes left on it.”

“Relax,” I said. “If I wanted to blow us all up, I could have done it from here. That’s no little bomb. These tunnels will channel the blast and blow everything in a half-mile radius apart before they bury whatever’s left.”

“I THINK YOU AND I MUST HAVE VERY DIFFERENT WAYS OF RELAXING.” The voice sounded playful again, but distracted.

“I just brought it so you won’t do something stupid when I
come in to talk,” I said, and walked around the bend with my Glock in one hand and the remote device in the other.

Janice was standing in front of me, holding a TEC-9 and using Andrej as a human shield. She was about five foot six and a little on the stocky side, with broad shoulders and a broad face. Her red hair was pulled back into a tight knot at the back of her skull, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pants and a bulletproof vest.

We weren’t in a cavern… it was more a space the size of a large living room. The dim illumination was coming from Christmas lights strung around the walls, hung up on metal rods slammed into the mud. I suppose that was practical if you didn’t have an electrician in your group. Christmas lights are cheap and easy to string up around tunnel bends, and they don’t use a lot of electricity, so you can run them off a battery for a long time. The lights reminded me of Molly and her holiday fixation, and suddenly I got angry in a way that I hadn’t been allowing myself to get angry. What had Molly thought when she’d seen those lights?

There were air mattresses and coolers and unfolding canvas chairs stacked up on the east wall and two dead bodies lying against the west one. The corpses had been recently killed. One of them was a middle-aged woman dressed like a jogger, and one of them was a teenage boy dressed like a gangbanger. Now I knew why Janice was so full of fresh blood that she was glowing, just as the scouts had been.

When you’re getting ready to move, you clean out the fridge.

There were a pile of discarded chains and two folding cots and plastic tubes and three footlockers that were full of blood bags and ice. Sig’s spear and shield were leaning against the wall along with a bolt-action rifle and a bulletproof vest.

Anne Marie was not in the room. She was around the bend
of another tunnel opposite me, watching me through one of those large sloping circular mirrors that you see mounted in the upper corners of stores—the kind that are supposed to let the clerks at the counters see around bends in all directions. The mirror was embedded in the wall at the mouth of the tunnel, but I couldn’t see what was reflected in it. My goggles’ light amplification was messing up the refraction somehow, so I took the goggles off and peered again. There were two silhouettes in the mirror, crouched behind at least twelve feet of solid packed clay. Anne Marie and Sig.

I couldn’t get a clear shot.

“Should I start shooting him?” Janice asked tensely.

“I don’t think so,” Anne Marie said reflectively. She wasn’t pitching her voice so loudly now that I was in sight. “He might be full of shit… but that old guy had explosives, and he killed the old guy. I’m picking up all kinds of weird chemical smells too.”

“Let’s talk,” I said.

“OK,” Anne Marie said unenthusiastically.

“Where are my other friends?”

“They’re not here.” Her voice became steely. “You can ask for them all you want, but I can’t get them for you.”

“How is that?” I asked, my voice as dead as hers.

“That priest bitch was smart,” Anne Marie said flatly. “We had her and her friend all bound up and she managed to use her hands to draw a cross on his chest with mud. I couldn’t even lift a gun to shoot them while she was holding on to him. They shuffled off down a dead-end tunnel trying to escape, and now they can’t leave and we can’t get in.”

“Give me a second.” I tilted my head and yelled, “MOLLY? CHOO?”

From somewhere down the second tunnel across the way, I heard Molly’s voice reply faintly. “
John?
”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s talk about how we’re going to do this, Anne Marie.”

“How do you know my name?” she demanded.

“Steve Ellison told us all kinds of things about you before we ended him,” I lied.

Anne Marie began to curse bitterly and creatively.

“It’s why that sniper was trying to kill you,” I continued. “How come he didn’t, anyway?”

“He shot my cousin, Sarah,” she said, her voice an odd combination of irritation and smugness. “I wasn’t even here. Me and Janice were in… somewhere else.”

The picture we’d had of Anne Marie was two years old, from when she’d first gone into the juvie system, and adolescents change a lot in two years. People with Anne Marie’s background tended to have a lot of half siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews floating around unofficially, and Andro could have mistaken a cousin for her.

My imagination began to fill in a narrative about Anne Marie’s relative who looked like her. Anne Marie had gone into the foster system, so the cousin’s family hadn’t taken Anne Marie in, but maybe that family was the only semi-stable point in Anne Marie’s landslide of a childhood, a place where she wound up sometimes when her mom was on a tear. Maybe this cousin was the only person in the whole world Anne Marie trusted, or maybe she had always been easily dominated. Either way, after all her problems with Steve Ellison, when Anne Marie needed a vampire she could trust to have her back, she had turned her cousin into one of the undead.

Maybe that wasn’t the way it had happened exactly, but I’d
bet it was close enough. And Anne Marie had left her cousin behind to keep an eye on things while Anne Marie went out scouting and collecting new recruits from among her Internet connections. That was why Stanislav hadn’t seen Anne Marie while he was roaming around the tunnels in his spirit form.

“Mistress? That bomb is on a timer,” Janice reminded her.

Mistress? Really?

Anne Marie stopped cursing and addressed me without any pretense of friendliness. “If you want to talk seriously, the first thing you need to do is get rid of that gun.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“We can’t hurt you because you’ve got your thumb on a bomb trigger,” Anne Marie said. “So why do you need that gun to protect yourself?”

“I’m very insecure,” I said.

“The only reason you need that gun is you want to keep your options open,” Anne Marie went on relentlessly. “But if you’re really gonna let me go in exchange for Busty the Vampire Slayer here, you need to prove it. Toss that gun away so I know you won’t shoot me the first time you get the chance.”

“Fine,” I said, and shot Janice in the forehead. She was fast, but surprise can momentarily paralyze the supernaturally quick too. Before she had a chance to react, Janice was dropping to the ground in a convulsion of limbs.

Andrej threw himself sideways to the ground and then scrambled frantically toward the nearest wall on his knees, trying to regain his feet without using his arms. His eyes were wild and frantic. I ignored him.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” Anne Marie screamed. “I’LL KILL HER! I’LL KILL HER RIGHT NOW!”

“I know you will,” I said, and threw my Glock across the
room, down the tunnel where I’d heard Molly’s voice from. “But not for Janice’s sake.”

“THAT IS IT!” Anne Marie raged. “THAT IS IT! YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE LIKE THAT AND I’M KILLING THIS BITCH! I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU DO AFTER THAT!”

“Calm down.” As if my own heart weren’t thudding frantically. “Janice isn’t dead, she’s just out of it for a while. If she really means that much to you, you can carry her out of here. Fair’s fair. I gave up my weapon. You had to give up yours. That’s the only way this is going to work.”

“No, this is the only way,” Anne Marie corrected. “I’m going to walk out of here with your cheerleader, and you’re going to let me.”

“You’re going to make me kill you both,” I said.

“I don’t care as much about that as you think I do.” Anne Marie’s voice oozed venom. “Do you know what it’s like being me? I’m a damned corpse! I can’t feel anything except cold, and I’m cold all the time!”

Then her voice went soft and hollow and hungry for a moment. “Except when I’m drinking blood.”

I moved sideways to place myself squarely between her and the exit in case she did start moving. “You died, Anne Marie. You never did come all the way back to life.”

She laughed bitterly. “You think I don’t know that? I smashed a hammer down on my hand by accident when I was putting some wooden beams together, and I barely felt it! I can hardly taste anything, or if I can, it’s because it’s so spicy or salty that it tastes like shit anyway, and then I can’t digest it.”

Her voice took on a plaintive quality. “I tried to go see a live band in Knoxville, just to try to have a life. Just to see if maybe
I could make this be a good thing. My hearing is fuckin’ awesome, I ought to still be able to like music, right? And everything was too loud and bright and all I could think about was the blood I kept smelling all around me.”

“So what’s the point?” I asked, gesturing around me with my empty hand. “Why do all this?”

“There is no point!” she shot back. “Shit just happens. Some people are born rich with nice parents and good looks, and some people are born poor and stupid and ugly and their parents are morons who beat the shit out of them or rape them. Some people who have everything get hit by cars and some people who spend their whole lives trying to kill themselves die in nursing homes.”

“I don’t believe that.” My tone was even and measured. “Even as a vampire, you’re smart enough to get by without keeping people in captivity and torturing them to get what you need. That didn’t just happen. That was a choice.”

“And why the hell not?” she seethed. “It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing’s good. Nothing’s bad. Whatever happens happens. Whatever we do, in a hundred years it’s gone. Time wipes it all away like a rag swiping our windows clean. Or it used to.”

“That’s what you say,” I said. “But I’ll bet that dead soccer mom over there looks a lot like the mom you wish you’d had when you were growing up. The kind of mom you wound up hating because they made you feel like you weren’t good enough to have one.”

“Oh fuck you,” she said, and for the first time she sounded like a teenager, not like someone trying to sound like a cool and controlled vampire, or the way they thought a teenager was expected to sound to be charming.

“I’ll bet that boy next to her is a lot like the kind of guy you
used to sneer at, deep down wishing you could date one,” I continued. “You’re not going out of your way to hurt people because they don’t mean anything. They mean so much to you that you can’t stand it.”

In the mirror, Anne Marie hoisted Sig violently to her feet and began to drag her along, walking sideways down the tunnel toward me with her chin above Sig’s shoulder. Sig was limp, but Anne Marie supported her weight effortlessly.

“Why do you need so much blood, Anne Marie?” I asked. “Why are you making plans to support a large number of vampires in a small area?”

Anne Marie ignored me, dragging Sig into the room. I could see now that Sig’s arms and hands were bound behind her back with thick chains and that her ankles were manacled together. She was otherwise down to her brassiere and panties.

“I’m walking out of here with her,” Anne Marie said more calmly as she scooted Sig toward the tunnel I’d come from. “And if you don’t move out of the way, I’m tearing her throat out.”

“Sig would rather I kill her than let you keep her,” I told her.

“But you won’t,” Anne Marie hissed. It’s always bizarre seeing someone who was turned into a vampire young: Anne Marie’s expression was a disturbing combination of an adolescent’s disdain and a vampire’s predatory menace. “You know what I just learned about you while you were doing your guidance counselor bullshit?”

“Not enough,” I said.

“You think this means something. You think God still cares what you do and what happens to you.”

Anne Marie’s mouth was never more than two inches away from Sig’s throat, her fangs bared while she talked. “You’re not
going to make me kill her because you think you’re going to ride away from here on a white horse with your blonde bitch.”

“I stopped believing in ‘happily ever after’ a long time ago, Anne Marie,” I said. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

“Oh, I get it all right. You won’t let me go no matter what.” Anne Marie placed her fangs against Sig’s throat experimentally, staring at me as she pressed them tightly enough to draw pinpricks of blood from the flesh. I froze.

Anne Marie relaxed her mouth so that she could grin and talk to me again, her lips brushing against Sig’s neck as she talked, in a mockery of eroticism. “You won’t let her die no matter what either. But one of those things is going to happen, and you have to choose now.”

Then two things happened in rapid succession.

Sig headbutted the back of her skull into Anne Marie’s mouth, hard, and actually broke off Anne Marie’s top fangs. I’d never seen anyone do that to a vampire before. I’d never even heard of anyone doing that before. Anne Marie’s head snapped back, her right hand going to her mouth while her left hand stayed around Sig. Sig took advantage of that moment and turned so that her mouth was now against Anne Marie’s neck, right above her carotid artery. She bit down on Anne Marie’s throat with all her might.

The surprise on Anne Marie’s face was not comical—the intensity of her shock and rage was horrifying. Anne Marie tried to angle her head so that she could get her remaining fangs under Sig’s neck, but the back of Sig’s head was nestled under her jaw so that Anne Marie’s bottom teeth could find no purchase. Anne Marie shook her head violently to dislodge Sig, but Sig held on to Anne Marie’s throat with her teeth like a pit bull, her feet actually being dragged off the ground. Then Sig planted her heels and straightened up, using her greater height
and leg muscles to rip Anne Marie’s throat out with a violent sideways thrust of her neck.