Kissing Corpses (15 page)

“Will I have the same powers as you?” I asked.

“You will,” he said. “Your abilities are directly determined by your sire. You were created from a great lineage. None of that ugly nonsense of turning into bats. Our line is one of the ones best equipped to hiding among humans.”

Rawdon stopped at an intersection of tunnels. “Which way?” he asked me. He was testing me, training me. I pointed down the left tunnel. It was short and it ended at a stairway. “Good. Your senses are sharp.”

I hadn't expected him to go hide this far away. What if he wasn't hiding in the tunnel at all? What if he had abandoned me? Maybe he wasn't planning to rescue me. What if he had laid a trail of blood to draw us further into the tunnel and then planted explosives to kill us both? What if I wasn't bait, so much as a sacrifice?

Rawdon turned to me. He brought his voice below a whisper, but I could still hear it. “Should Gilchrist be waiting at the end of this tunnel, stay behind me. You have not learned your strength and speed. It is dangerous for you. If he pulls out a UV gun, stay out of the light.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I've dodged Gilchrist for fifteen years. I'm not worried. I'll end this tonight.”

Gilchrist hadn't actually told me where he would be hiding. I wondered if he had done this to stop me from spilling the beans while I was doped up. Now that my mind was sharp, I wished he had left more specific instructions of what to do after Rawdon had freed me from my binds.

"Alright," I said. If Gilchrist was there, I had a decision to make. Did I help him fight Rawdon or stay in the shadows. If Gilchrist lost, and I had raised a hand to help him, I knew that Rawdon would put me down in the most painful way possible. Of course, if I helped Gilchrist, he stood a much better chance. It all came down to this: would I prefer to survive with Rawdon for eternity or perish for good?

Rawdon pulled me close and kissed me. Once again, I pretended to enjoy the romantic gesture. He needed to think I was on his side until the last possible moment. "I love you," he whispered, "Forever."

"I know," I replied, in Han Solo fashion.

Rawdon whipped around and ran down the tunnel, moving at a blurred speed. A sudden rumble ripped through the tunnel. It was the portable generator that Gilchrist had brought into our hotel room the night before. Rawdon was fast. His foot found the generator before it could create enough juice to power the elaborate UV lighting rig that Gilchrist had set up around the tunnel. It skidded along the ground, crashed into a wall, and lay silent, leaking pungent gasoline. The filaments in the light bulbs flickered and went out.

A much smaller light kicked on from a nook by the bottom of the stairs. It was Gilchrist's UV curing gun. The gun was drawn in the dark, but Rawdon caught Gilchrist's wrist and pointed it skyward before it flicked on. The beam of light fell on the ceiling. Rawdon reached up with his other hand, careful not to touch the beam of cool light, and crushed the device with his hand.

With Rawdon's hands both occupied, Gilchrist took the opportunity to make another attack. The vampire hunter wore an aparatus on his head that looked a lot like binoculars strapped to his face-- night vision goggles. A dagger sank into Rawdon's side, coming nowhere near his heart. His fangs sprang out and he hissed like an angry cat. Gilchrist lunged forward, and the men rolled onto the ground. Rawdon had the advantage of sight.

In seconds Rawdon had taken the top position, holding Gilchrist down and wrapping his fingers around his neck. Gilchrist socked him hard in the jaw. Rawdon didn't recoil. His neck stayed steady as his jaw dislocated. There was a vulgar crunch, the sound of Gilchrist's fingers breaking with the impact.

Rawdon paused and used his thumb to set his jaw back into place. Gilchrist's knuckles were bloodied; the smell of it made my senses go haywire. I was so hungry. He swung at Rawdon again, but the vampire's superior reflexes gave him the edge. He caught Gilchrist's fist and twisted, exposing the inside of the hunter's wrist. He bit down. Gilchrist screamed. Rawdon pulled back and spat the blood out on the stone floor.

Gilchrist laughed. "Garlic," he said. He must have ingested it after leaving me in the tunnel. He drew a stake from a strap on his leg. Rawdon caught his wrist and squeezed it until Gilchrist's dropped the stake.

The struggle didn't go on for long after that. Rawdon had superior strength and speed. He pinned Gilchrist's hands and hissed in his face. “I'm going to kill you slowly,” he said. Gilchrist kicked his feet, but was unable to make Rawdon flinch. Then his boot hit the stake and it skittered across the floor, stopping at my feet. I realized his plan.

It was my turn.

I crouched down slowly and picked up the stake. I was staring fixedly at the off-center hole in Rawdon's shirt. I knew that if I could hit it, I would be right on target. How hard did you have to push to drive a stake through a body?

Rawdon was pressing his thumbs into Gilchrist's collarbones. I heard a crack and Gilchrist screamed. It was now or never. I couldn't let Rawdon turn around and see me holding it.

My footsteps were masked by Gilchrist's cries. I bent my knees, lowering my center of gravity, raised the stake high above my head, and with my eyes trained on the flesh beneath the hole, I struck.

I guess I didn't know my own strength. The stake went through him, only stopping when the heel of my hand pressed against his cold, pale flesh. Rawdon stopped, frozen for the second time in a week. Gilchrist stopped screaming as soon as he realized that Rawdon was defeated. It had been an act to keep him distracted, though the broken collarbone was real.

He shoved the body off of him and stood up. Gilchrist drew the scimitar that hung off of his belt. “Back up,” he said.

“Are you alright?”

“I'll live. Back up.”

Gilchrist raised the sword high in the air and brought it down on Rawdon's neck. I looked away at contact. A squishing crack, a thump, and then silence. When I looked down, Rawdon's head lay three feet away from his body, face down in a puddle of blood on the floor. I stepped forward.

“Back up!” Gilchrist barked.

My confusion was only momentary. The first thing to change was the temperture of the room. My body might have been cold, but I could still tell when the temperature suddenly plummeted ten degrees. The shift was followed by a low hissing. Rawdon's head rolled onto its back, and his eyes looked up at me. His mouth opened, his fangs bared, and then black tendrils like smoke and shadows poured past his lips. The darkness that poured forth from his disembodied head was so complete that even my vampire eyes couldn't penetrate it. The hissing turned into a scream, and the room was covered in absolute, unnatural darkness.

The blackness quickly twisted and spiraled, forming into a cyclone of evil energy with a human face. Rawdon, like a shade, floated in the tunnel between Gilchrist and I. He lunged forward, hissing and screaming at Gilchrist and then dissolved into nothing.

I looked down and realized that the corpse was gone. A puddle of blood, blood that had once been mine, was all that remained.

“Shit,” I finally said.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” he said. “But I'd have hated for you to be standing right over him when it happened. I've seen men with more steel than you pass out.

“He's gone?” I asked.

“For good. He's passed on to hell.”

I stared at the puddle of blood for a long time. Everything was changed now, all because of a man that I had hardly known. I could never go back to that house in Cheyenne, living with Geneva and working for that pack of stuffy old lawyers. I didn't have a fortune like Rawdon had, and I knew that after the trauma of this week, Geneva and Cody would not accept me as I was. I would have to figure it out. First I would need to figure out where I was sleeping.

Gilchrist went to his bag, tucked away in the little alcove that he had hidden in. He unzipped the main pouch and pulled out a large square of cloth.

“So the UV lights,” I asked. “did you plan for him to break them all along?”

“It would have been nice to get him right there, but yeah, I figured it might not work. I was pretty sure I'd need you to stake him by surprise. It's hard to kill a vampire if you don't get the drop on it.”

I watched him fold the square in half along the diagonal and tie a knot with the opposite ends. He sipped it over his head and fitted the cloth as a sling. “Glad the fucker only broke one of them. 'Course my other shoulder will bruise, but I can handle a little black and blue.”

“Are you going home now?” I asked, “To your wife?”

Gilchrist nodded. “For a while. Right now I don't have any leads, and I'll need to rest up and heal. I could really go for her chicken parmesan right now.”

I was hungry, but the thought of chicken parmesan seemed as unsettling as the idea of eating mud. I nodded. “It's been a long night. We could use some rest.”

Gilchrist walked over to the puddle of blood. In the middle of it sat the stake I had used to paralyze Rawdon. He picked it up, getting blood all over his hands, and shook it until it no longer dripped. Then he slipped it into his bag and started packing up his things.

“You keep the stake?” I asked.

“Sure. It's the only trophy left.” Gilchrist laid the scimitar on top of the crossbows and extra UV guns before zipping it up. He raised a flashlight and turned it on. I winced.

“My eyes were just getting adjusted to the dark,” I said.

“We need to mask the blood,” he said. “In case someone comes down here.”

I held the flashlight while Gilchrist used an old scrap of wood to spread the blood around the floor like jam on bread. When it was reasonably thinned out, he collected dirt and crumbling cement from the corners of the tunnel and spread it over the blood.

“It still looks terrible,” I said, pointing the flashlight. Now the whole floor was red-tinted, instead of just a puddle.

“Best I can do. It'll test as blood, anyway. Just thought I'd make it harder to find.”

Gilchrist turned for the stairs. “We're done here?”

“Where does this go?” I asked.

“Crown Bar, I believe. They'll be doing last call, about now.”

I followed close behind him. Now I needed a plan. He didn't know I was turned. His work was done. He would be going back home to Boston. I could part-ways, or take off when he was distracted, and make a break for my parents' storage locker. I could stay there until tomorrow night, and then formulate a more long-term plan to stay hidden at night. Too-bad Rawdon's house was gone. I didn't really like the idea of burrying myself in a grave.

Gilchrist set his bag down at the top of the stairs. He withdrew a battery-powered screwdriver and removed the lock on the door. The old wooden door swung open and we stepped out into a dark basement full of liquor crates. He turned around and shut the door.

“You should probably put the lock back on,” I said. “So they don't find that poorly-hidden mess of blood down there and start looking for a body.”

Gilchrist nodded. He put the lock back on the door. I sat on a crate of Crown Royale while he worked and tapped my foot, impatiently. When he was done he motioned for me to start up the stairs. I was almost free.

The door to the basement of the Crown Bar wasn't locked. It was quiet on the other side. I just hoped that we wouldn't have to explain ourselves to some poor surprised bar tender on the other side of that door. I know that if I was closing up after a long night at work, and two blood-smeared people with a bag of weapons came out of the cellar, I would call the cops. The last thing I needed was police.

The knob turned easily. I opened the door and was immediately met with the pink light of the rising sun, streaming in from the glass window at the front of the bar. I was frozen, one foot forward, one hand on the door. In a state like rigor-mortis, I was propped up by my stable stance. I couldn't move. Even my eyes were locked. I was dead.

How much time had passed? I realized now that I had no way of knowing how long I had been dead before coming back to Rawdon. I had taken the pill and within twenty minutes, Rawdon had taken my blood from me. It had worn off soon after we had started walking. That had to be at least six hours. We had worked for an hour in the tunnel before. Maybe two. We had walked for a long time in the tunnel, too. Then he had covered up the blood. Had that been to stall for time? I had wasted precious minutes making him put the lock back on the door. Had the entired night passed since we had gone into the museum?

Gilchrist gave me a push on the back. I fell forward, dead weight on the bar floor. He stepped over me and turned around. All I could do was stare straight ahead at Gilchrist's boots. He crouched down and put his hands on the floor, lowering his face into my line of sight. He had pulled the night vision goggles up to rest on his forehead. He was smiling.