She doesn’t beg for mercy or scream for help.She whispers my name.
I charge forward. I’m too fast for these vampires to sense. They’re barely better than humans. Whoever made them is low grade tier shit. There’s a few ways to kill a vampire, fire, beheading, and of course, like anything—the heart. It doesn’t matter if it’s a stake or a bullet. You stop the heart, you stop the vampire.
I slam my hand through the female’s back and rip her heart out. It’s an easy enough aim. You don’t heal the sick for a few lifetimes without knowing where to find the heart. The female jerks like the batteries just got taken out of her and I guess they have. I glance down at her heart and squeeze. It deflates, the muscle giving in my grip like tissue paper. I toss the remnants of her heart to the side and drop to my knees beside Mars.
“Maris.”
Her eyes are hazy. Glazed. When she lifts a hand it’s clumsy and she barely manages to touch my side before it falls to the ground again. She’s been drugged. Roofied from the look of it.
“You’re an angel,” she rasps. “I knew it.”
“One of these days I’m going to show you what an angel looks like,” I tell her. Maris starts to cry. I wipe the tears from her cheeks. She’s so beautiful when she weeps.
Behind us one of the other vampires, a male, yells when he sees what I’ve done. “What did you do to Shainna?”
“Exactly what I’m going to do to you.” I throw the dead female vampire at him and whirl to face the other vampire. He’s on his knees with a horrified expression on his face.
“Who are you?” I don’t bother to answer him. Why would I?
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Maris and smooth her hair back from her face.
She doesn’t say anything, but there’s a smile on her face which is enough. I stand and turn to face the two remaining vampires.
“You touched my wife.”
The taller one, the wiry nervous looking vampire who’s so new I can still smell the humanity on him, shakes his head. “This isn’t what I signed up for. Fuck this, man!” He turns to run. I let him get a few seconds of running in. He really thinks he has a chance now that he’s a vampire. Probably thinks he’s fast enough to get away, but he’s wrong. He makes it to the edge of the docks by the time I catch him.
“You’re fast.” I catch him with a hand at the back of his neck and jerk him back. “I’m faster.” I dig my fingers into his neck and I don’t stop until I have his C1 and C2 vertebrae in my hand. The Atlas and the Axis. Crucial to holding up your head and turning it. He won’t be needing them anymore. I rip the vertebrae out of him. It’s as good as a beheading but it’s not good enough.
Nothing will be for what they’ve done to Maris.
The vampire slumps forward. He jerks and gags, convulses as his body tries to keep him going but it’s not happening. I reach down and it’s another jerk of my hand that pulls his spine out. I toss the whole thing to the side and leave him to rot. The last vampire doesn’t run, but he does beg.
“Please, man. I didn’t-I didn’t know she was your old lady.” He holds his hands up and backs away. “We’re the same. You don’t have to do this.”
I tilt my head to the side and look him over. He was a poor human from the sight of him. Busted workboots, uncombed long blond hair, stained pants, a flannel that’s half unbuttoned to show off the idiot turquoise and silver chains he wears like a fucking asshole.
I stalk forward and grab him by his throat. “We arenotthe same,” I growl.
He kicks, tries to break my grip and when he can’t he goes back to trying to reason with me. “Look, do you want money? We-my brother’s maker. She has tons of money. Blood. Whatever you need. We’ll hook you up.”
I pretend to think it over. The maker he’s talking about is Rosanna. She’s the one that raised the trash I buried for Maris. Of course she did. She’s always fucking up my plans. My life. My women’s lives.
“Where is she? I’ll talk to her.”
The vampire stops talking then and shakes his head. “I-I don’t know. I’ve only met her at his house.”
“Call her,” I tell him. All fledglings can call their makers. If I wanted to I could do it right now with Rosanna but with her, the trick is hiding, not calling.
I squeeze his neck harder and feel his trachea crunch. He cries out and shakes his head. “I can’t.” His voice is garbled from the damage I did to his throat. Every word he speaks is laborious now. “She’s not…my…maker.”
“Who is?”
“My brother.”
I jerk my chin at the two dead vampires. “He make them too?”
“Yes.”
