No.
The scent hit her again, stronger now that she was aware, striking like a hard punch in the face. Bile rose and she choked, scared, sick.
Not again.
She scrambled back, but hit something. Something soft and still.
Her eyes narrowed as she strained to see but the darkness was too perfect. Her hands fumbled, reaching out.
Flesh.
An arm. Cold to the touch.
A hip.
Stomach.
Then—oh, God, no—
A loud boom blasted to her right and light exploded on her as—what? A door?—flew open.
“Dee!”
Her head jerked at the sound and the move sent fire burning through the base of her skull.
“Oh, damn, what the hell happened?”
That voice…Simon.
A crack of light shot in behind him, illuminating the sparse interior of her hell. She glanced away from him, following the horror in his eyes to see the body.
High-end clothes, soaked red. Long, tangled black hair covered half of the woman’s face. A face she knew. Little Miss Sunshine lay dead beneath her hands. Not a pretty death. Too brutal.
Dee’s fingertips fluttered around the wooden stake that had been driven into the other woman’s heart.
Her breath rasped out. “I-I didn’t—” Her hands flew back. A human. Sunshine had been a human. In life, and in death.
Dee tried to scramble up, but she slipped and fell in the blood that coated the floor.
Just like before. “Mom? Mom! Help me!”
But no one had helped her.
“Dee? Dee?” Simon grabbed her and lifted her into his arms. “Are you hurt?”
Yeah, but the other woman was dead.
Did I kill her?
Please, God, no. She couldn’t remember anything. Not since the alley, when all those vamps jumped her—
Her hand flew to her neck. Had she been bitten? Christ. If they’d bitten her, they’d be able to get into her head. Sick, twisted freaks.
Simon turned away from the body. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!” His hold bruised her.
“No, no, we can’t leave her. The cops—”
“Are about to storm the place any minute.” The sirens screamed, so close now. So close.
Dee heaved against him, but he just clamped his hands tighter around her and ran from the pit. No, not a pit, she realized as more light spilled onto her. Some kind of warehouse?
Simon raced outside, holding her tight.
Yeah, a warehouse. With some boarded-up windows, a condemned sign on the side, and a few streetlights spilling light on her hell.
“The cops find you here, your ass will be headed for jail.” He all but shoved her into his car. The smell of leather flooded her nostrils but it couldn’t block the stench of blood. So much blood.
Sunshine’s blood had stained her skin.
A car door slammed. Dee glanced up just as Simon cranked the engine, then he gunned the Mustang and they flew forward with a snarl of the motor.
“We can’t…leave the scene.” Her mind wasn’t working right. She knew it. Everything seemed slow. The streetlights too bright. Dee squinted as she ran a hand over the back of her head.
When Dee touched the fist-sized knot at the base of her skull, her breath rasped out. What did they do to me?
Simon jerked the wheel to the right and turned down a street. Then another. Another. The mustang snaked through alleys and back roads, taking so many turns that Dee felt dizzy.
She’d thought she knew the city.
She’d thought wrong.
Her eyes squeezed shut and she saw—
A stake, driven deep into the woman’s chest. Blood.
“Why?” The word broke from her lips as her eyes cracked open. “She was a…lure. She shouldn’t have been—”
“Dee.” Simon spared her a glance. “Focus for me. How much of the blood is yours? Did the bastards bite you?”
Don’t know. Her hands started to tremble. The steady pounding in her head had nausea rolling through her. “Not sure.” Okay, that sounded normal. Didn’t it? Her tongue seemed so thick in her mouth. “The woman…”
“Fuck, Dee! She’s dead! She was part of a setup! The vamps left you there, with a stake—probably one of yours—in that woman’s heart, and they sent the police to find you.”
The sirens—how had the police known to come?
He took another corner and the tires squealed. “What do you think would have happened when the cops found you crouched over a dead human?”
The throbbing was worse. She could actually hear the pulses. That couldn’t be good. “Got…friends who are cops.” They would’ve listened to her. Tony—she could count on him. “T-Tony…” Okay, that had been slurred.
“Hell! You’re about to pass out, aren’t you?”
Maybe.
Um, yeah.
“Dee? Dee!” He hit the brakes and she fell forward. The seat belt she didn’t remember buckling—maybe he had?—cut across her chest. “Stay with me. I’ve got to know…it’s important. Did they bite you?”
The street lights didn’t seem so bright anymore. Or maybe her eyes were just closed. Hard to tell for sure.
“Dee?”
“Maybe,” she whispered and the last thing she heard was—
“Fuck.”
Yeah.
Death had a way of making the beautiful…ugly.
Baton Rouge Police Captain Antonio “Tony” Young stared down at the body before him. He was used to the blood, so the stench and the sight didn’t bother him. This wasn’t his first time to find a horror/freak show crime scene. Wouldn’t be his last either.
He crouched beside the body and a soundless whistle passed his lips. Someone had screwed up. He could see the bite marks on the woman’s neck, so yeah, she’d been a vamp chew toy, but—
But she hadn’t been a vamp.
The movies and TV shows had vampire killings all wrong. When vamps were staked, they didn’t age or shrivel or explode into dust.
Nothing so fancy.
But the change was there. You just had to know what you were looking for to see it.
At death, well, their second death, anyway, a vamp’s elongated fangs retracted. The darkness in their eyes—the darkness that came when they hunted—faded away.
Their bodies stiffened, hardening immediately so that when an ME looked later, the TOD was never right. No way could you determine the time of death for a vamp, just couldn’t happen.
Their skin whitened, not slowly turning ashy and yellow like a human’s. No, the skin drained of color until the flesh was the starkest of whites, and the drain was nearly instantaneous.