The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 3): Blood of Gold Read online

  He had his hand on a holster attached to his belt. He’d be wary of anyone out here alone, she thought, especially with all the chaos and danger of the last week. Still, he seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. She tried to walk around him, but he grabbed her arm. It was all she could do not to snarl at him.

  “Why don’t you let me give you a ride to town?” he said. His voice sounded kindly. Then again, when the Monster sounded kindly, it was when he was most dangerous.

  “No, thank you,” she said politely.

  “Listen, you can ride in the bed of the pickup if you’re worried. I’ll be driving. You’ll be fine.”

  Laura peered down the road. It was pitch dark. The lights of the town seemed a long way off. “OK,” she said dubiously.

  “Good!” the man said, sounding surprised. “That’s good!” He walked back to the truck, put his hand on the door handle, then looked back at her.

  Laura surprised herself by walking past the back of the pickup and going to the passenger-side door. She climbed up onto the seat, feeling like a little child, perched up so high.

  The bald man got in quietly, slowly, as if trying not to alarm her.

  He started the truck and the radio began blasting. Some guy was shouting nonsense lyrics at her. Rap, she remembered, though she’d probably only listened to it a few times in her life. The bald man quickly turned down the radio, then searched the channels until he came across a station playing classic rock. With the sound of “Piano Man” playing, he pulled out onto the highway.

  #

  Patty was pleased for Simone that she had found Rodney, who was obviously hopelessly in love with her. Patty was also desperately jealous. She needed to get away, at least for a while. The lovers’ shy glances at each other were too much. “Get a room!,” she wanted to shout. If Laura’s disappearance hadn’t given her the excuse, she would have found some other reason to leave.

  She expected to find Laura walking alongside the highway. Laura was pretty simple in her choices. She’d find a road and follow it. She probably wouldn’t even think to hide when she saw headlights coming toward her.

  Patty reached the outskirts of Crescent City without spotting her friend. Once in town, Laura could have taken any number of side streets, so after driving around fruitlessly for a while, Patty drove to their old prison, even though it was possible she’d get there before Laura.

  It was as if the universe had a hole in it.

  The house wasn’t there. In its place was a still-smoking heap of rubble, only a small part of the blackened frame still standing. When Patty got out of the car, a burnt-mildew smell assaulted her heightened senses. It seemed to her that she could smell every moment of her life buried under that rubble, all the crappy meals and soiled clothing, and… the Monster. She could smell him even through the smoke.

  She could also smell the stench of death. It was coming from a house on the same side of the street, two doors down. She walked swiftly toward the partly open door, looking around to see if anyone was observing her. Inside, she found the remains of four people, two adults and two children, from the looks of it, though it was hard to tell. Beneath the stench of rotting corpses, she smelled something else, subtle but unmistakable. The Monster. Her Monster. He’d done this. He’d been here.

  She went into the closest bedroom and looked out the window. From there, she could see most of the street. She sat down on the bed and waited.

  #

  The man driving the pickup smelled comforting to Laura. He smelled of cigarette smoke and whiskey, with an underlay of oil and fast food hamburgers. In fact, he smelled just like her father. And like Monster. But Laura could also smell his animal flesh under those familiar odors, could hear his heart beating and sense the blood coursing through his veins. She drooled, and a string of saliva splatted onto her T-shirt. She shot a glance at the driver, but he was pretending not to have noticed.

  The drool had dripped off of her elongated fangs, which she was having more and more trouble hiding. She turned her face to the window and tried to think harmless thoughts, but nothing came to her. She hadn’t felt safe for so long, she simply couldn’t remember the feeling.

  “You OK?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” she murmured. It was hard to speak clearly when her fangs were extended.

  She sensed him examining her, could almost feel him staring at her thigh where her too-short skirt was riding up, and then at her breasts, which she knew were large for her small frame. She started to tense, not sure what he was going to do, not sure what her reaction would be.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder. He probably didn’t mean anything by it; it may have simply been a comforting gesture, but she reacted as if he was attacking her. She turned her head and bit into his wrist.

  He cried out, and the pickup swerved onto the shoulder of the road. He overcorrected and suddenly they were shooting across the highway and into the trees on the other side. The truck started rolling, and Laura felt her head crack against the window and heard the glass break. The truck finally came to a stop, settling upside down.

  The quiet was broken only by the clicking of the cooling motor. Any animal sounds had been silenced, the night creatures scared away. They were too far from the ocean to hear the waves. Floating in the darkness, Laura realized that she had been in complete silence for as long as she could remember. She didn’t mind: it was peaceful. But wait… what was that clicking sound?

  She slowly came to her senses.

  She still had the bald man’s wrist in her mouth, and it was half chewed through, as if she had never stopped eating, even during the accident. She looked over at him and saw that his head had been sheared off by a tree branch that was embedded in the back of the headrest. She kept chewing, finishing off his fingers, then his hand, and on up his arm to his neck. She didn’t stop until the top half of him was gone, except for the bones.

  Laura crawled out of the wreckage, then had a thought and went back and searched his wallet. It was filled with twenties, more money than she’d ever seen in her life. She took the wallet and started walking down the highway toward Crescent City. Dawn was glimmering on the horizon. She’d have to find shelter soon. She looked down at her coat. It was covered with blood. She took it off, used the inside to wipe her face and hands and tossed it to the side of the road. Her stomach was full, and she felt good for the first time in a long time. She knew it was cold, but for some reason it didn’t affect her.

  The older motels were among the first buildings on the outskirts of town. She went to the office of the first one she saw and rang the bell. An old lady in a robe emerged from out of the back, hair disheveled, blinking, as though she’d slept the night in the armchair in front of the blaring TV.

  “Checking out?” she asked.

  “I want a room,” Laura said.

  “You want a room now?” The woman sounded suspicious. She examined Laura, who suddenly became self-conscious, wondering if she’d managed to wipe all the blood away. She looked out the window anxiously as she dug into her pocket.

  Laura handed five twenties to the old lady. “How many days can I get for this?”

  The clerk pulled the front of her bathrobe together. She got a shrewd look on her face. “Give me another twenty bucks and you can have three nights.”

  Laura dug into the wallet, keeping it out of sight below the counter, and handed over another twenty. When the woman tried to give her paperwork and tell her the checkout time, Laura almost shouted at her, “Just give me the keys, lady! I’ll fill out all the paperwork and stuff later, all right?”

  The woman took the keys from a drawer, looking startled. “It’s at the end. Last unit. You could have told me you needed to use the bathroom.”

  Laura grabbed the keys and hurried down the broken concrete of the walkway. She quickly unlocked the door and ducked inside, slamming the door behind her as the first rays of the sun came over the edge of the parking lot.

  Then s
he lay back on the bed, feeling completely satiated for the first time since she’d been Turned.

  Eating the man who’d picked her up had been easy. She probably would have killed him anyway, even if they hadn’t had the accident. She hadn’t felt a thing. Not a tinge of doubt, not a twinge of guilt.

  I’m going to like being a vampire, she thought as she fell asleep.

  #

  Deb Hutchins watched the girl slip into the room. Showing up at dawn and being in such a hurry for a room? Well, didn’t that seem a little suspicious? She was well aware of what had been going on in Crescent City, though her motel had been far enough away from the fighting to avoid damage. She’d benefited from the lack of decent rooms left in town and had been full almost every night: the conflict had been a windfall.

  She didn’t kid herself about the quality of her motel. When she was young, she’d thought running a motel was a no-brainer. Take people’s money for simply making their beds and cleaning the bathrooms? Piece of cake! Then things had started to break or wear out. She’d worked hard for years trying to keep up with the entropy, but the money had only been enough to fix things, never replace them. Her husband had run off with one of the maids, and she’d never trusted anyone else to clean since then. Now she was old and worn out, and tired of the crap people did in her establishment.

  When that cop had come in, giving her his card and telling her there was money to be made for any report of a vampire, she had taken the card but never expected to use it. But now there was a hundred bucks in it for her. Not bad, especially since the girl had been stupid enough to pay in advance.

  Now, where had she put that card? She fussed around the messy desk, then looked around in frustration. Ah, there it was, tacked to the bulletin board. She called the number on it.

  “Officer Butler?” she said, lowering her voice. She’d heard vampires had heightened senses. “This is Deb Hutchins at the Beachwood. I think I’ve got one!”

  Chapter 11

  Sergeant John Butler cruised the streets of Crescent City, looking for vampires. He’d been promoted to sergeant mostly because there weren’t enough cops in town to promote before him. The department had been desperate. He knew that and didn’t resent it. He still liked patrolling around town in his cruiser, keeping on top of the action, though he should have been doing paperwork back at the station.

  Butler had fought at the Armory alongside the FBI guys, Callendar and Jeffers, as had most of the other cops in the area. He’d also fought alongside vampires, including his old boss, Robert Jurgenson. These unusual allies had fought off the Wildering horde and then disbanded, each aware that the next time they met, it would be as foes.

  Then The Testament of Michael had started to appear in pamphlets all over town and all over the Internet and the news. No matter how much the authorities denied it, too many people had tweeted, posted on Facebook, and taken pictures and video, and it seemed like everyone had started believing in the Golden Vampires, and suddenly it wasn’t so clear-cut that vampires were always malevolent. Perhaps humans and vampires could live together, if the vampires could give up their evil ways.

  Butler didn’t know what to believe. He’d seen the faces of the monsters, the slavering bloodlust of the Wilderings, but he’d also seen his old boss protecting his woman, acting all noble. Robert Jurgenson. Good old honest Robert Jurgenson. It was hard to imagine him as a vampire, but even harder to imagine him killing people.

  So Butler knew about good vampires and bad vampires.

  But even more importantly, he knew about vampires with money and vampires without money. Vampires with money would pay to save themselves and their friends.

  He had been visited in the middle of the night by a huge vampire who could have killed him in his sleep. The creature had stood in the shadows, and there’d been something different about him; he seemed more knowing, more sinister than most vampires.

  “You hunt vampires,” the voice from the darkness had said. “You kill them.”

  Butler hadn’t been sure how to respond. “Uh… it’s my job,” he’d finally said. “Nothing personal.” He’d started to reach under the bed, where he kept his shotgun. Not that he thought it would do much good.

  “I won’t interfere with your job,” the Darkness had said. “Do as you will. I am looking for three vampires who have the appearance of girls from eighteen to twenty-five years old.”

  “Yes?” Butler kept his hand on the gun, but didn’t pull it out.

  “I want you to contact me when you find any vampire who meets this description.”

  “Why?”

  “I will pay you ten thousand dollars if you find the right girls, but only if they are alive. Call me at this number.” A piece of paper had came floating out of the darkness. Butler didn’t move toward it until the Shadow had disappeared.

  That was different, he’d thought. A vampire who will pay for information!

  So far, he’d called the number six times. Each time, his description of the girl had apparently ruled her out and the vampire had hung up on him. Butler had dispatched the vampire girls as usual.

  So much for vampires with money. Meanwhile, vampires without money were worth a bounty.

  Oh, they didn’t call it a bounty. “A reward for information” was how it was phrased, but it didn’t seem to matter to those paying whether the “information” was the whereabouts of a living vampire or the corpse of a dead one. Whenever possible, Butler preferred the latter, to the tune of five hundred bucks per headless corpse. He had every teenage hooligan in town out looking, mostly acting as scouts, though sometimes they actually brought him a body. He offered to pay them a hundred bucks, or if they were willing to take less, supply them with beer. They usually took a couple of cases of beer.

  Two weeks after the battle, the pickings were getting slim. It appeared that all the vampires had either been killed, left town or were deep in hiding. Things were getting back to normal. Butler admitted to himself that he was ready for some routine duty. It had been exciting while it lasted, but it had also been dangerous. Now that it was almost over, he was remembering how close to death he’d been more than once. Vampires were swift and hard to kill.

  His cellphone rang, and for a moment he was confused at the ringtone, a Twilight Zone-sounding thing. Oh, yeah. It was the number he’d put on the card he’d handed out. It had been a full week since he’d last gotten a call.

  “Yeah?” he answered.

  It was the old bat who ran the rundown motel south of town. Beachwood, it was called, though it was miles from the beach.

  “I’ve found one for you,” the woman was saying, speaking so low Butler could barely hear her. “Hard to tell under all the grime, but she looks about eighteen years old.”

  “All right, Deb! Way to go!” he said in a cheerful voice. “Don’t go near her. I’ll be right there.”

  Butler turned the patrol car around and accelerated down the highway. He felt an adrenaline rush and tried to calm himself. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure he had all his equipment in the backseat. It wouldn’t do to underestimate a vampire, especially one who had survived this long.

  It looked as if the return to good old boring routine duty would have to wait for another day.

  #

  Patty woke up with her toe on fire. She opened her eyes to see her big toe burning like a candle. Curious, she thought drowsily. Then the pain hit, and she yelped and pulled her foot away from the light streaming through the window. She’d fallen back on the bed and dropped off to sleep. Fortunately, only her feet had been exposed to the morning light.

  She hobbled to the kitchen, looked in the refrigerator and found some raw steak. The house reeked of rotten meat, but she wasn’t desperate enough to eat two-day-old corpses. Even animal flesh was better than that. She gobbled down the steak in a few gulps. Her toe started healing almost immediately.

  Looking out the window over the sink, Patty spotted the three teenagers coming down the street from a long
way off. They were peering into the windows of every house. Sometimes they went to the door and knocked. If someone answered, the kids acted sheepish, as if they were apologizing for getting the wrong house. As soon as they were out of sight of the residents, they dropped the humility act and reverted to their cocky selves.

  They’re looking for something, Patty thought. Most likely, they’re looking for me, or someone like me.

  They were big guys, maybe high school football players, and they carried wooden bats. If you looked closely, you could see that the handles had been sharpened to points. From a distance, they looked innocent, like kids coming back from a ball game, but they were systematically searching the neighborhood.

  They seemed particularly interested in the burned-out house, Patty’s old prison, going around and lifting lumber, shingles and masonry as if looking for something. A body, perhaps?

  Finally, they walked down the sidewalk toward the house Patty was hiding in, and she stepped a little farther back from the window. She saw them catch the scent of the dead bodies and stiffen, unconsciously lifting their wooden bats-turned-stakes and holding them at the ready.

  It was late afternoon. Patty could barely see in the light, it was so bright. She glanced around. There was nowhere obvious to hide. She ran down the hallway, looking to see if there was a way into the attic. Instead, she spotted the outline of a trapdoor in the floor. It looked exactly like the trapdoor in the house she had spent the last decade under. Apparently it was a feature of the houses in this subdivision.

  The trapdoor wasn’t obvious. She’d only noticed it because she’d seen one before. There was a throw rug in the next room, and she ran over and got it. She opened the trapdoor, backed down the steep steps to the basement and tried to maneuver the rug over the top of the trapdoor as she closed it.