Deception (Facets of Feyrie Book 3), page 8
I pick the man up by his shirt and slam him down again. Smiling at him in the process.
“I’m Iza and,” grabbing his arms, I lever my foot on the shoulder of the vampire in my hands. Pushing down with my foot, I pull both of his arms out of the socket, “I’m tired of you assholes getting in my way.” Putting more effort into it, I pull one arm out entirely with a moist pop. The screaming man starts fighting harder against me. Standing with both feet on his stomach now, I pull the other arm out with that grinding, bone cracking sound that makes the rest of them stop in their tracks.
He goes limp because he’s probably dead at this point. Good. Swinging up one of the severed arms like a wet noodle, I point at another vampire with it. He hisses at me. I’m not kidding… hisses.
“If you have any brains in your head, you’ll tell me why there are shifters in the Blood Prince’s territory, and why—the—ever—living—fuck you all think you’re scary. All I see is a grown ass man hissing at me like a scalded cat. Who the fuck does that?” I throw the arm at him. Reflexively he catches it, and then with a look of open-mouthed horror on his now pale face, throws it down on the ground and skitters back from it.
I’m pretty sure he’s gagging, yep… I step back away from him as he pukes all over the place. Including on the dead guy whose arms I ripped off. Speaking of arms, I still have one of them. Swinging it like a scythe, I smack it into several of the closer vampires. It isn’t my fault they were distracted by their puking buddy. Pulling back like a pitcher from TV, I lift my leg up, and I throw the arm as hard as I can at the closest one. The meaty thud it makes when it hits him makes me giggle.
When the first one turns and flees, yelling about me being a crazy bitch, my smile comes back. Three more join their friend, running away from me as fast as possible. They look like little roadrunners from the cartoons, dust flying behind them and everything. Those little suckers are fast. I had no idea they could move like that. They always seem so slow when I’m ripping their body parts off.
The hair stands up on my head and hisses, see now—they’re a relative of serpents, it’s normal for them to do it and much more realistic. Ducking forward, the board passes harmlessly above me. Kicking out backward with my leg, I catch someone in their soft belly and sidestep to kick them again, landing in a squat.
Rolling to the side, I come up with an undercut that takes one several foot off the ground. His jaw cracks under my fist and his teeth snap together with a cracking sound that probably means some of them broke. I hope it’s those two little ones they like to abuse people with so much. He lands in a lump of unconsciousness. Straightening, I look around at the remainder of the vampires. Only two of them remain, and they’re both unconscious… well, one is unconscious—I’m pretty sure the other one is dead.
The unconscious one just happens to be the one I punched into tomorrow. Squatting down beside his head, I slap his face. I need some answers, and he looks like he might have some for me. When his eyes finally open they immediately fill with fear. His mouth opens, and I see that one of those canines are in fact gone. I smile at him, all my teeth showing my appreciation… and the fact that I’m going to kill him afterward.
“Hello, sleeping beauty. I’ve got some questions for you.”
I za
IT TOOK A FEW SEVERED FINGERS, but he eventually talked. I think the fact that I bit the last one off assured his cooperation. I’ve also picked up a sort of stalker. A human who’s probably not even shaving age yet, but he is brave enough to follow me with his cell phone leading the way. I’m pretty sure he recorded everything with the vampires. Which means it’ll end up on the tube and the Google God.
Good.
For the moment, I’ll let him follow me—maybe once he gets an eyeful of what’s going to happen, he’ll have enough brains to grab some pictures and run. The part of me that likes to stir up shit considers stopping and giving him an interview, or maybe the finger I bit off that’s still in my hand. But there are too many vampires for me to contribute to his viewing count. I can smell them ahead of me now, the old apartment building is full of them. They remind me of an infestation of cockroaches. they’re crawling in and out of the decrepit rooms and decaying hallways. Scurrying away from the light like the bugs I’m comparing them to. Which creeps me out, I hate bugs—especially cockroaches. Honestly, I should burn the building down and go home, because it would be the simplest, easiest way to do things. It’s how Phobe would do it, in-out and then home.
Good thing he isn’t here. The easiest way isn’t as fun.
Standing at the bottom of the concrete stairs that climb the building like old spider webs, I take a deep breath to prepare myself. The stairs are mostly crumbled, but there’s just enough flat area for me to jump a few times, which will get me to the top floor. That’s where I need to go because that’s where I think they’re keeping the Blood Prince hostage. At least he’s not in the basement. I hate spooky, moldy basements. There is trash strewn everywhere, newspapers and old magazines. Soda bottles and half eaten food. Some of it piled up with probably a body or two hiding underneath it. The vampires didn’t clean up their victims.
Pushing off the ground, I jump up a level and then another.
A vampire makes a half-hearted leap at me, and I kick him away mid-air. The surprised look on his face is amusing. Why does no one ever believe I’m capable of whipping their asses? Vampires can move fast, but these are young—fodder, rather easy to kill. They’re also in my way.
The room ahead of me, with a bright red door, has what looks like some semblance of nicety. For one it has electricity because I can see the lights are on through the window, cleaner, and guarded. That’s what sets it apart from the other rooms. That is my target, and none of these fuckers are going to stop me from getting there. This time I don’t play around, the daggers come out, and I slice through the bodies with the solid steel determination to reach my goal. The Prince is hidden from me for a reason. The people doing it know where Jameson is, because the little squealer I chewed on told me as much. There’s a woman in charge, one I’m guessing belongs to that awful perfume. Which she used because she was stupid enough to think it would trick my sense of smell.
A lot of creatures would’ve been fooled, unable to go deeper than the chemical smell. Her mistake is not knowing that I spent most of my life in a prison with some of the most foul-smelling motherfuckers on the planet, but I could still smell a piece of stale bread hidden under a rock.
Speaking of smell.
That awful perfume wafts towards me, brought by the vampires running at me in a constant wave of sacrificial flesh. Smiling, I push myself faster. Now you guys can eat. I encourage the fiends, who I can feel salivating at the living, dead flesh of the vampires. The screams, oh the screams. The beautiful symphony fills the air as it echoes off the empty walls around me. Only to cut off when they’re sucked into the NetherRealm to become a feast for the waiting fiends.
Underneath the dissonance of death and pain, I hear one phrase repeating over and over. Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod. The human kid is still here, he’s still recording on his little phone, and he’s going to be eternally scarred. If he has any sense, very afraid of things that go bump in the night. After all, he just discovered that monsters are real.
“What the fuck are you?” The woman’s voice grabs my entire attention.
In damn near slow motion, my gaze zeros in on her. She’s standing behind a fresh wave of vampires, a smirk of arrogance on her face. With long curly, platinum blonde hair and a pair of bright blue eyes, even I have to admit she’s a beautiful woman. Her face is all Norwegian supermodel and reality star.
I got to stop watching so much TV.
“Where’s my nerd?” I ask her, calm, smiling and letting the fiends clear a path for me to her. I stop a few feet from her and lean against the wall.
“Your nerd?” She repeats, with a bit of a duh look on her face. The minute the realization hits her, she smiles like a cat in the cream. She eyes me up and down. “You don’t look like much.” Then, like the total skank she is, she opens her lips and languidly licks one sharp tooth.
Snorting with laughter I roll my eyes at her. What is up with these vampires and their two little teeth? It’s like a dog showing you it has a tail, or a siren making that obnoxious eek noise. It’s just not a big deal.
My glamour is back up again. It’s become a reflex of sorts, the minute I stopped fighting it returned. Well, we can’t have that. I let it slide off me, slowly, revealing what I am, fully, to all of them. The fiend armor, gifted to me, from the legion of fiends, flips out of my skin like scales. Tearing my clothes in the process. My hair grows and writhes around my head as my mouth stretches and pulls to make room for all my teeth.
With a serpentine tongue, I too, languidly lick all my sharp teeth. Now the paleness of her face is more pronounced, the cocky look and arrogant smile are gone. Her pupils are as small as the end of a pin because she’s terrified. The smell of it makes me smile again… the perfume stinks, but her fear smells divine.
“I’m asking you again… where’s my nerd?” Her eyes travel down my arm to the glowing dagger in my hand, then back up to my face where her eyes flicker back and forth as my agitated hair waves around and hiss at her.
“What the fuck are you?” she repeats. Her voice is shaky, breathless. It’s the voice of someone who is about to—she turns and takes off at a pace that knocks over her bodyguards that she just abandoned.
What a great lady.
I realize the mistake I made, in that very second—I stopped paying attention. There are so many vampires around me now that I can’t even begin to count them. With one longing look to the woman I want to chase down, who’s getting away I might add, I turn my full attention to the problem at hand. There’s no way I’ll catch her and avoid these fuckers, which leaves me one option.
With a roar I dive into them, the fiends echoing my war call.
IT’S moments like this that I understand why people smoke after a big fight scene in the movies. Looking down at my, mostly naked, the blood-covered self I shake my head. All I have left is one shoe, my socks, and my underwear. My armor destroyed most of it, but I have no idea where the shoe went.
Hopping up, I situate myself as comfortably as possible on the concrete wall of the parking lot. God, I’m tired. There were a lot of vampires, I lost count at one-hundred or so, and for a while there I thought they might get the best of me. If not for the fiends, they might have. Looking up I see the broken and bloody bodies littering the walls, the crumbled stairs… some are even hanging off the balconies. That’s not even counting the ones the fiends fed on. They ate so many that most of them are bloated and lethargic.
The others are waiting in reserve.
Honestly, I have no idea how all the vampires fit in that building because it was felt like a never-ending supply of them. They were coming out of everywhere, even from the roof. Maybe they thought that they could kill me with enough of them? There’s a good chance that someone thought they’d succeed—especially considering how many there were. All it did was let the one person who could give me information get away.
“Ma’am, get down on the ground and put your hands on your head.” The yelled order surprises me. Looking at the police officer—who’s holding a gun on me by the way—I hop to the ground and put my hand on my hip to regard him standing a few feet from me.
His pale face and wild eyes tell me he probably saw enough of the encounter to be a bit freaked out, and my glamour is still down. It’s safe to assume he saw things he can’t unsee, and it terrified him.
No normal human wants to know that things like monsters exist here, and I’m a fuzz scarier than the baby teethed vampires. I think it’s time they know; it’s why I let the little human follow me. The one who called this gentleman here, I imagine. The kid is still lurking too, on the sidewalk behind some bushes, on the other side of the police officer.
I smile and wink. He’s lucky, if I were a bad guy—a little gun wouldn’t stop me from getting to him. They’re all lucky. This group has probably been feeding on people here, so me killing them saved human lives. Dozens if not more a force this large would’ve required a lot of food. I decide to tell the cop that.
The man startles when I start talking. “You should pay me for killing them for you. I bet you’ve had people going missing left and right lately. Probably good people, and maybe even kids. Am I right?” After a moment of regarding me, he nods.
Then he says, “lady, you’re a monster, too. I saw you.” He licks his lips nervously, the gun wavering in his sweaty hands. I can tell by the white-knuckled grip he has on it that all it’ll take is one movement and he’ll shoot me.
“Yep, I am, but I’m a different kind of monster. I kill ones like those, the ones who hurt innocent people.” I keep my voice soft, non-threatening.
“What are you? Some kind of vigilante demon?” His voice is getting stronger. I think he’s becoming less afraid because I haven’t tried to rip his head off. If he sprays that poison in my face, though, I can’t make any promises.
Sighing, I flick a piece of flesh off my arm, I think it might have been a slice of an ear, but I’m not entirely sure. The leather of his belt creaks as he twists his arm around to take the cuffs off the hook. I genuinely don’t want to hurt him. Their motto is to protect and serve. That’ something I can mostly get behind, but I don’t like handcuffs, and I’m tired. I want to go home and bathe and deal with the fallout of sneaking away without telling—
The forlorn appears in front of me and roars, a demonstration of his master’s displeasure with me. The fiend’s immediate response is to attack it, males of their kind or not its being aggressive towards me, but I know that it won’t hurt me. The forlorn like me. To be fair, I’m betting Phobe is worried and this is an example of it.
“Hi, big guy. You can tell him I’ll be home soon, so he can get his panties out of knots.”
“What the fuck is that!” The retort of the weapon echoes off the walls and drowns out the words he’s yelling. The bullet hits me hard enough in the shoulder to send me a few steps backward. Bullets won’t kill me, but they sting like a motherfucker. The forlorn turns to him and roars again except this time it’s a different kind of roar. This is one of rage, not annoyance.
“No, don’t hurt him, you scared the shit out of him, he didn’t know that the bullet would go right through you. Now go, tell Phobe I’m coming home.” I put force in my words. The human just reacted, I can imagine how scary a forlorn is to them. All teeth, red eyes, and demon-like visage. I think they’re adorable but, I’m not human either. With one last look at me, the forlorn disappears.
Letting my fingernails grow I dig the bullet out with a grimace and throw it at the police officer. “Why’d you shoot me?” I demand, hoping that talking to him will calm him down. The forlorn is gone, and it’s just the three of us now. Oh, and the dozens of fiends hidden from his view. I think it’s best not to mention those to him.
“Put those on. I’m taking you in… I have no fucking idea what they’ll do with you, but my vest cam caught the entire thing. At least they won’t call me crazy.” I’m not sure if he’s talking to himself or me more. He keeps muttering under his breath about going to church.
He turns and digs around inside of his car. I catch the shirt he tosses.
“Put that on first, can’t have you… naked.” Then he goes back to muttering. I almost feel bad for him, but ultimately this will be good for everyone involved. I do hope the humans don’t get ideas about military occupations and shit. They’ve learned that lesson I think. I hope.
Sliding the shirt on, I ignore the smell of cologne and human sweat. I smell much worse than the shirt. I’m pretty sure I have some vomit on me too. Probably worse things, I did gut a few of them.
“Well, officer,” I look at the name on his badge, “Monroe, I need to get going, but that kid caught everything on camera, so I bet we’ll both be famous by tomorrow.” The gun comes back up at my words.
Moving fast I stop in front of him and grab the barrel of the gun, bending it up. I get right in his face, and say, “I have faith in what you do, and I’d rather not hurt you to leave. So, the short version of what happened here is, these were what you humans call vampires. They fed indiscriminately on humans under your protection. There are stacks of bodies in that building behind me to prove it. I killed them because they took a friend of mine and in the process did you humans a favor. Now, I’m tired, and I want to go home. If you’ll—”
He faints, right there in my arms, out cold. Gently, I lay him in his car and motion the camera boy out of the bushes. Immediately, he walks over to me. Kids have no brains, I swear.
“Never just come out… what the fuck, kid? I could eat you or something.”
“No way, you killed the bad guys. I heard everything that you said to that one you—” he clears his throat nervously, “chewed on.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m looking for my friend. They took him.”
“This video will be everywhere tomorrow. I’m sure someone will know.” I look right at the camera when he says that.
“I’m going to get you, assholes.” Turning, I start heading back the direction I came. He jogs to keep up with me, rapidly firing questions at me, that for the most part, I ignore. It doesn’t matter that I agree with this world finding out we exist but I’m not in the mood to play twenty questions, either. Stopping, I turn to face him, catching him when he almost runs into me.
“Look, there are creatures coming here… ones that want to kill you humans or enslave you. Hell, worse things than that I imagine, but it’s my kind that stands in defense of this place. When the time comes, you and your internet minions need to remember that.” Then I turn and jump back towards the room that the Prince is trussed up in. Leaving the boy standing there trying in vain to catch sight of me on that camera phone.
