Chapter 9
Flinging herself from a moving vehicle wasn’t the hard part.
It did cause her a pang or two to start the self-destruct sequence; she’d had that little gift installed by a mechanic Barry knew in Illinois, a woman in clean, pressed blue overalls who took cash and asked no goddamn questions.
Don’t go blowin’ yourself up now, you hear? Laughing while she said it, but Miz Kendra’s big brown eyes had been cold and considering, and she had never turned her back on Simone.
Which had been kind of… not irritating, but a little sad? Attempting to learn a bit about engines would have been pleasant, but some sure instinct—feminine, not vamp—had said that Kendra knew goddamn good and well what Simone was now, and didn’t like it.
Still, bloodsucker money spent like anyone else’s. And Simone had paid with a smile.
No, hitting the seatbelt’s catch and throwing herself sideways through the door with a screech of metal, a tinkle of glass, and a hard high snapping sound wasn’t difficult.
Nor was hanging in midair for what felt like a very long time, her body arranging itself to take the landing hit.
Her reflexes were on point, and the old vampire’s blood had given her a shot of pure power, so she overcompensated and cleared the eternal barbed-wire fence at the side of the road, easy as pie.
The hard part was hitting and veering in a curve, boots nearly smoking as grass whipped to either side, her body achieving balance instinctively.
The space between her legs was still a little tender, giving a harsh throb as she found her stride, running not quite flat-out but at a pace she could sustain for some while and almost tripping because of the newfound strength and speed filling her muscles.
Wow. He must be really old. All his talk about daywalking and a burning city—useless to think about it right now, she had to hope the RV’s tanks, recently topped-up, would provide enough boom-and-burn to kill the other vamp, or at worst slow him down.
Simone ran, focusing on breath and form. She’d hated PE class with a passion, attempted aerobics and other sweaty indignities to try keeping her weight down all through her marriage, and would never have believed that running could ever feel good. Then she’d gotten infected.
Now the low song of cloven air rushing by her ears, night’s invisible fingers combing her hair, lungs working hard, full of sharp, intense bursts of scent… oh, it was glorious, even the fear beating in time to her laboring heart sweet and wonderful, because it meant she was alive.
That she had, for however short a time, escaped yet another trap.
She’d felt the same fierce, terrified exultation that morning so long ago, staggering away from the abandoned, ramshackle church, nearly naked and blinking heavily in thin cloudy sunshine as the floppy-haired vampire’s screams still rang in her ears.
Scrubbing crusted blood out of her eyes, every bruise and scrape throbbing in time to her wildly pounding heart, but oh she’d been alive, high on the fact of her own continued survival.
Before finding out the price, that was. The world was full of snares just waiting to grab a woman, freedom only ever a temporary condition.
It irritated her to lose another laptop, a few rolls of emergency cash, and the stake, as well as some clothes.
She hated that the stepstool from her old house was going to be sitting abandoned on gravel until it was picked up, driven over, or rotted.
But chewing a limb off to get out of metal jaws wasn’t just a coyote’s trick; all it took to learn was marrying the wrong man.
Or getting snatched by a vampire. Did this count as a second abduction?
All these fucking vamps so interested in me.
Is it my cologne? Neither breath nor energy to laugh; she cut across rolling grassland, leapt a gully—nearly invisible to human eyes, but clear as day to her bright bloodsucking senses, her body taking the jump with swift, unconscious authority—and landed soft as a cat.
The plains weren’t flat, though they might look that way from a car window.
The grass sea had tides all its own, the movement of wind deceptive as the hummocks and ground-waves underneath swelled and dropped.
Still, if she aimed for the smear of low orangish glow that was a town lit by clustered human homes and streets, she couldn’t go too far wrong.
Because this town had a truck stop—the Big Horn Watering Hole, to be exact, where she’d recently filled up the RV before setting out to take her last bounty. And Simone, thinking furiously, had pointed her poor, now-burning vehicle in that direction.
She wasn’t going to bother trying to talk a trucker into giving her a ride, though that would be relatively easy. No, she’d parallel the route to I-25 and hop aboard a semi heading to Cheyenne.
Wedging herself between a cab and trailer wouldn’t be the most comfortable thing in the world, but better than the alternative. She didn’t particularly like her life as an infected vampire hunter… but it was hers.
It was the only goddamn thing she had left.
And with a fresh cargo of old-vampire blood singing in her veins, her limbs moving fluidly and her hair flowing like a pennant, she would keep running until she dropped.
If she had to. If it became necessary.
Three and a half hours later a refrigerated rig screech-braked all the way down an exit ramp, Simone hit the shoulder with a tooth-shattering jolt, and she was back in the Magic City of the Plains with no cash, no phone, no laptop, no RV, and a tiny tickle of returning thirst far back in her throat.
Not to mention she was tousled, jolted, head-ringing from the triple drone of wind, tire-hum, and engine-rumble, and a thin scrim of copper adrenaline had replaced the persistent spice-taste in her mouth.
She never used to think herself any good at navigation; maybe going vamp had granted her an edge.
On plains and prairie the cities often had room to sprawl, too, so the grid was often fairly easy to figure out.
Especially if you’d been through a location once or twice, poking around, looking for signs of the weird.
The demimonde, they called it—at least, those in the know, an old piece of slang deployed to prove at least initial bona fides. And it contained multitudes: Vampires, werewolves, spontaneous combustion, Mothman, ghosts, little green men, and a whole host of other creepy shit.
Some bits were entirely imaginary, sure. But the parts which weren’t? Oh, those were mean as hell.
To be fair she was one of the latter now, her conscience only pinching hard instead of stopping her outright from blurring up to a big chain bank’s drive-thru ATM, ripping the facing free, grabbing the cassettes which didn’t reek of dye packs or degradation fluid, and vanishing into the distance almost before an alarm could sound.
It was far better than robbing a credit union at gunpoint—there was federal insurance, and naturally the bigger banks scammed everyone so relentlessly their profits were astronomical.
This was a drop in the bucket. Plus, the security footage would get quietly filed under ‘weird shit’ and disbelieved like countless other urban legends and myths.
Her own aptitude for superpowered criminal activity was unnerving. She was trying to work an honest job—such as it was—but how long until she started finding reasons to simply do whatever the hell she wanted?
Simone’s desires had always been what she thought of as entirely modest. A small house with a garden, or a quiet condo.
Just enough money for rent and groceries.
Time to knit, to read, to watch period dramas and pet neighborhood cats.
Her fantasies had sometimes involved a husband who didn’t strew dirty laundry all over the floor, didn’t keep the television blaring in every room, and didn’t think it was funny to fart on you in the middle of the night, but she’d come to the conclusion that such creatures were even rarer than Sasquatch.
Plus, she never wanted to be a mother and thus, apparently could not be a good wife.
Her one attempt at raising a manbaby had failed—not even spectacularly, simply fizzling out under its own weight, and when Curt started banging that chippie from his office, well, affairs had taken an utterly predictable path.
She was better at being a vampire than a housewife—or a part-time secretary at a dental office until Curt got mad at her not having dinner on the table every damn night whenever he decided to wander in and turn the TV on.
Nowadays the slightly metallic smell of a city at 3am.
reminded her of lazy summer afternoons—familiar and almost comfortable despite the reek of human sweat or acute vampire-sense tingles of paranoia.
The streets vibrated under her boots like guitar strings, leading her to pockets of late-night activity: the gas station where a yawning clerk behind thick bulletproof plastic didn’t take his eyes off a smartphone’s face as he rang up a baseball cap, a pair of cheap shades, and a couple paper maps still lingering despite GPS; the fluorescent-drenched 24-7 box store where fright crew was busy stocking and a sleepy-eyed night manager opened a case for burner phones, incurious as only retail workers who have Seen Some Shit can be; the craps game in a downtown alley while a lookout on the corner eyed her curiously; the transit maps on bus shelters she studied while her nerves popped and pinged, still jangled from escape; a railway yard where she could catch another ride out of town in a pinch; the basement bar where she bellied up to the counter for a precious half-hour nursing—not drinking—a bourbon on the rocks, listening to hushed conversation that confirmed this was, indeed, a place she could negotiate certain quasi-legal services.
By then the night was old, dawn approaching like a freight train.
No time to acquire more than the hat, shades, phone, and cheap messenger bag with a tough nylon strap; she didn’t want a cheap cash-only motel, since housekeeping or fellow guests might walk in while she was passed out during daylight.
So she strolled back through downtown with the particular loose-hipped don’t fucking bother me gait that seemed to have arrived with vamp infection and warned off all but the truly dumb or psychotic human predators, and dialed a number she’d taken the trouble to memorize into the burner.
Thank God for entirely small commonplace miracles, because her finder was awake at an odd hour. Again.
“Hi, Barry. It’s Jane.”
“These your new digits, hot stuff?” At least he sounded pleased. “Bounty’s cleared, you should see the transfer tomorrow at the latest.”
It’s already tomorrow. She couldn’t wait to check Jane Smith’s bank balance; a thin warm thread of relief crawled into her chest at the prospect. “That’s good news. You still got that rich nutjob on tap?”
A sound of shifting, creak of his office chair. “Deal hasn’t changed. Hour of your time, he’ll pay, anywhere in the Lower 48. Or hell, he’d probably fly out to Anchorage if you wanted.”
Too good to be true. But if that money landed, she could maybe settle somewhere, or at least get a better RV and spend her time hitting hospitals for spare blood bags instead of running bounties.
Happening across one old-as-fuck vampire was enough.
Her luck had been incredibly good up until now, but she was ready to leave the gambling table.
Another benefit to age, she thought—learning to quit while ahead.
“Denver,” she said. “I choose time, he chooses place. 2am, Friday. Send me the location—I’ll be there, but if this is some kind of scam, Barry…” No threat was dire enough, so she simply let the sentence trail away into a warning pause.
“Holy shit.” Now her finder was definitely scrambling, paper fluttering and something falling with a clink. “That’s… okay, that’s two days from now. Right?”
“Yes.” She wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t checked the date as the burner powered up, getting its bearings just like its new owner. “I mean it, this had better be as advertised. I don’t have time for bullshit.”
“I promise, I swear.” He sounded ready to slap his hand on a Bible, if one could be found on the hurricane mess of his desk. “This guy’s legit, he’s funded at least five other crews, including that mad Irish bastard who worked for the Vatican—”
“I really don’t care, Barry.” I heard O’Shaughnassey met a bad end on the East Coast. Her one interaction with the man and his crew had been unpleasant at best, but then again, word was vampires had killed his entire family.
She didn’t quite blame him for being wary.
Simone’s goal came into view—a hotel on the edge of downtown, right next to the Union Pacific station. An old building, and no doubt ID was mandatory for all check-ins.
Good thing her plans didn’t involve paying for a room. “He gets an hour, I get the moolah,” she continued, her legs tingling as she lengthened her stride. “Set it up, leave a message at this number once it’s confirmed. And, Barry, ol’ buddy ol’ pal? Listen to me. Be smart about this.”
“Come on, Janie. Have I ever let you down?”
We’ve only known each other a few years, my man. You’ve got time. “Get some rest,” she said, and hung up, eyeing the hotel’s brick facade from the entrance of an old movie theater half a block away, its marquee overhead nearly dripping with nostalgia.
No, she didn’t have to pay or show ID. All she had to do was get inside.