Feral Hearts Page 19

  …where the fuck has she gone?

  “Over here, asswipe,” she whispered. “Calm yourself down. I can hear you breathing from over here, and I don’t have a pair of bat’s ears like those vampires hunting us.”

  “Well, where are you then? I can’t see shit out here.”

  He thought her voice was coming from behind one of those trees over to the left, but he still didn’t trust a fucking thing, much less the mystery girl.

  Paul’s questions were met with silence, a gap of soundlessness interrupted by the distant sound of screams and the ambient chatter of insects.

  “Well, sod the fuck off then,” he muttered under his breath and turned to walk into another part of the vineyard.

  Scared as he was, shivering at the sound of wind blowing through the vines and arbors, he started to feel like maybe making distance between him and Angela might be for the best anyway. If he was lucky, none of the vampires had seen him slip off on his own this way, and if he was luckier still, they were tracking Angela instead of him.

  The others would probably be dead by the time anyone came back here to check things out, but Paul was a lot more worried about his own ass at the moment. After all, what real tie did he have to any of the rest? So, they met and they spoke a handful of words to each other before the day had passed. So what? He and Barry were the only ones that had any real call to look out for each other. It wasn’t like he’d gotten them in this mess. No, that was Barry and his-what? Bravado? Balls-out lack of sense?

  Wow, I actually miss the dumb bastard. Maybe I just have a death wish…

  For a long moment, Paul paused where he stood, remembering everything that had gone on in that room before Barry lost it. If Barry hadn’t fought back, maybe the pair of us rabble rousers could have finally gotten that one last big high and gone out with a bang.

  He remembered the taste of Viktoriya in his mouth, copper and something intangible, something earthy and yet sweet and untraceable. In that place and in her bed, he really had been hers. He had given over every element of himself to her words and the sensations she gave him.

  What I offer you is a gift, something you’ll think about forever. She was right, damn her. Buried in the nightmare of what she really was, he was still enthralled.

  He still wanted her.

  * * *

  Jenna wept as Lucy pulled her along the old streets of Derosso. It was all too much, countless nightmares, scores of events she couldn’t control, and thousands of things she couldn’t keep track of no matter how hard she tried. She was starting to think that risks weren’t as good for her as Doctor Ed had told her they’d be, that her mother was wrong about her taking chances, and that maybe it would all go away if she could go home and talk to Cattabulous. She could then get it all out of her system and drain the poison that regular life had become ever since…

  “Jenna? “

  Suddenly, her face is in Lucy’s hands, lifted at just the right angle for the other woman to train her eyes on Jenna’s. Jenna watched them dart back and forth, not really able to focus on the things Lucy was trying so hard to say.

  It was all too much. Jenna wanted to go home. She wanted to restore some sense of order in her life. She wanted to wake up in the Derosso Grande hotel to find that Jamie had left her a note about meeting him for a romantic walk where they’d…

  “Hun, you’ve gotta stick with me here. All we have now is you and me. Now, I know it’s a lot to ask of you, and we’ve both seen some seriously fucked up shit.”

  Lucy’s voice broke and tears filled her eyes. Jenna didn’t have to hear her talk about all they’d seen to be able to remember. Her mind was a catalogue of God awful images dripping with blood.

  Lucy didn’t know where the others went. Instead, she thought about everything she and Jenna had come across since: one dead man torn in half and left for them to stumble over in the street, two lunatics fighting over the body of a dead woman with her eyes open wide, monsters attacking a family that tried to let them in on one dark and lonely street, dead bodies torn apart and bleeding where they lay on main street…and one Barry, drained of blood and unmanned as they watched. All of it was painted in vivid shades of Blood Crave red and darker things.

  “Cattabulous is waiting for me,” Jenna whispered to no one in the dark alley.” He’s probably getting hungry. What if I didn’t leave him enough food? What if the girl I asked to watch over him died suddenly in a terrible accident, and Cattabulous is trapped in the bathroom like I worried he would be? What if he needs me, and I’m still here trying to wake up from this very bad dream? What if he dies because I was selfish and wanted something for myself? What if—”

  Lucy wrapped her hand around Jenna’s mouth, pulling her into the dark corner beside a trash dumpster. Jenna could hear Lucy breathing in horrible gasps. She couldn’t breathe beneath Lucy’s palm, and she couldn’t see what was coming.

  There were footsteps in the dark, yet another threat in a night full of danger. One step, two steps, three steps…a shuffle a scuff and a scrape. A fifth step, a moment’s pause, and then a sixth step followed by panting breaths.

  Seven steps, and a thousand possibilities rush through Jenna’s thoughts. A shadow under the moonlight creeps along the wall in front of them followed by an eighth step, now nine, now ten, and then eleven.

  Screams of horror and pain cry out in the night around them, multiple victims meeting their end by way of minion or vampire, fire and destruction eating up what few safe places remain in the tiny Italian village with the romantic atmosphere.

  It was all Jenna could do to hold her breath, pleading with the night to end and for dawn to break. She and Lucy were defenseless, and the world around her was chaos.

  …a twelfth step, now thirteen, now fourteen, and finally fifteen.

  Whatever it was that was coming had finally begun to slip around the edge of the dumpster and was becoming clearer as it moved.

  A sixteenth step…seventeenth …

  She kicked Lucy in the shin with one heel over and over. She kicked and struggled in Lucy’s arms until Lucy started to let go. She finally released Jenna’s mouth. Jenna called out in the night.

  “Jamie?”

  * * *

  Angela was getting very sick of catching the stick in life, very sick of it indeed.

  It’s not like she hadn’t already lost enough people, not as if she went out of her way looking for trouble…well, most of the time. So why did it all keep coming back to this?

  At least it was her own ass now. She’d ditched that asshole Paul a while ago. He gabbed too much and was way too free with risking things for her. If that made her as much a piece of shit as he or that louse Barry had been, so be it.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time she put herself first, and doubtless not the last either. Angela Rollins was a survivor, and she could rely on that if nothing else.

  Of course, none of the other tourists had taken any time to really check in on her or push through the “mysterious girl” front she was always putting up, not even to try and catch a shag, which put her off a bit. In the end, of course, it paid off not to have any real associations with the rest of the group, but she’d been hoping for a couple of wilds romps before she gave up on this group and tried the next.

  Barry seemed like he might at least have known what he was doing, but she suspected he was way too much ego for her to tolerate. Jamie was nice enough, but she didn’t really like a guy who couldn’t give her a bit of a kick to the ass if it came down to it. Besides, Jenna (poor creature) seemed like she was sweet on him already. That left Paul, and before all of this shit with the vamps, she might have gone for it.

  Well, screw that!

  God, he was an ass, and none of the women had been her style either, not even the tour guide, as curvy and attractive as she was physically. That one was way too chipper and probably more than a little clueless. Nothing got on her last nerve like a woman who was all looks and no brains.

  No, the little vent
ure hadn’t been worth it, not even for a diversion, and certainly not with all of the goddamn vampires eating up the scenery tonight. She thought she’d seen the last of that lot when she bid Dallas adieu back home, but here they were again mucking it all up for everyone, eating and burning it all up as if they’d known she was coming.

  It was as if taking out their compound hadn’t been enough. She’d taken out every last one of those undead fuckers for taking the one damned thing that had meant anything to her in her entire life…

  So why not do it over again? Why not get this bit over with and maybe play the hero? I’m not a hero. I’m the girl nobody wants and the train wreck nobody expects.

  So fucking change the pattern. Isn’t that what all this shit was supposed to be about in the first place?

  As luck would have it, she looked up to see a large shed a few feet in the distance, and with a few quick strides through the tall grass, she was within range to see inside. Dark as it was away from the village, the moonlight still lit the edges of several tools there. Most of them weren’t going to be too terribly useful against vampires–wiring, boards, bits and pieces of barrels, and the like. But, there on one wall where the light hit hardest was something she thought would do quite nicely.

  A spax.

  * * *

  Jenna had barely gotten out his name before Lucy dove across the few feet between them, grabbed him by his shirt, and slammed him into the wall behind Jenna.

  She questioned him in a low voice through gritted teeth. “What in the fuck did you do, and where in the fuck have you been since all of this started? Don’t feed me any shit either. I’ll smell it coming off of you before you even speak it!”

  Jamie’s face was a snarl of pain and resentment. “You don’t know a damn thing about any of this, but if you keep pinning me here and making a racket, see what happens.”

  “Is that some kind of threat?”

  “No, it’s just a fact. Listen, I came through all this crap to try and help whoever was left. I didn’t do what I did to get anyone killed, not directly. I’ve been a prisoner of that bitch for years now. She took everything—my lovers, my self-worth, my dignity. It’s all piss in the wind because I looked the wrong way on the wrong night.”

  A skitter of claws and musical laughter sent them darting into another alley. Whatever else was going on, Jamie was clearly just as threatened by the beasts and vampires as the rest of them. “See? Those fucking lunatics are all over the place and just as bad as the women. Hell, worse!

  “Listen, I get it. I’m not all that trustworthy. I didn’t do the right thing for a long time because I didn’t have any other choice, but she turned me loose a little while ago, so I’m just as much at risk as you. Probably more so, now that I’m trying to help.”

  Jamie met Jenna’s eyes. “I wanted to try and make things right. I’m really, really sick of being the guy everyone pushes around, the one that doesn’t take risks. I’ve been hearing all my life about how I never take chances. I guess this is me taking chances for once, with my balls in my throat and stomach in my shoes, but I’m trying.”

  Jenna smiled at him, the tension melting away, her hands softening at her sides. It was the quietest she’d been all night, and with the moonlight hitting her face, lighting up the edges and making her shine, it was also the most beautiful she’d been. Jamie couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before, that light just behind her eyes, so like Mary and as broken and needy as Nico.

  “Three is a good number,” said Jenna. “This all started with three, and it should finish that way too.” It didn’t make any sense, but Jamie nodded anyway. He knew it was the right answer for her, if no one else.

  Lucy was still a ball of tension, however, her muscles taught and her eyes darting back and forth between them, trying to figure out what had happened. “Fine, she trusts you. You make her calm, but you’d better not make me regret—”

  That was when they were found.

  A wall of ravening, bloody men barreled down the alleyway behind Lucy, meeting her from behind. Jamie was pinned to the spot for a moment, watching in horror as they came at her. They gathered her limbs in their many awful, grasping claws and lifted her up for all to see.

  Jamie grabbed Jenna by the hand, and they fled the other way down the alley.

  “Don’t look,” Jamie told her, but he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder. It was an imperative moment, a thing he couldn’t look away from.

  Screaming and fighting them as they moved her up and around, Lucy pulled her body taught. Her mouth became an O of horror. With power and ferocity beyond the power of man, the lunatics hooted and howled and pulled her apart in several directions with a wet, rending pop.

  Her shrill screams were the terrible sound of animal agony. Blood and entrails shot out like rain over them, and they caught it all in clenched fists, devouring and snarling at each other as they consumed all that was left of Lucy.

  What have I done? What have I become?

  The mutilation over, Jamie pulled Jenna along and off in a direction he knew would be safe.

  * * *

  With a solid kick to the gut and a little lift with the help of some stairs, Angela managed to come up just enough to get a good solid swing, one that whipped the head from one of the harpies and slid right on through into the throat of one of her burly companions.

  Aha, a twofer! This really is a right handy little beast.

  She swung the spax back the other way and spiked the back of it through the throat of another of the Renfields and pulled. Blood and bits of gore came away, dropping the poor lunatic bastard before he knew what had happened to him.

  It spattered her with a lot more blood and bits than she’d wanted to deal with, but there wasn’t much she could do about it now. Better to shrug it off and get back to work.

  Hmm, wonder how many that leaves now. I got two creeping around the vineyard, thinking they were so damned cunning, the cunts!

  A long scream roared out, followed by hooting and growling down an alley four or five over from where she stood. It had sounded an awful lot like Lucy.

  Poor thing. Well, there’s nothing for it now.

  * * *

  Paul was starting to think that maybe he was getting just far enough from Derosso to consider it safe when he started to hear things.

  Oh, bloody hell.

  He wrote off the first few swooshing sounds as the wind slipping between the trees, creating a bizarre sort of breathy whisper he knew from his childhood. It was the sound summer nights made when he was alone under the trees and listening to the quiet night on his dad’s estate, probably the only time he had ever been anything but restless.

  Then, it started getting louder, sounding a lot more like words, words that came from that voice, the one that promised him death earlier tonight and swore retribution for Barry’s crimes.

  “Oh, sweet fucking Christ.”

  A shiver of horror slipped up his spine, reverberated in his bones, and whispered up into his skull. It was a physical thing, like a snake coiled beneath his flesh, touching him in ways that could not be possible, caressing his insides and whispering along his vertebrae. It caused his balls to retract high into his body.

  Hello, Paulie. Miss me? I’ve been looking for you, you know. Can’t have you just slipping off.

  “What do you want?”

  What do you suppose I want? What does your cold, greedy little heart tell you I want?

  “I-um…I can’t say.”

  Viktoriya laughed, a cold and terrible thing that finally brought his forward motion to a stop, freezing him in place.

  “Do you want me dead? Cause if that’s what it is, maybe you ought to just do it instead of beating around the bush, yeah?”

  If you insist.

  She laughed again, a cruel sound echoing all around him. White hot agony shot through him, pressure building as the ephemeral nothing that she was became solid. All that she was pushed the very real bits of his insides left, right, up, do
wn and everywhere it didn’t belong, pushed and then burst him apart.

  Bye, Paulie.

  Where he’d stood a moment before was a very bloody and smiling Viktoriya. Amused, she walked off into the trees, slipped back into mist, and made for the village of Derosso.

  * * *

  Jenna smiled to herself. She imagined going back home, curling up on her comfy little couch with Cattabulous in her lap and Jamie by her side.

  It was a sweet image, sweeter than confronting what happened to Lucy, sweeter than the truth she knew was coming, sweeter than the terrible nothing of her past and the darkness that ate her up in numbers, colors and so many thoughts, so many questions. Mom, I wish…I wish things could be different. I wish that I could have a normal life.

  Her mother answered her in her mind’s eye. What good is normal when it only brings you pain? What good can it do you if all it does is make you worry? It’s time now, Jenna, time you went out and lived your life. Go, enjoy your time, have your Cattabulous and don’t worry over it. It’s your gift. You will know when it’s time, and you will find your destiny isn’t so bad when you’ve faced it head on.

  Are you sure, Mom?

  Yes, my dear, I’ve always known you would be great.

  “Jenna?” Jamie’s voice was so soothing when she heard it again. It was quiet here, away from the violence of the streets of Derosso, back at the Derosso Grande, locked away in a room of their own.

  He’d been looking out the window for a long time now. He wanted to be sure that everything was safe, that they could talk. There was a lot they had to talk about now, plans to be made, choices to be considered.

  She knew just what had to happen now, and her mother had been right. It wasn’t so bad. Her mind was finally quiet. All the numbers, all the words and colors and random information that flooded her every waking moment had slipped away. She became clear, refined, renewed. All she had to do now was wait.

  His eyes were on her now, they shined, bright and clear but oh so sad. “Jenna…Jenna I have to tell you something about me, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”