Chapter 25
“You know, I don’t think this is working,” Roberts muttered. He turned the car down another street. “If they’re here, wouldn’t Mercy have sensed them by now? We’ve been all over this place. I’m running low on petrol.”
I shone the torch at the map. “You should have filled up when I said.”
He grumbled something I couldn’t be bothered listening too. Four hours of Roberts bitching was more than enough for me. I was starting to think I shouldn’t have called him and just come out in the Monaro. But there was no way in hell I would ever put roof racks on the Monaro, and Mercy did like to have something to hold on to.
I thumped the base of the torch into the roof of the car. Roberts scowled at me.
Mercy’s face appeared in my window, upside down, curling hair tossing in the wind created by the moving car.
“Get anything?” I asked her.
“Nope.”
“Not even a cold?”
Mercy was good at acting human, but some things still slipped past her. Sarcasm was one of them.
“Don’t get sick, remember,” she told me firmly. “Can we go dancing now?”
“Hey, that’s a good idea,” Roberts muttered. “Let’s do that.”
“But we haven’t found anything yet.” I glared at the map, daring it to keep hiding Big Red from me.
“Did it ever occur to you that the ghoul lied? I mean, he had just helped in your capture and imprisonment. And he’d almost let his friend eat your face off. That he would tell a big fat fib is within the grounds of possibility.”
Mercy nodded along, her hair flickering in the window to tickle my face. I shoved it out of my way.
“I suppose, but he sounded sincere. The second time at least. And this would be a good place to hole up.”
“Yeah, but it’s not exactly an easy amount of ground to cover in one night. They could be on the north side of the river too.”
I waved at the clock on the dash. “It’s only eleven o’clock. We’ve got hours of darkness left.”
“But no petrol. Come on, man. We’ve gone down every street, parked in every driveway, been chased out of most places and nearly had the cops called out on our arses. Give it up for tonight, plan for the north side and we’ll do it tomorrow night. Besides, I really should show my face somewhere, to at least pretend I’m doing my job.”
Mercy looked at me hopefully. I looked between them, trying to glare. It was hard, especially with Mercy’s little upside down face staring at me so hopefully. Roberts was right. We’d found nothing. There wasn’t a lot on the north side of the river at the mouth. Kermit had most likely lied to me. Stupid ghoul. Stupider Matt for even considering he might have been telling the truth.
“You really got nothing?” I asked Mercy.
She swung down off the roof and right through the rear window. “Nothing.”
“Seems I’m destined to not win anything tonight.” I sighed. “Okay, let’s go.”
Somehow Roberts had enough petrol left to warrant a gratuitous rev of the engine as he headed back toward the city like Big Red himself was hanging off the towbar. I studied the map during the trip, still wanting Kermit to be right. If he’d lied, I was right back at the beginning, with no idea where Big Red was. He’d found me the other night, which would indicate he could do it again. If I couldn’t find him and do some pre-emptive arse toasting, I suppose I would just have to go huge on the defensive.
I needed more paint.
Roberts stopped for petrol and got me a king sized Snickers. I forgave him his surliness, then went back to studying the map. By the time I gave up and folded the map away, we were cruising along Vulture Street.
“West End?” I asked Roberts.
“Yeah, haven’t shown my face here for a while.”
In the back seat, Mercy was humming. She had the window rolled down and was very nearly hanging out of it like dog. I turned to look out the window, but really wanted to keep an eye on her from the corner of my eye. While I was pretty certain she wouldn’t get hungry too soon, I had been wrong before. Not often, mind. She watched the people on the footpaths, frowning or smiling at the various activities she observed. A guy waved at her and she just stared back. The next person to wave, she returned it. A new learned response? Or just my vampire growing up? It was hard to know which was more desirable.
All this time I’d been set in my thinking Mercy was just a better trained animal than the wild vampires. Now I had Aurum’s perspective to consider as well, that age adds breadth to the wild vampire’s abilities to blend in, to act more human. Perhaps all my discipline with Mercy was just bypassing the natural path, accelerating her progress. Was that what the Reds wanted us for? If they could speed up the rate at which their young vampires became more autonomously successful then their army would grow and become stronger quicker than that of the other clans.
Argh. It was all too much to take in so fast. I just had to find a way to get Big Red off my arse. And really, about the only way I could think to do that was toast the mother. Thing was, had to find him first. Or sit around looking pretty and vulnerable until he came running. I’ll take option number one, thanks, Larry.
“Where are we going?” I asked Roberts.
“I thought I’d hit the –”
Mercy hissed in a sharp breath.
I spun around to look at her. “What is it?”
She crouched on the back seat, hands on the door, ready to throw herself through the open window and pounce. Her eyes were silver, flashing with the reflections of street lights and neon signs.
“Something big,” she growled. “Old. Strong.”
Roberts glanced at me, worried.
Yeah, I had a sinking feeling too. “Vampire?”
A desperate, vicious snarl was Mercy’s response. I took it as a yes. Nothing quite grabbed her goat like another vampire. I figured it as part of the whole clan deal. Reds liked Reds, but didn’t like Yellows, Oranges or Blues. Mercy, being until recently clanless, didn’t like any of them. Guess we were clan Hawkins now. Maybe we could be the ultra-marines, or cyan, or puce.
“Is it still here?” I asked, looking around furiously for Big Red.
Mercy shook her head. “Stale. Gone now.”
“Can you track him?”
“Aw man,” Roberts moaned. “Now I’ll never get any work done.”
Mercy began climbing out of the window. I nearly broke my back and did strain several important things reaching around to hold her back.
“What are you doing?”
“Chase,” she snapped at me, her fangs coming awfully close to my hand. “Track, fight. Kill.”
“Whoa, she’s in a mood.” Roberts quickly turned us down a less busy side street. People had started to stare.
“She’s got a point though. If she can track him tonight, this could all be over before dawn. We packed for vamp-ageddon anyway. May as well get some use from that sweet new gun you got me.”
Meanwhile, Mercy was quivering in my hands. She was like a dog that could see its favourite toy in your hand, waiting, just waiting, anticipating, salivating over the moment you were going to throw it. There was no freaking way I was actually holding her back by mere strength alone. She could have broken my arms as soon as look at me, but she contained herself, just barely, because I still held the toy.
Roberts gave me the it’s-your-choice look.
She was hot for the hunt, but it was different to last night. Then, she’d been charging out of hunger. Tonight, it was territorial, or something very much like it. She would latch onto this potential threat and ignore everything else. Probably.
No. Definitely. She was well fed, she was focused on the trail. It would be all good. Except for whatever we found at the end of the trail.
“Fly, my pretty,” I screeched and let Mercy go.
She was gone in a heartbeat, moving so fast she was a blur in the corner of my eye before the touch of her faded from my hands. I sat back and pulled out my phon
e.
Way back when Mercy was just a little tucker of a vampire, she’d run away several times. Twice I’d spent the whole night chasing her down the old fashioned way. You know, running madly through the streets asking strangers if they’d seen a petite blood sucking fiend with curly black hair whiz by. That, or just look for the trail of stunned and scared people left in her wake. Twice more still, she’d made her own way home, bloody from fights she hadn’t been strong enough to win, weak from overindulging in the wrong blood groups. When we’d hooked up with Roberts, he’d tuned me in to the easy way of tracking a speed freak of a vampire.
He’d low-jacked her.
Evolving technology was one of those things that moved too fast for otherwise preoccupied people like me to keep up with. I’m sure its open-the-box-before-it’s-outdated nature was the result of demonic forces. It was too diabolical for humans to manufacture. Still, it was nice to know it could help. Nice to know someone who could understand it all and then show me what button to push.
The GPS program on my phone had been tuned into her signal. A map popped up on the screen, a little square telling me where we were, a flashing dot telling me where we wanted to be. Real time satellite downloads had nothing on a vampire at speed, so the tiny Mercy-marker jerked across the screen in a wide zigzag pattern. I watched until three consecutive flashes of the dot went in the same direction.
“That way.” I pointed back up the street we’d turned down.
Roberts got the car turned around and we began following Mercy as she hunted.
It was a frustrating half hour. Mercy didn’t use roads. Know that saying, as the crow flies? Crows, vampires, same difference. We ended up the wrong way up one-way streets, in dead-end alleys and doing more than one illegal u-turn. At one point, swearing like the proverbial, Roberts simply took the centre island between lanes like it was a speed bump, earning us an impressive symphony of horn honks, and it wasn’t because the other drivers were horny. Quite the opposite I would hazard. Needless to say, I had one hand holding the phone, the other had a death grip on a panic handle and I wished for a third to cover my eyes.
“That,” Roberts shouted at me, “is why you need a four-wheel drive in the city. Not that pussy little low rider thing you got to compensate for whatever it is you think you lack.”
“Yeah, but in my car I’m more likely to get what I lack than in a freaking great big tank. Watch the light pole!”
Roberts swerved. “Where is she heading now? I have four turning lane options coming up.”
I peered at the phone. “Go left.”
“Fan-bloody-tastic. Into the city.”
It was a nightmare. But a short one. We ended up in Fortitude Valley. The Mercy-marker slowed down and began a more detailed search. She was closing in. Roberts parked near the China Town Mall, we geared up and then hot-footed it down Ann Street. When we were on top of the dot showing Mercy’s location, we stood outside the Fringe Bar.
Panting, Roberts said, “Well, she did want to go dancing.”
“She’s not here to dance. Big Red’s in there.”
“Are you certain? I mean, what if this was just a scam to get here?”
“She’s not that intuitive. There’s no way she could conceive of doing such a thing, let alone carrying it out so convincingly. When something gets in her head, that’s all she can think about. If she’d pretended to scent Big Red just to get away to go dancing, she would have headed straight to a particular place, not taken us back and forth across the CBD. He’s here.”
“Whatever.” Roberts trooped inside.
I scowled at his back and followed.
There is a reason I let Roberts do my advertising for me. Well, two actually. One, he is correct when he claims to be a better people person than me. I’m great one on one (refer to earlier flirtatious Matt with Ms Erin of the auburn hair and misty eyes) but in groups, not so hot. Too much time spent alone, maybe. Dunno. Dr Campbell thinks he can work me through it. I don’t see it as a real issue. It’s not like the freaks are inviting me over to BBQs or Tupperware parties.
Number two is that I have this dislike in particular for clubs. There’s a reason. It’s called ‘ending up in a correctional facility for eleven months’. Again, Dr Campbell thinks they’re one and the same thing. I don’t see it. Clubs. People. Different things. No, okay, I do get it. Yeah, club equals big mobs of people, but I’m sure one day I could stand in a corner at a cocktail party and tell everyone about how I was an awesome slayer of the vampires and not have issues. But I don’t think I’d be doing it in a club, ever.
It’s the close, tight atmosphere. The cloying mix of artificial scents and the all too real human ones. Noise that doesn’t just register in your ears, but in your chest, competing with the beat of your own heart. But worst of all, it’s the fragile balance between ‘yippee, we’re having such a fun time’ and ‘you spilled your drink on me, jerk’. I’m a man standing in the middle of that seesaw in the vast majority of my life. I try not to go looking for reasons that might tip me over to the ‘jerk’ end of the scales. There is one big obvious exception, of course, but in my own defence, I don’t go out looking for vampires just so I can get all berserk on their supernatural selves. It just happens that way… a lot.
So, me walking into the Fringe was akin to a reformed alcoholic winning a free pass to a drink all you can tour of the XXXX brewery. Each ignorant brush of some guy’s shoulder against me, each person that stepped back into me without knowing I was there, each hint that someone might smack into my injured knee screamed a challenge to the primitive part of my brain.
Dr Campbell had given me several methods of dealing with my issues. ‘Controlled breathing techniques’ was one of them. Yeah, just a fancy way of saying hyperventilate till you pass out and cease to be a threat.
“What the hell are you doing?” Roberts demanded. “Lamaze breathing?”
“It’s called ‘controlled breathing’. Supposed to help me, you know, leash the beast.”
“I can’t take you anywhere.”
I found a relatively clear spot by the bar and tried to ignore the crush of overexcited, mostly drunk and unsteady clubbers. Trying to calm my nerves was like trying to catch the soap in the shower. I managed it, eventually, and reached out to Mercy.
She wasn’t dancing. Take that, Roberts. She was still hunting, her mind a focused arrow, but one I could ride along on, not like the hunger-frenzy blocked mass it had been the night before. Now, I got a sense of where she was, what she was feeling.
He was close, he’d been here bare minutes ahead of us. His scent was thick, that old rush of cab sav, but souring, like a badly aged bottle. It was almost tangible in the air, a ribbon winding through the room, following a condensed pattern much like the one Mercy had created getting here. He’d been hunting, too. In the hall by the toilets it spiked into a heady rush of cold electricity. A mean mental whammy had been laid down on some poor sucker. Or should that be suckee?
I snapped back to myself just as Mercy shot past us on her way out. We tucked ourselves into her slip stream and followed. She wasn’t moving at the speed of vampire this time, but it was still fast. She left flapping coats and whipped up hair in her wake. Roberts and I just left gasps for air and perplexed looks in ours. I lost sight of her as she rounded a corner into a narrow, dark side street.
Roberts and I skidded around the corner and saw… sweet bugger all. No Mercy, no Big Red, no slumped body of his victim.
“Well, that was a bit anti-climactic,” Roberts said.
I drew the grand new paintball rifle. “Don’t talk too soon.”
Cold electricity rippled down my spine. I raised the gun. A figure stepped out of a recessed doorway. It raised its hands and took two steps toward us. Long legs in not too tight jeans, a form fitting tee and waves of long hair. Not Big Red.
“Help me,” Erin said and slithered bonelessly to the ground.
I started forward but Roberts grabbed my arm.
“It’s
a trap,” he said.
“I know. He’s gone to all the trouble of setting it up, may as well spring the stupid thing.”
He let me go, held his hands up in defeat. “Fine, go ahead. Rush in foolishly. Be the golden hero. I’ll send lilies to your funeral.”
Gun in hand, I stalked forward. “I like roses better.”
“Roses are for pretty things like love and weddings and babies. Lilies are for dumb fools who go out batting for top position in the Darwin Awards. You get lilies.”
Tracking across the width of the street with the gun, I kept an eye out for Big Red. The traces of the last compulsion he’d put on Erin lingered in the air, but I got no sense of his aura. If he was still close by, then he was doing something to hide his flavour that I’d never encountered before. Last week, I would have said with all sorts of confidence that he was long gone. But it was this week and I’d already had my quota of earth-shaking surprises.
I reached her without being side-tackled. Crouching, I checked her pulse with my free hand. Strong if a little erratic. Her neck had no puncture wounds. We’d either interrupted Big Red before he could chow down, or it had never been his intention in the first place.
“Erin? Can you hear me?”
She murmured something and shifted under my hand.
“It’s okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Gah,” Roberts hissed. “Famous last words much?”
“Got to do something to drag him out of hiding. I’m getting tired of waiting.” I shifted around on my toes, my left knee starting to ache.
“Hawkins?” Erin’s voice was soft, tentative.
I brushed the hair out of her face. “Yeah. You okay?”
“You lied to me. Said your name was Dave.”
“Middle name David. You got to do you some better research.”
“Not if you just keep on dropping beans,” Roberts said, coming up behind me.
I handed him the gun. “Cover us. Come on,” I said to Erin. “Let’s get you off the filthy ground.”
Between me and Erin we got her to her feet. She was as wobbly as a bobblehead with a loose spring. Arms draped over my shoulders, she slumped against me, head lolling listlessly.
“That must have been some whammy.” Roberts kept scanning the street while I rearranged Erin.
“More than a feeding compulsion, yeah. I think he must have been trying to get information out of her.”
“Feeding compulsion?”
“That’s what Aurum called it. Hey, here’s a whacky idea. How about we get out of here and then discuss nomenclature?”
“Not as whacky as some of your ideas. I’m all for it.”
I staggered to a stop, nearly dropping Erin as I coughed sharply. Cab sav drenched me.
“Night Caller.”
And Big Red flowed out the empty recess Erin had come from.