A wave of warm air wafted out of the room, carrying with it the smell of vampires.
A room full of sleeping vampires smells like snakes. When I was in college, I had a friend with a pet python. He kept it in a glass tank with a heating lamp over it and fed it baby field mice that he bought from a pet store on Rampart Street, at the edge of the French Quarter. His entire apartment always smelled strange, like hot, damp wood with an overlay of something like blood—it had that metallic tinge of copper—and of something else, something indefinable and predatory and reptilian.
Deirdre’s basement room smelled like that.
It smelled like danger.
But wherever that danger lay, it wasn’t waiting for us just inside the door. If any of the vampires were awake, they were hiding somewhere out of sight.
The room itself was huge, an open space stretching out into darkness, taking up, I assumed, the entire breadth and length of the upper floors. Enormous marble pillars supported the structure above. The floor was tiled, also in marble, and mirrors lined all the walls, reflecting the shadowy shapes of mattresses that in the mirrors looked mostly empty. We all pulled the tiny flashlights we carried out of our tool belts and turned them on. In the darkness, the mirrors fractured the light, sending it back to us in glaring beams that ruined our night vision and temporarily blinded us.
I blinked to clear the spots from my eyes. There were mattresses scattered as far as I could see. Some of them were draped in filmy fabric attached to the ceiling with hooks—those looked like a nightmare vision out of some really bad Arabian Nights remake. Others were covered with fluffy comforters in various shades of white or black or red. One had lilac-colored sheets with sprigged flower designs all over it.
Every last one held sleeping vampires and humans. One or two held a single vampire, but most held three or more, huddled together in a pile like sleeping puppies.
No. Not puppies. That was too cute-sounding, and this was far from cute. It was hard to tell, in those confused knots of arms and legs and heads, where one vampire ended and another began. I was drawn back to the snake imagery. They looked like snakes all tangled together. No wonder they used to call it a “slither” of vampires.
I shined my flashlight on the closest mattress and checked the mirror again. A lone human lay reflected, her arms and legs twisted into unnatural shapes, seemingly floating in the air as she slept.
Nick checked the mirror, too, and his eyes met mine.
“Hey, Malcolm?” he asked in a whisper. “Did you drug these humans, too?”
Malcolm looked startled. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure if any of these people were upstairs at any point this morning,” he whispered back.
Nick motioned us slowly back through the door. Dom closed it behind us and we all leaned into a huddle while Nick spoke.
“Okay, guys. This is going to be a mess,” Nick said. “We have actual people in there. You’ll have to check the mirrors before you make each kill. Some of those humans might wake up and try to stop us, so we’re going to need the stun batons, Dom.”
“Right,” said Dom. He unzipped his bag and rummaged around inside it.
“Why would they even have mirrors down there in the first place?” John asked.
“Worry about that later,” said Nick. “Right now, concentrate on killing the vampires and disabling the people.”
“They like to watch their victims in the mirror,” Malcolm said. “It… I don’t know… turns them on or something to see the person’s reaction.” I tried to catch his eye, but he avoided looking at anyone.
Dom handed the batons around. “Just hold it against them and push this button,” he said, pantomiming the motion with his thumb. “It sends out an electric shock that should knock them off their feet. It takes a while for the effects to wear off.”
“Is this a Taser?” I asked.
“It’s like a Taser—works on the same principle.”
“Will it work on vamps?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It might slow them down long enough to give you a chance to stake them.”
I nodded. I didn’t like the idea of going in carrying a vampire-killing weapon in only one hand, but if the Taser-like baton slowed them down, it would be worth it.
“Once we get back in, John’s going to run a perimeter check. There are a lot of shadows in there; I don’t want anything to surprise us.”
We all nodded.
Armed now for both humans and vampires, we once again moved through the door as Dom opened it. This time I was prepared for the weird smell. Nothing had changed.
We waited near the door while John jogged around the room, Taser and crossbow at the ready. I peered into the darkness after him; it didn’t take long for me to lose sight of him in the shadows.
It also didn’t take him long to get back to us.
“All clear,” he said. “Nothing but sleepers here.”
We spread out across the room, working our way toward the back. I noticed that Malcolm chose to begin at the side of the room farthest away from me. I moved to the first mattress against the far-left wall and checked the mirror. No humans in this pile.
Lucky for us vampires are such sick bastards, I thought, glad for the mirrors. Then I imagined Dierdre watching Malcolm’s reflection in the mirror while she fed from him, and shuddered.
I picked my first vampire and held my knife with its special wood inlay directly above her heart. She looked perfectly normal, sleeping there, peaceful and calm and beautiful. Sweat broke out along my upper lip.
Could I actually kill something, someone, when she wasn’t doing anything to hurt me? It’s one thing to put a stake through the heart of a vampire who is snarling and hissing. It’s something altogether different to kill a beautiful young woman as she’s sleeping. In the middle of the day. In a master vampire’s hell-dungeon. On a mattress with a pile of other vampires. None of whom had reflections.
Oh, hell, I thought, and plunged the knife straight down.
I hadn’t been entirely certain that the knife would work, so I brought several regular stakes tucked into my tool belt. I clearly was not going to need them. The knife slid through her chest easily. I felt it slice past a rib, catching for a millisecond and then sliding all the way in. To the hilt.
She never woke up. She just gasped and arched her back, and then subsided into silence.
But even without opening her eyes, she still managed to seem surprised that she was dying.
The wound I left behind spurted blood when I removed the knife. Some of it landed on my cheek, and I hastily wiped it away with the cuff of the jumpsuit. Nasty. After that, I learned to lean as far away from the corpse as possible when I pulled the knife out. I moved quickly among the mattresses, staking vampires, leaving humans alone. The huge hall was full of a strange rhythm, made up of the thwack and thump of stakes entering hearts, the sighs of the dying vampires, and pop-splurt noises as the stakes were ripped out of the chest wounds. Thwack, thump, sigh, pop-splurt. Over and over again.
So the first several kills were easy, if a tad gruesome. And by the third mattress-full of vampires, I hadn’t even had to Taser any humans.
That thought gave me pause. There was something really wrong here; I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Hey, Nick,” I called softly.
He finished staking a vampire and pulled his stake out of its chest. I cringed at the sucking noise it made. That noise was beginning to get to me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Come here for a minute.”
“What’s up, Dixie?”
“Have any of these humans woken up yet?”
He looked around the room. “No,” he said, his forehead crinkling in thought. “They haven’t.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”
“Not really. Malcolm said he may have drugged these guys, too.”
“Okay. As long as you’re sure,” I said.
“I’m not sure,” Nick said, “but I don’t think there’s anything sure in this game. Let’s just keep going and not look this particular gift horse in the mouth.”
So I went back to staking vamps. Thump, thwack, sigh, pop-splurt. My stomach heaved, and I hoped that I would get used to the noise soon.
Our ragged little line of vampire assassins had moved about a quarter of the way into the room when I first noticed the sound underlying the rhythm of our kills. I pulled my knife out of a vampire and stood still, listening.
First Malcolm, then Nick, then John and Dom and Tony all stopped, as well. In the silence left behind, I could hear a sibilant noise rising, like a wind picking up a speed. It came from the shadows in the back of the room.
Almost simultaneously, the six of us shined our flashlights toward the back wall. The light beams picked out the pale faces of vampires, all staring at us, all hissing softly, fangs bared.
“Oh, shit,” I heard one of the guys whisper.
And then the vampires charged.
Actually, “charged” isn’t really the right word, because that implies some sort of force behind the motion. And vampires don’t really move with force. They flow. They slide. They dance across the room with an inhuman animal grace.
These vampires did all of that, but they did it directly toward us. And they kept hissing.
I felt my knife-wielding hand start to shake. I dropped the flashlight and it rolled around on the floor, bouncing light off the mirrors and across the vampires’ faces as they circled around us. The knife felt slippery in my suddenly sweaty palms, and I redoubled my grip on it, then pulled the stun baton out of my belt.
I have no idea how many there were. All I know is that I was cut off from Nick and the others, fighting for my life. I backed up against the mirrored wall, hoping to keep them from circling around behind me. I could see Nick a couple of yards away, reloading his crossbow and firing shots into the darkness. One of the vampires sidled in closer to me, her blonde hair billowing around her shoulders as she bared her teeth and growled at me.
I slammed the end of the Taser into her stomach, hitting the button with my thumb just as Dominick had shown me.
For an instant, I thought it wasn’t going to work. Then her mouth stretched out into a rictus grin, and she collapsed. She wasn’t dead, but she sure wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The rest of the vampires backed off a bit, keeping enough distance between themselves and me that I couldn’t reach them with the Taser.
“Hey, guys!” I yelled across the room, “Tasers work!”
In reply, a crossbow bolt shot out of the darkness and thumped into a vampire standing in front of me. He staggered backwards and fell to the ground. I didn’t know if that crossbow bolt was an answer to my comment, precisely, but it sure made me feel better.
And then I was in the midst of it. I found myself kicking and whirling, hitting vampires with the Taser, stopping to stake them whenever I had a moment free from immediate attack. One after another, I Tasered the four other vampires who had surrounded me. It was a lot easier to fight vampires when I only had to touch them with a Taser to bring them down. I didn’t have to aim at all, I discovered—I just had to make contact with the weapon, and they fell.
With a few seconds to spare before any other vampires were upon me, I knelt down to stake the first who had attacked me. These vampires were harder to stake, I discovered. It took more power, even with the sharp edges of my knife, to get to the heart, almost as if something pushed back against me. But I managed it anyway.
Another crossbow bolt flew out of the darkness, and I spun around in time to see the vampire who had been sneaking up on me drop to his knees.
“Thanks!” I yelled. I saw John give me an acknowledging wave and turn to fire again in the other direction.
That’s when Greg wrapped his arms around me from behind.
“Hello again, sweetheart,” he said. His breath wisped across my ear. “I missed you.”
And then he stuck his tongue in my ear.
I’ve never been a big fan of the tongue-in-ear action, even when the tonguer was someone I liked. And I most emphatically did not like Greg anymore.
He had my arms pinned against my side, presumably to keep me from staking him. So I did the next best thing.
I Tasered him.
It was easy, too. I just spun the little baton thingy in my hand so that it was touching his thigh and I pressed the button. Greg went down hard, completely out for the count.
I could have staked him then. But he just looked so vulnerable, so defenseless—so much like he had always looked when he was alive and I was planning our wedding while he was planning to become a bloodsucking monster—that I just had to Taser him again.
The second jolt made him flop around on the ground like a fish. Watching him gave me a warm feeling inside. So I did it again.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
But watching Greg’s body twitch and jerk on the ground distracted me so much that before I knew it, I had another group of rabid vampires to deal with. So I went back to fighting before I had the chance to properly disembowel him.
I know, I know. Disemboweling doesn’t kill vampires. But I bet it hurts like hell.
And quite frankly, after all that Greg had done to me—from becoming a creature of the night who sucked blood to actually sucking my blood—I felt like a little payback was in order. I’m sure that says something unfortunate about my character—and maybe about my mental health, as well—but that’s the truth. I wanted to see him suffer a little bit before he died.
I should have just staked him right then and there.
I have a lot to atone for.