Chapter Three
I found myself bouncing along the asphalt. Butt first. Then one shoulder. A double slap of pain.
The fog in my head vanished, and my vision burst into Technicolor brilliance, blue sky and white clouds whirling above.
The back of my helmet rebounded against the road. The visor snapped loose and my sunglasses flew off. Something squished between my back and the pavement.
My brain clicked into vampire survival mode, and my synapses sparked at hyper-speed. Time slowed. Microseconds became milliseconds. Milliseconds became seconds. The blur of the crash sharpened into slow-motion focus.
Jolie pancaked beside me, landing on her back, arms and legs spread out, her aura a twirling pool of orange fire.
We spun down the road like hockey pucks. The Suzuki tumbled alongside us, somersaulting, chewing against the guardrail, disintegrating into a cascade of plastic and metal.
Close behind us, the Mustang charged through the motorcycle debris. An orange aura shimmered around the driver. Vampire! And red from the front passenger. Human. He aimed a shotgun out his window, no doubt hunting for Jolie and me. Though my mind was super-aware, I couldn’t make out his face behind the gaping snout of that twelve-gauge cannon.
Jolie had the best shot at the Mustang so I yelled to her, “You take out the car. I’ll get the pickup.”
Her helmeted head tracked the guy with the shotgun as she pivoted down the asphalt, unzipping her jacket, reaching with both hands across her chest to draw a brace of Kimber .45 pistols. Her boot heels sparked across the pavement. As she swung around like a gun turret, she aimed at the Mustang, squeezing the triggers so quickly that the semi-auto volleys came out like burps from a submachine gun.
The marble-sized slugs zinged toward the Mustang in a swarm of lead. Steam geysered from the punctured radiator. Bullet holes stitched the windshield in front of the driver. The shooter’s face tore up so fast that he remained scowling even as bullets mulched flesh and bone.
The Mustang swerved. The front wheels locked up, the nose end of the big muscle car digging into the asphalt, the chassis pitching forward. The air bags exploded against the driver and passenger. The car flipped between Jolie and me, tilting, pinwheeling, flinging parts, smashing over the remains of the motorcycle, and crunched upside down.
Jolie and I had slowed our spinning. The slides of her empty Kimbers were locked back, smoke hula-hooping from the exposed barrels and her boot heels. My backside burned from the friction as I continued to slide down the road. Jolie scrambled to reload her .45’s.
We were almost to the pickup truck parked on the shoulder. Tendrils of alarm whipped from the red aura surrounding the man in the bed. He wore a hat and a brown duster and held a cube of polished steel bars framing a box of layered glass.
I experienced a flash of recognition about the device, but first it was my turn for payback.
I yanked my jacket open, and at lightning speed, had the magnum out and blasting.
Bullets cleaved through the device he was holding. It broke apart in a spray of glass. Slugs hammered the man, doubling him over. Blood spurted from his chest. His aura vanished like a snuffed match flame and he fell from view into the bed. The truck pulled away, kicking dirt. It fishtailed across the pavement and accelerated up the highway. The driver’s aura glowed red in the rear cab window. The pickup rounded the curve and disappeared.
Heels dragging across the pavement, I finally spun to a halt. My mind slowed to normal speed.
Jolie catapulted onto her feet and limped toward the Mustang. She tossed her helmet and gloves aside. The leather on the spine, shoulder blades, and elbows of her jacket was worn to the Kevlar armor underneath. She reloaded the Kimbers with a pair of fresh magazines she fished from a jacket pocket.
The car lay on its battered roof, the shattered remains of the windows looking like the nubs of broken teeth, the wheels twisted like mangled paws.
Bones and joints aching, I struggled upright. The tattered backpack dangled from my shoulders. A smear of blood spiraled from where I had first landed to where I had come to rest—the red stain was from the bags of blood that had popped inside the backpack. The rest of the items—my toiletry bag, cell phone charger, and ammo—were scattered amid random parts of car and motorcycle.
I gathered loose cartridges from the pavement and replaced the spent shells in my magnum. After ditching my helmet, I joined Jolie where she crouched beside the Mustang. She stared at the slack bodies of the driver and shooter hanging from their safety belts, blood dripping from the bullet holes uglifying their faces. The spent airbags draped like used condoms. Neither of our attackers had auras. Fangs shone in the driver’s mouth.
I asked, “He look familiar?”
His blood was starting to turn into brown flakes.
Jolie shook her head and shoved her pistols into the holsters inside her jacket. She pointed at him. “We got a vampire.” She swung her finger to the shooter. “And a human.”
“Plus the two humans in the pickup,” I added. I knew where Jolie was going with this. Vampire relations with mortals were strictly controlled. We could feed on them, exploit them, but their awareness of us and the supernatural world, the Great Secret, was limited to those humans who chose to become chalices—willing suppliers of blood. Their knowledge of the undead was a guarded secret, and any revelations would be punished by turning or by death.
I put my revolver away and pulled the shotgun from inside the car. “These clowns were Phaedra’s soldiers. So she does have an army and vampire traitors are among them.”
The shotgun was a Mossberg Tactical Semi-Auto. I worked the action and ejected a round, which I snatched in mid-air. I clawed it open, not surprised the shell was loaded with silver buckshot packed in garlic powder. I winced at the poisonous odor. “These guys knew they were going after vampires.”
Jolie noted, “I doubt any of these humans were chalices.”
“Meaning,” I said, bending the barrel of the shotgun and sent it twirling over the trees like a boomerang, “whoever was behind the attack wasn’t afraid of betraying the Great Secret.” Protecting the Great Secret was the reason for the existence of the Araneum.
Talons extended, Jolie reached in, cut the safety belts, and let the bodies fall into heaps. “Let’s see who these douchebags are.” She retrieved their wallets and tossed one to me.
I opened it and looked inside. The ID was a Colorado driver’s license, but the colors were off and the photo was blurry. “So we got a name, won’t do much good as this ID is fake. There’s not much else. No credit cards. No business cards. No receipts.”
“Same here,” Jolie replied.
I pulled out a stack of crisp hundred dollar notes. “Plenty of these, though.”
Jolie plucked them from my hand, added them to the Benjamins she withdrew from the other wallet, and folded the cash into a side pocket of her riding pants. “For my expenses,” she explained.
We tossed both wallets back inside the car.
Jolie crouched again and retrieved a cell phone. The screen was cracked, the back missing, and its components fell loose. “Not getting anything from this.” She threw the phone into the weeds. “What about checking the registration? Running the plates?”
“Why waste our time? These guys were expendable. We need to worry about the next crew sent our way.” I pointed to the trail of debris. “Who knew we were making this trip?”
“It was a last-minute plan between Coyote and me.”
Jolie hadn’t set the trap for herself. Which meant—
“I know what you’re thinking,” she blurted. “No way could it be Coyote.”
I couldn’t believe that either. “Then I’ll bet the guys in the Mustang had my place under surveillance. They must’ve arranged an ambush with the pickup.”
Jolie had tuned me out. She was panning the desolate highway, eyes first drawn north toward the tunnel we’d gone through, then south where the pavement inclined and curved out of sight behind the rocks and ponderosas. The road had been plowed across the side of a mountain, rising on the left and dropping on the right into a wooded and rocky draw. I got the impression someone watched us, not close, but from a great distance.
As a vampire, I have no beating heart. Instead, a kundalini noir—the black serpent of supernatural energy—animates my undead body. Paranoia made my kundalini noir vibrate like a tuning fork.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get rid of the evidence before someone stops and gets too nosey.”
We each grasped a wheel on one side of the Mustang, heaved together, and rolled the car over. Sunlight slanted through the twisted windshield frame. As this light lingered across the driver, his skin darkened and shriveled and burst into flame. His head resembled a burning charcoal briquette.
Once death finally claimed a vampire, the sun would consume his undead flesh. Jolie and I backed away, though not afraid for our safety. Clothing and sunscreen protected us from the sun’s deadly rays. We kept our distance out of awe and terror at this preview of every vampire’s inevitable demise.
Smoke filled the interior and billowed from the broken windows and seams in the car body. The vampire’s hands withered and broke apart. His smoldering head deflated like a collapsing soufflé and crumbled into ash. After a moment there was nothing left of him but a pile of clothes covered in undead dust.
Jolie sighed. “Fuck, I always hate to see this.”
“Show’s over,” I said. “Back to work.”
We straightened the wheels so they wobbled more-or-less straight when we pushed the coupe past the guardrail and off the road. The car teeter-tottered over the edge. The rear bumper swung upwards, and the Mustang bounced down the slope, flattening a path through the brush, smashing saplings, and vanishing into the thicket. The car ripped and thrashed through the brush until it crashed with a loud krump that echoed across the hills. A cloud of dust billowed over the treetops below.
We talked as we tidied the littered wreckage of the Suzuki, tossing the larger pieces down the hillside, and collected my scattered belongings and her helmet and gloves.
Jolie thumped her palm against the side of her head. “What the hell caused that mental whammy? A ray gun?”
I reflected on the device the man in the truck had aimed at us. When I recognized what the device was, an icy hook twisted my guts. “No. A psychotronic projector.”
Jolie halted in mid-pitch, an exhaust pipe in hand, and perked an eyebrow. “A what?”
I punted my helmet into the draw. “The aliens on the Roswell UFO had brought it. They were testing it to see if they could psychically control humans. I destroyed the original at Rocky Flats.”
“So the aliens are back?”
“Can’t say for sure. Phaedra has psychic powers and maybe discovered how to make one. Or she’s cut a deal with the aliens. Have you met Phaedra?”
Jolie threw the exhaust pipe down the slope. “Haven’t had that pleasure. Remember back in Morada? When she gave us the slip?” Jolie referred to our assignment in southern Colorado when we had been ordered to stem an outbreak of zombies. Afterwards, when we tried to find Phaedra, the treacherous newly turned bloodsucker had disappeared. She later returned to my apartment in Denver with the severed head of another vampire enforcer and told me her quest was to destroy the Araneum. After giving me a demonstration of her special supernatural power—a psychic mind blast—she again vanished.
“Count yourself lucky,” I said. “She doesn’t need a projector. She can conjure those mental blasts on her own.”
“How?”
“Don’t know. She was dying of Huntington’s chorea when I met her. It’s a disease that causes voids in the brain. Maybe that allowed her to develop psychic powers. She could project her thoughts into your dreams and consciousness. Plus she had discovered a portal into the psychic plane, and that gave her the ability to see from place to place. After I turned her, she learned how to read minds and focus her psychic powers into a mental howitzer. Trust me, what we experienced a few minutes ago was the BB gun version.”
We found our sunglasses and put them back on.
“Is it possible she read my mind,” Jolie asked, “or yours, or Coyote’s, and learned about our trip?”
“It is possible. But you can detect her mental trespassing. Feels like a hallucination controlled by someone else. I haven’t felt anything like that recently.”
“Me either,” she replied. “What about Coyote?”
“Good luck to Phaedra. Reading his mind would be like snorkeling in a sewer.”
Jolie surveyed the surrounding mountains. “And she’s out there. What does she want?”
“Long term? Take charge of the vampires.”
“She’s welcome to that headache. But why?”
I shrugged. “Arrogance. Ambition. Could be she’s simply fucking nuts.”
“What about short term?”
“Get rid of you and me. And she could know about our plan to get Carmen.”
We stood quiet. The wind rustled through the trees. I wondered about the details of our mission, uncertain and overwhelmed by the tasks ahead. Meeting Coyote. Rescuing Carmen. Stopping Phaedra. I was sure Jolie’s thoughts were spinning around the same axis.
I broke the silence. “What’s next?”
“Get to New Mexico. Pronto.” She gestured that I follow her behind a clump of tall mountain grass. She unbuckled and kicked away her boots and peeled off her jacket and riding pants, stripping to a green tank top and black yoga pants. Shrugged loose her cross-draw holsters and pistols. She had a gymnast’s build: a wide back and shoulders, small firm breasts, muscular thighs, and a world-class bubble butt. She unfastened the leather tail tamer and raked a hand through her hair to loosen the tresses.
She cocked an ear to the north. “Car’s coming. Hide.” Standing in her socks, she straightened her shoulders and puffed her chest, adding an unimpressive inch to her less than voluptuous chest.
I scrunched low behind the grass. “What are you doing?”
She angled her buns toward the road. “Hoping for an ass man.” She extended a thumb.
“What if it’s another hit?”
“Then they’re fucked. Felix, keep your goddamn head down.”
I flattened myself below the slope, fangs and nerves primed, hand on the grip of my revolver, just in case.
A throaty engine cruised to a halt. A window scrolled down. Jolie mumbled. A door lock clicked. The door opened and closed. The car growled and pulled away.
Irritation raked through me. Had she left me? No sooner had I thought that, the car’s tires chirped to a stop. The car idled for a moment, then whined in reverse and halted beside my grassy blind. The horn honked.
I raised my head. A silver Porsche Panamera Turbo S with Texas plates rumbled next to the shoulder, Jolie at the wheel.
“Bring our stuff,” she hollered.
I scooped up our things and rushed to the car.
Jolie wiped blood from the corners of her mouth. The owner of the car, a big meaty guy, was sprawled across the rear seat like a slab of prime rib, medium rare. The fang marks on his neck were fading. I tossed our gear in the back next to the unconscious Texan.
I settled into the front seat and raised my window. Refrigerated air whooshed from the vents. “Much better.”
Jolie took in the interior, the sweeping lines of brushed steel, exotic woods, and cream-colored leather. “How much do you think this go-kart cost?”
“A hundred and fifty grand. Maybe one seventy-five.”
“How fast does it go?”
“This is the top of the Panamera line. I’m sure it will move along.”
Jolie eased the Porsche onto the highway. “Ever hear the expression ‘drive it like you stole it’?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Then let me demonstrate.” She grinned and floored the accelerator.