Halfway to the Grave Read online

  “I suppose toilet paper’s out of the question?” I called out flippantly.

  There was a bark of laughter in reply. “I’ll put it on my shopping list, Kitten.”

  “Stop calling me Kitten. My name is Cat.” Finished, I lowered myself down until I again stood on somewhat solid ground. “What’s yours, by the way? You never told me. If we’re going to be…working together, at least I should know what to call you. Unless you simply prefer answering to profanity, of course.”

  There was that sly curl to his lips again when he faced me. His feet were planted apart and his hips tilted slightly forward. Pale hair hugged his head in tight waves. Under the pinholes of light around him, his skin positively glowed.

  “My name is Bones.”

  “First things first, luv. If you’re going to be truly good at killing vampires, you need to know more about them.”

  We sat on boulders facing each other. The dim light in the cave from the shafts of sun had a vague strobe effect. It had to be by far the strangest moment of my life, sitting across from a vampire calmly discussing the best ways to kill one.

  “Sunlight doesn’t do anything but give us a bad sunburn. Our skin won’t explode in flames like it does in the movies, and we won’t turn into bits of crispy chicken. However, we do like to sleep in the day because we are most powerful at night. That’s an important point to remember. During the day we are slower, weaker, and less alert. Especially at dawn. By dawn, you’ll find most vampires tucked into whatever they call a bed, which as you could tell from last night doesn’t necessarily mean a coffin. Oh, some of the old-fashioned ones will only sleep in coffins, but most of us sleep in whatever’s most comfortable. In fact, some vamps will have coffins staged in their lair so some Van Helsing wannabe goes there first while the vampire sneaks up on them. Done that trick a time or two myself. So if you think throwing up the blinds and letting the sun stream in will do the trick, forget it.

  “Crosses. Unless they’re rigged up like yours, crosses don’t do much more than make us laugh before we eat you. You seem to know that one yourself, so we’ll move on. Wood, as you are also aware, might give us splinters and piss us off, but won’t stop us from ripping your throat out. Holy water…well, let’s just say I’ve had more damage done to me by someone throwing dirt in my face. The whole religious thing is bunk when it comes to hurting our kind, got it? Your only advantage is that when a vampire sees that special stake of yours, they won’t be put off.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll use this information against you?” I interrupted. “I mean, why should you trust me?”

  In all seriousness he leaned forward. I leaned back, not wanting to be any closer to him.

  “Look, pet. You and I are going to have to trust one another to accomplish our objectives. And I’ll make this very, very simple: If you so much as look cross-eyed at me and I even wonder if you’re thinking about betraying me, I’ll kill you. Now, that might not scare you, being the big brave girl you are, but remember this: I followed you home the other night. Got anyone you care about in that barn of a house? Because if you do, then I suggest you make nice with me and do as you’re told. If you cross me, you’ll live long enough to see that house burned to the ground with everyone still inside. So if you ever make a go for me, you’d better be sure you finish me, understand?”

  Gulping, I nodded. I understood. Oh God, did I ever.

  “Besides”—his voice brightened like a spring day—“I can give you what you want.”

  Doubtful. “What could you possibly know about what I want?”

  “You want what every abandoned child wants. You want to find your father. But you don’t want a happy reunion, no, not you. You want to kill him.”

  I stared at him. He’d spoken aloud what I hadn’t even allowed my subconscious to whisper, and he was right. It was the other reason I hunted vampires, to kill the one who fathered me. More than anything, I wanted to do that for my mother. If I could, I would feel I had in some small way atoned for the circumstances of my birth.

  “You…” I could barely speak with all the thoughts flying through my mind. “You can help me find him? How?”

  A shrug. “For starters, I might know him. Know a great many undead types, I do. Face it—without me, you’re looking for a needle in a fangstack. Even if I don’t personally know him, I already know more about him than you do.”

  “What? How? What?”

  He held up a hand to stop my babbling. “Like his age, for example. You’re twenty-one, right?”

  “Twenty-two,” I whispered, still reeling. “Last month.”

  “Indeed? Then you have the wrong age as well as the wrong address on that fake license of yours.”

  He must have gone through my purse. Well, it made sense; he’d also stripped me when I was unconscious. “How do you know it’s a fake?”

  “Didn’t we just cover this? I know your real address, and it’s not the one on that license.”

  Oh crap. That defeated the purpose of why I’d gotten the phony ID to begin with, in case I ever lost against a vampire and he rifled through my things. I hadn’t wanted one to be able to track down my family. That had been the thought, anyway. Stupid me never expected a vampire to follow me home.

  “Come to think of it, pet, you are a liar, possessor of false identification, and a murderer.”

  “Your point?” I snapped.

  “Not to mention a tease,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Foulmouthed, as well. Yep, you and I will get along famously.”

  “Bollocks,” I said succinctly.

  He grinned back at me. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But back to the subject. You said your mum carried you for, what, four months? Five?”

  “Five. Why?” I was more than a little curious as to his reasoning. What did that have to do with how old, or how undead, my father was?

  He leaned forward. “See, it’s like this. When you’re changed, it takes a few days for some of the human functions to cease completely. Oh, the heartbeat stops right off and the breathing as well, but some of the other things take longer. Tear ducts still work normally for the first day or so before you cry only pink due to the blood-to-water ratio in our bodies. You might even piss once or twice to get it out of your system. But the main point is that he still had swimmers in his sacks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, luv. Sperm, if you want to be all technical about it. He still had living sperm in his juice. Now, that’s something which would only be possible if he’d been newly changed. Within a week at most. Right off, then, you can pinpoint almost exactly how old he is, in vampire years. Add that to any recent deaths around that time and place matching his description, and bingo! There’s your dad.”

  I was stunned. Just as promised, in a few seconds he’d given me more information than my mother had known all of my life. Maybe, just maybe, I’d stumbled onto a gold mine. If through him I could learn more about my father and killing vampires, and all he wanted in return was to pick the targets…well, then, I could stomach it. If I lived long enough.

  “Why do you want to help me find my father? In fact, why do you kill other vampires? They’re your own kind, after all.”

  Bones stared at me for a moment before replying. “I’ll help you find your father because I reckon you hate him more than you do me, so it’ll keep you motivated to do what I say. As for why I hunt vampires…you don’t need to bother about that now. You have more than enough to concern yourself with. Suffice it to say some people just need killing, and that goes for vampires as well as humans.”

  I still didn’t know why he wanted me to work with him in the first place. Then again, maybe it was all a lie and he was biding his time, intending to rip my throat out when I least suspected it. I didn’t trust this creature, not for a moment, but right now I had no choice but to play along. Find out where this led to. If I was still alive in a week, I’d be amazed.

  “Back to the subject at hand, luv. Guns don’t
work on us, either. There are only two exceptions to that rule. One, if the bloke is lucky enough to shoot our necks in two and our heads topple off. Decapitation does work; not many things can live without a head, and a head is the only part on a vampire that won’t grow back if you cut it off. Two, if the gun has silver bullets and enough are fired into the heart to destroy it. Now, that’s not as easy as it sounds. No vampire will stand still and pose for you. Likely he’ll be on you and the gun shoved up your arse before any real damage is done. But those silver bullets hurt, so you can use them to slow a vamp down and then stake him. And you’d better be quick with that silver, because you’ll have one very brassed-off vampire on your hands. Strangulation, drowning, none of that does anything. We only breathe about once an hour for preference, and we can go indefinitely without oxygen. Just a breath now and then to put a dab of oxygen in the blood and we’re sound as a pound. Our version of hyperventilating is to breathe once every few minutes. That’s one way to tell a vamp is tiring. He’ll start to breathe a bit to perk up. Electrocution, poisonous gas, ingestible poisons, drugs…none of those work. Got it? Now you know our weaknesses.”

  “Are you sure we can’t test some of those theories?”

  He wagged a finger at me reprovingly. “None of that, now. You and I are partners, remember? If you start to forget that, maybe you’d best remember the things I just mentioned would work really well on you.”

  “It was a joke,” I lied.

  He just gave me a look that said he knew better. “The bottom line is that we are very hard to put down. How you’ve managed to plant sixteen of us in the ground is beyond me, but then the world never lacks for fools.”

  “Hey.” Piqued, I defended my skills. “I would have had you in pieces if you hadn’t made me drive and then sucker-punched me when I wasn’t looking.”

  He laughed again. It transformed his face into something I just realized was very beautiful. I looked away, not wanting to see him as anything but a monster. A dangerous monster.

  “Kitten, why do you think I made you drive? I had you pegged five seconds after speaking with you. You were a novice, green to the gills and, once off your routine, helpless as a babe. Of course I sucker-punched you. There is only one way to fight, and that’s dirty. Clean, gentlemanly fighting will get you nowhere but dead, and fast. Take every cheap shot, every low blow, absolutely kick people when they’re down, and then maybe you’ll be the one who walks away. Remember that. You’re in a fight to the death. This isn’t a boxing match. You can’t win by scoring the most points.”

  “I get it.” Grimly enough, I did. In this he was correct. It was a death match every time I confronted a vampire. Including this one.

  “But now we’re off topic. We’ve covered our weaknesses. On to our strengths, and we have many. Speed, vision, hearing, smell, physical strength—all are superior to a human’s. We can scent you long before we see you, and we can hear your heartbeat a mile away. In addition to that, all of us have some form of mind control over humans. A vampire can suck a pint of your blood and seconds later you won’t even remember seeing one. It’s in our fangs, a little bitty drop of hallucinogen that, when combined with our power, makes you susceptible to suggestion. Like, for example, someone didn’t just suck on your neck but you met a bloke and had a chat and now you’re sleepy. That’s how most of us feed. A little dab here and a little dab there, and none the wiser for it. If every vampire killed to eat, we’d have been outed from our closet centuries ago.”

  “You can control my mind?” The thought horrified me.

  His brown eyes suddenly bled to green and his gaze drilled into mine.

  “Come to me,” he whispered, yet the words seemed to resound in my head.

  “No fucking way,” I said, chilled at the sudden urge I had to do it.

  Abruptly, his eyes were brown again and he threw a cheery grin my way.

  “Nope, appears not. Good on you, that’ll come in handy. Can’t have you getting all weak-minded and forgetting your goals, can we? Probably it’s your bloodline. It doesn’t work on other vampires. Or humans who imbibe of vampire blood. Guess you have enough of us in you. Some humans are immune to it also, but only a very small percentage. Have to have extraordinary mind control or natural resistance not to let us in and meddle about. MTV and video games have solved that problem as far as most of humanity goes. That, and telly, as it were.”

  “Telly?” Who was that?

  He grunted in amusement. “Television, of course. Don’t you speak English?”

  “You sure don’t,” I muttered.

  Shaking his head, he frowned at me. “Daylight’s burning, luv. We have a lot to cover. We’ve gone through the senses and the mind control, but don’t forget our strength. Or our teeth. Vampires are strong enough to break you in half and carry the pieces with a finger. We can throw your car at you if we want to. And we’ll rip you apart with our teeth. The question is, how many of our strengths do you have in you?”

  Hesitatingly, I began to tick off my abnormalities.

  “I can see very well and darkness doesn’t affect me. I see as well at night as in the day. I’m faster than anyone I know, humanly speaking. I can hear things from far away, maybe not as far as you can. Sometimes in my room at night I could hear my grandparents downstairs whispering to each other about me….”

  I stopped, judging from his look that I’d revealed too much about personal issues.

  “I don’t think I can control anyone’s mind. I’ve never tried it, but I think if I could, people would have treated me differently.” Dammit, there I was opening up again.

  “Anyways,” I went on, “I know I’m stronger than the average person. When I was fourteen, I beat up three boys, and they were all bigger than me. That was when I couldn’t hide anymore from the fact that something was very wrong with me. You’ve seen my eyes. They’re different. I have to control them when I’m upset so other people don’t see them glow. My teeth are normal, I guess. They’ve never poked out funny, anyhow.”

  I glanced at him through lowered lashes. I’d never spoken of my differences to anyone like this before, even my mother. It upset her to know about them, let alone discuss them.

  “Let me get this straight. You said at fourteen you truly realized your uniqueness. You didn’t know what you were before? What did your mum tell you about your father when you were growing up?”

  That was a very painful subject, and I felt a shudder go through me at the memory. A vampire was hardly the person I ever thought I’d be talking to about this.

  “She never mentioned my father. If I’d ask, as I did when I was little, she’d change the subject or get angry. But the other children let me know. They called me a bastard from the time they could speak.” I closed my eyes briefly, the shame still stinging. “Like I said, when I hit puberty I started to feel…even more different. So much worse than when I was a child. It got harder to hide my weirdness, like my mom told me to. I liked the night most. I’d wander for hours in the orchard. Sometimes I wouldn’t even sleep until dawn. But it wasn’t until those boys cornered me that I knew how bad it was.”

  “What did they do?” His voice was softer, almost gentle.

  In my mind I could see their faces as clearly as if they stood before me.

  “They were shoving me around again. Pushing me, calling me names, the usual stuff. That didn’t set me off. It happened almost every day. But then one of them, I can’t remember which, called my mother a slut, and I lost my temper. I threw a rock at him and busted his teeth out. The others jumped me, and I beat them. They never told anyone what happened. Finally, on my sixteenth birthday, my mother decided I was old enough to know the truth about my father. I didn’t want to believe her, but deep down, I knew it was true. That was the first night I saw my eyes glow. She held a mirror up to my face after stabbing me in the leg. She wasn’t being mean. She wanted me upset so I could see my eyes. About six months later, I killed my first vampire.”

  My eyes stung with u
nshed tears, but I wouldn’t cry. Could not cry in front of this thing who had made me retell what I’d tried to forget.

  He stared at me in a very peculiar way. If I didn’t know better, I would say there was empathy in his gaze. But that was impossible. He was a vampire, they didn’t do compassion.

  Abruptly I stood. “Speaking of my mother, I have to call her. She’ll be worried sick. I’ve come home late before, but I’ve never been out this long. She’ll think one of you bloodsuckers killed me.”

  That caused his eyebrows to fly into his hairline. “Your mum knows you’ve been luring vampires with promises of shagging and then killing them? And she allows you to do this? Blimey, I thought you were joking when you said she knew you were putting a dent in our population. If you were my child, I’d have you nailed inside your room at night. Don’t understand people nowadays, let their kids do anything.”

  “Don’t speak about her that way!” I burst out. “She knows I’m doing the right thing! Why wouldn’t she support that?”

  His eyes bored into mine very steadily, clear dark pools of brown. Then he shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  Suddenly he stood in front of me. I hadn’t even had time to blink, he was so fast.

  “You’ve got good aim when you throw things. Found that out last night when you chucked your cross at me. Just think, a few inches lower and you might have been planting daisies over my head by now.” He grinned as if amused at the mental image. “We’ll work to improve your speed and accuracy. You’ll be safer if you can kill from a distance. You’re too bloody vulnerable up close.”

  He grasped me by the upper arms. I tried to pull away, but he held on. Iron bars would have had more give.

  “Your strength leaves much to be desired. You’re stronger than a human man, but probably as weak as the weakest vampire. We’ll have to work on that as well. Also, your flexibility is shit and you don’t use your legs at all when you fight. They’re valuable weapons and should be treated as such. As for your speed, well…that might be hopeless. But we’ll give it a go anyhow. The way I figure it, we have about six weeks before we can get you out in the field. Yep, five weeks of hard training, and one week to work on your looks.”