Turning like that not only drove my point home, although I’m sure my presentation was made somewhat less intimidating by the presence of a massive housecat sitting on my shoulder, but it also gave me a chance to assess the forces arrayed against me.
They weren’t much, as far as an array of forces went—half a dozen college-aged girls, all pretty, all blond, all wearing pretty typical walking around town or campus garb. It looked like my wannabe Nosferatu was more than just a vampire, he was a perv as well. I mean, let’s be real. When the age gap between you and your girlfriend is measured in centuries, it gets a little creepy. And yes, I realize the irony of that statement, given that I’m engaged to a human woman who was born close to a hundred years after I first emerged kicking and squalling into the light. But she’s almost a century younger than me, so I’ll take the tiniest sliver of moral high ground here.
“What do you say, kids? You gonna get the hell out, or am I gonna send you to Hell?”
When the first one leapt at me I knew that my negotiating skills were still in top form. The first vampire, a fledgling from the slavering, half-insane look on her face, clad in a faux-vintage Iron Maiden hoodie and artfully shredded jeans, blond hair flying out behind her like greasy streamers, charged me with her hands outstretched to rip my throat out. That didn’t go well for her.
Fledgling vampires aren’t really all that powerful. They can take out a normal human easily enough, but I think we’ve pretty well established that I’m not normal, if I’m human at all. But baby vamps only have a little more speed and strength than they did as humans, and while the young woman currently shrieking as she ran at me was apparently pretty athletic in life, she hadn’t been dead long enough to get good at the whole vampire thing. And she wasn’t going to get any better.
I sidestepped her charge, spun clockwise as I drew one of the big silver-edged daggers from my belt, and slashed through the back of her neck as she passed. I pushed a little extra energy into my strike, because spines are hard to cut through, and I felt her vertebrae part like the Red Sea. It did nothing to halt her momentum, so her body kept running past me for a couple steps even after her head fell to the ground and rolled a few feet to the side. But eventually all things must come to an end, and her torso and limbs collapsed to the concrete.
The rest of the vampires froze in mid-step, stunned at the almost instant death of one of their own. I’ve seen this a lot over the decades; humans gain some power and decide they’re not just strong but immortal. Until someone stronger and closer to actual immortality comes along and instructs them on the realities of their situation—they can still be killed, and if the opponent is strong enough, or skilled enough, it can happen in the blink of an eye. Or even faster, if the open glassy eyes of the dead blond vampire staring up at me from the skull at my feet were any indication.
“Kill him!” the master shrieked, and the remaining five vampires charged me all at once. I wasn’t really all that concerned with five fledglings. That I could handle on any given Tuesday. But I did need to keep an eye on the boss to make sure he didn’t run for the hills the first chance he got, and I had this fuzzy counterweight throwing my balance off, so it was a little more trouble than I expected. My saving grace was that not only had none of them ever learned how to fight together, odds were pretty good they’d never been in a fight before at all, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to die. Unless the damn cat opened up my carotid while trying to hang onto its perch.
“Hey kitty, you wanna grab onto my shirt, or even the top of my head instead of the side of my neck?” I asked, thrusting my leg out and cracking several ribs on the nearest vamp.
Damned if the fuzzy freeloader didn’t adjust his grip to latch onto my scalp when I asked. It didn’t feel any better than him clawing my neck, but at least it reduced the chances of me bleeding to death from cat scratches. Slightly.
The next vamp to get to me had a length of two by four in her hands, a good call since she wasn’t strong enough to beat me without caving my head in. But since she obviously wasn’t a home run hitter in life, she lacked the coordination to actually connect with the lumber. I snatched it out of her hands, broke it over my knee, and shoved half of it through her chest. Then I swore under my breath, because while I’m definitely strong enough to break a two by four over my leg, and durable enough not to suffer any serious injuries because of it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like a son of a bitch. I swear I felt the claws in my scalp dig in a little more, like the little bastard was punishing me more for hurting myself.
There were four baby vamps left, and these women were taking their time, spreading out so I couldn’t engage more than one of them at a time, at least as far as they knew. Two charged me from the front, and I called up power into my hands, shrouding them in bright purple spheres of pure magical energy. There was no real “spell” involved, just me channeling the raw power of the earth and all its creatures into twin blasts of pure purple power.
No good reason it had to be purple. I just thought it looked cool. Luke scolds me about being ostentatious, but if the flashiest thing I did in that fight was purple magical bolts, then it would go down in the record books as one of my most subtle encounters ever. Flashes of blinding purple light streaked from the palm of each hand, straight through the chest of each vampire, leaving a softball-sized hole in each young woman’s torso. I actually took half a second to bend at the waist and wave at the “master” through one of the holes, just to be a dick.
And of course, that’s when things went sideways.
I heard a thunderclap just as I felt a sledgehammer slam into my left kidney. I dropped to one knee, one hand reaching around behind me to feel for holes. No blood, so the Kevlar lining in my biker jacket did its job, but I was going to have one mother of a bruise, and probably a cracked rib or two. I looked behind me and saw the vampire I’d kicked in the ribs grinning at me with a smoking double-barrel shotgun in her hands.
“Now that’s not fair,” I said when I could draw a deep enough breath to speak. “The critters with the fangs and super-speed aren’t supposed to use guns. Those are for us mere mortals.” Then I reached under my left arm, drew my pistol, and shot her in the forehead. She dropped like a piano in a Warner Brothers cartoon, and the shotgun clattered to the floor. Three down, one to go.
The last vamp standing was literally shaking in her shoes. I could see it from where I was kneeling. “Last chance,” I said. “Run away now, learn to feed without killing people, and never make another vampire, and I won’t turn you into a puddle of goo. Stay, and you’re never seeing another moonrise.”
Her gaze flickered from me to Bone Throne Boy, and I could read the indecision like yesterday’s headlines. She stood there, frozen by indecision and fear, until I raised my left hand and made it glow purple again. That made up her mind for her, and she sprinted for the shaft of moonlight streaking in from the hole in the ceiling, leapt up to the first floor, and vanished. I heard the slap-slap-slap of her Chuck Taylor high-tops as she hauled ass out of there, hopefully never to be seen by me or mine again.
I don’t have anything against vampires, really. I don’t even begrudge them their need to feed. I mean, people make more blood, so it’s just like donating to the Red Cross. Only a little more directly.
I turned to the throne, smiling at the “master.”
“Okay, buddy. Down to you and me. You gonna make it easy on me and just cut your own head off, or are we gonna have to dance?”