Chapter Thirty-Three – Sam

 

Faith’s scream was like a tear in the air that stretched from her lips to my ears, reaching me all the way down in the basement.

I nearly jumped out of my skin as my heart began to beat triple time. I gestured with the lighter.

“Don’t!” Tanchovsky shouted, stopping me in my tracks. “Do anything, make any fast moves, and she’s dead. I swear it. Worse than dead, even.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Me?” he asked, gesturing with his hands, palms up. “Me? I haven’t done anything. My servant, though?”

Upiers, like most vampires and a few other supernatural creatures, could control less powerful things. Like birds, wolves, bats . . . even humans. But, if I remembered correctly, in the case of an upier, it took the willingness of the human to go along with it. They had to willfully ingest some of his tainted blood. But, once they did, they formed a bond.

“All I had to do,” he said, “was offer the old man a promise of youth. Not even everlasting youth, just a way for his old bones to not creak early in the morning, or his joints to not ache quite so badly. He jumped at the chance when I showed up at his door. Well, not literally, of course. Dr. Lawrence was a little too aching for that. But afterwards? We could probably have him run a marathon, now, and still have him put in a full day’s work down at the slaughterhouse.”

I swallowed hard, trying to keep my rage in check. So that’s why he’d turned me away when I’d arrived the day before. How he’d known to remove the remains from the morgue. Dr. Lawrence must have seen me talking to Faith out in the parking lot. Must have realized we were going to come back later that night.

I gritted my teeth, narrowed my eyes. “You lay a finger on her, you bastard, I’ll fucking kill you.”

“Who said I’d be laying a finger on her at all?” he asked, his tone almost conversational. “If you put the lighter down, walk away from all this, and allow me to return unmolested to my life, you’ll leave here with the girl. Both of you completely intact.”

Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Not a chance in hell. Not with dead humans in the equation. Besides, what if Faith and I did leave, and never looked back? Could he guarantee he’d never hurt a human again? That he wouldn’t ever feed from another one?

I didn’t think so.

And, if something did happen, how was I supposed to live with myself? Knowing that I’d taken the easy route out, that I’d just abandoned my mission because I wasn’t willing to go all the way to fulfill it?

“I can see you’re thinking it through,” the vampire said after a moment.

“I thought you said you weren’t a monster? That those deaths were all accidents? Why hurt Faith? Why hurt me?”

“This is no more than self-defense,” the vampire replied, almost casually. “You’ve come into my retreat, into my house. I’m doing nothing more than protecting my own castle.”

“How Texan,” I replied.

“Live somewhere long enough, you begin to take on cultural characteristics,” he replied. “To assimilate. No man is an island.”

I snorted, disgusted at myself that I was even talking with this thing while Dr. Lawrence struggled upstairs with Faith, held her hostage.

He moved a few steps towards me, seeming to somehow blink from one space to the next like I’d closed my eyes for a moment as he crossed the distance. One second he was there, the next he was here.

Thing. That’s what this was. No doubt about it. I was a red-blooded human compared to Tanchovsky and his kind. I tightened the grip on my pistol. Reminded myself that I wasn’t dealing with a human, or something that even acted or reasoned like a human.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice smooth and calm, but as hollow as the grave. “You don’t want this, Mr. Fitzgerald. You don’t want to sacrifice the life of your little girlfriend upstairs. I know you and your type. You white knights. More than one of your kind have shown up on my doorstep, looking for a way to remove me from the town of Garrison.”

I gripped the pistol more tightly.

“And, believe me,” he continued, “I know how she feels about you in return. I was in her dreams, after all. I saw you there. I saw the way she clung to the imagined form she’d conjured up from memories of you, how she whispered your name in the heat of the moment. It was rather sweet.”

I growled deep in my chest, had to fight the urge to draw my sidearm right then and there at his gloating. “Don’t you dare talk about her. You keep her name off your lips, or I swear I’ll take your tongue.”

“Threats?” he asked, grinning a little. “When I’m the one with the upper hand?”

I waved the lighter menacingly. “What do you think this is, huh? A wiffle ball bat?”

He laughed. “What good would it do to burn my soil?” he continued, his voice like velvet in the dark basement. “I’m old, Mr. Fitzgerald, nearly two centuries on this earth. I can go for weeks without being anywhere near it, now. Whereas I can have a contractor collect soil from my hometown and ship it over here with UPS. I can have more by Tuesday.”

I growled again, tightening my grip on my sidearm as I narrowed my eyes. Maybe he was right, and what I’d done to his soil was just a set back. But the bullets in my gun were silver. And silver, I knew, would work to kill him just as well as it would for me and most other supernatural creatures. Sure, he was fast, but he couldn’t be as fast as me on the draw. No way he could close the distance before I put a bullet or three in him.

“Come now, Mr. Fitzgerald,” he said after a moment. “Why are you continuing to put the woman you love in danger? Take your hand from the pistol. I’m giving you a chance to walk away from this. Why don’t you just take it?”

My growl intensified for a moment, before fading away with a whimper as two sets of footsteps sounded over my head. Dr. Lawrence had Faith in the kitchen, now.

Faith’s fear, her confusion over what was happening to her, seemed to permeate the air around me like a fog, filling my nose and stinging my eyes.

“And, oh yes,” the upier continued, “it’s definitely love. What other explanation do you have for the way it broke the enchantment? And, you know, it must be mutual for it to work that way. Stalkers don’t count.”

Love?

My memory flashed back to the way she’d felt in my arms, to the taste of her lips. How her form had seemed molded to fit mine perfectly. How her hand had felt in mine. So soft, but still so firm and intense.

“Sam,” Faith cried from upstairs. “Sam! I’m okay! Don’t listen to him! You kill that bastard!”

Her words belied the smell in the air, though, which betrayed her true feelings. She was scared. Scared of death, of losing herself. Of not seeing tomorrow.

Glancing away from the vampire, I looked up to the ceiling for a brief moment. She didn’t deserve this. Didn’t deserve to be a bargaining chip. “Hurt her, and I’ll rip your lungs out,” I said, my voice as sharp as my words. “I’ll hunt you down, Tanchovsky. You won’t even see me coming the next time, either, because I’ll know exactly who and what you are.”

My words hung in the air for a moment, the only sound Faith’s struggling in the kitchen over my head.

“Fine little speech,” he said smoothly, doing that strange shift again as he moved another step closer. “Now, just take your hand from the pistol and put the lighter aside. I know you’ve salted the soil, but I’ll forgive you that little trespass. We all deserve one get out of jail free card, don’t we? Just put the gun aside and close that damned lighter, and we’ll part company.”

I knew I couldn’t trust him. I knew it in my gut, knew it in my bones.

But what was I supposed to do? If Dr. Lawrence had drunk Tanchovsky’s blood, that meant he was nearly stronger and faster than I was, even. Given the right orders, and under the right circumstances, he could easily snap Faith’s neck like a twig, snuffing out her life like it was nothing.

What could I do?

Col. Harrington would have told me to take the shot. Would have told me that the mission was the most important thing, that sacrifices needed to be made. That more civilians would die if I didn’t sacrifice this one, or myself. That it was the right decision to try and take him out, to drop the lighter into the box, take us all out in the flames.

But, I wasn’t Harrington.

And Faith wasn’t just any civilian.

Instead, she was the woman I loved. The woman I now realized I’d been looking for all my life.

That kiss…that kiss had been something special. Wonderful. Magical, even. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want another one. Just one more, at least.

“Just take your hand from the gun, and put the lighter away,” Tanchovsky whispered, his eyes burning more brightly for a moment. “And we’ll call everything even.”

“I have your word?” I asked, wincing as Faith’s muffled cry came bouncing down the ladder to my ears. I had to stop myself from drawing my sidearm, taking the shot at Tanchovsky.

“You have my word,” he said.

“Promise she’ll be fine? I don’t even care about me, but at least promise you won’t hurt her.”

“I promise, Mr. Fitzgerald. What more can I give you?”

I shouldn’t have believed him, not for one second. But I was stuck between two losing propositions, and the outcome of one of my options certainly ended in Faith’s death. Even if I died during this, I couldn’t imagine her having to pay for my mistakes this way, for my decision.

What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t let her get hurt because of me.

“You’ve made the right decision,” Tanchovsky said as I flicked the Zippo’s lid closed and took my hand from my sidearm. He came closer, his distinctly human smell filling my nose as he reached around behind me and drew my sidearm. “Such a funny thing, guns. Don’t you think? An intricate tool designed only for killing. How far humans have come, from just using sticks and stones to break bones. When I was a boy, we only had muskets. When I first came to this house, revolvers had just arrived on the scene. Now? Tanks, jets, nuclear weapons. And, for what? All to kill each other with.”

“In all fairness,” I replied, “I use them to kill your kind, too. So it’s not just humans.”

His lips curled back in a cruel smile as he raised the pistol to his side, pointing the barrel right at me. “Yes. Quite. Too bad that this time it’s your turn to be on the receiving end, Mr. Fitzgerald. Rather, may I call you Sam? I think we’ve reached that stage in our relationship.”

“What stage would that be?”

“Well, there’s nothing more personal than shooting a man with his own gun.”