Chapter Forty-One – Sam

 

Silver. If I were Superman, we’d just call it kryptonite.

My whole body burned, ached, like the worst kind of flu anyone had ever imagined, times one thousand, as a steady heat began to diffuse throughout my body as I lay there in the front yard of the antebellum mansion. The smell of the pines seemed to suffuse me, to cover my naked body in its sticky scent.

The bullet had entered through my side and, from the feel of it, gone right out the other. But all that damage on the way through wasn’t healing itself back. And, I knew, it wouldn’t. At least not at the supernaturally fast speed I was used to. Or which I depended on. There were herbs I could take, concoctions Col. Harrington and Tabitha had created together. But they were in my go-bag in the trunk of the car.

I swallowed hard, biting back the urge to retch as I watched Dr. Lawrence, with his deformed face, easily lift Faith into his aged arms and move to place her inside the trunk of his Cadillac. “Dr. Lawrence,” I said, pausing to cough up a mouthful of blood, “don’t! Don’t let him take her!”

Dr. Lawrence looked at me with that weird, blank expression Renfields had after they’d consumed the blood of a vampire. The distant, puppetish face, where you could tell they were nothing more than marionettes, and their strings were being controlled elsewhere.

“Now, now, Sam,” Tanchovksy said, moving to block my view of Faith. “Rest. You don’t have much longer.”

I looked up at him, at those burning eyes. Those eyes of the devil himself. I closed my own very slowly, deliberately, trying to fight back against the agony filling my body like the waters of an overflowing reservoir. I didn’t know how much longer I could handle, how much more I could take.

“Just know she’s in good hands. Remember how I told you I was going to kill her? Torture her?”

I didn’t say anything, just tried to stay conscious. Just tried to keep my eyes open, to keep my mind focused on the mission. The mission of getting Faith out in one piece, and of killing Tanchovsky.

“I’ve changed my mind, Mr. Fitzgerald. Instead, I’m going to make her one of mine. Make her another little concubine, add her to my harem.” He crouched down next to me. As his face drew closer to mine, the cracks in the facade he used to cover up his rotting interior became more evident. “And I’ll keep her for all eternity, Mr. Fitzgerald. I’ll keep her by my side. And all because you didn’t die like a good little shifter down in that fire. Because you stepped out of line and questioned your betters in life.”

As he spoke, he leaned down and dug his finger into my side, into the bullet wound.

I screamed through clenched teeth, my whole body going rigid with the new, angry pain burning like a wildfire inside me.

“That’s ugly. You should really have it looked at. Too bad the only doctor in the area is about to die.” He pulled his fingers away and straightened up, walking over to Dr. Lawrence. “Keys, maggot.”

As I watched, the medical examiner dutifully pulled his keys from his pocket and dropped them into Tanchovsky’s outstretched hand, that dull, vacant expression still on his face. The vampire’s hand was a blur, then, as he lashed out and across the wrinkled, wattled flesh of the doctor’s throat, baring his lifeblood.

Dr. Lawrence’s eyes went wide as he reached up, tried to staunch the crimson flow that came rushing down the front of his dress shirt.

“No,” Tanchovsky said, his voice as cold as a winter morning after a fresh snowfall, “leave it. Just die.” The doctor lowered his blood-stained hands at the order, continuing to take rattling, gurgling breaths.

“You fucking monster,” I breathed.

“That’s the point, Mr. Fitzgerald.” The vampire jingled the Cadillac’s keys in his hand. “I have a hundred more just like this. Even if you do get out of here, you’ll never get through them. They’re as willing to die as Dr. Lawrence here, all because I tell them to. After all, it’s not my fault they didn’t read the fine print.”

“You bastard,” I growled as I struggled to my knees, my muscles aching with the exertion as a cold sweat broke out over my body. My arms shook, burned, before finally collapsing beneath me and sending me sprawling to the ground.

Without another word, he just walked around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac and climbed in. He started the car up with a smooth purr of the engine and slowly backed out. He turned the car around and headed back out on the dirt road we’d taken just a couple hours earlier. As Tanchovsky disappeared in the doctor’s Cadillac, Dr. Lawrence dropped to his knees and fell face first into the dirt.

God, to think it had only been a couple hours. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

I’d found true love. I’d lost true love. I’d been smacked around, had my ribs broken, and almost burned to death.

Lastly, I’d been shot.

And now, all I had to do was find a way to get at that son of a bitch before he could hurt Faith.