Fall of Night The Morganville Vampires - By Rachel Caine Page 0,53
legs with dispassionate calm. There was a lot of screaming, and within seconds, seconds, it was all over and there were seven guys on the concrete.
Then Jesse helped me stand up, and there were six.
‘Don’t worry, they’re not dead,’ she said, and gave me a merciless appraisal. ‘You look like shit, Collins.’
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. I didn’t mean for the compliment. ‘Well, that walk sucked.’
She laughed as I spat out a mouthful of blood, and if she thought I was wasting food, at least she didn’t say so. Pete brought the rebar along with us, and we went to a car parked about a block down. It was a long walk. I passed the time by wondering (probably aloud) why Pete had brought along his iron stick. I know it was aloud because he finally said, ‘Fingerprints,’ as he tossed it in the trunk of the car and helped Jesse pile me into the back. ‘You’re drunk.’
‘You’re perceptive,’ I said, and slid sideways until my already-sore head collided with window glass. ‘Ow.’ That wasn’t adequate to the situation, but I didn’t think it was manly to cry like a little girl. I pulled myself into a leaning position and breathed deeply, trying not to think of how the world was spinning. ‘It was only a six-pack.’
‘Of?’
‘Russian imperial stout.’
‘Oh, honey,’ Jesse said from the driver’s seat, clearly amused. ‘The Russians have nothing to do most of the winter but drink as a hobby. You really should work up to that stuff. Take it from me, I was around when Gregory Rasputin was still the man to beat in a drinking game. You’re going to regret that.’
‘He’s going to regret it a lot more,’ Pete said. He was poking and prodding me, a fact I realised late, and when I ineffectively slapped at him to stop, I missed and smacked myself in something that was already bruised. Not sure what. ‘Might have to take him to the ER. He could have internal bleeding.’
Jesse cocked her head and glanced back at me, and I saw that red glow in her eyes again. Weirdly, it seemed comforting right now. Homey, even. ‘He might have, but he doesn’t,’ she said. ‘I could tell if he did. Oh, he’s got plenty of haemorrhages, but they’re not life-threatening. And he’s no stranger to cuts and
bruises. Watch his head, though. I saw them get in a good shot at least twice.’
‘He’ll have a hell of a headache from the contrecoup, but doesn’t look like anything too bad. Might want to get an X-ray, though.’
I was starting off my time in Cambridge pretty much the same way I had my return to Morganville: with hospital visits. ‘What the hell,’ I sighed. ‘I haven’t had a good X-ray in a long time. Could be fun.’ Because unlike most drunken tough guys, I’d seen enough to know that head injuries were nothing to fool around with. You could look and feel fine for a day, then drop dead of the swelling and exploding veins.
‘I think you’re confusing X-rays with something from a porn movie,’ Jesse said, ‘but sure. One ER visit, coming up. I hope that whatever you had going with those guys was worth all the trouble. What did they do, kick a puppy, insult your mother …?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. They just wanted to hurt someone, and I was there.’
After a moment of silence, she said, ‘Yes, I know how that can happen.’ She sounded grim, like she personally knew it, and hey, she probably did. She might have even been on the receiving end, but you could never assume that kind of thing with vampires. ‘Why were you wandering around in the dark, Shane? I’m assuming that coming from Morganville you know better.’
‘I thought it’d be safer here.’
Pete laughed. He had an odd kind of laugh, one that hitched in the middle. ‘You don’t get out much, Shane. That’s kind of cute. Take a walk in a genocide zone and tell me humans can’t be worse than bloodsuckers. We’re hardwired to be bastards, take it from somebody who did volunteer work in the Congo.’
Thing is, I already knew that perfectly well, because I knew what Amelie, the Founder of Morganville, was afraid of. She was most afraid of us. Humans. And our tendency to kill whatever we feared and/or hated.
Our ability to target things that were different.
I wasn’t any better, I thought. I’d hated vampires most of my life, and I still didn’t feel totally comfortable