Demons Are Forever (Love at First Bite Book 2) Read online

  Marco shot between the two dying vampires as he suddenly had the attention of the other three vampires. He already had two other bottles of holy water in his hands and hurled off to either side, striking the vampires at either side of the formation. He flicked his twist, releasing a stake into his hand and whirled to his right, at the nearest healthy vampire.

  The vampire swept his arm down like a pendulum swing, blocking the attack wrist-to-wrist. At the same time, the vampire punched for Marco’s face.

  Just like Marco had planned.

  Marco intercepted the strike, redirecting it with an open palm. The punch went right by his head. Marco stabbed into the vampire’s arm, driving the stake all the way through.

  This was one of Marco’s special stakes. He had a firecracker taped to one side of it. This wouldn’t have impacted the vampire… except that the stake had been soaked in turpentine.

  Marco kicked the vampire away as his arm burst into flame, dismissing him as dead already. Marco leapt upon the next vampire, who was still blinded by holy water to the face. Three good stabs to the chest, and it was dead and dusted in seconds.

  Marco whirled on the last vampire standing, the second one he had hit with holy water.

  That vampire was still blinded by the holy water, but reached inside his coat anyway.

  Marco spotted the H&K MP5K submachinegun.

  That math was even easier.

  I run at him, he cuts me down with blind-fire.

  I run away from him, he sprays and prays, and cuts down bystanders.

  One move.

  Marco reached into his jacket and drew two more glass soda bottles, and hurled them for the vampire.

  The vampire did exactly as Marco expected, and swatted them both out of the air with no problem, moving with the speed and ferocity of a bullet. Had the vampire moved slower, it would have lived.

  Instead, the impact activated the blasting caps on the inside of the bottlecaps.

  The blasting caps ignited the volatile mix of styrofoam, soap powder, and gasoline in the bottles.

  This mix is commonly known as homemade napalm.

  When all was said and done, from the opening salvo to the second the final vampire burned to dust took all of ten seconds. The sounds had been covered by the opening chords of Nightwish’s “Everdream,” and the crowd had mostly been blinded by the flashing lights that Marco had so hated of modern dance halls.

  By the time Yana had found Marco, he was already leaning up against the wall, eyes closed, as though taking a nap. She threw herself at him, hugging him.

  “You were awesome,” she shouted, barely heard over the music.

  Marco smiled. Well. I’m in, just as Merle Kraft wanted me to be.

  * * *

  Merle Kraft wasn’t entirely certain what he wanted to do next.

  Over the months since he first encountered the entire strangeness of the United Nations case, his life had been frantic. He hadn’t been bored once—fight vampires in one’s backyard on one hand, and fight them abroad with the other, and suddenly, one’s life becomes quite eventful.

  Mine certainly has.

  Merle looked into the mirror that evening and wondered when his dark blue eyes had become framed by red. He’d been protecting his people, and the citizens of San Francisco, by night, researching, locating, and burning out vampires by day, and in the down time, he had been Googling his little heart out about the United Nations and Saddam Hussein and the food-for-oil program.

  For most people, it was old news. Saddam was dead, Iraq had management and new problems. But there were several dead intelligence officers, including a few FBI agents, who would severely disagree that it was irrelevant.

  Merle’s mouth bunched up at one corner as he looked over the research. For the most part, it’s rather plain that Something Was Not Right. Oil was purchased from Iraq, with the expressed purpose of purchasing food from the United States. They weren’t purchasing food from the United States, and about eighty thousand people starved to death in Iraq every year from the first Gulf War to 2001. Nearly a million people died, and most of them children, since they’re always the first to go in times of hunger.

  Now, if they weren’t buying food, where was the money going?

  We know the answer now, don’t we? Merle thought. It went into kickbacks. Lots of kickbacks, mostly to the French, and the Russians, and the Chinese, and everyone else who didn’t want to go into Iraq in 2003. They had all been bought and paid for via the very same program they were in charge of. I’m sure the pocket change is what Saddam used for suicide bomber life insurance in Israel.

  Part of the money went to buy off Secretary General Kofi Annon’s son, Kojo. But oil is a billion-dollar enterprise. Merle frowned at his cellular phone and muttered a curse before dialing out to a friend at The Farm—the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “DDI Patrick Cochran,” came the sleepy voice of a Harvard man, his voice thick with the sound of New England salt air and clam chowder.

  “Pat, it’s Merle. How are you?”

  “Mmm?” he grunted. There was the rustle of sheets at the other end. “Merle, what do you want?”

  “I want some information that you haven’t given the FBI.”

  There was a harsh chuckle at the other end. “Please, Kraft, be more specific than that.”

  Merle arched a brow, even though he couldn’t see it, and closed his eyes, leaning back on his bed. His eyes burned like they had a bad rash. “Do I look like FBI to you?”

  “Well, it’s true that I have yet to see you in a suit …”

  The Deputy Director for Intelligence of the CIA thinks he’s funny. This is why I have him on speed dial… and he’s one of the few people who know I exist. Maybe I should have talked to the DDO. “Patrick, I’m serious. Where did the food-for-oil money go?”

  Cochran paused a moment. “Forgive me for asking, but why do you want to know?”

  “Because an FBI agent got eaten in an alleyway a few months ago while investigating the UN, and I heard that Kujo got kickbacks.”

  “You mean Kojo. Right, and?”

  Merle squeezed his eyes harder, forcing the burn to sting him awake. “There are billions of dollars kicking around, and the Israelis never had enough suicide bombers knocking down their doors for Saddam to burn through all the cash.”

  “Saddam had dozens of Presidential palaces, Merle,” Cochran answered, “where do you think? That, and paying off the United Nations, of course.” Cochran hesitated a moment, thinking. “Didn’t you catch that killer? Some scarred monstrosity in the middle of Brooklyn. I recall something about you taking his head.”

  Merle almost laughed. Lucky that I did, otherwise the vampire probably would have eaten me. “My dead fed had a laser microphone pointed at Kofi’s old window while he was looking into food-for-oil. The guy who ate him? I found him destroying the laser mic.”

  There was a pause as long as the California coastline. “You said he was eaten?”

  Merle winced at the choice of words. “He had his throat ripped out and his blood drained. I live in the land of San Francisco vampires. Think about it.”

  “Oh… point taken.” Pat cleared his throat. “Now, if you’re wondering if this were enough to kill the man over, definitely. One man for billions? Certainly murder is possible. Just don’t expect anyone from the UN to be involved, you understand. Not directly. They may have many undesirable qualities, but murder is not one of them…that’s what the savages running two-thirds of the nations on the planet are for. They make good muscle when their interests are threatened. And you can always find someone whose interests are threatened.”

  After a moment, Pat said, “Merle, are you there?”

  Merle’s eyes flashed open. He had fallen asleep. Damn, that isn’t good. “Hey, Pat, I’m here. So, what you’re thinking is that someone from, what, the UN was the killer?”

  “Not impossible. It could also be someone from Iraq who pocketed some money.”

  Yes, but would a
n old Saddam crony have sent a vampire? And if he had, how bad can this get? “If that’s the case, then why did the FBI send an agent to look, if we know where all the money is going? Just so they could prove it?”

  “Of course, why not? They’re the FBI, it’s what they do.”

  However, there was a problem. The United States never did anything when the UN screwed up. Ever. The only one to ever really complain about it was New York’s mayor over parking tickets. As part of Merle’s investigation, he could write a small history of the United Nations, from when it had been designed by the Soviet double agent Alger Hiss, to how it helped to create the 1967 war between Egypt and Israel, and other miscellaneous idiocies. And, while the Unites States held the purse strings, it never, ever, yanked them.

  So, the question became, “But if the FBI proved all of this, what would happen then?”

  Another long pause. Nothing on his end.

  Exactly. Nothing. “Patrick, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Well… while it is certain where the money is going, some of it… we can’t account for it with absolute certainty. We keep losing the money around Switzerland.”

  Merle sighed. “Of course. Bankers for the world’s fascists since 1933.”

  “Yes, well, it was a trifle hard for them to release any of their records during the initial food-for-oil project. We’re not even certain where Arafat’s money is, and the old bastard had millions squirreled away somewhere before he died.”

  Merle nodded to himself. “So, money goes into a bank account in Geneva, but no one knows who it belongs to, whether or not it’s still there, or where it goes. How much is unaccounted for?”

  “About ten billion dollars, possibly more. Not to mention the money our government lost when we went in.”

  Merle winced. The UN lost about a billion a year for the length of the program. Just great. “Now we’re talking real money. All right, thanks Pat.”

  Missing money, vampires, the UN, Saddam Hussein, Switzerland, oil …

  He was asleep before he could finish the list piling up in his head.

  CHAPTER 12:

  BLOODSTAINED

  September 10th, 10:00 pm, New York

  Amanda walked out of the hospital chapel, feeling like death warmed over, which she supposed she was, technically. The night had started for her as it always did—exercise to keep the muscles fresh, a visit to church—and then, to the hospital.

  Since visiting hours and her waking hours never overlapped, she had slipped into a hall closet, hung up her clothes and changed into a rat, covertly visiting each of the men wounded in the previous night’s assault.

  Once upon a time, she might have felt slightly disturbed about reforming naked into someone’s hospital room. But, after the first five decades of men hitting on her while abroad, she was darned certain of her body, and, in this case, none of the patients were conscious.

  The three of them were in the same ICU wing. They were better than they had been, but not by much. They were stable, but whether or not they would live was another quandary.

  She quickly checked the area around her before reforming as a person, then did exactly as she had the night before.

  She bent down and she bit each of them.

  Her teeth drained only milliliters of blood, but it didn’t matter. The microbes in her saliva were mingling with the blood of each of the burned gang members, making him stronger. When she and Marco spent the next week after Kraft’s visit to New York explaining what she was, they had left out the fact that a small bite from her could make a person stronger. Marco had argued that it would be annoying if they kept asking for her to charge them up, or relied on it too much.

  Though, given the big deal that novels about her kind that made blood draining like unto sex, she suspected that Marco had other reasons. Had he foreseen those other problems, too?

  Having had a quick bite with all three of them, she had gone back, changed into her clothes, and then moved out of the hospital as quickly as possible.

  To what, though? Where in Hell am I going?

  That was a problem. She had spent decades alone, but she did have jobs, plenty of them. That had ended over twenty years ago, though.

  But then, she had found Marco. Which, amazingly, had been a surprise at a point in her unlife where she thought she had run out of them. He was even mentally stimulating, and never boring. And he was certainly…

  She stopped in her tracks. She hadn’t even noticed that she was walking down that far. Technically, she was walking the wrong way, she needed to go due north, but she didn’t even need to do that directly, since she wasn’t exactly going to be slowing down anytime soon.

  Somehow, Amanda had walked straight to Marco’s college.

  No, we’re not being Freudian or anything, she thought, even her own brain reflecting sarcasm.

  She shook her head and sighed, looking down Manhattan Island. The new World Trade Center stood there, twinkling in the night. The “Freedom Tower” looked like the entire building was still alight with people working, a strange green quartz shape in the middle of her beloved island.

  Colt smiled and shook her head. She had been in the City when they had built the first World Trade Center. She thought they were…inoffensive, despite the critique that the towers disrupted “the gentle slope to the sea” of the other buildings. They were nicknamed the butter sticks, bread boxes, and generally every nasty name in the books. Then, twenty-six years later, they were just… there, taken completely for granted, until one day, they were just gone.

  Sort of like Marco.

  Amanda shook her head again. Marco was smart. Hell, he was brilliant. He didn’t think it was a big deal, and he wouldn’t hesitate to tell anyone—mainly because he didn’t think it was a big deal. He would usually state it the same way he would tell someone that he was “just fine” that day, or that the weather looked “not bad.”

  Marco’s problem was that most of the people he met resented him for it. Something about the general attitude of the university that disagreed with him. Possibly because he was a Catholic in an aggressively anti-theist institution. Most of his friends had moved away, and much of his time was spent with her and the gangs, and even the gangs were just purely business.

  In fact, when was the last time he had a girlfriend? Or just a date? Or… ? She shook her head. There was something niggling in the back of her head. Something was just wrong with that particular bit of information. Marco was smart, physically fit, and while not personable, he was certainly not unattractive.

  Heck, I deal with him often enough… dealt with, anyway… Did Lily hurt him that badly? Or did Marco merely throw himself into hunting vampires?

  Colt turned away from the World Trade Center and started making her way home. It wasn’t like she had any place to go, or anything in particular to do.

  Why had I never noticed that Marco consumed all of my nights, and some of my days? Maybe I really should try getting an afterlife.

  * * *

  Greenpoint

  The concrete floor of the unfinished building vibrated, as though a T-Rex stomped around outside. There was even a glass of water on a desk that vibrated, the surface of the water rippling as though a pebble had hit.

  The next strike was audible, shaking the floor, as though a truck had struck the building.

  The blows came fast and furious now. They came with the speed of a jackhammer, and the force of a bomb. Across Brooklyn, there were military veterans who hit the deck, thinking that mortar fire was incoming. In Queens, there were people who thought that there were gunshots. In the Bronx, they this it was a few backfires.

  When the fist finally came through the floor, half the floor exploded away.

  The creature that emerged from the floor was covered in concrete dust. It was slight and almost scrawny. As it took the first breath of air in months, it let out the most terrifying sound it knew.

  It laughed.

  The rats scurried away in fear at the sound.
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  Mister Day was back.

  CHAPTER 13:

  HUNTING PARTY

  San Fransciso, September 10th

  Marco Catalano looked around the Artful Krafts and said, “Did you steal this design from the store on Buffy The Vampire Slayer or something?”

  Merle’s face was buried in folded arms, down on the table in the center of the main room. A cup of coffee was clutched in one hand, and it had long ago been mostly drained, and completely cooled.

  Merle looked up and glared. “Do you have something interesting to say, or should I just kill you now for even joking about that?”

  Marco grunted a laugh. He grabbed a chair and sat across from Merle. “So, what’s up? You look like hell.”

  Blink. “No kidding.” Blink. “I’ve been trying to keep up with the various and sundry disasters of my life. My job is to find the terminally weird and run a stake through its heart…”

  Catalano grinned. “Metaphorically, of course.”

  “Or at least until lately. Most of my cases tend to end with some kind of cult, or some kind of strange and wondrous insanity that is, thankfully, mostly human. Now, it’s just… ” Merle blinked again. “Don’t you have classes to go to?”

  He shook his head. “You think I would be able to organize an effective resistance against the vampires of Brooklyn and handle my training without being smart enough to generally write off the whole educational experience?”

  Damn, I’m useless this morning. “What do you mean?”

  Marco gave him a look. “I mean I have an eidetic memory, and an IQ somewhere around a hundred and sixty-plus. I bore really easily.”

  Merle shook his head. “So, go out and find, oh, I don’t know, friends, leave the rest of us alone. Get a social life.”

  Marco smiled. “You think I’d fit in well in San Francisco? I’m a somewhat Conservative, ultramontane Catholic who thinks that if Haight Ashbury burnt down, it wouldn’t be that bad an idea... except that the rest of the city high for the next week.”

  The government agent had to smile. “You’re at least right about that last part. But, no, seriously, can’t you waste time talking on the phone to friends in New York or something?”