Sometimes it sucks to be right. It took about a dozen cuts from the knife to get all the blood that Brigham wanted, which felt like about two gallons. Vampires heal quickly, and things like a knife cut really don’t slow us down much, so every time he’d cut me, I’d leak a little, and then heal right up again. And just because we heal fast doesn’t mean we don’t feel pain. You try taking a dozen cuts with a Rambo knife sometime. It really stings.
When the bloodletting was done, I was seeing red. My blood was up, my fangs were out, and I was ready to kill somebody. If it wasn’t for the innocent girl wrapped up in my chains, I would be all over this gang and through them in about a minute. Brigham stood over me with a very satisfied smile, inspecting the vials of blood in his hand. “So now what?” I snarled. “Is this the part where you try and figure out how to kill a vampire? Because I gotta be honest with you, it ain’t easy.”
“My dear Mr. Jarczynski, of course we’re going to kill you,” he replied. “As I said, it wouldn’t do for you to get in my way, especially now that I’ve given you, shall we say, extra motivation.”
Double crap.
“Of course, I won’t be getting my hands dirty,” he said. “No, I think my boys here are up to the task.”
“And what about the girl? She has nothing to do with any of this. Hell, I just met her tonight. Why don’t you let her go?”
“Ahh, yes. The girl. Don’t worry, Mr. Jarczynski. I have special plans for her.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that.
Brigham walked over to his limousine. Before he got in, he said, “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Jarczynski. This really has been a most profitable evening. I’m glad we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.” To his goons, he said, “Boys, you know what to do.” Then he got in his limo, his driver at the wheel, and they rolled out of the warehouse, the roll-up door closing behind them.
Raven was silent behind me. I couldn’t tell if she was in shock, crying, or just simply trying to take in everything she had just heard. It must have been a hell of a shock to not just get kidnapped, but to also find out that the guy she was about to hook up with was a vampire. I was about to try and console her when Vinnie opened up the wooden crate his cohort had been sitting on and pulled out a gleaming axe like something out of Game of Thrones.
I guess Brigham really did know how to kill a vampire.
Chapter 10
“Raven!” I hissed. “Raven! Can you get loose from your chains?” There was no response. “Listen I can get us out of this if you can get out of the way. Is there any way you can shimmy free?” Again, nothing. Dammit. This was going to be tricky.
As Vinnie walked up with the axe, he looked at me with a smile. I braced myself for what was about to happen; I knew it was going to hurt like a bitch. Vinnie wound up like a baseball player getting ready to aim for the bleachers, and he swung the axe with all his might directly at my neck.
At the last second, I wrenched my head to the side. The blade of the axe sliced into my neck, ripped through my tendons, severed my jugular on one side, and buried itself into the column. I almost passed out due to the pain, but somehow I managed to stay conscious. You see, a beheading will kill us; traumatic injury to the neck… well, that heals.
I flashed a fang-filled smile at Vinnie as he wrestled with the axe, which was stuck deep in the pillar. My ruptured jugular vein was spurting blood everywhere, covering us both. My hands were quickly coated, and I used the lubrication to wrestle one free of the chains. With the extra leverage I got from having a free hand, I grabbed the chain with both my hands and snapped a single link in two. This freed up the chains without having to reduce Raven to a pile of skin and broken bones. I lashed out at Vinnie with my free hand and sent him flying. With a flick of the wrist, I shook the rest of the chains loose and stepped out from them, turning to look at the other three goons.
My neck was already starting to heal from the axe wound. I cracked my knuckles, then stretched. Sitting on a cold concrete floor for the last couple of hours was not comfortable. The other guys looked unsure of what to do, until one of them pulled out his handgun and started firing. I took four bullets before I reached over to him and quickly snapped his neck. The other two saw this and then turned and ran. Remember that vampire speed I mentioned earlier? Even though they were about 20 feet away, I was on them in less than a second. I grabbed their heads and smashed them together. There was a loud cracking noise, and the pair of them dropped to the floor, dead.
Then I turned my attention to Vinnie. Brigham may have been the driving force, but Vinnie clearly relished the time he had cutting me. Just as he was getting on his feet, I leaped across the room at him, knocking him down. I let him get up again before I knocked him down again. I let this happen a few more times, like a cat playing with a mouse, before I yanked his head back and bared my fangs. His eyes went wide with the realization of what was about to happen, and then I buried my mouth in his neck. Only — unlike with many of my one-night stands — I didn’t stop. I drank him until his body was drained, and then let the desiccated corpse fall to the floor. Like I said, I’m not a bad guy, but if you mess with me you are going to get bit; pun very much intended.
As I wiped my mouth, I felt a sharp jab in my neck. “What the…?” I managed to get out before the world began to swirl. I lashed out blindly before I stumbled a few feet, and my world went black once again.
Chapter 11
I came to still in the warehouse. Through a foggy window, I could see that the sun would be coming up soon, as the sky was slowly lightening to an iridescent shade of indigo. I gingerly rubbed my neck, the wounds already healed. I surveyed the scene. The three bodies were still where I had dropped them, but Raven was nowhere to be found. Dammit. I hope she got away okay.
I checked my pockets and still had my cell phone, my wallet, everything, so I hopped in a cab and took it back to my apartment. I threw the cabbie a twenty, walked into my apartment, and slumped onto my couch.
You remember when I told you that everything you know about vampires is wrong? Well, everything you know about everything else is wrong, too. The fact of the matter is, sometimes the bad guys win. Wallace Brigham grabbed me, talked me to death, cut me and bled me, and now, he’s probably turning into a vampire. And there’s nothing I can do to stop that. At all.
But I’m also not the type to let some guy come in and walk all over me, even if he is one of the most ruthless men in Vegas. I’m not going to just let him make me his personal blood bank and leave me for dead.
It was time to call in a few friends.
Chapter 12
Orlando, Florida
1988
I was sitting in a hospital room, next to a bed with a guy in it who was barely breathing. I hate hospitals, always have. Trying to get me into one of them was like trying to get me into a church. For the record, I can walk into a church, I just have no reason to and I avoid them like the plague.
But this wasn’t just any hospital room, and it wasn’t just any hospital bed. In it was my best friend in the world, Charlie Kennedy. We had met in the mid 1970s at a party that I think was celebrating the end of the Vietnam War, but frankly, I was too wasted to remember for sure. Charlie and I hit it off immediately, and soon we were completely inseparable; best buds. Charlie’s parent’s died when he was just a teenager, so he came to live with me for a few years. We’d been like brothers ever since. We road tripped around the country a few times; just the two of us in a 1973 MGB GT V8 convertible roadster with a cooler full of beer, no particular destination, and a sense of freedom that was rampant in this country in the 70s.
Now Charlie was lying in this bed, wasting away, barely recognizable as the fun-loving and intelligent guy I had spent so many years having some of the best times of my life with. Charlie had AIDS. He was in the final stages of the disease, and there was nothing I could do to help him. The only option I had was to turn him into a vampire,
but I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of it yet. Then again, I also wasn’t comfortable with the idea of my best friend dying.
Charlie’s eyes fluttered, and he looked at me. “Hey, man,” he whispered. “Don’t you have to go home sometime? You’ve been here for, what, four days?” His breathing was ragged, and it took a lot longer for the words to come out than it should have. He attempted a smile, but it came out as more of a grimace.
“How are you doing, Charlie? How’s the pain? Are the drugs helping?” I asked.
“You know, man, I have my moments,” he said. “It… it’s not as bad as it could be.” I could tell he was lying, but I just nodded and smiled. He closed his eyes again.
When Audrey and I had ended things a few years earlier, Charlie was the one who picked me up off the floor and helped me get back to real life. I had descended into the bottle, hitting it so hard that I was an incoherent mess for the better part of a year. It was Charlie that finally stepped in and helped me get back on track. I can’t tell you how many nights he had to listen to me ramble on drunkenly about Audrey this, Audrey that. I would tell him the same stories over and over again, and he would just sit there, listening patiently every time, offering up comforting words and friendly advice. I would yell and throw things at him, and he never once got mad, never walked away. After hitting rock bottom, I finally got my head on straight, and I owed it all to Charlie. Hell, I probably owed him my life.
It wasn't long before I decided it was a debt I was going to repay. I sat in his hospital room staring at his tired, withered body. He had seemingly decayed even more, even though that didn’t seem possible. Finally, after visiting hours had ended, I snuck back into his room and simply added a few drops of my blood to Charlie’s IV. It didn’t matter if he drank it or not, as long as his body ingested it. He quickly fell into what the doctors all assumed was a coma, but that I knew was the vampire metamorphosis period. The next night, as the hospital lay quiet once again, he simply woke up, and he looked like himself again. His body hadn’t fully healed yet, but the Charlie I knew was gleaming in his eyes.
Charlie and I had never really talked about the vampire thing, but like I said, he was a really smart guy. He knew something was up with me, I just don’t know if he ever nailed it down 100%. When he sat up in his bed, he looked at me, then looked at himself. A smile broke out on his face. “You son of a bitch…” he said. I knew there were a thousand questions to follow, but before he could start, I said, “Listen, let’s get out of here first, and I’ll explain everything later.” “Cool,” he replied, still unable to wipe the smile off his face. I threw him over my shoulder with as much dignity as I could muster, opened the window, and jumped the five stories down to the parking lot. Charlie let out a whoop, and at that point, I couldn’t help but share in his enthusiasm. We climbed into my car — I still drove that same old convertible — and drove off into the night.
Chapter 13
By mid-morning, I was sitting in my living room with two of the people I was closest with in the world: Charlie was one, of course, and the other was Sax, the sexiest vampire you’ll ever meet. Sax is a dancer on The Strip. Say what you want about strippers, but she drinks more blood than anyone I know. Private lap dances are the perfect place for her to snack on a sleazy businessman or a dentist in town on a convention. They go home none the wiser, thinking they had the greatest strip club experience of all time, and Sax gets to feast at will, and make a ton of money while she’s at it. Plus, personally I think she gets off on it. There’s something about having that power that she really enjoys. Hey, I don’t judge. Sax is a smart lady and I trust her implicitly. She knows what she’s doing and by all accounts, she’s got her life a hell of a lot more together than I do.
Sax and I have definitely enjoyed each other’s company on more than one occasion. But since we’re relatively young (in human terms), we live in a party town like Vegas, and we like to have fun, things have never gotten serious. Her real name is Rebecca, but try calling her that sometime and see what happens. She picked up the nickname Sax in college when she went through a brief (and painful) avant garde jazz music phase, and it’s stuck ever since.
We sat in my living room, eating cold pizza and drinking beer, coming up with a plan. We had about 18 hours to make it all happen. Assuming Brigham ingested my blood sometime over the night, he would be holed up somewhere and out cold for about 24 hours. I was pretty sure we’d have until Brigham was up and running again before my plan would go right out the window. So we had to move fast.
“Are you sure this is such a good idea, Alex?” Sax asked. “Let’s face it, Brigham is an incredibly powerful man in this town, and, well, I hate to say it, but it’s not like he killed you. Yes, he’s an evil bastard, and yes, we’ll have to deal with him, but if this goes wrong, we could all end up in big trouble.”
“Now, hold on a minute, Sax,” said Charlie. “Are you really suggesting we give this asshole a free pass? Not only does he need to pay for what he did to Alex, but is this the kind of guy you want running free in Las Vegas? A sadistic bastard and a vampire? I think we’re asking for trouble in the future if we don’t let this guy know who’s boss. I still think we should kill him.”
“I wish it were that easy,” I said. “But the fact of the matter is we have no idea where he’s holed up. It could be in any one of the dozens of buildings he owns. We could spend the entire night searching for him and not even come close to finding him. Besides, taking out a guy like Brigham would draw a lot of attention, and probably not the kind we want. Knocking off a few of his guys is one thing, but a guy like Brigham goes missing and the world takes notice.
“Fine, fine, you have a point. I guess,” said Charlie sullenly. “Hell, I owe you my life. I go where you go.”
“And I appreciate that, man, I really do. But, I think this is a good opening salvo. We teach Brigham a lesson, and hopefully he’ll decide Vegas isn’t worth it. And then if he doesn’t get the message, we can discuss more permanent solutions.”
“Works for me,” Charlie replied.
“Also,” I said, “I need to figure out what he was talking about before we resort to killing him. He’s got some kind of plan in motion, and I apparently know something about it, although for the life of me I can’t figure out what. I’m going to need to keep an eye on him and see what the hell he has in the works. Maybe he’ll reveal something if I can quietly keep tabs on him for a while.”
“Makes sense,” said Sax. “And hey, you know I get a lot of businessmen through at the club. I can always poke around a bit when I’m doing my thing; they’ll never even remember what I was asking them about.”
“Great idea, Sax, thanks,” I said. “When it comes down to it, I’m not willing to risk any of you getting hurt for me. If and when the time comes to put him down, I’ll do it by myself.”
Sax smiled, and Charlie grimaced. I loved these guys more than anything, but if it came down to me and Brigham taking it to the next level, I wanted them to be as far away from the fallout as possible.
After a little bit more strategic planning, we dispersed. We all had a lot to get done. Sax started spreading word to the vampire community, with Charlie taking care of logistics, while I was prepping a few last minute details. It was already almost lunchtime; my plan would go into effect just after sundown.
Chapter 14
It came to be known in Vegas as Black Sunday.
You remember how I told you that us vampires are pretty good at gambling, and that’s part of why so many of us live in Las Vegas? Well, on this particular night we put that skill to use, in spades. Because here’s the thing: vampires in Vegas are a pretty tight-knit community. It’s not like we all get together and have a sewing circle on weekends, but if you mess with one of us, you pretty much mess with all of us. Sax and Charlie had gotten the word out about what had happened and what the plan was, and the vampire community responded. In kind. I didn’t personally know every vamp wh
o got involved, but it didn’t matter. They knew I’d do the same thing for them, without hesitation.
It turns out that one of the ways Brigham had made most of his money and rose to power so quickly was by acquiring a number of hotels and casinos in Vegas. The Lucky Slot, The Palm, The Royal, Nevada Towers… he owned a bunch of the big boys. He had muscled out most of the owners of the properties he wanted when they didn’t want to sell; some of them he’d even had knocked off. After a few of those stories hit the grapevine, most owners willingly sold out to Brigham when he came calling. Pretty soon, he owned something like 30 percent of the strip.
And so, shortly after sundown, some three or four hundred vampires descended upon downtown Las Vegas. If we’d had more time to spread the word, we probably could have had a couple of thousand, but as it was, the showing was enough to get the job done.
Rather than initiate a bloodbath, every single vampire headed towards one of Brigham’s casinos. And only Brigham’s casinos. One by one, they simply walked into the casinos and started gambling. There was literally nothing to set them apart from every other get-lucky hopeful hitting the slots or playing Texas Hold ‘Em. Except for the simple fact that vampires always come out ahead in gambling.
Each vampire played their own game, none of them teaming up or making even casual contact. They hit the poker tables, the blackjack tables, the high stakes clubs. Some of them hit the slots just for fun, to see if they could get lucky, and some of them even did. They did what we do, and over the course of the night started to win more and more. I’m sure the pit bosses started to sweat at some point, but since there was no actual cheating going on, there was nothing they could do about it. Most of the vamps switched tables and casinos throughout the night, too, so as not to get too much money in one place and risk being thrown out.