Angel of Vengeance (20 page)

Too late. I hear an ominous thwack as something is fired. Then pain—and lots of it—as an object pierces my back and tunnels its way through me to the front. I look down to see the gory tip of what looks to be a wooden crossbow bolt poking out through a ragged hole in my shirt on the left side of my chest. Not good. My whole body goes instantly numb. My knees buckle. Effectively paralyzed, I crumple without feeling to the floor. My head smacks the wood molding of the closet hard. Unable to move, I find myself forced to stare at the pair of two-tone snakeskin cowboy boots directly in front of me.

Cotney kneels down into my field of vision, a mean-looking crossbow in one hand. He’s dressed in a pair of worn-out Wranglers and a checked cowboy-cut shirt. His blond hair is longish without being long and pomaded back into a rock-a-billy-style pompadour. His face reminds me of a snub-nosed revolver; a little unfinished and all business. It’s a good-looking face, if you don’t mind features that look like they might turn mean on a dime.

He flashes his pearly whites my way. “Tell me somethin’, hoss, that hurt as much as it looked like it did?”

I try to respond. Try to tell him how if I get the chance I’m going to pull his legs and arms off as if he were a bug, but with the stake in me I only manage a pathetic gurgle.

“What’s that? Yer gonna hafta speak up there, pard. Cain’t hear ya.”

He and Reesa laugh merrily.

“Oh Cotney, you’re so bad,” Reesa says in a way that makes me wish I’d hit her after all.

Then a hood gets pulled down over my head and the bottom drops out of the world.

25

I
have been rolled in a carpet and dumped into the corrugated metal bed of a pickup truck—the ’77 Ford is my guess. The engine growls and we head west. I know because I sense the coming sun at our backs. A vampire can always sense the coming sun.

Sea salt stings my nose as we near the Pacific. We hang a right on what must be PCH and head north for Malibu. Or Santa Barbara. Or Canada.

I hear Cotney and Reesa talking together through the sheet metal wall of the cab. It’s too faint to make out over the wind and the engine, but I get the gist. She’s worried. He reassures her.

We slow. We climb. We twist and turn and stop. Too soon for it to be Canada. Malibu feels about right.

Doors creak open, and then slam. I am picked up again and carried like so much dead meat up a set of stairs and inside, where I am dropped again. Hard. A bolt of pain shreds through me as the wooden shaft in my chest is jostled on landing. I’d scream if I could.

“Sorry ‘bout the rough landin’ there, hoss,” Cotney says, but he doesn’t sound sorry. Maybe I’ll get the chance to make him that way. Hope so.

Footsteps exit and I’m left alone with only my pain for company.

Cotney’s voice rouses me. “Wake up, boy.”

I must have blacked out. Opening my eyes, I see I have been unrolled, the hood removed. I find myself propped against a leather couch in a high-ceilinged solarium. In front of me, a wall of windows looks out onto a lighted deck and what must be a spectacular view of a private beach and crashing waves far below.

My gun in hand, Cotney leans cowboy-casual against the sliding glass door, a smile of anticipation on his thin lips. Off to his right, Reesa sits primly on an antique wingback chair. But it is the lithe figure swathed head to toe in black directly in front of me that rivets my attention. I take in the old-fashioned high-necked black lace gown that sweeps down to a pair of gloved hands and polished sharp-toed shoes. An opaque black lace veil hangs from the brim of a lady’s black poly-straw hat, obscuring her features. But I don’t need to see her face to know her. There’s no mistaking the orchids and death scent of her decay. My heart pounds. My stomach drops. A nails-on-chalkboard chill scratches its way down my spine.

Coraline.

“Hello, lover. Surprised to see me?” She goes on without bothering to wait for an answer that won’t come anyway. “It was a good try. You only made one little mistake.” She shakes a gloved finger and speaks as if to a child. “If you want to kill a vampire you have to scatter the ashes, silly. I mean, if you want to be certain. Otherwise, we can come back.”

Good to know. There really should be a goddamn manual.

I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

Coraline looks over at Cotney. “I want to talk to him, darling. Take the stake out, please.”

Cotney looks uncertain. “You sure? What if he tries somethin’?”

“If he tries something put a goddamn bullet in his head. You’ve got the gun, you don’t need to be afraid.”

Embarrassed, Cotney’s eyes jerk tellingly toward Reesa before he can put the brakes on. “I ain’t scared a that peckerwood. I ain’t scared a no one.”

“You forget who you’re talking to. I can sense your fear, and frankly, it’s an embarrassment.”

Cotney goes red as she turns to me and says, “He’s nice to look at, but he doesn’t have your guts, Mick.”

Whether she means it or just wants to humiliate Cotney further, I can’t say. Either way, the look of smoldering hatred in his eyes tells me it’s not going to turn out good for me. Fuming, he tucks my pistol into the waistband of his Wranglers and stalks over.

“I’ll do it gentle, hoss. How’ll that be?” he says, going straight to work. He doesn’t. What he does is wrench the bolt back and forth like a dog worrying a rope toy, enlarging the already sizable hole in my chest as he jerks it out inch by half-inch. It hurts like hell. I nearly black out again with the pain. Finally, the eight-inch bolt wrenches free with a wet sucking sound and the wall of blackness recedes.

Seeing evidence of all the pain he’s inflicted on my face, Cotney grins, dropping the bolt to the floor as he goes back to stand by the sliding glass door.

“That better, lover? Can you talk?”

“Yeah.” It comes out as a whisper—barely that. I’m still numb, but now I feel the first sharp pinprick tingles as feeling begins to return.

“Good, because I want to show you what you did to me and hear what you have to say for yourself.”

Looking for all the world like a corpse bride on her wedding day, Coraline reaches up and lifts the veil.

From her seat, Reesa is unable to refrain from gasping. I have to agree with her assessment. What lies beneath is worse than anything I could have imagined. I gape at Coraline’s ashen skin. It looks stretched and overextended, as if there was not quite enough to go round. Here and there, small moth hole-sized patches are missing, exposing sections of charred bone beneath. Her once near-perfect features appear smeared like melted candle wax across her face. Making it all the more horrible, behind this macabre monster mask I can still just make out the Coraline who used to be. It makes my flesh crawl. There’s no hiding the fact. I don’t bother to try.

“What’s wrong?” Coraline asks bitterly, seeing the look of horror in my eyes. “Don’t you like the new me?”

There’s nothing there for me. I just turn away.

“Don’t you look away from me,” Coraline says through clenched teeth. “You did this to me. You look at what you’ve done, goddamn you.”

“You did it to yourself,” I tell her, but I don’t look. I can’t look.

“You know what it was like putting myself back together? You know how awful it was?”

“Well, you did a good job, doll, you should be proud.” It’s out before I can stop it.

As if waiting for a stage cue, Cotney rushes over and bangs the butt of the gun across my jaw. “You shut yer goddamn mouth! You don’t talk to her like ‘at.”

Stung, Coraline stiffens and drops the veil again, but not before I see venom the likes of which I’ve never seen flash in her ruined eyes.

“It’s okay, dear. If Mick finds the fact that I have to live on forever looking like some kind of circus freak amusing there’s nothing we can do about it. It doesn’t change anything.”

“I hate to point out the obvious, but you weren’t actually supposed to live,” I say.

“But I did. I did and now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done.”

“So that’s what all this is about? Revenge?”

“Of course. What else?”

She makes a good point. What else?

“Why’d ya wait so long?”

She tells me how the house burnt and her with it. How it took a long time before she even became aware and even longer before she could come above ground. She tells me about waiting for victims to come along, sometimes for years at a time.

“When I was strong enough I started to plan my revenge. You weren’t hard to find. I did a little research and found out you were working as a private investigator.” She laughs now, genuinely amused.

“Something funny there?”

“It’s just, you’re so perfectly cliché, Mick. I mean really, a private dick?”

“It pays the bills.”

“Yes, I can see you’re doing very well for yourself. Anyway, once I found that out, I thought it would be fun to hire you to find me. I loved the irony of it. So, knowing what a sucker for a damsel in distress you are, I had Cotney find us a girl.”

Coraline looks over at Reesa, still seated in the chair. “Lovely, isn’t she? Almost as pretty as I was once upon a time, don’t you think?”

“Prettier even—”

“You’re trying to upset me, but it won’t work. I’ve waited a very long time for my revenge and I’m not going to let you rain on my parade.”

“Well, I do love a parade,” I say. “One thing I can’t figure though—if it’s revenge you wanted, why get me out of jail? Why not let me rot?”

“Oh no. That was an accident brought about by Cotney’s rash action. Prison is too good for you. I have something much worse in store.”

“You wanna let me in on it, or is it gonna be a surprise?”

“It’s simple. I’m going to do to you precisely what you did to me. I’m going to put you in a hole in my basement and burn you up and let you slowly piece yourself back together again, because that’s all you can do. And decades from now—when you’re almost whole—I’m going to burn you all over again. And I’m going to keep on doing it. Forever. So long as we both shall live.” The sweet, matter-of-fact way she says it sickens me almost more than the words themselves.

“So that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is.”

“And what—? You and the hayseed here live happily ever after?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Pretty idea, but I don’t think it’s gonna work out that way, baby,” I tell her.

“Oh? And why wouldn’t it?”

I jerk my head at Reesa. “’Cause your boy—he’s in love with her.”

“The hell I am,” Cotney protests hotly. Too hotly.

I ignore him, all my attention focused on Coraline. “Face it, doll, you’ve gone and set up a Brasher situation of your very own here. It’s only natural a young buck like him is gonna be drawn to someone less—don’t take this the wrong way but, well, let’s be honest—less monstrous. Way I figure it, it’s only a matter of time before you’re on your way out. And not a long time either.”

“No. You’re wrong. He doesn’t want her,” she says, but she doesn’t sound so sure. It’s funny how sometimes you’re so close to something it takes someone else to point out what you should have seen all along.

“There’s a bite mark high on her inner thigh that says different,” I say. “See for yourself.”

But she doesn’t need to see. The twin expressions of guilt and worry on Cotney and Reesa’s faces tell her all she needs to know.

“That’s what has you so worried,” she spits at Cotney. “Not Mick. That he’d say something and I’d find out—”

“No, baby, no. It ain’t like that,” Cotney says. “This sumbitch is jus’ tryin’ to make trouble for us. She don’t mean nothing to me.”

“Then prove it,” Coraline says quietly, after a pause. “Shoot her.”

All eyes shift to Reesa, who stares back wide-eyed and fearful.

“What?” Cotney smiles a hopeful half-grin like maybe it’s all a joke and he’s ready to laugh along.

“You heard me. Put a bullet in her pretty little head and then set her on fire. Let’s let Mick see what’s in store for him.”

“No. You can’t—” Reesa says, the skin of her face pulled tight. “I did everything you wanted. I gave you my sister. I helped you get him.” She nods at me, frantic.

“And sniffing around my man like a bitch in heat—you think I wanted that?”

“No. I—I wasn’t trying—It wasn’t like that.” Tears welling, Reesa turns to Cotney and pleads. “Cotney, tell her it wasn’t like that.”

“Baby, she’s right. It wasn’t.”

“I’m not going to argue with you. I told you to shoot her. Now do it.” Coraline’s voice is terminally cold. If Cotney knows her at all, he knows there is no more room for argument when she sounds that way.

He knows. The gun floats from me to Reesa like driftwood on an outgoing tide. When it stops, he seems almost as surprised to see it pointing at her as she is.

Rather than move away, Reesa lurches toward him and drops to her knees and clutches him hard around the legs, all pretenses gone now. “Cotney. Cotney, you can’t do this. You said everything would be okay. You said we’d be together forever. You promised me, Cotney.”

Biting his lip, Cotney gently places the gun barrel dead center on her forehead. Her wet, red eyes plead up at him. She shakes her head, no, once. It is a small thing and there is no defiance in it.

A long moment passes. Cotney’s finger tightens on the trigger, and I think that’s all for Reesa, but at the last possible second, he spins and points the gun at Coraline instead.

“I love her,” he says with a sheepish smile, and pulls the trigger over and over.

He’s a good shot, even with a snub-nose. A nice grouping of bullets slam home in the black lace covering Coraline’s chest. Some exit out her back. Some don’t. Stunned at this development, Coraline falls to the floor, sucking wetly for breath through shredded lungs.

I take the opportunity to make my move. Transforming as I go, I grab the crossbow bolt from the carpet and lunge for Cotney. Seeing me coming, he manages to get a bullet in my gut as he too metamorphoses.

It hurts, but it doesn’t stop me. Doesn’t even slow me down. When I reach him, my momentum sends us crashing through the sliding glass door behind him and we land on the deck beyond, snapping and clawing like a pair of rabid dogs. I knock the gun from his hand and attempt to jam the stake into him, but he catches me by the wrist. With his free hand he grabs me by the hair and attempts to pull me within reach of those lethal fangs.