Circus of the Damned - Laurell K. Hamilton [67]
He reached over me and encircled my right hand, the one that was pinned, the one that was still holding the gun. He pressed the bones of my hand into the metal. His voice was deep and soft. “Drop the gun or I’ll crush your hand.” He squeezed until I gasped.
Larry screamed, high and mournful.
Screaming was for when you didn’t have anything better to do. I scraped my left sleeve against the road, baring my watch and the charm bracelet. The three tiny crosses glinted in the moonlight. The vampire hissed but didn’t let go of my gun hand. I dragged the bracelet across his hand. A sharp smell of burning flesh; then he used his free hand to drag at my left sleeve. Holding onto just the sleeve, he held my left hand back, so I couldn’t touch him with the crosses.
If he’d been the new dead, just the sight of the crosses would have sent him screaming; but he wasn’t just old dead, he was ancient. It was going to take more than blessed crosses to get him off my back.
Larry screamed again.
I screamed, too, because I couldn’t do anything else, except hold onto the gun and make him crush my hand. Not productive. They didn’t want me dead, but hurt, hurt was okay. He could crush my hand into bloody pulp. I gave up my gun, screaming, tugging at the knife that held my arm pinned, trying to jerk my left sleeve free of his hand so I could plunge the crosses into his flesh.
A shot exploded above our heads. We all froze and stared back at the cemetery. Jeremy Ruebens and company had recovered their gun and were shooting at us. Did they think we were in cahoots with the monsters? Did they care who they shot?
A woman screamed, “Alejandro, help me!” The scream was from behind us. The vampire on my back was suddenly gone. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care. I was left with the child-monster looming over me, staring at me with large dark eyes.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” he asked.
It was such an unexpected question that I answered it. “No.”
He looked disappointed. He squatted down beside me, hands on his small thighs. “I meant to cut you so I could lick the blood.” His voice was still a little boy’s voice, would always be a little boy’s voice, but the knowledge in his eyes beat down on my skin like heat. He was older than Jean-Claude, much older.
A bullet smashed into the rear light of my car, just above the boy’s head. He turned towards the fanatics with a very unchildlike snarl. I tried to pull the knife out of the road, but it was imbedded. I couldn’t budge it.
The boy crawled into the darkness, vanishing with a backwash of wind. He was going for the fanatics. God help them.
I looked back over my shoulder. Larry was on the ground with a woman with long, waving brown hair on top of him. The man who’d been on top of me, Alejandro, and another woman were struggling with the vampire on Larry. She wanted to kill him, and they were trying to stop her. It seemed like a good plan to me.
Another bullet whined towards us. It didn’t come close. A half-strangled scream, and then no more gunshots. Had the boy gotten him? Was Larry hurt? And what the hell could I do to help him, and me?
The vampires seemed to have their hands full. Whatever I was going to do, now was the time. I tried unzipping the leather jacket left-handed, but it stuck halfway down. Great. I bit the side of the jacket, using my teeth in place of the trapped hand. Unzipped; now what?
I pulled the sleeve off my left hand with my teeth, then put the sleeve under my hip and wiggled out of it. Slipping my right hand free of the pinned sleeve was the easy part.
Alejandro picked up the brown-haired woman and threw her over the car. She sailed into the darkness, but I didn’t hear her hit the ground. Maybe she could fly. If she could, I didn’t want to know.
Larry was nearly lost to sight behind a curtain of pale hair. The second female was bending over him like a