• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I fought an urge to touch the wall where he’d been.

Edward called softly, “Anita.” He was at the door.

I hurried up to him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“She killed Phillip in here.”

“Keep your mind on business. I don’t want to die because you’re daydreaming.”

I started to get angry and swallowed it. He was right.

Edward tried the door, and it opened. No prisoners, no need to lock it. I took the left side of the door, and he took the right. The corridor was empty.

My hands were sweating on the shotgun. Edward led off down the right hand side of the corridor. I followed him into the dragon’s lair. I didn’t feel much like a knight. I was fresh out of shiny steeds, or was that shiny armor?

Whatever. We were here. This was it. I could taste my heart in my throat.

46

THE DRAGON DIDN’T come out and eat us right away. In fact, the place was quiet. As the cliche goes, too quiet.

I stepped close to Edward and whispered, “I don’t mean to complain, but where is everybody?”

He leaned his back against the wall and said, “Maybe you killed Winter. That just leaves Burchard. Maybe he’s on an errand.”

I shook my head. “This is too easy.”

“Don’t worry. Something will go wrong soon.” He continued down the corridor, and I followed. It took me three steps to realize Edward had made a joke.

The corridor opened into a huge room like Nikolaos’s throne room, but there was no chair here. There were coffins. Five of them spaced around the room on raised platforms, so they didn’t have to sit on the floor in the draft. Tall, iron candelabra burned in the room, one at the foot and head of each coffin.

Most vampires made some effort to hide their coffins, but not Nikolaos.

“Arrogant,” Edward whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back. You always whispered around the coffins, at first, as if it were a funeral and they could hear you.

There was a neck-ruffling smell to the room, stale. It caught at the back of my throat and was almost a taste, faintly metallic. It was like the smell of snakes kept in cages. You knew there was nothing warm and furry in this room just by smell. And that really doesn’t do it justice. It was the smell of vampires.

The first coffin was dark, well-varnished wood, with golden handles. It was wider at the shoulder area and then narrowed, following the contour of the human body. Older coffins did that sometimes.

“We start here,” I said.

Edward didn’t argue. He let the machine gun hang by its strap and drew his pistol. “You’re covered,” he said.

I laid the shotgun on the floor in front of the coffin, gripped the edge of the lid, said a quick prayer, and lifted. Valentine lay in the coffin. His scarred face was bare. He was still dressed as a riverboat gambler but this time in black. His frilly shirt was crimson. The colors didn’t look good against his auburn hair. One hand was half-curled over his thigh, a careless sleeper’s gesture. A very human gesture.

Edward peered into the coffin, gun pointed ceilingward. “This the one you threw Holy Water on?”

I nodded.

“Did a bang-up job,” Edward said.

Valentine never moved. I couldn’t even see him breathe. I wiped my sweating palms on my jeans and felt for a pulse in his wrist. Nothing. His skin was cool to the touch. He was dead. It wasn’t murder, no matter what the new laws said. You can’t kill a corpse.

The wrist pulsed. I jerked back like he’d burned me.

“What’s wrong?” Edward asked.

“I got a pulse.”

“It happens sometimes.”

I nodded. Yeah, it happened sometimes. If you waited long enough, the heart did beat, blood did flow, but so slow that it was painful to watch. Dead. I was beginning to think I didn’t know what that meant.

I knew one thing. If night fell with us here, we would die, or wish we had. Valentine had helped kill over twenty people. He had nearly killed me. When Nikolaos withdrew her protection, he’d finish the job if he could. We had come to kill Nikolaos. I think she would withdraw her protection ASAP. As the old saying goes, it was him or me. I preferred him.