Going Dark (Nightfallen #1) Read online

  Slowly, they realized it too.

  “Get a stake,” Dave yelled. “We’ll shove it in her heart.”

  “Dude, where are we going to get stake?” one of them said, panting from kicking my torso and face.

  “A leg from a barstool . . . anything!”

  “I have a pocketknife,” another of them said before pulling out a Swiss Army knife and slashing the thin blade into the side of my throat.

  My neck tightened as I continued struggling. It was going to take all night for him to decapitate me.

  I hadn’t been immortal that long, and I couldn’t believe this was how it was going to end. The pain arced through me like an electric current, and tears flowed from my eyes. It was tempting to let them kill me, to be done with the pain, but I kept trying to fight them.

  I had no choice, really. We all knew where we went once we were killed, and any pain we experienced on earth was a thimbleful of what was awaiting us there.

  A voice boomed like a drill instructor: “Let her go.”

  Dave and his friends stopped pummeling me to look behind them at who had said it.

  “Just keep walking, man,” one of them said. “Believe us, this is not what it looks like.”

  I was still on the ground, but between the redwood-like legs of the men surrounding me, I could see the newcomer approaching us. He was a sucking black hole, totally devoid of life, just like me. I thought it was Nathan, but seeing the blackness’s nuances—much smaller than Nathan’s, meaning he was younger and less powerful—I recognized him as the man in the dark overcoat and Army cap at the bar.

  “I know exactly what it is,” the man in black said.

  “He’s like her,” Dave whispered.

  I somehow managed a laugh. “You’re right about that,” I said.

  I could feel terror reverberate through them like a plucked guitar string. They would have run if Dave hadn’t spoken up to the man in black. “We handled your girlfriend here pretty easy. I don’t think you things are as hardcore as in the movies.”

  “How’s this for hardcore?” the man in black said, then pulled a handgun from beneath his jacket. I recognized it as a 1911, the same design as the battered, Vietnam-vintage .45 my grandfather had let me shoot.

  Dave and his friends stepped back, some of their arms instinctively going up.

  “Run,” the man in black said.

  This time, they did, breaking for the opposite end of the alley.

  “Why did you let them go?” I asked, still lying on the pavement, wondering if I’d be able to move before sunup.

  “The sound of gunfire would draw more attention than screams,” he said. “Besides, five deaths, whether they’re from guns or drained blood, might be too suspicious for this little burg.”

  “Leaving living witnesses isn’t?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Drunk, frat-boy meatheads—who are they going to tell? Who would believe them? Besides, if anyone was going to call the cops, we’d be hearing sirens by now.”

  “What kind of undead carries a gun?” I asked, as it disappeared into his coat.

  “Old habit.” Kneeling beside me, he pulled off his hat.

  His hair was short on the sides, slightly longer on top, and as black as his coat. He looked as though he’d been older than me when he’d been alive—mid to late twenties when he’d nightfell, I guessed. He was taller than Nathan, and his eyes were brighter, blue as the daytime sky I remembered. Handsome, definitely, but also hard-lined, as if the world had treated him badly before he died.

  From his coat, he pulled a plastic blood packet. “Here,” he said, holding it before my mouth.

  The blood was clearly hospital grade, which was harder to get than various vampire TV shows made it seem. Maybe he had someone living helping him? Still, rather unusual for someone so new to have set up a Renfield relationship. I wanted to ask him where he’d gotten it, but couldn’t stop myself from biting the bag. The blood had been coagulated by the cold outside, and seeped out with all the effort of sucking molasses through a straw.

  But still, it was life. I began to heal. It would take more to get me completely right, but it was enough that I could feel the pieces of my pelvis beginning to knit.

  “Why are you helping me?” I asked after a while. Altruism wasn’t exactly one of our strong points, and I was in no condition to give him sex.

  He sat against an alley wall. “I’m new to this. Looking for someone to show me the ropes. I’ve seen you around town. Was getting ready to make introductions, but the pretty boy rolled up on you first.”

  Self-interest. That I could believe.

  “That’s so funny. When I saw you, I thought you were trying to steal him off my plate,” I said.

  “Nah. It’d be pretty gay if a guy drained another guy.”

  Strange. Most of us reveled in any degeneracy. Besides, food was food. But another question came more immediately to mind. “Why would you need my help? Where’s your sire?”

  “‘Sire’?” he asked.

  “Oh, you are new, aren’t you? Sire: the one that made you.”

  “He didn’t stick around.”

  “‘He’?” It sounded funny, given his commentary on male-on-male drinking a moment before.

  “Yeah. The humor isn’t lost on me. Anyway, I was laid up in the Veterans Hospital. Flesh burned, and a paraplegic on top of that. Doctors had me so drugged up, I thought the guy who showed up in a World War I uniform was a figment of my imagination. Especially when he started talking about how his flesh was ruined in an American war too and someone had healed him. Going on about how sometimes soldiers deserved second chances. Next thing I know, it’s three days later and I’m clawing my way out of the local vets cemetery. Never saw him again.”

  Whoa. Better than my origin story.

  Nathan wouldn’t like it, of course, another male sniffing around his harem. But the man in black was nice to look at, not to mention cool, with his gun and blood packet, his soldier confidence and weird origin. It was easier to disobey Nathan whenever I wasn’t near him, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t kill me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Jackson Wheel. Yours?”

  I finally had the strength to sit up. “Virginia Dare Weston, but please do call me Ginny.”

  3

  Training Night

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it,” Jackson said, as I slid into the seat across from him.

  “Well, you know how it is,” I said. “Takes a girl some time to make herself beautiful, especially after she’s had the ever-loving hell beaten out of her.”

  It was a couple of hours after sundown, and we were in one of Echo Valley’s triumvirate of independent coffee shops. Each shop had its own culture; this was Café Trios, the meeting place of hipsters and the bohemian pretentious. Everyone here was so thin and sickly looking that Jackson and I were probably the only ones that didn’t look undead.

  We sat away from the window, not wanting anyone to notice our lack of reflections. We each had small mugs in front of us, but neither of us drank our coffee. Like so much our kind did, the mugs were just camouflage to blend in with the cattle around us. It was loud enough that we didn’t have to worry about being overheard.

  It had been three nights since the alley. We’d agreed to meet here tonight, mainly because I’d thought it’d take me that long to heal enough to be presentable.

  “You’re looking better, by the way,” he said.

  “Thank you.” I smiled. I had to take his word, since the pools of still blood we could see our reflections in were poor substitutes for mirrors.

  “Your sire nursed you back to health?” he asked.

  “And my sisters,” I said.

  “‘Sisters’?”

  “It’s a nice way of saying the other girls in my sire’s harem.”

  “How many are you guys?”

  “Just me, my two sisters,
and Nathan, our sire.”

  “You seem pretty okay with the arrangement.”

  “What choice do I have?”

  In some ways, death had been liberating. I’d been such a good girl growing up. Too bookish, too much of a shrinking violet, there was no chance I’d be that nuclear-hot, life-of-the-party girl that every boy seemed to want.

  But then the Nightfallen found me. I was forever sixteen, and no longer needed makeup for my eyes to look smoky and my lips to be slut red. My skin, so pale before, looked healthy and sun-kissed now. Suddenly I had serial killer self-confidence, and my body moved with a hypnotically liquid grace. These were adaptations, naturally selected, so that I could find victims easier while blending in among the living. Darwinism in action.

  No need for parents now. I could have all the nice things I’d seen at the mall and online, either by hitting my headlights on someone or simply taking it by force.

  There were trade-offs, though. The ones I had known about included sunlight, crosses, mirrors, and blood. The one I hadn’t was how much a sire would loom over my existence.

  After the alley, I had limped back to the foreclosed Victorian that had been our home the past couple of months. Getting up its half mile-long, ice-covered driveway, abandoned and unplowed, was difficult.

  The previous occupants must have resented being forced out. To spite the bank, they had smashed the fireplaces’ marble and the winding staircase’s thick, mahogany rails on the way out, making the downstairs look like a haunted house.

  They had left the upper two stories untouched, though, and there was luxury in the polished hardwood floors and the decorative plaster of the ceilings. This was our den now. The candles we burned, hidden from the outside world by the blackout curtains we’d installed against the sun, made it look warm and romantic, despite the constant chill.

  It started farther from the house, I noticed. Just as strength and speed increased over time, so did a sire’s hold. That’s why my oldest sister was little more than a shell wherever she was inside a city radius of Nathan, and why the other, just a few years older than me, began losing herself within a mile of home.

  I had begun to feel my sire’s presence as I approached the house, a pressure pushing my thoughts from my mind. With every step up the stairs, I became more of Nathan’s vessel. Making it worse was how good it felt to lose myself.

  By the time I had reached the third-floor bedroom that Nathan had made his throne room, Jackson Wheel was barely a memory. So was most of myself. If it wouldn’t please Nathan, it was not important to me.

  Nathan was wearing jeans as I entered, but otherwise undressed. In the corner, a grandfather clock we had brought along with his crates of war mementos chimed the hour.

  Curled at his feet like a cat was Cynthia, the eldest sister. Of us three girls, she was the most voluptuous, with long, chestnut hair and a beauty mark just above her lip that made her look like she belonged in classic Hollywood. She had been twenty-four when she died in the early ‘60s.

  The decade must have been encoded in her DNA. She’d have been sexy in a Marilyn Monroe one-piece swimsuit, but looked cheap in the sheer body stocking she was wearing.

  Between Nathan’s legs was the middle child, Gina. Her blond hair was done in tresses that couldn’t help but come loose as her head enthusiastically bobbed up and down in Nathan’s lap. Her naked back was to me, her legs tucked neatly underneath her, the thigh-high boots encasing them the only things she was wearing.

  She had been closer to twenty when Nathan had taken her, a junior here at Ramsgate. “The campus has changed so much since ‘89,” she’d gushed the night the four of us came to town.

  At my approach, Nathan gently pushed Gina away. She obeyed grudgingly. The umbilical cord of saliva connecting her mouth to him was severed only when he zipped up his jeans.

  He had lean muscle flowing beneath firm skin. His hair was as long as some of the guys on campus, but Nathan combed his neatly.

  I had come across a photo—a daguerreotype—of him once while packing for one of our moves. Aside from the mustache and Union uniform, he looked exactly the same.

  “Did you bring us anything?” he asked.

  Letting your parents down, betraying your country—multiply those by a thousand, and it almost captured how I felt at his question.

  “No.” I sobbed, pulling open my ruined shirt to reveal my battered body. “I tried, but his friends found him. There were too many of them, and they did this to me.”

  He stepped to me and caressed my face, and suddenly it was the only place on my body that didn’t feel pain.

  I almost told him about Jackson then, Nathan’s human gesture making me want to be transparent with him. But my predator mind, always thinking about self-preservation, had again spoken up: “Don’t tell him.”

  He withdrew his hand, and the pain returned to my face, somehow worse without his touch. The smile on his face made me think he’d planned it that way.

  “I understand, Ginny,” he said. “Alas, now we’re all reduced to day-old deer blood. That’s not very good, is it?”

  “No,” I’d said, tears streaming down my bruised and cut face.

  “Not very responsible.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Well, my fault for having us rely on the runt of the litter. Terrible of me. You probably haven’t eaten either. You must be famished. Cynthia, fetch me a bucket from the other room.”

  When she returned, I recognized it—one of the pails we’d been draining deer into. Even if the blood was old, the house’s chill had kept it fresh enough. I could smell it. I could see it, life still radiating from it in slow, uneven waves.

  I was so hungry.

  Taking the pail from her, Nathan emptied the bucket over my head. “There you go,” he said. “That’s your dinner. Whatever you can lick off yourself.”

  That’s what I did, stripping naked to wring all the blood from what had been my favorite outfit. While I did, my sisters took turns riding him like competitors in a perverse derby. Nathan didn’t look at me for the rest of the night, but my sisters occasionally gave me triumphant glances when our sire’s face was buried in their chests. I was jealous, allowed to watch but not allowed to play, until daylight mercifully came, and with it sleep.

  Everything that had happened hurt, but what made it worse was when I was allowed to leave the house tonight. The true magnitude of how pathetic I was really came home.

  Of course, I wasn’t going to tell Jackson any of this. A lady has to keep up appearances.

  “Are you anyone’s sire?” he asked.

  “No. It takes time to be strong enough to do that.”

  “How long?”

  “It varies,” I said. “I seem to be coming along faster than most. Why risk it, though? If you try making a thrall when you’re not ready, you’ll just kill your intended and yourself.”

  “Can you be resurrected?” he asked. “Seems like it’d be easy to pull a stake out of a dead buddy’s heart.”

  I didn’t want to roll my eyes at such an adorably stupid question. “I’m afraid not. There are no sequels for us. Once we’re ended, we’re gone forever, cast into Hell.”

  “‘Hell’?” Jackson asked, as if uncertain of the word’s taste.

  I nodded. “We’re damned. All of us Nightfallen.”

  “What’s a Nightfallen?”

  “You, me—all of us undead. It’s our name for ourselves.”

  “So a fancy word for vampire?”

  “More than that. Names are important.”

  “A rose by another name would be just as sweet.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected a literary allusion from a soldier.”

  “We covered Shakespeare in basic. Or it could have been high school, I can’t remember.”

  “Well, if that rose were called rankbreath, would you stop to smell it? Words have power. ‘Nightfallen’ encapsulates us. Things that are not just fallen, as
Man is fallen, but who accept it and know there is no salvation. The name also reinforces that identity, amplifies it. And so we revel in our own degeneracy. Why shouldn’t we? God hates us, after all.”

  “The way you talk about God like He’s a fact, I’d say you’ve got more faith than the pope.”

  “Because it’s not faith. We have proof. Why else does holy water boil our skin, and we catch fire if we set foot on consecrated ground? What other explanation is there for how blinding a little cross is to us? You could spend all your immortal days helping old ladies cross the street, but in the end, it would still be lakes of fire for you. So until then, you may as well have fun and protect yourself with everything that you have, because otherwise, it’s eternal torment.” Finally he seemed to understand how serious I was.

  “Then tell me what my weaknesses are. Sunlight, I know, and I’m assuming stakes to the heart and decapitation, but that’s more movies than instinct talking.”

  “The movies are right—about those things, at least. Of course, we are able to last for a whole minute in the sun before completely burning up. We may not have as many cool powers as other Nightfallen races, but at least we don’t combust on first contact with daylight.”

  He frowned. “‘Races’?”

  “Other types of Nightfallen.” His eyes widened at that. “I know, I thought it was crazy when my sire told me about the others too. Pop culture hints at our existence, but the idea that there are different vampire races hasn’t really permeated.”

  “And they have different powers?”

  “More like the same kinds of powers and limitations but to different degrees.”

  “Where are we in this pecking order?” Jackson asked.

  “Putting it in scientific terms, we are toward the middle of the bell curve,” I said. “Mid-range undead, as it were.”

  “So we’re kind of like Hondas. There are Chevys beneath us and Lexuses above.”

  “There are Maseratis and Hummers too,” I said, indulging the analogy. “Or so I’m told. I’ve never seen them, though. Echo Valley is supposed to be some sort of crossroads. I think it’s why Nathan brought us here.”