the man holding Tanya asked.
"Much." She walked over to them, and Tanya noticed that even though she wore stilettos she didn't wobble at all on the gravel road. She kept coming closer, and for a moment Tanya thought she was going to attack her too, but instead the woman pressed herself up against them both and kissed the greasy man. Caught between them, Tanya tried to catch her breath, tried to think, but she was only struck by the awkward absurdity of her position. They took their time about it.
When the girl pulled away, she had a lot less blood on her face, and Tanya felt sick. "Your turn," she told Tanya, smiling wickedly.
"Hold onto her," the guy pushed her forward, and the girl snatched her up before she could break free, wrapping one iron-strong arm around Tanya's torso and grabbing her breast through the sweater. With her free hand, she toyed with Tanya’s curls, and her scalp ached from the abuse.
The man kept a vice-like grip on her wrist, and slowly pushed up her sleeve up past the elbow. "I want to watch her face." His eyes, she saw, were a strange metallic color, like stainless steel, and they almost seemed to glow in the darkness.
The girl laughed. "You're such a pervert," she joked. Her voice and laughter reverberated against Tanya’s back, and the intimacy of it made her skin crawl.
When he bit down on the soft skin on the inside of her elbow, Tanya screamed. It hurt, worse than even the time she had broken her wrist falling out of Nana's tree. She screamed until her throat was raw and she, too, tasted blood.
Suddenly, the man lifted his scuzzy head and looked down the road. The girl holding her turned too. Tanya couldn't look, all she could see was Jake—Jake's body, she realized—staring off into the distance.
"Shit," the man cursed, and then they let go of her and stood up, as if on command. They stared down the road for a second more and then ran away in the opposite direction.
Tanya toppled over, trying to crawl to Jake. Her shoulder and wrist ached and her elbow was still gushing blood. She managed to reach Jake's hand and grab onto it.
A long silence was interrupted by a voice. She hadn’t heard anyone coming. They sounded surprised, but she couldn’t make out the words. Someone pulled her up into a sitting position with strong hands. They turned her arm to see the elbow and hissed a couple words.
"Are you alright?" he asked her. It was a man's voice. She couldn't look away from Jake to see what he looked like. "Tatiana, are you alright?" He shook her gently, and then cursed again, standing up. She could hear the sound of a cell phone being opened, a short number dialed, but all she could see was how Jake's eyes weren't moving, weren't blinking. There was blood all over him, but his eyes kept staring.
"Yes, I need an ambulance right away on rural Route 8," she heard the man say. The world tilted beneath her, and then everything went dark....
Tanya sat up in bed, gasping for air. Pushing the covers away, she swung her legs out over the edge of the bed, trying to decide if she needed to run to the bathroom. She was drenched in sweat, dizzy and nauseous, but her mouth wasn't watering, so she probably wouldn't throw up.
It had been a long time since she'd had the nightmare. A year, maybe? She had started to think she wouldn't have it anymore.
When the dizziness passed, she got up and lumbered into the kitchen, squinting into the brightness of the refrigerator to grab the water pitcher. She found a glass by feel, her night vision ruined by the light, and poured the water into it.
She downed it, poured another, and returned the pitcher to the fridge before sitting at her rickety table to remember.
When she had woken up after the attack, she had been in the hospital. Jake was dead. There was a big mess while they tried to figure out what the hell happened. Being the 17-year-old idiot she was, she told them exactly what she remembered, and they immediately decided she was delirious from the trauma. Obviously, she and Jake had been attacked by some wild animal. Vampires simply were not real.
She had tried to point out the obvious proof: why would she and Jake have gotten out of the car? How did her shoulder and wrist get sprained? Didn't the teeth marks on her arm, through the stitches, look like a human's?
In a sick twist of irony, the psychiatrist had tried to use that last bit against her. Wouldn't a vampire have fangs, he reasoned? Wouldn't there be just two puncture marks instead of two half-crescents? When she had refused to "accept the truth" they had doped her up so much she didn't even cry at Jake's funeral. She was so out of it, she hardly remembered anything. Somehow she managed to go back to school after a couple weeks, catch up, and keep plugging on.
Only her dad had believed her. They had always been close, and she remembered lying in bed at night listening to him and her mother fight about it. After a while, he gave up. He came into Tanya's room one night, when her mother was already in bed, to talk to her.
"Tanya, I still believe you, really I do. But I don't think anyone else does. Maybe if we just... If we just don't tell anyone else, they'll let you off the meds, you know?"
She had shrugged. It was as good an idea as any other. She had gone back to the psychiatrist, said the things they wanted to hear. They lowered her dosage, slowly. She didn't tell them that the less she took, the angrier she felt. She had a right to that anger, and they weren't going to take it away from her again. Finally, a year later, when she had managed to squeak into graduation by the skin of her teeth and the pity of her teachers, she was allowed to stop taking it altogether.
Her grades were shit, though, and there was no way she was going to a nice university. Her mom had laid out a number of very good paths she could take: go into the military, get a job, or go to a tech school. She settled on community college and started taking classes. When her dad finally asked her what her plan was, she told him.
I'm going to hunt those bastards down. And she did. It took her a couple of years, but eventually she found the female vampire responsible for Jake's death. She’d caught the female during the day, tied her up, and dragged her into the sunlight to burn. She hadn't even woken up.
But she’d never found the man with steel eyes. She had thought it would be enough to avenge Jake’s death, but knowing he was out there, that he could do this to someone else…. Tanya couldn’t let it rest. So she’d kept looking, and traced him across the state.
Tanya had never meant to make a life of hunting vampires. She’d just wanted to get those two, to settle the score. But her prey was elusive, and every time she found a vampire that wasn’t him… she couldn’t just ignore the situation. When she lost the trail in St. Louis, she’d just started looking for any vampires, and gone from there.
Along the way, she had learned a thing or two about vampires and how to kill them. It wasn’t like there were books on the subject, at least none that she could rely on to be truth and not imaginative fiction. Mostly it was trial and error, and looking back she was surprised she hadn't gotten herself killed. None of the deaths had made her feel any better, though, so she just kept going. After a while, it stopped being about finding her attacker and was just what she had to do. She got better, discovered that killing a Master vampire would instantly kill all of his minions. Got smart about it after Bradley caught her.
She had lost count. Probably somewhere in the thirties, as far as the ones she had actually killed herself. As for their minions, who knew? Hundreds, she would like to think. Sometimes she wondered if she’d already killed the man she was after, killed his Master. Bradley kept an eye on John Does in the morgue, but a lot of bodies were never found.
Tanya
