My Precious Nightmare

23: Vampires Aren't Good for Carpets

You'd think after a little under four hundred years Husani would have seen just about everything. Nothing should have surprised him, besides Lea, that is.

But when an honest to god kid stuck his head out of the helicopter door, he had to stare. The 'I will cut you' look on the kid's face when he saw his brother's bloody body in his arm didn't even faze him, though. He'd seen his share of child soldiers in his day. He fully expected a knife in his back the moment the kid had the chance.

"You're flying this?" he asked above the roar of the helicopter blades. Yeah. That was the weird part. Because who the hell brought a kid to a vampire fight?

"Put him in," snarled the boy with narrowed eyes.

The moment he did the kid was there, pushing a plastic bag with a bead of blood poking over the top. The unconscious vampire curled about it like an infant. After pushing one more bag into the bundle of vampire, the kid turned back to him, teeth bared, and in that moment Husani knew.

This kid was infected too.

He swore.

"Get in," barked the kid.

Husani put his bloodied hands into his pockets and raised an eyebrow. But the kid lost patience and hauled him in by the front of his shirt with much more strength than a kid should ever be allowed. He let him. There wasn't any reason why he shouldn't. After all, he had already made his decision concerning this rich little bastard.

"Lea," he turned to reach for the young girl bowed beneath the weight of her friend. She had taken Sky on so that Husani could have both his hands for maneuvering the much larger vampire down.

He expected her large expressive eyes to widen and for her to step away. She had no reason to follow after him in the first place, even if he did have her unconscious best friend on one hip and a dying vampire on the other. He expected her to be done with him, to take advantage of his preoccupation to escape him.

What he didn't expect was for her to take his hand and give him a reassuring smile.

"Help me with Sky, please?"

Three hundred something years of experience was nothing, he decided.

Husani jumped to assist before Lea could change her mind. He still shook from the intensity of the emotion that had run through him when he had first smelled vampire beneath all the cleaner and came up to find her gone. He couldn't justify his reaction with that of someone who just wanted to keep hold of the key to killing an especially dangerous, old vampire.

And then when that stick of a girl, Sky, had told him no with such passion in her eyes, the roll of murder in his heart had been so firm, so violent--

Lea's warm hand clasped his, interrupting his thought. He pulled her into the helicopter and shut the door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the child vampire up front at the wheel, wearing a set of headphones that looked too large for his head. Already he was making plans of what to do should the kid prove to be a flop at flying. But even as he thought this, the helicopter eased off the earth so gently that he hardly noticed they had left at all.

"Husani, your hand."

He let go of her. He'd been holding her with the hand he had used to yank out a heart. He took a spot near the other vampire's head, intent on keeping vigilance should the other go through his blood baggies too quickly and went sniffing for more.

Husani tried not to be too obvious with how he watched Lea, still wearing his clothes as she rubbed her wrist a bit and curled up next to her friend. He had to stop, though, as her shivering was beginning to make him uncomfortable. The urge to wrap himself about her and rub out every bit of cold was mind numbing.