Bastien shrugged. “For me it sort of is. I’ve never felt like this before.”
Richart stared at him. “Never?”
“No time, really. When I wasn’t fighting other vampires who had succumbed entirely to the madness and avoiding fights with you immortals, I was hunting Roland.”
“I didn’t realize you fought vampires when you lived among them.”
“Hard to avoid. Sometimes they did the craziest shit. And I don’t mean crazy wild. I mean crazy demented. I knew some of them weren’t right. It just took me awhile to realize that they all eventually weren’t right.”
Richart grunted and looked at his watch. “Time to meet Stuart.”
“Already?” Maybe he had been mooning. He hadn’t noticed the passage of time. Bastien took out his cell phone and dialed as promised.
“Yeah?” Tanner answered.
“We’re heading over to meet Stuart.”
“Okay. Let me know if you need me.”
“Will do.”
Ending the call, he dialed again.
“Hello?”
Lowering his voice to a sleazy, rusty whisper, he said, “What are you wearing?”
Melanie’s laughter danced over the line. “Chuck Taylors and nothing else.”
Bastien smiled. “I wish.”
Beside him Richart chuckled.
“Are you heading over to meet Stuart now?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“And call me afterward to let me know you’re okay.”
“I will.”
Richart gave the campus one last thermal once-over as Bastien put away his phone. “How does it feel to have people worrying about you?”
“Strange.”
“But good, right?”
Bastien nodded.
Richart put away the scope. “All right. Let’s do this.”
Bastien kept his eyes open while Richart teleported them to the site of his old lair, ready to fight if Stuart had betrayed them.
What he saw the instant they materialized filled him with rage.
Stuart had returned. And he had not returned alone.
While Stuart stood off to one side, looking as somber and itchy as a drug addict in need of a fix, nine vampires staggered around the center of the clearing.
Raucous laughter silenced wildlife. The scents of alcohol, stale sweat, and urine befouled the air. The dumbasses were talking loud and saying nothing, acting drunk even though the liquor they swilled had no effect on them, courtesy of the virus. Bastien’s gaze flashed amber as it narrowed on the loudest, who laughed and turned in a half circle as he whizzed on what remained of Bastien’s property.
On some level, Bastien knew this was no longer his home. Though he still owned the land, this chapter in his life had ended.
But damned if that kid pissing on the winter brown landscape with such glee didn’t feel downright disrespectful.
Stuart’s eyes widened when he sighted Bastien and Richart. Wrapping his arms around his middle, he hunched into his jacket and edged farther away from the others. Anxiety pinched his features. And Bastien got the distinct impression the boy wanted to say something.
The whizzer, dick still in hand, turned and saw them. “Hey,” he called the others’ attention to them. “Where the fuck did you guys come from?”
Bastien ground his teeth together and offered him a smile. It was not a nice one. “I would say your mother’s bed, but . . . I’ve seen your mother.”
Richart turned slowly to look at him and raised his eyebrows.
Bastien didn’t care. The little prick was pissing on what used to be his home.
A moment of silence passed, then the other eight men burst into guffaws.
“Ooh! Burn!”
“He thinks your mom’s too ugly to fuck!”
The whizzer’s eyes flashed a dazzling greenish blue.
Bastien nodded to him. “If you’re wise, you’ll put your wee willy away now.”
“Why? Is it turning you on? You want to suck it?” the whizzer asked snidely and gave his friends an ain’t-I-clever grin.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear. If you want to keep your wee willy, you will put it away.”
Something in his voice or appearance must have registered on some lone firing neuron, because the asswipe tucked himself away and zipped up. “What’s it to you anyway?” he asked. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Yeah,” another added. “And what’s with all the black? What are you guys—Immortal Guardian wannabes or something?”
Richart never cracked a smile. “Or something.”
Bastien cocked his head to one side. “As for who I am: I’m the man upon whose property you are currently trespassing.”
“Bullshit. That would mean you’re Bastien.”
Which meant the little prick had known whose territory he had just desecrated. “Give the man a cigar.”
The whizzer exchanged glances with his buddies.
“So . . . what? He’s Roland?” one asked, peering at Richart
“I thought Bastien and Roland ran around with some human bitch,” another said.
Richart looked askance at Bastien. “You know, I’m beginning to feel a bit testy that you and Roland are so revered amongst the vampire population, yet my name remains unknown.”
Bastien glared at the whizzer. “If they don’t know your name, they can’t piss on your lawn.”
“Good point.”
“Wait,” yet another vamp said. “You really are Bastien? For real?”
The whizzer’s incandescent eyes narrowed. “You’re Bastien the Betrayer?”
“My, aren’t you quick?”
As one, the other men’s eyes flashed.
“Kick his fucking ass!” the whizzer shouted.
Their forms blurred.
Bastien drew his katanas.
Richart vanished, then reappeared in front of the rushing vampires, swords extended to either side.
Two heads leapt from the bodies that carried them. As they tumbled to the cold ground, Richart spun and stabbed two more vamps through the heart.
The remaining vampires reached Bastien en masse.
Bastien focused on the whizzer, disarming him while deftly fending off the others’ clumsy attack.
These vamps, like those last night, lacked the training he had attempted to instill in his own vampire followers and boasted none of the training the vampire king had driven home in his. There was a lot of exuberance and power, but no control or direction. One even overextended himself and stabbed one of his cohorts.
The bumbling buffoons didn’t appear to have ever fought together as a unit. That was somewhat comforting as it meant the vamps they were dealing with now were just random roving bands rather than a new army gathering.
These were also members of the digital generation and had no notion of what real battle was like, carrying what Bastien liked to think of as vanity weapons that they thought were cool but proved utterly useless when fighting immortals. Bowies with elaborately carved handles and animals painted on the damned blades. Shiny butcher knives that looked like they would be more at home on a cooking show or in a horror movie. A flashy hunting knife with a ridiculous blade shaped like a dragon of all things. And one weapon that Bastien could’ve sworn was a fillet knife.
What did they do, buy all of their blades on one of those cable shopping networks?
While Bastien opened the whizzer’s veins, a couple of the vamps belatedly noticed their two headless companions and the pair Richart was carving up. Halting their attack, they gaped at Richart.
As his opponents gasped out final breaths, Richart smiled a Grim Reaper kind of smile and vanished.
The vampires near Bastien looked around frantically.
Using the distraction to his advantage, Bastien took out the two fighting him with ease. Both were slavering like rabid dogs, so focused on their desire to kill and bite and tear that they didn’t even seem to register what was happening around them. Both were clearly too far gone to be helped or recruited.
Their bodies sank to the ground and began to shrivel up.
Bastien sheathed one of his swords and grabbed the arm of the distracted vamp closest to him as Richart appeared beside the other. The vampire’s emotions infiltrated Bastien like acid. Fear. Violence. Rage. Hatred. No remorse. No grief for his friends. Nothing remotely positive.
When the vamp belatedly swung his butcher knife, Bastien knocked it aside and cut the vamp’s carotid and femoral arteries. The vampire stumbled backward, tripped over one of the bodies, and fell.
The last vamp standing leapt away from Richart and swung bowies at Bastien.
Bastien deflected several blows, grew bored, and struck in earnest. The blade in one of the vamp’s hands broke. Bastien hit the other with such force that the vamp yelped, dropped the blade, and gripped his hand with a grimace of pain. Bastien grabbed him by the shoulder. Emotions flooded him, so sick and twisted he felt almost physically ill from it. Shoving the vamp away, Bastien cut his throat.
Blood spattered his face.
Bastien sighed and swiped his sleeve across it.
The vampire fruitlessly tried to stave off the inevitable, sank to his knees, and keeled over.
Bastien cleaned his blade on the guy’s Dead Kennedys T-shirt, then turned to Stuart.
Stuart’s eyes were almost as big as his face. Spinning around, he bolted into the trees.
Richart vanished and appeared in front of the vamp, who dropped several F-bombs as he rebounded off the immortal.
“I wasn’t with them,” he blurted as he rubbed his forehead and turned to face Bastien. “I mean, they weren’t with me.”
Bastien strolled over to join them. “Who were they, then?”
Richart removed a handkerchief from an inner pocket of his coat and began to wipe the blood from his blades.
“I don’t know,” Stuart said, his expression frantic. “You weren’t here last night—”
“Something came up.”
“Or someone,” Richart muttered.
