Honeymoon From Hell Book #1, The Neck Romancer

Chapter 2: Talk Later

So, it’s been a while since I’ve treated the people who pay me.

Yes, almost the entire blog has been free so far, but those of you who pay me? You should get something for it.

And right now, I’m hoping you like my Love at First Bite series. Because if you don’t, you may not understand what’s happening.

I have a sequel series en route. Technically, it’s a continuation of the original, but that will be up to the publisher … especially now that I have a publisher for this series.

So, here… we… go.

Chapter 2: Talk Later

Marco pulled a scalpel from his lab coat pocket and pushed into the room. He scanned the room, checking the corners before examining what was left of the patient.

Marco’s eyes narrowed, and his pulse shot up at the remains of Elise Baglio. A mother of three who had come in for a simple hernia, Marco had found her pleasant, and more than tolerable—which in Marco’s world was the equivalent of a five-star human being.

With a quick sweep of his eyes, he reconstructed the crime—it wasn’t that difficult. Baglio’s hands were crushed, and her arms had been broken in what he could only conclude were defensive wounds. After that, something had fed upon her. The sheets had been shredded and torn aside. Her stomach was a gaping wound. Standing at the foot of her bed, he could see that the stomach had been the start, and whatever killed her had gone under the ribcage from there. Parts of her upper arms had been eaten away as well.

Something had gone for the fleshy bits.

Amanda stood near Elise’s head. She was already examining Elise’s face. “Bloody paw print.” She placed her hand a millimeter over Elise’s mouth. “Relatively man-sized. It’s why no one heard her scream. It muffled her cries.”

Marco’s smile flickered. His eyes had gone dark and arctic. “Werewolf?”

Amanda shook her head. “It’s the full moon. Most werewolves would be roaming the halls on a killing spree. This is something else.”

Marco nodded. He had been a were-furry a few months ago, until they had found a unique cure for his condition. Since then, he gratefully hadn’t kept track of the lunar calendar.

It’s the last time I make that mistake, he thought.

“What about you? Do you smell anything in particular?”

Amanda shook her head. “Nothing more than blood. Whatever else was in here either cleaned up or doesn’t have a smell I can identify.”

Marco nodded absently. “I’ll report this to the nurses’ station. They’ll call the cops. I’ll meet you later.”

Amanda nodded, not needing an explanation. She had been a spy too long to want to hang around for when the “proper authorities” arrived. “Are any of the guards or cops here one of ours?”

Marco nodded. “Three or four, depending on the rotation.”

Amanda straightened and headed for the door. Marco pried himself away from the horror in the center of the room and sidestepped so he could intercept her with a one-armed hug. He made certain his arm went around her sternum so he could draw her in without groping her.

Marco kissed the crown of her head and stayed there for a long moment, breathing her in just enough to inure him to the long night ahead of him.

“Timing, huh?” he murmured into her hair. “Four months without this insanity.”

Amanda sighed. She reached an arm up to press his arm tighter against her chest. “I know. Timing.”

He took another deep breath to steady himself. Since the night Marco and Amanda had leveled a cemetery full of vampires and their possessed leader, he hadn’t been forced to kill anything. More importantly, he hadn’t felt the urge to go hunting.

But now that the opportunity had come to him, he felt the old thrill run through his veins.

“Think of it as nostalgia,” he answered.

Amanda let out a laugh. “I suppose.” She tapped his arm. “We have to go.”

* * * *

One of the few things that Marco didn’t miss about killing supernatural things for fun was the paperwork. After he reported the murder, he had tried to finish up his rounds while talking to the police. Luckily, he wasn’t due in surgery anytime soon.

After eating up more than an hour of his time, Marco escaped to the nearest break room.

Amanda was already there, waiting for him behind the door. He saw her, raised a brow, then poked his head out into the hallway. He turned to her with a predatory smile.

Her smile matched his. “What was that for?”

Marco strode toward her, backing her against the wall. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hall to enter the break room with a standard stride.”

As his arms slipped around her waist, she said, “What was that before about exhibitionism?”

“That was a patient room.” One hand slid up her back to cradle her head as he kissed her deeply.

* * * *

After two minutes and forty-nine seconds, he pulled back, breathing deeply. “I think that’s our limit.”

Amanda blinked, surprised. “You need an endurance test?”

“Restraint.” He forced himself to disentangle from her and take a long step back. “So, monsters or ‘the talk’?”

Amanda cocked her head, her hair spilling over one side. “What do you mean?”

“We have a thing eating patients. Before the corpse, you said ‘We need to talk.’ Which do you want to go with?”

Despite knowing Marco for over two years, she had only dated him for a few months. His ability to burn hot one minute and become clinical and detached the next still gave her whiplash.

Then again, with my work history, I should be used to it by now.

“We should hunt first, talk later,” she answered him. “This thing may be any number of things—some of which become hungrier the more they devour.”

Marco sighed and shook his head. “Pity. I was hoping the cops could at least shoot this one. You want to do it floor-by-floor, or do you think you can smell it out?”

Amanda shrugged. “I am a vampire, not a bloodhound.”

“And? It hasn’t stopped you before. And you were a spy for sixty years.”

Amanda was one of the few vampires who were purely “good.” Most vampires were either some flavor of evil (like pineapple pizza) or had gained barely enough control to act like people with fangs. She had spent decades controlling her predatory impulses—which hadn’t gone away, just sublimated to beating the crap out of Soviets, Nazis, demons, vampires, and other monsters. She had been born Alina Savinkova at the turn of the previous century, but “Amanda Colt” was the name she had worked with for decades now.

Marco once asked what it was like to go to confession. The most she would say was “It hurt. But I can at least wear a crucifix.”

Marco absently reached to touch her hand, then stopped. His hand clenched slightly as he restrained himself. “Lord, this is going to suck.”

Amanda blinked. “What is?”

He took a slow, deep breath, and kept both hands bunched up by his sides. “I just don’t want to stop touching you. And yes. We need to talk.”

Amanda stepped forward and gripped his arm gently. “We can skip talking aloud.”

Marco spared her a glance. He looked at her neck. Her lips. Her cheeks. He settled on looking at her ears as the least erotic part of her face.

And even they’re worth nibbling on, he thought. Don’t think about biting the vampire…

Once he was certain he wouldn’t accidentally look his vampire girlfriend deep in her eyes, he said, “We can save that for when my thoughts are more on point. Again—restraint. But God I love you.”

She forgot to tell her heart to beat for a moment, and it skipped a few.

He cleared his throat. “Anyway. Monster eating patients. Where do you want to start?”

“The queen of the damned?”

Marco nodded.

* * * *

Amanda’s previous engagement for that evening had been with Jennifer Bosley, President of the New York City Vampires Association.

When Bosley answered, it wasn’t in her standard upper-class English accent, but her more relaxed Londoner voice. Amanda didn’t know which one was real, but she suspected.

“How did it go?” Bosley answered.

“It has not, yet,” Amanda told her. She smiled at Marco briefly, hoping he didn’t suspect.

Bosley sighed. “Did he chicken out?”

“No. A patient was eaten.”

Bosley hesitated for a moment. “How eaten?”

Amanda described the damage found, and the lack of evidence left behind—no blood trails or scent.

Bosley scoffed in disgust. “Ugh. Nasty bit of work. Our killings are neater. Was there anything that looked like a bite pattern?”

“Not that I saw.” Amanda pulled the phone away and looked at Marco. “Bite pattern?”

Marco didn’t look up from his hospital paperwork as he shook his head. “Too ragged. The edges of the attack marks were in shreds. Looks like meat was torn, not bitten, off. The claw mark may be our only lead.”

“There was a bruise on her mouth. Five fingers. Claws about two inches long.”

There was a long pause from Bosley. “Sorry. Can’t help you. Do you know how many cannibalistic shapeshifters there are? Hell, it could be a strigoi. It could be a vampire who’s gone barmy. Any number of things. Though I can tell you one thing—if there aren’t any missing parts in the morgue, then you have something that likes freshly-killed meat.”

Marco casually asked, “What about something native to New York?”

Bosley heard the question and laughed. “Everyone who has ever come to New York brought their monsters with them. You don’t want to know what clung to the hull of the Mayflower.”

Amanda relayed the answer. Marco rolled his eyes. “Yes, but everything in New York has been ripped up and put back together again a hundred times since then. We need something that’s native to the land. Something that has a reason to stay. And, obviously, something that has a hibernation period. Otherwise, our charming media would have boasted about the body parts strewn over the city recently. Whatever it is, it’s either new in town, or something that has always been here and just woke up.” Marco paused, looked up from the paperwork, his eyes drifting off. “What was the local tribe before this was New Amsterdam? Iroquois? Algonquin? They have any cannibal monsters?”

Bosley winced so hard, Amanda heard it over the phone. “Wendigo.”

Amanda frowned. “I have not heard of a Wendy Goh.”

Marco’s focus turned from the paperwork and locked on Amanda. “Wendigo? Aw crap.” He stood immediately and took the phone away from Amanda with one hand, and took Amanda’s arm with the other. He said into the phone. “Thanks for the update, Madam President. I have to get Amanda out of here now. We’ll call you. Bye.”

Amanda let herself be dragged for four steps, then stopped. The counterweight swung Marco around so they were face to face. She took his arms and smiled pleasantly. “Hello. Care to explain?”

Marco nodded eagerly. “Sure. When you’re out of the building. When everyone is out of the building. In fact, let’s hit the fire alarm on the way out.”

Amanda shook her head. “It may drive out the people, but it may also drive off the creature. What is it?”

Marco closed his eyes, counted to five, then released a deep breath. His words came out clipped and fast, delivering bullet points like he was in a powerpoint presentation for a D&D campaign. “Wendigo. Cannibal. Never ending hunger. Smart enough to mimic human speech and pick locks—so it’s probably fully sapient. Faster than humans. Patient enough to track humans back home, kill the residents, and claim it as a nest. Allergic to silver… I think, but isn’t everything? It can hear probably as well as, if not better than, you can. And it regenerates. Fast. Even with damage from silver. It would be like fighting Mister Day all over again.”

Amanda winced. The demon that had called itself “Mister Day” healed so fast from the hundreds of wounds foisted upon it, a sword that tried to decapitate him cut clean through—but the back of the neck and the spine had reattached before the blade even left the front of its throat.

“How do you know all of this?” she asked.

Marco shrugged. “I read books. None of them pointed out that the suckers were local.” His amused smile flickered wider. “Probably a good thing. I’d be carrying around Claymore mines.” He took her by her upper arms, leaned in and kissed her tenderly. “If we’re done, I’d like you out of here.”

Amanda looked at him patiently. “Marco. I love you. And your concern. But I survived World War Two, Vietnam, and working in Moscow long before I met you.”

Marco scoffed. “I know. I’ve seen your souvenirs. But now—”

The wall of the break room banged like a truck hit the side of the hospital. Marco pivoted on his left foot, swinging his right back in an arc so he stood side-by-side with Amanda. His scalpel was in his hand before his pivot was complete.

Both looked at the wall, expecting a monster to come bursting through like the Kool-Aid Man. The next noise sounded like the wall was being pelted with small stones. After five seconds of this, Marco stepped toward the window.

The windows crashed in with hailstones the size of baseballs. Marco leaped back as the hail poured in. Most of the hail was the size of 22-caliber Long Rifle bullets, with the occasional baseball.

Marco’s smile slid into a scowl. Amanda patted him on the shoulder to get his attention.

“Another fun fact,” he muttered. “Wendigos can conjure up ice storms and tornadoes.”

Amanda sighed. “It wants to keep us here.”

The public address system announced that yes, there was a hailstorm outside, and no one should leave the hospital. Everyone should shelter in place.

Marco’s eyes narrowed. He met hers.

Meeting the eyes of a vampire created an immediate joining. Amanda immediately linked up with Marco’s mind. They put the pieces together instantly. Hospital administrations were like any other bureaucracy—it took forever for them to make any decisions. It would take at least a few minutes to confer about an earthquake, to heck with an ice storm in the middle of September.

But the announcement was ready within the minute the hail started.

Wendigos can talk like humans, they thought as one.

At the fringes of his mind, Amanda caught his overwhelming concern for her. Motivated by his love, and by … Murphy’s Law? That’s odd.