A ghost of a memory whispered in my brain. Tried? Talk about a nice way to say failed.
Well, I was done fucking up and failing. I fired the truck up and headed for the Dark Mansion.
Clare and Lonely had left it up to me to decide how I would get inside without getting staked at the door. I had considered sneaking in the back way again, but that hadn’t done me any good earlier. This time I figured I would just drive right up to the front door.
I thought I heard myself giggle at that, then I remembered that I didn’t have a voice to giggle with anymore. A shiver rolled down my back. This was the kind of crazy you went when you knew you were about fifteen minutes away from waking up in Hell.
The truck fishtailed as I took the turnoff onto gravel, but I didn’t downshift or take my foot off the gas. The muscles in my arms pulled tighter and tighter the closer I got to the Dark Mansion. I was almost to the mansion’s lane before I realized I was silent-humming and tapping my thumbs on the steering wheel along with the psycho-thrash death metal playing in my head.
I turned down the lane, fishtailing again, but I still didn’t touch the clutch or the brake. The little orange needle on my speedometer was climbing toward sixty.
That parking lot full of Hummers and helicopters was coming up fast.
I spun the wheel so that my headlights were shining on the Dark Mansion’s front steps. Something about the headlights was bothering me, but whatever it was, it couldn’t get through the noise in my brain. Something about darkness and light? I’d almost got ahold of the thought when it occurred to me that there wasn’t any old barn where I used to play basketball to distract me this time.
The needle on the speedometer jumped up over the halfway point on my gauge and started heading south again toward 110 mph. Usually my truck topped out at 106, but tonight she was running like a champ.
I grinned. That Whitney luck’s finally starting to kick in.
The headlights lit up the t-post with what was left of my brother’s body wrapped around it.
Dead ahead. I swallowed another silent crazy-giggle at the thought.
I couldn’t swerve or I would flip the truck. It wasn’t Colt anymore, anyway. It was just rotting meat. My stomach clenched, but I gritted my teeth and mowed the post down.
In addition to the eight-inch lift and the badass speakers, my truck’s got a set of mud grips that would make an off-roader cream his jeans. They cost me two months’ pay from Rowdy’s and they were worth every penny. When the truck’s front wheels hit the steps, the grips grabbed ahold and hauled me up, bouncing and throwing me around inside the cab. If I hadn’t had the vamp strength and a strangle-hold on the wheel, I probably would’ve broken my neck.
The big front doors splintered across the hood of the truck. Both side mirrors snapped off. I watched the passenger mirror spin through the air and drop into the bed of the truck.
Then I was wrapped around the dash with the steering column sticking through my left lung and out the back window. The engine block was on fire. I could tell because it was sitting in the seat next to me. Out my window, I saw black smoke billowing up from the wheel wells.
Sound faded back in. The engine roaring, the tires spinning. My foot must still be on the gas. I took it off. The truck lurched, died, and rolled back a few inches from one of the big stone columns in the Dark Mansion’s entrance hall.
The maggots started chewing away at my face, arms, and legs, so I must’ve been pretty messed up. I pulled my right arm out of the hole it’d made in the windshield, then went to work trying to un-impale myself.
Foot soldiers flooded the scene of the crash like first responders. Except these first responders were holding guns on me and screaming to get my hands in the air and my ass out of the truck.
With both hands, I shoved the dash as hard as I could. There was this squishing sound. Pieces inside me that weren’t supposed to move moved. Another shove. Another squishy burping sound. Then a wet pop and I was off the steering column. I fell back in the seat and slumped over.
“Get out of the truck!” a foot soldier with a pistol screamed at me through the glassless passenger side window. He was one of the newbies I didn’t recognize. “Get out of the truck!”
I nodded and reached for the door handle with my left hand. The maggots picked that moment to go to town on my chest wound. I fell over, squirming around in the cab while they crawled and chewed and generally drove me insane from the inside out. You can’t scratch your internal organs.
Through the vamp healing fit, I could hear the foot soldiers yelling—newbies were yelling at me, locals were yelling at newbies that I was a vamp, everybody was yelling at everybody to find a stake.
When the last maggot finally stopped crawling around inside my chest, my hand was resting on the butt of the shotgun. I laughed. If things kept up like this, I wasn’t going to be able to make any more jokes about Whitney luck.
I picked the shotty up and kicked the bent metal that used to be my truck’s driver side door. It screeched open. I came out shooting.
One for you. The shotgun exploded fire, leaving the entrance hall burning and one foot soldier minus
