Heartbeat (Morta Fox Book 1) Read online

  “See, that’s where we differ, you and I. I would never mix business with pleasure. And this,” I made sure to clearly point between me and him, “is strictly business. I’d appreciate it if you remember that next time you think about unleashing your…charms on me.”

  “Unleashing my charms on you?” he asked, incredulous, and got even closer to my face. “I don’t need to unleash anything, Morta. I just go with what I feel. And right now, I feel that you want me as much as I want you.”

  I didn’t even realize his hand was on my face until I felt his ice cold touch. I leaned back.

  “So what you’re saying is, you want me?”

  He lowered his shaking head, laughing silently. “And what you’re saying is, you don’t?” he asked in return.

  I nodded.

  “That is what I said.” Good thing lying was one of the things that kept me alive and going while I was living on my own.

  “Unfortunately for you, you leak feelings, Morta. That’s another human thing about you, aside from your beating heart. I smell your desire all over you,” he whispered, and it was the sexiest sound I’d ever heard in my life, unfortunately for me. I had a feeling he wasn’t lying about my scent.

  “Brain is the boss, remember?” I said, pointing at my temple. I would’ve blushed bright scarlet if my body was able to.

  “That it is.” He nodded, stepping back from me again. “I sure hope it’ll change opinion before this is over.”

  I didn’t even want to ask what he meant by that so I asked him something else I’d been wondering about.

  “Do you want to bite me?” I knew how I felt when I heard a beating heart. I wanted to know if he felt the same about me.

  “Morta, I do want to bite you.” He grinned beautifully, and I realized just how my question had sounded. “But I have a feeling you didn’t ask me about that kind of biting, though you are missing out.” I couldn’t talk even if I wanted to. “No. I don’t feel the urge to drink your blood. Yours just seems like another kind I’m not very keen to try.”

  “Good to know,” I mumbled. Beating heart or not, I didn’t want to run from vampires as I’d done from humans my whole life.

  “You know, there are seven families about eight hundred miles from here,” he said, pointing east.

  “Really? How do you know?”

  Drink in hand, he went back to the sofa.

  “I found them on my way here from my shelter. I fed from a couple of them,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world to say. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, and that’s why I kept my mouth shut, but I felt sick. The face of the man I’d drunk dry flashed in front of my eyes and gave me a whole new point of view on things: hate yourself before judging others.

  I lit my last cigarette.

  “Listen, I know how you feel about us,” Hammer said.

  “You mean that we’re monsters?”

  “Morta, we’re not monsters. We just do what we have to do to survive.”

  And that was the exact same thing my mother said to me when I asked her why she felt the need to sell her body and why she was taking Harley and Jessica down that road, too. I even called her a monster. Yep, I remembered. I said that even a monster wouldn’t do that to her children. I remembered clearly how my name rolled off her tongue, with so much hatred and disgust.

  “It’s just how you look at things. We are what we are and we can’t change that, Morta,” Hammer continued, and I shivered. Not that I didn’t like how he said my name, but I guess I just hated it. And really, what was not to hate?

  “Don’t call me that, can you?” I said before I could shut up.

  “What, Morta?” I flinched, and that was enough of an answer for him. “Sure, Fox.” I had to roll my eyes. “Well, I have to call you something!”

  “Fine, call me Fox.” Just not Morta.

  “Hammer and Fox. It sure has a nice ring to it,” he said, smiling. “Too bad the story won’t have a happy ending.”

  “Trust me. It will.” I couldn’t imagine how I could be happy with being what I was. It just didn’t fit my logic.

  We stood like that for a while, each staring at our own cracked wall, or the burnt and broken stuff on the floor all around, thinking. Wondering. Waiting impatiently.

  “So, what do you do when…you know, you’re not chasing after Everard?” I asked when thoughts in my head became too much to handle.

  A smile spread slowly across his features.

  “I hunt,” he said.

  “I know you hunt. I mean, when you’re not hunting.” I was extremely uncomfortable with calling the blood-sucking thing a hunt.

  “No, not when I feed,” he said, making me flinch. Feed. Even worse. “I mean I hunt down vampires.”

  “You hunt vampires?”

  He jumped to his feet and lit another cigarette, watching the white smoke coming out of his mouth as if it was that fascinating. “Kinda cool, isn’t it? I’ve been smoking for the past century and a half, and I’ve never even coughed,” he said in wonder. I guessed he was right about that. No functioning lungs to kill.

  “Hammer, what did you mean by that?” I asked as curious as ever.

  He shrugged. “Just that. I’m like a bounty hunter. I get an order from His Excellency to track down and kill—or bring back—a vampire that has been naughty.”

  I felt as intrigued as I felt disgusted. I had no idea on which account to react. I watched him, such a beautiful creature that was but a disguise of a monster that fed off the blood of humans. I couldn’t help but find him a bit fascinating, though I’d never admit it to him. But my life had been a constant from the day I was born. Nothing mildly interesting ever happened to me. Well, at least not before I met my Lord.

  To see him there in front of me, to know what I knew and to feel what I felt, to be so thoroughly transformed and yet remain with the knowledge of twenty-one years of human life—it left me as confused as it did excited.

  “I have a feeling you won’t call me a traitor,” Hammer whispered in a low, soothing voice.

  “Huh?” I breathed, coming out of the trance.

  “A traitor,” he repeated. “That’s what most call me among our fellow vamps. They take me as a traitor for hunting down and most of the time killing my own.” I saw him frown, but I couldn’t determine how to interpret it. Was he sad? Worried? Or even regretful?

  “Why do you kill them?”

  I knew that technically, I was them; I showed myself that truth when I drank a human dry. Bile rose with impossible speed in my mouth, and I had to take a long sip of my whiskey to force it back down.

  “Like I said. It’s complicated.”

  I didn’t want to ask him, but I did want to follow my curiosity. I turned to him, feeling more tired with each second. I knew that the sun was close to showing itself. I just didn’t want to sleep yet.

  “You’re too sad,” he whispered first, then turned to me. “I’ve never seen eyes so sad. So very, very sad.” He looked at me with such intensity that I felt nude, stripped of skin and blood, and he could see all of me. “Why?” he breathed.

  For a second there, I wondered what it would be like to actually talk to someone. To just forget about my inhibitions and the urge to stay away, to run, to speak in nothing but short, hatred-filled words and keep everyone as far away as possible.

  I guessed it would’ve been okay.

  I jumped down from the counter and headed for the stairs.

  “Going to sleep,” I mumbled and half expected him to stop me. He didn’t. I went to the same room I had woken up in the night before. In the corner, I curled myself into a ball and closed my eyes.

  Hammer’s words kept turning inside my head, bringing tears to my eyes. I kept them shut. Images of sharp teeth biting at my neck flashed before me. I rocked my shoulders forward and back, as if I wanted to sing myself to sleep, or go into a coma, or whatever it is that I did during the day. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I chanted to myself over and over again that it was o
kay. That it was over and that I was safe. As safe as I could be with a stranger monster under the same roof. In the morning I would still wake up being this…being a monster.

  A breath filled with a scream left my lips the second I felt the sunrays creep above the hill. My rocking shoulders slowed down eventually, and I gripped tightly at my forearms, waiting for it.

  “It will be okay, little Fox,” someone whispered, or it could’ve simply been my imagination, because I hadn’t heard anything move around me. I was too gone to open my eyes and look. With a last intake of breath, my mind let me go.

  VI

  When I woke up the next night, I found my body covered in a thick piece of wool. There was no one in the room with me, and I wondered if Hammer had covered me last night. Who else?

  Why, I couldn’t begin to understand. I didn’t want to think about it. Partly because it didn’t matter, and partly because no one had ever cared if I froze to death or not before. I wouldn’t have frozen anyway, but because this made my insides crawl and want to run, I didn’t let my mind focus.

  Once we got four bottles of alcohol tucked into a makeshift bag made out of dirty rags Hammer carefully tied together, we were on our way. We ran and ran and never once was I left out of breath.

  Neither of us mentioned the night before or the wool blanket that I’d been covered with. I didn’t ask him if he’d been there when I slept; weirder things had happened.

  As we ran, I watched the world of darkness around me move too fast, yet I caught almost all the details. There was nothing in me that told me that none of this had happened, but I still thought it. I still didn’t completely believe that I was a monster. I guess I still hoped, more than expected, to wake up and find that it was all just a dream. A terrible nightmare that would no doubt haunt me for the rest of my days, but a dream nonetheless.

  Hammer was three steps ahead of me, running, until he disappeared completely. I stopped, my heels scratching the dried mud of the path we were taking. It was around what had once been a small neighborhood surrounded by tall, burnt buildings on one side and trees on the other. A space that was now left with black, spooky tree trunks and nothing green that the eye could see.

  I turned around and found Hammer five steps behind me. He’d stopped so abruptly and soundlessly that it took me five more steps to notice.

  “What?” I asked, looking around as he was doing. I saw absolutely nothing. He held his index finger to his lips and took another four or five seconds to inspect.

  “There are at least six humans ahead of us,” he said, and I doubted a person would’ve heard if he was standing only three feet away. But I heard.

  “What? No, there aren’t. I can’t hear anything.”

  “Your ears are young. In a decade or so, they would’ve improved. But since you’re dead set on dying, I guess you’ll never find out,” he said with a cocky grin.

  “Did anyone tell you in your three hundred years of life how much of a pompous ass you are?” I asked.

  “Actually, I’ve been called worse.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” I mumbled with an eye roll and started walking ahead again.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that you never, ever, not once in your life, had a friend,” he said, and my insides shivered, though they were supposed to be dead. I pulled my hands into fists and continued to walk. “And my second wild guess is that people started to stay away from you and whisper behind your back by the time you turned ten.”

  The hard reality still wanted to try and suffocate me, but I held my ground in the fight and continued to move my legs. There was no reason to feel bad about Hammer’s words. He was right. I never had friends. People always tended to stay away from me, and the mothers of the kids my age wouldn’t let their babies even ten feet close to me. I knew that. I lived that. It didn’t need to hurt me anymore, but it did.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” he asked, his voice filled with a sense of victory.

  “Five.”

  “What?”

  “Five. I was five when people started to move away when I passed by.”

  He was silent for a while after that, leaving me to remember all the times I’d wished I had a friend, all the times my imaginary best friend Turtle changed shapes, turning into one of the neighbor kids I dreamed about being best friends with.

  Until I started to hear the voices. I heard the sound of laughter first, and then two screams. I heard the beating hearts, and I was already running.

  “Morta, what are you doing?” Hammer called behind me, but I didn’t stop. The blood rushing inside the six bodies ahead me, and the laughter mixed with terror screams had my full attention.

  The smell was heavy, ashes mixed with rust and mud. The place resembled the other part of the city we’d left behind, the only difference being the narrow streets, as if the people had been eager to fill each square of land with huge buildings. Buildings that were now empty, lifeless, frozen in time.

  It was so hard to try and imagine that once, not too long ago, people turned the corners of each one of those streets every day. People filled the walls of concrete and glass around me with life. Children played and ran and spoke for the first time inside those buildings.

  Though I’d grown up in ROB’s Boston, everything had always looked so fake, so colorless and cold. Maybe because I never did belong to the world the ROB tried to create with the sole intention of imitating perfection.

  I stopped in my tracks at the sight in front of me. The building was only three stories high but very wide. The first floor had no walls around, as if they used to be of glass and they broke during the explosion. The inside was empty but for eight pillars that marked the base on which the building stood. There was a digital lamp hanging on one of the concrete pillars, lighting the whole floor up.

  Six men shouted from in there. Four in laughter, two in pain. I recognized the dark green uniform of the ROB soldiers on four of them. I recognized clothes of the streets—torn, dirty and thin—on the two others. They were lying on the floor, one on his knees and hands, and the other on his back while the soldiers hit them. Kicked them. They beat them while laughing.

  The back of the giant gun in the hands of one soldier hit the skull of the man on all fours. The sound that flew from his lips made me cringe. So many times I’d felt like I wanted to scream like that. My ears were burning, and my mouth felt like it was growing. The anger rushing in me through the drunk man’s blood in my veins made me see in perfect precision the very vein in the solders’ necks where it would be best to sink my teeth.

  I shot forward with all my strength. Until something grabbed me from behind.

  Hands of steel wrapped around my waist, turning me completely immobile. My feet flew before me from when I’d gathered momentum to run.

  “Morta, stop,” Hammer whispered in my ear. All I saw was red in front of me. The soldiers kept kicking the poor bastards on the ground. They kept shouting, their screams an addition in the collection of my own painful sounds. I watched them, and I kicked with all I had and moved my arms to try and break Hammer’s hold on me.

  “Morta, please. If they see us, it won’t be fun,” he whispered again. Was he fucking kidding?

  “We’re monsters! Fucking monsters…just get the hell off me! There’s nothing they can do to us! We can…we need to…”

  “Their guns are filled with silver bullets, Morta. They can hurt us,” he hissed again, but I didn’t hear. All I heard was the screams.

  “I need to help them,” I said under my breath and stepped with all my strength on Hammer’s black leather boots.

  He didn’t even feel it. “No, you need to stay away from this.”

  “Hammer, let me go!” I said, glad that we were still too far for a normal ear to hear. I didn’t want to give the soldiers time to prepare for me.

  “No. You need to calm down first.”

  “Hammer, please,” I pleaded.

  I couldn’t believe how cold he wa
s. How could he just stand there and watch them?

  “I need to help them…just please. They’re screaming,” I begged, way past trying to play the strong, independent woman he very well knew I wasn’t.

  “Morta, we need to get out of here. You don’t want to be touched by silver,” Hammer said, his hands so strong that they would’ve broken me had I not been a vampire myself.

  “I need to help them!” I breathed, sound too strong an effort to make.

  “You can’t.”

  And I couldn’t. Hammer dragged me back where we came from and didn’t let me go until three gunshots echoed in the dark of the night. Tears streamed from my eyes as I saw the two of them, being mocked and beaten, and not even by a monster. By humans. I stood there and watched when I could’ve ripped their throats apart. Just like I wanted anyone to do when my mother hurt me, when men ran after me and looked for me after my family died, and word got out on the streets that I was alone. I wanted someone to stop the people that didn’t let me sleep at night.

  Nobody did. Just like I didn’t for those two.

  I stayed with my back against Hammer, despising him with every breath I took for not letting me go. It was too late now. I knew the second I heard the shots, and my heart sank in desperation.

  “We need to keep moving. I haven’t fed in a long—”

  “You fucking bastard!” I hissed before he could finish. “You want to fucking talk about feeding now? You just cost two people their lives!” I screamed, my voice much higher than the usual cold sound that came from me ever since I was turned.

  “There was nothing we could do without eating a silver bullet in our heads!” His shout was filled with anger, and he looked more dangerous than I’d ever seen him before.

  “Are you out of your mind?! Can you see the way we run? They would’ve never seen us coming!”

  “Of course they would! They have detectors. They can sense the V virus a mile away, and once the damned machine beeps, they’re trained to keep the trigger pulled and shoot all around them. Do you know the speed at which their guns shoot a bullet?” he hissed, his face so close to mine I could clearly see the amber in his eyes.