Морган Райс - Loved

Caitlin felt her heart sink. Did he not want her around? Or was he trying to protect her? She felt like it was the latter.

“I know I have a choice,” she said. “I choose to be with you.”

He stared at her for a long time, then finally nodded. “OK,” he said.

“Besides,” she added, smiling, “I can hardly let you meet my family alone.”

Kyle walked excitedly down the cobblestone streets of the South Street Seaport, doubling his pace. He had pictured this moment for years.

He turned the corner, and he could already begin to see it. The ship. His ship.

Disguised as a historic sailing ship on display from a European country, it would be docked at the Seaport for a week. How stupid these humans were. They could believe almost anything. Too trusting to think to check the hull of a piece of history. To realize that it could be the means of their death. Their Trojan horse.

Adding stupidity to stupidity, inane tourists flocked around the ship, delighted to see this piece of history under their noses. If only they knew.

Kyle elbowed his way past the crowds, and headed down an alleyway. Four hulking men stood guard, but when they looked up and saw him coming, they all nodded in recognition and quickly stepped aside. All members of his race. All dressed in black, and as tall as he. Kyle could feel the rage coming off of them to, and it relaxed him. It always felt better to be around his kind.

They parted ways respectfully, and as Kyle walked down the middle, they closed up the alley way again.

Kyle approached the rear of the ship, hidden from the public. Several more of his kind stood by it, and when they saw him approaching, they immediately got to work. They lowered a huge ramp in the side of the hull, and began to wheel down an immense carton, boxed up in plywood. Ten men rolled the massive carton slowly down the ramp, down to the cobblestone sidewalk. Kyle came up to it.

“My master,” a short, balding vampire said to Kyle, running up to him and bowing.

This man was sweating profusely, and seemed very nervous. His eyes darted all over the place.

He must have been looking out for the police. And it looked as if he had been waiting a long time.

Good. Kyle liked to make people wait.

“It is all here,” the man continued, in a rush. “We’ve checked it several times. It’s all safe and sound, my master.”

“I want to see it,” Kyle said.

The man snapped his fingers and four men ran over. They raised crowbars to the carton, and removed one of the wooden planks. They tore away at layer and layers of heavy duty plastic.

Finally, Kyle stepped up and reached in. He felt a cold, glass vial, and extracted it.

He held it up, examining it under the light of a street lamp.

Just as he remembered. Microbes of the bubonic plague swarmed in his hand, perfectly intact.

He smiled slowly.

Now his war could begin.

Kyle wasted no time. Within hours, he was in Penn Station, ready to get to work. As he marched through the station, against the crowd, his temper flared. He walked right into hordes of people, at rush hour, all racing to get home to their pathetic little families and homes and husbands and wives. He felt his hatred well.

If there was anything he hated worse than a human, it was mobs of them, rushing to and fro in every direction as if their lives mattered even a bit, as if their mere 100 years on this earth held any consequence at all. Kyle had outlived and outlasted them all, generation after generation, for thousands of years. Even the more significant humans, like Caesar and Stalin and—his favorite, Hitler—had been practically forgotten within a few hundred years of their lifetime. They were something at the time, but nothing shortly afterwards. Their frenetic movements, their feelings of self-importance, rattled him to the core. He felt like killing every single one of them. And he would.

But not at this moment.

Kyle had important work to do. Truly important work. He was flanked by a small entourage of eight vampire thugs, and they all strutted through the crowd as quickly as possible. Each carried a backpack. And each backpack was packed with 300 vials of the plague. They would split into four teams, and each team, like the four Horsemen, would spread their death to each corner of the station. One team would cover the station itself, one the Path to Grand central, one the A, C, or E subway line, and one the 1 or the 9 train line. Kyle reserved the best location for himself alone: Amtrak. He smiled to think that his portion of the plague would spread farther and wider than any of the others. Just maybe he could take out other cities, too.

Kyle had other vampire minions hard at work, too, in subway stations all over the city, in Grand Central, and in Times Square.

Kyle nodded, and the teams immediately split up. He walked alone towards the Eighth Avenue entrance.

He descended the escalator, walked to the end of the platform, then kept walking, past the point where anyone was looking. He quickly jumped down onto the tracks. As he landed, rats parted ways.

They could sense his presence. How ironic, Kyle thought. It was the rats who spread the plague to begin with. Now, they ran from it.

Kyle walked into the blackness, down the tunnel, sticking to the side of the rail. He kept walking, and finally came to the juncture where all the tracks met. He reached into his backpack and took out a vial, and held it up under an emergency light. He could barely contain his excitement. He set down the pack, reached in with both hands, and got to work.

After so many centuries of waiting, it was now only a matter of hours.

Sam couldn’t believe his luck. He was being shown around an awesome house by a gorgeous girl—a senior, no less—who seemed into him. She was hot. And really cool. And she had the entire place to herself.

It was like an angel from God had come down and dropped her into his lap. He still couldn’t believe it. It was just what he needed, and at just the right time. He was afraid that any second all of his luck would turn, and she’d ask him to leave. But she didn’t seem in any rush to ask him to go. In fact, she seemed like she wanted company. And she didn’t even care that he’d been in her barn. In fact, she seemed to have liked finding him there. He couldn’t believe it. He’d never had any luck in his life like this before.

As he walked around, he saw that her house was still basically empty. No food in the fridge, and not even that much furniture. There was just a random chair here and there, and a small couch. That made him feel good, cause he could help her. If she wanted. He could help her fix it up, move stuff, buy food, shovel, whatever she needed. Even if she just let him crash in her barn, that would be cool. And if she wanted him in the house, well, that would be awesome. More importantly, he really liked her. He was lonely. He realized it now. He really liked being around her.

“And this is the living room,” she said, as she walked him into the final room. It was really bare, no pictures on the wall, no rug on the floor—just a small loveseat in the middle.

“Sorry it’s still so empty,” she said. “I just got here. I didn’t want to bring any of my old stuff. I figured I’d just get a new start.”

Sam stood there, nodding. He was dying to ask her a whole bunch of questions. Like: where are you from? How did your parents die? Why did you come here?

But he didn’t want to be too pushy. So he just stood there, nodding, like an idiot.

He also felt kind of nervous. He was really attracted by her, more than he’d been by any girl in his life, and he didn’t really know what to say—and didn’t trust himself to say anything. He had a feeling that if he said anything, it would come out wrong.