Free First Kill: A Dave Carver Novella by Andrew Dudek Page B

kids a
thing or two. Maybe no one else will have to die.”
     
    Chapter 11: Back to the Past
     
    For a few weeks, Nate flatly refused
to go see Felix Guinness. When he finally changed his mind, it was
on a warm September day after a long, quiet stretch. It didn’t make
sense to me, but the fact that we hadn’t seen a vampire in weeks
made Nate think they were getting better at avoiding us. He decided
we needed to learn how to hunt them.
    Waiting to meet Guinness felt a lot
like waiting to ambush a vampire nest. Nate and I, alone, crouched
in an alley across the street from a four-story residential
building in Harlem. My palms were sweaty and my stomach churned,
just like before a raid. There were differences, of
course.
    It was the middle of the day, and the
sunshine felt good on my skin if uncomfortably warm after a few
minutes. The vampires hadn’t crossed the Harlem River, yet—there
were people everywhere: enjoying the late summer sun and walking in
small groups, chatting, laughing. A few people gave Nate and me
strange looks, but most seemed to take no notice. I knew the
feeling: There are homeless people on every corner in New York—you
can’t live guilt-free without learning to ignore them. They just
thought that Nate and I were bums.
    That struck me as funny, but I didn’t
mention it to Nate. His lips were set, exactly the way they got
before a raid. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset about this
expedition. It had been a chore convincing him to go—and even
harder to convince him to let me come. But rule number one of the
Family was that no one went anywhere alone, not if they can help
it. Even during the day, you never knew when you’d run into an
agent of a vampire.
    We were getting paranoid.
    Nate needed cheering up, I decided. It
wasn’t like this mission required total stealth. I said, “So this
guy was a friend of your mom. Did you know him?”
    “No.” Nate was brusque,
but then a pain appeared behind his eyes and he softened. “I don’t
think so. My mom had a lot of friends—coworkers and apprentices and
customers and fellow practitioners. I was pretty young when we
moved up here and only a few years older when she died. It’s
possible I knew him back home.”
    “What happened after
that?” I asked. “I mean after your mom died. That was, what, five,
six years ago? You were on your own that whole time?”
    “I stayed with Squirrel
until I was eighteen, then I got a place of my own. I was working
at a bookstore in Brooklyn when I heard about the disappearances.
It sounded like vampires to me. I found Maria just after her family
got killed and you know the rest.”
    I guessed I could
understand Nate’s troubles. Going to see a friend of his mother’s
must have been difficult, like going back to a time he thought was
done. He’d built a life for himself, and asking for help from
someone who might remember him as a child made him feel like a child. I
couldn’t imagine going back to my old life, even if it was
possible. That’s what this must have felt like to Nate: going back
to a world he thought he was truly past.
    For my part, though, I was excited. I
had no idea what Felix Guinness, this sorcerer, could teach us, but
the possibilities seemed endless. Nate’s little gadgets were
impressive, but Guinness was apparently in a totally different
league. Who knew what a mightily powerful and fully trained
magician could do?
    Up till now, the Family
had been, at best, a local sheriff’s office. Really, though, we
were a neighborhood watch. We were reactive, unable to do anything
until we knew where a vampire nest was. Now, though, with Guinness’s help,
I could see us going on the offensive. The war suddenly seemed to
be on more even footing. We were about to become the goddamned Navy
SEALs.
    At the same time, I felt a hell of a
lot smaller. When I’d first found out about vampires, it was as if
the walls of the world had been blown out and reconstructed miles
away. The rules