I was amazed. Just as vowed, in a few seconds he'd delivered me further proof than my mother had learned all of my life. Maybe, just maybe, I'd strumbled onto a gold mine.
If through him I could understand more about my father and slaying vampires, and all he needed in return was to grab the targets…well, then, I could sustain it. If I stayed long enough.
"Why do you want to assist me to find my father? In fact, why do you kill other vampires? They're your kind, after all."
Max gazed at me for a period before answering.
"I'll help you find your father because I suppose you despise him more than you loathe me, so it'll hold you motivated to do what I say. As for why I chase vampires…you don't have to worry about that now. You have better than sufficient to concern yourself with. Suffice it to say some people only require slaying, and that goes for vampires as well as humans."
I still didn't understand why he needed me to work with him in the first place. Then again, probably it was all a fable and he was biding his time, aspiring to pluck my throat out when I least imagined it.
I didn't count on this beast, not for a duration, but right now I had no option but to play along. Discover where this led to. If I was still active in a week, I'd be astonished.
"Back to the theme at hand, Luv. Firearms don't work on us, either. There are just two exceptions to that regulation. One, if the bloke is fortunate enough to shoot our necks in two and our heads fall off. Decapitation does work; not many creatures can survive without a head, and a head is the only part of a vampire that won't grow back if you chop it off. Two, if the gun has silver bullets and plenty are shot into the heart to eliminate it. Now, that's not as easy as it sounds. No vampire will stand still and pose for you. Likely he'll be on you and the gun shoved up your ass before any substantial harm is performed. But those silver bullets ache, so you can use them to slow a vampire down and then stake him. And you'd better be smart with that silver because you'll have one very brassed-off vampire on your hands. Strangling, drowning, none of that does anything. We only inhale almost once an hour for preference, and we can go indefinitely without oxygen. Just a breath now and then to lay a dab of oxygen in the blood and we're sound as a pound. Our version of hyperventilating is to inhale once every rare minute. That's one manner to tell a vamp is exhausting. He'll begin to breathe a little to buck up. Electrocution, toxic gas, ingestible toxins, drugs… none of those work. Got it? Now you know our weaknesses."
"Are you sure we can't verify some of those theories?"
He wagged a finger at me reprovingly.
"None of that, now. You and I are colleagues, recall? If you begin to ignore that, maybe you'd best recall the things I just spoke of would work well on you."
"It was a prank," I fibbed.
He just gave me a glimpse that said he knew better.
"The bottom line is that we are extremely difficult to put down. How you've managed to trap sixteen of us in the earth is beyond me, but then the planet never lacks for fools."
"Hey." Piqued, I upheld my abilities.
"I would have had you in slices if you hadn't made me drive and then sucker-punched me when I wasn't looking."
He chuckled again. It altered his face into something I simply understood was very gorgeous. I looked away, not wanting to see him as anything but a devil. A dangerous monster.
"Kitten, why do you assume I made you drive? I had you pegged five seconds after talking with you. You were an amateur, leafy to the gills and, once off your routine, helpless as an infant. Of course, I sucker-punched you. There is only one way to combat it, and that's dirty. Clean, gentlemanly combatting will get you nowhere but lifeless, and promptly. Grab every cheap shot, every low blast, definitely hit people when they're down, and then perhaps you'll be the one who walks away. Remember that. You're in a battle to the death. This isn't a boxing contest. You can't gain a victory by achieving the most points."
"I get it." Grimly enough, I did.
In this he was exact. It was a casualty tournament every moment I met a vampire. Including this one.
"But now we're off topic. We've coated our shortcomings. On to our stability, and we have many. Speed, vision, hearing, scent bodily strength—all are superior to a human's. We can smell you long before we see you, and we can hear your heartbeat a mile away. In addition to that, all of us have some aspect of mind management over humans. A vampire can suck a pint of your blood and moments later you won't even recall perceiving one. It's in our fangs, a minor bitty tinge of hallucinogen that, when incorporated with our strength, makes you sensitive to opinion. Like, for instance, someone didn't only suck on your neck but you confronted a bloke and had a conversation and now you're weary. That's how most of us feed. A limited dab here and a little dab there, and none the wiser for it. If every vampire killed to devour, we'd have been outed from our closet centuries ago."
"You can regulate my mind?" The feeling terrified me.
His brown eyes abruptly bled to green and his stare locked into mine.
"Come to me," he muttered, yet the utterances seemed to reverberate in my head.
"No fucking way," I let out, froze at the immediate urge I had to do it.
Suddenly, his eyes were brown again and he tossed a pleasant grin my way.
"Nope, occurs not. Good on you, that'll come in handy. Can't have you earning all weak-minded and neglecting your objectives, can we? Perhaps it's your ancestry. It doesn't work on other vampires or humans who imbibe vampire blood. Imagine you have plenty of us in you. Some humans are invulnerable to it also, but just a relatively little proportion. Have to have an incredible psyche as far as most of humanity gets on. That, and telly, as it were."
"Telly?" Who was that?
He groaned in amusement.
"Television, of course. Don't you communicate English?"
"You certainly don't," I mumbled.