The Sharpest Kiss

by Elizabeth Myles

  “What?!” Fury and confusion amped Celia’s voice into a panicked screech, and Nathan felt the master’s psychic hold quivering around him. Dissolving. For a few precious seconds, she was completely discombobulated—and off her guard. But Nathan wasn’t.

  Praying her stint underground had rendered her vulnerable enough for this gambit, he raced past Jessica at super-speed, grabbed Celia by the throat, and drove the table leg straight into her body. It took every ounce of Nathan’s vampiric strength to get the stake to even penetrate her rib cage, and for a second, he worried it wouldn’t. But then he felt it sink home, plunging into the flesh of her cold, dead heart.

  Celia’s lovely cerulean eyes stared up at him, wide open in horrified surprise. She crumpled to the floor, and Nathan followed her down, a grunt issuing from him as they both hit the carpet, she on her back and he on his knees.

  “Nathan,” she croaked, clawing at him. “Nathan, NO…”

  Die, he thought, ignoring the insistent gouge of her fingernails through his shirtsleeves. Just DIE already!

  Long seconds drew by, during which there was more flailing and complaining from her, more hissing, spitting, and snarling, but then…Celia seemed to gradually grow languorous. She stopped struggling. Pain flashed across her face. With a pathetic groan, she went limp, her arms dropped to her sides, and her eyes slipped shut.

  Nathan sat back on his feet, eyeing her cautiously. “Celia?” he asked.

  She didn’t move, didn’t even twitch.

  A sanguine feeling started in Nathan’s chest. She was dead, he thought with an inner burst of laughter. Goodness gracious, he had done it! It was over! A shout of triumph built inside him…but it curdled in his throat when he realized almost a minute had now passed since the stake had entered her heart, and the master still wasn’t turning to ashes. That couldn’t be right.

  “Celia?” He leaned closer, perusing her placid face. “Celia!” He jabbed his finger into her stomach a few times.

  Her right eyelid flipped open and she glowered at him. “Did you really think that would work?” she huffed.

  “Ahh!” Nathan startled. He swung his fist at the stake, ready to slam it down further into her chest, but she caught his wrist before he could make contact.

  “I am a master, Nathan. An immortal.” She flung his hand away. Both her eyes were open now, but narrowed down to slits, and her mouth was beginning to curve into a smile.

  She was far from dead, Nathan realized with an agonized clench deep in the pit of his stomach. In fact, aside from the bloodied stake jutting out of her chest, Celia looked…perfectly fine. If rather annoyed with him.

  “I am forever!” she screamed. And then she started to cackle, rocking from side to side, literally rolling on the floor laughing, as the humans of this era liked to say.

  “No,” Nathan said, watching her in horror.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” he heard Jessica groan from somewhere behind him.

  My sentiments exactly, he thought. He grabbed Celia by the shoulder and ripped the stake out of her heart. He brought it back down, stabbing her again, punching a new ragged hole right beside the first.

  “Ouch!” she cried, frowning petulantly. “Stop it, Nathan! Listen to me! It’s actually a good thing you can’t kill me because I have something you want.”

  “What could you possibly have that I would want?” He twisted the stake further into her heart. He thought he felt it poke through the skin of her back and meet resistance. With a surge of exultance, he brought his fist down on the end of it, hearing a satisfying crack as it hammered itself between two floorboards.

  “Augh,” Celia said, and he was gratified to see a stream of blood bubble out from between her lips. Maybe if he kept this up, stabbing her over and over again, she would eventually die. He snapped off the end of the table leg, creating a second stake, and raised it over his shoulder to test the theory. Celia held up her hands. “Nathan, please! You’re Marta’s get, aren’t you? One of her runts?”

  He paused at the sound of his master’s name, frowning, but he didn’t say anything.

  Celia smiled, her teeth outlined in blood. “Yes, I thought so. I smelled her all over you. I’d bet you’d love to know where she is right now, wouldn’t you? So you could kill her and turn yourself back? Well, I know where she’s hiding! Think of it, Nathan, if you destroyed her, you’d have your humanity again. You could wed that pudgy sow hovering around behind you and sire a whole litter of piglets off of her. You could be happy! Just let me go and I’ll tell you where Marta is. But keep poking at me and I won’t divulge a word. I vow to you, there’s no way you can find her without my help.”

  Nathan watched her for a second, his frown deepening. He looked up, as though he were meditating over what she’d just said to him, or maybe praying for guidance. After a few seconds, he let out a defeated sound. He dropped the second stake and staggered to his feet.

  “Yes.” Celia was elated. “I knew you’d see reason!” She tried to sit up but couldn’t. The table leg kept her securely fastened to the floor, and being stabbed seemed to have weakened her too much to remove it. “Help me up!” she ordered, kicking her legs and stretching her arms out to him.

  Instead of touching her, Nathan leapt straight up and grabbed the metal flag he’d spotted dangling directly overhead. It was anchored to the ceiling with steel cable but, with one savage pull, he ripped it free. Bits of plaster rained down his arms and drifted into his hair. As he landed again, he shifted his grip on the flag pole, wielding it like the sickle it was meant to represent.

  “No!” Celia howled as she realized what he meant to do. Her hands went to the stake in her heart, working desperately to yank it free. She was too weak, though, and her fingers only scrabbled futilely off the blood-slickened wood. She stayed stuck right where she was, trapped like a bug on a collection board. Panic flooded her bulging eyes. “You can’t do this to me!” she shrieked, writhing and pounding her feet against the floor. “You’ll never know where Marta is! Never, never, no one will ever help you—”

  Her yowling was cut off as Nathan brought the flag down on her neck. The cut was clean, the metal slicing all the way through her body and burying itself in the floorboards. Celia’s head rolled slightly to the left—and started to collapse, fragmenting like a broken pumpkin. A stench like moldy death—like centuries’ worth of rancid air escaping a crypt—saturated the air around Nathan and made him wince. Celia’s skin smoked and crumbled like tissue paper, turning a sickly gray before it fizzled off. And then came the acrid smell of flesh burning, as her body flaked apart into a pile of blackened ashes. Even the stake caught fire and combusted, disintegrating right along with her remains.

  Nathan stepped back and took a moment to appreciate the gruesome sight. “Immortal my vampiric ass,” he spat, and slung aside the flag.

  ◆◆◆

  Aaron felt it when Nathan severed Celia’s head from her body. It was like a string had been cut inside him, and a jolt of awareness shot through his skull. She was dead. He knew it. Which meant he was human again. He stared at his hands, expecting to see some change, but really, there hadn’t been much to distinguish him physically from his former self in the first place. Even so, he could feel it. A sort of wrongness that had clung to his psyche ever since that fateful night at the Red Palm had lifted. A rightness had descended in its place. His humanity was back. His virtue.

  He swung around to look at Lucy and found she was staring at him. It was as if she somehow knew what’d happened, too, and tears of joy flooded her eyes. He dropped the holy water and felt it splash against his pant legs. He started toward her, but only managed a few steps before an appalling sound rent the air and seized up every muscle in his body. It was high and unnerving, almost more bestial than human. A scream, he finally realized, blinking. A terrified, pain-drenched keening.

  And it was coming from Dara.

  Aaron’s gaze found Jason’s wife, where she was still standing on the sidewalk, althou
gh she looked about ready to collapse. Kiefer’s spell book lay discarded at her feet. Her beautiful face was a mask of agony, and she was pointing frantically at something in the distance. Oh, no, Aaron thought, Jason. And then, with a knot forming in the pit of his stomach, he forced himself to turn around and look...

  ◆◆◆

  Jason had spotted the knife a few times tonight. Figured Kiefer must’ve missed it somehow, but he wasn’t worried. One of the minions had it, and kept trying to use it, but Jason hadn’t ever let him. He’d even wrestled the knife away from the dude at one point, and tossed it away, but the goon must have picked it up again because now there it was, right in the palm of his meaty hand. And something else must have happened, too, because this time, as he jerked aside to avoid the blade, Jason couldn’t move quite fast enough. The knife plunged into him like he was made of butter. He was no longer like iron, he realized with a long, slow-motion blink. He was soft again. Soft and hurting.

  What the-? Jason looked down in amazement at the knife handle protruding from his abdomen, and at all the crimson seeping out around it. Nathan, he thought, and smiled in spite of the situation. Nathan had killed Celia! He had done it! Jason had known he would.

  I’m human again! he thought next. We won!

  As he folded to his knees in the courtyard, all he could see in his mind’s eye was Dara, smiling as she brought his plate to the breakfast table, sitting in his lap and laughing at his corny jokes, writhing underneath him in ecstasy. And all he could think was…Wow. This really sucks.

  ◆◆◆

  Nathan stumbled back a few steps, and Jessica raced across the carpet to him. “You did it! You got her!!” She giggled, and it sounded kind of hysterical, which was fitting because after everything that had happened tonight, she felt slightly out of her mind.

  The vampire didn’t look at all pleased with himself, though. He turned to her with a look of such torment in his eyes, it stopped her in her tracks.

  “Hey,” she brought her hand to her throat, “wh-what’s the matter?”

  “Jessica. For future reference—and I hope this proves to be unnecessary advice—you should never, ever tell a vampire to eat you. They just may do it.”

  She giggled again.

  “I am serious. When Celia had you in her grasp, I thought it was all over. I was…” Fear washed over his face. “Well, I was very worried.”

  “About me? Why? You knew vampire mind tricks don’t work on me!”

  “I knew that mine don’t. Celia is a master…was a master. She was much more powerful.”

  “Yeah, well, I won’t lie.” Jessica held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “I did feel her gross little psychic digits clawing at my brainpan. But she wasn’t powerful enough to get by me.” She couldn’t stop the grin from resurfacing on her face. “Or you. You totally pulverized her, Nathan! Look!”

  “Yes.” He followed her pointing finger to the floor. His expression was rigid, difficult to read, but there was a thread of remorse running through his words as he said, “I…killed her.”

  Jessica paused, staring at him. Did he feel guilty, she wondered? Seriously?

  “She tore up perfectly good books, Nathan,” she reminded him. “She deserved to die!”

  “It is not that…” he said, and swallowed hard.

  Jessica followed his gaze to the pile of sooty ashes leaving a stain on her brand-new carpeting, and the realization struck her like a spear to the gut. “Oh. Do you think she really knew where Marta is?”

  “Who knows. It does not matter.” He put his hands on his hips and kicked at the cinders, watching them fan out across the floor.

  Jessica saw the distress gathering in his eyes and knew it did matter. How could it not? He’d just lost a possible chance to find his maker and be human again. That was all he had wanted for more than forty years now, and yet…he had sacrificed that opportunity with hardly a second’s hesitation.

  In order to save people he didn’t even know.

  To save her friends.

  “Thank you,” she said, clasping her hands together. “Thank you so much for getting rid of Celia anyway.”

  “It was the right thing to do,” he said, still not looking at her. “I would do it again.”

  She sidled up to him and touched his forearm. When he didn’t pull away, she brushed her hand along his sleeve, enjoying the firmness of his corded muscles bunching underneath the sweatshirt, even as she tried to console him. She watched his face, hoping to see some of the tension dissipate but, if anything, he only looked more tortured.

  “I know you would do it again,” she finally said, and her gaze returned to the stain on the floor, “and I’m glad Celia’s gone for good. And not just because of Aaron and Jason, if I’m being honest.”

  “Because she ruined your store,” he guessed.

  “Because she was a bitch. Did you hear her call me a pudgy sow? Ugh.” Jessica kicked at the ashes, too, and felt a thrill of satisfaction zip through her as she watched them filter back down to the carpet again.

  She chuckled, but, beside her, Nathan stood stiff and expressionless, as if he were too shocked by the insanity of everything that’d just happened to say anything else, much less laugh along with her.

  “Nathan?” she said, worried. “Um…Nathan?” She gave his arm a shake.

  Rousing, he turned to look down at her. As their eyes met, the stunned mask melted from his face. He cracked a handsome smile. “Oh, Jessica,” he said, and chuckled under his breath. “Jessica, Jessica…” He surprised her by cupping her cheek in his rough palm. “You are not a sow. Nor pudgy, nor anything else save for…” He paused, flicking his gaze over her from head to toe.

  “Yeah?” she prompted.

  He licked his lower lip so fast she almost didn’t see it. “Ideal,” he finished. “In more ways than one.”

  Jessica’s heart leapt excitedly. She couldn’t keep from beaming. “I am? Well, thanks. So are you, you know.”

  His smile grew, but he dropped his hand from her face. “We should go outside and find the others. See if killing Celia did what it was meant to.”

  “You mean, we should check and see if it worked? See if the guys are human again?” The idea excited her so much, she started toward the doors before Nathan could answer her. She’d only taken a few steps when one of the bookcases in front of the window twitched.

  “Jessica?” Lucy’s voice filtered in faintly from outside. “Jessica, can you hear me?”

  “Lucy?” Jessica called back. “I can hear you! Are you guys okay out there?”

  There was a masculine shout of warning to stay out of the way, and then the case came crashing down, making a tremendous racket as it struck the floor and sent a cloud of sofa stuffing and shredded book pages raining into the air. Kiefer appeared in its wake, his shirtless—and, Jessica saw, tattooed—torso streaked with dirt and sweat and who knew what else. He jumped down from the display window, followed by Lucy. At their heels came Aaron and Dara, propping Jason up between them. Dara’s husband was pale as a sheet of parchment, grimacing and clutching a hand against his side.

  “I don’t know what happened.” Kiefer’s face was white and fearful as he strode toward Nathan. “Someone must’ve had an enchanted knife out there, something I missed. I don’t know how…” He trailed away, guilt flaring in his eyes.

  “Oh no,” Jessica said, and swore under her breath. Because Celia’s demise had definitely done what it was supposed to. The vampiric curse had been broken. Jason was obviously human again—judging from the way his legs were buckling and the life was leaking out of him, trickling rapidly all over her floor.

  ◆◆◆

  “In some ways it is good to still be a vampire,” Nathan murmured as Dara and Aaron laid Jason down on the settee.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Jessica performed a brief victory shuffle as she remembered. “You’ve got the magical vampire healing power! Yes!”

  Dara, who was kneeling at Jason’s side, choked out a s
ound that was part grief-stricken sob and part relief-laden laugh. Her face was dripping with tears as she stared up at Nathan. “Please,” she begged, her voice raspy. “Please tell me you can help him.”

  “I will do what I can, of course,” worry glinted in Nathan’s eyes as he pushed up his sleeves, “but if the wound is too severe, I do not know if…”

  Dara sobbed as though someone had just stepped on her heart, and Nathan stopped talking. He laid his hand on her head in a comforting gesture. She scrambled aside to let him crouch beside her husband. Kiefer produced a knife, and Nathan used it on his own forearm.

  Jessica watched, no less amazed than the previous times she’d seen him do it, as the vampire bled into Jason’s mouth and over his injury. This time, though, the wound didn’t heal right away. Jason coughed up some of the magical blood, even as his own continued to seep out of his midsection, soaking his shirt and the couch cushions underneath him. Dara’s husband’s breathing was becoming shallower by the second, and his eyes had slipped halfway shut. Jessica felt her stomach twist into an anxious knot.

  “What is it?” Dara asked, her voice trembling. “Why isn’t it working?”

  “I am unsure.” Nathan’s own voice was tight with apprehension. “As I said, it is possible the injury is simply too severe for me to handle.” He paused, a thought occurring to him. “Or, if this wound is indeed from an enchanted weapon, the spell may interfere with my ability to heal it.” He glanced up at Kiefer. “I do not suppose you have any idea what sort of magic might have been used on that blade?”

  “No, but I can try to find out.” Moving in beside Nathan, Kiefer stretched his hands above Jason’s wound and closed his eyes, concentrating.