Many Bloody Returns

by Charlaine Harris

  Especially since I try to be so low-impact, you know? I even recycle my toilet paper rolls.

  “We have to do something,” I insisted. I was starting to feel a bit warmer, more like myself, but not quite. My hands shook where I gripped the steering wheel.

  “Yeah, drive,” said Sebastian. “Away. Fast.”

  The snow flurries lessened enough to give me a tad more visibility. I glanced down out the side window, hoping to see Fonn unconscious on the snow. No luck. She was out there somewhere. Lurking.

  I waved my hands in the direction of the sheets of snow still coming down thick and wet. “If I hit the gas right now, Sebastian, we’d ram into a light pole or another car. I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Except that,” Sebastian said dryly, pointing.

  I gasped. Fonn pressed her face against the windshield. Rows of sharklike teeth lined an open, hungry mouth. Her hair whipped like snakes in the wind, blending into the sleet. Claws raked at the glass.

  “Oh, great,” I said.

  “Did you have a plan to get rid of her?” Sebastian asked as the safety glass began to show spiderweb cracks. “Because now would be a great time to let me know.”

  “So, what do you think?” I asked, jumping in my seat at each slam of her claws on the windshield. “Could you take her? You’ve got super-vamp strength, right? How about you jump her?”

  “How about I not? For one, I don’t think I could take her down, and secondly, what do I do once I have her? I can’t bite her; she might have antifreeze in her veins. How about you unleash Lilith?”

  The windshield was completely cracked and starting to buckle in places. Safety glass, my ass.

  Lilith was more than ready for the fight. It would not be a difficult thing to let Her out; but, She was Queen of Hell, Mother of Destruction. What if Lilith not only killed Fonn but also showed her usual lack of discretion and killed Sebastian, too? Then we’d have all that environmental disaster or Ragnarok or Goddess-knows-what-end-of-the-universe kind of stuff, and I’d be out one boyfriend.

  Coldness began to seep in. I knew Fonn would be inside in a second.

  I hit the gas hard and then slammed on the brakes. She slid off the hood and disappeared into the whiteout.

  “Oh,” said Sebastian, a little startled. “Good job.”

  “She’ll be back,” I reminded him. “We need to think of something slightly more permanent, but not too permanent.”

  “Not to be unmanly, but I still think running away is a good option.”

  “Well, it may come to that,” I admitted, hating the idea of leaving the next poor sap who happened to be out on Christmas to the fate of getting chomped by a heat-munching demon. “Are you sure you can’t bite her?”

  “I could,” Sebastian said thoughtfully, then added, “if I want to die. Magical blood will kill me dead. And, like I said, God knows what’s coursing through those veins. You saw her, right? Did she look even vaguely human?”

  “No,” I agreed. “So, if she eats energy, how do we counter that? She can’t be too affected by cold. I mean, she clearly controls it.”

  “What about antifreeze?” Sebastian asked. “What if we blasted her with hot water and antifreeze straight from the radiator? Maybe, if nothing else, we could overload her…. Yeah, this could work. Turn off the engine. I’ve got an idea.”

  Switching the ignition off meant no more heat. In the dangerous snowfall, it made no sense. As I hesitated, I felt someone pull at the truck’s door. I had to twist in my seat to double-check that it was locked. Sebastian reached across the seat and pulled out the keys.

  “Distract her,” he said, opening the passenger’s side door and disappearing into the snow.

  “Distract her? With what, my good looks?” I shouted at the open door. Two seconds later it registered: there was an open door.

  Slowly taking form, Fonn materialized out of the snow. First, I noticed the black pits of eyes. Next I saw snow-white hair slashing wildly around her inhuman face. She crawled across the seat toward me, slowly, like a cat stalking its prey. Bitter wind blasted me, freezing the tips of my nose and ears.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I screamed. Screeched, really—all high-pitched and useless. I even started fumbling with the locks, slipping and scrabbling like a classic horror-film babe, until I remembered my purse. I made a snatch for it, and in a second, my fingers found the Mace where it always hung on the chain next to my keys.

  Pulling out the tiny canister, I pointed the nozzle at those razor-sharp teeth. I let rip a big, nasty blast of the stuff.

  Fonn reared back with a painful shriek. She pawed at her face.

  I didn’t wait to see how quickly she might recover. Besides, discharging the pepper spray in an enclosed space had unintended consequences, like my own eyes starting to water. This time deftly flipping the lock, I scrambled out of the truck. Once outside, I slammed the door. I hadn’t really meant to shut it quite so hard, but the wind propelled it out of my hand.

  Snow raged around me in blinding swirls. Momentarily, I lost sight of the truck even though I was standing right beside it. For a second, I thought maybe I’d blinded myself with the Mace. Then the truck reappeared in a gust of wind. I slapped my hands on to the metal frame so as not to lose it again.

  “Sebastian,” I shouted into the squall. “Where are you?”

  I strained to hear anything beyond the rush of air, and I inched forward toward the hood of the vehicle. Oh, it would so not be good to lose my boyfriend on his birthday. I started to feel a real quiver of panic as the storm continued to bluster. I couldn’t see anything. Snow slid into the tops of my boots as I sank knee-deep with each step. I felt like I was climbing forward into empty space.

  “Sebastian!”

  At this point, I might even have been grateful to see Fonn. Any sign that I wasn’t completely swept away into nothingness would have been welcome.

  As if on cue, claws snipped at my back. Talons pierced my coat and scratched skin.

  I tried to run. I tripped over something and lost my grip on the truck. My entire world became snow. There was snow in my mouth, my eyes, my nose, covering my face, and surrounding my body. I felt suffocated by cold. I started really screaming—deep, terrified-for-your-life bawling.

  Hands griped my shoulders with a familiar strength and pulled me under the truck. The space between the undercarriage and the road was like a little cave. Heat from the engine had carved a no-snow zone, and I lay on my belly on warm, wet road. Sebastian stretched out beside me with a long hose in his hand. The hose was attached to something above us, and his fingers rested on a tiny spigot.

  “Radiator drain,” Sebastian explained. “Is she coming?”

  I started to explain that Fonn had been at my back a second ago when we noticed the digging. Claws scooped out huge chunks of snow, like a demonic prairie dog. Plus, I could feel her magic leeching the heat from me. Cold seeped in from the ground. My body felt heavy with ice, as if I were freezing solid.

  Teeth were the first things I saw. I swore they’d grown. They now extended into grotesque spikes, like something you might see on a deep-sea creature or in your nightmares. Her face, too, was distended, almost fishlike, so she seemed to be one human-sized, extended gullet.

  Sebastian’s hand began to quake. Ice rimmed his eye lashes and coated his hair. I hadn’t noticed that his fingers crimped together the hose; as the magic started to immobilize him, his fingers slipped off. A blast of heated liquid shot forward. Steam billowed everywhere. The smell of antifreeze filled the air, and I coughed, gagging.

  Neon green splashed down Fonn’s gaping throat. When she startled and closed her mouth with a snap, the hot stuff squirted her right between her eyes.

  Fonn yelped like a wounded dog, but there was so much steam in the cramped space I had a hard time seeing what was happening. But I certainly heard the gnashing of teeth, the snarling (which might have been Sebastian, come to think of it), and then a howl like a wounded hound of hell that nearly split my
eardrums. The wind lifted the tires of the truck off the ground unevenly, so it seemed to bounce.

  Then everything was quiet. Dead quiet.

  Sebastian crimped the hose again. When the steam cleared, all I could see was a huge melted hole of toxic-green slush. From the front bumper, icicles dripped to sharp points like teeth.

  There was no sign of Fonn. I held my breath hopefully and strained to hear anything. Sebastian scanned all around us, his fangs still bared.

  I almost didn’t dare hope, but I felt the difference immediately. I still felt cold, but my limbs lightened. I no longer thought I might become a block of ice.

  Sebastian put his hand on the spigot. “Do you think we got her?” he asked.

  I wedged my hand between the ground and my belly. Closing my eyes, I let my consciousness rise out of my body. With Lilith’s eyes, I scanned the storm. When I didn’t sense Fonn in the immediate area, I reached my mind out further. Far off, on Highway 169, I caught the image of a woman riding bareback on a giant wolf. The vision blurred at the edges, melting into the snow, and steam streamed out of her like blood. She was running wounded. “We got her,” I said confidently.

  Then I sneezed. The antifreeze smog and the cold plugged up my nose. Dirt was slowly freezing itself into the fabric of my ripped coat and dress. Sebastian screwed tight the spigot and looked over at me. Perhaps in reaction to my miserable expression, he laughed.

  “I’m clearly not cursed.” He smiled.

  “Oh, yeah, why not?” Although, when I said it, the words sounded a bit more like “Hi, what?”

  “For one, we’re not dead,” he said, pulling the hose from the radiator drain. “Second, you’ve got a smudge of dirt on your nose that’s absolutely adorable.” He leaned over and kissed said nose, and I had to scrunch my face to hold back another wet sneeze.

  I shook my head. “No, you are cursed. This was insane.”

  “Come on,” he said with a laugh. “Once I get the hose back in place, we can get this baby running again.”

  I guess defeating an ice demon can brighten a vampire’s day, or night, as the case may be. Feeling gross, exhausted, and tired of the cold, I wasn’t nearly as chipper as I had been at the start of our trip.

  As he popped the hood, I started to wonder. I supposed the truck now could be considered a stolen vehicle. What is it when you borrow an abandoned one? Still a crime, no doubt. And, honestly, I had to wonder about whether or not Fonn owned this truck to begin with. What if, somewhere out in the snow drifts, there was a heat-sucked corpse waiting to be found and somehow linked back to us? “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Be practical,” Sebastian said as he slid me out of our warmish, wet cave under the truck. “You’ll freeze to death without the heat.”

  He had a point. I was already chilled to the bone. “What about all the antifreeze?”

  “The truck can run on water for a little while.”

  I tried to remember if I’d seen a bottle of water anywhere in the cab. “Where are we going to get that?”

  Sebastian looked around at the piles of snow and gestured with his open hands. “We seem to have an abundance of the frozen kind right here.”

  I nodded. He got to work with a grin and a whistle. He seemed genuinely pleased to be fixing up the truck. I left him to it. The storm had abated to the point where I could see where I was going, so I stumbled my way back and threw myself into the passenger side of the truck. The interior stank of pepper spray, and, while I waited for Sebastian to finish, I coughed and sneezed until I had to open a window. Sebastian worked by the light of the headlights, while I sat there glumly.

  In the fifteen minutes it took him to reconnect the hose and refill the radiator with snow water, the storm quit enough that I could see the occasional star through breaks in the clouds.

  The truck ran hot all the way into town, but, luckily, Sebastian told me that the best way to contain that problem was to keep the heaters on full-blast.

  My toes were toasty again by the time we pulled up to the darkened restaurant. “Oh, no,” I said, noticing the absence of any lights.

  Sebastian just shook his head, a trace of his earlier sullenness returning. Even so, he pulled the truck into a parking spot and killed the engine. “We might as well go check it out.”

  Despite myself, I felt a deep stab of desolation. The one thing I’d been fighting for—a decent night out for Sebastian’s birthday—now seemed ruined. I could feel a tear hovering at the corner of my eye. I wiped at it with a knuckle. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound hopeful, but failing even to my ears. “Let’s go check it out.”

  I trudged through the courtyard, one of my favorite features of Portobello during the summer. Snow draped the barren Virginia creeper vines that twined around the walls like white-frosted lace. Where they poked through the drifts, black-eyed Susan seed heads wore dots of snow. Dried husks of milkweed and mullein stood sentry over sleeping garden beds. The cobblestone walkway had been recently shoveled, and Sebastian and I made our way quickly to the heavy wooden door. A pull on the brass handle confirmed my worst fears. It was locked. Closed.

  “I’m sorry,” I blubbered. Despite my best efforts, a hot tear ran down my chill-burned cheek.

  Sebastian wrapped his arms around me, and I smelled that comforting scent of cinnamon again. I breathed in deeply. “It’s okay,” he lied smoothly. “I’m just glad we’re both alive.”

  Yeah, and it’s my fault we were out in the first place, I wanted to say, but I was too choked up to make my throat work. I was just about to suggest we turn around and head for my apartment, when the door swung open, nearly knocking us off our feet. A round-faced older man wrapped in a shapeless parka and a stocking hat raised his eyebrows at us hugging on the restaurant doorstep.

  “Von Traum party?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping at my tears. “How did you know?”

  “You were our only reservation tonight,” he said. “When the blizzard hit, everyone cleared out. The storm only now just let up enough for me to get out and shovel. I was just about to head home.”

  I wanted to beg him to stay, but I couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to get home after a storm like this one. “Please don’t let us stop you. I’m so sorry you waited for us. We forgot our cell phone.”

  “No, no problem. If you’re happy to pay, I’m happy to stay!”

  “Seriously?” I brightened.

  He waved a mitten dismissively. “I’ve seen worse storms. Besides, it’s your birthday,” he said to Sebastian. “You should do something nice. I know how it is; my birthday is on Thanksgiving. Do you even know how sick of turkey I am?”

  We all laughed.

  Then, to Sebastian I asked, “Are you up for it? Really? I’d understand if you just wanted to go home, too.”

  Sebastian smiled. “Let’s stay. I’m starving.”

  Though my dress had claw marks down the back, we had wine and pasta by candlelight and the place to ourselves. The cook pampered us with special sauces, fresh breadsticks and garlic butter, and tiramisu for two. Sebastian’s kisses tasted of fresh whipped cream and chocolate.

  We walked to my apartment in the quiet, peaceful snow, hand in hand. At home, I gave him his birthday present—ironically, a part for his antique car that he’d been searching for—and a lot more.

  “Still think you’re cursed?” I asked him, after.

  Sebastian thought for a moment. “Let’s see, today we had our car break down, met some kind of storm demon who tried to kill us, and had fantastic pasta. Yes, I’m cursed,” he said. When I was about to protest, he put a finger on my lips. “But I also have you. That makes the whole thing bearable.”

  And then he called me incorrigible again, and we laughed and kissed until dawn.

  Vampire Hours

  Elaine Viets

  Elaine Viets is the author of two mystery series. Murder with Reservations is her sixth Dead-End Job novel. Her third Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper book, Accessory to M
urder, will be out this fall. Elaine has won both the Anthony and Agatha Awards for her short stories. “Vampire Hours” is her first vampire story. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, across the water from a condo whose occupants were the inspiration for this story.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Katherine. Go to sleep.”

  My husband, the surgeon. Eric barked orders even in the middle of the night.

  “I can’t sleep,” I said.

  “I have to be at the hospital in three hours. Turn off the light. And go see a doctor, will you? You’re a pain in the ass.”

  Eric rolled away from me and pulled the pillow over his face.

  I turned off the light. I felt like a disobedient child in my own home, as I listened to my husband of twenty-five years snore into his pillow. Eric could fall asleep anywhere, any time. Especially when he was in bed with me.

  If I pushed his face into the pillow, could I smother him?

  Probably not. Years of late-night emergency calls had given Eric an instant, unnatural alertness.

  I lay alone on my side of the vast bed, stiff as a corpse in a coffin. My white negligee seemed more like a shroud than sexy sleepwear. My marriage to Eric was dead, and I knew it. I wanted him to love me, and hated myself for wanting a man so cold.

  He wasn’t like that when we were first married. Then, he’d ripped off so many of my nightgowns, he’d bought me a thousand-dollar gift certificate at Victoria’s Secret. I’d model the latest addition and he’d rip it off again. Back then, he didn’t care if he had early surgery. We’d had wild, all-night sex.

  A tear slipped down my cheek, and I cursed it. Tears came too easily these days, ever since menopause. “The change,” my mother had called it. Once, before I knew what those changes were, I’d looked forward to menopause. I wanted the monthly flow of blood to stop. I was tired of the bloat, the cramps, and the pain.