“This from the werewolf who wouldn’t go out in the cold to hunt rabbits?” I demanded. He yipped in response and danced around me. I shook my head and kept shoveling, but couldn’t help laughing at his antics. “Get back to work, you big doofus.”
I was glad I had tire chains, as well. I didn’t often have to use them, but there were enough mountains in the territory I tended to patrol that they’d come in handy more than once.
At Rarities, Nanci continued to let Wolf stay inside, especially once she saw what a well behaved dog he was. He threw her a dirty look when she said as much aloud, but he didn’t move from his spot inside the storeroom where I was doing inventory. Instead, he simply snorted and settled his head back down on his paws.
“He’s a smart one, isn’t he?” Nanci added, tilting her head as she regarded him.
“Oh, I don’t think there are very many like him.” I grinned, and he ignored us both.
Darkness fell early in the winter this high in the mountains. By four-thirty that afternoon, it was all but dark outside, and I was still inside the store, doing inventory in the background. Nanci wanted us to finish it before she closed up for Christmas day, and she’d had a small but steady stream of last-minute Christmas-gift shoppers all day long.
I jotted down a tally for a box full of decorative notepads and then moved to the next box. I opened it without looking inside, turning to Nanci to make some smartass comment as I reached into the box.
Hot pain flashed up my arm from my fingertips, and I whipped my hand back up toward my chest with a hiss.
“Are you okay?” Nanci reached out to take my arm to check my hand, but I clasped it to myself.
“I’m fine. Just a paper cut—I must’ve cut my hand on the cardboard.”
“Is it bleeding? Is it bad? Do we need to get you a Band-Aid or a Kleenex or something?”
“I’ll just go to the bathroom and rinse it off.” I scuttled into the employees-only restroom, where I finally pulled my arm down, away from its protective grasp near my chest, and slowly unrolled the fist to check the damage.
I’d lied to Nanci. I hadn’t cut myself at all. The box had been full of silver jewelry. A necklace had come out of its box, and I had touched it without realizing what I was doing.
Bright red blisters ran up to my fingers and into the center of my palm.
I washed the hand in cold water, but I knew time was the only thing that would heal this—or possibly magic, and I didn’t have time or privacy to try to work any of the magical spells I knew. Such as they were. My cousins were always better with magic than I was. The only thing I could do with any certainty was a kind of earth-magic. I could read rocks, metal, soil. Move them around.
Sometimes toss them at demons.
That wouldn’t help here.
I flexed my hand a couple of times, making sure I could still use it, and gritted my teeth. I’d have to keep working through the pain.
When I came out of the bathroom, Nanci had left the room and Wolf was standing outside as if to guard me.
“I’m okay,” I murmured to him. He tilted his head and stared at me suspiciously.
“Really,” I insisted. “It’s just a small injury. I’ll be fine.”
With his nose, he tapped my hand, which was closed in a light fist.
“It was silver.” I opened my hand and showed him the injury.
He sniffed it, then sneezed.
“I told you. Silver. You can’t touch it, either.”
With a clear shrug of one shoulder, Wolf turned and marched to his spot by the door.
From the front of the store, I could hear Nanci chatting with a customer.
Something about the customer’s voice from the other room set off my internal warning system. It ran up my spine like a lightning strike, lashing out to the same points that had sent me running toward Colorado in the first place.
I didn’t even have to say anything. Wolf’s ears perked up and his nose lifted slightly as he used his head to gesture toward the other room questioningly. I nodded, and we moved toward the door.
I couldn’t hear what the man in the other room was saying. His voice was a low murmur, but hearing him made my stomach clench. It made my hands sweat.
A curtain separated the stockroom from the front room. I reached one hand out, pulled it back slightly to peek out, and then jerked back quickly.
Fuck.
A vampire.
I wanted to say as much to Wolf, but those bloodsuckers have seriously good hearing.
Instead, I gestured for him to stay close and went about finishing the inventory. Using a clothes hanger, I fished the open silver necklace that had burned me earlier out of the box—but I kept my attention turned toward the showroom, hoping I could hear something useful.
Wolf took up his station by the door but did not settle back into his comfortable resting position. I might not have been able to tell him it was a vampire, but I suspect he was able to smell it. At the very least, he knew I was feeling wary and, having picked up on that, was maintaining his own vigilant stance.
As soon as I heard the bell over the door jingle, I grabbed my coat and dashed out into the showroom.
“I’m going to step outside so Wolf can… do his business,” I said hurriedly. Wolf threw me a reproachful glare.
“Sorry,” I said as the door shut behind us. “It was all I could think of.”
Wolf shook his head, but I was already peering back and forth on the sidewalk to see if I could tell where the vamp had gone.
He was about three stores down, strolling slowly—much more slowly than I knew they had the ability to move. He looked like any other citizen of the town, winter-pale and dressed in a dark coat and hat.
He glanced back over his shoulder and made eye contact, first with me, and then with Wolf. His upper lip curled up on one side, flashing a fang—something else I knew he didn’t have to do unless he wanted to.
The sucker was showing off, letting us know he’d been aware of our presence all along.
Wolf growled deep in his throat, and I dropped my hand onto his back. “It’s not worth it,” I said. “We’ll take care of him later.”
We watched as the vampire strolled up into the canyon at the end of the street, and then out of sight. If nothing else, he was laying a perfect trail for us to follow.
“Do you have his scent?”
Wolf nodded once, the affirmation clear in the motion.
“Then we’ll follow him as soon as we’re done here.”
As anxious as it made me to know the handsome, bloodsucking son-of-a-bitch vampire was prowling the streets, I went back inside the store to see what I could find out from Nanci.
How long had a vampire been hunting here?
This was a small town, and there weren’t many people to victimize.
Surely someone would have noticed an excess of murder victims. Or even disappearances.
“Oh, no, Creede is a safe little place,” Nanci assured me when I steered the conversation that direction. “I mean, sometimes people get drunk and rowdy, and it’s not like we never have any crime. But not much overall, and small stuff.”
“So nothing like huge robberies or murders or anything? I know I’m only here for a few more days, but even with a big dog like Wolf, I sometimes worry. You know, a woman traveling on her own.”
It hurt my soul to say that. I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself against any kind of threat, human or otherwise. But I had learned early on that pretended helplessness got as many—or sometimes more—answers as real toughness.
”Oh, I completely understand. No, not much in the way of theft or murder. I guess it’s about average for a town the size of Creede. Once in a while, someone goes a little crazy. But it’s usually typical domestic stuff. I’m sure you’ll be absolutely fine. Perfectly safe.”
I nodded and changed the subject to something less morbid, pretending my mind had been eased by her assurances. It hadn’t. In fact, her claims that Creede was
safe only made me more nervous. What the hell was a vampire doing in a place where his hunting would stand out so obviously?
I gritted my teeth against asking more questions and went back to counting T-shirts.
We had been quiet for several minutes when Nanci suddenly spoke up. “What we do get a lot of around here are people wandering off into the mountains and not coming back. They get hurt or lost and sometimes it’s years before anyone figures out what happened to them.”
Disappearances. Of course.
I had been hunting in the cities too long, hadn’t spent enough time tracking monsters through inhospitable landscapes. It made sense. In cities, bodies were hard to hide. Up in the mountains, though? A vampire could drain a body and hide it knowing it was unlikely to be found for a long, long time.
Especially if he preyed on the more mobile population of the tourist town—people who came in for a season and left, anyway.
People like the one I was pretending to be.
Maybe—if I was lucky—I had caught his predatory eye.
”You know,” I said thoughtfully to Wolf as I waited for the van’s engine to warm up enough for us to drive away after work. “Normally, I would let the vampire track me. He was in the store today, he saw us, he might actually even believe we’re who we say we are—a drifter and her dog.”
Wolf snorted and shook his head.
“You don’t think so?” I rubbed my hands together and blew on them to warm them up. “So you’re guessing he knows I’m a hunter and you’re a… whatever you are?”
He rolled his eyes and turned to look out the window, his breath fogging up the glass.
“Well, then, that settles it. We absolutely have to hunt him. You got his scent, and it looked like he was hiking up the road into the canyon. Want to go see what we can find?”
He turned back to face the front and settled more firmly into the passenger seat, which I took as a sign that he was willing to come with me.
Good thing, since I couldn’t easily track the vamp on my own.
Some things about my life had gotten much easier since Wolf had joined me.
I drove up the street, all the way to the end of town, where the road wound through the canyon, steep rocky cliffs rising on either side. When we reached the last place we’d seen the vamp, I pulled over to the shoulder and we got out for Wolf to pick up the scent again.
From the back of the van, I pulled out the drawer that held most of my vampire hunting gear, carefully stowed away. Somewhere along the way, I had acquired a giant wooden cross. It didn’t always work—for some reason, the vampires only sometimes seemed afraid of religious symbols, and I wondered how much of that had to do with what they saw in the movies. In any case, I set it aside, going instead for the stakes and a huge knife—almost a sword, really.
The stakes were made of apple wood—it seemed to work best at cutting through whatever it was that protected vampires from dying when they were hit with other killing implements.
The blade was wickedly sharp. It had once belonged to my cousin Grace. After her death, Daddy had given it to me. He might not have been able to bring himself to hunt any longer, might not have been capable of putting down the bottle long enough to pick up a stake of his own, but he still took care of my cousins and me in his own way. He had a whole room of his trailer devoted to stuff my cousins and I wanted to keep but didn’t want on the road with us for one reason or another. I didn’t know why Gracie had left this knife behind, but I was glad to have it now. It was perfect for lopping off vampire heads. At least, I assumed it would be. I hadn’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I slid the knife through a loop on my belt, tucked two stakes into my boots, and carried two more in my hands.
I also slung on a holster and stowed a pistol in it. I might be going vampire hunting, but there were almost certainly other things out in the woods. A gun might be useful for other creatures.
Like bears.
A shiver of cold—or maybe excitement—trailed up my back. I wouldn’t have said so aloud, but I would’ve been hard-pressed to give up hunting entirely, even if I was suddenly released from my family’s curse tonight.
I suspected that was part of why Daddy drank so much.
I never said that aloud, either.
Wolf yipped softly when he picked up the vamp’s scent and began following it. If he went too far up into the mountains, we’d come back for the van. For now, though, I was content to follow Wolf on foot.
It had grown even darker outside since we stepped out of the store to watch the vampire walk away. I stopped for a moment and glanced back at downtown Creede, nestled into its little valley behind us.
A light coating of new snow had fallen and the brightly lit holiday decorations on the storefronts glowed and twinkled in the clear mountain air. The town looked like a Christmas card.
Too bad there was a bloodsucking vampire hunting in it.
Kind of ruined the whole Christmas vibe.
I had worried that the snow would hinder Wolf’s ability to track the vampire, but it didn’t make a difference, apparently. Once the werewolf had a handle on the trail, he followed it without ever wavering—up the road, around a curve, and straight up to the entrance of an old mine.
A silver mine.
Of course.
“Well, fuck,” I muttered.
The tall building that housed the mine loomed above me, an old wooden structure that sat atop it like a façade in front of a gaping wound in the ground.
I glanced around nervously.
“Is he really down there? This close to town?”
Wolf nodded.
This could be bad.
Then again, I reminded myself, the mines have been closed down for years.
Nope. I couldn’t even convince myself that this might be okay.
Taking a deep breath, I sent my magical senses questing out from me. I could feel the tunnels running all through the mountain surrounding me, meandering into the heart of the world, following the veins of silver that throbbed like poison against me even from this distance.
If I kept these senses open, I would be able to avoid most of the silver in the mine itself.
Too bad I hadn’t learned how to do this more effectively. I was going to need to improve my magic use eventually.
Starting now.
Wolf and I stepped up to the plywood covering the mine entrance. It had signs all over it, variations of Keep Out and Danger. I tugged at the edges a little until Wolf nudged me with his nose and pawed at the bottom left-hand corner. When I grabbed it, the heavy plywood swung up and away, opening to reveal the wounded earth behind it. The bright moonlight illuminated a small cavern long enough for us to step inside. When the plywood dropped closed behind us, the room went black. Wolf whined a little, deep in his throat.
“I know,” I said quietly, gripping my stakes tightly. We leaned against each other in the dark, and I let my earth sense quest outward again.
As if my magic, so rarely used, had sparked a light in the darkness, a shining blue-white network of silver veins popped up in front of me like a map. The darker lines running beside it were tunnels. As long as I held on to my power, I could get us back out of here.
But Wolf still couldn’t see, not without some real light. I had never done this before, but suddenly I knew exactly what had to happen. Tucking one of the stakes into my back pocket, I dropped my hand down onto Wolf’s head, burying my fingers in his fur. And then I concentrated on sending a spark of whatever it was that animated my power through my fingers and into him.
He twitched when it hit him, and although I couldn’t precisely see him, an outline image of his form leaped into my sight, as if someone had painted his edges with glowing neon.
Wolf swung his head toward me and gestured deeper into the mine. I studied the lines on the magical map, trying to determine which way to go.
When I saw it, I wasn’t sure how I had ever missed it in the first place. A pulsing red pustule, deep down one of the tu
nnels, but heading our direction.
It was the vampire. I was certain of it.
And there was someone else with him.
Someone human.
“This way,” I whispered, and Wolf and I set out, moving deeper into the silver mine.
We tracked the vampire using the magical map, winding our way down, and down, and down, even as that pulsing red mark, throbbing in my vision like a point of pain, moved up through the tunnels, closer and closer to us.
“I can hear you.” The vampire’s voice echoed around us, and if I hadn’t known exactly where it came from, it would’ve been disorienting as hell.
But Wolf and I were not confused. We headed toward him in a straight line.
“Oh, little van-driving hunter and her big, bad Wolf. You have found me.” His mocking tone bounced from wall to wall, fading out until it was taken over by the screams of his victim.
“Help me!” Her shout cut off with a gurgle, and I picked up the pace. But even with a perfect map in front of me, I had to step carefully to avoid stumbling over loose rocks or banging my head against low-hanging ceilings.
By the time we got to the open cavern where the vampire waited, we were too late.
In the dark, my hearing had grown even more sensitive. I heard my breath and Wolf’s. I heard the vampire laughing. And that was all.
A click in the darkness sent light flaring up in front of Wolf and me, and we both flinched away before realizing that the vampire carried a perfectly prosaic flashlight.
It illuminated a gruesome scene.
Bodies and parts of bodies. If I’d had to guess, I would’ve said probably four or maybe five different people—but at first glance it was a jumble of bloody torsos and limbs and empty, staring eyes.
The vampire turned the light away from his victims and shined it up under his chin so that it highlighted the gore around his mouth and cast his eyes in dark, shadowed hollows. Again he laughed, and I heard the edge of real madness in it—not the kind of bloodlust that so often comes out as maniacal glee in vampires, but actual psychosis.
Holidays Bite: A Limited Edition Collection of Holiday Vampire Tales Page 5