Magic and Mayhem: A Collection of 21 Fantasy Novels

by Jasmine Walt

  “Damn it!” I said. And more in irritation than anything else, I dodged his leap and hit him with the stake. He stumbled, but I didn’t wait to see what happened next. I jumped past him and sprinted toward the exit.

  I almost made it, too. But the vampire I had just staked grabbed my bad arm, spinning me back toward him. Apparently I had missed his heart. Crap.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, reaching up and yanking the stake back out of his chest.

  His face contorted in rage as he clutched the gaping wound the stake had left in his chest. He let out a grunt of pain. In retaliation, he grabbed my injured shoulder and squeezed.

  The pain sent me almost to my knees and for a moment my head swam.

  When the stars had cleared from my eyes, it was as if everything had slowed down. I could almost see my anger flickering around the edges of my vision.

  The vampire stood above me victoriously, his eyes completely black and his teeth shining white against the blood drying around his mouth. I leaned my head over as if offering him my neck, and he reared back to strike me with those teeth. At that moment, my right hand came up as if of its own accord, and I felt the wood slide, centimeter by centimeter, under a rib and into a softness at the center of his body.

  I swear I could feel his heartbeat reverberating down the wood of the stake and into my hand. It beat once, then twice, then hammered out a tattoo as the vampire recoiled from the weapon that had already killed him.

  As his heartbeat faltered to a stop and he crumpled to the ground in front of me, time resumed its normal speed. I had no idea how long the whole thing had taken or if I could even still catch Greg, but I knew I had to try. I stumbled back to my feet and made my way to the hidden entrance. I had to jump over several black-clad bodies along the way. I hoped they were vampires and not our guys, but I didn’t have time to stop and check.

  I raced to the end of the small corridor, then squeezed my way out the opening into the night air.

  Nothing. Greg was gone. Probably long gone. I considered trying to track him, but I had no idea which way he had gone. Besides, I was wearing blood-soaked clothes. And a ski mask. Not something that would necessarily blend in, though I wouldn’t put it past people scurrying down the sidewalk at night in the Bronx to ignore, if not actively avoid, someone who looked like I must have looked at the moment.

  Besides, some of my teammates were still back in that room fighting vampires. I couldn’t very well leave them to go chasing after my ex, even if he was one of those vampires who might need killing.

  By the time I made it back to the tower room, though, the fighting had ended. Twelve dead vampires lay stretched out on the floor. Tony and Dom were systematically going around the room driving stakes into every vampiric heart. Nick and John were nowhere to be found.

  “Just making sure they’re really dead,” Dom said, looking up at me as I walked back into the room.

  “Want some help?” I asked.

  “Sure. Grab a stake and a vamp and set to. But first get that shoulder tended to.” He jerked his head toward Tony, who had a small medical kit open in front of him.

  “Where have you been?” Tony asked me as he poured some sort of anti-bacterial stuff over my shoulder.

  “Chasing the one that got away.” I winced as the liquid bubbled up in the wound.

  “Any luck?”

  “Nope. He really did get away. Where are the others?”

  “Scouting out the rest of the place to make sure we haven’t missed anyone.” He spread some clear goop on my shoulder and taped a large sterile pad over it.

  “That’s not as bad as it looks. Or as bad as it probably feels. Keep it clean, change the bandage every day, and keep putting this on it,” he said as he handed me a tube of antibiotic ointment.

  “You fixed up?” Dom asked. “Good. Here’s a stake. We haven’t done the three on that side of the room yet.”

  Just as we were finishing our post-staking staking job, Nick and John came back in through an interior door that I hadn’t really noticed before.

  “All done?” Nick asked.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Tony. “What do you want us to do with the bodies?”

  Nick handed him a gun. I don’t know much about guns, but this one looked big and mean with an extraordinarily long muzzle.

  “Put bullets through all the stake holes; that ought to confuse the issue if there’s ever an autopsy.

  We’re going to have to hide the bodies on site. I don’t want to risk taking them to the van,” Nick said.

  “Do you think anyone will hear the gunshots?” I asked worriedly.

  “That’s a silencer on that piece.”

  Tony proved Nick’s point by shooting the first of the vampire’s bodies. The gun made a muffled whump sound and the bullet thwacked into the body with a sickening thump.

  “Let’s start moving these vamps,” said Nick, grabbing the body underneath the arms. John took the feet and they moved out of the room through the same door they’d used moments before. I followed them.

  The inner room of the armory was enormous; I could believe it used to hold that racetrack Nick had mentioned. We crossed it and moved through a set of doors into what was clearly the flooded auditorium I had read about online.

  “Oh,” I said, “this place reeks.” I covered my nose with my hand.

  John and Nick swung the body a few times, then heaved it into the murky water where it slowly sank.

  “It’ll cover the smell of the rotting bodies,” Nick said.

  “Ugh. I think I’ll stay behind to help Tony,” I said as we headed back to the tower room.

  “Good,” said John. “That means you can help with the rest of clean-up. I can’t even begin to tell you how tired I am of bleaching floors.”

  After the smell of the fetid water, bleach sounded just fine to me.

  13

  I was almost sorry I’d volunteered to help by the time we were done scrubbing all the blood off of the floors and walls of what we’d taken to calling the “meeting room.”

  “More like a slaughter room, if you ask me,” Dom muttered. He was crouched over the last of the blood stains, scrubbing at it with a bleach-soaked sponge.

  When we were finished, we changed clothes in the van. All of our blood- and bleach-soaked clothing went into one of Nick’s ubiquitous black gym bags and I realized why he had insisted that I bring a change of clothes.

  “I’ll send these through the incinerator at the shop,” he said. The shop again. This time I didn’t ask.

  I almost balked at the thought of stripping down in front of four men I didn’t know very well, but I finally decided I was too tired to care. I’ve never been terribly modest, anyway, and surely killing a bunch of vampires together counted for something in the “ways to bond with new people” category.

  “Okay, Dixieland,” Nick said, turning around to face me as John pulled away from the curb.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I want to know where you got the info. Time to talk.”

  I told him everything: sneaking into the law offices, printing out the files, getting caught by Greg, finding the bloody t-shirt, breaking up with my undead ex. Seeing him in the meeting room tonight. All of it. It didn’t take as long in the telling as I had anticipated, and no one interrupted. When I was done, Nick looked off into space over my head for a long time.

  “So Pearson’s got a guy on the inside,” he finally said.

  “Apparently. But I’m not sure about Greg’s reliability, Nick.”

  “Me either. He’s a vampire. You can’t trust vampires. Alec should know that by now.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “You’re not going to do anything yet. I need to think about this some more, check a few things out. Hold tight; if I need your help I’ll let you know.”

  “What about us?” Dom asked.

  “I’ll let you know, too,” Nick said, his voice sounding distracted.

  I felt better for having
told him. I was glad to let someone else take over for a while.

  “You didn’t tell this Malcolm guy anything about the vampires?” Nick asked me.

  “No. I thought he might be safer if he didn’t know.”

  He nodded. “You were right—the fewer people who know, the better.” He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “You think he’s got any connection to the vamps?”

  “I really don’t think so, but I could be wrong.”

  Nick nodded again and stared out the window thoughtfully.

  By the time we pulled up in front of my building and Nick sent John to walk me up to my apartment, I was wiped out, completely exhausted from the night’s events. I fell into bed and was asleep almost instantly.

  A dull ache in my shoulder woke me up the next morning. I got up and took some Advil. Then I took a shower, changed my bandage, made a pot of strong coffee, and considered the shape of my life as I sat on my couch and blew across the top of the cup to cool the hot coffee. I do that a lot in the morning. It’s not the same as staring blankly at a wall until I wake up. Really.

  At nine o’clock, I called a vet and made an appointment to take my cat in to get her shots.

  Okay, I know it sounds odd: kill some vampires, inoculate a cat. But more than anything, I wanted to try to keep at least some aspects of my life as normal as possible. And continuing to be the sort of Responsible Pet Owner that all the brochures in the vet’s office advertised meant getting Millie’s vaccinations.

  So the next two days were perfectly normal. I worked to make them that way. Actually, to be entirely honest, it wasn’t all that hard. I was still floating in some sort of post-killing rush. I felt light, like some enormous weight had been lifted off me. It hadn’t, of course. But I felt better for having enlisted Nick’s help. I went to my classes on Friday. I felt almost normal.

  Then Jenna pulled me aside after class. “Hey,” she said. “We’re all going out tonight. Want to come? I think it would be good for you. And we’ve missed you.”

  I stared at her blankly for a second before realizing that she didn’t know not to go out at night.

  My feeling of normalcy fled and I frowned.

  “No thanks,” I finally said. “Maybe some other time.” I tried to think of some way to warn her, but couldn’t.

  Jenna stared after me worriedly as I walked away, toward the library.

  Still, it wasn’t until day three that I really began to droop. It was one thing to pretend I had a perfectly normal life. It was another thing to spend that life scurrying home before dark just in case the vampires came out in search of me. I suppose I should have felt safer after killing five vampires all on my own. But the first time I had been out of my mind with rage. And I’d had backup on vamps two through five. I wasn’t entirely certain that I could actually take out a vampire all on my own—especially if that vampire happened to take me by surprise.

  So I continued to spend my evenings at home alone. Millie pouted for a while about her shots, then resumed her habit of curling up on my lap to sleep.

  But even though I adored Millie, she wasn’t quite enough in the way of company. Cats aren’t strong conversationalists. I finally had to admit to myself that I missed Malcolm.

  Still, I had broken up with him, at least inasmuch as it’s possible to break up with someone you’re not dating. I knew it wouldn’t be fair to call him, so I resisted the urge.

  That lasted all of about twelve hours. And I spent a lot of that time picking the phone up, dialing, and hanging up before the number went through.

  I didn’t even get an E for effort.

  I finally gave in and let the call go through, but he didn’t answer. I didn’t think much of it when I first heard his voicemail click on. For all I knew he was on campus working and had his ringer off.

  But then an electronic voice came on the line and told me that his message box was full. That’s when I started to worry. I called Nick and left a message on his cell phone. Apparently no one was answering tonight.

  I was still fretting at midnight when I finally got ready for bed. I had tried to call Malcolm every few minutes, but he had never answered.

  I decided that I would spend the next day asking around the math department to see if anyone had heard from him recently. Hard as I tried, though, I couldn’t think of anything useful to do that night.

  So I put a DVD in and settled into my bed, hoping that a light comedy would take my mind off Malcolm.

  It did. Instead of thinking about Malcolm, I thought about the last time I had watched this movie with Greg, before his Big Vampiric Career move. I heaved a sigh and turned off the television. Maybe a book would help me fall asleep. I pulled Jane Austen’s Emma off my shelf and crawled into bed with it.

  I had just snuggled down under the covers when an abrupt rap on my window made me jump.

  And scream. Not a big scream—more of a loud squeak. Apparently I don’t scream when I’m surprised. Or scared.

  I wanted to ignore it, but the rapping continued. I felt like the guy in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem

  “The Raven.” If I opened the curtain and saw a bird on my fire escape, I was going to scream for real.

  It wasn’t a raven. It was worse. It was Greg.

  As if my thoughts had summoned him, there he was, sitting on the fire escape outside my window, knocking on the glass. I was suddenly glad Nick and his guys had installed window grates.

  “Let me in, Elle.” Greg said. He wasn’t yelling, but I could hear his voice clearly through the glass, just as if he were already in the room. Another vampire trick, I guessed.

  “No.”

  “Then open the window.”

  “No. Go away.”

  “Look. I can’t come in unless you invite me. Just open the window and let me talk to you.”

  “You’re doing fine through the window.”

  “It’s harder this way, though. Come on, Elle. I promise not to hurt you.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “I promise. Look, if I’d wanted to hurt you, I could have done it at the office. Or at the armory. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

  I finally gave in and walked to the window. I couldn’t figure out how to get him to go away without talking to him. And I couldn’t see myself going to sleep with Greg lurking right outside my window. For that matter, I wasn’t entirely certain that I would ever be able to sleep again now that Greg knew where I lived.

  I did, however, pick up the big wooden crucifix Nick had given me.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Put the cross down, Elle. Believe me, you want to hear what I have to say.”

  I set the cross down on the bed next to me but kept my hand on it. I opened the window just a crack. “Is that good enough?”

  “I guess.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Magic vampire senses.”

  I sighed. I never could get a straight answer out of him, even when he was human. “Fine, Greg.

  Talk.”

  He smiled at me, a slow, malevolent smile, and I involuntarily stepped away from the window. I could see his fangs.

  “I know where your boyfriend is,” he said.

  I froze. “What boyfriend?”

  “The one who helped you break into my office. You got my files, didn’t you? That’s how you and your army buddies knew where to find us.”

  “They’re not in the army,” I said absently. “You know where Malcolm is?”

  “Yes. And if you’re very, very nice, I might even take you to him.”

  “You bastard. What have you done to him? Tell me where he is.”

  Greg made a tsk-ing noise and shook his finger at me. “That’s not very nice, Elle. Keep calling me names and I won’t tell you anything else.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “Okay, Greg. What do I have to do to get you to tell me where he is?”

  “Marry me.”

  I must have loo
ked as shocked as I felt, because he laughed so hard tears came out of his eyes.

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for his laughing fit to pass.

  “I’m kidding,” he finally said, wiping the last of the tears away. “Just give me that list you stole from my office.”

  I’m just no good at bluffing; my face always gives me away. But I continued trying anyway.

  “What list?”

  “The one you and your little thug platoon used to find our meeting hall the other night.”

  “And if I give it to you, you’ll tell me where Malcolm is?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is he in danger?”

  “I’m not telling you anything until I have the paper.”

  “You at least have to tell me if he’s alive—and I mean really alive, not vampire-alive—or I’m ending this conversation.” I knew that challenging him that way was a risky move; it could just as easily backfire and cause him to quit talking to me altogether. But I wasn’t about to go somewhere with Greg just to see Malcolm’s corpse. Even the thought of it nearly made my heart stop. I didn’t think I could bear it if I had foolishly gotten Malcolm killed.

  “To the very best of my knowledge, he is still alive, still human.”

  “But that might change?” I asked.

  “The files.”

  “And then you’ll tell me?”

  “Everything. I promise.”

  I started to get up to go for the list. It didn’t matter if I gave it to him; Nick already had the information. But I stopped, suddenly realizing that there was a good chance Greg had some trick up his sleeve.

  “If he’s in danger, will you let him go?” I asked.

  “Not my call.” He smirked in a way I had always found irritating, even when I had liked him.

  “Will you take me to him?”

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t in the contract.”

  “We don’t have a contract yet; I haven’t agreed to anything. We’re still in negotiations.”

  “Hmm. Well, then, I guess that would be okay. Yeah. You give me the file and I’ll take you to him.”