by Jasmine Walt
“Sure.”
We left the room and headed back up the stairs. Dom went first, loaded crossbow in front of him, ready to fire. I trailed behind him, keeping an eye out over my shoulder for anything behind us.
Especially anything that resembled my ex. I was getting tired of his penchant for grabbing me from behind every chance he got.
The rooms on the next floor up were still empty. I wondered if Deirdre and crew reserved those for special occasions. The main floor was empty, as well.
The top floor, the one where I had changed clothes for Deirdre’s party, was not empty. The rooms up there were full of sleeping humans, maybe twenty-five in all. The curtains upstairs, unlike the ones on the other floors, were thrown wide. The fading sunlight streamed in across the floors. I was surprised to see that so much time had passed. We’d come into the building sometime in the late afternoon. Now the sun was setting.
The sun was setting. Oh, hell.
“Dom,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know if anyone downstairs actually saw Deirdre?”
“I don’t know. You and Malcolm are the only ones who know what she looks like. I saw a lot of blonde vamps, though.”
“You need to get back downstairs. The sun’s setting. If Deirdre’s not dead, she’ll be able to escape as soon as it’s dark. I’m going to stay up here and search through these rooms. You get Malcolm to check the bodies down there, see if Deirdre’s among them.”
Dom didn’t even bother to answer before racing back down the stairs.
I stopped by the dressing room I’d been in the week before. My clothes were still in a pile on a shelf. They even looked like they’d been laundered. I decided to come back and pick those up on my way out—if Nick burned too many more outfits of mine, I’d soon run out of clothes altogether.
That wasn’t why I went into the dressing room in the first place, though. I picked up a hand mirror from the makeup table and carried it back into the first of the bedrooms. I didn’t think any vampire could withstand the sunlight shining in through the windows, but I wanted to be sure. I held the mirror in one hand and my knife in the other as I checked the people one by one, holding up a hand or a foot or a few strands of hair to see if the mirror reflected them back at me. So far, so good, I thought as I closed one door behind me and stepped across the hall to the next room.
By the time I had searched most of the rooms on the floor, the sun was sinking into the horizon, its last red-orange rays turning the clouds a rosy pink. Two rooms left. I chose the one closest to me, and swung the door open.
Unlike the other rooms, this one was dark; heavy curtains shaded the windows. A small square of sunlight shined in from the hallway and lit up the floor in front of me. The few pieces of furniture in the room—a bed, a lamp, and what looked like a desk—were just shadowy forms, slightly darker than the space around them. I blinked a few times to adjust my eyes.
The light behind me faded, and I saw a shadow on the bed shift. Slowly, the shadow resolved itself into the figure of a woman sitting up in the bed. Reflected light glinted off her golden hair. I dropped the mirror to the floor. I wouldn’t be needing it in here.
“Hello, Deirdre,” I said.
She turned to me and I could see the white oval of her face, though I couldn’t make out her features.
“I thought you might come back,” she said. Her voice was still low and rich, and I shivered involuntarily. “Did you bring your army boys with you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But they’re all downstairs. It’s just the two of us right now.”
She laughed, a sweet, resonant sound in the darkness. “Oh, good. I was hoping for some time alone with you.” I saw her swing her legs over the edge of the bed and stand up.
And then she was beside me. I never saw her move, but she was pressed up against my side, her breasts brushing against my arm as she leaned in close to my ear.
“Did you miss me?” she whispered.
A deep, ragged moan escaped me.
I’ve never been addicted to anything. I tried cigarettes a few times as a teenager, but they made me cough and want to vomit. I drank alcohol occasionally—at least until I found out about vampires—but I’d never even tried drugs; I like to be in control, thank you very much. So I didn’t have anything to compare this feeling to.
All I knew was that I wanted to feel Deirdre bite me. I craved the feel of her mouth on my skin like I’ve never wanted anything else, before or since. She terrified me. She made my heart race and my skin crawl, and all I wanted was for her to slide her fangs into my neck, my arm, anywhere.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good.”
She slid her cheek along mine, her breath gliding along my neck. I bent my head to the side to give her better access. Her mouth gently caressed the skin above my jugular, then slid back up to my ear.
“I missed you, too.”
Then, ever so delicately, she traced the outline of my ear with her tongue.
That made twice in one night that some vampire had licked my ear. Gross.
Looking back on it, I’m ultimately glad that she made that one mistake, because it broke some of her hold over me. I might crave her bite, but that didn’t mean that I would put up with the whole ear-licking business. I knew Greg had to have picked that up from someone else; I certainly didn’t teach him that little trick. Yuck.
I didn’t step away from her, but I reached into the back of my jeans and pulled my crucifix out. I brought it up in front of her face, forcing her to draw back from my neck a little.
She shook her head.
“I’m not Christian, dearest. Your religious icons don’t frighten me.”
“So why did you make me hand over the crucifix I was carrying the first time we met?”
“I told you then, it was a symbol of your willingness to negotiate. Symbols have meaning, sweetness, but only if we give them that meaning.” She smiled.
I didn’t move the crucifix, but I brought the knife up between us, sliding it to a point over her left breast. She glanced down at it, then rested her face in the crook of my neck and laughed.
“Knives can’t hurt me either, darling,” she said.
I shoved it, hard, and it sliced through her skin and into her body.
“Even if it’s got wood on it?” I asked.
She got that surprised look, but she didn’t crumple to the ground. Instead, she took a step backwards and stared down at the hilt sticking out of her chest.
“That hurt,” she said. She sounded more petulant than anything. She plucked the knife out of her body and tossed it on the ground. “You’re going to pay for that,” she said.
I hit her heart. I know I did. I had the right angle on it. I felt the knife slide in and enter the flesh.
I’d just spent all afternoon staking vampires and I knew how it felt when I hit the heart.
She hadn’t reacted to it at all.
I was learning all sorts of new things about vampires today.
I ran. At that moment, I was convinced it was my only option. I wasn’t even halfway down the hall before she caught me, though. Actually, she didn’t so much catch me as suddenly appear directly in front of me, much as if she had teleported there.
Okay. Running: bad idea.
“Elle, sweetest, why are you doing this?” she asked. She sounded sad, almost disappointed. “You know what you want. Why don’t you just let me give it to you?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I was trapped.
“Okay,” I said. My shoulders slumped in defeat. I turned and walked back into the dark bedroom, where I sat down on the edge of the bed.
Deirdre appeared beside me as if by magic. She stroked her hand across mine.
“There. Isn’t that better?” she said soothingly.
“Yeah.” I sounded like a disgruntled teenager.
Deirdre laughed and buried her face in my neck. I arched my back in pleasure as I felt her teeth graze a
cross my skin. The hand that she’d been stroking clutched at her arm.
Just as she sank her fangs into my neck, I brought my other hand across my body and jabbed the
Taser directly into her side, pushing the button as hard as I could.
Modern technology is such a beautiful thing.
Her teeth snapped together convulsively and I screamed as pain coursed through my entire body.
Pulling the Taser away from her, I pried her jaws apart and pushed her away from me. Blood flowed down across my shirt. I grabbed the bedspread and wadded it up against my neck. Hoping that I wouldn’t bleed out and die before I could finish the job, I poked the Taser into Deirdre’s stomach and buzzed her again, just to make sure.
She’d already proven that a stake to the heart wasn’t enough to kill her. The sun had gone down. I didn’t have many options left. So I took the only one I knew.
I beheaded her.
That sounds a lot neater than it really was. It was actually a bloody mess. A stinking-of-rotten-vampire-blood bloody mess. The only thing I had to work with was my little knife. Granted, it was sharp, and that was helpful when I sliced through her neck. But then I reached her spine and I had to use both hands to cut through it. My hands were slippery with blood by that point—my own clean, red blood and her foul-smelling, blackish-red, rotten blood—and I was having a hard time holding onto the knife. I was also finding it difficult to keep the bedspread bunched up against my own neck.
I ended up breaking her neck—again, something that sounds easier than it actually is. I had to grasp the spine in both hands and twist. Even using all my strength, it took three tries before I felt it crunch. By the second try, I was sobbing from frustration and sheer horribleness—my eyes were clouded with tears and I couldn’t wipe them because everything was covered in gore. My hands kept slipping in the blood. And then I had to cut through the spinal cord. It made a snapping noise and I whimpered.
By that time, the bed and I were both covered in the blackish vampire blood. My shirt was so soaked in blood—my own and Deirdre’s—that it clung to my body. I could feel tears making tracks down my face. My arms were streaked with red and black up to the elbows and my hands were beginning to feel glued to my knife. And I smelled even worse than I looked. I smelled of vampire blood, fetid and decayed and decomposing.
I didn’t bother to clean my weapon. I just peeled it away from my fingers and shoved it into a pants pocket. These clothes were ruined anyway.
The bedspread was soaked, too, so I dropped it. I picked up Deirdre’s head by the hair. It dangled from my grasp as I walked out into the hall and stepped into the dressing room. I had planned to take my clothes with me. Instead, I just picked up the shirt I’d left behind last time and held it against my neck. I was beginning to feel dizzy. I moved back into the hall and toward the stairs.
And of course, that’s when I found Greg.
He was backing away, I presume in horror, from the scene in Deirdre’s bedroom. I’m sure it looked pretty gruesome from his perspective in the doorway, what with Deirdre’s limp, headless body leaking blood onto the bed and all. He’d been in the room across the hall from me when I killed Deirdre—the only room on the floor that I hadn’t gotten around to checking.
He literally backed into me as I reeled out into the hall. He spun around, took one look at me, and backed up several paces. I’m sure I looked like a crazy woman, covered in blood, clutching a shirt to my neck with one hand and dangling a severed head in the other.
We stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Neither of us moved. I didn’t think I had the strength left to fight him if it came down to it. But I didn’t want him to know that. Finally, I spoke.
“Okay, Greg,” I said. “Here’s the deal. You. You don’t ever fuck with me again. Ever. Got it?” My voice was harsh and raw. “If you do, I will hunt you down. And this—” I waggled Deirdre’s head at him “—this will look like an easy out. Understand?”
Greg nodded, silently, eyes wide as he stared at the head in my hand.
I took a step backward, toward the stairwell, and he turned and bolted back to the room he’d been hiding in. I heard a lock click as he shut the door.
I turned and trudged down the stairs, still swinging Deirdre’s bloody severed head. That made—what, three times now?—that I’d broken up with Greg.
24
Everyone stopped what they were doing when I stumbled into the basement room; they just stood there staring at me for what seemed like a full minute as I stood in the doorway.
Then Dom starting laughing. Hard. So hard he had to sit down on the floor and hold his stomach.
No one else moved.
For some reason that irritated me.
“When you’re done laughing at me, maybe you could go upstairs and stake my ex-fiancé for me.
Or maybe someone else could do it?” I glared around the room. “He’s locked himself in the last room on the left.”
“I’ll go,” John offered. “I need to get away from that smell.” I could see him trying to hide a grin as he swept past me and trotted up the stairs, taking them three at a time.
“Show-off,” I muttered. Then I leaned my back against the nearest mirrored wall and slowly slid down it until I was sitting with my knees tucked up under my chin.
Tony was by my side in an instant, tugging the t-shirt away from my neck.
“Let me see what you’ve got here.” I recognized his soothing, I’m-a-professional voice.
“Mmm,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s going to need stitches.”
“Great,” I said.
Dom wiped the tears of laughter out of his eyes. “Hey, Elle?”
“What?” I was still angry.
“I take it that’s Deirdre’s head you’ve got over there?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Any particular reason you brought it with you?” He dissolved into laughter again.
Reason? I looked down at the head. I was still clutching it by the hair. I untangled my fingers and peeled them away from the clumps of hair, now sticky with blood.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, looking back up at Dom. He seemed to swim in my vision, like he was receding into the background. I felt cold suddenly.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Tony said, pushing me over so that my head was between my knees. “You’re not going to pass out on us.”
“Oh, I think I might,” I said.
“Nope. Malcolm, do you know where the kitchen is in this place?”
“Yeah.” Malcolm looked pale. His throat moved convulsively.
“Then go get some juice or something,” said Tony. “And grab a blanket while you’re at it. She’s lost a lot of blood and she’s going into shock.”
Malcolm disappeared from my view.
“He didn’t look so hot,” I said to Tony.
“Yeah, well, neither do you,” he replied.
“I think maybe he was about to throw up.”
“The sight of severed heads will do that to some folks,” Tony said.
I looked back down at the head on the floor beside me.
“I guess it is kind of disgusting,” I said. “You think I should close her eyes? Maybe that would help.”
Dom and Nick stood over me now, looking at me with concern.
Behind them, I saw one of the humans on the mattress start to move. A pale young woman with long brown hair, so long that it almost touched the floor, stood up and stretched her arms above her, yawning.
“Hey, Dom,” I said, jerking my chin toward the woman. The motion made my head spin again so I closed my eyes and dropped my head back down between my knees. When I opened my eyes again, I could see Dom reflected in the mirror, walking toward the woman with his hands out.
“It’s okay, Miss. I just need to talk to you,” he said.
I saw her turn to look at him, and she smiled, and then… then her reflection slowly faded away. I thought for a second that my eyes were playing tricks on me, but th
en I realized that I could still see Dom, still moving toward her, still talking.
I jerked my head up and yelled, “Dom! Watch out!”
Dom, confused, turned back to look at me. Luckily for Dom, Nick caught on much more quickly, and was already pulling his crossbow up to shoot. The bolt hit the newly-made vamp right in the chest as she leaped at Dom.
I looked in the mirror again and hissed through my teeth as I realized that every single human we had carefully spared earlier either already had awoken or was in the process of waking up. And every last one of them, as they regained consciousness, lost his or her reflection.
And gained a lovely new set of fangs as a parting gift.
“Well, hell.” I muttered. I started struggling to get up.
“No,” said Tony. “You are not going to participate in this one.”
“Fine. But I am going to stand up so that I can at least defend myself if one of those vamps decides to ignore my doctor’s warnings.”
Behind him, Nick and Dom were holding the vampires at bay, Nick by shooting his crossbow every few seconds and Dom by waving a crucifix at them while Nick reloaded.
“Okay,” said Tony. “But unless they come over here, you are to lean against this wall. And that’s it. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Tony helped me stand up.
“That okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Now go help them.”
He sprinted off, stopping long enough to bend over and scoop up another crossbow and a bag of wooden bolts from the floor.
I concentrated on retaining my balance.
It really didn’t take the guys very long to finish off most of the new vampires. I had to admire their efficiency. Nick and Tony alternated shooting and reloading the two crossbows. Dom made sure the vampires who were down were really dead by running another stake through them.
Malcolm came back in the middle of the new fight. He walked in and, in his surprise, dropped the glass of orange juice he’d been carrying for me. The liquid splashed across the floor and mingled with the blood that had leaked out from the stump where Deirdre’s neck used to be.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Can I have the blanket, though? I’m really cold.”