“You wish to challenge me?” he demanded. “I accept.” He threw her across the field and the seating so fast that she hummed through the air, a human projectile that abruptly hit home—decapitating one of the stadium’s floodlights. Lucia hung suspended for a moment, surrounded by molten glass and sparking electricity, the turbulence of her passage screaming in her ears before she pitched into the parking lot, hitting one car and knocking it into all its parked neighbors. Lucia clawed herself free of the stationary pileup.
“Okay,” she muttered. “To the death, then. Again.”
Mindy made herself sit up. Hide, HIDE.
Lucia hobbled to the visitor’s lot, the fleet of school buses that had transported the opposing team, their cheerleaders, the band geeks. She rolled under the first as a cloud of bats shrieked up into the sky over the stadium wall, a dark cloud that rolled over the moon before it narrowed into a more singular monster. Bakula stepped out of the living vortex, examining the debris of Lucia’s impact and the blood trail she’d left limping away.
Lucia checked her wounds. Flush with Mindy’s blood, they were healing fast. She rolled out from under one bus straight under another, and another, crouching behind a tire to watch Bakula stalk after her through the maze of parked buses.
Casually, Bakula flipped a bus out of the way. “Finally smart enough to be scared, are you?”
Lucia looked at her hands.
How strong are you?
She dug her nail into a scabbed cut, opening it up fresh. She scooped up some of the blood, slapped it on a window, and ran.
Bakula strolled among the buses, scraping his nails across the glass of the windows. They’d already grown an inch long. “If you were still alive, I’d wager I could hear your heart racing. Almost makes me regret killing you. But then, you made such a lovely corpse…”
He saw Lucia’s blood, black in the moonlight. As one might stop to sniff a rose, he ran his finger through it, then delicately traced his fingertip over the tips of his teeth. “You’ve gotten sour with age, my dear.”
The bus he faced lurched into him, pinning him against the bus behind him. Lucia kept pushing, pile-driving these two buses into a third, the three into a fourth, and the four into a fifth, until the pileup got too heavy for her to move. The cab side had dented into her palm prints. She pushed off. “Step on a Lego, fuckface.”
Yeah, he’s not dead.
“Nah, he totally is. It goes ‘stakes, decapitation, sunlight, school buses,’ right?”
Glass shattered. Lucia looked up. An eerie mist rose like a storm cloud above her. Streaming over the twisted metal and broken glass. She turned and ran as the mist avalanched toward her.
And Mindy ripped herself fully out of her paralysis. Teetering on sleeping legs, skin flushed, eyes blinking, having to swim through a layer of Jell-O to take a single step…but she was back.
And she had two choices. One, she could go up against a stalkery vampire lord and his bullshit magical powers to save her girlfriend. Or two, she could enter the lesbian dating scene.
Well, that was no choice at all.
CHAPTER 30
Mindy thought she was going to be sick, riding shotgun in Lucia’s head. Lucia was running, pulling the world past her, focusing with eagle eyes on the distant horizons where she’d be in a few steps. Taking the roads of Carfax at a couple hundred miles an hour. Bakula behind her the whole way. Where are you going?
“Away from him. You know me. I may not have a plan, but I have a lot of stupid ideas. One of them has to be stupid enough to work.”
Mindy forced herself out of the church, into the parking lot, flashing between the parked cars and the speeding ones Lucia was passing—islands of metal that Lucia sailed between. Piled into her own car; Lucia was in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Twisted the key in the ignition as Lucia scooped up groceries, shopping carts, open car doors to throw backward at the coach. The engine turned over. Bakula batted aside the projectiles with ease.
Mindy put the Taurus into gear, but had nowhere to go. Lucia’s vision was a DVR on three-arrows fast-forward, a DVD glitching and skipping. Mindy saw cars shrieking past her, felt the wind making her hair whip and snarl like a cat of nine tails, and then Bakula caught her hair—
Right next to a Jiffy Lube. The one on Danish Street. She got her oil changed there, she knew where it was. She stepped on the gas and tried to ignore Bakula shaking Lucia like a dog with a rat, spinning her around to punch a car off the road, whipping her into a minivan.
Hold on, El.
Mindy was jerked back to reality—red light ahead, stopped cars; she was about to plow right into them. She twisted the wheel, veering around them, punching through traffic in a flurry of car horns and squealing brakes. Clear road.
She pushed herself back into Lucia’s head, saw what Bakula was making her see. Car wreck, bodies sprawled, imprint on the side where Lucia’s body had impacted.
The wreck suddenly dwindled. Lucia was thrown off the road and through the wrought-iron fence of Karnstein Cemetery. The rails with their spear-tipped finials were knocked out of the fence by her body, like teeth in a heavyweight bout. When she tried to get up, the rails she had landed on rolled under her scrambling hands.
This is not funny… Cats doing people things, that’s funny…
The inhuman scream of metal on metal. The rear passenger door and cab of Mindy’s car were crumpled inward. She had run another red light, been sideswiped, and was sent into a spin. Off the gas. The tires clung to the pavement, trying to stop her, and did it in a huff of burning rubber. When she hit the gas, the car still drove.
She couldn’t help herself. She went back into Lucia’s head just in time to see Bakula stalking after her, casually ignoring a car as it just missed him, its side mirror snapping off on his shoulder. “You should’ve been here in the first place, Lucy! You belong dead! You’re a born victim, only breathing to make it to the bottom of a ditch. Run, dead girl! Run!”
Lucia ran. He followed. Constant as the North Star. They were heading north, and Mindy followed—passing bodies and wreckage and hoping there was something more at the end of the trail.
* * *
Lucia ran with the flow of traffic. Mindy, still riding along in her head, felt like she was on the world’s fastest motorcycle. Lucia cut between lanes, in front of cars, behind, between cars, past a Peterbilt and a few bikers, putting everything she could between herself and Bakula. He was unstoppable, barrelling after her, right through the cars, crumpling them like tinfoil as he ran them over. Then one side of the road was gone—replaced by a guard rail and a scenic view of the river.
El!
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
I really hope not.
Lucia stopped suddenly, digging in her heels to grind her Keds into a smear on the blacktop, and Bakula stopped before her. He looked at the water. Looked at Lucia. His smile made his teeth seem even longer.
“Fancy a swim?” Lucia asked.
He came for Lucia. She gathered herself, fists curled. Fighting angry made him even faster, but he telegraphed everything, swinging wildly—a choreography she could easily learn. She was head cheerleader for a reason.
Watching, Mindy could not even follow the blur of jumbled fists and arms, punches and blocks and counters like jackhammers drilling into each other. Knifing arms meeting each other like steel against steel. Lucia slipping aside, over, under, barraging him, a hundred punches into his ribs as his right hook caught air, another hundred into his face as his left cross went where she’d been a moment ago. But she was a rainstorm chiselling at a statue, and his rage couldn’t last forever. He cooled like molten lead, catching her fist as it bobbed for his nose. Then he simply picked her up and swung her out over the water.
Lucia fell, over the guard rail and the steep decline of the riverbank, down to the silvery ink of water at night, reflecting the stars but not her. Like a portal to another realm, the water exploded around her, into her. Her flesh coarsening into crysta
l, the crystal cracking, the cracks shattering. Thankfully, the water was shallow. She propelled herself out of the battery acid river and onto the riverbank like a scalded cat. She landed on all fours, her body trembling.
“Yes, honey, I’m afraid the swimming lessons were a waste of time.” Bakula came down the cliff-side like a spider. “A little running water, and it’s all over. Even you should be able to remember that…”
Lucia looked around. She was in a small cove, just a sprinkling of sand and a few cypress trees. Rock walls on either side of her.
Mindy didn’t like her chances. Climbing would slow her down, she’d never get past Bakula. She didn’t know how he was doing his Spider-Man act and wasn’t likely to figure it out before he reached her.
“I’m going to put you in the water, Lucy. Down among the dead things. And let the crabs have you.”
El, you have to run across the water.
“Okay, Minz, this is a situation where ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ does not apply…”
Run as fast as you can when you hit the water, just keep going. You’re going to have to slap the water with your foot, creating the support force of a pocket of air around your foot while you kick your shoes through the water to propel yourself forward. The Flash does it all the time.
“The Flash is a comic book character!”
Yeah, and you’re a vampire! It’s just like riding a bike. Don’t think, just go!
“Don’t think,” Lucia repeated. Alright, I’m good at that…
Bakula stepped off the cliff-face and onto the sand. He gestured her closer. Lucia crouched to the ground, ready to run.
Lucia, no, Lucia!
She ran, right at him, his arms spread wide to greet her. Two trains on the same track. A sand trail kicked up behind Lucia. She flew to him.
And at the last possible second, she swerved, sweeping back the other way, cutting a scar into the earth with her speed as she burned toward the river, hit it—her foot in the water, no support, no resistance… Don’t think, she told herself and swung her other foot forward, pumped it into the water, driving herself upward, forward. Just keep running. Another step. She was going to fall in. She was going to drown. It would burn like acid. No! She made a fourth step and a fifth and a sixth. She didn’t think. She just had to do. It was just another routine.
She streaked across the water, as light as the East Wind.
Oh, El, thank God that worked.
“You weren’t sure?”
Hell no, I just cited a comic book, for Christ’s sake. Get to the shore before you lose any momentum.
“We’re not going to the shore.”
Lucia—!
Down the river, Tate’s Creek Bridge waited, that old skeleton blood-stained with rust.
“I’ve got a plan!”
Let me guess, a bad one.
“Says the woman who dated a vampire.”
Alright, fine, the bridge. Can you get to shore now?
“I told you, we’re not going to shore.”
Then how—
The bridge pylons waited for her, concrete streaked green with moss.
“I’m going to run straight up it, just like the Flash.”
How do you—
“I watched the TV show.”
She hit the concrete and ran straight up it and heard Mindy laughing in her ear like they were riding a motorcycle together. She took the pylon three steps at a time, came up over the railing, and Bakula was there reaching for her throat. He slammed her into a truss so hard, the rivets popped. Then he ran her through the bridge’s pilings, bending them as easily as the tines on a fork before tossing her broken to the ground.
“You’re in there, aren’t you Mina?” He turned Lucia over with his toe and forced her eyes to meet his by wedging his shoe under her chin. “She’s got you locked away somewhere or running scared. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m a man of my word. Come to me, and none of your friends will die. I said you had until the end of the game. Well, Mina, the game is over. No more running.”
He drew his foot off Lucia’s chin, down her body, all the way to her knee. Then he stomped down.
Mindy let out a howl of pain and drove faster.
CHAPTER 31
She drove like she was still dreaming; everything just flowing by. Even the ambulances, even the cop cars, even the people packing their cars in the residential neighborhoods. There was no thinking to do. She wasn’t even afraid until her headlights glinted off the iron trusses. Then she thought, what if Lucia were dead? Mindy wondered how she would die without her heart? All at once or would she just crumble a little at a time?
The trusses cut the moonlight into shadowy slivers. Lucia and Bakula stood in the dark until Mindy pulled up, her headlights illuminating them. Lucia was kneeling before Bakula. He stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders. Mindy imagined him twisting her head right off if she so much as moved.
“You…children.” Bakula’s voice was almost completely gone, rasping out in a growl so deep that Mindy felt vibrate in her bones. “Raised by television, by movies, by books when you bother to learn how to read. You think of life as a playground.” Bakula was on a rant. “Everything is love triangles, choice, free will. No. We are what we are. We do what we do. Mindy, you and I are destiny. We are eternity. There is nothing else. Just me.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” Lucia said.
“Silence!” Bakula barked. “Out of the car.”
You shouldn’t have come, Minz. Get out of here.
Mindy unbuckled her seatbelt. Opened the door. She’d done something wrong; the car beeped like a time bomb in a movie. She couldn’t care about that right now. She stood outside it, staring at them down the beam of the headlights. “Let her go!”
Bakula drummed his fingers on Lucia’s shoulders. “Come closer first.”
Wait a minute… Think I’ve got an idea.
See? Facing the Prince of Darkness not so bad if I get to see that. Out loud, Mindy said: “What assurances do I have that she’ll be safe?”
“Mina. I’m a gentleman. The fact that I didn’t rip you out of your crumbling car the moment you put it in park should be proof enough of my good intentions.”
“Yeah, you’re a real humanitarian,” Lucia said. Bakula grabbed her by the hair and wrenched her head to the side.
“And you could’ve had it all, Lucy. Just like you said. We could’ve shared Mina. You both could’ve been my brides.”
“Dude, you’ve watched way too much Playboy Channel.” Mindy, I need a very loud noise.
Bakula flicked Lucia away with a distasteful snap of his wrist. “Enough of this. Mina. You can do this willingly or it can happen another way. All your other lives much preferred the willing way.”
Mindy wasn’t listening. A loud noise? El, he’s not a cat. He’s not just gonna run off!
I’ve got a plan. Trust me.
Mindy looked at Lucia. Lucia gave her a wink.
“You called my car a junker.”
Bakula looked askew. “What?”
“My car. I mean, you’re right. It’s a P-O-S that’s old enough to vote. It needs about a kazillion different repairs. Look, one of the headlights is brighter than the other, what’s up with that? And I did spend a little of my tip money on it. I didn’t fix the two windows that won’t roll down. I didn’t buy a new seatbelt to replace the one missing in the back. I didn’t even pay to get rid of that smell in the trunk. You wanna know what I did buy?”
Mindy reached inside the car. Spun the radio’s volume to the max, touched the number three preset, and finally hovered her finger over the power button. “A stereo system.”
Ozzy screamed out “Flying High Again.” Lucia raised her fists and slammed them hard down on the asphalt, shaking the entire bridge with pavement-cracking force.
Bakula was thrown off-balance; the bridge creaked and groaned. And the colony of bats exploded out from underneath the bridge like a broken dam.
Mindy threw herself back into
her car, shutting the door as the bats blindly slammed against the windows.
“You wanna know what team I’m on?” Lucia asked. Bakula grabbed her, but his hands closed on empty air. She had transformed into a bat—one of the hundred thousand filling the air.
He immediately dismissed her, wheeling on Mindy. He took a step toward her. “Mina…!”
Behind him, Lucia returned to human form. She drew her arm back, twisted her hip, shifted her weight; threw a punch that was worth a million dollars. Her fist stabbed between Bakula’s shoulder blades, driving into his body and out his chest. Dry meat hit Mindy’s car head-on. And, a small, black, twisted thing that might’ve once been a heart dribbled down the windshield.
“Team Mindy, you snaggletoothed fuck,” Lucia whispered in his ear. Then she realized she had her arm through a hole in his chest. “Oh, shit!” She pulled her hand free. “I didn’t know I could punch through people! Sorry! Sorry! You deserved it, though. Sorry!”
The storm of bats passed, and Mindy turned on her windshield wipers. The heart was batted off her windshield. She got out of the car. It laid at her feet, still beating.
Bakula was flagging. Mindy could see his clothes hanging off his body, his skin pulling tight to his bones, his eyes glossing over in a dull maroon. “Alright, Mina, I can see you’re not ready for a serious relationship…”
Mindy rested her foot on the heart. It beat against the heel of her Amanda Seyfried Collection ankle boots.
“Maybe we can try this again in a few years, when you’re a little more mature…”
Mindy shifted her foot. The heel on her shoe wasn’t very long, but it was enough inches for him.
“Mina—Mindy—I have gold…jewels… I can make you a very rich woman!”
Just a little pressure, at first.
“Tell me, what do you want?”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 37