by Allison Hurd
My sister laughs. “Hot damn! Vampire ghost wolf chupacabra! What’d that be? Wolpirecabra? Chupolf vampost?”
“Well don’t keep saying it, you might summon it.”
She laughs again while I dig around for water.
“Can we please not listen to something that sounds like I am in fact tripping balls on sleeping pills?”
“So what…want the radio?”
I glare at her. In this neck of the woods, it’s all Delilah and country music. I’m not sure which is worse. “Just...something else, please. Until I wake up.”
She shrugs and changes the song, guitars screaming as something metal starts. “Much better,” I approve, leaning back again.
We take turns driving straight through. Our system is pretty practiced at this point. About every hour, I can fall asleep for twenty minutes—maybe even twice in an hour, if it’s dark and the road conditions are perfect. After three of my naps, I can stay awake for three hours without needing to sleep. It means I get an hour for roughly every three my sister gets of shut eye, which is less than ideal. But our last honest work was over a month ago and funds are short for motel rooms where, frankly, I don’t really sleep much better anyway. I think sailors must feel the same way—that sleeping when you can’t sense movement is unsettling. We only stop for necessities, stretching, and trouble.
Straight through, it’s about forty hours, accounting for rest stops, and the seven fill ups we need to pay for to get there. Driving in this old gas guzzler, sometimes flying is cheaper, but the TSA ask so many questions about weapons, and checked baggage fees...oy. Who needs the headache?
We pull up in the outskirts of Roanoke, Virginia and into the cheapest motel that has a second story. We feel too exposed on the ground floor—there’s nothing like bringing your work home with you when you’re in the monster fighting industry. I’ve tried it a couple times now, and Lia and I agree that it’s best that we keep work at the office. Motels are only economical when you don’t need to pay for burned out mattresses or blood-stained carpets.
“Sweet lord in heaven, hallowed be thy name, a shower,” my sister says, making as if to race me to the bathroom.
“Go for it, I’ll do a perimeter check,” I reply, with a look of longing at the bed. “Focus, Summer,” I mutter to myself testily. I walk around, hanging our travel safety measures: dream catchers, cold iron, a small pat of butter in a bowl by the door and so on. Things for humans, too: a lens that fits over the fisheye in the door to project images of people outside onto my laptop, and a small shatter-proof glass pane secured by a tension rod that covers most of the window. It’s not super helpful for keeping determined things out, but it’s pretty good at catching a bullet or two and limiting the amount of glass in the room. I’m really tired of pulling glass out of wounds.
When I feel that my preparations are sufficient, which maybe not coincidentally coincides with Ophelia opening the door to the bathroom, I throw a pinch of salt over my left shoulder, grab my shower stuff and head in myself.
“What’s left?” my sister asks.
“The room should be about good to go. You get to choose: you can search for dinner, news reports, or work.”
“I am the luckiest girl on the planet, all those enticing options.”
“You bet your ass. Livin’ the dream.” I make a sarcastic face at her and close the door, avoiding the puddles she always leaves when she showers, but enjoying the warm steam already wafting around the small, tiled room.
I undress, careful of the hitch in my collarbone from when I broke it two years ago. I trace the scars on my hips and back, and feel for the earring that heats up and glows when trouble is near. I straighten the silver and iron cross around my neck, and move my spell pouch to the back of the toilet, within reach of the shower should I need it.
As soon as hot water touches me, I feel alive again. The road grunge, the aches and pains from sitting too long, the headache from insufficient sleep all fade away under the glorious water pressure. Leaving is hard, but my very exacting internal clock starts going into overdrive if I shower more than fifteen minutes, so with a sigh I turn the water off and towel dry.
“Which did you pick?” I call out as I pull on yoga pants and a thermal shirt. Silence. “Lia? Which did you pick?”
I instinctively reach for my earring again as I open the door. It’s not hot, which is a good sign, but Lia isn’t on her bed or anywhere else in the room, which is less good.
“Fuck!”
I grab my phone, my gun and the last of my cash before I run towards the door, trying not to panic. The previous close calls she’s had swarm to the forefront of my mind, and the worst possible scenarios vie for my attention. All of our wards are still in place. What could get past them?
CHAPTER 2
As I head down the stairs to the parking lot, I see the idiot I call my kid sister stepping out of our car. She waves cheerfully at me. My knees give out under me and I fall to the step, trying to slow my heartbeat.
“What’s wrong?” she has the nerve to ask. “Something after us?” She looks around suspiciously, hiding the knife she draws behind the take-out bags she’s carrying.
“Well, you’re certainly about to die,” I say when I regain breath enough to speak. “You can’t just wander out, Lia, I’ve told you. Definitely do bother me if you’re about to leave. Or at least leave a note for fuck’s sake. Jesus. I’m going to be grey by twenty-five, I swear to God.”
“I’m sorry! I saw a place down the street—thought I’d be back well within the eighteen minutes of peace I get when you shower. But then I got to talkin’ and though I may have added more grey to your head, I did get us both dinner and jobs and a few leads in under twenty minutes. I’m the best. You’re welcome.”
I stand back up and look at her warily. One of our mottos is, if it feels too simple, it’s because you don’t know everything about it yet.
“I can’t help but feel that maybe some of that isn’t the sort of news I’ll be happy about, but good work all the same.”
“Let’s eat first, and I’ll fill you in.”
I look down at the shirt that bags around my waist, and the hip bones you can see through my leggings. “Food is good.”
We go back to the room and sit on the floor with our backs to our respective beds. It may not be as comfy, but it doesn’t leave crumbs in the bed, and the one chair in every hotel room simply isn’t comfortable enough to fight over, most days.
“So, catch me up,” I say as I bite into the ham, egg, and cheese sandwich she brought me back. We’ve found that after several days of packaged food, easing back in through things like breakfast sandwiches is for the best.
“Hang on, let me get a bite, too.” I nod and we fall into contented silence again while we enjoy something that has exactly zero soy or chia in its ingredient list.
Soothed by carbs and cheese, I let out a sigh of contentment and allow some of the tension I didn’t realize I’d been carrying to release. I fix Ophelia with a patient stare while I wait for her to finish her sandwich.
“Okay. So the four girls are all part of Chi Kappa Kappa, which we may also be in, Idaho U. chapter.” She looks at me contritely.
I wave aside the implicit apology. “Suspicious. Go on.”
“They all disappeared after a night out...bar, mixer, kegger, bar.”
“Of course.”
“And, a couple of the girls at our new place of employment know all of them and saw them the nights they disappeared!”
“Hella convenient,” I allow, impressed at the break. “So, what’s the job?”
“Oop—I almost forgot! I got muffins! Coffee cake or chocolate chip?”
Muffins are my kryptonite. The timing of the offering should put me on guard, but I can’t help it; she’s gone right for my weak spot. It’s almost like she knows me.
“What the hell kind of question is that? We split them, and each have half of both.”
We navigate splitting the muffins serious
ly, using the age-old customs that separate the cutter from the chooser and settle back down to enjoy our treats.
“So,” I begin again, maw crammed with muffin. “What’s the job?”
She clears her throat. “Ah, beer tub girls?”
I lean back against the bed, staring at the ceiling above her head.
“Beer tub girls,” I repeat, trying the words out loud. Ophelia watches me carefully. We’ve done almost every menial job on the market out of necessity, but there are definitely some I prefer to avoid. Jobs involving hot pants, like the ones held by girls who pour beer and dance on platforms, being one of those.
“It’s sort of perfect, if you think about it,” she says as the silence stretches. “We get to mingle, see their Greek sisters, observe the big players, make pretty good cash…”
I nod along, still looking at the ceiling.
“And it’s not forever,” Lia concludes.
I look her in the eye. “Beer tub girls.” She fakes a too-big smile. “Well, that’s just super.”
The next day we get up and decide to scout out the campus, particularly Greek Row, where all of the fraternities and sororities keep houses.
“You ever miss not going to one of these things?” Lia asks me as we walk onto the quad.
“A campus? Lia, we’ve been to all fifty states. We’ve seen dozens of campuses. It’s not exactly new territory.”
“You know what I mean.”
When most of my peers were sitting for SAT’s and visiting local universities, I was tracking and subduing a vampire pack that had been looking to recruit Ophelia. When others in my graduating class came home for Christmas after their first semester at college, I was fighting to get one of my sister’s friends away from a counselor who turned out to be feeding on her night terrors. You really can’t expect any better from Germanic nightmare monsters.
I look at her and smile. “Nah. We’ve probably listened to more lectures than any of these sheep ever have, about more subjects than they’ll cover by their third change of majors.” I look around at the students sitting on the lawn, throwing Frisbees, repeating conjugations or arguing over last week’s insert-network-cable-show-here. “Plus, I’m only twenty-four. If I want this, I got time.”
We walk on in silence for a minute. “Why—do you?” I ask her.
She laughs again. “Yes. A place with lots of people who probably remember their childhoods, all running around talking about how they’re gonna start really living life once they ‘make it.’ Totally my scene,” she says sarcastically. “I’m already an artist, I don’t need people trying to learn to be like me to tell me how to be me.”
“That was a super bitchy art thing to say,” I tease as we walk up to the house for Chi Kappa Kappa. “I’d graduate you.”
I gotta say though, it is true about the artist thing. Lia’s sold around three thousand dollars’ worth of her work over the past couple of years. If we could sit still long enough to make any connections, she could probably do her own gallery show.
I ring the doorbell, and a lanky brunette answers the door.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“Hi! Me and my little are visiting my cousin here, and I had to stop by the local chapter!” I exclaim, introducing Lia as the new sorority pledge my persona is mentoring. “Summer, Chi Kappa Kappa, Idaho U chapter.”
“Oh, yay! I’m Katie, come on in!”
We enter the old Victorian house into a vibrantly green foyer.
“Great house,” I say, taking in the shockingly hued rooms radiating off the central hall. Lia raises her eyebrows significantly at me from behind Katie’s back.
“Aw, thanks! We have a couple sisters who are design majors? So every year one room gets an update. Taking into account, of course, the aesthetics of the sisters who all live here.”
“Oh, of course,” Lia adds brightly.
“This is my little, Lia.” We’ve decided to play this as sorority sisters rather than biological ones in order to gain the trust of our most promising witnesses.
“Well the two of you must, must, must come to our mixer tomorrow. It’s gonna be awesome,” Katie says. “Seriously, though,” she gets a little less bubbly and steps closer to me. “It’s sort of a bad time for the chapter. If you’re new, I wouldn’t want you getting into trouble.”
“What do you mean?” Lia asks.
“I mean…” Katie’s face falls. “I mean that four of us are missing right now...I don’t know who could do this. Chelsea and Brittany have been missing for almost a month.”
“Oh my God, that’s horrible,” I say. “What happened?”
“We don’t know. They all went out, people saw them throughout the night, they said they wouldn’t be home that night, and none of them have been seen since.” She looks at us worriedly and I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s been a really sucky time overall, but especially if you wanna get lucky,” she adds with a small laugh that turns into a shudder.
We commiserate a little longer and head back out into sunlight with promises that we’ll try to come to the mixer.
“Missing a month. That doesn’t sound great,” Lia remarks once we’re out of earshot.
“No joke. Kinda doesn’t sound like it’s our sort of thing after all. Maybe we should call in one of those people who interview serial killers.”
“Oh God, I hope we don’t need Charlize Theron or Tom Hardy to play anyone for the movie based on this.” Lia looks at the time on her phone. “Shit. It’s almost three, I told the manager that we’d both stop by to fill out paperwork and pick up our uniforms.”
“If it’s not our kind of deal, do we still need to show up for uniforms?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did you have some sort of emergency snub-the-tub money squirreled away somewhere I wasn’t aware of? Or perhaps you’ve converted the car to breathatarianism?”
“No, I ha— wait, what? Breathatarianism?”
“Yep. Some sort of new age cult that thinks that nutrients of all kinds are a hoax.”
“Darwin is right—not all of us are meant to pass on our genes.”
We head back to the motel to hooch up a little before going to the bar. Lia and I are highly trained in several key areas like firearms, hand-to-hand combat, knives, and various blunt-object weaponry. I’m a licensed electrician, and she’s got a knack for tech support. We both know first aid like the back of our scarred hands. We are also both pretty good at disguises, which is the macho word for “makeup artistry.”
Ten minutes later in skinny jeans and crop tops, fully coifed and painted, we peel out to the local college sports bar, Finnegan’s. A guy out front is dispiritedly washing down the sidewalk, but stops moving the hose as we walk up. I can imagine the effect. We’re both practically the same height, around five-four. She’s let her natural curl take over, tawny hair spiraling around a face that looks like it could have been a painting itself a hundred years ago—she has milky white, flawless skin, her makeup giving her the slight impression of permanent bedroom eyes. I have straightened my hair, my sun bleached highlights shining red in the late afternoon sun. I’ve pumped up my eyelashes so that my already oversized baby blues now look big enough to dive into, my deep red shirt emphasizing the tan I’ve encouraged from long hours outside.
We flash him near identical smiles—she’s got a slightly better cupid’s bow, I’ve got slightly fuller lips, but I don’t think most people notice that distinction as much as we do.
Inside is that strange smell of disinfectant, wet wood and beer that seems to attach itself to all dive bars.
“Lia,” a man in a short sleeve black button up shirt walks up to us, smiling and taking her in. “And this must be Summer,” he says turning to me. I see that I too pass the examination. I smile like I don’t notice that I’ve just been appraised.
“Thanks so much for letting us work here, Mister…”
“Steve, just Steve,” he says taking my outstretched hand. He gives a quick look of surprise when my grasp is too
firm for the normal serving wench—I mean beer tub girl. I always forget one detail. I throw in a small giggle, hoping that covers it back up. Lia shoots me a look of horror, like she thinks I may be having a stroke, which makes the laugh more genuine.
His smile widens again and he looks down at the podium to his side. “Here. Sorry girls, just some routine paperwork. You can sit at the bar and fill them out.”
We sit down and I take stock of the environment. You can see how it’s set up for happy hour now, with small high-tops giving people a place to store bags and set drinks. You can also see how those tables are meant to be moved to the edges of the floor when the bar starts really filling up in order to provide more space for awkward standing, and that there’s a separate area by the front raised platform for dancing. Around the room are four tall stools behind four enormous kegs of different beers. Our new domain.
We finish our paperwork as honestly as we can, sometimes copying answers from the other that seem more plausible, finessing responses to questions like “have you ever been arrested” and “were you ever fired?” Our lives are just a little too shades-of-grey to fit neatly into small boxes on such simple things as applications.
We finish our signatures ten minutes later as Steve comes back with a Lycra monstrosity that would make Hooters waitresses blush. It’s gonna be ever so much fun hunting monsters with my pants trying to cut me in twain.
“And uh, not that I’m saying anything about how you look, but the other girls advise that dressing to impress leads to noticeably greater tips, so, keep that in mind.” Steve looks at his phone. “Damn, we’re actually opening in half an hour, do you want to stick around? Get the tour, shadow some of the other servers through happy hour?”
“We would love that,” Lia quips, grinning with bewildered amusement at the uniform and back at me.
I give her a sour look, and we head to the bathroom to change. I start to put mine on, but my legs are pretty well scarred. Nothing too disfiguring, but there are small white marks that cover my knees, and an obvious animal scratch on my left calf, most noticeably. So, I make a covert trip to our car and fish around in the detritus that seems to accumulate in all lived-in vehicles. Bingo.