“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 then 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.”
“Sure,” he mumbled. He handed me the blanket without looking at me. I don’t think he was looking at anything. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders.
I think he might be in shock, I thought.
And then I passed out.
*
When I came to, I was sitting on the last bench seat in the van, leaning against Dom’s shoulder. In fact, we were all in the van, and headed back into the city. By all, I mean me, Nick, John, Dom, Tony, and Malcolm. And a strange young man tied up in the back of the van. Hog-tied. With a gag shoved into his mouth.
“Who’s that?” I asked no one in particular.
“Tony’s lab experiment,” Dom said.
“Yeah? Where you planning to keep him?”
“I’ll lock him in one of the rooms,” Tony said.
“In the shop?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Couldn’t we kill him first?”
“We already went through all this while you were out,” John said from the driver’s seat. “Tony wants to see if he can figure out how the vamps tick—he wants to check out how much poison they’ve got, how they deliver it, and what exactly hurts them. He needs one alive to do that.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess.” I snuggled back down into the blanket that was still wrapped around me. “Are we going to kill it when you’re done?”
“That’s the plan.”
I nodded and closed my eyes again. They snapped open again a moment later. “What did you guys do with Deirdre’s head?”
“We left it where you dropped it,” Nick said from the front seat. “I didn’t think you needed it any longer.”
“Won’t someone find it?” I asked. “Like the police or something?”
“I’m guessing that at least some of those humans upstairs will stick around long enough to clean up after us. They don’t want the police finding all those dead bodies any more than we do.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Is she okay?” I heard Malcolm whisper to Tony.
“I think so. She’s in shock, and that neck wound needs stitches. But other than that, I think she’s fine.”
“You don’t think that business with the head was a little,” Malcolm paused for a long moment, “…weird? I mean, you don’t think she’s lost her mind or anything, do you?”
“I heard that,” I said.
“I think she’s going to be just fine,” Tony said. I could hear a smile in his voice.
When we got back to the shop, John helped me climb out of the van and into the elevator. Dom and Nick carried the bound vampire by sliding some sort of stick—it looked like a broom handle—through the ropes and swinging him from it. They looked like the old pictures of people who had gone hunting for boar. When they got to the elevator, they slid him off of the pole and onto the floor. He bounced and grunted. Malcolm winced.
“Is it really necessary to hurt him?” he asked. The elevator door closed and I felt us begin our ascent.
“He’s a vampire,” Dom said. “Who cares if we hurt him?”
“Yeah, but he used to be a person,” Malcolm said. “I kind of got to know him over the last couple of days.”
“He’s not a person anymore,” Nick said. “And he’s certainly not the person you knew. If we let him, he’d kill every last one of us. Drain us dry. You can’t think of him as a person; he’ll use it against you if he can.”
The vampire glared up at us. His eyes, totally black, promised death. Nick was right. He wasn’t a person.
*
I called first dibs on the shower, since I was far and away the filthiest one of the group, but Tony insisted upon stitching up my neck first.
“You’re going to end up with a lot of battle scars,” he commented as he pulled the thread through the numbed skin around the wound.
“I guess I’m just going to have to give up my dream of becoming Miss America,” I said. Tony didn’t laugh.
By the time I got to the shower, much of the blood on my body had dried. I had to stand in the shower for a while to soften up my t-shirt so I could peel it off. I dropped it directly into the trash can. It took a long time to scrub the encrusted blood out from under my fingernails. And no matter how hard I scoured my skin or how hot I ran the water, I just didn’t feel clean. In the end, I borrowed a bottle of isopropyl alcohol from underneath the sink and poured it directly onto my body. I found a lot of little scrapes I hadn’t noticed until then that way—the alcohol burned like fire.
Cleansing fire.
I stepped out of the bathroom feeling better than I had in weeks. Better than I had since I had come home and found Greg in the arms of a vampire.
In fact, I felt so good that I didn’t even think to wonder about Greg until the next morning. I was pouring coffee in the kitchenette when John wandered in, and suddenly it hit me.
“Hey. John. Did you kill my ex for me last night?”
“Oh, that’s right. You were out when I got back.”
“So?”
“Nope. I didn’t find him. It was pretty much full dark by the time I got up there, so he probably took off. You worried about him finding you?”
I considered that. “You know what? I’m not. I mean, maybe I should be—he does know where I live, after all—but I’m really not. Do you think I should be?”
John laughed. “After last night, I don’t know anyone who should be less worried. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of you throwing open that basement door and standing there swinging that head at us.”
“Yeah. I half expected you to let out some wicked warrior yell.”
I snickered. And before I knew it, John and I were both howling with laughter, holding on to the counter and wiping tears away from our eyes.
It wasn’t even that funny. I think we were laughing more from relief than anything. We had taken on Deirdre and her vampire army, and we had won. It was a fabulous feeling.
Later that day, Nick pulled me aside.
“Elle, Pearson wants to talk to you again,” he said.
“What does he want?”
“I think he wants to offer you a job.”
“Really? What kind of job?” I was honestly confused.
“Here. With us. Killing vampires.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I hadn’t considered it.”
Nick just shook his head. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“Understand what?”
“How rare it is to find someone who is willing to do what it takes to survive in this business.”
“Business?”
“You know what I mean, Elle. Quit stalling.”
And I did know what he meant. I didn’t know if I really did have whatever it was he was looking for in a vampire-killing employee—at least, not in the long term—but I did know that I felt stronger and more alive, right then on that day, having hunted and killed who knew how many vampires the night before, than I had ever felt before in my life.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, my voice serious. “Give me a few days and I’ll get back to you on it.”
Nick nodded.
*
Malcolm stopped me in the hall on my way back to my room. “I don’t really know how to put this,” he said.
I frowned and leaned back against the wall. “I can handle whatever you need to say, Malcolm.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I know we’re not dating or anything. But I think you know how I feel about you. How I felt about you.”
Ouch. I didn’t like the switch to the past tense.
“But after everything that’s happened, I think that maybe…” he paused and took another deep breath. “I think that maybe it would be a good idea if we didn’t see each other for a while. I just don’t know if I can handle all of this.” He waved his hand around. I knew he meant the shop, the guys, all of it.
“I did my part,” he said. “I went back in there. And now I’m out and it’s over and I think I need a break from all of it.” The last sentence came out in a rush of words, and then he was silent. Staring at me. Waiting for me to say something.
Finally I nodded. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay? That’s it? Just okay?”
“I don’t know what else to say, Malcolm. I didn’t want any of this either. But it’s here and I know about it and I can’t do anything about that. And Nick’s offered me a job—a permanent job—with these guys. I don’t know if I’m going to take it, but I am thinking about it.”
Malcolm just stared at me.
“Because the thing is,” I said, “the thing is this: there are monsters out there. Real ones. The ones who eat people up. The kinds that the police won’t find. And nobody knows about it. But I do.”
I took a deep breath. Suddenly I realized that I had already made my decision. “I can make a difference here,” I said. “I can do something that’s real, that’s important. So yeah, if you need to get away from ‘all this’”—I waved my hand around in an imitation of his earlier gesture—“then you’re right; you do need to take a break from seeing me. And the only thing I can think of to say is ‘okay.’”
I pushed myself up from against the wall.
And then I went to find Nick to tell him what I had decided.
*
I found Tony before I found Nick. When I pushed open the door to his lab, he was looking down speculatively at the unconscious vampire strapped to the examining table.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine.” He didn’t even look up.
“Problems?”
“I’m having a hard time figuring out what to use to knock him out tonight. I moved him onto the table this morning while he was still out for the day, but I want to get some work done tonight, and I don’t want to get my hand bitten off.” He didn’t look up at me as I left.
A few seconds later, I opened the door again and tossed him the stun baton I’d taken from the weapons room. Startled, he reached into the air and caught it seconds before it landed on the vampire.
“Stun him,” I said. “It’ll knock him out for at least a few minutes. Any time he gets any ideas about biting you, stun him again. He might eventually get the idea and lie still.”
Grinning at me, Tony said, “Thanks,” and I pulled the door closed behind me.
I was still smiling when I knocked on Nick’s office door and he called out for me to come in.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“Okay. I’ll do it. But we need to talk terms. I still want to finish my doctorate.”
A smile creased Nick’s face. “No problem.” He leaned back and kicked his feet onto his desk.
By the time I headed back to my room, I was an employee of Calvani Investigations, a subsidiary of Forster, Pearson, and Sims, Attorneys at Law.
Chapter 25
Nick and I decided that I should sign on as a part-timer, at first. And that I would start in the summer, after I had finished the semester.
I decided that if my job was going to be this weird, I wanted to keep the rest of my life as simple as possible. So I started doing all those things I had avoided while being stalked by Greg. I moved out of the shop and back into my own apartment. I invited a group of my grad-school friends over for dinner in the evening and made my favorite New Orleans Cajun food: gumbo and shrimp etouffee—I would have made crawfish etouffee, but I couldn’t find fresh crawfish in New York.
Jenna pulled me aside during the evening and said, “I’m so glad to see that you’re back to your old self. I know that the breakup with Greg and… well, you know, everything that happened, was really hard on you. It’s nice to see that you’ve come out the other side of it and are feeling better.”
And she didn’t even know the half of it.
I went back to all my classes, explained to my professors that I had been absent so much recently because of the breakup. It was a little embarrassing—some of them seemed to think my excuse was thin. But I didn’t care what they thought as long as they let me finish out the semester.
As far as I was concerned, my life was great. None of the other big bad vampires knew where I was, and I was quite certain that I could take out any newbie vamp who came along. Including Greg. And if I couldn’t handle something on my own, I could always call Nick and the guys.
So that was my state of mind the night I got jumped beside the playground across from Middle School 45 in the Bronx, three weeks after we had cleaned out Deirdre’s den.
I had walked down to Modern Groceries to pick up a few essentials: milk, eggs, root beer, Pringles—the usual. I was walking back up the street toward my apartment building, swinging the plastic grocery bags and humming tunelessly to myself. I had plans to go home, snuggle up with Millie the cat, and stare at my television all night long.
I didn’t even notice the figure lurking in the shadows behind the fence. Have I mentioned how much I hate it that vampires can hide in shadows?
He jumped out at me from the opening in the fence just as I was passing by. As usual, I didn’t scream—just let out a little squeak. I did, however, drop all my groceries instantly and scrabble for my knife.
This vampire was big and ugly. All the vampires that Deirdre had kept around her had been beautiful. Even Greg was attractive, much as I hate to admit it now. But this guy had squinty little eyes and an enormous nose stuck in the middle of a pock-marked face.
I would just hate to go through eternity with po
ck-marks.
He moved back inside the fence and I followed him.
We circled each other on the concrete playground, just like those guys who do those cheesy fake wrestling shows, each of us waiting for an opening, a chance to take the other one out.
He lunged at me and I ducked, then spun around to meet him.
I love my knife with its vampire-killing wood inlay on the blade. I adore it. It’s perfect. It’s all sharp and pointy and slides right into vampires’ hearts—especially when they’re new and slow and have the fighting skills of a frog. From the time we entered the schoolyard, it took me about fifteen seconds to slam my lovely knife into his chest. He looked from it to my face, a bemused, almost hurt expression passing through his eyes.
Then he fell over.
I pulled my knife out of his heart and wiped the blade off on his pants leg. A gush of blood followed.
That’s when I called Nick, propped up the dead vampire, and settled in to wait for the guys to come to my rescue.
So there I was, hanging out in the playground where moments ago I had been attacked. The worst part of it was knowing that there were more vamps out there in the dark, maybe even watching me right at that very moment. The hairs on the back of my neck kept tingling in that way that’s supposed to signify that you’re being watched. In my case, I was pretty sure it just signified that I was totally creeped out.
Eventually, though, I moved around so that the big dead vampire was covering my back. And I mean that literally. I spread his legs and plopped myself down right between them so that I was leaning up against his chest, big bloody post-mortem wound and all. Ruining my shirt was the least of my worries. At least this way no one would stab me between the shoulder blades.
And hey, maybe anyone driving by would think we were just a couple of kids sitting in the playground enjoying the late-summer night air. Or making out. Whichever. As long as none of the passers-by thought, “Oh, my God. There’s a woman sitting on the lap of a big dead vampire,” I’d probably be okay.
Truth be told, that was just about the longest half-hour of my life up to that point.
Second longest. Right after the half-hour Deirdre and Greg spent sucking my blood. Anyway, this one was right up there.
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