Bite Marks

by Jennifer Rardin

  Vayl shrugged. “That was a long time ago. And he deserved it.”

  I hid my surprise. Vayl had never told me he’d vanquished one of the hellspawn that’s often confused for a vampire. Though it would’ve been appropriate given that my mom had been married to one before she met my dad.

  As Raoul gave me a blade that felt like it had been designed by a guy who adored underfed redheads and I returned his own sword, he said, “Since the closest door between planes is just on the other side of your fence, we need to set up our—”

  He stopped as he heard the click of a regular door opening. Ruvin led his family down the hall and into the living room. The boys took one look at the weaponry on the floor and in our hands, exclaimed, “You beaut!” and began asking questions one after the other.

  LAAL: “Are those swords real?”

  PAJO: “Are you going to cut people’s heads off?”

  LAAL: “Can I hold one?”

  PAJO: “Are you going to cut people’s arms and legs off?”

  LAAL: “What’s in the cans?”

  PAJO: “What about their knees? People can live without their knees ya know. My grampa had his replaced.”

  Tabitha shushed them both. “They’re all just movie props,” she said. And even when Laal stared up at her doubtfully she trucked on. “I told you, these people are from Hollywood and they’re filming a movie, which we have been a part of all this time.”

  “Where were the cameras?” demanded Laal. “And the microphones?”

  “All hidden,” she said. “They wanted it to be more like a reality show, which was why they didn’t give us scripts either.”

  Seriously? You’re lying through your teeth and somehow you think that’s going to hurt your kids less than the crap they’ve just been through? What a crock! I suddenly realized that was what had made my relationship with Albert so strained. Who wants to cuddle with a dad who’s not only gone half your life, but a lot of times won’t even tell you where he’s headed? It wasn’t enough that he was a Marine. Or that later he’d worked for the CIA. Lies by omission are still lies. The worst kind, in fact, because they never give you the chance to challenge them.

  Ironic that you are so good at weaving them, is it not, my queen?

  Shut up, asshole.

  While I stewed, Vayl introduced Ruvin and his family to Cole and Raoul. When I began to pay attention again he was in the middle of setting up an escort.

  “—concerned that they should reach the airport safely,” he was saying. “Perhaps one or two of us should ride with them.”

  When nobody spoke up right away, he pointed to Bergman. “What do you say, Miles? It would remove you from Ground Zero, so to speak.”

  While Bergman debated, Tabitha said, “I won’t hear of it. You people have gone above and beyond what anyone should do for complete strangers. We can make our way from here.”

  Ruvin looked at her doubtfully, but something in the set of her chin must’ve convinced him because he said, “The wife’s right. You’ve done more than your share. Now it’s our turn.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Vayl went quiet after Laal and Pajo left. He didn’t seem to notice my struggle to shove Brude out of every stray thought. He ignored Bergman’s announcement that Astral was almost finished. Just brooded and helped Raoul, Cole, and I bring the patio furniture around front onto the driveway.

  We were setting the last chairs in place when Miles said, “That’s the last adjustment.” He set Astral down onto the table and slowly drew his arm back. When she didn’t topple onto her side he sighed with relief.

  “Great!” I glanced at the living room window to make sure our cat killer was safely out of range. Jack stood inside with his nose pressed against the glass, trying to see past the shrubbery to figure out if he was in trouble or if we were just keeping him safe from passing cars and incoming demons. “Is she, uh, screwed on tight?” I asked.

  “I think so.” He set her on the table just in time to keep his sword belt from falling down around his knees. As he hitched it up he said, “I’ve put her through all her tests and she’s functioning at acceptable levels in every aspect.”

  Cole gracefully flipped his sword out of the way just before dropping into a chair. “That’s great news, kitty!” he said, talking directly to the robot like she was a real, live pet. “Now you’re a Sensitive like me and Jaz. Can you say Lazarus?”

  “Hello!” said Astral.

  “Watch out!” Cole grabbed the arms of his chair and jumped his feet from the front to the back so he ended up crouching, holding it in front of him like a lion tamer facing down a particularly scary customer. He wasn’t the only quick reactor. When I looked down I realized I’d pulled Grief without even thinking. And Vayl had dropped the temperature in our vicinity at least ten degrees. Only Bergman and Raoul seemed relatively calm. Maybe Raoul didn’t know Astral wasn’t supposed to talk like Long John Silver’s parrot. And Bergman just kept shaking his head.

  He said, “Astral, what’s going on? Your voice-recognition program hasn’t been initiated.”

  Astral said, “Hello!”

  Raoul said, “How interesting. Her mouth’s making just the right movements.”

  Bergman said, “Astral, shut down voice program until further notice.”

  Astral’s ears started twitching. Two seconds later they began emitting the worst music I’d ever heard in my life. Again. “It’s the gnome band!” I said as Raoul slammed his hands over his ears.

  Vayl’s eyebrows crooked. “Bergman, make it stop.”

  Miles reached for the cat, nearly lost his belt again, and compromised by unsheathing the sword. While he lightened his load, the rest of us watched his invention.

  She didn’t seem to be melting down. It was more like she’d piped the music in for her own enjoyment. Her tail began to twitch with the downbeat. Then she began to circle the tabletop, pausing every few steps to have some sort of all-body seizure.

  Cole chuckled. “She’s dancing!”

  “It’s not funny!” said Miles. “Astral, shut down your voice program.”

  The music stopped and she sat down. After a moment Vayl began to speak. We all turned to him. But his lips weren’t moving.

  “So is that how you want it, my pretera?” I turned back to Astral, realizing she was playing back another moment she’d recorded. Vayl, his voice low and suggestive, getting ready to bare all for me.

  Holy shit!

  I reached for her, ready to pop her head again myself, but Bergman was too fast. He dumped the sword on the table and swiped her off of it.

  “I’ll fix her, I promise!” he said, his voice high enough to qualify as a squeal.

  “Don’t you dare!” Cole was laughing so hard he’d dropped the chair. Even Raoul was having a hard time keeping a straight face.

  “Perhaps if you could encourage her to play a form of music we could all bear?” Vayl suggested. Something in his voice caused me to spin around. Yup, no mistaking that glitter in his eyes.

  “I am not amused,” I growled.

  He leaned in so only I could hear. “That is only because you did not get to see the end of the show. I promise you, it will be worth the wait.”

  Eeep! I forgot my embarrassment in the sudden rush of anticipation.

  “Okay, Bergman,” I said. “Astral’s off the hook if you can get something reasonable to come out of her mouth within the next three minutes. If not, I’m stuffing her in an Express Pak and Fed-Exing her to Zimbabwe.”

  Bergman nodded gratefully. Slinging the shield he carried over his shoulder, he pulled a set of miniature tools out of his shirt pocket and yanked his chair as close to the table as his scarecrow frame would allow. I sighed.

  On the positive side, Cassandra was relatively safe, hiding deep beneath the Space Complex’s guest quarters. Only, knowing her, she wouldn’t be content just curling up in an abandoned storage cave. Nope, she’d probably had half a dozen visions and acted on every one, making herself twice as many
friends (and probably a few enemies) in the process.

  On top of worrying about her, the whole job-satisfaction rating had plummeted as well. Because lately it seemed like all we did was clean up after, around, and before ourselves. In fact, my muscles had already begun to ache from the heavy lifting we’d done in anticipation of the next few minutes. Because preparing for a demon attack is like getting ready for a party without the happy thoughts. Or the sneaky snacking.

  The most important part was preparing for the portal crossing. They’d know about the door, of course, all others did. Weird to think they’d always been there, that I must’ve walked past hundreds of them without even realizing. Because I’d only begun to see them after a powerful creature named Asha Vasta had boosted my Sensitivity by brushing my cheeks with his tears. I still didn’t know much about them though. It took Raoul to explain that the fence boards might buckle when the lima bean cans exploded. An acceptable loss. But that didn’t mean the play sets on the other side had to be destroyed too. So we’d moved them out of blast range. The kids’ indoor toys had already survived flying bodies. We figured asking the outdoor stuff to withstand shrapnel was going too far.

  Since we’d lucked into a seminatural setting with the line of trees that separated the property from the hills, we capitalized on it. After rubbing mud on the cans to take the shine off, we made piles of brush to disguise them on either side of the door. They looked natural, like a dumping site where the owners had thrown the sticks out of their yard so they could mow. Raoul took the majority of the cans into the plane where we meant to lure the demons and Bergman rigged an ingenious trigger system for both sets. The one on the outside went off at a code word. The one on the inside exploded when you stepped inside the door. So anyone who went in from our group would have to jump and roll.

  Raoul picked Bergman and Cole for that job, since he said they had the juiciest souls.

  (At this point Cole got Bergman to do a bump and grind with him while Cole sang, “We are juiceee!”)

  He stopped singing when Raoul threw them both a set of full-body armor. It was a lot like the kind I’d worn in my battle with the Magistrate. Clung like a leotard. Protected like Kevlar. It would keep everything but their faces and hands safe from flying debris. It also made them look like blueberries.

  “Jaz needs some!” Cole had protested.

  “I only have two,” Raoul said. “Besides, Vayl has them covered.” He turned and raised his eyebrows at my boss. Was that a twinkle in his eye when he said, “Right, Vayl?”

  It must’ve been, because Vayl stirred uncomfortably before he replied, “Our protection is in place.”

  I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but the don’t-go-there sign was flashing on his forehead, and I was still having too much fun razzing Cole and Bergman about their blueman suits.

  So we went back to discussing our options, since the whole setup wouldn’t work unless it didn’t look like a trap in the first place. In the end we decided to summon our enemies. Show them one hand. Slap them with the other.

  Vayl and Raoul took seats at the head and foot of the table. When they were in position, I sat to Vayl’s left. I pulled up my right sleeve, unstrapped the syringe of holy water I usually kept tucked there, and laid it on the table in front of me. Cole, already parked beside Bergman, had been watching my preparations. Now he raised his eyebrows as Astral began doing a remarkably good cover of “Survivalism” by Nine Inch Nails.

  Miles bobbed his head and kept the beat against his thighs until he realized we were all staring. “What?”

  I began quoting lyrics. “I got my propaganda I got revisionism… All a part of this great nation?”

  He shook one of his fingers at me. “You know better than to trust your government. Or any government for that matter. Which is the best reason yet why you should dump the CIA and throw in with me. They’ve already gone crooked on you once.”

  When I started to protest, he added fingers until his whole hand was raised. “Don’t try to tell me Senator Bozcowski was some kind of blip. He was a rotten apple in a crate of wormy fruit. And he nearly got you killed back in Miami, not to mention what he had planned for the rest of the country! They’re all on the take. Which is why I’ll work with them, but not for them.”

  Cole leaned forward. “I think you need to wipe your mouth there, Bergie. You’re frothing at the corners.”

  “None of you can tell me I’m wrong!” Bergman insisted, though he did press his sleeve against his mouth.

  “Of course we can,” Vayl said, the absolute stillness of his posture a peaceful counterpoint to Bergman’s seat-wriggling passion. “The very extremity of your position makes it questionable.”

  “Plus, you’ve forgotten the most important point,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Bergman asked.

  “Those government pukes you’re so afraid of are our employees. And if they piss enough of us off, we’ll fire them.”

  “It’s not that easy!”

  “Sure it is. Happens all the time. You’re just mad about a lot more things than the rest of us.”

  “What if something terrible goes down? What if the entire cabinet gets infested with demons and starts some sort of coup?”

  I leaned forward. “Just watch what we do next, and you should have some idea how much patience we’d have with an executive office full of possessed administrators.”

  At a nod from Vayl, Cole pulled his sword and cocked it over one shoulder like a ball bat. Raoul and I both had belts, his at his waist, mine at my back. We also drew.

  Seeing all the metal put Bergman back in his seat. “I get your point,” he said.

  Vayl rolled his cane between his fingers as if it helped him think. He said, “Then shall we move on?”

  We nodded.

  Cole began. “Kyphas, drop everything and come flying.”

  “Kyphas, do not delay, we require your presence, your visage, your favor,” said Vayl. He took the syringe off the table.

  “Kyphas, rise quickly to our circle,” I said as I pulled Raoul’s blade across my forearm and let the blood drip on the ground between my feet.

  “Blood to the hellspawn,” I murmured.

  “Nema,” chorused Cole, Vayl, and Bergman.

  We all spat over our left knees.

  As we knew it would, the thrice-naming brought a feeling of electricity into the air that raised the hairs on our arms and made the backs of our necks itch. We rose together. Bergman and Cole strained to see into the night. Not a problem for the rest of us. Vayl and Raoul had natural abilities. Mine had come at a price I often questioned.

  But it was almost worth it all to be able to see my blood and our separate puddles of spit merge and flow to a spot in the middle of the yard, like the driveway had tipped sideways, forcing all the liquid into the parched grass. The puddle expanded to the size of a manhole cover and Kyphas shot out of it. She landed badly, flopping onto the lawn like a beached dolphin.

  Vayl threw the syringe into the middle of the summoning circle, shattering it. The holy water it contained boiled instantly, barring the gateway. But even our vampire wasn’t fast enough to prevent a few of Kyphas’s allies from flying through first.

  “Slyein!” I yelled as I recognized the unlined faces of hell’s scum. The kid killers.

  In life they’d been adults. Moms and dads, truck drivers and CEOs, fanatics who didn’t give a crap who died in the blast. In death they’d been doomed to the bodies they’d destroyed. Eternal youth screaming for the chance to grow up. Dream on. Fulfill.

  The rage they brought to battle made them even harder to fight than their aerial capability, which could be awkward given the bloody rips they’d torn in their own wings. Self-mutilation. One of the sure signs that the creature you were fighting wasn’t hellborn. Only the originals weren’t subject to torture. Which made them harder to injure and, ultimately, destroy.

  Still, we’d be lucky to survive the onslaught of the three monsters who’d followed Kyp
has through the gateway before Vayl closed it. A girl with spiked black hair and eyes rimmed in purple, a blond boy whose reddened teeth showed he’d just been feasting on raw flesh, and a toddler with white curls and long black lashes who might’ve been a girl, except he wore a blue jumper with the words “I’m a good boy,” stitched across the front.

  “No,” muttered Miles. “Can’t be.” He swiped his sword off the table. “Slyein?” His voice crept higher while he stalked toward Kyphas, who was halfway to her feet and already reaching for her hat. “You dare to bring those fuckers here?”

  “Miles, no!” I yelled. “You need to run!”

  We all do! Look, see? Raoul’s trying to lure them toward the trap. Follow him! No, you—this wasn’t the plan and you know it!

  Ignoring me, he swung at Kyphas, who easily avoided his attack since he’d telegraphed it half an hour earlier.

  I snapped, “Astral, protect Bergman!” fully realizing it might be an empty command. But my hands were full with the female slyein. With Vayl fighting the male and Cole trying to deal with the toddler, that left Raoul to save the crazed genius. And he’d only just realized nobody had followed him to the corner of the house.

  As he rushed back to us, I slashed at the female’s wing, forcing her to abandon her first run at me. That gave me a second to check on Miles. Kyphas’s hat, which had done its boomerang trick, was just about to hit him. He turned aside, clearly forgetting that his shield still hung over his shoulder. The boomerang thumped against it, causing him to stagger backward, but doing no major damage.

  Astral leaped into the air, snagging the boomerang between her teeth before it could return to its owner’s outstretched hand. At the same time, George Thorogood and the Destroyers began rocking “Bad to the Bone” out the sides of her mouth. Talk about multitasking! Those metal alloy jaws clamped down and refused to let go, even when George kept insisting he was “b-b-b-b-b-bad,” and her weight wasn’t enough to stop the spin of the weapon.