by Night, H. T.
“But you want to know what really gave away that you’re a vampire?”
She must have broken into my apartment and found the blood hidden in my refrigerator, or maybe she’d figured out what the secret compartment in my trunk was for. And if I had my usual powers, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I would have punched, ripped, and bitten my way through the crowd. Now that there was no Lilith to save, I had lost my direction.
“Next time,” Parker said, “don’t get perfect scores on your history tests. Not that there’s going to be a next time.”
Then Erasmus raised the thing he’d been holding, and I could see it was a beautifully crafted, silver-tipped wooden stake, the gilded handle beset with jewels. Somebody had put a lot of craft into making the stake, and the wood was darkened with age and—
Something that might have been the blood of all the victims who had gone before me.
They were going to kill me, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. “I threw in that bit about the drained body just to make sure,” Parker said, her words coming to me as if through a wall of gauze. “A normal person would have said, ‘What do you think did it, a vampire?’ But you didn’t even joke about it.”
“A dead girl’s no laughing matter,” I said.
“Neither is a dead cult member in the basement,” Erasmus said. To Parker, he said, “Sometimes I suspect you have clairvoyant powers in addition to possession and shapeshifting.”
“The hero thing,” she said. “All we had to do was have ‘Lilith’ send Hero Boy to the rescue, and somebody was going to get hurt. Since we didn’t know which guy he’d hit, we had them all contaminated with garlic and a bellyful of holy water. No problem to them, except for their bad breath, but you couldn’t resist the impulse to feed. Funny that your undead hunger is going to lead to your second death.”
Garlic and holy water. And I’d drunk from the neck of one of them. That’s what had hit me—vampire kryptonite. A couple of the cult members grabbed me on each side, and I tried to fight them off, but I was as weak as an anemic kitten. I looked at them to discover they were teen girls, pretty frail themselves. My self-esteem took a big nosedive.
They guided me to the chair and sat me down, and my head was so heavy I could barely hold it up. Then it flopped backward and I found myself staring way up at the ugly stone face of the demoness.
I was starting to figure it all out. It wasn’t Lilith they’d wanted for the sacrifice.
It was me.
“This is a big honor, Spider,” Parker said. “You could have gone on forever, hiding away, moving from place to place, surviving on stolen blood. And it would have been a meaningless existence. This way, you get to be part of something bigger.”
Erasmus moved in from the left, holding the wooden stake in a ceremonial position, while Parker moved in from the other side, with a crystal chalice in her hand.
“This way,” Parker said, “you get to serve.”
I wasn’t Catholic by any means, but I guessed the intent. Erasmus would jab his fancy stick in me, Parker would collect my blood, and as I died for the second time, the crowd would pass around the chalice and share a sip. I didn’t know what would happen then. Maybe they expected it would make them live forever.
Or maybe it would give their chants enough power to bring that big stone bitch to life.
I imagined it stomping down the main street in the town where I’d had my last Virgin Mary, probably with Parker inhabiting the stone and serving as the creature’s heart and soul and mind. Parker’s evils and sociopathic soul in an immortal, invincible body.
Holy shit, the trouble she could cause.
And all I could do was sit on my ass while the world ended.
Chapter Twenty-three
At least, that’s what I wanted them to think.
Truth was, I had very few options. In the past, most of their vampire victims had no doubt been rendered nearly catatonic thanks to the holy water/garlic cocktail of blood.
Trust me, I was almost there, too, but I doubted they had faced a vampire as old as me—and as versed in, well, being a vampire. You see, being a vampire doesn’t come with a handbook, and for the most part, no one shows you the way.
You just get by, feeling your way through your new undead life night after night, year after year, decade after decade, figuring it out as you go.
Well, I’ve figured out a few things in my time. And time is just what you need to figure some of this stuff out, too. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is great entertainment, and I had read it with interest back in the day. Although I was amused at all the inaccuracies, the man did get a few things right, and one of them would prove helpful now if I could just summon enough strength.
That was a big if.
As the two girls held my arms down, it was all I could do to keep my head from lolling forward. Through my blurred vision, I could see Parker grinning. For that matter, I could see Erasmus grinning, too. No doubt everyone was grinning at the idiot vampire on stage.
Did all these girls know what was truly about to go down? I doubted it. More than likely they thought this was part of the show. A ritualistic interpretation of a sacrifice, like what had happened with “Lilith” earlier when Erasmus snipped a lock of her hair. Little did they know that a real vampire was meant to die tonight. And if they did know, they were too bombed out of their brains to do much about it—or even remember.
Plus, all those teenybopper Twilight fans aside, most people prefer their vampires with a stake in the chest.
Erasmus stepped before me. Apparently, he was going to do the honors. Parker stepped to the other side. Her eyes, I saw, were unnaturally big. Too big to be human.
I’d really stepped in it this time.
Did I really think the stone statue would come alive behind me? I didn’t know. I suppose when you’re dealing with demons anything could happen.
Did I think that Parker had a crazy bloodlust that made my own seem tame? Yeah, I did. I’ve seen a few demons in my time, and their agenda is always the same: create havoc, destroy lives, gorge on humanity. Not necessarily in that order. Their power is also misleading. They promise the world, when, in fact, all they can do is create trouble.
I thought I heard a slow drum beating somewhere, until I realized it was my own heartbeat thumping steadily in my ears. It was my sluggish warning system reminding me that something bad was about to happen.
Ya think?
It was then that Erasmus raised the bejeweled stake high overhead. Parker lowered her head, her lips brushing my ears. “Bye-bye, Spidey. It was fun knowing you.”
Erasmus spun the stake in his hand, reversing his grip, and plunged it down into my chest—and he couldn’t have been more surprised when his hand went through my chest. All the way through and out the back. He stumbled when he was met with no resistance...and would have stumbled into me, except he stepped right through me.
The crowd gasped. Parker drew back, furious.
You see, Bram Stoker’s Dracula had gotten a few things right, and one of them was this: vampires—or at least some vampires—can turn into something other than monstrous bats.
We can turn into mist.
Or a semblance of mist. Indeed, I still looked like me, unless you looked closely enough. If you looked closely enough, you might rub your eyes and wonder if you were seeing things. No doubt you would see through me.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to make the change; luckily, turning into mist is a nearly effortless transformation, requiring little energy.
And, after all, my very “life” depended on it.
As Parker raged on the stage, grabbing the stake from Erasmus and swinging at me wildly, her arms passing through me harmlessly, I used the last of my energy and rose up from the stage, up into the wind, which I rode into the highest trees.
In this state, crazy as it might seem to mortals, I can’t truly see or hear. I can only feel and sense. It’s a very base existence, very elemental, like wind without the earth and fire.
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And it was from this state of being, as I hovered near the tallest trees, that I gathered my strength. Vampires are supernatural creatures, and the holy water and garlic has a supernatural effect on us. Even in this elemental state, I could still feel it in me, still feel its tainted effects.
And so I hovered and waited.
Waited for my strength to return.
Chapter Twenty-four
It was a stalemate at that point.
Erasmus and his band of drugged-up merry pranksters couldn’t reach me, and one of his security goons even fired a couple of bullets at me before realizing I was immune. All I felt was a cool breeze as the bullets whistled through me.
On the other hand, I wasn’t doing so hot at keeping my mist together, being contaminated with the garlic and holy water as I was. I was starting to seep out a little, and part of me felt like just letting go, letting my undead spirit scatter across the atmosphere and go back to nothingness. It might be the final peace that had eluded me for decades.
But, even though I wasn’t alive, I had a deep, intense urge to survive. It was a thirst of a different kind, but connected with the very act of drinking blood. Draining the fluid of the living was in some ways a mockery of existence, but wasn’t my existence just as valid as that of my victims?
Yes, I wanted to survive.
But even deeper than that, I wanted vengeance.
Up in the tree, I was nearly at head level with the stone demon statue, and I could see where unknown sculptors had hewed out that brutish face and chipped, shadowy eyes.
Okay, you ugly hunk of cold bitch. I don’t have a body and you don’t have a soul. Maybe we can make some beautiful music together.
Below, some of the disciples in robes were emerging from their stupors enough to figure out something really freaky was going on. A few headed for the safety of the surrounding buildings, and even one of those muscle-headed security guards took off running like a kid who’d heard a graveyard owl.
Erasmus and Parker weren’t running, though. They were standing near the base of the tree, Parker waving the stake while her “father” screamed at her, obviously blaming her for bringing him a vampire that didn’t just lie down and die like the others.
I wondered how many vampires had fallen prey before my turn. Maybe I was the unlucky seventh or something, the one that would bring the statue to lurching, lumbering life and open the way for Parker to possess it.
I was looking down at Parker, who seemed to be shapeshifting a little, because her fingers grew long talons and her teeth stretched an inch or two longer, which made her wicked grin all the more sickening.
She stuffed the stake in her mouth, like a pirate about to climb a mizzenmast, and drove her claws into the trunk of the tree. She skittered up a few feet and hugged the trunk with her lithe legs, bracing herself so she could once again reach up and sink her spiky fingers into wood.
She apparently planned to climb up to me and wait for me to incorporate, at which time she would finish her sacrificial slaughter.
Which meant I had to get my act together and fast.
I glanced over at the statue once more, and I could have sworn I saw the bitch twitch.
Has to be the moon, bouncing off Mount Shasta and playing tricks with the shadows.
Hell, I believed in vampires and I believed in demons, so an animated statue wasn’t much of a leap. A few shrieks, screams and whimpers arose from below, as more of the robed females came to their senses enough to understand the Cloudland scene had taken a bad turn.
And it was then that my head, which was already feeling foggy, seemed to get even lighter. The statue turned toward me with a rumbling and grinding, but I also realized I was turning to look at it at the same time.
Holy shit.
As an experiment, I slowly lifted my head and looked up at the moon, and the statue did the same, a few bits of gravel tumbling twenty feet down to the ground during the motion.
I raised one hand, which was made more of vapor than flesh. The statue trembled and then the arm moved away from the body, and the tree shook with the vibration that rippled across the compound like an earthquake.
By then, almost all the Cloudland disciples had been scared straight, and they fled along with the security guards. But Erasmus still held his ground, making me wonder if he’d seen the stone beast move before.
Probably. After all, he’d set up this sacrifice for a reason.
Parker was glaring as she scuttled up the tree trunk, and now she was only fifteen feet below me, meaning I had to make a decision soon. I was still groggy and weak, and I couldn’t hold myself together as a mist much longer. And that meant I’d become solid again while I was at my most vulnerable, probably about the same time Parker reached me with her evil little stake.
I figured you only got to play Barbie Doll with a twenty-five-foot statue once every blue moon, so I stretched my arm up and watched the statue lift its crude, stubby arm. I reached straight out away from me and clutched at the air as if I were trying to snag a mosquito and steal its stolen blood.
The statue repeated my motion with its blunt stone hand.
I focused and visualized Parker scrambling up the tree below me, and I edged my hand forward to snatch her up in my imagination.
I felt the tree shake and looked down, expecting a piece of the stone to have broken free and plummeted to the ground. Instead, the big gray hand held Parker pinned against the rough bark. She hissed and cursed, stabbing at the stone with her stake.
I felt tiny little pinpricks against the back of my hand.
“I hate you, Spider,” she grunted.
“Bet you say that to all the vampires,” I said, but my voice was kind of weak. My snappy comeback was a little lame, too.
I blamed it on being spiked with garlic and holy water. And I blamed it on Parker.
But mostly I blamed it on myself, and my desire to play hero.
Who is the sucker now, Spider?
I was balanced in the crook of the tree between three fat branches, and I was now solid enough that I could feel my skin reforming and growing whole again. I tried to push harder with my hand, to make the statue smash Parker like a bug, but apparently my brief power of transference was gone. The effort had drained what last little bit of reserves I had.
Now I was helpless again, intoxicated with garlic, and feeling limp and heavy. And the statue sagged a little and returned to its former position, once again stiff and cold and dumb.
Sort of like me.
Below me came the scruffing sound as Parker resumed her climb, and I didn’t even have enough strength to tell her to go to hell.
I had a feeling I might get there first.
Chapter Twenty-five
Who knew demons could climb so well?
As she sped swiftly up the pine tree, using branches like ladder rungs, I weighed my options. At full strength, I liked my chances against her, even if she was wielding a stake. I’ve fought worse, truth be known, and I’ve had decades to perfect my fighting technique.
As it stood, I realized I had one option. And only one option.
When she was about ten feet below me, I positioned myself directly over her. My plan was simple: I was going to drop down on her like a vampiric A-bomb. We would crash through the trees together, and if I was lucky—very, very lucky—I might seriously hurt her. If my guess was right, Parker—or whatever the demon’s real name was—was using a young woman’s body as its host. Whether or not this young woman had permitted the demon in, I didn’t know. But if her host was indeed human, well, human bodies can break.
And a broken human body didn’t do a demon much good.
If I happened to kill an innocent person in the process, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
I was just preparing myself for what I expected to be one hell of a shitty fall when Parker looked up. Her eyes were completely black and filled with hate. She must have suspected what I was up to, because she held up her hand.
“Wai
t, you fool,” she said, speaking around the stake in her mouth.
I couldn’t do much in my present poisoned state, but one thing I could do was let go of a tree and let gravity take over. Also, I didn’t take orders from demon-possessed girls wielding stakes.
I shook my head and very nearly eased from my precarious perch on a branch that was already sagging mightily.
Holding on to a tree limb with one hand, she removed the stake from her mouth. “Wait, dammit. All I really need is your blood. The ceremony was just for show, just for that idiot Erasmus.”
I wanted to say something clever and snappy, to show that I was ready for action. Except I was too weak to even talk. Hell, I was almost too weak to keep myself from falling on top of her anyway.
She anxiously looked up at the moon shining in sections through the tangled tree branches. “Time is literally running out. And vampires take much too long to die. All that screaming and writhing and hissing. All I need is your blood. A drop. And I’ll be on my way.”
I stared at her in disbelief. As if to prove her point, she opened her hand and the stake dropped, crashing lightly through the pine needles below. She cocked an eyebrow as it to say, “See,” and then moved the last couple of feet up toward me.
I was now sitting on the far edge of the branch. If I shifted my weight just a little, I would drop. Directly onto her. I was dense enough to do real damage, and the two of us would drop like a rock. I would survive, but I doubted her human host would.
She took another step, and another.
I wondered if she had another stake concealed somewhere. What she would do with my blood was anybody’s guess, but I suspected it had something to do with the stone giant nearby. After all, I had just felt its power, although limited. And one thing I knew about demons was this: they were always looking for a host. A way to escape the confines of hell, where they damn well belonged.
And a massive stone body, full of unlimited power, would no doubt fit the bill nicely.