Once Bitten, Twice Shy

by Jennifer Rardin

  “I may be able to explain that better than Jasmine.”

  She brought out the smallest of her four suitcases and set it on the ottoman I’d moved from its spot beside the couch not five minutes earlier. Now it sat center stage. I sank onto the couch beside her. Vayl, still looking irritated, sat opposite us in a wing chair upholstered in blue twill.

  Cassandra opened the case, reached into it, and brought out a foot-high pyramid made of multicolored glass orbs, each about the size of a large marble. I moved the case out of the way and Cassandra gently set the piece on the ottoman.

  “Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

  “The Enkyklios,” she said, nodding. “My vision of your . . . My second vision is recorded here.” She touched the top marble of the pyramid and the whole thing shivered in response. “You may want to watch this in private.”

  “No,” I said, challenging Vayl with my glare. “Let’s keep this all wide open. That way nobody can accuse me of more lies, and later we can talk about how I can’t abide people who leap to judgment!” I let the anger carry me, give me the strength to sit in the living room like a regular person rather than lock myself in a closet like a scared kid. It’s hard. It hurts to stop hiding. Riding another, and probably my last, wave of anger, I said, “Let’s do this.”

  She pressed on the top marble, which bent but didn’t break, like the Jell-O molds Granny May used to make because she thought we liked the taste of rubbery strawberry letters and two-legged elephants.

  “Enkyklios occsallio vera proma,” Cassandra whispered. Well, that’s what it sounded like anyway. She kept going, reeling off a list of words that sounded like Latin but weren’t. As she spoke, the marbles shivered again, then began to roll in random directions, though they never completely lost touch. It reminded me of clock gears, and yet no one movement seemed to trigger another.

  The pyramid undid itself, rolling into a variety of other forms that resembled the prow of a ship, a sailor’s hat, a Harley-Davidson, a strand of DNA.

  “That is so cool,” I whispered, despite my pounding heart and a nauseating fear of how Vayl would react to the new discovery. Bergman had left his lab/computer center, a miracle in itself, and sidled over to the empty wing chair. He stood behind it, looking as if he wanted to attack the Enkyklios with a bat.

  At last the marbles stood in vertical rows of three, forming a sort of plateau with a single, bluish gold globe sitting above the rest. “Is that me?” I whispered, feeling a little faint as Cassandra nodded.

  “Are you ready?” she asked. I rubbed sweaty palms down my pants.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s get it done.” My voice sounded fake in my own ears, a recording in definite need of a remix.

  She touched the marble and said, “Dayavatem.” She pulled her hand away and sat back, making room for the images that rose from it, digital-quality holographs in living color and sound.

  I saw myself, fourteen months younger and light-years closer to innocence, sitting in the living room of what looked like an old frat house. The stuffing peeked out of several holes in the couch and love seat, the coffee table had once been a working door that now sat on a double-high pile of cement blocks, and the chairs only rocked because their legs were uneven.

  “Look, Jaz,” said Bergman, “the furniture in the picture is arranged the same way you did it just now.”

  “The same way she always does it,” Vayl said, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Since you’re so determined to be mad at me, go right ahead,” I said. “But the fact is I never knew why I kept moving the furniture around. I wasn’t usually even aware I was doing it. Then you said something, and it seemed like such a strange thing to do.” I shrugged. “I made up a reason so you wouldn’t think I was crazy.”

  Did I detect a slight softening in Vayl’s expression, or was I just fishing? Never mind. The show had gone on. In a room it hurt my heart to see again, my band of Helsingers and I sat around the recycled door playing a card game I knew I’d been good at but could no longer remember the name of.

  I could tell we meant to go back out, because we still wore our uniforms. Superman Suits, we called them, featherlight body armor encased in navy blue leather. We were all high on adrenaline and success, toasting each other like German bobsledders, eating pizza, for God’s sake. Pizza.

  The room tilted and nearly took me with it. But Vayl’s hand on my shoulder steadied me. I looked up, grateful he still thought enough of me to leave his chair. He settled on the arm of the couch beside me.

  “I only remember bits of this,” I said, sensing that explanations might keep me from falling headfirst into the nightmare that, until now, had only played itself out behind my eyelids. “That’s Matt on my left. He’d just turned twenty-nine two weeks before. The tan is from the trip we’d taken to Hawaii to celebrate.” My throat closed on the words, and for a minute I couldn’t speak.

  Matt and I sat on the couch, talking softly while the others played out the hand. Brad and Olivia, a married couple from Georgia, sat in the tattered love seat that met our couch at forty-five degrees. They took turns throwing red plastic chips into the growing pile and teasing each other about losing the down payment on their house in a single hand.

  Dellan, a muscle-bound vamp who’d been turned in the sixties, sat on the floor to my right, cradling his crossbow, eating all the toppings off his pizza. He threw what was left to Thea, also a vamp and sometimes his lover—depending on how much he irritated her—who sat on the floor to Olivia’s left. Tomato sauce made her gag, but she couldn’t get enough of that stuffed crust.

  We’d go back into the field as soon as the pizza and cards had played themselves out, but for now we were just kicking back and enjoying the company. “That’s Jessie, sitting in the chair across from us, the one in front of the fireplace. She was my sister-in-law. She was—” I shook my head, not knowing how to capture in words Jessie’s vibrant, infectious humor, her intense loyalty, her deep and abiding passion for my brother. “She was my hero.”

  Jessie had draped her leg across the chair beside her, as if saving it for David. Having made her bet, she was fashioning an airplane from a couple of paper towels. I knew eventually it would come floating my way and I would be required to throw my napkin back at her, but for now I was content to snuggle with my honey.

  It felt a little sick to watch my handsome young lover rear his head back and laugh at one of my wiseass comments, as if I was some grief-crazed widow rolling out the home movies for a torturous walk over the coals of memory lane. But, God, it was good to see him, to see all of them, and remember with a sort of shock how happy we’d been together.

  I started talking again, fighting the vortex of pain that had robbed me of everything I’d liked about myself. “Nobody ever heard the knock at the front door. No one except Ron. He was Dave’s sub, a rookie straight out of the academy. He was still kind of sick from the slaying, not the vampire bit, the human part that comes before you get to the vampires. Anyway, he’d been visiting the upstairs bathroom periodically.” We watched him, a young, spiky-haired version of David Spade, with the physique of a marathon runner and the constitution (at least temporarily) of a tubercular alcoholic. He was coming down the stairs, one hand on the rail, the other on his stomach.

  In the living room it was my deal, and I’d just begun to shuffle the cards.

  Ron came down the steps slowly, stepping in eerie time to the rhythm of my shuffling. When he reached the bottom, he heard the knock. Nobody else did. They were all yelling at me.

  “Get the lead out and deal already!” Jessie roared, throwing her paper airplane at my head.

  I grinned. “Just getting the cards warmed up for you, Jess.”

  A chorus of “Aw, come on!” and “Deal, dammit!” drowned out Ron, who was saying, “Please tell me you didn’t order more pizza,” as he opened the door.

  A blue-eyed, long-legged blonde stood on the threshold, carrying an insulated pizza box container. She smile
d coyly at Ron. “Hi. Wow, are you a SWAT guy? I love your uniform!”

  Ron grinned. The poor fool couldn’t help it. She resembled every centerfold he’d ever drooled over. “Kinda,” he said. “Um, how much do I owe you?”

  “Sixteen fifty,” she said, flashing a couple of dimples, this time accompanied by a tempting bit of cleavage. “Do you mind if I come in?” she asked, looking over one shoulder with just the right hint of fear. “It’s kind of creepy out here in the dark.”

  “Sure, come on in. My house is your house,” he said, a chivalric knight taking temporary ownership of federal property to save his distressed damsel. It turned out she was just damned. Ron died with both hands in his pockets, fishing for a twenty while a goofy, I’ve-bagged-a-Playmate smile played across his face. Pizza Girl had lunged for his throat and torn out his larynx before he understood his mistake had killed us all.

  The complaints from my comrades had finally reached a satisfying peak and I’d just dealt Matt his first card when we heard Ron’s body hit the floor. Jessie, who had the best view of the entrance, jumped up and yelled, “Vampire!” just as Pizza Girl cried, “Enter and be welcome!” out the front door.

  A stream of vamps poured into the house with the impact of a tidal wave. But we were nothing if not prepared, and all of us still wore the weapons we’d used to clear the nest earlier that day.

  Brad and Olivia fought shoulder to shoulder, pumping bullets into the vamps. Pizza Girl, her chest a mix of her own blood and Ron’s gore, waded through the barrage, lofted the love seat, and threw it at them. They went down in a flurry of splinters and stuffing, and the vamps went after them, swarming like locusts until all you could see were Brad’s twitching fingers and all you could hear were Olivia’s fading screams.

  Dellan smoked two of the vamps who came after him, but with no time to restring his crossbow, he had to resort to hand-to-hand combat. His punches rocked the three monsters who came for him, his kicks knocked them back, and I’m sure I heard ribs crack before they overpowered him. One vamp, who looked like he should’ve been doling out the cash at First National’s drive-up window, picked Dellan up and threw him headfirst into the fireplace, where he lay, limp and broken as a discarded doll. He followed up with a poker through Dellan’s heart.

  Thea emptied her magazine into the swarm before retreating to the fireplace wall and having at them with the ash shovel. She held her own until Dellan lost his battle. The momentary distraction of seeing him fade to nothing was all her attackers needed. They jumped her like a gang of rapists, only it wasn’t her body they wanted. They bled her dry and finally smoked her while Matt, Jessie, and I made a fighting retreat to the kitchen and the back door that entered into it. We delivered bolts, body blows, and bullets in equal numbers. For a minute there was so much blood and smoke in the air you’d swear it was storming plasma.

  “Get out, Jessie!” I yelled. She stood closest to the door. “Get help!” She ran to the door and I shot the vamp who tried to intercept her, tore a hole through his brain that would take days to heal. She wrenched the door open and stepped outside. But they were waiting for her, a hungry little horde of newbies so freshly turned their bite marks still remained, livid and glowing to my new-seeing eyes.

  Through a haze of grief and unshed tears, though my teeth were chattering like a badly tuned engine, I managed to say, “I don’t remember anything at all after Jessie’s death.”

  “I hate for you to have to see this,” Cassandra whispered, clutching her hands together so tightly her nails made bloody imprints in her skin. “But it’s necessary in order for you to understand the final outcome—to believe.”

  Oh, I’ve believed I was God’s biggest mistake for some time now, Cassandra, I thought as I watched Matt and former me trade blows with our adversaries. It seemed like they were everywhere, although I only counted four. They just moved so quickly it was like fighting an army.

  “What?” said a voice from my holographic memory, one I now recognized. “Are they still alive?”

  Aidyn Strait stepped into the room and we experienced a sudden cease-fire. He sneered at us, his fangs dripping with the blood of the other Helsingers. “When you killed my humans, you set me back years in my research. Did you know that?” He snatched a knife from the butcher-block table that stood just inside the kitchen/living room throughway. “That makes me angry. And it’s not nice to make Aidyn angry, is it, children?”

  The other vamps flinched at their own hidden memories and shook their heads.

  One moment Aidyn was sidling toward us; the next he was a blur of motion. He dove at me, the knife he held a glittering extension of his arm.

  “Jasmine!” I’d never heard such fear in Matt’s voice; it squeezed at my heart. But I couldn’t comfort him because I couldn’t escape the blade. Unbalanced by the speed of the attack, realizing my fatal vulnerability, I felt this tremendous, oceanic regret that my life should end so soon, with so much left undone.

  And then Matt was there, pushing me aside, standing where I’d stood, trying to deflect the blade, trying to defend me. I grabbed at him, attempted to reverse direction and push him out of the way. I was still innocent enough to believe the blade would pause, give me the time I needed to save him. But all my youth and all my will did nothing to slow the blade’s descent. I watched it fall and wanted to be the one beneath it after all. But time ran out on me.

  Both in that place and in Cassandra’s living room, tears rained down my cheeks and I jerked like a marionette as Aidyn’s blade pierced Matt’s chest. He crumpled to the floor, pulling my whole world with him. An abyss of grief opened beneath me, obliterating every other thought.

  I kneeled over Matt, weeping uncontrollably. And Aidyn, his knife still in Matt’s chest, closed in. One kick, powerfully dealt and directly on target, snapped my neck. I slumped over Matt, so obviously dead that present-day me put my hands to my chest, puzzled and amazed that I could feel my heart beating.

  Every eye in the room was on me, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from the tragedy that had ended life as I knew it. I shook my head. “I didn’t know,” I told them. “I don’t remember this.”

  Bergman started to speak, “How—”

  “It is a shame we had to kill them, in a way,” said holographic Aidyn. “They would have made excellent lab rats.”

  “We turned at least one of them.” Pizza Girl had come to survey the damage. “You can experiment on her.” She nudged my body with her toe. “Did you get to see this one’s face when she died, Aidyn? I love to see their faces as they die.”

  Suddenly, like a window opening in my brain, I remembered why I’d missed Christmas. I’d been chasing Pizza Girl. In fact, I’d nailed her with the syringe Liliana had escaped. And my other long blackouts, yeah, those had been revenge trips too. During the past fourteen months I’d killed every vampire in the holograph except Aidyn Strait.

  Good God Almighty, if one more insight crashed into my skull today my eyes would stop spinning and just completely pop out of their sockets.

  In the holograph there was no movement, no noise, and yet all the vamps jerked their heads up, looked to one corner of the kitchen ceiling as if something hovered there, threatening their very existence. And it did. I could almost see it, like the superheated air over a bonfire.

  “Out,” hissed Pizza Girl. “Back through the front door. Move!”

  They ran like scared kids, cleared out of the house so fast the curtains swirled in their wake.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Bergman.

  I felt sorry for him. Because I could. My soul rose from my body and stretched, reaching over to touch Matt’s soul as it hovered in the air, seafoam green laced with dark blue, a living jewel that suddenly flew apart just like poor Charlie’s had. Most of it raced out into the night. But some remained, swirled into my silver-red essence and stayed there, waiting with me, becoming part of me.

  A golden light, bright as a meteor, warm as a pair of fuzzy slippers, moved from its spot in
that superheated corner of the ceiling and encompassed me, coalescing into human form. Into a man. He could’ve been one of David’s men, his bearing was so upright, so military. But he was as gentle as a lover as he turned my body so my sightless eyes faced his. He laid my hands across my stomach and straightened my twisted neck. He leaned over and lay his lips on mine, passing his breath into my mouth. Then he sat back on his heels.

  “What is it that you want, Jasmine?”

  He watched my mouth open, heard me say, “To fight.” Nodding with satisfaction, he touched the tips of his fingers to my neck and leaned in to lend me one last breath.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I’ve lived through some strange moments. Once, when Granny May took me Christmas shopping, we stopped at a Hallmark store. I was idly eyeing a display of candles, trying to decide if I could weasel twenty-five cents out of her for a gum ball when all the candles suddenly lit. I looked around and caught the eyes of a boy my age who, with a jerk of his head, put them all out again. It’s certainly a novel way to meet girls and one I hope worked out for him in the end.

  Another time, I was working a case that required me to partner with a coven of witches who got so irate at our target that they cursed him. Before I could actually eliminate him, he stepped off the curb wrong and broke his ankle, ate a hamburger that had been left out overnight and spent a night in the hospital puking it up, found his wife cheating with his boss, and chipped most of his front tooth off when a drunken waiter got too enthusiastic with a champagne cork and let it fly into his face. I think by the end he was probably grateful when an honest-to-goodness piano fell on his head.

  I’ve met psychics and snake charmers, serial killers and geniuses. But nothing in my experience had ever come close to watching my own rebirth. I suddenly understood the supernatural meaning of “weird.” I’d always imagined resurrections would be quiet, sacred events. But now I thought maybe Lazarus had screamed just like holographic me did when my soul plummeted back into my body and parts that should never be broken were forced into repair.