Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  Mike nods.

  Vincent stops. He stands to his full height, and looks all the more like some hairless white rat, but the rusty red in his eyes is the same as ever. I just stare at him, my feet frozen in place.

  His voice is a low rasp and carries on the wind, like a slick of rancid oil on dirty water.

  “There you are. I forgot about you.”

  “Go away,” I shout back, my voice wavering. As a tiny smirk twists his pale bloodless lips, my resolve grows. “I don’t belong to you anymore.”

  “You will always belong to me. You and my bitch sister. She’s here too. What did you do to her?”

  “I took her away from you. Leave, Vincent.”

  I know he’s not going to. Nor do I want him to. I spent most of today draining a major part of Mike’s supply of stored blood.

  Come and get me.

  Mike takes my hand. We stand in the open doorway and wait. Vincent sniffs, his lips curling into a sneer, moving along with his nostrils like some kind of an animal.

  This disgusting dead thing made me into this creature. It killed Andi. I hate him. I hate him even for holding Victoria down while the other one, their father, ripped out their throat. That’s why she wasn’t cruel to me. She knew what it was like. To have someone you trust, someone you love do that to you.

  “You want us? Come and get us.”

  Mike squeezes my hand.

  Vincent laughs, like a rustling of dry papers in a stiff wind.

  “I am going to eat your heart,” Vincent rasps, moving forward. He stops, and his eyes trace the same lines of energy criss-crossing the front of the house, the ones I was staring at earlier.

  “Curious,” he says. “Curious and curious. Well.”

  He raises his hand and snaps his fingers. Long, bony fingers, like dried waxy leaves wrapped around sticks, with bits of bones showing through. When he does, more shapes move out of the trees. Shambling things, dressed like him.

  Thralls. Like I was.

  “How?”

  “He carried them with him somehow. I wasn’t expecting this.”

  Mike pulls me back as a pasty, half-rotted shape in filthy clothes storms up the brickwork path to the front steps and charges at the open door. Mike pulls me out of the way just in time. The thrall comes screaming inside, but it is not a whole shape that enters the house. He collapses into a spray of charred bone and ash, a fine gray dusting spreading across the carpet.

  The wards thrum with energy, like invisible guitar strings. Each bend of energy is just a tiny bit thinner now, just a bit smaller.

  The next one explodes just the same, crashing apart in a flash of smoke and ash, bones tumbling across the carpet, still glowing from the heat, and the wards fade a little more. Mike clutches my hand, squeezes.

  “Like we said, up the stairs. Stay behind me.”

  We back up the staircase to the second floor while the next thrall throws himself, itself, through the door.

  Before it does, I catch a glimpse of its eyes.

  It’s not like the other times I’ve tried this with another creature. There’s just nothing. It’s hollowed out, empty.

  There’s nothing there.

  When the next thrall passes the threshold, it staggers into the house for a few steps before collapsing, exhaling a puff of flame as heat glows in its chest. The next one and the next one make it a little further.

  There’s a twang as the wards wear down. Vincent walks inside, his pinched rat face sneering as invisible lines of heat cut into his papery flesh. The wards give with a final twang.

  “Now,” he shouts.

  We join hands, standing side by side, and each of us thrusts our free hand into the air. I’m still shaky, unsteady, but it comes naturally to me, like when I put Victoria to sleep. I just did it, without thinking about it. In a world of shimmering gold and flowing energies, Vincent is a dark black void, just like the things behind him. Four or five of them slide into the house behind him before the second set of wards go up.

  Not keeping him out, trapping him inside.

  Mike explained the pig latin to me, why he mumbles in another language when he uses his power. Something to do with controlling the flow of energies, keeping it in check. When he shouts now it’s in plain old English and I lend my voice to his, and throw the power singing in my veins at Vincent.

  “Burn!” Mike roars.

  I join my voice to his. “Burn, motherfucker, burn!”

  There’s fire. It just sort of folds out of the air in a wave and rolls down the steps, slams into Vincent and throws him back against the ward on the walls and door. The flames lick over him from the front while explosive lines of coal red fury burn through him from the back. The thralls go up like candles, running screaming around the foyer, their voices hollow, empty, a reflection of Vincent’s cry of agony.

  He topples forward and lands on charred hands, crouching on all fours. Blackened, broken, Vincent lurches forward, looking more animal now than ever before.

  Something ripples under his skin. Something hard, with too many joints.

  “Run,” Mike bellows.

  He pushes me up the stairs, shielding me with his body. Vincent comes scrambling up behind him. A swipe of his gnarled, blackened hand misses Mike’s ankle, makes him stumble.

  Victoria and Mom wait in the library. They swing the doors closed as we pass through and the third layer of wards slams together with an almost audible thrum. Even Mom reacts like she heard the noise. Victoria hisses and stumbles back from the warded wall, while Mom hefts my father’s old shotgun and steps into the circle. Mike crouches to seal it, panting.

  That took a lot out of him.

  There’s a boom and the walls rock. Books fall off the shelves, and dust peels down from the ceiling in thin little streamers. Another boom and the doors rattle, the wards flaring up, flashing as a thrall hits them and burst into ash and bone. A puff of pale ashes floods under the door.

  “Open up!” Vincent bellows, “Open up, little pigs, or I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”

  “Come right in,” Mike shouts back, but his voice is strained. He’s gone pale and he’s sweating.

  Another boom. The door bulges in before settling back into place. As before, the wards are wearing down, becoming less effective.

  Then it stops.

  A dead, eerie silence falls over the room, broken only by the soft sound of wood and metal rattling. Mom clutches the gun to her chest and shakes like a leaf in the wind, staring at the door. I look at her and she steadies, takes a deep breath.

  The silence drags on, becomes unbearable, stretching until it might break.

  Then the voice comes, small and quiet. When I hear it I take a step towards the door until Mike stops me. Victoria looks at me, terrified.

  “Chris?” Andi calls. “Chris, I can’t find you.”

  Her voice, her trembling voice comes through the door.

  “Chris, help me. I can’t see. It’s cold in here. Where’d you go?”

  It takes everything I have not to tear those doors open. Victoria edges back, glancing at me.

  “Chris, please, I want to go home.”

  Then silence, once more.

  I swallow, hard.

  “You did something you shouldn’t have,” Vincent whispers. I can feel it as much as hear it. “You have something I want now. Whatever you did to Victoria, I want it. Give it to me. Give me your blood.”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  He laughs, and the soft rasp has nothing human in it. “If you don’t I’ll come in there, and I’ll hurt you. I’ll start with the cattle. Your mother, isn’t it? I’ll turn her and feed that snake’s withered heart to her. I’ll make Victoria mine again and you, you Christine. I will show you such things.”

  “If you want me, come and get me.”

  The doors buckle in, crack, and the next blow sends them collapsing in. Vincent stomps across the wood, dragging one leg.

  “Now,” Mike rasps.
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  I have to do it. He’s not strong enough. Besides, I’m the one they’ll hear.

  “Exspiravit,” I shout, “Sanguinare exspiravit, surgencio ex mori, sanguinare vampiris!”

  Vincent stops, and blinks, the same curiously unnatural motion I remember so well.

  Andi stands next to him. She blinks a few times.

  “Chris?”

  Vincent rounds on her.

  “Away, slut. I summon you not.”

  It doesn’t work. There’s another one behind him, another girl, not much older than I was. Another appears, another and another and another filling the room, surrounding me. Andi doesn’t even look at Vincent. She stares at me.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She blinks at me a few times, and a smile spreads on her face.

  Vincent looks around the room, confusion slack on his burned, inhuman face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Get him!” Andi shrieks.

  They move all at once, a hurricane wind surging through the library. The books fly off the shelves, toppling to the floor while others hurl across the room and smash against the walls. The shades seize Vincent. Andi has him in a headlock. Another girl grabs his arm, and he wrenches her around and bodily flings her away but it’s too late, slim pale hands grab his and another one has him and another and another, and where they can’t grab they dig fingers into his charred flesh and pull. His arm cracks with a great hollow sound like a rotten log and he goes down to one knee, dragged by the spirits.

  He’s too strong. He throws them back, shakes loose. The break in his arm is like another joint, his limb flexing obscenely. Beneath the rotted, burned flesh I see something slick and black, dotted here and there with coarse sharp hairs. His upper arm expands, bulges out and the skin stretches, and bursts in half. His hand falls away and two long jointed black legs slide out of his body and their sharp ends dig into the floor with heavy thunks as they bite into the wood. His face goes slack and when his cheek sloughs away, horrid slick button eyes peer at me, four of them, lidless.

  His other hand clamps down on my neck. My feet dangle above the floor as he lifts me in one hand, his fingers digging into the flesh of my neck.

  I swing my arm around and slap the heavy collar around his neck. It closes with a loud snap and the links clutch together as they once did on my throat, crushing his neck. He sinks to his knees again, lets go of me and begins digging at the collar, succeeding only in pulling away flesh from his neck as the metal refuses to budge. The spirits surge into him again, and the disgusting chitinous legs bursting from his left side crack and vile black ichor leaks onto the carpet.

  Victoria raises my father’s heavy bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin and brings it down on Vincent’s head with a sharp crack.

  “Get down!”

  I throw myself past Vincent, seize Victoria around the waist and drag her out of the way. Mom shoulders the shotgun and pulls both triggers. It bucks up almost vertical, and she stumbles and falls on her ass, but not before Vincent’s back bursts open like a rotten melon.

  He starts laughing. He won’t die.

  Not yet.

  I know what I need to do. I get up and throw myself at him. He claws at me, but I grow stronger as he grows weaker. I rake my nails over his chest, shredding the remains of his filthy clothes with my claws. I dig until I find pale flesh and my fingers sink into it to the knuckles, and I pull. Ribs crack under my fingers with hollow pops, and my arms are bloodied to the elbow with thick black muck.

  There it is, cold and small and slick. My hand closes around his heart. Mike grabs my mother and turns her away, hiding me from her sight.

  Good. She doesn’t need to see this.

  The arteries stretch and break, and Vincent, pinned down by the shades, held in place by the weight of his own evil, watches as his shriveled excuse for a heart tears free of his chest, pulled by my hand. I squeeze it, feel the cold pulpy mass of it, and part of me is disgusted.

  I remember that part of me. Vincent tried to kill her.

  I look him in the eye, in what remains of his face.

  A twist of my neck and my jaw unhinges. Like a snake.

  It goes down in one great gulp, like a pulpy, rotten fruit.

  Some recognition dawns on him. I can taste the horror of it. I can feel his thoughts.

  She’s eating me.

  I reach down and grasp his head in my hands, dig my fingers in to get a good grip.

  Wait, please.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” I rasp. “You’re going to run, and I’m going to chase you.”

  Then in a single motion, I twist off his head.

  Vincent just… goes away. His body bursts open and ash spills out, and I throw myself back in disgust. The ashes writhe, and tiny creatures crawl away from the main mass as he turns hollow and folds in on himself. Not just creatures.

  Spiders. Hairy little spiders.

  They try to get away. Some of them just stop and puff into little piles of ash, others fall apart, some drag themselves into little streaks on the carpet. In a moment they’re all gone and there’s nothing left but a few chunks of brittle, ancient bone, a skull without a jaw.

  I pick it up and squeeze it and it bursts into shards in my hand.

  Kneeling, I let my arms fall to my side and breath.

  Arms close around me.

  Andi kneels in front of me and rests her forehead against mine. She hugs me tight, and I can’t help but break into sobs.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  I should say something but I can’t control the sobs to form words.

  “I have to go home now,” she whispers.

  When I reach to put my arms around, they close around nothing but air, but I hear a ghostly peal of familiar laughter, and voices in the distance, and for a split second I see Andi where she belongs, in a sunny place with a warm breeze in her face and a long island ice tea in her hand.

  “I love you,” I whisper, and somehow I know she hears me.

  I’m still sobbing softly when Mike puts his arm around me and pulls me to my feet. Mom grabs my arm.

  Victoria turns and walks towards the window.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Outside, to wait for the sun with the rest of Vincent’s mindless thralls.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Yes. So am I. I’m tired of this.”

  “No.”

  She stops. I can feel her resisting me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You can leave now, but I command you to live.”

  “What are you doing?” Mike says, squeezing my arm.

  I give him a look.

  “Do you,” Victoria says. “What about the people that have to die for me to feed?”

  “You’re not going to hurt anybody. Go, Victoria. I forbid you to die.”

  She rubs her chest and stares at me with mournful eyes. She walks out of the library. The thralls ignore her. They stand there, like robots waiting for orders, staring at nothing. They’re still there in the morning. When the sun hits them they go up like candles, flames bursting out from under their skin. It’s horrifying to watch, so I don’t. I go outside. By then Victoria is long gone. I have no idea where she went.

  Mom watches the house for a while.

  “Well need to get it cleaned up,” Mike says, softly. “Bring someone in to repair the damage.”

  “Leave it,” she says. “It’s just a house. I have my daughter back.”

  I throw myself into Mike’s arms and bask in the sun, ignoring the cold until it’s time to leave. I don’t know my destination yet, but I know where I’m going.

  My name is Christine Elizabeth Moore, and I’m going home.

  Afterword

  Thanks for reading His Princess and Thrall. If you enjoyed them, I hope you’ll become a member of my newsletter, if you haven’t already. :)

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  - Abby <3

  Playlist

  This is the first time I’ve ever done this, but I felt like throwing it in this time as a little bonus. :)

  Like many authors, I listen to music while I work. For me, it’s about a fifty/fifty mix of pop/rock/ and classical/movie soundtracks.

  My work mix is about four hours long. Rather than just barf out the whole thing for you here, I’ve included a list of songs that I listened to frequently during the writing of the three books in this volume. This is my “top ten” so to speak.

  1. Fight Song- Rachel Platten

  2. The Cemetery (Batman Returns OST) - Danny Elfman (in my head this will always be Christine’s Song and I must have listened to it a thousand times while I was writing Thrall)

  3. Prologue (Dark Shadows soundtrack)- Danny Elfman

  4. Love Me Like You Do- Ellie Goulding

  5. Across the Stars- John Williams

  6. Sympathy for the Devil- The Rolling Stones

  7. Because of You- Kelly Clarkson

  8. Stand by Me- Ben E. King

  9. A New Day- Danny Elfman

  10. Can You Read My Mind- John Williams

  I listened to a heavier mix of soundtracks and film scores while I was working on Count. I think I must have played the Sleepy Hollow score fifty times.

  Also by Abigail Graham

  Standalone Romances

  Benched

  Player’s Princess

  Books set in the world of Paradise Falls

  Paradise Falls

  Blackbird

  Hawk

  Bad Boy Next Door