“Nah. Samurais are warriors. I’m training to be a ninja assassin.”
She laughed, and her large earrings bobbed. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
“Get me a little more whipped cream, and I promise you’ll be on my good side forever.”
“Deal.”
Holly whip-creamed my pie until it drowned. Death by dessert—the sort of death I could firmly get behind. Sighing happily, I dug in.
When I was halfway done, the bell over the café door jingled. A moment later, a man sidled up to the counter, making mooneyes at Holly and grinning hugely. I didn’t need to see his aura to know he was madly in love with her; affection oozed from his pores. She was just as bad as him, based on her goofy smile.
“Hey, Baby Mama,” he said to her.
“Hey, Baby Daddy,” she replied, voice breathy.
“Missed you.”
“Missed you more.”
“Did Baby miss me?”
“Baby missed you most of all.” She touched her belly, and in her cartoon chipmunk voice, she said, “Didn’t you, Honey Bear? Yes, you did!”
Satan spare me from the love-struck and new parents. I rolled my eyes and ate my pie.
Baby Daddy said, “Ready to go?”
“Give me a sec.” Holly untied her apron as she walked over to another waitress, presumably to talk waitressy things. Baby Daddy kept smiling at her, even though Holly wasn’t looking at him. The expression on his face was the stuff of epic poetry, all adoration and joy. He was a man who had everything that mattered and was blissfully happy.
But that kind of happiness never lasted. I knew it, even before his aura flashed, spiking black.
I pretended I didn’t see it as I scraped whipped cream from my plate.
Holly grabbed her purse from behind the counter and fiddled with an earring that had caught in her hair. It looked like the silver cat’s face was trying to cough up a hairball. She pouted, “Darn thing keeps getting tangled in my hair!”
“So take it off,” said Baby Daddy.
“These earrings are from you,” she cooed. “I’m never taking them off! Besides, they’re the closest things I’ll ever get to having a cat. You and your allergies!”
“Find a cat that’s dander-free, and we can talk about it…”
“Not one of those mummy cats with no hair! Cats are supposed to have hair!”
“Some people even call it ‘fur’.”
She laughed as she playfully slapped his arm.
In that moment, I caught her aura, too, and I fidgeted. Ignore it, I told myself. I’m just here for the pie. Any waitress could serve me pie. So what that Holly always chatted with me, always laughed at my bad jokes and shared a couple herself? So what that she’d told me she was going to name her baby after her father, who was dead for five years? So what that I knew she tended to sing in her sweetly off-key voice when she was stocking the napkins, sing a song about rainbows and lovers and dreamers? So what to all of that? Holly was just another human, in this world of more than seven billion. I didn’t even know her last name.
But I knew what the auras meant.
As she and Baby Daddy walked to the door, Holly called out, “Good night, Jesse!”
I couldn’t manage the lie of wishing her a good night, so I waved half-heartedly and tried to convince myself that I didn’t care. I ate my pie, but all the taste had bled out onto the crumbs on the plate.
My aura reading was a flaky ability, I reminded myself; maybe I was wrong about what I’d seen.
I knew I wasn’t wrong.
I stared at the smears of chocolate and whipped cream on my plate and saw bloodstains on the street.
Bless it all.
I left a twenty on the counter and ran out the door.
By the time I caught up to Holly and her man, it was already too late.
Baby Daddy was a mess of limbs on the blood-spattered ground, his throat torn out, his face and body awash in red. Next to him, Holly was in a heap, her body jerking and one hand clutching her belly as if she could save the baby within. Squatting over her, a demon slobbered at Holly’s neck.
Not just any demon—the vampire from earlier that night. The one I’d let go, because he hadn’t been worth my time.
My vision tunneled as I summoned my sword, a blade forged from magic and steel. The vampire didn’t even have time to hiss before I skewered his brain. His body poofed away in a burst of brimstone.
On the sidewalk, Holly let out a weak moan.
I dropped my sword, and it magicked itself away to a pocket dimension. Out of sight, and all that jazz. Crouching next to Holly, I assessed the damage. One of her ears was bleeding from its ragged end, the lobe having been ripped off. Maybe that dangling silver cat’s face earring had saved her from meeting Baby Daddy’s fate, because instead of her neck being a mess of meat and blood, there were only two puncture marks, now weeping a viscous red.
I tore off part of my shirt and pressed the material against Holly’s throat to slow the blood loss. Holding the scrap with one hand, I used my other hand to fish my cell phone from my back pocket and punch the button for 9-1-1.
“Your effort is in vain, you who were Jesse Harris.”
I threw a glare at the angel, both for the sudden appearance and for the less-than-encouraging announcement, then ignored her as the emergency operator answered the call. I gave the pertinent information and hung up without offering my name. The operator wouldn’t be able to trace the call to me—benefit of having a magically spelled cell phone and a witch who’d owed me a favor.
When I was done, I pocketed my phone and looked over at the angel. She was dressed head to toe in white, wearing a certain 1970s-style leisure suit that begged for a disco soundtrack. A glance at Baby Daddy told me that the celestial had already collected his soul: his corpse seemed emptier, deflated.
She reached for Holly, and I growled, “Don’t.”
Disco Angel frowned. It was a beautiful frown, and filled with derision. I would have been impressed if the frown had been on anyone else’s face. Angels could teach demons of Arrogance how to be proud. And they tend to have sticks jammed firmly up their trapdoors.
“Don’t what, you who were Jesse Harris?”
“One, don’t call me that. Two, don’t touch the woman. She’s still alive.”
The frown deepened as Disco Angel lifted her chin. “You were, briefly, mortal, and named Jesse Harris. You were, far longer, nefarious and called Jezebel. What shall I call you now, you who are a hybrid creature of Pit and Clay?”
I smiled, showing far too much tooth. “My friends call me Jesse. But you and your kind can call me Jezebel.”
“As you wish, Jezebel.” She inclined her head, once, perhaps in a show of respect. “As for your other request, consider it granted. I’m not here for the woman.”
I glanced at Holly’s swollen belly.
“Do not interfere,” Disco Angel warned. “That soul longs for the joy of Paradise.”
With a heavy sigh, I turned my head away. I hated it when angels were right.
There was a warm breeze, a hint of summer flowers—and then nothing but the sound of sirens approaching quickly. Disco Angel and her charges were gone, and I was left with a dying woman and two corpses, one still buried in its mother’s womb.
Two ambulances arrived moments later. I stood in the shadows, unnoticed—a perk of tapping into Hell’s power—as the emergency medical service crew loaded Holly onto a gurney and carried her into one of the trucks. It left, sirens screaming, in a mad dash to save her life.
The second ambulance took Baby Daddy’s body. No sirens for him, just the mournful sound of a cold wind blowing in the dark night.
Unseen, I watched the police attempt to determine how Baby Daddy had been killed, and what had attacked Holly. For now, they were calling the victims “John and Jane Doe,” because there’d been no wallets and no purse at the scene. A mugging gone wrong, they were saying, even though both vics had gold wedding rings
on their fingers and the woman still had one silver earring dangling from her attached ear. The other earring—along with the remains of that ear—had been found a few feet down the sidewalk. Yes, a mugging gone very wrong, with no trace of the perp.
They’d never think “vampire”; everyone knew that creatures like that didn’t exist.
The results of what everyone knew were in the back of two ambulances.
A muscle twitched in my jaw as I watched the police waste their time.
This was my fault.
I had the vampire earlier and let him go.
I’d seen the auras flash over Holly and her Baby Daddy and had said nothing. That wouldn’t have changed anything; auras never lied. They had shown me Baby Daddy’s death. They had shown me the unborn baby’s death.
And they’d shown me Holly’s death.
All my fault.
The least I could do now was see Holly’s journey to the end.
With a grim sigh, I tucked Baby Daddy’s wallet into Holly’s purse, then I walked away from the police, unnoticed, and began to make my way to the nearest hospital.
*~*~*~*
Holly was already dead when I arrived. I knew she would be; that’s why I’d gone straight to the mortuary. It had taken only a little bit of jiggling to distract the attendant, and then I cold-cocked him with the hilt of my sword. Maybe I would have felt guilty about that if I hadn’t seen his aura. Naughty boy. Under other circumstances, I would have given him my phone number.
Holly was on the covered table, her skin already corpse pale. Blood and body matter had pooled between her legs, staining the sheet.
I stripped off the attendant’s blue smock top and used it to scoop up the discharge that had been Holly’s baby. I wrapped it up with the uniform top and tucked it under the attendant’s unconscious form just before Holly’s arm twitched.
“Hey, Holly,” I said, rising to my full height. “You’ve had a bit of a shock.”
For a long moment, nothing.
Then she gasped and opened her eyes. She sat up quickly—too quickly for a human—and pressed her hands to her flat stomach. As the wounds on her throat closed and her torn ear plumped, she rasped, “My baby…?”
It took less than a minute to tell her what had happened.
It took the rest of the night to console her. She probably would have kept crying and screaming even after the sun came up; instead, she’d frozen mid-wail, then fell down dead.
I managed to sneak her out of the hospital—combination of former-demon mojo, an empty laundry sack, and a healthy dose of devil’s luck—and flagged down a taxi. Once my bundle was in the trunk and I was in the back seat, I opened Holly’s purse, dug out her wallet, and found her license. I gave the driver her address and off we went. (In another life, I would have also pocketed the cash and credit cards. Humanity really was rubbing off on me.)
Holly lived on the tenth floor of an apartment building that thankfully had no doorman. Huffing, I dragged the overstuffed laundry bag across the lobby and headed toward the elevator bank. Dead weight, it turned out, was really heavy.
Upstairs, I used Holly’s key to unlock her door, and then I pulled the sack over the threshold and into the apartment. Catching my breath, I took in the cluttered but neat living room, the cozy kitchen, the hallway that presumably led to bedrooms and a bathroom. Small place—a starter apartment, fine for two people in love with a baby on the way.
Fine for a new vampire to keep her coffin.
Leaving Holly where she was—in a heap in the laundry bag—I closed the window blinds in the living room, sealing off any chance of stray sunlight, then did a thorough window-check in the rest of the apartment. While I was pretty sure Holly would stay dead until the sun went down, I wasn’t willing to risk her going up in flames in case I was wrong. Once everything was shrouded, I dragged Holly’s sack into the bedroom and managed to heft her onto her bed.
Oof.
Mental note: start weightlifting.
It had been a very long night, and a longer morning. I sank onto the sofa in the living room and closed my eyes for a minute.
I woke hours later to the sound of screaming.
Lurching to my feet, I staggered down the hall and into the bedroom, where Holly, naked and unmarked by any wound or blemish, was shredding her blanket and wailing fit to put banshees out of business.
“Hey!” I shouted, “Holly, it’s okay! Calm down!”
She whirled to face me, red-eyed and snarling.
“Holly,” I said again, not shouting this time, holding out my empty palms. I really didn’t want to kill her like I did her maker; I had enough guilt on my conscience. “It’s me, Jesse. From the café. The one who eats pie five nights a week. Remember me? Great figure, training to be a ninja?”
Holly blinked, and sagged, and collapsed to the floor, sobbing.
For most of that night, I consoled her. Between losing her husband, losing her baby, and losing her humanity, she was a hot mess of hurt and confusion. I explained that she’d died and been reborn as vampire. I could have gotten into the specifics, how she wasn’t a vampire in the classic sense because she wasn’t a demon, but I figured at the moment, she really didn’t give a damn about such things. So I went over the undead basics: Blood good, sunlight bad, predator skill-set unlocked. As I talked, she kept rubbing her empty belly. Tears left pink-tinged trails down her cheeks.
“I should have grabbed blood for you when we were at the hospital,” I said. “Sorry, wasn’t thinking. Want me to run out, get a few bags for you? Or I can help you learn how to hunt for your dinner. Stick to the criminals—less police interference that way.”
She rubbed her belly and cried silently.
“Holly,” I said quietly, “tell me what you want.”
Her voice a bare whisper, she said, “My baby. I want my Honey Bear.”
I gently took her hand. “Your baby’s in Heaven with his daddy. They’re both happy. It’s a place of joy,” I said, remembering the angel’s words. “You need to think about you. Come on. Let’s get you dressed, and I’ll show you how to scare up your dinner.”
But when I took her hunting, she just followed listlessly. I even let an overly testosteroned musclehead grab me and slam my head against the side of a storefront, to show Holly how to play helpless, but she didn’t react at all. So I took Musclehead down with a bit of Hell mojo—bam, instant infatuation—and had him crane his neck to give Holly easy access.
She wouldn’t bite. Literally.
Same thing happened with the car thief, the desperate junkie, and the politician who thought we were working girls. No matter what, Holly had zero interest in ingesting blood.
After I scared the politician into a lifetime of chastity, I spun to face Holly. “Sweetie, you gotta eat. Drink. Whatever—you need blood. It’s a vampire thing.”
“Don’t want blood,” she said dully. “Want my Honey Bear.”
By now, my patience was thinner than a supermodel. “Honey Bear’s dead. Give up the ghost and focus on you, Holly. Come on, I’ll show you how to spot demons possessing the unwary. You want to avoid full-scale demons. Most don’t have a sense of humor, and even more will jump at the chance to skin a vampire. Even angels will have a go at vampires, but they’re more like celestial voyeurs—they tend to sit back and watch while demons get their hands dirty. Give me a demon over an angel any day.”
Holly didn’t reply.
For the rest of the night, she was nothing more than a shadow—following me, saying nothing, looming darkly.
I checked in on her for the next week, even made sure that her refrigerator was stocked with bags of blood so that she didn’t have to hunt. Holly refused to adjust to her new life—she didn’t eat, didn’t speak, didn’t do anything but collapse inside herself. Her form grew emaciated; her eyes were haunted. She kept rubbing her stomach, as if trying to feel the ghostly kicks of her dead baby. Had she been anyone else, I would’ve cut her loose. But Holly’s condition was my fault. The thou
ght of leaving her to suffer made my chest hurt. Stupid human feelings. I’d been much happier when I’d been a self-centered demon bent on debauchery.
The eighth night of Holly’s undead life, I brought her a gift.
The kitten was homeless, white as dirty snow, and eager to play. It had been the noise that had drawn me to it earlier that afternoon; I’d walked into a dark alley in a seedy part of town, thinking I’d found a demon. Instead, I found the kitten, facing down a rat over the contents of a broken garbage bag. The kitten had been hissing loudly, his poofed-up tail thrashing back and forth, warning the rat to clear out. The rat, apparently, didn’t speak Feline—it lunged forward to attack. In a flash of teeth and fur, the kitten jumped up and landed on the rat’s back, tearing at the creature with his tiny claws.
It was the most adorable display of violence I’d seen in a long time.
I scared the rat away and scooped the kitten into my arms. He pressed his face against my ear and purred loudly. Smiling, I’d walked out of the alley and headed toward Holly’s apartment. The kitten needed love and nurturing, and I knew a certain vampire who fit the bill.
“I remembered you saying something about wanting a cat,” I told Holly as I presented her with the kitten. “Well, this little guy wants a home.”
For the first time since her transformation, something close to life lit in Holly’s eyes. A tentative smile touched her lips, and she hesitantly reached out to the dirty-white mass of fur and whiskers.
The kitten jumped into her arms and got right in Holly’s face, purring up a storm as he rubbed against her mouth.
Holly laughed and spat out fur, which made her laugh even more.
It was a good sound.
I left her to bond with her kitten as I bought her supplies—a litter box, cat food, a bunch of overpriced cat toys, a scratching post. When I returned, Holly was smiling as the newly named Pounce attacked a throw pillow.
“He’s perfect,” she cooed.
“Well,” I said, “Mr. Perfect there might have fleas. Just a heads up.”
Over the next few hours, she played with Pounce and laughed as he explored his new home. When the kitten settled down to eat, I coaxed Holly to drink from a blood bag. “Gotta get your strength back if you’re going to take care of an active kitten,” I told her.
Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 25