by Eve Paludan
However, deep inside this bird body was a loathsome evil that tried to take over my Fang brain with tentacles of death and destruction. I knew that it was Khan trying to use his ruthless dark master powers in the ring to try to control me.
So, I tried to fight the ring by thinking of everything that was good in my world. I thought of Sam, of Kingsley, of Dracula, and of Justine. I thought of my beloved grandparents, long passed on, and how, during those summers on their farm, they’d instilled in me that I should always be kind to strangers because they might be angels.
As I struggled to keep thinking of goodness that might shut out the darkness that pounded on the door of my psyche, I recalled my brief conversation with little Carrie:
“Why were you singing in there?”
“So my magic dragon will make the bad man’s voice be quiet.”
I suddenly realized what Carrie had figured out. Now, I had a tool to mentally fight Khan’s draw into darkness—I knew that Dracula and the Order of the Dragon were his sworn enemies. I wracked my brain but suddenly couldn’t recall the words of the children’s song Carrie had sung to keep Khan out of her head. But a thrill went through me as I recalled another dragon song that I’d heard many times: “The Dragonborn Comes.” It was a song I knew well from my Skyrim gamer obsession—and from the popular cover of it sung by a girl whose light had recently left this world.
My singing came out in bird screeches, but the haunting lyrics and melody in my head rang true and vibrated through me, drowning out the dark master’s demands in my head. It was the first time I’d ever used music as a defense weapon—my unhindered flight was my proof that a song could have great power against evil. And I had learned to fight with it from a little girl.
I felt at one with my wings as I kept flying and singing “The Dragonborn Comes” song. So, this is what it is like to be a flying vampire. If I could, I would do it every night. Minus the ring’s dark master trying to possess me and control me, of course. And minus having to bear my own terrible singing in order to fly without being overwhelmed by evil.
Even as I worried about Justine and Celine and was desperate to get there before it was too late, I felt a thrill as I soared through the air under my own wing power. I could see colors I’d never seen before and from far away, especially red and yellow. My bird eyes on the sides of my head had a wide field of vision. And I discovered a navigation built into my bird brain. I knew exactly where I was going and I was enthralled by an aerial view of Southern California that I would never forget.
At first, I followed the PCH that zigzagged along the coast, but I realized I could take a more direct route as the bird flies. Sometimes flying just above the ocean through the spray, I flew now in a straight line and finally spotted Culver Boulevard, which cut through a protected riparian area called the Ballona Wetlands. That marsh would offer me cover in case I needed to make an emergency landing.
North of the busy air traffic at LAX, and downwind from the choking fumes of the sewer treatment plant of Playa del Rey, I spotted the house where Khan was holding them.
A ramshackle two-story clapboard house stood far apart from the newer rent-controlled apartments that were built on much higher ground. The house had a buckling roof with curling shake shingles and seagull poop polka-dotting the broken windows and the bowed roofline. The hovel, with illegal wires running from a power pole and through a broken window, sat porch-deep in brackish water on a marshy spit of land on the outskirts of Playa del Rey. There was a “No Trespassing” sign in front of it, and the subtle scent of Joy perfume wafting on the wind.
Justine.
Amid the constant air traffic from planes taking off from LAX, I stayed low to keep out of the flight path and circled the house several times. My sharp bird eyes caught the gleam of a cell phone through a broken window in a darkened upper bedroom. I was sure that Khan was trying to lure me in through that window and perhaps had even set a booby trap.
So, I did the one thing that I was sure he wouldn’t expect. I didn’t burst in through the proferred open window. Instead, I landed in the squishy marsh of the yard, transformed to my man form and put on my clothes from my backpack. And then, I strapped on Justine’s silver daggers in their scabbards just the same way that Justine had worn them: one on each thigh. Okay, so I wasn’t doing her elegant concealed-carry style. The scabbards were strapped over my jeans. But soon, it wasn’t going to matter.
There was no sneaking up on a vampire, even with all of the airport noise. I did a bold cop knock on the back door: Bang, bang, bang!
And then, I grabbed a silver dagger in each hand, to fight as boldly as Justine once had.
When Khan wrenched open the door, I went at him with both daggers, and managed to slash one hand so that he dropped his gun. When he went for it, I kicked it into the air, but he missed catching it with his wounded hand.
Feminine hands that were zip-tied at the wrists reached out and caught the spinning gun. Unfortunately, from the deer-in-the-headlights expression on her bruised and bloody face, I knew that it was Celine who’d caught it.
“Shoot him!” I screamed and stabbed Khan in the leg with a silver dagger.
He roared and dove at me with a knife that he pulled from his boot. He slashed my chest open. Oh, that silver burned—I almost went down as blood poured from my wound, but I knew if I did, we would all die.
Somehow, I stayed on my feet and kept slashing at the hulking vampire with the shark-like rows of teeth and hammerhead-shaped head.
“Give me my rings!” Khan bellowed.
I shouted back, “You mean your crappy, cursed rings that you use to cover up the fact that your male vampires can’t even fly without wearing them? That they’re a dilution from the old days when you were a world conqueror? The male vampires you create now are less than you pretend!”
“The rings! Now!”
“Come and get them, Khan!”
He thrust and I parried.
“Drop those rings or I’ll cut them off!”
And then, I thrust and he parried.
“Oh, I’m not done with your dirty little secrets yet,” I taunted. “I know that the female vampires that you created are the only true and natural flying vampires left in your bloodline. And that you enslave them into gladiators because you’re afraid they’ll rise up and take your turf! Mere vampiresses are stronger than your male vampires and you can’t handle that truth—the truth that your twisted eugenics program has diluted your male human-to-vampire descendants and buried your plan to take over the world!”
He roared his fury and his blow glanced off my shoulder—his knife went all the way into the rotting moldy wall and disappeared. As I stabbed his forearm with the silver dagger in my right hand, he grabbed the silver dagger from my left hand and went for my heart—but ended up losing the blade in the meat of my left shoulder.
I screamed in intense pain and pulled it out. I was seeing red and realized that my shoulder was spurting blood upward into my eyes.
Celine finally pulled the trigger of the gun she was waving, but her aim was off. The bullet zinged past my ear and thunked the wall as I slipped on the blood on the floor and somehow missed being killed.
“Shoot Khan, not me!” I shouted at her.
“Sorry!”
Justine moved protectively between Celine and Khan just as he pulled out a Taser. I heard the high-frequency sound of it charging just before he pressed the button. I launched myself at the women and took the full charge of the Taser, which knocked me down before I even heard the snap. The electric shock made my teeth chatter.
I let loose a cry of anguish that I couldn’t hold back.
Khan leaned over me and reached for my hair to pull my head back and slit my throat, but I used that backward force to butt my head back and bang him in the crotch as hard as I could with the back of my head.
This time, he went down.
I scrambled to my feet and shoved my arm through the drywall to find the knife he’d lost in the wal
l. When I drew my hand out, the knife was in it.
I threw the knife at him, full force, with no way I could miss in these close quarters.
But just as the knife was about to reach his throat, he grabbed both twins by their hair and banged their heads together. A fraction of a second before he would have been killed, my knife thunked into the shield he’d made of a twin’s chest.
A rose of blood bloomed on her shirt just as the other twin screamed.
I went berserk. In a rage of grief and with complete evil and hate in my heart—and without any weapon in my hand—I launched my body at Khan and pummeled him with my bare fists until they were full of blood, his and mine.
This time when he tased me, it only served to enrage me further. I knocked the device out of his hand. I bit, I scratched, I punched, I kicked. I was a murderous madman expressing my rage over the loss of Justine.
Celine was crying over her sister’s body—and I was fighting for our lives—when Khan stomped on my foot to hold me in place. I heard the bones crack on my instep as I leaned to grab a knife from the floor and use it on him.
He didn’t seem to care that I was now slashing his legs and arms. He kept ducking and weaving to escape my slashes that would have finished him if they had landed anywhere vital. But I was in such a blind rage that my aim was off. I was quickly losing control of any master plan to kill this evil vampire warlord. I was just a randomized stabbing machine now, jabbing anywhere and everywhere.
Khan caught my hand and pulled off the bird’s-eye ring to take it from me, but it went flying and then, I was myself again. The planner, the plotter. Level-headed. And most of all, accurate.
I swooped a last sweeping arc with the knife and caught him in the neck. His blood spurted in a fountain, but he stabbed me in the collarbone and broke it with the hilt.
We went down together, clutching each other and fighting viciously and then, he was still.
When I got up, Celine was holding her sister’s body and weeping.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” I shouted. “It was an accident. I threw the knife at Khan and he moved her into the path of it.”
“I know,” she whispered.
A sob escaped me as my sorrow took over. I cradled them in my arms, one live sister and one dead one. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears poured out of my eyes and terrible grief overwhelmed me. I kissed the unmoving lips of Justine. “My love, what have I done?”
Suddenly, Celine was startled by something behind me. “Look out, Fang! Khan’s alive!”
I jumped up and whirled around and as I did, I felt a silver knife pierce my side. It burned like fire. I gasped and pulled it out, then reached up to cut off his head with it, using a mighty tug with my other hand.
I dropped to the floor as his heavy, misshapen head bonked away in a haphazard roll.
Celine put her hand over my stab wound to staunch the flow of blood by pressing hard on it.
I blurted, “Let me die, Celine. Justine’s dead and it’s my fault. I don’t want to live with that.”
She said two things that changed everything: “First of all, this isn’t a fatal wound for a vampire, though I’m sure it feels like the worst pain you’ve ever known.”
I nodded.
“And second, I’m not Celine.”
I looked at her through my tears. “What?!”
“It’s me, Justine. Celine died. It’s me who lived.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted it so much. “This is a trick. Justine can shoot a gun. You couldn’t hit anything at close range.”
“I’m mortal and I have zip ties around my wrists. The binding cut off my circulation. I can’t even feel my hands and you expect me to aim a gun and shoot it?”
I fell to my knees in shock and put my hand on the other twin’s face. “I don’t understand. I thought she was Justine.”
“To save me, Celine pretended she was me. Khan planned to kill her because he thought she was me and because she didn’t know…”
I wracked my brain. “She didn’t know what?”
“Khan wanted the secret!”
“What secret?”
“The secret of how I turned back to mortal after being a vampire, but she didn’t know it.”
“Tell me everything.”
“Celine said she was me. She did it to save me. And she whispered in my ear that if I told Khan the secret, then her death would have been in vain.”
I was stunned. “What a beautiful human being your sister was.”
“Yes. She was.” Justine was sobbing as I carefully cut the zip ties on her wrists with my bloody knife. When she was loose, she rubbed her wrists and gasped in pain when the circulation came back into her hands.
“Did you tell him the secret?” I sure didn’t want Archibald Maximus to be endangered after he’d helped us.
“No, I swear, I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended I was Celine and he tased me a few times, hit me, too, but she knew enough about me to say she was me and—neither of us told the secret of how to change from vampire to mortal. I barely understood what happened in that library myself.”
Even though I didn’t need to breathe, I let out a sigh of relief.
I looked at Justine and noticed something different about her. A brief panic went through me that it was Justine who had died and that this was a trick. “What happened to your vampire tattoo on your neck and the tracking device in it?”
“Laser and microsurgery. It was painful and expensive. They’ll never track me again.”
“How did Khan find you then?”
“Media attention was generated by the doctor who wrote a scholarly paper about kidney transplants in identical twins. It went viral in the mainstream with our names and Hawaii’s a small place when someone evil is looking for you.”
“But how did you get from Hawaii to California?”
“Khan is—or was—the last natural flying male vampire of his bloodline. The others were weak and didn’t live long. He carried us across the ocean in zippered body bags with air holes cut in them. The vampires with bird’s-eye rings can’t fly that far. They’re inferior and they live only a few months at most. I don’t know the reason, if it’s something wrong with them or that the rings poison them.”
“Understood.” I cleared my throat and wiped my face of tears. “I hate to ask, but would you mind showing me your scar?”
“From donating my kidney?”
“Yes, please.”
She lifted her shirt and showed me a three-inch donor scar on her bikini line. I walked to the dead twin and lifted her shirt. There were several giant healing incisions from the kidney transplant.
A sense of relief greater than I had ever known crackled through me. God had answered my terrible, selfish prayer to let Justine live. I felt soaring joy and immense guilt at the same time because I had not prayed for both of them to live. Another thing I could never forgive myself for.
“It’s you. You’re really alive.” I hugged her so tightly that her spine crackled.
“Did you doubt it was me?”
“For a moment or two. You two are identical.”
“We were,” Justine said. “After all we did to save her, my sister’s dead. I can’t believe it.”
“I’m so sorry.” I gathered up all of the weapons that I’d touched, and put them in my backpack. “Gather everything you’ve touched.”
I wiped down the room with a dirty cloth I’d found and she helped me.
Now, Justine was crying even harder.
“We have to leave now,” I said.
“I hate leaving my sister.”
“We can’t take her with us.”
Justine scooped up the ring from the floor in a filthy shaving mug and handed it to me. “This bird’s-eye ring is evil. How did you wear it and not succumb to the darkness?”
“I sang a song about dragons while I flew. It drowned out everything else.”
“What? And that worked?”
“Surprisingly well. And
I love flying.”
“After we fly home, I want you to get rid of the ring. I never want to see evil in your eyes again.”
“What if the darkness is gone from it because Khan’s dead?” I argued. “It could be useful for me to fly sometimes.”
“Terrible idea. The ring could be tied to someone else or have far-reaching curses from the… underworld.”
I frowned. “I’ll give it to someone trustworthy for safekeeping.”
“Who?” she demanded.
“Dracula, when I see him.”
Justine cried as she kissed her dead sister on the cheek.
We didn’t talk about the ring that let me go out in the sun and I didn’t tell her about the other two rings that I’d left on my dining room table.
I heard a crackling sound and smelled smoke coming out of the drywall where Khan’s knife had gone in. “There’s a fire in the wall. His knife must have shorted out a wire.”
“How are we going to put out the fire?”
“We’re not. Let’s go!”
“People can see us, Fang. It’s daytime.”
“It’s Los Angeles. They’ll just think it’s part of a movie being made. Or a drone disguised as a huge bird.”
We went outside. I shed my clothing and put it in my backpack. I put the ring on my hand and again shapeshifted to the big bird with the blue-and-black feathers. I stretched to fill my wings with air and flapped them.
“Remember, I’m mortal, so don’t crush me or drop me.”
You’re pink. I know you’re mortal, I thought.
Hey, I can hear you in my head, Justine replied telepathically. How cool is that?
I bowed my head in acknowledgment and she tentatively walked closer and grabbed my backpack. I held Justine in my silver-tipped talons as gently as I could. Then, I flew around the neighborhood, circling in broad daylight like a plane waiting for clearance.
When I finally saw the flames leaping out of the upstairs windows of the house, I heard sirens approaching and saw a fire engine.
I headed into the sky, singing the Dragonborn song again, the whole way home.
Justine sobbed when she heard my singing, and if giant near-prehistoric birds could weep, I would have wept, too.