Dressed to Slay

by Harper Allen

  “If we call the police we’ll have to file a complaint and we won’t get to bed for hours, Meg,” Kat said with elaborate casualness. “Since we weren’t taken in by our visitor’s con there’s really no harm done. I say we let him leave—”

  “One will be striking talons of eagle!” the old man interrupted harshly. “One will warn of coming danger and third will fly into core of darkness! By blood of all slayers before you, including mother, is vital you believe. Battle has already begun and we have no time to waste!”

  He didn’t know it, but he’d blown it. Halfway through his eagle rant I’d been one wide-eyed gasp away from throwing skepticism to the wind, even though I knew there was a possibility he’d been lurking outside the house and had heard Kat when she’d said those very same words. But by bringing our mother into his little scam he’d pushed the envelope too far.

  Grammie and Popsie have always done their best to make Mom and Daddy real for us. But Kat and Tash and I have an unspoken agreement to leave the subject of our mother…well, unspoken between us. When the Russian made the mistake of trying to use her to convince us, my immediate reaction was fury.

  And if behind the fury I felt an awakening dread, I didn’t bother to examine that, either.

  I opened my mouth to tell him where he could shove his eagle, but he spoke first, his glare fading. “I should not blame you,” he said heavily. “You know nothing of duties that have been yours throughout all unlit—”

  “‘Throughout all the unlit centuries of night.’” Kat’s face paled. “‘Without my presence the circle is dangerously open. I close it and form the three.’ Oh, God, it’s what I said just before everything went crazy, isn’t it? How could I have blanked something like that out so completely? And how you could you know those words unless—” she swallowed “—unless you really are our grandfather. What happened here tonight was connected in some way to our mother, wasn’t it?”

  “Our mother the vampire killer. Yeah, right,” Tash said, her tone dripping sarcasm. “Don’t tell me you believe him, Kat. You’re probably still on edge from…” Her words trailed off. “From vamp-slaying,” she said hollowly. “Omigod…we’re hereditary slayers?”

  “We’re hereditary normal American girls, is what we are,” I said tightly. “You said it yourself, Kat—Boris here’s a con man, using a few scraps of information he somehow gathered about our grandfather to pull a scam on us. We’re vamp slayers? Mom was a slayer?” The illogical dread I hadn’t acknowledged a moment earlier was suddenly as impossible to ignore as a grenade with its pin pulled. Desperately I tried to defuse it. “I’ll admit Dean and Lance and Todd behaved like total pigs when they showed up here tonight, and even that we had to fight them off. The rest just couldn’t have happened the way we remember.” In my mind I saw Dean crumbling to dust, but I thrust the vision aside and grabbed at the only acceptable explanation. “It’s more likely that the appletinis we knocked back are making us recall things a little foggily.”

  “That you try to deny is no surprise to me.” The Russian shook his head, watching me closely. “But in your heart you know the truth, granddaughter. You must face it.”

  “Megan’s the Queen of Denial, Grandpa Darkheart,” Tash broke in impatiently. She turned to me. “There’s a big ol’ pile of greasy dust upstairs that used to be my boyfriend, another in front of the sofa over there, and I’m betting there’s a third dust pile in the kitchen. I know it sounds crazy, sis, but since we now have proof that vamps exist, isn’t it kind of reassuring to find out we’re genetically equipped to handle them?” She frowned thoughtfully. “When I snapped off that bedpost and staked Todd, I was like Yes! You go, Tash! And I totally didn’t understand where that was coming from because I’m so against violence usually, but now that I know I’ve got slaying in my blood, it makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Kat contradicted. “But given that nothing else that’s happened in the past hour does, either, I agree with Tash, Megan. If Grandfather Darkheart’s correct and some kind of battle’s already begun, you’d better start believing in this triplet slayer business pretty fast, sweetie.”

  The old Russian’s steel-gray eyebrows pulled together. “Nyet. Only one of you is true Daughter of Lilith—a slayer, as they say in your American televideniye shows. The other two may kill vampyrs, but through luck and determination, not because they inherit title from mother.”

  Something inside me snapped. “Nyet to all of it, Boris! Our mom wasn’t a slayer, she was a part-time translator at the New York firm where our father worked after graduating from Harvard Law. Two weeks after she and Dad met, they got married,” I said, my voice shaking, “and Grammie’s told me a million times how happy Mom was in the role of a wife and mother—so happy that it was only at the urging of my father that she agreed to a trip back to her home country. Not as imaginative as your scenario of her being a cut-rate Buffy, perhaps, but that’s the way it was.”

  “She did not want to make journey home?” I had to admit it, the old fraud was good. The rawness in his voice seemed almost real. “She still had not forgiven me,” he said in an undertone. “If she had never forgiven, tragedy might not have come so soon.”

  His fake pain was the last straw. “My parents’ deaths are none of your business,” I said tightly. “It was a tragedy that their car went off a cliff during their visit home, but if you think you can use that tragedy to bolster whatever false claim you’re—”

  “They did not die from car going over cliff.” He gave a firm shake of his head. “That is what everyone was supposed to believe, but—”

  “But nothing!” I yelled. “She was killed in an accident, not by a vampire, and she was an ordinary woman, not a Daughter of Lilith or whatever you want to call it!” I rounded on Kat and Tashya, but they were a blur, because sometime in the last second my eyes had flooded with tears. “Don’t you understand, we have to keep believing that! In his version our nightmares were real!”

  The words were out there and there was no way to call them back. My gaze sought Kat’s, hoping for her particular brand of languid reassurance, but it was Tash who broke the silence.

  “But in my nightmares Mom died trying to save—” Her eyes widened and a shutter fell behind her gaze. “You’re right, Megan, they just can’t be real,” she said huskily. “They were just nightmares that I can blame on cheese or my imagination or watching a scary movie before bed. That’s the only way I can handle them.”

  “Same here.” Kat’s fingers went to her neck, as if she expected to feel the familiar silver chain and cross around it and her other hand tightened on the revolver. “I think I’ll go with my sister’s version, Grandfath—” She caught herself and her voice hardened. “I dumped too much vodka into the mix tonight. You’re a fake. There’s no such thing as vampires, we’re not Daughters of Lilith, and the nightmares we used to have when we were kids were just that—nightmares. Now get out of our house before I’m forced to use this gun.”

  The three of us were standing shoulder to shoulder. The old man’s hooded gaze swept from Tashya to Kat before coming to rest on me, but when he spoke it was obvious his words were directed more at himself.

  “There is no strength in blindness, and without strength they will not live through another night. I must do what I had hoped not to do.” Before he finished speaking I took a step toward him, but as I took a second step I froze. “It is time, Mikhail.” The Russian didn’t look down at the wolf that had silently materialized from the darkness outside. “Show them!”

  Like its master, the beast stared straight at me, but unlike the man’s gaze, the animal’s glowed with hatred. “Kat, get ready to shoot,” I said tensely, not looking away from the wolf. “I think Cujo’s about to—”

  Watch!

  The one-word command exploded in my head. I looked at the Russian, but his eyes were closed and his mouth was set in an anguished line. My glance darted from Kat on one side of me to Tash on the other, and the chill in me intensified. They were bot
h staring straight ahead, and as I watched I saw tears glaze the china-blue of Tash’s gaze. From her parted lips came a low moan of terror. I broke through the paralysis gripping me.

  “Stop it!” I tugged the revolver from Kat’s limp fingers. Turning back to the wolf, I jammed the barrel between his eyes, my hands shaking so badly that the gun knocked against his skull. His glare on me didn’t waver. I thumbed back the revolver’s hammer. “Whatever you’re doing to my sisters, stop it right now or I’ll blast you to—”

  My throat slammed shut in midsentence. A giant hand seemed to squeeze painfully around my heart. As if I were in a speeding train rushing toward a tunnel, blackness suddenly blotted out everything but the hypnotically glowing gaze in front of me. From a long distance away I heard the gun hitting the floor, and at the sound I made a last attempt to struggle free from whatever was about to envelop me.

  But I was already enveloped, not by darkness, because my vision was slowly returning, but by a thick, homespun…cape?

  Instinctively I began to pull the heavy fabric from my shoulders. Then the same moan of terror I’d heard Tash make rose in my own throat. I thrust my hand out in disbelief.

  It wasn’t mine. It was a man’s right hand—an older man’s, judging from the veining beneath the work-worn skin. That wasn’t all; the shoulders over which the cape was flung were broad and solid, like the rest of the body I seemed to be trapped in, and even my mind didn’t feel entirely my own anymore. When I tried to scream, the voice that came out of my mouth wasn’t mine, and although I had no trouble understanding the words, they were in a language I’d never spoken.

  “Pridyl slishkom pozdno.” I have arrived too late. My—his—mutter was shot through with anguish. His—my?—feet stumbled on a rough path that led to a Hansel-and-Gretel cottage before carrying us up the stone steps to the cottage’s half-open door.

  As I saw the heavy gold ring on the middle finger of the left hand that pushed the door fully open, any last doubts I had vanished and pure terror sluiced through me.

  I was back in the nightmare that had haunted me as a child. But this time I was experiencing it as my grandfather had experienced it…

  He was too late.

  Bursting through the front door, Anton Dzarchertzyn almost fell over the body of the son-in-law he’d never met. He swept his travel-stained cloak aside and crouched quickly, his fingers seeking a wound he prayed not to find. He rose, relieved that his prayer had been answered, and pushed through the door at the end of the hall.

  From the still-smoking spots on the floor, it was evident the young blond woman had killed two of them already. As he moved to her side she smashed a wooden chair against the wall and was left grasping a splintered leg that still had a partial rung attached. Quickly he held out the object he’d taken from under his cloak in the hall.

  “Use this!”

  If his daughter felt any surprise at seeing the father she’d once angrily thrust from her life standing beside her now, she showed no sign. She spun toward him and snatched the stake from his grasp, turned again to confront the thing rushing at her, and plunged the sharpened yew-wood into its chest.

  The vampyr was a young woman with short black hair curving onto her cheekbones. Her paleness was an indication she hadn’t fed recently, Anton knew, and now she never would again. He turned away. A moment later he heard the rattle of wood striking wood and he turned back.

  The stake lay on the floor. A few ashes clung to it, but as he looked they sifted into nothingness, leaving a third charred spot. His daughter grabbed up the stake and faced him.

  “I told myself that if I was careful, my family would be safe,” she said, her voice ragged. “I let David convince me that even though you didn’t approve of our marriage, you had the right to meet your granddaughters at least once. If I hadn’t come back here, he’d still be alive, damn you!”

  Anton shook his head, understanding that her anger at him stemmed from intolerable grief. “Eventually the one who calls herself a queen would have found you and yours, my daughter. While you grieve for your husband, console yourself with the knowledge that you fulfilled your destiny when you sent her to hell.” Revulsion swept through him. “God grant that the fiery hair she was so proud of is now truly alight for all eternity.”

  His daughter’s face blanched. “I killed this one and two males. What do you mean, a queen vampyr with fiery red—” From a room upstairs came a faint mewling cry, swiftly cut off. Anton read the truth in her terror-flooded gaze a split second before her words confirmed it. “The triplets! She’s with my babies!”

  She pushed violently by him, racing through the hall to the flight of stairs he’d seen as he’d entered the house. He sped after her, his heart a stone in his chest.

  Red hair rippled down the back of the queen vampyr’s garnet velvet gown as she bent over one of the three cribs lined against the wall of the nursery. That much Anton glimpsed before his daughter pulled her from the crib and the stake in her hand sank into the vampyr’s breast. Blood, ancient and black, spilled over the velvet bodice, filling the air in the room with the stench of a charnel-house. Letting the stake fall from her hand, his daughter turned to the cribs.

  The Queen of Darkness fell upon her.

  “Nyet!” Anton grabbed up the stake. Even as his fingers closed around it his daughter fell backward into him, released from the vampyr’s grasp. Instinctively he caught her…and then instinctively he recoiled.

  “Yes, staryj vrag.” The mocking whisper sounded like burning bells on a hell-steed’s bridle. Lifting his stricken gaze from the twin trails of blood running down his daughter’s neck, Anton Dzarchertzyn saw a smile curve the red lips of the thing standing in the doorway. “I have tasted her, as you see. When the Daughter of Lilith is one of my creatures I will insist her attacks be more on target, but this time her rash aim was to my advantage. Before another night passes she will be hunting with me, not against me.” A pale finger touched the already congealing blood high on her breast and was raised to parted red lips. A pointed red tip of a tongue flicked out and the blood disappeared. “Unless, of course, you do what you must to prevent her from becoming mine. I will be waiting to see if she comes to me, old man.”

  A soft rustle of velvet and she was out of sight. A harsher rustle, like stiff wings unfolding, seemed to come from halfway down the stairs. Anton heard the front door slam shut.

  Slowly he lowered his daughter to the floor. As he cradled her to him her eyes, blue and unfocused, met his.

  “I missed her heart. I failed, Father!” The admission escaped her in a whisper. “I tried to forget who and what I was, and my skills grew rusty. I have shamed my heritage…but thank God I stopped her before she harmed my daughters.”

  The trembling of her hand was a sign that the poison was traveling through her and unconsciously his gaze moved to the stake on the floor. He looked back to see her watching him.

  “Now I ask you to keep me from further harm, too, Father, and protect me in the only way possible. But first give me your word that my daughters will be safe.”

  “It shall be done. A home will be found for the little ones here in their mother’s country—”

  “No!” Blue eyes blazed at him. “They will have the life I once thought I could have—an ordinary life far from the shadows and ancient blood-obligations of the old country! I want my daughters to have the opportunity to live without realizing such evil exists in this world…to live without ever knowing the burden of being Daughters of Lilith! Besides, the queen will anticipate you will keep them here. If you truly care for your granddaughters, deliver them to my husband’s parents and stay out of their lives!”

  In her agitation she gripped his arm, her clutch upon him weak. Suddenly Anton felt faint strength flowing into her fingers, and from the fear that crossed his daughter’s face he knew she understood as well as he did what that growing strength meant. She released him.

  “It is beginning,” she said flatly. “Do what you must, and do
it quickly.”

  “Yes.” His voice sounded like dry leaves blowing across a November landscape, Anton thought. Once it had thundered at her, argued with her, tried to bend her to his will, all to no avail. From childhood she had taken risks that had stopped his heart in fear, shown defiance that had made it beat faster in anger; and throughout all her days she had been the skylark of his mornings, the dancing firefly of his dusks, the glowing star that warmed his world.

  Did she understand that? Was it too late to tell her?

  “I know, Father.” Her eyes holding his, she put the stake into his hand. “Even when the rift between us was as wide as an ocean, I knew you loved me as I love you. I have your vow that my daughters will come to no harm?”

  “You have my vow,” Anton said. He felt his heart break.

  “Then strike the blow and deliver my soul to God,” his daughter whispered.

  Anton Dzarchertzyn raised the stake. He saw the light begin to fade from the blue eyes fixed on his, saw the dark sickness start creeping across them, and he brought it down in a sudden sweeping plunge toward his daughter’s—

  “No!” My eyes flew open as the scream tore from me, and I saw that I was no longer in the room where my mother had died twenty years ago. Even better, I was back in my own body again—although from the waves of disorientation passing over me and the fact that I was on my hands and knees on the floor, I’d forced my little astral projection jaunt or whatever it had been to end far too abruptly.

  Tash had been right, our mother had died trying to save us. So had our father, but his violent death hadn’t been tainted with the fear that those he was fighting had turned him into one of them. I remembered my grandfather’s fingers checking for tell-tale puncture wounds on my father’s neck, and his relief when he’d found they weren’t there.