Dressed to Slay

by Harper Allen

  Arm yourself, Megan, they’re coming! His voice resounded through my head as it had done the night before when he’d forced me to watch the replay of my mother’s showdown with the Vampyr Queen—not like a thought, but as if he had opened those terrible jaws and was speaking out loud. If you still retain enough humanity that they can’t sense you’re one of them, they’ll tear you to pieces! Arm yourself now!

  Grammie didn’t raise any dumb blondes. Okay, she raised Tash, who comes close sometimes. But I didn’t need it spelled out as to whom the they who were coming might be. Graveyard = Vamp Central. Megan in Graveyard = Not Smart Move. Megan in Graveyard with Shape-shifting Jerk Who Brought Her Here Running Away Like a Rabbit in Wolf’s Clothing = Totally Fuckin’ Fucked.

  I was always good at math. Just so you don’t get the wrong impression of me, I’m usually better at swearing, too.

  “You fucker, Mikhail!” I hissed after him as he disappeared. “What am I supposed to arm myself with—a stalk of gladiolus? Floral wire? There aren’t any stakes around!”

  He’d planned this. He was going to watch from the bushes while I got torn apart by vamps, and when all that was left of me were my pink scuffs and a smear of blood on a gravestone, he was going to trot back home like Lassie and tell Darkheart that Timmy’d had an accident down by the bridge, woof, woof.

  Or something like that.

  No trees, or at least none with branches low enough to snap off. No handy furniture legs. “By now Kat and Tash have probably reached the part in their training where they learn how to McGyver a stake out of a bra strap and some nail polish,” I muttered as I frantically gazed around for something to use as a weapon. “Not that they need to, given that they’re safe in the House of Garlic. The only Crosse triplet who might be able to use the handy tips Darkheart’s handing out is the sister who wasn’t invited to their little Daughter of Lilith tea party—the sister who’s about to get killed, dammit!”

  And I would be killed, I thought, my brief spurt of anger draining away. Though he’d made me doubt myself for a few seconds this evening, I knew Mikhail was wrong about me being a vamp. I didn’t feel like one, any more than I felt like a hereditary Daughter of Lilith. I just felt terrified.

  So I did what any sane person would do in those circumstances: I began running like hell…but on my second step I tripped over the spilled basket of gladioli and fell sprawling on the newly laid sod of the grave I’d been standing on.

  “Oh, my! Theodore, help her—the poor girl’s hurt herself!”

  “Back off, bitch! One of my sisters is a Daughter of Lilith, and if you kill me she’ll hunt your vamp ass down and drive a stake right through your undead—” I’d fallen on my face. As I fearfully rolled over and scooched backward from the two figures standing over me, I recognized them and my unladylike greeting came to an abrupt halt.

  Mikhail had been wrong about me. He’d been wrong about incoming vamps, too. Because the two frail people who stood in front of me looking slightly taken aback were Dr. Maisel, my sisters’ and my orthodontist when we’d been little, and his wife, Hetty, who’d been his receptionist and who had served on the Maplesburg Beautification Committee with Grammie last year. For the second time that evening I felt like curling up and dying.

  “Megan Crosse, is that you, dear? Gracious, whatever are you doing here at this time of night?” Hetty Maisel, with the same mother-hen concern she’d shown when nine-year-old Kat and Tash and I had filed miserably from her husband’s office sporting new braces, drew a breath as Dr. Maisel helped me to my feet. “Land’s sakes, child, your knees! They’re positively bloody.”

  “So stupid of me,” I babbled, looking down at my scraped legs and wondering what in Goshen—okay, what in hell, but when I’m with Grammie’s friends I feel like I should keep even my thoughts Sunday-school clean—I could say that would keep them from insisting on escorting me home and delivering me straight to Grammie and Popsie. “I know it must seem strange, me being here in the cemetery at night, but there’s a perfectly good explanation,” I began, dabbing at my stinging knees with a tissue I’d found in my robe pocket. “I was supposed to be married today, but you probably knew that, since I’m sure Grammie sent you an invitation, and I guess you probably also know that I was jilted at the altar. And tonight I was at home, feeling as if my heart had actually died, and I thought, well, if that’s how you feel, Megan, then give it a symbolic burial and get on with your life. So I came here.” I looked up with a bright smile. “And you know, it worked! So now I’m going to go home again and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention any of this to—”

  “Why a symbolic burial, dear?” Hetty Maisel’s face creased in confusion. I didn’t blame her.

  “I know, ridiculous,” I agreed swiftly. “Which is why I’d rather Grammie and Popsie never know how silly I’ve—”

  “I did a tip-top job with those teeth, Mother, wouldn’t you say?” Dr. Maisel broke in. He peered at me. “Straight and white and even, thanks to orthodontics.”

  A thought suddenly came to me. “If you don’t mind me asking, what are you two doing here?” I asked as he studied me with professional intensity. Obligingly I flashed him a full-frontal smile. “Do you have a loved one, uh, resting nearby?”

  “Remind me to take them afterward, will you, Mother?” Dr. Maisel interrupted again. I remembered he’d always been a little hard of hearing.

  “Take what?” I asked, raising my voice so he could hear.

  “Oh, Theo, you’d forget your own head if I wasn’t around to remind you.” Hetty twinkled at me. “I tell him that’s why he turned me—because he couldn’t get along without me after all these years, but he says it was because he missed the hot sex. Men! Aren’t they a caution sometimes?”

  For the second time that evening my mind reeled as an image assaulted it, this time a picture of Hetty and Theo going kinkily at it in the dental chair, Dr. Maisel wearing his white lab coat and nothing else, an orthodontic probe in Hetty’s liver-spotted hand. I shoved the image away in horror.

  And then I froze. “Turned you? As in made you a vamp?”

  Mrs. Maisel was still twinkling at me. “Don’t step on my grave, dear,” she admonished, her voice suddenly thicker. “You young folks today! So careless!”

  “Yes, we are,” I said quickly. “We young folks are darned careless. I mean, I haven’t even had the courtesy to inquire as to how Dr. Maisel became a vampire.” As I spoke I glanced surreptitiously down at the headstone, noting the fresh carving on it. Beloved Wife of Theodore, She Swiftly Followed Him From This Vale of Tears—blah, blah, blah. I let my gaze move past the writing to the basket lying on its side by the stone. I’d dismissed it before, but now I saw that its handle appeared to be made of one curved branch bound with slimmer ones.

  “My part-time practice,” Dr. Maisel said. His voice was thicker, too. “I officially retired months ago, but I couldn’t give up my work completely. I began offering evening walk-in consultations on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and one of my first patients presented me with an interesting orthodontic problem.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. My best bet would be to smash the basket against the Maisel’s gravestone, I decided tensely. “Occluded fangs?”

  “Exactly!” Dr. Maisel’s eyes glowed a dull red. “Misaligned canines are one thing, but when they lengthen into fangs they can create major problems. Pierced lips, painful bite action, an inability to close the jaw. Fascinating!”

  “Only to you, Theo,” Mrs. Maisel said indulgently. “Megan’s more interested in wondering if I’m going to tear her heart out while it’s still beating or kill her first, aren’t you, dear?”

  “Not really,” I said, my mouth feeling as though I’d just eaten a whole box of dry crackers. “I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my plan of burying it symbolically and then getting on with my life isn’t in the picture anymore. Once a girl passes that point it’s kind of futile to worry about what part of me you’re going to rip off first.” I
gathered myself for action. “It’s way more productive to figure out which of you two undead oldsters to stake first—and I’ve decided to go for you!”

  As I hurled my last words at her I grabbed the basket and swung it against the headstone. It hit with a satisfying crunch, but as I looked at it I saw that all I’d accomplished was to smash in one of the sides. The handle was still holding firm.

  Which kind of took care of plan A. As Hetty Maisel lunged for me, I realized I’d neglected to formulate a plan B.

  “First I’m going to tear you limb from limb,” she snarled as her outstretched hands grabbed the lapels of my robe. Her voice still sounded motherly, but think Satan’s mother. “Then I’m going to reach into your chest and—”

  One of my scuffs got tangled up with one of her Easy Spirit Comfort Walkers. I felt myself going down, and without thinking I let my arms slide from the sleeves of my robe. I hit the ground, not with the thump I was expecting but with a similar crunching sound to the one the basket had made when I’d tried to smash it. As I rolled sideways and saw its remains flattened on the patch of grass where I’d fallen, I understood why.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, Miss Smartypants!”

  Even as I frantically wrenched the handle from the now-demolished basket, out of the corner of my eye I saw the waffle sole of Hetty’s walking shoe blurring toward me. I tried to jerk my face out of the way, but it was too late. My chin snapped up and I went flying backward against the headstone.

  That’s when I got mad.

  I’m not saying I stopped being scared, because I didn’t. Old or not, the Maisels were vamps, and if Hetty’s iron grip on my arms or her Bruce Leelike kick to my face were any indications, along with the dubious privilege of being senior citizens for eternity, they’d also received the gift of super strength in return for their immortal souls. They could easily kill me. They probably would. But that thought wasn’t uppermost in my mind anymore.

  I’d been kicked in the chops by a woman wearing a powder-blue polyester pant suit. I’d been put in this situation by an Alpo-eating son of a bitch who’d deserted me at the first hint of danger. My sisters had joined a club that wouldn’t take me, my maternal grandfather was teaching them all kinds of secret signs and handshakes that I would never know, and I was totally pissed.

  I spat out the flakes of sod Hetty’s waffle sole had deposited into my mouth and grabbed my fallen basket handle. “Miss Smartypants?” I gave a short laugh and dodged sideways as her foot came toward me again. With my free hand I grabbed her ankle—ewww, she was wearing support knee-highs—and shoved upward. “Land sakes?” Her balance gone, she began to fall backward. Her arms flailed wildly, and as she went over, one of them windmilled solidly against her husband’s nose. I jumped to my feet as his red eyes filled with instant tears. “I’ve got a lot of problems with the whole vamp concept,” I informed her, “but giving you centuries to inflict your Little House on the Prairie phrases on the world is right up there in my top ten. Fangs and the little old lady act just don’t mix, Hetty.”

  I raised my basket-handle stake, but before I could drive it through the safari-style breast pocket of her truly horrendous pant suit into her heart, Dr. Maisel made his move.

  “You snot-nosed little brat!” He grabbed my arm. White spots of pain danced in front of my vision as he bent it behind my back. “You young people, with your damn rollerblades and your fast driving and your Mariah Carey music blaring from your hi-fis think you’re so superior to us old fogeys!”

  Even in my pain I felt the need to set the record straight. “Hey—I only have Charmbracelet because Grammie bought it for my seventeenth birthday. It’s not like I asked for it or anything.”

  With the hand that wasn’t tearing my arm off he reached around from behind me and twisted my chin around so I was forced to face him. “The tables are turned now, missy. You might be young, but we’re immortals. We’ve got superstrength and superspeed. Best of all, we get to kill anyone we—”

  “Wh-what about the shape-shifting into a wolf part?” My words came out in a gasp as he started to give my neck a final painful twist. His fangs poised to tear into my throat, Maisel hesitated.

  “What are you talking about?” he snarled.

  I blinked in feigned confusion. “All vamps receive the power to—” I stopped, as if suddenly reconsidering. “My mistake,” I said quickly. “Go ahead and finish that ripping-off-my-head thing, Doc.”

  “You old fool!” Hetty was on her feet again. With a backhanded blow that Anna Kournikova would have envied, she knocked her husband’s hand from me. She shoved me aside and confronted him, punctuating her every sentence with a poke in his chest. “When you told me this vampire deal was too good to be true, I should have remembered the other times you tried to handle business by yourself—like the land down in Florida that turned out to be in the middle of a swamp, or that surefire gold-mine investment that almost lost us our shirts in the seventies!” Poke, poke. “Why didn’t you bargain with her?” She drove her finger into his chest again, fury suffusing her plump face. “But then, you always had a weakness for redheads! Anytime you see one, your brain shuts down and little Theo stands up and salutes—”

  She was so intent on reaming out her husband and he was so intent on trying to avoid her finger that for a moment they took their attention from me. Swiftly I stepped behind Hetty and grabbed up the stake. Even as she broke off with a scream of rage, I plunged it into her back.

  For a second the two of us remained locked together as if we’d stopped in the middle of an intricate tango step: me behind her, her looking over her shoulder at me, our faces inches apart. The breath went out of her in a chilling hiss and her crinkly old-lady top lip lifted to reveal the full length of her fangs. Dismay clouded her rheumy red eyes, but then she smiled slowly.

  “You know what’s wrong with young people today?” Her tone was harshly malevolent. “They don’t follow through with anything they start. You didn’t push it in far enough to reach my heart, dear, and now you’re going to die regretting your mistak—”

  My grip was still on the stake. As Hetty Maisel’s eyes glittered in triumph, I gave it an extra shove.

  The scream that ripped from her throat was made up of equal parts fury and terror. Her fingers clawed at the air, her fangs sliced impotently inches from me, and then she disintegrated into dust.

  “Thanks for the timely tip,” I said shakily, glancing down at what little remained of her. I looked up in time to see Dr. Maisel rushing toward me and I pivoted to face him. He feinted sideways with such frightening speed that I barely changed position in time, and when I slashed at him with my stake he avoided it easily. Panicking, I slashed again in his direction.

  His heavily veined old-man’s hand darted out and effortlessly batted the stake from my grip. In numb disbelief I watched it arc through the air, bounce off a headstone and land a couple of graves away. I took a deep breath and turned my gaze to my former orthodontist.

  “Okay, I didn’t want to tell you before, but now I guess I have to,” I said, trying to keep the quaver from my voice. “I’m a vampire, too. I know, the fangs haven’t come in yet, I don’t flash-fry in the sunlight, but those are details.” I gave him what I hoped looked like a just-between-us-vamps smile. “I got marked by a queen vamp when I was a baby. You might even know her—red-hair, runs a strip club, goes by the name of—”

  Maisel rushed at me, his fangs fully extended. The next moment a stake came flying out of the darkness to bury itself in his chest.

  Chapter 7

  Whoever had thrown the stake had unerring aim. Maisel turned to dust so suddenly that it seemed as if he’d exploded. I had just enough time to register the thought that tonight apparently wasn’t my night to die before a second stake came whizzing through the air straight at my left eye.

  “Megan, duck!”

  Kat’s cry came out of the shadows as my hand wrapped around the lethally sharpened piece of wood. I blinked and felt the lashes of my left ey
e brush against the point of the stake I’d caught in midair. Slowly I lowered the stake to my side.

  Then I followed Dr. Maisel’s example and exploded. “What the hell, Kat!” As she ran over to me I realized she hadn’t seen my impossible catch and I found myself feeling glad she hadn’t. The whole night had been creepy, but for some reason my fortunate reaction to a stake coming at me unsettled me more than anything else that had happened in the past hour. Putting my unease aside, I glared at my sister.

  She was wearing a pair of dark form-fitting pants I hadn’t known she owned and a dark racer-back tank top. Instead of sexily skimming her shoulders as it usually did, her hair was pulled into a ponytail. Contrasted with her, in my grass-and-blood-stained Nick & Nora baby-doll short set, I felt like one of those girls with the black bars across their eyes in Glamour magazine’s monthly Fashion Do’s and Don’ts feature.

  “I see that the back-in-black look’s the latest thing for those after-hours cemetery jaunts,” I said sarcastically, “but dressing the part doesn’t make you a Daughter of Lilith, Kat. Maybe you should practice with a dartboard.” I saw Darkheart and Tashya hastening toward us. “Or ask Darkheart to give you some extra lessons before you blind someone. Judging by his aim a moment ago, he’s obviously no slouch at—”

  “Omigod, Meg, are you okay?” Tash ran up, a red-gold riot of curls obscuring her vision until she tossed back her head. Her outfit was similar to Kat’s, except her pants were even more formfitting and her top more low-cut. “I totally wasn’t aiming for you. I got so excited when Kat let fly, I kind of hoped she’d miss and I’d get him. Oh, good, I didn’t want to have to search for this in the grass.” Relieving me of her stake, she looked down at the pile of dust by our feet. “I didn’t get a really good look before he disintegrated, but wasn’t that Dr. Maisel?” she asked.