All three of us scrambled away from her, stumbling over furniture and bumping into walls, as ungracefully as we possibly could.
“What’d you bring something like that for?” I yelled. I had never actually seen in person what holy water did to a vampire, I’d just been told stories. Horrible stories. It wouldn’t kill us. It would just hurt. You’d think as a vampire I would be a little better about handling pain.
“I thought it’d be useful.” She was exactly right, of course.
“Wait a minute,” Aaron said. He went back to his pile of Nerf weapons and held up one of the little darts that went with one of the guns. The spongy little darts. Oh, that could work…
He found a pair of ancient rubber dishwashing gloves under the kitchen sink. Must have been left there by the last tenants. Ginny was helping him, searching cupboards for a stray bowl they could use for soaking the darts.
I watched her. She had the look of profound concentration I imagined she wore while gaming.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked out of the blue. “This isn’t your fight.”
She shrugged. “Because I put myself in the middle of it? Because they’re bad guys and it’s the right thing to do? Because I like you?”
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” I said.
“I’m already in this. They know who I am, they were already coming after me.”
I had to smile. I felt gooey. This was so weird. “Um. That thing you said, about being here. You said you wanted to move closer to downtown, right? You want to move in?”
She chuckled. “I’ve known you for like a week. This is only the second time I’ve seen you face-to-face.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I said.
“Sam, no!” Aaron said, horrified.
Jack added, “Aaron’s got a point, what exactly are you thinking here—”
I found a paper towel in the kitchen and the Sharpie Aaron had been using to label boxes. Sharpie on paper towel—lots of bleed. But I wrote out three lines of a sublet agreement: Ginny can live here if she promises not to mess things up too bad and maybe pays a to-be-agreed-upon rent.
I signed, then shoved the towel at Jack.
“Sign this.”
“No! I don’t want her moving in here—”
“Just for a couple of days, until we’re not being attacked by vampires anymore.” He stormed off. Shit. We all of us had to agree to it.
Jack said, “Someone around here has to be practical. Does someone maybe want to help me rig up a booby trap for the door? Aaron, you have any rope in that hoard of yours?”
“Yeah, I think so—”
He did. Miles of it. I didn’t know where he got all that rope—was rope a desirable commodity on eBay?—but he had a lot of it. Jack found the pieces of broken wooden table, and together they built something. Had no idea if it was actually going to work, but at this point we had to try everything.
Even the lunchboxes. I dug in a couple of kitchen drawers, the ones where all the junk ended up, until I found a roll of duct tape. The all-powerful duct tape. “I’m really sorry, Aaron.”
“Hey, what—Sam!”
“I won’t tear them up, they probably won’t even get hurt, not unless someone actually stabs at us. But you know, if they actually stab at us, you’ll be glad I’m doing this.”
I held a Dukes of Hazzard box against his chest, over his heart. “Hold that.” He held it, baffled. I stretched loose a long length of tape with that comforting ripping sound, and slapped it across the box, his chest, under his arms, around his back. I wrapped it around four or five times, with a couple of loops over his shoulders to stabilize the box so it didn’t fall. A regular duct-tape-and-lunch-box cuirass. I didn’t even have to worry about him being able to breathe.
“Now do me,” I said, handing him the tape and holding a Dragon’s Lair lunchbox to my chest. A minute later, I had my own armor.
“This won’t work,” he said, bemused, arms outstretched, staring at the box awkwardly taped to his chest.
“Or maybe it will?”
We looked dumb. We looked like total dorks. But you know what? Wasn’t nobody going to be stabbing any of us through the heart.
“You want one?” I said to Ginny.
“No, that’s okay,” she said. “I figure they won’t kill me, I’m food.”
Sobering thought, there.
Aaron was still looking at himself like he’d been drenched in slime. “I’m never gonna get that sticky tape stuff off these things. I’ll have to list them at ‘fair,’ tops.”
“Two words, my friend: Goo Gone. It’ll be fine.” I turned to Jack. “So, do you want to be taped up with Care Bears or The A-Team?”
He looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “The A-Team. Duh.”
BEFORE I COULD try one more time to get Jack and Aaron to sign the sublet towel before handing it to Ginny there was a scratching noise at one of the windows in the living room, behind the TV. Normally, I would have said it was an animal, a rat or raccoon maybe, clawing at the edges, looking for a way in, but the silhouette, shadowed by the streetlights outside, was of a human figure. After tapping at the window a few more times, the figure left, slipping away like smoke. I went to my bedroom, looked at the window on the back wall—again, the tapping came, a concerted scratching, testing access. We’d secured the windows. We’d be okay.
A knock came at the front door, and a voice called. “Jack? Sam? I just want to talk. Can’t we just talk? You don’t even have to open the door.” It was Carter.
“I think we’re just fine where we are, how are you?” Jack answered.
“There’s been some kind of misunderstanding—”
“Oh, like you hiding away your own vampire squad? Did I misunderstand that?”
Silence. Then glass broke. The sound came from Aaron’s room.
“Shit,” Jack muttered and grabbed one of the spear-like table legs.
We all started for the room, but I said, “No, Jack, stay by the door, we can’t let anyone get in.”
So much for the place being defensible. We suddenly had four fronts to cover, and we didn’t know anything about the bad guys except that they were vampires. I could sense them, cold eddies in the atmosphere. Ginny shut the bedroom door and I assumed locked it, but it locked from the inside, it would only slow an invader down a couple of seconds.
Aaron, protected by rubber gloves, and Ginny grabbed Nerf guns and moved in to aim them at the bedroom door, where we expected the swarms to come through. We were screwed.
“I gave you a chance. I was more than happy to give you a chance. You could have helped us. We need people like you. Vampires, young and hungry. Well, young anyway.”
A pounding struck the front door. This wasn’t knocking—this was someone hitting it with something large and heavy. A battering ram. A few seconds later the bang came again, and the door bounced in its frame. The third one, the plywood around the deadbolt splintered. The next one, the door would fly open.
“Everybody stand back,” I murmured. I glanced up at the ceiling, where Jack and Aaron had hastily installed a spiky rake chair thing and rigged it with rope around a couple of makeshift pulleys. We hadn’t had time to test it and I had no idea if it would work. We’d find out now.
“If you guys would just sign the sublet—” I muttered. Make this place Ginny’s, the vampires couldn’t come in—
“Too late for that,” Jack said.
More breaking glass from the back bedroom, and the thud of someone jumping down from the window. I couldn’t worry about Ginny and Aaron because the lock in the front door finally splintered.
The door swung open, yanking on the rope trigger, and the contraption on the ceiling fell.
At first, I thought it didn’t work—it just fell, dropped straight down as if whatever was holding it up had failed. But then, at the last minute, it swung—and three different splintered shards of wood caught the guy coming through the door square in the chest.
&n
bsp; The guy, a vampire, fell under the tangle of wood and rope, made a kind of choking noise—and dried out. Turned desiccated, his skin going leathery, eyes sinking back in his skull. In the space of seconds, he turned into a dried-up corpse. No longer undead, just plain dead. He’d been holding a wooden spear in one hand and a hand-held crossbow, wooden bolt loaded, in the other. Yeah, they wanted to kill us. Good to know.
“Ew,” Jack said, lip curling.
“Yes, and if we don’t want that happening to us, we have to stop them.”
A second guy came through the doorway. The trap and its victim had the added bonus of gumming up the threshold. The guy had to pick his way over debris and his fallen comrade. The glare that he gave us was full of fury. He bared his teeth and fired his hand crossbow.
The bolt glanced off the lunchbox strapped to Jack’s chest.
“Holy shit, it worked!” he said, his voice filled with awe. He charged forward, his makeshift spear outstretched and impaled the intruder, who just stood there and let him do it, apparently in shock that his bolt had missed. The spear made a wet, cracking sound as it went in, and like the other guy he collapsed, arms splayed out, a look of pain and disbelief on his pale features. His corpse dried out, caved in, like a body left in the grave.
How old had he been? He looked about mid-twenties, but so did I. I had no way to tell. They’d felt… older. More powerful. Our only advantage here was surprise.
Jack yanked his spear out, stepped back, and stared wide-eyed at his victim.
“Why don’t vampires wear armor? Like, stab-proof vests or something? That technology’s been around for a pretty long time,” Jack said, knocking a couple of times on his lunch box.
Ginny and Aaron both let out shouts. The bedroom door had crashed open, another goon-looking guy was coming through. They both let fly with Nerf darts. Aaron had found a couple of big-ass repeater-loading bandolier-equipped Nerf guns in his stash. They didn’t have to reload. Droplets of water flew off the darts as they gently lofted and bounced against the vampire.
“What the hell—” The bad guy gave a short laugh, brushing away the darts like he’d swat at gnats. Some of them had hit his bare face and exposed hands. Then, his expression warped into a grimace. “Shit! What is that?”
Ginny and Aaron kept firing, damp projectiles bouncing harmlessly off the vampire’s face and clothes, but leaving angry red welts behind. He stumbled back into the bedroom, unslinging a spear from his shoulder.
“Ginny!” I shouted and tossed one of the loaded hand crossbows left by the dead vampires to her. She studied it for a second, gave a determined nod, aimed, fired.
A shout came from inside the room. I couldn’t see what happened, but given that Ginny quickly went to reload, the shot hadn’t stopped him.
“Sam!” Jack called.
Two more heavies came in through the front door, unceremoniously crawling over their fallen comrades. This time when Jack went to stab one, the guy in front grabbed the spear and yanked it out of his grip, just like that.
I threw Jack mine and went for another, one of the broken broom handles I’d set in a pile by the sofa. The heavy wasn’t expecting an immediate comeback, and Jack got him, leaning in to really wrench the spear home. The second guy came for me.
The doorway was defensible. It was pretty straightforward to stand there and knock the guys over as they came through. But once he got inside, I didn’t have anywhere to go, no place to hide. I held my spear out, aimed straight for his chest—pointy end in the other guy, that was how it went, right? I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I wasn’t trained for this.
The guy pointed at me. “What… is that a lunch box taped to your chest?”
“Yes.”
“You look ridiculous.”
“But hey—I’m not the one getting staked through the heart.” I prepared to charge.
He just stopped me. Unlike the others, he was ready, he was expecting it, so he gracefully stepped clean out of my way, grabbed my arm, spun me and slammed me into a wall.
Something surged in me, some kind of power or survival instinct. When he went to hit me, I ducked, and the world blurred, or slowed down, or something. I was moving faster than I ever had, I felt stronger than I ever had. It wasn’t enough, because the next time I ducked, he was moving even faster than I was. He grabbed my hair, pinned me to the wall. I couldn’t shout for help because I couldn’t breathe in. Besides, I heard fighting—the others were busy.
He tipped my head back, caught my gaze. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help it.
He was older than me. Stronger than me. He could put enough force into his stare, enough strength into his grip, I’d just stand there while he took my head off. This was the real thing, the real power of vampires.
Screw that. Maybe he was stronger, but I didn’t have to sit here and take it, and I was a smart monkey. I didn’t need brute force.
I dropped, shoved, and it was just enough to throw him off balance and let me escape. He was right behind me, his hands grasping at the untucked tails of my shirt. But I had a target, and I didn’t look back and didn’t slow down. I crossed the room in a flash, reached the kitchen, and the bowl of holy water Ginny and Aaron had been using to soak Nerf darts. Grabbed it, flashed on the awareness that this was probably going to hurt like hell, but I didn’t exactly have time to stop for gloves.
I emptied the bowl right into the guy’s face. He screamed, bent fingers scrabbling at his face, trying to wipe the stuff off.
Some of the holy water splashed onto my hands, and the burning was like putting my hand on a stove, and no matter how fast you pulled your hand away, the burn would still be there. It didn’t seem fair. I wasn’t even religious, not before I was turned and certainly not now. But it burned. I wiped my hands on my shirt.
The vampire’s face turned red, a rash covering him, down his neck and under his shirt where water had soaked through. He let off a string of curses, keeping his eyes shut against the burn. It was like I’d heard: it didn’t kill. But boy, it hurt. I curled my hands and crossed my arms to keep from scratching at them.
The guy didn’t notice Jack coming up from behind and using a broken broomstick to stab him through the back, and through the heart. The splintered end didn’t come out through the front, which would have been cool. But it got the guy, and he dried out, his body decaying before our eyes, until he was nothing more than a dusty husk, a corpse on the edge of disintegration.
“Aaron, sign it!” That was Ginny, and there was Aaron at the kitchen counter, signing the paper towel.
He brought towel and marker to Jack, who pressed it against the wall. The ink bled through and left a mark. I didn’t much care.
Then Ginny signed it. And everything went still.
No more breaking glass, no more intruders climbing through the mess. Just the four of us standing in the living room, weapons ready, waiting. Ginny was the only one gasping for breath, and her heart was racing. I could hear it.
“Is that it?” Aaron asked.
Six vampires had gotten in. I tried to be impressed that we had rated, like, a whole platoon. But I was suddenly very tired.
We waited another minute. Still quiet. If there were any more outside they couldn’t get in. The sublet had worked. “Maybe it’s over?” I said.
Jack wasn’t letting his spear go. “Okay, but where’s Clarissa?”
“It’s all right. We have her.”
That was Rick’s calm, upper-crust voice. My muscles almost gave out. All of us almost gave out. Jack and I tried to clear out some of the mess and the desiccated dead vampires. But my hands hurt.
“Oh my God, Sam, what did you do?” Ginny said, reaching for me, then hesitating.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Does it hurt much?”
“Yes, yes it does.”
Jack wrenched open the door. Standing on the concrete stoop was Braun, the bouncer from Psalm 23, playing soldier now. Rick appeared next to h
im, with Clarissa Carter, whom he held immobilized, an arm across her neck, her hands held fast behind her. There were other vampires behind them, at street level, shadows in the darkness. I didn’t know if they were Rick’s or Clarissa’s.
“You see?” Rick said, showing her the destruction, the bodies of her minions. “You’re not wanted here, and this city is very much protected.” He turned her, put a hand on her face to tip her head back, forcing her to stare into his eyes. He focused his vampiric gaze on her.
“Go back to Mercedes Cook. Tell her not to try for Denver again. Ever.” In reply she nodded, slowly.
I had always thought of Rick as a nice guy. A benevolent Master. Right now, he was kind of scary. No, he was really scary.
She slumped his grip. He passed her over to Braun, who slung her over his shoulder.
“Put her in her car and leave her,” Rick ordered. “Do not harm her. But make it very clear we could have.”
“Understood,” Braun said, and went out with the unconscious Carter.
Rick stayed behind and tried to look us all over through the open front door. His expression was serene—when wasn’t it? He might have been out for an evening walk.
“Well done, gentlemen,” he said finally. “And lady. You are?”
“Um. I’m Ginny,” she said. “Just a friend.”
“Right.” Rick glanced at me, eyebrow raised, putting two and two together. I felt like a kid who’d gotten caught staying out too late. He just kept standing there. “There suddenly seems to be a prohibition on the place.”
We all looked at Ginny, who said, sheepishly, “Yeah, um. I signed a sub-lease.”
“Very creative,” Rick said, lifting a brow. “So, may I come in?”
“It’s okay, he’s a good guy,” Jack said.
But Ginny shook her head. “If it’s all the same to you, we can talk through the doorway, yeah?”
“Fair enough,” Rick said. I thought he would argue, but he really was that nice of a guy. He gestured at our so-called armor. “Nice work, there.”
“They were collectible,” Aaron said grumpily.
“I’ll help you clean them up. It’ll be okay.” I started picking at the duct tape and peeling off the lunch box, but had to stop. My hands hurt. I was a vampire, I was supposed to be invincible, why did my hands hurt?
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