I wipe down my blade, then retrieve the scabbard and put the katana back in it. “Dammit.”
“What?”
“Coralie told me to come here. Those guys were going to kill you. Dammit.”
“Why are you saying dammit? They didn’t kill me.”
I look at her. “Because I’m starting not to feel guilty about the idea of burning them to death.”
“You don’t have to do it.” Sierra shrugs.
“You’re not playing with matches. Mom will freak,” I say to the little girl covered in blood who just chopped helped me chop a dozen vampires into pieces.
She laughs. “No, not me. Call Wolent. Have him send people here to clean up. These guys are basically enemies on his territory, right? Whatever he decides to do to them is not your fault.”
“Good point. Hey Siri? Send a geotag to Arthur Wolent.” She beeps acknowledgement. “Hey Siri, send a text to Arthur Wolent.” I wait for the beep. “Bad guys at this location. They kinda fell to pieces. Will give more details later.”
“Oh…” Sierra pokes me. “Before they saw me, I heard them talking about a guy named something weird. Sounded like Anselme Ernoul.”
I blink. “Isn’t he a snob chef from some TV show?”
“Umm, no idea. He’s a vampire in Astoria. I think he’s their boss, too. Sounded like a big group of vampires want to take over Seattle. They’re kinda frustrated the elders haven’t started ripping each other apart yet.”
“Good.” I smile. “So, we have a name for this guy now.”
“Yeah. He sounds like a butthead.”
I glance at her. “Now for the big question. What the hell are you doing here?”
Sierra gives an exasperated sigh like she’s late for work because she got stuck in traffic. “Soph was trying to use magic to scry and find out who’s causing all the trouble.”
“Scry?”
“Yeah, you know… crystal ball type stuff? Anyway, let’s just say things didn’t go quite the way she wanted.”
“Shocking.”
Sierra chuckles. “Tentacles may have been involved.”
“Uh oh.”
“I ran to grab my sword so I could cut her loose, but when I got back to her room, they were gone. So was Soph. I opened the closet to look for her… and a tentacle grabbed me around the head. Next thing I know, I’m here.”
Oh, that explains the black stuff on her face. Dried void tentacle slime. Eww. And crap. Sophia might be in trouble somewhere. The girl really needs to stop trying to mess with opening gates.
“They didn’t notice me right away, so I crawled under a shelf to listen. They were talking about stealing a whole bunch of dead bodies so some dude named Anselme could send them to ‘mess stuff up.’ It’s not just our family being attacked. They want the old vampires of Seattle to fight each other.”
“Yeah. I got that feeling.”
“Over here!” Sierra runs off, the patter of bloody feet echoing in the now-silent warehouse.
It’s kind of a miracle no cops have shown up due to the guns firing. Pretty sure the police won’t come in quiet, at least not quiet enough to escape my ears. I should have plenty of time to grab Sierra and make a roof exit if they do.
She leads me to the other end of the warehouse where six garage doors line the wall at a loading dock. Multiple cafeteria style tables are set up around some forklifts. A pair of zoned-out security guards sit handcuffed to one forklift. Probably snacks for the vampires. It wouldn’t surprise me if the vamps intended to kill these two guys later to be used as ‘zombies.’
“This is where they hung out before.” Sierra points at a laptop. “The woman who had the gun seemed to be the one in charge. She kept looking at the computer when talking about the places they planned to attack.”
Hmm. This is definitely not their lair, most likely a temporary staging area for a campaign of misdirection. It’s probably not a great idea to spend much time here. Looks like someone got the stupids and forgot to lock the screen when they noticed Sierra and everyone began searching for her. After changing the admin password to the word ‘password’ so we don’t get locked out for good, I grab the laptop to take with us. Oh, oops. Sec. I snap the handcuffs off the security guards and—damn. The mental command in their heads to stare into the ninth dimension is too potent for me to overcome. Hopefully, whoever Wolent sends here to clean up can take care of them.
“Uh oh.” Sierra gestures at the trail of bloody footprints we left.
“Compared to the mess in the back of the building, that’s mild.”
“Yeah, but my tracks are small. They’re going to know a kid was here.”
“Relax. Wolent’s people will take care of it. C’mon. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She nods. “Promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Don’t fly too high, and if some dickhead decides to attack us, sprint for the ground. I’d prefer to fight instead of fall.”
“Okay. And I won’t tell Mom you said ‘dickhead.’”
She frowns. “Are you going to tell her I sliced up a bunch of vampires?”
“Still debating.”
Sierra laughs.
28
Bloodbath
Greg Miller, a boy in my class from high school, liked to go to the firing range with his dad.
He used to say shooting targets was a lot of fun, but cleaning the guns afterward sucked. Sierra loves going to her sword fighting lessons. Being covered in blood is kinda like the annoying chore after the fact. Thankfully, she hasn’t come home from there looking like she jumped into a blood lake. I’m almost certain Mom would pull the plug on those classes if Sierra routinely had to slice up vampires. To be fair, she adores sparring. Actual fighting, she gets no real thrill out of. Awesome. Much like me, the whole time she’s in a real fight, her brain is basically screaming an endless stream of profanities and hoping to walk away alive. She’s not a small psychopath.
Defending herself from vampires is way different from stabbing a living person.
She may or may not hesitate to slice a living guy trying to hurt her, but either way, doing so would probably leave a mental scar—unlike what we just did. My sister has filed it away as no more traumatizing than shooting fake people in a video game. It helps to know nothing either one of us did with our swords tonight is permanent. All those vampires will get back up in hours… provided Wolent’s people don’t leave them out for the sunrise. Heads don’t roll back in place all on their own. Those vamps will have some fun trying to maneuver their bodies around blind looking for the head.
Ya know what looks super weird? Sticking a sword into a head and the flailing decapitated body fifteen feet away drops unconscious. However, headless bodies running around and pouncing blindly is definite nightmare fuel even if I completely understand what they are.
My sister is pretty quiet on the flight home. It doesn’t take long, only a few minutes, so we have no real time for a deep conversation. Upon arriving at the house, I don’t touch down and glide into the kitchen via the patio door. I hover for a second, debating between the basement shower stall and the upstairs bathroom. Heck, I’ll drop her upstairs and use the one in the basement. She’s a little too old for sharing a shower. Maybe if we’d been covered in poop she wouldn’t care, but yeah, this is only blood. Sierra lifts her head off my shoulder to look around. Before she can ask why we’re floating like a gory pinata in the kitchen, I drift forward across the house to the upstairs bathroom, careful not to brush against any walls or furniture. The two of us are so soaked we’d act like a permanent marker writing in blood. Still hovering, I set Sierra on her feet in the bathtub.
Sierra sets her sword on the rug, blushes a little, then shrugs. “You gonna go downstairs?”
“I was planning on it… umm, unless you don’t really want to be alone.”
She smiles, looking relieved, blush fading. “Nah, I’m fine. Swordfights, please always help me if you’re there. Showering, I can handle
myself.”
We stare at each other for a moment. Sierra’s expression shifts from defensive to guilty to adoring. I can’t help but read her thoughts. She’s feeling bad about how she used to scream ‘get out’ at me if I tried to walk into the bathroom when she was already in there, as if I did it on purpose. My almost-death has ‘slightly rearranged’ our family dynamic. Sierra won’t yell at me now, but accidentally barging in on her still embarrasses the hell out of her. She was really hoping I didn’t plan to stay here and shower in the same tub.
And she knows I’m looking. Guess my emotion’s on my face.
“What about poop?”
“Eww.” Sierra grimaces. “If we got covered in poo, it wouldn’t matter if we shared a shower… because you would be erasing the entire memory from my head.”
I chuckle.
“Careful going downstairs, don’t drip.”
“We’re not dripping anymore. The blood’s dried enough to be tacky.”
“Wearing blood is always tacky.” She grins.
“Oh, no!” I facepalm. “You’ve got it too.”
“What?” Sierra goes wide-eyed.
“Dad’s pun genes.”
“Noooo!” Sierra fake wails.
One does not simply witness a bloody apparition drift through the house and not go to investigate. Mom skids to a stop in the doorway, staring at us. Once she realizes she didn’t witness a strange multi-limbed floating blood golem and, in fact, it was only me giving Sierra a piggyback ride, she covers her mouth to hold back a scream of worried confusion. “What happened?”
“Well…” I gesture at Sierra like a game show hostess. “She’s getting older. A girl’s bound to end up covered in blood at a bad time sooner or later.”
Sierra gasps. I think she’s blushing. Difficult to tell.
Mom smirks, unimpressed.
“Seriously, though,” I say. “Some vampires attacked us. We had to cut a few bitches.”
Sierra laughs. “Sare, you are way too normal and suburban to ever say ‘we had to cut a bitch.’ It’s as cringey as Dad quoting lyrics from rap music.”
“What?” gasps Mom, jaw open.
“It’s true,” says Sierra. “Dad listens to rap sometimes.”
Mom stares at her. “No, I mean… attacked? Why are you in a nightie? Please tell me what the hell happened before I lose my mind.”
“Nothing in the house, Mom.” I’m seriously getting tired of standing here covered in blood. It’s tempting to peel my clothes off so the sticky sensation stops. Nothing Mom hasn’t seen already and my sister would look away.
“We, umm, had a magic oops.” Sierra shakes her head.
“Speaking of…” I look at her. “Where is Sophia?”
“I dunno. Kinda lost track of her when the giant tentacle wrapped around my head and yanked me into the closet.”
Mom rubs the bridge of her nose. “Why does Sophia have a giant tentacle in her closet?”
I cringe, resisting the urge to go for the cheap joke. “Uhh, not touching that one with a ten-foot-pole.” Okay, maybe I didn’t resist it well enough.
Mom’s turn to blush hard.
Sierra scrunches her nose at me. “Huh?”
“Why are there strange creatures from the void lurking in your sister’s closet,” says Mom in her ‘I’m angry but keeping myself composed’ voice.
Sigh. “I’m guessing she tried to open a teleportation gate again and didn’t quite pull it off.”
“She’s not old enough to drive. She shouldn’t be trying to establish pan-dimensional gateways.” Mom looks at us again, exhaling in disbelief.
“She didn’t.” Sierra points in the general direction of Sophia’s room. “She just wanted to scry, you know… look at stuff. Get information.”
“Mom, I need to start searching for her as soon as we don’t look like a walking crime scene. Gonna head downstairs and clean up. Uhh, Sierra, you want me to just take your nightie and toss it in the laundry?”
“Ugh. Okay.” Sierra turns the water on and pulls the shower curtain forward to hide behind it.
“You know, Sarah, a fun evening out with your little sister isn’t supposed to end with the two of you covered in blood.”
“I know, Mom. Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring her to a sword fight… but you should be proud of her. She kicked ass.”
Sierra peeks around the shower curtain, grinning proudly.
Mom whistles. “And what are you doing outside at this hour?”
“Accident. Tentacle, remember? I didn’t want to go anywhere.” Sierra lifts one foot into the gushing water. “It’s warm enough. Gonna start showering now. Can I please have the bathroom to myself?”
Her bloody nightgown comes flying over the top of the shower curtain. Easy catch.
“I… don’t know how to handle this.” Mom rubs her forehead again. “Grandma said motherhood could be rough sometimes. She had no damn idea.”
“C’mon, Mom.” Without touching her—due to blood all over me—I sorta shoo her out of the room. “Mind getting the door? My hands are a mess.”
29
Vast Interdimensional Non-Space
Showering off semidry vampire blood is a chore.
This stuff is stickier than normal blood. It’s like someone dumped a bucket of cherry pancake syrup over my head and it hardened into a lacquer. Much scrubbing needed. Fortunately, it’s mostly on my face, arms, and hair. It didn’t soak through my shirt or pants much. Note to self: next time I end up a bloody mess, don’t wait so long to clean up. Once I’m back in my bedroom, I finish drying off, then grab a clean T-shirt and pair of jeans.
It’s unnerving Sierra showed more discomfort at the idea I might have tried to share the tub with her than she did at chopping up a bunch of vampires. Yes, she had a total non-reaction to a swordfight as gory as a Quentin Tarantino movie. If my unlife continues like this, I may need to buy a weird yellow jumpsuit. I’ve already got the katana. Did I mention it’s a ‘real’ one? Not a Home Shopping Network cheapie. According to Coralie, the sword does not have a soul trapped in it, which is good. Nah. Forget the yellow track suit. It wouldn’t look good on me. Besides, it’s difficult to get bloodstains out of bright colors.
Somehow, Sierra views ‘killing’ vampires like stepping on bugs, but she doesn’t regard me as a creature. Not sure how she’s processing the contradiction, but hey. I’m not a meaningless creature. Go me. I am, however, prepared to deal with the possibility Sierra’s going to have a nightmare or two in the near future. She’s like the ballsiest twelve-year-old in the world, but she is still a child. Neither one of us acknowledged how scared she had been while hiding under the shelf before I got there. Kinda like two grown men in the middle of a combat zone catching each other crying from fear—they just accept the moment and move on like it didn’t happen.
Right, I can worry about helping Sierra manage the pieces of a potentially crumbling psyche tomorrow. Sophia’s still missing. I’m almost to the basement steps when her voice comes from the second floor.
“That totally sucked!”
I rush upstairs. The ’rents and Sierra are slow-motion walking across the hall from Sierra’s room. Thanks to my accelerated speed, we narrowly avoid jamming together, squeezing into the room at roughly the same time. Sophia’s room is empty.
“What the heck?” I spin to look at the parents. “You heard her, right?”
“In here,” calls Sam.
We scramble across the hall again.
Sam and Ronan—both in pajamas—stand on either side of Sophia, who’s got both feet in an orange plastic beach bucket a short distance in front of the closet. I can’t tell what Sophia’s wearing because she is a silhouette, as if someone dipped her in a vat of black paint. The substance drips down her body, explaining the bucket. Klepto is pasted to the top of her head like a lumpy toupee with eyes. Both Sam and Ronan look like they stood a little too close to a cartoony explosion, having smears of black stuff on their PJs and faces.
; “Totally sucked,” mutters Sophia.
Klepto emits a miserable sounding “Mew.”
“Do I even want to know?” asks Mom.
“What happened, Soph?” I ask.
“Things that cannot be unseen.” Sophia shivers.
“Looks like she had a negative experience with void energy.” Dad gingerly swipes a finger at Sophia’s forehead. He sniffs the gunk on his fingertip. “Doesn’t smell like anything.”
“It technically smells like nothing.” Sam holds a finger up. “It’s liquid nothingness.”
“I don’t like tentacles,” says Ronan in a flat tone.
Dad pats him on the head. “You are normal. People who like tentacles are considered strange.”
The kids all look at us, confused.
“Not now, Jonathan.” Mom exhales. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“Uhh.” Sam wipes black smudge off his cheek. “Olmaz helped us get Soph back from the non-space where the black tentacle thing lives.”
“It hit me.” Ronan scrunches up his nose. “Like getting smacked with a baseball bat made of Jell-O.”
“You had to fight the giant void octopus to get Sophia back?” I ask.
“No. It just kinda flailed at us like we were mosquitos buzzing around it while we pulled her out.” Sam chuckles. “He wasn’t trying to kill us. I think he’s afraid of humans.”
“Good instincts.” Dad nods. “If the void starts tolerating humans, next thing you know, there’ll be Starbucks, McDonald’s, and KFCs all over intra-dimensional non-space.”
Mom sighs.
“I was trying to scry to figure out who’s causing all the trouble for the vampires.” Sophia wobbles, almost losing her balance from standing in a bucket. “I kinda saw this big room with a bunch of shelves and stuff. Tried to get a closer look, but something went wrong and my closet popped open. Tentacles grabbed me. Sierra ran to get her sword, but the void monster pulled me into the closet… and slime.”
Vampire Innocent | Book 11 | How To Stop A Vampire War In Six Easy Steps Page 26