by P. N. Elrod
She is not afraid.
Why?
Do you know who I am?
Everyone of our race knows who you are.
Then you know I can’t let you go.
Still no reaction. Her mind is closed. Mine is not. Do you think because you are not resisting I will spare you?
I think you will spare me because I have something to offer you.
I pull her to her feet. She faces me squarely. We are the same height. Her dark eyes have changed back; she still holds the vampire in check. She wears pants and a blouse that skims her shoulders, a denim jacket. Her hair is tied back from her face with a scarf. She looks like a woman of about twenty-five. Her thoughts are much older, much darker.
The creature before me radiates malevolence. She has killed for a hundred years. She has a taste for it. Lust for blood oozes from her pores like the foul smell of rotting meat. My instinct to kill her now and quickly battles with a desire to find out what a being like this thinks she can offer me.
See? You are curious.
I backhand her across the face. She flies fifty feet and lands on a barrel cactus.
She struggles to her feet. Damn, bitch. That hurt .
I’m at her side with my hands around her throat before she can finish whining.
She still has not released the beast. I can feel her fury building. She wants to. What is holding her back?
I have killed vampires before. Vampires more powerful than this sniveling female. It can be done many ways. This one, however, deserves to die slowly. The same way she has killed the helpless humans she’s lured to this place with a promise of a new life. She will feel her life ebb away drop by drop until there is nothing left but an empty husk.
I am done with you.
For the first time, something besides sarcasm and confidence flickers in the depths of her eyes. Fear is there, too. She pulls away, her hands on my arms as she tries to break my grip. Her struggles are fruitless.
But I have something you want. Information I am willing to offer in return for my life.
You have recklessly taken human life. Left bodies to be discovered—
No one of importance. No one who will be missed. I have incited no threat against us. Why should it matter to you that I thin the ranks of the miserable? I do them a service, ending their pathetic lives.
Her attitude is like a red-hot poker in my gut. Do you ask them first? Give them a choice? You kill for sport. You take their money. Worse, you offer hope, then snatch it away. You are an animal. You deserve the same fate as those you toy with, the ones you consider unimportant. I am here to exact vengeance.
Then what Chael says about you is true.
The name makes me draw back a tiny step, to look into her eyes. What does Chael have to do with you?
She takes advantage of the momentary distraction to draw herself up. Chael says you think more of mortals than you do of your own kind. I see he is right. Her words drip acid. Well, be warned. You may soon find yourself alone. There are many of us who are tired of hiding. The tide is rising.
So this is why you are here? To deliver a warning? You have made a grievous mistake if you think killing innocents is the way to gain my support for your cause.
She shakes her head. I am not here to gain your support. Chael told me there would be only one thing to tempt you away from the path you have chosen. Kill me now and you will never know how to achieve what it is your heart desires.
And how do you know what my heart desires? How does Chael?
It is obvious. You wish to return the gift of immortality, to become human.
I make a guttural sound in my throat—half snort, half snarl. You think you can forestall the inevitable with this foolish talk? The only reason you are not dead already is that I want to make sure the humans are safely away before I end your miserable existence. They have been traumatized enough.
I may not be so easy to kill.
Finally. The beast is unleashed. Her right hand dips into her jacket. Lightning fast. She pulls out a small stake and lunges for my chest.
I am faster. A half turn and the stake strikes a rib. It tears flesh and opens a gash that weeps blood. The pain, the smell of my own blood, only strengthen my determination. Adrenaline propels me forward and I wrest the weapon from her hand, toss it away.
She makes her move. Locks her arms around me, intent on bending me backward; snapping jaws seek my throat.
I am stronger. It takes very little effort to break her grip. Our positions reverse. For a fleeting moment, I have a glimpse into her head. Hate boils in her blood, turns her thoughts red with rage.
And Chael is there, too. His whispered entreaties that she should seek me out. Tempt me with the secret.
Chael is there.
Who is this female to Chael?
What is the secret?
No matter.
The bloodlust burns too strong to pull back now. Nothing is more important than the hunger. I tear at her jugular. Her blood, hot and delicious, fills my mouth, my senses. She squirms and pounds at my chest with her fists. The blood from my chest wound seems to mingle with her own blood as the one flows out and the other flows in.
She is strong. Her will to live is not easily extinguished. She is kicking at me, her hands frantically seeking anything to use against me.
Too late to deflect it, I feel her fingers close around the gun clipped to my belt. She fires it without drawing it out of the holster. The roar of the gunshot rips the quiet fabric of the night. A bullet pierces my side.
The bullet moves inside me, scorching a path through muscle and sinew before it explodes out. It does not penetrate organ or impact bone. It does not weaken my resolve.
It does not stop me from snapping her arm.
We both scream in pain.
It’s the last sound she makes. She is getting weaker. I regain my hold, lock my jaws tight once again. Her blood is no longer thick, but thinning out as the last drops are consumed. She no longer fights. She is no longer capable of shielding her thoughts. The atrocities she’s committed, the victims she’s tortured, the senseless agony she’s inflicted. All threaten from the dark. There is no thought of loved ones or family. Like her victims, she has lived most of her second life alone. Only fear is left. Dread.
As I drain the last of her blood, feel the shudder as her soul leaves the body, my hatred ebbs. I rejoice.
It is just.
She has died like her victims, alone and afraid.
The metamorphosis begins the instant the soul leaves the body. The young woman I held in my grasp is an old, withered shell by the time she hits the ground. It is the way. Drained of blood, the vampire body reverts physically to its mortal counterpart. I stand looking down at an old lady well past her one hundredth birthday.
My metamorphosis begins, too. The human Anna comes back, slowly, reluctantly.
Slowly. Infusion of blood temporarily warms a body that is even now returning to its natural state. The warmth fades too quickly.
Reluctantly. With the return to human form comes rational thought. I will not forget what I have done.
I have killed.
I have no regrets. She deserved to die. I only wish killing didn’t come so easily.
But what of Chael? What was this woman to him? His instincts were good. The fairy tale of regaining mortality is the one carrot he could dangle in front of me—the one prize I might be tempted to pursue.
But not at the cost of more innocents.
Never at the cost of more innocents.
With rational thought comes something else—awareness of the pain that racks my side. Slowly, carefully, I draw myself up, stretch gingerly, willing the healing process to move more quickly, to numb this ache.
CHAPTER 7
“Anna!” Max’s voice. “Where are you?”
I rouse myself and step over the vampire’s body. I realize I never learned her name. Does it matter? Not now.
Max is fifty yards out, moving toward me at a run.
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“Here.”
I let him find me. He has his gun in his hand and he is breathing hard. When he sees the crumpled remains on the ground, he turns to me, startled, bewildered.
“Who is that?”
“Your coyote.”
He kneels for a closer look. “She’s an old woman. How could she possibly—”
“What you’re looking at are mortal remains. You were right in suspecting a vampire was behind the attacks. She was with a couple when I found her. I let them go.”
“I know.” Max holsters his gun. “I saw them run by.”
“Did they make it?”
“From what I could see.”
“Good.”
Max switches his gaze from the corpse to me. For the first time, he sees the blood soaking my shirt, on my thighs.
“You’re hurt?”
“No.” Not much anyway.
I don’t think I’ll tell him I let myself get shot with my own gun. “It looks worse than it is.”
He nods. Luckily, he knows how it is with vampires.
“What should we do with that?” He points to the thing on the ground.
“Bury it.”
Max swings his flashlight in an arc. “I didn’t bring a shovel. What can we use?”
I spy a flat piece of rock and a long, sturdy branch kiln-dried by the sun. I retrieve them. “It will take work, but we can use these.”
I hand him the branch to begin scraping away sand and follow after, scooping out a hole with the rock. My side screams in protest, but within fifteen minutes we have a hole big enough and deep enough to cover the corpse. I grab her by the arm and throw her in.
“She’s really dead, right?” Max asks.
“You mean is she going to rise up in three days and come after us?” I prod at the body with my foot. “No. She’s gone.”
We set to work, shoveling the sand back in, tamping it down with our feet, setting a layer of rock and debris over the grave. To protect it from scavengers.
A flashback. Another vampire corpse. Another grave dug in the desert. Another pair of hands working beside mine.
Lance. Friend. Lover. Traitor.
Dead now. By my hand.
A shudder racks my body.
Max’s shoulder is so close to mine, he feels my body jerk. He pauses. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The vampire answers from the darkest place in my soul. “It’s nothing. I just walked on someone’s grave.”
EPILOGUE
Max recognizes one of the guards at the border crossing. They exchange a few words in Spanish and he waves us through. It’s good because I’m not sure I want to try to explain the rust-colored stains covering my clothes.
Max drives me back to my car. He watches me climb gingerly out. “Can you drive?”
I massage my side. The scrape caused by the stake is healed. The path the bullet tore through my side is healed. Now it’s just the skin pulling tight as it regenerates over the wounds that makes me wince when I move.
“Yeah. I’m a little stiff but by the time I get home, I’ll be fine.”
Max watches as I get into my car and crank the engine before he motions for me to roll down the window.
“Thanks, Anna. You did good tonight. I owe you one.”
Okay, here’s my chance to tell him what I planned to tell him. To go fuck himself. To never call me again. To go to one of his vampire whores the next time he needs help.
What am I waiting for?
Max is leaning toward the window, smiling. He looks more like the Max I remembered. Superman, defending truth, justice, and the American way …
Shit.
I smile back.
And drive away.
MONSTER MASH
A DELILAH STREET, PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR, CASE
Carole Nelson Douglas
Sansouci, the main muscle for the Las Vegas werewolf mob, caught up with me at the neutral territory of the Inferno Hotel bar.
“Muscle” was no cliché when it came to Sansouci. I stand almost six feet in heels, and talking to him made me tilt up my chin, but then, I’m not afraid to lead with it.
“Delilah Street,” he greeted me, or maybe purr-growled.
Everybody assumed Sansouci was a werewolf. Yeah, with the silver forelock in his jet-black hair, the forest green eyes, and a long, lean build, you could picture him chasing the full moon in a thick fur coat, a creature of ferocity and grace.
Except I already had my own really butch wolfhound-wolf-cross dog named Quicksilver, and Sansouci was a vampire.
Not everybody knew the truth about Sansouci. Just me, in fact. Taken either way, Sansouci sported extremely white and handsome canines, which now flashed at me like a fishing lure.
“And where’s your boyfriend, the Cadaver Kid?” he asked.
“Ric’s in Mexico,” I reported, “rounding up demon drug lords and feral zombies in a multinational policing operation. And what have you done for the good of humanity and world peace lately?”
“Looked you up. Or down.”
His glance slowly skied the curves of the sweetheart neckline on my fifties black velvet top.
“One spike heel to the kneecap and you’d fold,” I pointed out.
“Maybe. But I’d take you down with me.”
Flirting with Sansouci was dangerous, which was why I enjoyed it so much.
And I was dressed to kill. The velvet bodice topped a ballerina-length, full, dark gray taffeta skirt that made solid me look so Audrey Hepburn–girlish you’d want to take me to brunch at Tiffany’s … until you noticed I was wearing silver-metal-laced gladiator-goth-style high heels that also worked well as weapons.
Sansouci had, and was looking even more lean and hungry.
“So,” I asked, “why’d your mangy, murderous werewolf boss let you off-leash from headquarters at the Gehenna Hotel?”
You’d think a female human paranormal investigator like me would sympathize with werewolves. We shared that three-days-a-month temporary-insanity-and-blood thing.
Yet I liked Sansouci precisely because he hated his werewolf overlord, Cesar Cicereau. Sansouci had been a hostage in the uneasy peace between the werewolves and the vampires that had lasted since Las Vegas’s 1940s founding all the Way to Where We Were, 2013. That added up to seventy-five years. Good thing Sansouci was immortal.
And most vamps still suffered from that twelve-hour-a-day “impotency handicap,” not that I’d dare use the phrase with Sansouci. Being an ex-reporter, accuracy was my middle name. Anyone who survived as a vampire gigolo was good to go 24/7. His breed of New Model Vampire had been in the making since the 1930s, a daylight vamp who sipped from a willing harem of female donors. Killing them softly with sex, not death, and they loved him for it.
Not I.
“Why’d you come all the way over to the Inferno,” I prodded Sansouci, “where you’re not welcome, from the Gehenna, where you’re really not welcome?”
“We have a problem.”
We? I lifted my eyebrows.
Nick Charles, the official Inferno barfly, rushed to my side. Yeah. That Nick Charles, the 1930s book and movie lush–detective with the witty wife and hyperactive terrier, Asta.
The entire trio was black-and-white and gray all over. They were Cinema Simulacrums, aka SinCims. Vegas throngs with black-and-white movie characters overlaid on zombies to give the tourists some semi-“live” entertainment they could not only gawk at, but actually talk to. Which was happening right now.
“Look here, my good man.” Nick Charles accosted Sansouci with a hand on the concealed gun in his tuxedo jacket pocket. “You’re not to pester our Inferno patrons.”
Asta’s teeth were tugging on one leg of Sansouci’s black designer jeans while Nicky’s sleek wife, Nora, was running a languid hand inside his jean jacket and down his firm pecs and abs to frisk him. Friskily. Face it, Nick Charles has a retro-cool pencil-thin mustache, a tipsy wit, and ace deductive ability, but he’s not exactly buff in modern ter
ms.
“You have the most annoying allies, Street,” Sansouci said with an impressive shrug. “Get these reanimated vintage-film freakos off me. We have business to discuss.”
“I’m okay, Family Charles,” I assured my friends. Then I ordered Brimstone Kisses from the human barman and we adjourned to a table for two.
“I’m actually celebrating a private party here with some of my CinSim pals,” I said, sipping the spicy cocktail of my own concoction. “What’s going wrong at the Gehenna now?”
“Yeah,” Sansouci seconded me, “Cicereau does seem accident-prone, particularly when it comes to the supernatural set.” He slugged down my spicy liquor-loaded concoction in three gulps. “When are you going to invent a cocktail in my honor?”
“You don’t claim the Vampire Sunrise?”
“I’m not that kind of vamp.”
“The ‘Sansouci’ sounds comatose. Hardly you.”
“More like Cicereau lately.”
“You saying he’s comatose?”
“That would be nice, if you could arrange it. I know a few dozen vamps who’d like to catch him snoozing and kill him without tasting a drop of his rotten blood. But, no, he’s the same power-hungry, brutal, dumb mob boss as ever. Except he’s been cursed.”
“Cursed? Like bespelled?”
“Maybe that way. On the surface, it looks like a vengeful dead dame’s got him on her radar.”
“And I can help … how?”
“You got rid of the daughter he offed. He thinks you’re the one to banish this new dame.”
“What do you mean, me ? I know what crimes against women Cesar Cicereau is capable of. He tried to force me into his Gehenna magic act when I first hit town, playing on my exact likeness to that hot CSI V: Las Vegas corpse, Lilith, but he gave up that idea.”
“You weren’t as cooperative as he likes his women to be.”
“You mean alive and kicking.”
“I do. Not a problem for me, though.”
“Why can’t you handle this?”
“He won’t listen to any of his pack, and I’m the hostage help, so I rank even lower. You’re the perfect undercover operative to figure out what’s going on.”