Vampaholic
“That I screw my brains out?” I asked with icy politeness. “Because at least I do it with men, sweetie. Tell me, have you bought a dog license for Mikhail yet?”
Megan paled. I waited for her to scream at me, to insult me back, to give me an angry shove, but what she did was worse than any of those things.
She turned and walked away from me.
“On the bitch-o-meter, that one rang the bell,” Tash said hotly, planting her hands on her hips and tossing back a red gold curl from her glaring blue eyes. “Mikhail might be able to shapeshift into a wolf, but that doesn’t make him one. And for your information, it’s not the number of men you’ve been seeing that has Meg worried, it’s the way you treat them.”
As if by some mysterious signal, the hammering that had been going on all day by the stage suddenly stopped. Then I realized that the signal hadn’t been mysterious at all; the clock behind the bar showed eight o’clock, which meant the crew had put in their agreed-to overtime. On the other side of the room, both Ramon and his conga line had gone, too.
I felt like a drink. I started to push past Tash, but she stepped in front of me.
“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it, I’m going to say it anyway. You’ve always loved ’em and left ’em, sis, but now it’s different. Your carpenter boy-toy was right—you’ve turned into a ball breaker. You never spend more than one or two nights with the same man, and if they can’t be as casual as you are about it, you make sure you dump them as publicly and humiliatingly as possible. Megan says she can’t figure it out. It’s like you’ve got a hate on for all men. I agree. Only difference is, I have figured it out.”
“What an exciting new experience for you, sweetie,” I said acidly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I really must run.”
“This won’t take long.” Tash took a deep breath. “I know what’s been eating away at you since Megan killed Zena, and why you’ve been acting all ‘Girls Gone Wild’ lately and treating men like Kleenex. It’s because of what that queen bitch said about Dad just as Meg staked her—that he’d been one of her vamp servants and he’d betrayed Mom.” She bit her lip. “If that were true it would mean he betrayed us, too, in a way. We grew up on Grammie and Popsie’s stories about what a great son he was and how much he loved Mom and adored his darling baby daughters. When Zena realized she was going to hell, she saw how she could use our love for him as one final weapon against us, and that’s exactly what she did. But it wasn’t just a lie, it was a stupid lie, because Grandfather Darkheart saw our father’s dead body that night twenty years ago when Zena came for Mom and us. If Dad had been a vampyr, he’d have been dusted, not dead.”
Her words had tumbled out of her like a torrent. Now they abruptly dried up and her gaze burned into me.
I could have said a lot of things. I could have said that even if the son Grammie and Popsie remembered had once been as loving as they said, becoming a vamp would have changed him completely. I could have said that Grandfather Darkheart might well have lied about what he saw the night my mother died, to spare us pain. I could have said that it would be easy enough for a vampire to feign death to fool a desperate old man, and then to disappear into the night, never to be seen again.
I could have said any or all of these things, but seeing the shadowy fear lurking behind Tash’s china-doll blue gaze, I didn’t. I gave a little laugh.
“So touching of you to try out your pop psychology on me, darling, but guess what? I don’t have a Daddy complex or anything complicated like that. I like delicious men. I like having a cocktail or two. Is that simple enough for you, sweetie?”
Tash’s gaze hardened. “Go to hell, Kat.”
“Been there, done that, courtesy of Zena, remember?” I said with a sweet smile. “Or is my little sojourn in the hot place on the night we battled her and her vamp army just another one of those things we’re supposed to forget about?”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Tash said tightly. “Because the woman who came back from there wasn’t my sister anymore.”
She spun on her heel, leaving me alone in the room. That’s when I walked out of the club and practically into the fangs of a vampire, the perfect finishing touch to a day that had turned completely to merde.
Chapter 2
Thank God I was wearing Manolos. Swiftly I slipped off my left shoe and grabbed it up. By the inadequate illumination of the few parking lot lights, the vampire looked to be a teenager. He was moving so fast he almost ran into the spiked heel and staked himself, but he skidded to a halt just in time. He looked at me, astonishment on his acned face.
“Are you fucking kidding? That’s not gonna work.”
“I don’t see why it fucking wouldn’t, sweetie,” I told him. I heard the slight fuzziness in my voice and made a mental note not to drive home if I got out of this alive, but at least the cocktails I’d downed over the course of the afternoon lent me a certain Dutch courage, I realized. The hand that was holding the Manolo against his AC/DC T-shirt was rock-steady. “And you’re not so sure it won’t, either,” I continued. “If you were, you would have rushed me by now.”
He stared at me in frustration, and then the red glow in his eyes faded a little. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Guess I’ll just have to use my glamyr on you.”
The air between us seemed to shimmer. For a moment his adolescent chest took on definition under the dirty tee, his greasy brown hair looked glossy and beautiful and a wave of dark sexuality began lapping around me, drawing me to him. Even his acne-ridden skin cleared up before my very eyes.
Except for the angry red pimple on his chin. I shook my head and took a breath. “Zit-check at six o’clock,” I said, feeling the glamyr dispel abruptly. “Sorry, sweetie, but it ruins everything.”
“Shit!” he swore, his hand going self-consciously to his chin. “For a couple of weeks before I turned, my skin actually looked pretty good,” he said defensively. “I was going out with this girl who worked in Hazlitt’s Drugstore and she gave me these medicated pad things, you know? Then Bitsy and me broke up and I stopped using the pads. Just my crap luck to become undead when I was back in pizza-face mode.”
Megan’s MINI was still parked next to mine. Obviously she and Tash had been delayed in leaving the club. My plan was to keep the vamp talking until they showed up, but something he’d said puzzled me enough that I didn’t have to fake interest “Hazlitt’s?” I frowned, taking care not to relax my grip on my impromptu stake. “I can remember Grammie Crosse taking me there for ice cream when I was about five or six, but they must have gone out of business at least ten years ago. When did you become a—”
Maybe he’d been trying to keep me talking, too, in the hopes I’d become distracted enough that he could risk a lunge at me. But as it had done with me, something in our conversation triggered a real response from him.
“Crosse? You’re one of the Crosse sisters?” His face had been pale before, another indication that he needed to feed, but now it went so white his acne stood out like beacons. He took a step backward. “Oh, fuck, you’re not Kat, are you?”
“Megan,” I lied immediately. “If you’ve heard of my sister, you’ve heard of me, too, so you know you don’t stand a chance against—”
“Nuh-uh.” He took another step back, his eyes beginning to glow red again. “I can smell a Daughter of Lilith a mile away, and you’re not the vamp killer. You were trying to fuck me up! You were trying to get me to bite you, you bitch!”
“I was trying to make you bite me?” I leaned in, astonishment momentarily overriding my fear. “Is this the undead variation of ‘you know you want it, honey?’ Because I don’t appreciate it when human males try to pull that merde on me, and I’m certainly not about to let an underage, undead vampire—”
“Stay away from me!”
His words came out in a high-pitched snarl. As I stood there, my Manolo clutched in my nerveless hand and fear freezing me to the spot, he backpedalled away from me so fast that his feet got tangled up with each other and he tripped. He scrambled up again, his horror-filled red eyes still locked on mine. Then he turned to run.
I think I saw the stake before he did, but I’d swear he had time to dodge out of the way and save himself. Instead, he seemed to run deliberately into its path.
It came speeding through the near-dark parking lot with unerring accuracy, the deadly tip sinking deep into the left side of his chest, right through the DC part of the gothic AC/DC lettering on his tee. His hands flew to the shaft of wood sticking from him, as if he intended to pull it out.
His glowing eyes met mine again, but instead of the terror that had been in them a second ago, I saw an emotion so out of place that I knew I had to be mistaken. His hands fell away from the stake, his lips drew back from his razor-sharp canines in a death-rictus, the red glow in his eyes dimmed.
Then he turned to ash.
In the past couple of months I’ve seen so many vamps die that you’d think I’d be used to it. My sisters are. Megan stands over her kills grimly, as if she wants their last sight on earth to be the Daughter of Lilith who sent them to hell. Tash is the opposite; she all but does a victory dance around the ashes, and once I saw her kick them. Grandfather Darkheart caught that little performance, too, and in his heavy Carpathian accent gave her a stern lecture that I could tell Tashya tuned out before the second sentence.
I feel agonizing pain. The first time I experienced it, I was sure the vamp had somehow turned my stake against me before he’d died and I’d looked down at myself, expecting to see a yew-wood shaft protruding from my body and dark gouts of blood pouring from the wound.
I felt like that now, but I didn’t bother looking for a wound I knew wasn’t there. Instead, I turned to watch Megan sprinting across the parking lot toward me, Tash right behind her. I took a breath and put on my best bored manner.
“Yay, team. Chalk up another one for the good guys, and all that.” Languidly I pumped the hand holding the Manolo into the air before bending to slip my shoe back onto my foot. “Impressive stake-hurling, sis. Ever think of giving up this vampire-killing gig and trying out for the Olympic javelin toss?”
Megan retrieved her stake and shoved it into the strap holster on her left bicep. “You’ve got a right to be pissed,” she said evenly. “I shouldn’t have interfered with your kill. Sorry, Kat.”
“We saw you standing there like a dummy and we thought you were caught up in his glamyr,” Tashya explained. “Either that, or so scared you were about to wee-wee your panties. Which one was it, Kat?”
I raised my eyebrows and hoped my drawl covered the last remnants of my shakiness. “Gawd, sweeties—scared? Whatever gave you that idea? I simply hoped I wouldn’t have to ruin a perfectly darling pair of Manolos by using one of them as a vamp sticker…and as it turned out, I wouldn’t have had to.” I gave an elaborate shrug. “Your reputation’s spread, Meg. I told the little pisher I was you, and he tripped over his own feet trying to get away.”
“I wondered why he was running,” Megan answered. “And like Tash, I also wondered what you were playing at, standing there and talking to him instead of sending him to hell. You sure he wasn’t using a little glamyr on you without you knowing?”
There it was in her voice again, that repressive tone that she’d seemingly inherited with her life mission of vamp killing, but now it was accentuated with a marked coolness. Not surprising, given our recent contretemps in the club, I supposed. I extracted my car keys from my purse.
“Believe it or not, sister dear, the rest of us aren’t totally incapacitated when we’re facing the undead. In fact, I’ve always suspected I’m a little less susceptible to vamp wiles than you are, but to answer your question, no, his glamyr didn’t work on me.” I turned to unlock my car, adding casually, “He seemed so inept all round it’s a wonder he wasn’t staked a decade or so ago. Since he was a local boy, it positively dented my civic pride.”
I began to get into my MINI, but Megan’s hand shot out and clamped around my arm. I stiffened. She removed it but didn’t apologize. “A local vamp who’s been around for decades? Not possible,” she said flatly. “Maplesburg wasn’t infected until Zena arrived here.”
“So we believed,” I answered. “Apparently we were wrong.”
“You’re wrong,” Tash snapped. “That would mean Maplesburg had already turned when—”
She stopped and I finished her sentence for her. “When Daddy lived here, sweetie? Yes, that’s exactly what it would mean.” I looked away from her frozen face and met Megan’s hard gaze. “If you don’t want to take my word for it, use the resources of Darkheart & Crosse to locate a woman named Bitsy. As a teenager she worked at Hazlitt’s Drugstore before it went out of business, so she’d be in her thirties now, at least. Ask her about a boyfriend she had who was into AC/DC and Clearasil.”
“I will,” Megan said coldly. “And if I find out you’re yanking our chain over this, Kat, you’ll be sorry.” She strode to her car and got in. Tash was already sitting in the front passenger seat. Megan started the ignition and then rolled down the window. “Take this,” she called to me, her tone expressionless. “I always keep a couple of spares in the car. You really shouldn’t be out after dark without one.”
I caught the stake she tossed my way. Even as my fingers closed around it, she was revving her MINI out of the parking lot. I saw the car’s taillights flare red as she came to the stop before the road, and then my sisters were gone.
Ten minutes ago I hadn’t trusted myself to drive. Now I was stone-cold sober. I began again to get into my MINI, and for the second time in as many minutes didn’t complete the action.
From the far end of the parking lot came the growl of a car engine starting up. It caught and became a full-throated roar. I heard the solidsounding thunk of a transmission dropping into first gear, heard the roar immediately ease into a deep rumble and then saw a pair of headlights flare to sudden life. Dazzling tunnels of light cut through the darkness and early evening ground mist as the car began slowly heading my way.
It passed under one of the lot’s two feeble lights, and my heart sank. The vehicle’s windows were black—not merely tinted, but blotchy black, as if someone had applied the contents of a can of matte paint to the interior of the windows. That could only mean one thing.
“Shit.” I was too tired to bother translating my comment into French. “Vamp transport.”
It had to be. The car had moved out of the pool of light and was now rolling through the dark again, a hulking, dated silhouette. A certain type of vamp seemed to go for vintage vehicles; probably, as Megan’s Mikhail had once informed my sisters and me, because the trunks of older cars were roomy enough to make a comfortable daytime resting place if necessary. “Also,” he’d added with a significant glance at the matching MINIs that had been Popsie Crosse’s most recent birthday gifts to us, “because those old Detroit tanks can ram most newer vehicles off the road. At that point, sitting in a ditch in your car, you’re the equivalent of a can of Dinty Moore beef stew to a hungry vamp.”
“Which means that making a run for it in the MINI might be a teensy bit rash,” I told myself out loud as the car rumbled closer. “I’ll never make the three miles to town before he catches up with me, so what other options do I have?” I forced a casualness to my solitary conversation, hoping to keep my growing terror at bay. “The obvious one is to stake him. On the plus side, I was Grandfather Darkheart’s star pupil when he was training Megan and Tash and me in the finer points of vamp sticking. On the negative side, when it came down to doing it for real during the battle at the Hot Box with Zena and her followers, I—”
I didn’t finish my sentence, but I couldn’t shut off my thoughts. I had been Anton’s star pupil, so much so that I’d been secretly sure I was the Crosse triplet who’d inherited my mother’s vamp-killing legacy and would be the next Daughter of Lilith. My first kill had ripped that fantasy from me forever.
When Zena had loosed her pack of undead on us that night, I’d taken up a fighting stance like a vampire-killing Joan of Arc, knowing I was fulfilling the destiny that had been written for me long before my birth. The first vamp that had rushed me hadn’t stood a chance. I’d been so confident of my powers that I’d let him come close enough to grab me, but as he’d leaned in to slash at my throat I’d thrust my stake into his heart. In triumph I’d looked into his eyes, wanting to see him die.
Instead, I saw him being born.
It had been like watching a movie, except I wasn’t watching it, I was living it. And although only a split second could have elapsed between the time I staked him and the moment he fell away into dust, I experienced his whole life. I stood in the delivery room as he came into the world. I was on the sidewalk watching him take a tumble from his trike, inside the pet shop as he pointed out the puppy he wanted, with him on his first day at school when he wet his pants and tried to hide it.
I saw him fall in love.
I saw him graduate.
I saw him being attacked in an alleyway one night by the vampire who turned him.
I saw his first kill, his final kill…and then I saw myself standing over him, my hand still on the stake lodged in his body. Terror and agony ripped through me, both overwhelmed by an agonizing sense of loss. In the moment that he turned to dust I knew the truth. His death was mine. Part of me would follow him down to hell.
I forced myself to take on the second vamp who came at me, a female, and went through the whole process all over again, but during my third kill something broke in me and Zena made her move against me. Since her move consisted of sending me to hell, I don’t think it’s too surprising that for the most part I’ve blanked out that unpleasant interlude. I don’t have any trouble remembering what happened when I finally came back to full consciousness, however: the battle was over, Zena had been vanquished and Megan had proved herself to be a true Daughter of Lilith.
I’d received proof, too. I’d walked into the Hot Box wanting only to kill vampires. When I left hours later I finally understood a favorite quote of Popsie’s, one he’d told me he’d read in an old cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I’d seen the enemy. I’d felt the blood tie between me and them—a blood tie forged years ago when a queen vampyr had marked a Daughter of Lilith’s baby. I hadn’t turned yet, but if Grandfather Darkheart was correct and the kiss of the vampire bore fruit in her victim’s twenty-first year, I would soon.
But until I did I had to assume I was as vulnerable to being killed by a vamp as any normal human would be.
“Which brings me back to my original problem, no?” I muttered now as I steadied myself against my MINI and thrust all future problems aside to deal with my current one. “If it’s a question of my survival, am I capable of staking the son of a bitch?”
I was about to find out the answer to that question. The vehicle came to a stop about twenty feet away from me, its engine idling with a heavy rumble I could feel through the spike heels of my shoes, its chrome grille glittering ominously. I waited for my gentleman caller—a car like that simply had to belong to a male vamp, I thought—to get out, saunter over to me and flash fangs.
The black-painted driver’s window rolled down. Something projected from it and I shifted position slightly to see what it was.
Thunk-whap!
The metallic sound exploded right next to me and adrenaline kicked through me like a double shot of one-hundred-proof vodka. I’d been set up, I thought hollowly, appalled at my own carelessness. A second vamp had apparently landed on my MINI while I’d been watching the approach of the one in the car. Stake in hand, I whirled to face my attacker.
There was no one on the MINI. A nerveracking possibility flashed into my mind and I dropped to my knees, stake at the ready, my gaze scanning the pavement under the car.
Thunk-whap!
Pain blazed through my right hand, and my stake clattered to the ground. Instinctively I tried to cradle my hand to my body to ease the agony, but trying to move it sent a sickening wave of fresh pain through me. In confusion I looked at my hand.
At first I didn’t understand what I was staring at. My fingers were outstretched on the driver’s door of my car, every tendon on the back of my right hand standing out in sharp relief. Blood ran down my wrist onto the glossy white paintwork of the MINI, and between my index and middle fingers something gleamed silver in the half light.
I suddenly recognized the silver gleam for what it was, and shock slammed the breath from my lungs. I’d wanted a drink earlier. Now I needed one, if only to numb the horror of what I was seeing.
The object spiked through the web of skin between the fingers on my hand into the car’s door…was a nail.
Chapter 3
“Damn.” The low-voiced oath came from the direction of the idling car. I heard the sound of the vehicle’s door being opened and the scrape of shoes on the pavement. After my first sickened glance at the nail through my hand I’d turned away, but now I made myself look at it again.
There’s something about seeing yourself as a carpentry project that makes a girl want to throw up. I forced back the bile that rose in my throat and tried to pull the nail out with my free hand.
It wouldn’t budge. I pulled harder, my grip slick with my own blood, but the nail was firmly lodged into the MINI’s door panel. From the sound of his unhurried tread, the vamp wasn’t in any ravenous rush but even so, I had only seconds to free myself.
I’d lived through Brazilian waxes. What I had to do next couldn’t be more excruciating, could it? I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth and ripped my hand free of the nail.
I’d been right, the pain didn’t beat out Brazilian waxes—not by much, anyway. But in my experience, the agony of a wax is always replaced by a delightfully sleek and sexy feeling after it’s over. Seeing the torn and bloody web of skin between my fingers just made me feel like a rat that had gnawed off its own foot to escape a trap.
Not delightful. Not sexy. And definitely not as conflicted as I’d been a few minutes ago about staking the sadistic undead who’d done this to me. My Badgley slip dress looked like a rag that had been used to mop an abbatoir floor, and my hair was hanging around my face in damp hanks. As I scrabbled under the car for the fallen stake and my knees scraped painfully against the oil-stained pavement, a primal rage surged through me.
He wasn’t playing fair. Vampires had the whole fang and super strength and flying thing going on, and all we humans had were wood and garlic and maybe a splash of holy water if we were lucky. For a vamp to add a nail gun to his arsenal was overkill—and where had he gotten it from, anyway?
Nausea rose up in me a second time. Of course. The son of a bitch had killed one of my carpenters and taken the tool from his dead body. I thought of the crew that had been working all day and into overtime this evening to get the club’s stage rebuilt on schedule for me, and my anger grew. Nailing me through the hand had made it personal, but this made it war.
My fingers closed bloodily around the stake as the footsteps behind me came closer. I jumped to my feet and let my rage out in a scream as I raced toward the approaching vamp.
“Get ready to kiss your ass goodbye, you bastard! When I’m finished with you there won’t be anything left but dust!”