by Mia Archer
I thought that over. Honestly I didn’t have an answer to that. Nothing I’d ever read had said anything about doing something like separating the demon that turned someone into a vampire from their soul to reverse the vampirism. Death seemed to think this was uncharted territory. Or if someone else had charted this territory before then they hadn’t bothered to leave their charts behind so other reapers who came after them could make use of them.
“I honestly have no idea,” I said. “But do you really want to keep forever young if the price is being a bloodsucking vampire doing this motherfucker’s bidding?”
Her eyes hardened, and I saw that the part of Veronica that never gave up while she was a vampire must’ve been something that came from her, and not something that came from the vampire spirit that’d invaded her and tried to eat her soul.
“No fucking way,” she said. “Do what you have to do.”
“I figured you’d say that,” I said, and I surrounded the demon with death magic and slipped between worlds.
I arrived on the other side and wasn’t at all surprised to see Death right there looking at me like he’d been expecting me.
“Another vampire demon?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said. “Separated this one from the soul of the person it’d infected decades ago, even, so with a little luck she won’t be coming here to the other side hot on the heels of this bitch.”
He blinked. Dude seemed genuinely surprised. Which was different. I wasn’t surprised to see him waiting here for me on the other side, but I was surprised to see him looking at me with clear surprise.
“You did what?” he asked.
“Um, I went into her head and separated the vampire demon thingy from her soul so I could take out the demon without killing her? I figured you would’ve figured that out what with the way you were standing here waiting for me and not all that surprised that I’d showed up.”
“You… I know I keep saying this, but I don’t think anyone has ever done what you’ve just done, Gwen,” he said.
“What, fought off a bunch of vampires at the same time? I mean I know it’s not like we go after the creepy crawlies that go bump in the night all that often, but…”
“No, I’m saying we haven’t had anyone who’s ever managed to pull the demon soul out of a vampire and save the soul of the person the vampire spirit attacked,” he said.
“Look, if I’ve done something wrong here then it’s only because I need to save Stacy,” I said.
He held up a hand and chuckled. It was a surprisingly warm chuckle. There was no voice that sounded like the rasping of bone against bone when he decided to speak, which was a simile that mortals describing death always seemed to love using.
“You’re not in trouble here, Gwen,” he said. “I’m impressed with what you’ve done here. We always just got rid of vampires. Never thought of rehabilitating them.”
“Yeah, well it’s possible,” I said. “And maybe I have a lot more incentive than your typical reaper to rehabilitate the bloodsuckers.”
He cocked his head to the side. “So is there any particular reason why you were so intent on freeing this vampire instead of letting her go to the great beyond?”
My expression hardened as I thought of what that Veronica bitch had done. Sure she was a vampire who couldn’t control herself because there’d been a massive demon creature attached to her soul that was calling the shots and literally pulling the puppet strings, but that didn’t make me any less angry when I thought of what she did to Stacy.
“She turned my girlfriend,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “At least I think she did. So I had to take her out.”
Death put a hand on my shoulder. Again it wasn’t all that cold, for all that every description I’d ever seen of the grim reaper talked about the icy touch of death.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Let’s just hope that whatever you did was enough to break the bond. This is uncharted territory.”
I jumped at that. I guess I’d never thought that doing things this way might invalidate whatever it was that lifted the curse of every vampire that’d been turned by a vampire after they were dusted.
“Fuck,” I hissed. “I didn’t think of that.”
“I think it’s time for you to go back and see what there is to see,” Death said. “And don’t worry about your usual duties in town. I’m going to send some relief to handle the usual stuff. I want you to work on this vampire thing exclusively.”
I sighed.
Death arched an eyebrow. “You don’t like the idea?”
“No I do,” I said. “That was a relieved sigh. It was hard enough going to school and sneaking away to visit nursing homes or work sites with lax safety standards. Add hunting vampires on top of that and it was almost more than I could take.”
“Yeah, well don’t worry about all that other stuff. I’d thought you might take over for you father someday, but the more I see of what you’re doing the more I think that might be a waste of your talents.”
I turned to ask him what that meant, but he wrapped the vampire soul in tendrils of death and floated up to cart the thing over to the big portal. I watched for a moment, then figured it was time for me to get back to the other side.
There were still a bunch of vampires out there, after all, and the last thing I wanted was to come back to my body only to find that some freshman cheerleader had been sucking the blood out of me and I was going to have to wait until my body slowly replaced all of it to get back into action.
I didn’t have the time to sit around and wait for something like that. Not when I had to track down Stacy and see if freeing Veronica’s soul had also been enough to free my girlfriend’s soul. Sort of a package deal.
So I stepped between worlds. Back to the real world and all the trouble waiting for me there. I really hoped none of those troubles included Stacy still sporting a pair of fangs because my new method of vampire elimination didn’t work the way a stake to the heart did.
33
Still Sucking
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
I gotta be honest. The last thing I expected to see when I slipped through the veil between worlds was Jimmy and Veronica rolling around on the grass sucking face like their lives depended on them devouring as much of one another’s tongues as they could.
They stopped when they realized I was back. Veronica sat up and brushed some twigs and leaves off her shirt that had been pulled up enough that I got a good look at the goods.
Nice, but I wasn’t in the mood to see the goods from her.
“Sorry,” Jimmy said as he rearranged his clothes.
His pants were undone and the zipper was down, and it was another one of those situations where I really didn’t want to see the natural conclusion of his pants being in that sate of disarray.
“Get a little distracted, did we?” I asked.
“Well I was holding her down and then you did whatever it is you did and suddenly she’s blinking and her fangs are gone and she’s staring up at me, and the next thing I know she’s pulling me down into a kiss and…”
“Spare me the details,” I said, turning my attention to Veronica. “What’s your excuse?”
“I mean I woke up and he was hovering over me holding me down and it was so hot and I felt blood pumping through my body for the first time in like half a century and…”
I held up a hand. “I was right when I said you need to spare me the details. Thanks for something that’s gonna haunt my nightmares.”
Veronica blushed, and looked down. Though I noticed she also reached out and took Jimmy’s hand. Maybe there was some sort of vampiric magnetism that was working its spell on her now that she was a mortal again, but I couldn’t be sure. If they were happy doing what they were doing then I wasn’t going to mess with that for now.
Though I wondered if Jimmy was in for a disappointment if I managed to take care of whatever vampire had sired him and returned him to normal.
>
Which reminded me.
“Veronica. Did you sire Stacy?”
“What? Of course not?”
“Motherfucker!” I growled.
On the one hand that was good. It meant the motherfucker who turned her was still out there, so I hadn’t potentially fucked up my surefire ticket to curing her of undeath by changing the rules of the game with how I’d brought Veronica back to mortality.
On the other hand that meant Stacy was still a vampire.
“The Master did that, of course,” she said. “He insists on being the one to turn all the new pretties.”
I shivered. Talk about another bit of nightmare fuel I could’ve done without.
I looked around the clearing. More particularly I looked at all the cars that definitely weren’t rocking now. Well, there was at least one at the other end of the clearing that was still rocking, but that could be because they were at the other end of the clearing and the vampire cheerleaders hadn’t had a chance to get to them to try and turn them before I worked my magic on Veronica. If they were occupied by what people were usually doing up here then I could see them completely ignoring a vampire attack because they were busy getting busy.
I looked at the vampire cheerleaders. They were definitely showing signs that they’d been turned mortal again, and I figured that was a good sign. I guess worrying about breaking the rules was a moot point. My vampire cure worked downstream.
That would’ve been a relief if the bastard who turned Stacy wasn’t still out there somewhere..
I walked over to one of the cheerleaders and prodded her with my foot. She started, and her eyes went wide as she looked up at me. As soon as her eyes locked on mine she started to scramble away, screaming in terror.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Don’t throw me please!” she said. “I’m not a vampire anymore and I don’t want to die!”
“If you’re not a vampire then I’m not going to do anything to you,” I said, but that didn’t stop the girl from continuing to scream and beg me not to hurt her.
Great.
There were other vampire cheerleaders in the clearing, but none of them looked like they were in a position to chat. The people they’d been turning into vampires were also in various stages of twitching as they recovered from their recent brush with undeath.
Some of them were on the ground twitching where they’d fallen while they were trying to get away or join the fight. Others were twitching on top of each other in the backs of their cars doing a close approximation of what they’d been up to before a bunch of vampires interrupted them doing what teenagers do best in the back seats of cars.
“Looks like we took care of most of the trouble here, at least,” I said. “It’s not like any of the people who were being targeted here are going to be turning into bloodsuckers any time soon.”
“Are you so sure about that?”
That voice sent a chill running through me. Usually that chill was because the girl attached to that voice was so damned sexy, but right about now it was sending a chill through me because I was pretty sure that cocky voice meant Stacy was a lot closer than I’d thought.
I turned around. Locked eyes with her. She smiled, revealing the fangs I was expecting.
More people materialized out of the woods behind her. People I recognized from school, and they all looked just a touch disoriented. They also were all sporting fangs and they were looking at Veronica like she was a juicy morsel they wouldn’t mind tasting.
“Don’t touch her,” I said.
“Oh?” Stacy said. “So now you’re turning on me for her? Talk about a fucked up reversal. And here I thought I meant more to you than that.”
“You do mean more to me than that,” I said. “That’s why I did something no reaper has ever done before to try and save your ass. Though it looks like it didn’t work.”
“You have to get the vampire that turned me,” she said. “Maybe if you showed a little more school spirit…”
She turned and motioned to the other vampires. They faded into the trees. She turned one final time and smiled at me.
“Come find me,” she said with a wink.
I reached out with tendrils of death magic. If I’d managed to separate the vampire spirit from Veronica’s soul without killing her then I could do the same thing with Stacy, only she jumped over one tendril and ducked under the other, then disappeared into the forest.
I growled and threw myself at the trees at full speed. The only problem with that being the forest was just thick enough that it’s not like I’d be able to get through them without whacking myself against some wood in its natural state and probably dealing with an unfortunate death for a little while.
So I flew over the trees. Only looking down into the forest from above, especially in the middle of the night, and trying to find someone was impossible.
I growled in frustration and lashed out at the trees with some death magic. Leaves fell off of them here and there, but that was all I accomplished. I certainly didn’t hit any vampires in hiding.
I clearly wasn’t going to do any more good here than I’d done every other time I’d tried to hunt a vampire recently, so I reluctantly turned around and headed back into the clearing.
On the bright side it looked like the cheerleaders who’d been turned earlier were recovering nicely. Most of them were up and about, though they were also rubbing their heads like they had one hell of a hangover.
I didn’t have much of an idea of what a hangover felt like considering I’d never touched booze, but I knew a lot of the more popular girls on the cheerleading squad, even the freshmen, were no stranger to hitting the sauce at parties so this was probably something that wasn’t all that unfamiliar to them.
Some of the couples who’d been attacked were also recovering. At least the ones Stacy hadn’t made off with while I was busy fighting Veronica. Some of them were running as fast as they could for the trees, which didn’t strike me as the best idea considering there’d been vampires lurking in those trees not so long ago.
One girl was sitting rocking and sobbing against the giant boat of a car she’d been making out with her boyfriend in before they were interrupted by creatures of the night. I didn’t see a boyfriend there comforting her, so I could only assume he was one of those vampires out among the trees.
“You really don’t want to go into those trees right now!” I called out.
A couple of them stopped and turned to stare at me. Which wasn’t a good thing. As soon as they realized the reaper girl from the homecoming video was calling and telling them not to go into the forest that was the first thing they turned and did.
I sighed and muttered a few choice words under my breath. If they wanted to be idiots and go into a forest infested with vampires then that was their business. I’d done my duty tonight, and the last thing I was doing was going into a dark and scary forest to save their asses a second time.
“They’re gone,” Veronica said. “You don’t need to worry about anyone else being turned tonight. I was supposed to distract you while Stacy grabbed as many new foot soldiers as possible if you showed up, and I guess she did her job.”
I wheeled around on her. Stalked across the clearing to where she sat with Jimmy wrapping protective arms around her. I got down on my knees and jabbed a finger at her chest, and that finger might’ve been loaded with a touch of the old death magic that hit her straight on over her heart.
“Why aren’t they in the trees? What the hell is going on here tonight? Why do you need foot soldiers when all you’ve been going on about up ’til now is talking about your stupid Master and his pretties?”
“They’re going to be at the pep rally,” she said with an enigmatic smile.
“A pep rally?” I asked.
Okay then. Talk about the last thing I was expecting to hear. Still, if she was in the mood to talk then I was going to let her talk. This was the most information I’d gotten about the vampires and what they were up to
in a good long while, after all.
Maybe bringing her back to the mortal coil had its advantages. Now that she’d gained a pulse she also had a good reason to switch to the side that wasn’t going to look at her like she was a particularly delicious snack. Maybe. I still didn’t trust her all that much.
“The pep rally to end all pep rallies,” she said. “Your girlfriend is going to be there, along with every other vampire who’s ever been turned at our school.”
“That sounds ominous,” I said. “How many vampires have been turned from our school over the years?”
“A lot more than you might think,” she said. “How good are you at breaking into things?”
“I mean not at all,” I said. “But we might be able to get Jimmy here to break something with his vampire strength if it’s super necessary, why?”
Veronica glanced down at her watch. It looked like the thing hadn’t been updated in half a century. I was more impressed that it was even still around if it was the watch she’d been wearing when she was turned.
“We have a little time before the pep rally starts,” she said. “We might as well go to the library so I can show you something you might find very interesting.”
“Wait. How do I know you’re not going to double cross me? Like we show up at the library and there are a bunch of vampire punk ass book jockeys waiting for me or something?”
“I guess you don’t know until we get there,” she said. “But you just turned me into a mortal. What incentive do I possibly have to want to be turned back into a vampire after something like that?”
“Maybe you liked being a vampire? Maybe you liked the idea of being immortal?” I said, really thinking out loud more than anything.
“You were there in my head,” she said. “You saw what that thing was doing to me, and I don’t want to go back to that.”
She had a point. I’d literally seen her soul laid bare before me, and that soul didn’t seem like it was all that keen on having a bloodsucking soul taking over again. I’d quite literally looked into the depths of her soul to see the truth of her words.
