“Any ideas?”
“One theory, although I have never seen it in action.” He presses a thumb at the cranium. “The weakness here—and I’m referring to his inability to easily defeat a mortal in fisticuffs, not the bones being flimsy—makes me suspect it.”
“Suspect what?” I lean closer, peering at the skull.
“When we give the Transference to a mortal, it weakens us. Not permanently, mind you, merely a severe exertion. The older we are, the less we notice this exertion. If a young vampire gives the Transference, it hurts. Too young, they may incapacitate themselves for some time. Our general rule of thumb is not to risk attempting a Transference until one’s fiftieth year as a vampire. Earlier than that, it may leave the sire in a greatly weakened state for an extended time. If a vampire is too weak when giving the Transference, the progeny they create can be unstable. I do not mean that in terms of mental stability. More like mixing volatile chemicals.” He glances over at me. “You mentioned this one started a fight with a mortal and found himself losing?”
“Yeah.”
“Mmm.” Heath sets the skull on the table, leaving his hand on it. “He likely attempted to temporarily increase his physical strength, and in doing so, entirely consumed all of his power, destroying himself.”
I gasp.
“This is my theory, mind you. I’ve never seen it actually occur.”
“Eek… so he literally got so angry he blew up? Wow. We can really flame out like that?”
Professor Heath pats me on the arm. “Relax, child. Healthy vampires cannot overexert themselves to the point of destruction. Attempting to draw power when there is nothing in the battery simply fails to work. A situation like this could only occur from an incredibly unstable vampire who”—he taps the mottled femur—“has not yet fully developed into a vampire at all.”
“This has to be related to the baby vamp issue. Someone is making a ton of newbies.”
“Whatever for?” Professor Heath makes the sort of face one might make when watching a person spread mustard on a chocolate cupcake.
“I have no idea. No one does. Well, except for the idiot doing it.” I glance at the bones. The separation between pure white and old, yellowed bone looks kinda like a zipper with peanut-shaped teeth, slightly fat and rounded at the ends. “Thanks for giving me a plausible theory. Umm, what should I do with these bones?”
“Ideally, burn them. We cannot leave such things around for mortals to discover.” He starts putting them back in the trash bag. “I can toss them in the boiler here if you like.”
“Cool. Works. Thank you.”
He offers me a femur. “Unless you need one to show the society people.”
“Nah. They know what’s going on already. Not sure randomly disintegrating vampires makes much difference. It’s basically a self-fixing problem… unless the wrong person finds the bones.” I take the femur. “On second thought, maybe I should show this to Mr. Wolent.”
29
Sorry, My Bad
Sam cheated slightly at Nerf war.
He’d gone to Daryl’s place for the afternoon to hang out because Mr. Linton chose today, Wednesday the 27th of June, to open the pool. A spontaneous nerf battle developed, pitting Sam and Daryl against Ronan and Jordan. Not only did Ronan and Jordan both have blonde hair, they both wore blue swim trunks, defaulting them to being in uniform on the same team. Except for the battery operated nerf dart guns—one of which Sam used—the ‘fighting’ migrated in and out of the water.
Daryl’s older sister Miranda sunned herself on a lounge chair in the middle of the warzone, occasionally yelling at them whenever a Nerf projectile or ball bounced off her. She’d turned fifteen a few weeks ago on the eighth and operated on the mistaken belief she’d become an adult with authority to order the boys around.
As far as cheating came into it, Blix did something to cause all the nerf darts Sam fired to reappear inside the gun a second after they came to rest on the ground, effectively giving him unlimited ammunition—until the batteries died. They didn’t play any sort of organized game. No rules. No points. No winning or losing, so he didn’t mind ‘cheating.’ Somehow, Daryl and Jordan didn’t notice he’d been firing continuously without reloading once for fifteen minutes.
Jordan darted out from behind cover—an overturned picnic table—and ran sideways toward the diving board while lobbing a hand grenade (Nerf football) at Sam. By most conventional rules of boyhood, Sam was obligated to scream and dive for cover. He would have, if not for a most unusual sight.
Miranda’s bikini top had disappeared.
Whoa. That’s… not right.
An odd feeling made him shift his gaze left at a scrap of black fabric floating in the middle of the pool. None of his friends had gone anywhere near her, and she certainly hadn’t thrown half her suit into the water. Daryl wouldn’t dare prank his sister like that. Blix, as far as Sam knew, hadn’t done it. He perched on the fake grass turf behind Sam, occasionally throwing Nerf balls at Jordan and Ronan.
Miranda had been a complete pain to the boys all day, screaming at them, trying to get the parents to kick them out so she could have the pool all to herself, and generally acting like a brat. He could possibly see Blix playing a trick on her as revenge for a selfish attitude, but knew he hadn’t done it. Imps also adored embarrassing people. Disappearing clothing ranked high on their list of go-to pranks, below property destruction, serious bodily injury, and overflowing toilets.
Another reason Sam failed to follow the code and pretend to dodge a ‘dangerous’ hand grenade: he sensed a demonic presence in the air worse than Miranda. It seemed strongest by the end of the pool. Exactly where he sensed the presence, a three-foot-tall potbellied creature emerged from the bushes and scampered onto the diving board behind Jordan, rushing up behind him.
The Nerf football bounced off Sam’s forehead the same moment the boy leapt for the water. Jordan’s cheer of victory at a direct hit turned into a pitiful squeal as his swim trunks snagged on the corner of the board, pinned under the little demon’s foot. All of Jordan’s weight came down on his crotch when the springy diving board arrested his fall, then catapulted him back up into the air a short distance. Cackling, the demon ran away into the bushes at the back of the yard. Jordan hit the water in a fetal position and went under.
Sympathetic pain made Sam wilt on his feet. Ronan and Daryl both groaned and grabbed themselves.
Miranda sat up, screaming due to being splashed… and noticed her missing top. She screamed even louder, clamped her arms over her chest and shouted, “You little shits!”
“Blix,” whispered Sam. “Fix that, please!”
“On it!” chirped the imp.
Evidently blaming Daryl for… reasons, Miranda jumped to her feet and chased him, murder in her eyes. He soon slipped on the wet ‘AstroTurf’ like stuff around the pool and went skidding into the fence. Miranda, shrieking in anger, began walloping him with one flip-flop, calling him every name she knew—until she noticed her swimsuit mysteriously back where it belonged. She stopped swinging, staring at herself, making the same face most people did the first time they witnessed something supernatural and couldn’t come up with a way to explain it.
“What are you talking about, Ran?” Daryl lowered his arms away from his face. “No one ripped your top off. Eww. Like seriously. Who’d want to see that?”
She whacked him over the head again.
Sam dropped the Nerf gun and jumped into the water, swimming down to grab Jordan’s arm. The boy had sunk to the bottom, still in a fetal position. Sam towed his friend to the surface and helped him to the side. Jordan clung to the pool’s edge as Sam climbed out of the water, offering him a hand up.
“Not yet. I’m gonna just float here for now. My nuts are somewhere up behind my stomach.”
Crack!
A sudden, sharp noise like a tiny pistol firing made Sam spin to the right.
Miranda teetered up on her toes, her mouth open wide as if screaming,
though no sound came from her. Another little demon stood behind her, holding the wet towel it had just snapped her in the backside with. Ronan, who’d been innocently walking along the edge of the pool, stopped short, gawking at the floating towel. Except for Blix, who allowed the boy to see him, Ronan couldn’t see supernatural beings. The demon tossed the wet towel at Ronan before scurrying off.
Miranda grabbed her butt, seemingly at the verge of tears from pain. A second later, she screamed and whirled—staring straight at Ronan, who hadn’t moved. The boy was easily the smallest of Sam’s friends. He wouldn’t be ten until August, but he could pass for an eight-year-old. In that moment, he looked like a terrified field mouse staring up at the eagle diving for him. Despite not having had anything at all to do with the giant red mark on Miranda’s posterior, he shrieked and ran like a guilty brat.
Fuming, Miranda chased him.
Motion at the corner of the pool caught Sam’s eye. Another demon lurked behind a lounge chair, holding a long-handled pool net. In the span of a half second, Sam looked at Miranda, the net, and the metal handrail of the ladder going into the water. He knew without a doubt the demon intended to trip her and she’d hit her head on the steel curve, breaking her neck.
Crap!
He panicked for a split second, then randomly grabbed the Nerf gun and opened fire on the demon, hoping to distract it. Demons didn’t react well to being seen by humans. His first nerf dart hit the small demon in the face, ripping a three-inch-wide hole all the way through its head. The second and third darts left equally huge wounds in its fat chest. Wailing, the demon fell over backward and melted into a cloud of orangey-red smoke.
Miranda chased Ronan past the pool net without tripping over it, mostly because no demon lifted it to tangle her feet.
“I didn’t do it!” shouted Ronan.
Sam’s swim trunks yanked downward to his ankles.
Faint growls came from behind. He calmly pulled his bathing suit back up, no one appearing to have noticed the depantsing amid the chaos. Blix and another, darker grey, imp wrestled and bit each other, rolling back and forth.
Sam pointed the Nerf gun at the bad imp.
Scrape.
A folding lounge chair slid on its own into Ronan’s path. He tripped over it and went sliding on his chest across the AstroTurf. As soon as he stopped moving, he curled on his side, grabbed his pectorals, and wailed in agony.
“Hah!” Miranda held her nose in the air. “Serves you right, you little turd.”
Another demon near the house picked up one of Mrs. Linton’s lawn gnomes and threw it. The porcelain figure shattered over Miranda’s head, knocking her senseless. She collapsed, falling sideways into the water.
“What the hell!” Daryl dove after her.
Sam narrowed his eyes, stepped on the imp’s wing to pin it down, and shot it in the face, point blank. The imp’s entire head exploded like a water balloon. Blix scrambled backward, then offered a nod of approval.
“Guys,” yelled Daryl. “Help!” He struggled to keep his sister’s head above water so she didn’t drown.
Jordan still appeared to be in too much pain to pull himself out of the water. Ronan sobbed like a small child, his chest red from fake grass burns. Sam again dropped the Nerf gun and jumped in, swimming over to Miranda.
Blix flew over and helped, pulling Miranda by the hair. Between the three of them, they got her to the stairs at the shallow end where she couldn’t slip underwater.
“What the hell is going on?” whispered Daryl, out of breath.
Sam figured immediate need outweighed long term secrecy. Sarah could clean it up later. “Demons are attacking us.”
“Will you stop calling my sister a demon?” Daryl grumbled.
“I’m not. I mean real demons.”
Ronan screamed.
Sam and Daryl twisted to look.
The skinny blonde boy floated in the air, half mummified in a garden hose doing a spot-on impression of an angry anaconda. A taller, barrel-shaped demon held the hose, apparently trying to get it around Ronan’s neck.
“Okay, maybe you’re right,” deadpanned Daryl. “That hose is alive…”
Sam hurried over to the Nerf gun and unloaded five shots into the demon trying to kill Ronan. The instant the fiend evaporated into a smoke cloud, the hose went limp, dumping the boy to the ground.
“What did you do, Sam?” wheezed Ronan.
“Shot it.”
“No, I mean, why is stuff messing with us?” Ronan detangled himself from the hose and looked at the spot where the demon had been. “I didn’t know demons followed Nerf war rules.”
“No idea and umm, neither did I.” Sam looked over the bright orange plastic gun. “One tried to hurt Miranda. I just wanted to distract it, hoping it would freak out at someone seeing it… didn’t expect to blow a big hole in it. This thing hits them like a real gun.”
Grunting, Daryl dragged Miranda up to lay on the ground at the top of the pool steps. She bled a little from a cut over one eye, but didn’t appear seriously hurt.
Blix ambled over to them. “The dart isn’t kill. Sam kill.”
“Umm, sorry.” Sam glanced at the giant toy gun.
“No sorry.” Blix shook his head rapidly, making his floppy ears slap back and forth. “Bad demons. Good kill.”
Another demon raced out from under the deck, scurried over the small lawn, and jumped on Miranda’s chest, grabbing her neck in both hands.
Sam swung the Nerf gun up, sighted, and fired three times, blasting the demon into a splatter of beige slime. The darts bounced off Miranda’s chest harmlessly, hit the ground, and disappeared back into the magazine.
“Dude…” Daryl gestured at her. “She’s hurt. Why are you shooting her?”
“I’m not. I’m shooting the demon trying to make her stop breathing.”
Yet another pudgy, short demon emerged from the bushes around the deck, holding a garden gnome over its head in both hands, poised to smash over Daryl’s head.
“Look out!” Sam pointed.
Daryl spun in time to see the gnome fly. He got his arms up to block, sparing his skull. The force of the hit against his crossed arms made him trip over Miranda and fall into the water.
“Whoa,” whispered Jordan. “Did that lawn gnome just fly?”
“Sorta.” Sam chased the demon around the pool with Nerf darts. Hitting a sprinting three-foot-tall demon proved challenging. The eighteenth shot finally clipped it in the knee, blasting the leg off. Once it fell, he had little trouble shooting it twice more, destroying it. Considering the magazine only held ten darts, he wouldn’t have nailed the annoying critter without the trick enchantment. “Thanks, Blix.”
The imp gave a thumbs up.
Three faint pops accompanied a few more darts reappearing in the magazine.
“Hey, is your ammo trick why it’s killing them?”
Blix shook his head again. “You kill. Have magic like Sophia, but linked demons. Nerf, real bullet, knife, ping pong ball, same.” The imp cleared his throat. “The foam darts are a physical representation of you wanting to send the demons back to their home plane, so it works.”
Sam chuckled. “You sound weird when you talk in full sentences.”
Blix flashed a cheesy grin. “Make fun humans.”
Sam glanced at the Nerf rifle. “So even though this is a toy, if I want to smash a demon, it works?”
Blix gave a thumb-up.
“Who are you talking to?” asked Daryl.
“Not funny,” said Jordan.
Everyone looked at him. The boy still clung to the edge of the pool, only visible from the chin up.
“What’s not funny?” asked Daryl.
“Which one of you buttheads stole my swimsuit?”
“I got it,” chirped Blix before leaping into the air and retrieving a pair of bright yellow shorts from the roof.
“Dude. Seriously uncool,” muttered Sam to no demon in particular. He sighed, shaking his head. “Guys if an
imp pantses you, act like you don’t care. They’ll stop doing it if they don’t think it bothers you.”
Daryl gawked at the swim trunks seemingly flying on their own, then disappearing.
“Thanks.” Sam saluted Blix.
“What is wrong with you?” Daryl nudged him. “Who are you talking to?”
“A friendly demon,” said Sam before raising his voice. “Jord, look down.”
Jordan peered down at himself. “What the crap? I swear they were missing a second ago.” Still blushing a little, he pulled himself up out of the water and limped over to Sam, Ronan, and Daryl. “Something seriously weird is going on.”
“Yeah, really. Miranda’s been quiet for ten whole minutes,” mumbled Sam.
“Duuuuude!” Daryl bumped his arm. “She’s knocked out. We gotta call 911.”
“Your sister is not a knockout,” muttered Jordan.
Ronan shrugged. “I think she’s pretty.”
“Speaking completely objectively here,” said Sam, “your sister is physically pretty but her personality makes her unattractive.”
“Guys!” yelled Daryl, “You are—”
Clank.
A shovel bounced off his head.
Daryl collapsed to the ground, both hands clamped to the back of his skull. He whimpered, “Ow. Shit.”
“Where is it?” Sam spun in a circle, Nerf gun up.
“Why are you asking us?” Ronan ducked the swinging Nerf weapon. “You’re the only one who can see them.”
Blix went wild-eyed, reared back, and bit Ronan on the left wrist.
“Yaaaaah!” He screamed, yanking his arm up with such force Blix flew in an arc to the pool. “Ow!”
Two little puncture wounds dribbled blood.
Sam smiled. “He did magic on you so you can see demons.”
“How do you know that?” Ronan clamped his mouth over the wound.
“I dunno. I just know. Same way I just knew the demon was gonna try to kill Miranda by tripping her so she broke her neck.” Sam pivoted and fired two Nerf darts into a moving bush. Something went splat. “Hah! Got one.”
Vampire Innocent | Book 12 | Ancient Vampire Death Cults & Other Annoyances Page 25
