Stakes Have Sword Envy

by Holly Ryan

  “Are you part of the Slayer Senate?”

  It cocked its head in the other direction, this time with a goofy, sweet smile.

  If a bunch of dogs ran the Slayer Senate and were currently having a fancy dinner party, I could totally deal. No hard feelings whatsoever.

  The double door to my right clicked open. I whirled and raised Night’s Fall and my stake, my heart pounding. A pair of eyes met mine, so light blue they were almost white. The person they were attached to reared back into the dark room.

  “Wait.” My voice snapped through the entryway before they could vanish.

  The figure froze. “Slayer.” A whisper, hardly more than an exhale.

  “I need a library.”

  “Don’t we all?” a trembling, young-sounding voice asked.

  I narrowed my eyes because she had a point. “Can you lead me there?”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “That depends on you.”

  The figure moved forward slightly out of the gloom. A girl of about thirteen with white-blonde hair braided and twisted around her head stared back. Her porcelain skin had a blue tinge to it, almost as though she’d been holding her breath much too long. She wore what looked like a frilly maid’s outfit, complete with a white apron and a feather duster.

  “Do you work for the Slayer Senate?” I asked.

  She nodded. “A servant.”

  “A servant?” My voice bounced off the walls as my rage boiled like lava through my veins. She was just a girl. What was it about the Senate and their punishment of kids? Traumatic childhoods of their own? Fuck. Them.

  The girl shrank back into the dark room, her fear rolling through the open door, thick and choking.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. I’ve had a rough day.”

  She peered back out, her light blue eyes wide. “I can see that. You’ve been crying.”

  Vampire guts had exploded over me, and yet she pointed out the tear tracks, triggered by the impossible photo on Detective Appelt’s desk, that had surely cut through the grime? Strange, but also telling of her empathy levels if she chose to home in on that. Maybe she could be trusted. Eventually.

  I waved a hand at the rest of the house. “So...the library?”

  After a moment, the girl came back out and crossed the entryway toward the opposite door. “This way.”

  I followed, and the dog brought up the rear, its claws clicking the marble floor.

  “Is the dog mean?” I asked as she opened the door.

  “Not too bad.”

  We trooped into a large room with thick rugs and dark-paneled walls, the smell of tobacco smoke thick in the air. The instrumental music drifted in behind us.

  I glanced behind me and gave the dog a skeptical onceover. Its tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth as it loped along after us. “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “Well, I guess it depends on who you ask.” The girl swept past a leather chair in the middle of the room, trailing her fingers along its ornate arm. “She’s nice to me because we’re friends. Her name is Cleo.”

  “After Cleopatra?”

  “No. After the famous TV psychic.”

  Of course.

  “Do they have a lot of dinner parties here?” I asked.

  “Fundraisers, they call them. They invite rich people and ask them to give the Senate money.”

  “For what?” I demanded.

  The girl stopped in front of another door and glanced behind her. “Salaries? This house?”

  But not for me. I’d been so broke the devil himself had sent me checks to cover expenses. Checks I hadn’t cashed, but still. As I passed it, I gripped the back of the leather chair the girl had so lovingly stroked and poked five finger holes into it. It was either that or throw it.

  Off this room led a narrow hallway to another large room, this one the library. Even bigger than Eddie’s, floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the four walls, most of them spilling books and even loose pages to the floor in tall stacks. Several smaller shelves sat in the middle as well as a couple rectangular wooden tables with green glass lamps on top and stiff-looking leather-backed chairs behind them. The tables themselves were covered with books, some of them lying open facedown with stacks of them sitting on top and destroying their spines. Not well organized, even for me, a non-librarian. Poor Eddie would have a fit.

  “Um...” I didn’t even know where to start. “Do you know where the books written about the individual slayers are?”

  “No, but you could ask the librarian.”

  “Where are they?”

  “At the dinner party.” She took slow steps toward the door we’d just come through, her back wooden and her shoulders hunched to her ears. “I suppose I should go tell everyone you’re here.”

  She radiated nervousness at that idea, which cranked my nerves even tighter. What were her other reasons to fear them other than her apparent forced servitude? Something told me I wouldn’t like the answers.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Lolly. What’s yours?”

  “Belle. And I have your back, Lolly. I’ll tell them that straight to their faces so they won’t ever give you shit again.”

  She backed toward the door, staring at me, and then finally nodded once as if to shake my promise deep inside her memory. Then she left.

  I maybe had minutes to search this gargantuan library before the Senate showed up. Night’s Fall symbols were still etched into the black blade, so I still had time, but I needed to hurry. After wandering aimlessly among the bookshelves with Cleo trotting behind, I eventually spotted what I was looking for. Thick, dusty tomes bound in leather and sitting side by side, the history of slayers dominated a whole wall, though not in any order I could figure out. Some of the names on the spines were so faded I could hardly read them. I pulled several at random out and took them to one of the tables in the middle. Cleo settled at my feet as I cracked open one slayer’s history. The pages were yellowed and badly flaking, so I flipped to the end so I wouldn’t ruin it as much. Scanning the neat, slanted handwriting, I learned that this slayer, Beatrice Solomon, had died of suicide. Same with the next slayer, and the next. They’d impaled themselves on their own stakes.

  Except they hadn’t. Several mentioned odd behavior beforehand, including the repetition of a certain phrase. I stopped reading at that part since I knew Paul’s favorite phrase all too well.

  But who from the Senate had bothered to pay attention to all of this and had painstakingly recorded it in detail? The handwriting was the exact same in all the histories I’d looked through so far.

  I reloaded my reading material from the shelves and found more suicides, but also a large number of slayers who’d been murdered by townspeople. That had likely been Paul strolling through their minds and driving them to kill the slayer. Been there, done that, and survived by the skin of my teeth.

  Then, finally, I found Roseff’s history, the slayer who had imprisoned Jacek and tortured him. His was longer than the others, likely because he’d become a vampire and had lived a long life being an asshole before Jacek had killed him. This one I would take with me to see what his plan had been for beating Paul.

  The instrumental music that had been playing from somewhere in the house since I arrived stopped suddenly. Cleo lifted her head from her paws over by the table, and her low whine pierced the quiet library.

  The party was over. It had to be past midnight by now, judging from the heaviness in my eyelids.

  The dog glanced at me, the green light on the table casting an eerie glow across her droopy eyes. She let out another whine.

  I zeroed in on the door we’d come through. Why hadn’t the servant girl come back with the Senate in tow? At the very least, wouldn’t they be curious how I’d found my way here?

  Cleo rose on all fours and then trotted over to the door. Using her paws and her nose, she opened it and slipped out like she’d done just that a thousand times.

  “Wait,” I hissed, b
ut she had no reason to listen to me.

  The hair along my neck prickled as I picked up Night’s Fall, my stake, and Roseff’s book. The intense quiet pressed in, magnifying every sound I made. It was too quiet. If the party were over, why weren’t there voices drifting elsewhere, like toward the front door or...anywhere?

  I moved across the thick carpet, listening, sensing, but also cursing myself. No way I could fight, if it came to that, with this massive book in my arms, so I supposed I should just stash it somewhere until I was ready to leave and hope nobody noticed. Or I could just leave now and say fuck the Senate since they’d thoroughly fucked me.

  But Lolly the servant girl and Cleo weren’t the Senate. If something was wrong...

  Damn me and my heart and my inability to not cry at commercials. If Paul didn’t kill me, then caring too much about everything probably would.

  I edged out the door, but the book’s heft knocked against it, screeching its hinges as it opened wider. I froze. Way to announce my exact location. No sign of Cleo, so I stealthed down the narrow hallway and then through the tobacco room. As soon as I cracked open the double door that led to the entryway, I smelled it. And then saw it a split-second later.

  Blood. So much blood. Pooling out from the door where I’d first seen Lolly. Smearing a messy path up the marble staircase. All of it twinkled with rainbows from the crystal chandelier above, painting the house in violent beauty.

  I became nothing more than my heartbeat as I stared, a thudding alarm that shook me to my bones.

  Time to go go go go go. I had what I’d come for. The symbols on Night’s Fall had noticeably faded.

  But I couldn’t leave. If Cleo or Lolly were still alive, I had to save them or I would never forgive myself for not even checking. This was a child and a dog, two of the most innocent creatures ever created. Whether the trapdoor was open by now or not, I couldn’t just walk away from them. But if I found them dead, the unfairness of that would bowl me over, rip me up, and make me useless against whoever did this.

  I glanced down at Night’s Fall—I still had time before the symbols faded completely and its power became dangerous.

  Forcing myself to breathe through my mouth, I stepped out into the entryway, avoiding the bloody mess as much as possible so I wouldn’t slip. None of the blood led to the front door. The way out. As if whoever it belonged to was trapped inside for some reason. Or as if seeking help from the second floor.

  I backed toward the front door, attempting to keep everything around me in sight at once, and then squatted down next to a potted fern tree in the corner. It was a good enough hiding spot for Roseff’s book. After stashing it, I squared off with the door Lolly had come through earlier, the one that seeped blood from underneath it, and then turned the knob.

  Darkness crowded the room as well as the thick stink of blood. The flickering candlelight from the chandelier at my back lit my way into the room, yet it was still dark enough that I skated and fumbled my way across the blood-soaked marble floor. I caught myself on the edge of a grand piano, or the shape of one anyway, my pinky finger grazing one of the ivory keys. A soft high note filtered out, a symphony complete with crashing cymbals in the quiet.

  I sucked in my breath. Froze. Waited. Cursed myself. Then moved on to a single door on the opposite wall. Outside, I found myself in another narrow hallway, lit by several wall sconces down the length of it. Bloody paw prints led to one door on the left, the only sign of blood here. I followed them on fast tiptoes.

  Through the door they’d disappeared through, I—

  Oh. No. I blinked, trying to process the room, the scene within, why it made bile scorch its way upward and kick the back of my tongue.

  I’d found the dinner party. And it was most definitely over.

  Chapter Seven

  A long, shiny dark oak table sat in the middle of a large dining room, and seated around it were about twelve men and women of various ages and races, all of them slumped forward with their faces pressed to their dinner plates. They were dressed in fancy tuxes and bejeweled silk dresses with white napkins folded in their laps. Silver candelabras adorned the length of a delicate lace centerpiece on the table, their candlelight flickering inside empty crystal wine glasses.

  There wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere, but I knew they were all dead. Even so, I reached out to the nearest woman’s swan-like neck, my palms soaked with nervous sweat, my hand trembling so hard I had to concentrate to keep it steady. No pulse. Not even a hint of one on her still-warm skin.

  This was the Slayer Senate. This had to be them. But why? Why were they dead? More importantly, where was the person who did it?

  I took a single step forward, steeling myself to stand tall among all this death. I had no love for these people, and yet they’d seen something in me at the tender age of nine, something that told them I had the strength to still be standing today. I’d wanted to demand answers of them, show them what they’d made and what I’d become. But it was too late for that. Anyway, it would’ve likely ended up with me in a one-sided shouting match.

  Leaning between two of them, I searched for a hint of what had happened. Some of their plates still held food beneath their faces. Had they been poisoned? I touched a fingertip to one of their crystal wine goblets. The only thing I knew about wine was that it wasn’t coffee. And that it shouldn’t feel greasy. Wincing, I wiped my fingers on the lace runner on the table.

  A soft click sounded from outside another door that led off the dining room, barely perceptible. It triggered my blood to storm through me, too loud to hear much else. Had that been a dog’s claws or something else?

  I dragged in a nervous breath and released it in the barest of whispers. “Cleo?”

  Only the Senate answered me back with their deadly silence. It was then that I realized that two chairs at the table were empty.

  I should really go. Because two chairs. Two members of the Necron Brotherhood. I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore.

  I turned to leave when the door I’d come in through banged open. I jumped at the same time as ice needled through my veins. Tattoo Guy from the police station, from the Necron Brotherhood—Detective Blake Friday—stood there, a wide grin stretching his face too tight. He wore a tux, and curling out from underneath his jacket onto the backs of his hands and up his neck were the Brotherhood’s son and moon tattoos.

  “The vampire slayer herself.” His eyes twinkled in the candlelight, a menacing storm of dark glitter. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  I’d walked right into a trap. I’d known I was walking right into a trap, even though the trapdoor was nowhere near here.

  Detective Blake Friday moved closer to let the door close behind him, but I stood my ground. While my insides quaked, I refused to show him my fear. But I would show him that poison was for cowards when I fought him to face to face, fist to face.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “A humble servant”—his eerie grin grew wider—“to the dark unknown. I thought for sure you’d figured that out by now.”

  “Who are you to them?” I asked, pointing to the dead. “Why are you here?”

  “Well, I thought that would be obvious too. You wave enough cash in these people’s faces, and you’ll be covered in drool.” He cocked his head and frowned, waving dismissively at me. “Tell me, is that blood yours? Did you hit your head and jumble that slayer brain of yours so you can’t think straight? Without the Senate, another slayer can’t be chosen.”

  My stomach convulsed as if he’d punched me, but deep down, underneath the layers of shock the night had poured on top of me like wet cement, that thought had occurred to me. With the Senate dead, and then me dead, the slayer would be a thing of the past. Done.

  “Why?” I hissed.

  “Because that’s what the dark unknown wishes. Once he finds what he’s looking for in the Tunnel to Nowhere, the world as we know it will be his for the taking, and no one, not you or the Senate, can stop him.”

&nbs
p; The Tunnel to Nowhere. The trapdoor in the Appelt mausoleum. It had to lead into this tunnel, and it did not sound pleasant.

  “What’s he looking for?”

  His face stretched too tight again with his creepy grin. “He doesn’t tell me everything.”

  I nodded as if everything made all the sense in the world, and then gazed around the table at the fallen roadblocks in Paul’s path. Now, there was only one more. Me.

  Willing my knees not to buckle, I forced a swallow. “So what happens now? Does Paul show up and off me? Are you going to offer me some poisoned wine?”

  He smoothed his hand down his tux jacket and made a face like he was talking to a blank wall. “No.”

  “No?”

  He cut his gaze to the left. “But she might.”

  I turned and met an oncoming semi-truck right to the face. The force hit me so hard I spun, like my body was hanging from nothing but strings. Then I smashed into the table. Dishes and cutlery bounced, and by the time they clanged back to the table, pain speared through my head. Blood gushed into my mouth, so much that I was forced to spit all over the delicate lace runner. Ruined. Just like the Senate themselves.

  “Get up, Belle,” a voice said. Familiar, but at the same time not.

  I closed my eyes to place the voice, but that simple movement sparked a rush of pain all over again. The left side of my face throbbed, and my vision on that side was seriously wonky. Much, much slower than normal, my legs received the message to support my weight. I stood using the back of a dead Senate member’s chair for support.

  It hadn’t been a semi-truck that had smashed into my face at all. It had been a heavy silver tray, held by none other than my boss at The Bean Dream, Sylvia. She wore a red sequined dress that hugged her curves, much more glamourous than the dress I wore made from vampire blood. Hatred had swallowed up all of her features and had spit them back on her once-pretty face so she looked terrifying. Hatred for me even though I’d never once been late, busted my ass, and I always added a little extra whipped cream to the gingerbread lattes I brought her. Seeing her like this, seething with so much rage that it shook her hand gripping the silver tray, twisted up my throat and burned my eyes.