by Mary Hughes
The tavern was a long shoe box of a building dug down into a hillside, like a bunker. Only the bright neon beer signs in the windows, like every other bar in the universe, kept me from freaking.
I poked around the outside but no tossed-away iron bars—in fact, no tossed-away anything. The place was Meiers-Corners neat. I stoked my courage and tried inside.
The feeling of warm familiarity intensified. Long bar to my left, TV playing sports at the far end, a couple tables along the wall, walnut-paneled and decorated with plaque-mounted dead things. A real mancave, but I’d played gigs in worse.
No metal rods, though.
Behind the bar, a slim, vivacious woman in her forties tapped a tall one, holding a white handle with short red-lacquered nails. She snapped the lever with professional ease, stopping the stream of golden liquid just before the developing foam head overflowed the rim.
She filled a second glass from a pitcher of pulpy pale liquid and handed both off to a young woman who immediately grabbed all my attention.
Her short blonde curls were spiked on top—like mine. Her punk clothes were topped off with four-inch platform combat boots.
Like something I’d wear.
Okay, didn’t mean she’d be my BFF. But I instinctively trusted her more than the beefy guys glaring at me from their stools. I bellied up to the bar near her and away from them and caught the barkeep’s eye.
The bartender did a double-take and glanced at the other punk woman. But she only gave me a professional, “What can I get you?”
“What’s that?” I established myself on the stool next to the blonde punker and pointed at the unlabeled tap handle. Hey, I couldn’t just steal their rebar without buying something.
“Local brew. Pilsner. Draft.”
“Nice.” I salivated, but I had my tiny boarder to think of. “That?” I nodded at the pitcher.
“Lemonade.”
“Sounds good.” While the barkeep poured, I turned to the punk woman and stuck out my hand. “Hi. I’m Nixie.”
The woman swiveled her head to eye me up and down. She had a long nose, red lips and a diamond nose stud—and a tiger tattoo on one arm that made me like her even better. She said, “Nixie? What the *eff* kind of name is that?” She used the real F-word, but I mentally buffered it for the kid’s sake.
“German.” I cast around me for metal. Nothing. I couldn’t even pull the legs off the barstools. They were wood.
“Sounds effing foreign.” She put her hand in mine and pumped. “I’m Bessy.”
I was beginning to see she put the F in Four-Letter Word, but before the kid, I put the endcaps on FiretrUCK. I pumped back. “I’m from Meiers Corners, not Germany.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near Chicago.” I released her hand and kept looking for metal. Not one loose bar in the place.
She grimaced. “Effing FIB.”
I should explain there’s a friendly rivalry between Wisconsin and Illinois. FIB stands for effing Illinois astard-bay. We call them cheeseheads. It’s all in good fun. Mostly.
But it reminded me I was off my turf. I missed Julian. I felt alone, out of place, and scared. This punk lady, this tavern, was the closest to home I’d get.
So instead of leaving immediately, I said, “You hear about the murder?”
“Yeah.” She sipped the beer, savoring it as it deserved. “Wish it was my *dish*-head”—again she said the real word—“creep of an ex that bought it.”
A thump distracted me, the barkeep setting a sweating glass of lemonade before me on the bar, condensation pearling down its sides. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” I picked up the glass and drank—and immediately sucked in my lips. There were real lemons in this stuff. I coughed.
“Gotta stir it,” Bessy said. “You want in on the Who-Done-It pool?” She pulled a dogeared notebook from a pocket and drew the stub of a pencil from its spirals.
“I do.” The barkeep laid down an Abe. “I’ve got five dollars that says it was bears.”
“I take it we’re not talking the football team,” I said. “Have there been other maulings?”
“Are you kidding?” Bessy snorted. “Ashhole tourists get tired of shining deer and drive to the dump to find bears. The fools find ’em all right. The bears take off several layers of hide and paint before the ashholes take off. Good riddance, I say.”
“Their money spends just fine,” the bartender said.
A skeleton of a guy with a three-day beard and a five-day stink sidled up. “I’ve got a five on aliens.” He wandered away.
“Aliens, right.” I laughed. “Might as well have put five on vampires.”
Bessy stopped midsip, eying me over the rim of her glass.
My laugh died. “What?”
“You staying at the Chipmunk Lake Cabins?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Some folks found wandering around out there. Dizzy, out of it. I think that’s why Ann was so anxious to go help her daughter. That toddler’s a hellion.”
“What, people wandering like they’re drunk or stoned? You saying there really are alien abductions?”
She eyed me like my name was Dolty P. McIdiot. “They were raving about foo-king fangs. A couple of ‘em had scabs right here.” Bessy tapped two fingers against her neck.
Right where a vampire might drink.
Chapter Ten
“Weird.” I sipped lemonade, trying to act cool. A vampire lived near the cabin complex—or at it?
I chilled. The three thugs across the bridge? No, Julian would have smelled them. Besides, vamps are extraordinarily good-looking. They start out like a young person in perfect health and only get more appealing from there. Part of their predator bag of tricks. So not the trolls.
“Is that all?” I tapped two fingers on the side of my neck like she had.
“Isn’t that enough?” Bessy sharply signaled a refill. The barkeep nodded and returned to the tap.
“Yeah. Enough.” I backed off. Very few people were clued into vampires, much less the factions and infighting—some vamps were pro-human and some treated us like blood cattle. So most folk were scared, deep down, root-reaction primitive scared, like mice and creepy deadly snakes.
I edged the conversation back toward the sane side of the street. “What about you? Who’s your money on for the killer?”
It worked. She snorted. “If he still lived here? My *asktard* ex.” She used the Not-Safe-For-Work word. “Or the bizatch he was cheating with. I like to think he found her cheating on him and hacked her to pieces.”
“You sound a tiny bit bitter.”
The bartender set a fresh beer in front of her. “Couldn’t help overhearing. Bessy has a right to be angry. He cheated on her—but the hypocrite tried to completely control her life. He’d even call here, checking up on her.”
“True dat.” Bessy sipped beer. “I suspected he hacked my email and listened in on phone calls. But the last straw was that detective he put on my cute heinie, like some sort of stalker. I divorced his ash.”
She had her own creepy stalker. “Wow. Sorry.” I finished my lemonade and set it down with a shake of my head.
“Another?” The barkeep held up the pitcher.
“I probably should get going.”
She nodded. “While I still have it out…” She pointed her chin at the full glass next to Bessy. “Is Suelle in the bathroom again?”
“Yeah,” Bessy said. “Twelve-week pukes.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
I seconded it. Pregnancy wasn’t easy. Some parts were harder than others. As if agreeing, when I eased off the stool Snagrat played trampoline on my bladder. “Where is that bathroom?”
The barkeep nodded toward the end of the bar as she put the pitcher in a minifridge. “In back.”
“Great. Thanks.”
I felt pretty good, considering. While I hadn’t found a metal bar, I had a couple leads for the killer other than Julian. Although both a vampire and a bear were
more likely to use claws than knives, it was just possible those cuts on Caldwell were super-sharp claw tips. Relief made me stupid. “One more thing. You have any metal rods you’d be willing to lend me?”
“What for?” The bartender looked up sharply.
“Um, nothing important.” I suddenly realized how strange a request that was. Bessy had almost made me forget this wasn’t Meiers Corners, where people just expected weird things to pop out of my mouth. To cover I put a five on the bar. “This enough?”
“More than. I’ll get your change.” She started for the register.
I followed. “Keep it.”
“Thanks for the tip.” The barkeep hit a register key and stuffed the money in the drawer. She paused, with a glance at Bessy. In a lowered voice she added, “Thanks for keeping her company. She dresses like a tank and swears like a Marine but underneath she’s really sweet. Her ex is such a jerk. I didn’t tell her but he was in here the other night.”
“Bessy said he’d left town.”
“Sure, but he comes back a few times a year, trying to get in her bed or her wallet. Every time he’s in here he shoots off his mouth or gets in a fight or both. I feel sorry for the chick he was yelling at on the phone the other night. He did not like her.”
I thanked her for everything and made my way to two narrow doors, labeled “Guys” and “Gals”. I had my hand on the knob of “Gals” when the door flung open in my face.
Scowling lips and glaring eyes expanded in my vision like an oncoming truck before a battering ram of a woman sent me sprawling.
One of the burly guys caught me. I gave him a grateful “Thanks” then turned to glare at Scowly Gal’s receding back. I opened my mouth to let loose with the mother of all four-letter tirades.
Baby Benedict kicked me in the spleen.
Slowly I closed my mouth. He was right. No reason to get upset. Poor woman was probably just pissy from tossing her cookies every half hour, and she didn’t have a Julian to feed her between barfing bouts.
Julian. Damn.
Scowly Gal took the stool next to Bessy, frowning as her friend offered her the lemonade, transferring the frown to me, then back to Bessy.
It wasn’t just me who thought I looked like Bessy.
Brain cells fired. What if Caldwell tried to attack a woman he thought was me, but it wasn’t me, it was Bessy? What if Bessy fought back? She might have accidentally killed Caldwell.
Bessy as killer…even if it was self-defense, I didn’t like it, because I did like Bessy.
Still, I had to consider it for Julian’s sake. As dawn closed in, I might have to suggest that, just to pump doubt in the commissioner’s mind, and get him to release my poor husband.
Comfortable again after my restroom break and back in my car, I punched Julian’s location up on my GPS, glad it had a “return” feature, because I sure wasn’t going to find it in the wooded blackout these folks called “night”.
As I drove I put in a call to Elena to update her on everything. I didn’t worry about waking her. Even before she married her master vampire, she’d been a third shift cop.
Sure enough she answered on the first ring. “Strongwell.”
“Me.” I fed her everything that had happened, soft-pedaling Julian’s incarceration—Bo could shift but as far as I knew he couldn’t do passenger jets, so if she couldn’t get here any faster than Liese why worry her?—ending with, “So the betting pool is bears, aliens, and vampires.”
“Vampires, in the north woods? Nah. There aren’t enough people to drink from without getting caught.”
“Unless it’s a newbie vamp who doesn’t know better. Come to think, that makes sense. The fledgling left holes. It’s a better suspect than Julian.”
“Less likely than next of kin.”
I pulled into the concrete hut’s clearing. “Speaking of, did you find anything?”
“There’s a brother, but he’s a salesperson who happens to be on the coast right now. An ex-wife, Emma Caldwell. According to her medical records, she was ‘accident prone’.”
“He hit her?”
“Looks like. She’d be my lead suspect for motive, if she had opportunity. I’m still trying to track her down. Although we can’t rule out the fledgling v-kid.”
Something about the ex-wife niggled. “Nah. The kid left his vics dizzy but alive. What about the trolls?”
“Those three jerks in the cabin near you? Yeah, top of my list.”
“On your cop instinct?”
“Naw, on their sheer asshole-ness. Good luck getting your husband sprung.”
“Thanks.” I hung up and left the car to try the hut’s red door. Still locked. No Olyeo. I wondered if Parker even knew where the place was.
Spank me with a stroller. Now how would I talk things over with my husband?
Oh yeah. Vampire plus punk rock singer. “HEY JULIAN!” What can I say? I have lungs.
From within the building I heard a Nixie followed by faint bellowing along the lines of Why aren’t you someplace safe?
“I WAS.” Looking for stray metal rods—which I had in my own doggammed car, in the forms of a tire iron and oil dipstick. Maybe more, if I thought longer.
I pumped air. Success. I spun for my car.
Immediately I spun back. The closed door mocked me. Failure. All the metal in the world was useless until someone returned to let me in.
My shoulders slumped. Snagrat kicked me. Poor kidlet. No idea what a mess his parents were in. I trudged back to the car and hunkered down in the front seat to wait, hoping no bears or trolls or aliens or killer deer found me.
Snagrat kicked me again. As if he was saying, Don’t give up.
Trolls, aliens, killer deer—or vampires. I couldn’t get into the locked cinder block hut. But a stray fledgling could. I just needed to locate him.
I yelled “BE BACK SOON” at Julian and returned to the Chipmunk Lake Cabins.
The moment I turned onto the gravel drive I flicked my headlights off. I didn’t know who or what those three goons were, except that they weren’t Emerson-friendly, so I waited until my eyes adjusted and navigated the by the sprinkling of stars and illumination bleeding from the garbage platform and kitchen door floodlight.
The bridge creaked as I slowly rolled over it. I held my breath. Either that creak would bring bad guys running guns-a-blazin’ or the bridge was about to collapse in a pile of Nixie-coated kindling.
Wood for car bridges. Just wrong.
Murphy must’ve been on a little boys’ outhouse break because I got over without alerting the goons or falling into the crick. Once parked behind our cabin I shut off the engine and waited. Nothing beyond the rasp of my own panted breaths.
The baby tumbled in my belly, maybe from my adrenaline, maybe just a mite concerned I was taking his fleshy baby buggy off into the deep dark woods to hunt a predator with nothing more than my wits. Immune to hypnosis and quick on my feet, but I was a human juice box—now with a bonus 30% free! It wouldn’t take Murphy to award me Best Actress in a Too-Stupid-To-Live moment.
I needed some tools. First, a light more powerful than my phone. I found a flashlight in the emergency kit Mr. Hinz put in all household vehicles.
Second, a weapon. In the bedroom, I dug through our luggage. Liese, when she’d come into the fold of v-spouses, had supplied all of us with stun guns. You had to be quick to nail a vampire, especially one of the older ones. But the advantage of stun guns over even my bazooka was they not only worked on vampires, but on vampire mist.
Before I came across the gun I found Julian’s backup stash of protein bars.
The one guy who really understood me, who cared. I collapsed onto the bed with a sniffle. Though I’d never let on, he was right. I got hungry pretty often, even pre-kid. And here he was, taking care of me, even though he never ate.
I dashed my eyes dry. Time for me to return the favor.
I snatched up a couple bars and stuffed them in my mini-purse, armed myself with a stun gun, and prep
ared to let myself out the lakeside door.
The fireplace in the living room caught my eye. The nice fireplace, with a full range of nice metal fireplace equipment, including a hefty poker with leather handle. I snatched it up and leaned it against the kitchen door for when I left again.
If I left again.
Then I exited the lakeside door, locked up, switched on my flashlight and crept into the woods.
“Here, baby vamp. Come get the nice blood.” I heard my voice shake. I was banking a lot on this vamp being civil, from his having left his victims alive. Still, I couldn’t leave Julian to fry in the morning so what choice did I have?
But as I moved deeper into the woods, I realized it wasn’t just fear for my husband that drove me. The beat of my heart changed from a frantic flutter to the pound of a war drum. Sure this was maybe dangerous, but at least I finally was doing something.
I missed this. I missed brash Nixie, punk Nixie.
I’d gone maybe five minutes when I heard a rustle in the bushes. Not in front of me, an animal running away.
Beside me. A predator, hunting.
My heart jumped into my chest and started pumping triple time. Brash Nixie reminded me of all the reasons I was sure this was a baby vamp, not one of the older, cleverer, downright dangerous ones. An older vamp would close the holes. A clever vamp would hypnotize marks not to remember.
Although a fledgling was in some ways actually more dangerous—couldn’t really predict what they’d do. Just out of the ground, he might be nothing but blood-sucking instinct.
I shivered, suddenly cold despite brash Nixie.
Dizzy people. Not dead people. Not sucking humans dry. Ergo—Julian’s word for “so”—ergo there was control. Probably a lone baby vamp who didn’t know enough to lick the wound closed. Like kittens, vamps learned feeding behavior from their mamas.
I weeble-wobbled around to face the rustling, keeping my stun gun hand hidden by my hip.
“Hey there. My name is Nixie. I’m the mate of master vampire Julian Emerson. He’s an old dude, you know? You might have smelled him around here.”
More rustling, this time agitated.
