Death's Excellent Vacation

by Charlaine Harris

  Tonight most of all.

  The Heart Is Always Right

  LILITH SAINTCROW

  Lilith Saintcrow is the author of the Dante Valentine, Jill Kismet, and Strange Angels series. She lives in Vancouver, Washington, with her two children and assorted other strays.

  MOST gargoyles go to Paris. It’s ridiculous. When you spend all your time hanging on the sides of buildings, why go to a place where you just do more of the same? Even if the Heart is there beating under the streets. Even if it is, for pretty much any stoneskin, home.

  No, I didn’t want to spend two weeks of vacation hanging on to the side of a building. I was gonna go to Bermuda. Had my plane tickets and everything. I was even packing. Suntan lotion, BluBlocker sunglasses, flip-flops. It was an adventure buying the flip-flops at EvilMart. I was thinking about how in my trueform I only had three toes, and flip- flops are built wrong for that kind of foot. Then I figured I wasn’t going to be fighting any evil on the beach, so it didn’t matter that there aren’t three-toe flip-flops out there. It’s too bad there aren’t. Someone could make a killing.

  I guess I shouldn’t say things like that, should I?

  I got to the front of the EvilMart, wincing at the bright fluorescent light, and for once the Heart was kind to me. She was there.

  Blond. The kind of blond that looks dishwater under tubes of buzzing EvilMart light but lights up in island sunlight. Blue eyes, usually tired and bloodshot, and an aristocratic nose under them. She’s got a pretty mouth, too, though it’s always pulled tight with something like pain. I think if she ever relaxed, she’d be a knockout.

  Who am I kidding? Even in a blue polyester EvilMart vest that does nothing for her va-va-vooms, she’s a knockout. I like ’em juicy. Give me a girl with real hips any day, not a stick with mosquito bites.

  As if I’ve ever gotten close enough to smell a girl. But I can still look, right?

  I’m not dead. Just gargoyle.

  Her nametag says Kate. And there are always dark circles under her eyes.

  She was just reaching up to turn off the light over her register when I shambled up. It was about two A.M., quitting time. She hesitated, one hand in the air, and I wished I were shorter. Or at least less broad in the shoulders. We stoneskin are built like linebackers—wide and stupid. The sloppy brown hair, hat pulled down to hide my ears, stubble to hide my gnarled skin, and the smell of concrete and rain on me probably isn’t very pretty either.

  A tendril of that blond hair was falling in her face, and I stopped dead, planting my cheap canvas shoes. My heart made a funny jumping noise inside my ribs, knocking at the cathedral arches.

  Then she smiled. It was her usual pained smile, the mouth pulled tight, but her eyes lit up and my heart not only banged on the old ribs, but splashed in my guts. My skin felt too tingling-small, and I had to take a deep breath, reminding myself that my real form wasn’t something anyone here would want to see.

  “Come on up,” she said, and flipped her light off. “I’m just about to go, but I can fit in one more.”

  “Oh. I . . . Gee. Thanks.” Yeah, I actually said gee. Her smile widened a bit, and I had to make my feet move. They were tingling, too, just like the rest of me.

  I stumped up to her checkout stand and started unloading the carrying basket. Two beach towels, both printed in big block colors. Two pairs of orange flip-flops, size fourteen wide. White socks—you can’t ever have too many socks. Two family-size bags of CornNuts. Sunblock. A two- liter of Coke. A pair of ragg-wool gloves. And three jumbo tins of Bag Balm.

  Hey, when your skin rasps against rock and concrete all the time, it gets cracked and stuff. Bag Balm is the best.

  Her hands sorted the items without any real effort on her part, the checkstand beeping and booping. Her nails were bitten down, and she wore a thin gold necklace. It looked cheap but it smelled real—I’ve got a nose for metal. The small gold ball earrings she wore were real, too. And this close her skin was dewy even under the glare.

  I bulged shapelessly, like a balloon without quite enough air. I’ve got a boxer’s face, including pointed cauliflower ears—not that boxers have pointed ears, you know. I’ve got a mushroom nose that looks like it’s been broken one too many times, and the scarred, pitted skin of any gargoyle past puberty. My eyes are too small, and they’re yellow. And my hair is okay—thick and dark—but I must be the only curly-headed stoneskin on the continent.

  I’m even ugly to my own Heartkin.

  “You must like CornNuts.” A quick flutter of a glance from under her long blond-brown lashes. Her hands kept working, bagging everything. “I see you getting them all the time.”

  She was talking to me.

  My brain went absolutely fucking blank. “Um,” I managed. “Yeah. Like ’em a lot.”

  Her smile widened a bit. The tips of her two front teeth showed, very white. “I could never eat them. They make my teeth hurt.”

  It’s real fun when you spit ’em at pigeons. Knock ’em right on their little heads; you can feed yourself that way for a while if you’re awful poor. You can even spit a CornNut right through them if you get it going fast enough. “You can just suck on ’em until they’re soft,” I mumbled, and blushed when her eyebrows went up a little. Her smile hovered between genuine and embarrassed for a half second, and a round of cursing went off inside my head.

  “Maybe I’ll give that a try,” she finally said. Uncomfortable silence bloomed between us.

  She took the cash, her skin brushing mine. “Is it still raining out there?”

  So soft and warm. They don’t feel hard and cold like us. No, they’re soft and pink and perfect. Especially her. “Pouring.” It was raining as if it wanted to drown the city, in fact.

  “Well, you’ve got towels.” She grinned, but I only caught the very beginning of her smile because I had to look down in a hurry or I might’ve grinned back, and a crooked yellow picket fence of teeth is not something she’d want to see. “All right, there you go. You always have exact change. It’s nice.”

  Because I have to. Any gargoyle does; it’s a compulsion. Once a gargoyle gets a hoard, we like counting exact change. Each penny is taken from muggers or other Bad People. But that’s no reason to waste it, and the count makes us irrationally happy.

  Plus, you have to pay in cash when you don’t have a real name or a social security number.

  My pulse was pounding so hard. Was I going to have an attack right here? Heart, I hoped not. I muttered something and took my bag, almost tripped in my hurry to get out. I left her standing there in the glare, and it wasn’t until I got outside that I realized I wasn’t having a cardiac arrest or a reaction. I was just stupid.

  I loitered outside under the awning for a little while, breathing deep lungfuls of wet, smog- laden air. The cars all hunched their shoulders and turned their backs to the storm, wet metal and rubber moving only under protest. I hung around near the end of the covered section, waiting to see if the rain would slacken. It probably wouldn’t until I was halfway home no matter how long I waited, that’s just my luck.

  Besides, about ten minutes after, Kate came out through the sighing automatic doors. She walked straight out into the rain, her thin denim jacket completely inadequate for the weather, and I saw that one of her sneaker soles was flapping a little at the heel.

  The sight of the heel rubber sticking to the wet ground, then flopping as she lifted her foot, made something inside my chest hurt. I guess they didn’t pay her enough to buy a new pair, even at EvilMart prices. She hunched her shoulders and hurried.

  Who was I kidding? I followed her, drifting behind and staying on a parallel course as if I were looking for my own car. I’d done it every night I’d come in for the past month. She had a rusted-down blue Chevy Caprice, and I usually made sure she got in and it started before I faded into the shadows.

  Hey, it’s a dangerous world. If there’s not the Big Bad out stalking, there’s other bad waiting right around the corner. Sometimes it’s Evil w
ith a capital E. Other times it’s grim luck, predators, accident, or just plain human foulness.

  I swung my bag a little as I walked, kept her in my peripheral vision. She parked way the hell out in the farthest regions of the lot—I guess EvilMart doesn’t want the employees snuggling up to the store.

  Kate walked with her head down, her steps slowing as she got out near her car. She looked nervous, and I wasn’t sure but I thought she was shaking. It was certainly cold enough. Even I was a bit chilled, and stoneskin don’t feel it the way the soft pink ones do. She jangled her keys slightly, sweet music.

  The lights were out here in the corner of the lot. That was the first wrong thing. The next was the thickness in the rainy air, like rancid soup. Last was the shadows crowding around, and the red pinprick lamps of eyes blinking on and off.

  What the hell? I dropped my plastic bags and my trueform shredded out through the mask of disguise. There went another cheap pair of canvas shoes—my real feet tore out through them, claws spreading lightly on concrete. My legs burned a little as I crouched, gathering myself. The darkness reached down from the sky to touch the ground in a thick, wet curtain.

  The Big Bad likes to take its victims in the dark. So Heartkin have infrared and other ways of seeing. She was like a lamp, heat and life shining along my skin, and for a moment it was so bright I was confused but already committed to my leap.

  The thing after her was a kolthulu. I hit in the middle of the nest of rubbery, snakelike tentacles. They’re lined with dry hairy suckers that can strip flesh off bone, but that’s no match for gargoyle skin. They give reluctantly under claws, so just brute force is needed to tear the things apart. There was Kate screaming, but I wasn’t worried about that just yet because it was a terror sound, not a pain sound. And who wouldn’t be terrified in the dark with the sounds of ripping and crunching all around?

  The kind of light she was giving off didn’t cast shadows, so it was a type of blindness all over me. My coat flapped; I dug my hind claws into concrete that gave like butter and pulled. The heartstring of the beast ripped out with a sound of gristle tearing from bone, and the screaming didn’t diminish as the tentacles lost their will and life, and became just twitching meat.

  There were other sounds, too. Soft sliding sounds, and her voice choked off hard.

  Where there’s kolthulu, there’s always bloodsuckers, too. I whirled, the battlefield drenched with directionless illumination that didn’t come in through the regular visual spectrum. The Heart in me gave a single loud knock against my meat and bone, thrilling up into hypersonic, and I tore through their hard, thin bodies. They were clustered around her, and the not-light of her dimmed and faltered.

  Holy shit. It was only then I realized what was happening.

  They were clustering her, and a soft sucking sound echoed against wet pavement and the dark curtain holding the world away. The not-light dimmed even further, infrared taking up the slack in a deep crimson haze. Six of them, one of me, bad odds when I could smell coppery blood.

  But bad odds aren’t something that worries a gargoyle. The Heart always wins, that’s what we say. Even if I fell here, others of my kin would get these things. I’d go into the Heart and come back stronger and better.

  Or so they said. I didn’t want to put it to the test.

  Metal crunched as I flung one of them. A car alarm went off, the sound knifing through the other din that I ignored because it wasn’t the screaming. The screaming had stopped, and that was a bad sign. A snap of greenstick neck-breaking, and the three remaining bloodsuckers fled, one of them limping badly and hissing in their weird piping tongue. They can’t talk right when their teeth are out, the little idiots.

  The darkness fled with them, the Big Bad picking up its toys and going home. I stood, half snarling, stone flexing over my skin and the strength of the Heart thudding underneath it. Regular sight returned, and I looked down.

  Kate lay sprawled on the wet concrete, rain beading on her pale skin. One of them had ripped her shirt open, and there were her breasts in a cheap black-lace bra.

  Hey, I looked. I might be ugly, but I’m not dead.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. My ears tingled, and I stared at her chest. There on the pale slope of her left breast, a sinuous fleur-de-lis curved. The lines were sharp black, as if they’d been inked by a master. But it wasn’t a tattoo. It ran with its own odd light, a dark fluorescence human eyes wouldn’t see.

  She was a Heart candidate.

  And I heard running feet and shouts behind me, as black-looking blood mixed with rain and threaded down from the puncture wounds in her throat. She was bleeding. She was a candidate, and she’d been bitten with a gargoyle right next to her, and there were people coming.

  It was a moment’s work to scoop her up and cradle her close. Her purse fell free, its patent-leather strap broken, and her jacket was in shreds. The sole of her sneaker had been almost torn off. Her sharp chin tipped back, the blood on her skin doing funny things to the inside of my head.

  “Jesus!” someone yelled, and I compressed myself like a spring, ready to leap. Situation: One parking lot, people beginning to cluster now that the excitement was over and the cloaking darkness was worn away. One gargoyle, shifted fully into stoneskin and hulking inside his raincoat, his hat knocked off and his hair unraveling away from high-pointed ears. One mortal woman, bleeding from a vampire bite. Her car was a shattered hulk of metal and glass, and just before I sprang I heard sirens in the distance.

  Wow, someone actually called the cops this once? Figures.

  The world turned underneath me. There was a scream as I vaulted over the heads of the gathering crowd, a sound of effort like grinding boulders escaping me, muscles and bone working overtime. I bounded like a springheel jack, Kate’s unconscious head bouncing against my shoulder, and all I could think of was that she might get a concussion if she hit her head on me too hard.

  I’ve never claimed to be the smartest gargoyle in the world. But just that once, maybe I did the right thing.

  On the other hand, she was bitten. And things were about to get even more interesting.

  MY flight left for Bermuda at five the next morning.

  Instead of sitting uncomfortably in a business- class seat, pouring down the drinks so I wouldn’t think of the empty air between me and the ground, I was crouched in the belfry of Immaculate Conception downtown. The rain beat steadily against the bell tower as I watched the clouds lighten by imperceptible degrees toward dawn.

  Yep. I was at home when my vacation started. Lucky me.

  Once dawn had a good grip on the city, I climbed down the rickety stairs. This particular church was built in 1911, and it’s got the standard architecture—and the winding little stairway behind a painted panel of Saint Stephen in a small side chapel, going down to my cell.

  It’s actually a comfortable little place. I’ve got my hot plate and my little fridge—the gargoyle before me wired the place for electricity. I do all my laundry down the street at the Kleen Kloze Washateria, and I’ve got a toilet and a shower. It’s damp, kind of, since it’s all underground. But that doesn’t matter much to a gargoyle.

  And there, on my barely-big-enough bed, Kate lay. Her chest rose and fell with regular breaths, her thin gold necklace gone but her earrings still there. She hadn’t moved since I’d laid her down and checked her clumsily for concussion. I tried to repair her sneaker with duct tape, too, because it hurt me to see it all torn up like that.

  Now, I touched the supple lines of the fleur-de-lis and felt them quiver against the calluses on my fingertips. The Heart under my skin banged into life, blinding me for a moment, and when vision returned, I caught the lines shifting just the tiniest fraction, settling into the familiar circled fleur—the mark all stoneskin spend their nights fighting the Big Bad for. It means a lot of things. Light. Blessing. Beauty.

  Those things we’re denied, or the things we’re too ugly to be comfortable with.

  The messy double puncture wounds
on her throat had finally sealed up, since I’d painted them carefully with the coagulant that works best—gargoyle spit and garlic paste. Chewing that stuff up raw makes my eyes water.

  I pulled my hand back, and not a moment too soon. The mark twitched, her breathing changed, and she sat right up and screamed.

  “Jesus!” I almost went over backward. She scrambled back, producing an amazing kettle whistle of sound, and hit the wall. Tried to keep going, her eyes bugged out of her head and her hands flailing.

  I wasn’t so worried about the sound getting out. The painted panel of Saint Stephen is over a thick shell of rock that only a stoneskin could whisper aside, and there’s the stairs and the other oak door, too. But the sound of her scream burrowed into my head, tugged at the Heart under my skin, and I had to fight against my trueform hulking out and making things interesting.

  She stopped for breath, the scream hitching into sharp little sucking sounds as she tried to get in something to breathe and push out the yelling at the same time. I backed up, my heel hitting an empty energy-drink can and sending it rattling. I had both hands up, trying to look harmless, but it’s so hard to do when you’re built like a weightlifter. Another can crunched underfoot; I stumbled. We stared at each other, Kate and I, and the screaming petered out.

  We both took a deep breath, and then we spoke at the same time.

  “Please don’t hurt me—”

  I was a little more on the ball. “I’m not gonna hurt you—” Boy, is that a lie.

  We stared at each other some more. I tried again. “Hi.” The word was totally inadequate. “How do you feel?”

  Her hand flew to her throat, and her eyes got very round. Then she noticed her shirt was torn open, and a flush rose up the curve of her neck, exploding in her cheeks like New Year’s fireworks. She gulped audibly, and my heart made a funny bursting movement. It was like the movement of the other Heart under my skin, the stone that makes the change into stoneskin possible. If both hearts decided to go wiggy on me, I would be gasping and blushing myself.