Staked

by J. F. Lewis

  Uber me turned its head to look at the blood, swatting the werewolves away on autopilot, using both wings and the less-injured arm. Then, I got a look at the box with Greta inside and heard my own voice say, “Hold tight, sweetheart. We’re getting the hell out of Dodge!”

  I still wasn’t in control, but that certainly sounded like a step in the right direction. The uber vamp grabbed the box and leapt into the air.

  Gunshots sounded from below and the twang of arrows filled the air. The arrows made me laugh on the inside, but Supervamp must not have thought it was funny. Real wooden arrows are much more useful than bullets against a vampire, and William’s werewolves knew it.

  I wanted to see how many werewolves were down there, but uber me wasn’t interested. A mass of bats poured out of the sky, diving toward the werewolves, and the uber vamp’s black skin began to sizzle again in the now imperfect screen created by the remaining bats above.

  I spotted Rachel in the loaner car. My uber vamp body made a beeline for the vehicle, landing a few feet from the front bumper. Rachel screamed, but she didn’t hit the gas.

  Crouching low over the box, shielding it with tenebrous wings as if afraid an arrow or stray beam of sunlight might strike Greta, the uber vamp and I punched through the seam of the metal box with one black talon. Metal screeched as the weld gave way, little curlicue strands falling to the grass as we peeled back the top. Tilting the box to the side, we let Greta roll out onto the ground. She looked pretty bad, like charred hamburger, but she was still with us.

  As soon as I saw my girl, the whole transformation happened in reverse. My nerve endings woke up. It would have been just fine with me if they had waited a while. I had multiple gunshot wounds, cuts, scratches, bites, and two or three arrows in me. One of the arrows was close enough to my heart that I was afraid to move too quickly lest it wiggle those last few centimeters and leave me paralyzed midrescue.

  “Rachel!” I shouted. “Get over here and pull these arrows out!”

  She stared at me motionlessly for a moment before springing into action. “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “Arrows. Out. Now!”

  Rachel grabbed the first arrow and jerked it out of my shoulder with a loud grunt. It came free, red blood mixing with the black blood already covering the shaft. She grabbed the next and pulled with all her might. I gritted my teeth against the pain as the shaft came free. Rather than pulling out the arrow in my left side, she thrust it the rest of the way through. My legs buckled and I fell to one knee. But when she grabbed the last arrow I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was too deep.

  “Leave it,” I said.

  “I’ve almost got it.” Rachel put her knee in my back for more leverage and I shouted as the arrow twisted in my chest.

  “Just leave the damn thing in and start the car!”

  More spots of sunlight appeared on the grass as she dove straight through the open window of the car and into the driver’s seat. Overhead and back near the camp, the mass of winged minions was beginning to disperse. A core group of gray bats struggled to maintain formation, but was losing the battle. As Rachel kicked open the passenger’s side door, dozens of werewolves, no longer blinded by the horde of bats, howled a battle cry and began loping toward us.

  I gashed my wrist open with my fangs and bled into Greta’s eyes. When they flickered open I pushed my thoughts into her head. “Turn into a mouse.”

  “Can’t, Dad,” she replied. “Too tired.”

  I latched hold of her thoughts, but they were hazy, jumbled, and confused. So were mine. I tried to block out the sound of the approaching werewolves and pushed harder, so hard she screamed. She managed the change, then went limp again.

  She was a sad, burnt-looking mouse. Talbot would have thought her an hors d’oeuvre gone wrong, but she was still my Greta and she was still undead, which was all that mattered to me. I jumped into the car, holding her carefully in my fist, and yowled as sunlight hit the exposed flesh on my back where claws, bullets, and arrows had torn through the leather. Rachel gunned the engine and started pulling away.

  As the first wolf cleared the hill I tucked Greta into Rachel’s purse, turned into a mouse, and jumped in after her. Rachel reached over, closed the purse flap, and drove hell-bent toward the park exit. Inside the bag, I cuddled against Greta and hoped William’s pack didn’t catch up with us.

  I had no idea how the whole uber vamp thing actually worked, but I knew it was tied to my anger. If I got angry enough to have a rage blackout, then I did my own little version of the Incredible Hulk or Super Dracula, whatever you wanted to call it. Freud would have said that it was pure id, unleashed and given form, not unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that was a little too easy an answer for me. No one was lining up to explain why I’d been aware this time either, why I’d heard and seen what happened, though I’d never remembered any of it before.

  Could it be that making Rachel my thrall had been responsible? If it allowed me to sense my offspring, and to supposedly recognize the thralls created by other vampires…who knew if it helped control the part of me that went berserk? Was it a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn’t decide.

  I’d been a vampire for over forty years, and all along I’d been turning into this thing right, left, and sideways, whenever people pissed me off. Why had nobody said anything? Talbot said he hadn’t told me because he thought I knew. I believed that. How do you not know you turn into a giant vampire blender and puree things when you’re mad? Maybe Marilyn had never seen it. No one ever had to tell me that I turned into a bat, a cat, or anything else. Why would they assume I didn’t know? But Roger knew me better than that.

  In fact, I’d bet Roger knew the most about it, and I couldn’t ask him about it. Not right now. What if we’d already had that discussion before, or after one of my blackouts, and I’d forgotten? What if I’d “figured it out” any number of times, but, unable to control it, had forgotten?

  What’s your father’s name? Marilyn’s question from earlier rose, a disturbing specter in my thoughts. I’d already forgotten what she’d said. The last name started with a C, I thought.

  Take it from me: If you’re going to die in a car crash and miraculously rise as one of the living dead, don’t let them embalm you. I was starting to think maybe it had screwed with my head. As I lay puzzling out the complexity of my life, the thrum of the motor and the exertion of the day lulled me gently to sleep.

  28

  TABITHA:

  PMS

  Void City was quiet and brooding that Monday night. Every traffic light glared bright red before allowing Talbot’s Jaguar to weave its way homeward. Halfway there, the two of us realized that it was Eric’s birthday, or at least, it would be after midnight, so we went shopping.

  Talbot bought him a new cell phone and I made do with a selection from Victoria’s Secret, Frederick’s of Hollywood, and Sahid’s Adult Books and Novelties. I spent too much money, but I felt guilty about sleeping with Talbot. Eric would have slept with a human and not called it cheating. Maybe he already had. I hoped he had. It would make me feel better about what I’d done.

  I stood up on all fours, turned in a circle, and sat back down on the seat fitfully. I liked being a cat, feeling warm, having a heartbeat, breathing autonomically, things that my human body no longer provided. Even as a cat, though, I was increasingly on edge. “Damn him, that man has me wrapped around his little finger!” I hissed.

  “I would hesitate to refute that,” Talbot said as he glanced down at me.

  “I have never cheated on him, not once! There is no telling how many times he’s screwed around on me, but I’m the one who feels guilty.”

  Streetlamps and skyscrapers passed by the windows and Talbot did not comment. “Well?” I meowed.

  “Well what?” he answered. Eyes on the road, he reached down and silenced the classical music on the radio. I hadn’t even noticed there had been music until he turned it off. “Eric never made any pretense at being faithful. You
did. Maybe you took pride in it? It kept you in the right as the long-suffering faithful member of the relationship. Now you’re not the martyr anymore and it’s eating away at you.”

  Turning human, I crossed my arms and stared out the side window. “That is so totally screwed up! I don’t even know how you said it with a straight face.”

  “Oh, so now you’re mad at me?” he said with a grin.

  “I was vulnerable and hungry, and I’m still new to this. You’re used to dealing with newborn vamps.” I kept my eyes focused on the window, staring out at the city. “You should have stopped me. I wasn’t in control of myself.”

  “Buckle your seat belt,” he ordered. Outside the window, a little boy in dirty jeans and a ratty T-shirt stood on the street corner. He smiled at someone across the street. I rolled down the window as we passed. Wind hit my face, tousling my hair. Craning my neck out of the window, I watched the woman the boy was smiling at cross the street. “What happened to your jeans?” she asked him.

  The rest was lost to me as we sped past. Remorse struck me by surprise and I blinked back tears. “I can never have kids.”

  “And this didn’t occur to you before you decided you wanted to be a vampire?”

  “It did. I thought I didn’t want kids, but now that I can’t have them…”

  “Buckle your seat belt if you’re going to be in human form,” he said patiently. “I don’t want to have to pay my way out of a ticket.”

  “What do you mean? Couldn’t you just flash your fangs or go all cat-eyed so they’d let you go?”

  “And then I’d have to pay for the ticket in cash later when one of Lord Phil’s cronies called me up to talk about the fang fee.”

  “Fang fee.”

  “Hey,” Talbot said more cheerfully. “Now that you know Lord Phil, maybe you can get him to fix my tickets.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Rushing in on the end of my thoughts about children, I thought about my last sunset. Shouldn’t I have looked at the sun one last time, to say good-bye?

  “I’m talking about you buckling your seat belt so that I don’t get a ticket. Void City cops love to pull people over, particularly if they think you’re undead.”

  Drops of blood flew off of my cheeks when I jerked around to face him. “I don’t want to wear a fucking seat belt!” Fingernails elongated into claws at the end of my hands and my jaw popped to accommodate the fangs that slid out of their sheaths in my gums. Refusing to flinch, Talbot remained blasé.

  “Turn back into a cat if you don’t want to wear a seat belt. There is a cop up ahead.”

  “Would you shut up about the damn cop?” I yelled, not sure why I was reacting this way. “If he pulls us over I’ll rip his fucking head off, okay? Just forget about it! I’m not wearing a damn seat belt, you stupid motherfucker, and you can’t make me! I’m the boss here! I’m the vampire, not you. I’m a Lady Bathory and you’re just some…some…mouser, whatever that is. A cat, or a human that used to be a cat, or whatever the fuck you are. You’re not even human. You probably don’t even have a soul. You probably never had one…and…and you raped me, you bastard!”

  The officer in question eyed us warily as we passed, saw my fangs, and mouthed “Fuck that” to himself. Smarter than the rest of us, he knew when to mind his own business.

  A twinge of pain squeezed my chest. With it came other thoughts, emotions, a flood of regret. If Rachel hadn’t died, I’d never have become so obsessed with death. I never would have gotten wrapped up in the vampire scene. I’d have stayed in college like my parents had wanted instead of rebelling and deciding life was too short to waste.

  I wouldn’t have even met Eric, I wouldn’t be in love with him, and I wouldn’t have spent the last two years praying that he loved me back. I’d probably have been off somewhere, hopelessly in love with some asshole who just wanted my body, but he would have been a human asshole. Maybe I’d even be pregnant.

  The tight ragged pain spread out from my chest, up into my skull, and down my arms and legs. My insides felt tight and shrunken. At the back of my eyes, the pain and pressure increased, as if my eyes were going to jerk through the sockets and become recessed in my braincase.

  “It hurts,” I yelled.

  “What?” Talbot asked.

  “It hurts!”

  I grabbed the sides of my head with full vampiric acceleration. My elbow touched the window with what would have been a light bump, but the increased velocity magnified the force of the blow, shattering the passenger’s side window. Glass cut into my elbow and I started to scream. I needed to get out of the car, to run; I felt trapped, as if the car were attacking me, or keeping me prisoner, or both. I attacked back.

  Brakes squealed and the Jaguar swerved into an alley. The driver’s side door flew open, and I lost sight of Talbot as I lashed out at the upholstery, leather shredding easily under my claws. Something was wrong with me again and it was worse than the drugged blood. Euphoric anger had detached me from my actions in the Demon Heart, but this was real.

  Pain lanced through my hand as I punched through the dash and into the glove compartment. Metal and plastic cut me, but I jerked my hand free, leaving blood and skin behind, before kicking away from the dash, breaking my seat, and flailing into the back of the car, my claws tearing at the ceiling and smashing out the rear window.

  Suddenly my lungs started working and went into over-drive, pumping air in and out with such urgency it might have been trying to atone for all the breaths it had missed over the last couple of nights.

  Once, in high school biology class, we’d had to dissect a frog. I had been so afraid I’d hyperventilated and passed out. This felt a lot like that. Rapid, shuddering booms shook my chest and I realized my heart was beating. Not only was it beating, it was beating far too fast. Gritting my teeth, I managed to stop actually screaming, but a high keening sound escaped my throat.

  Talbot rounded the car, put his hand on the passenger’s side door, and I hit it from the inside with both feet, ripping the door loose of its hinges and sending Talbot and the door flying into the concrete wall of the building. He was still holding on to the door when he hit the ground. “Get away from me,” I screamed through chattering teeth. “Don’t touch me!”

  Color leached out of my vision, the world sliding to black and white, to grayscale, and then to shades of red. Waves of heat rushed over me and my entire body began to vibrate. Staggering out of the Jag, I pressed my head against the cool metal on the roof. Beating loudly in my ears, the sound of my heartbeat was joined by another sound, a loud whooshing sound; I realized it was the blood rushing through my veins once more. The pain left my chest, the inner tightening faded as blood flowed. Color vision came back, but the colors were too bright, blindingly kaleidoscopic. “What’s happening to me?” I demanded.

  “Turn back into a cat,” Talbot choked out as he shoved the door off onto the sidewalk.

  I tried. Desperately. I couldn’t.

  Panic continued to swell inside me. I felt like my heart was about to tear itself out of my chest like a baby alien from that space movie with Sigourney Weaver.

  He got to his feet and took a deep breath. “It’s probably autonomic function return brought on by postmortem stress, maybe even a panic attack. It’s rarely this bad, but I’ve seen it before.”

  None of that made sense to me. My body was too loud. At the end of my fingers, claws extended and retracted, rhythmically gouging holes into the roof. “Don’t touch me,” I panted. “Get away from me.” Bottom fangs pushed their way into my mouth from between the teeth in my lower jaw, blood filling my mouth as the gums ripped open, a long searing pain. I shouldn’t even have bottom fangs. What was happening to me? “Your blood must have done this to me,” I spat out, shaking so hard I could barely talk. “It’s poisonous or something.”

  “It’s not my blood, Tabitha, it’s you. Your body is reacting to stress the only way it remembers how. Turn back into a cat,” he urged, “and it will stop. You h
ave a pulse as a cat. Your body will remember what it’s supposed to be doing.” He didn’t sound mad at all, but there was a tone in his voice that I didn’t recognize, a tinge of concern or wonder. “Trust me, Tabitha. Turn into a cat.”

  Hugging my arms tightly around myself and closing my eyes, I finally managed to turn into a cat. The panic and anxiety were still there, but my body was calm and controlled. Normal heartbeat. Normal breath. Normal blood flow. Everything felt right, natural, as it should be.

  Talbot leaned in through the passenger’s side door, turned off the engine, and pulled his keys out of the ignition. Leaning up against his poor Jaguar, he asked, “Better now?”

  I nodded.

  He looked down at the keys in his hand and mumbled, “Ninety-three thousand dollars. Damn, you’re high maintenance.”

  Angry, sad, and terrified all at once, I curled up into a ball of fur, pressing myself against the brick wall of the alley, not knowing what to say, what to do, or how to react. Why had I let Eric do this to me? No more sun. No more mirrors. No food but blood. How could I have wanted this? Liquid diets had never worked for me, and now I was on the ultimate liquid diet. Not just for six to eight months, either. No, I had signed up for the infinity plan. Immortality was all fun and games until you read the fine print.

  “What’s happening to me?” I meowed.

  “PMS,” he said, stone-faced.

  I glared at him.

  “Postmortem stress,” he continued. “It happens to the newly undead. There comes a point when you stop thinking of yourself as human and accept your new self. You let go of who you were and become what you are. When it happens, your body freaks out. Your mind freaks out. So essentially, you’re freaking out,” he answered. “Eric is the only vampire I know of who never did it. I meant to tell you about it first thing. I guess it slipped my mind.” It hadn’t, though; I could tell from the smug cat grin on his face. He’d worn the same self-satisfied expression when he’d held me down at the Demon Heart while Marilyn and Desiree fed me cold blood.