Blessed

by Cynthia Leitich Smith

  “I’m not infallible.” Zachary began rubbing his temples. “I can’t believe I just blew my secret identity again. No wonder I’m —”

  “Why are you following me around?”

  “I belong to you,” he said. At my double take, he clarified. “I mean, I’m your guardian angel. Newly assigned. Middle management didn’t bother to float me a background file or anything so I’m having to sort of wing this. No pun intended.”

  I bent to retrieve a dog-chewed Frisbee from the dry grass. I’d remembered the cherubim with the flaming sword who’d guarded the Tree of Life, and I’d done my time in Sunday school. But I wasn’t a biblical scholar or even that regular of a churchgoer. “Vampires get guardian angels?”

  “Up until now, only natural beings with souls — like humans and shape-shifters — were assigned guardians. But we’re the first match in . . . let’s call it a pilot program involving neophyte vampires, those with at least some of their soul still left.”

  Thinking that over, I tossed the Frisbee at Zachary, who snatched it from the air. “Why would I be the first?”

  “Beats me,” he replied. “I’m not the all-knowing one.” For a long moment, he frowned down at the plastic disc in his hands. “But I can already tell that you, the real you, are worth saving.” He studied me. “You’re a sweet, smart, very hardworking girl. You’re funny, and though you hold most of them at arm’s length, anyone could see how much the staff at Sanguini’s means to you. How important it is to you to stick with your family business. And despite what you’ve become, you’re making a sincere effort not to kill anybody.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I said, not sure all of that had been a compliment.

  Headlight beams from a passing pickup truck illuminated the side yard, and Zachary motioned for me to follow him past the veggie garden, toward the back of the property. “Quincie, I’m glad that you’re happy about this. But it’s only fair that you know — I don’t have a great track record. I’m not even a fully powered GA. For the foreseeable future, I’ve been banished from the celestial plane. For a while, I lost my wings, and even now I’m earthbound, stuck in corporeal form.”

  I took a giant step back. “You’re a fallen angel?”

  “Not fallen,” he insisted. “Slipped.”

  I stayed where I was. “Like Lucifer?”

  “Not like Lucifer!” he exclaimed, indignant.

  I almost apologized, but then he tossed the Frisbee back and added, “Except maybe for a bit of pride. Besides, Lucifer didn’t just slip. He fell. All the way down.”

  As I fumbled the catch, Zachary went on, “That doesn’t have to happen to us.”

  I believed him. I did. And it was all so amazing. Aimee had been right. It was time for good things to happen again. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “It’s about Brad, about what he did —”

  “Quincie!” Dr. Morales called from the back door. “Is that you out there?”

  Damn. “Tomorrow,” I whispered. “Tomorrow we have to talk.”

  When I stepped into the kitchen, Dr. Morales asked, “Everything okay?”

  “I thought I heard something outside,” I said. “Um, raccoons. It turned out to be some baby raccoons.” I suppressed a smile. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Can’t stop thinking about Kieren,” Roberto admitted, plugging in the coffeepot. “Wondering how he’s doing. It’s different for Meara. She knows about pack life. She knows what it means to manage a shift or not. She was raised with certain ideas about life as a wereperson. I respect all that. I do. But . . .”

  “You never wanted him to leave in the first place,” I realized out loud.

  Dr. Morales’s eyes went misty. “He should’ve had a chance to play football and graduate with his class and . . . You both deserved more, better than what you got.”

  He gave me a big dad hug, and I just went with it.

  I hadn’t been able to get ahold of Zachary yet that morning, but Clyde and Aimee met me before school on the front steps. At my request, they’d stopped by Sanguini’s on the way and picked up a fresh sports bottle of porcine blood, courtesy of Nora.

  I took a drag and relayed what had happened the night before.

  As students flowed by, Clyde settled next to me. “A flaming sword?”

  Aimee, leaning against the handrail, smirked.

  “It’s not funny!” I exclaimed, biting back a grin. I felt giddy, more hopeful than I’d been in ages. “Y’all believe me, don’t you?”

  “You could argue that a lightsaber is a flaming sword,” Aimee said loudly, and it was then that I noticed gossip queen Winnie Gerhard lingering above and behind us on the stairs, pretending to do something on her cell phone.

  “A lightsaber is a laser sword,” I insisted, also projecting.

  “Have you two ever played D and D?” Clyde put in.

  A moment later, Aimee said, “Winnie’s gone, but our geek cred is sealed forever.”

  “Who cares about her?” I exclaimed. “What do you think?”

  “You’re sure he wasn’t a werepelican?” Clyde asked.

  “No way! There would’ve been feathers all over his face, and he would’ve lost the arms completely.” I glanced up. “Aimee?”

  “I want to believe.”

  It was then that I remembered Zachary muttering something about his secret identity. I’d been so excited about the whole “angel” part that it had completely slipped my mind. For what it was worth, though, I suspected that Clyde thought I was crazy and Aimee knew how to keep a secret.

  Due in part to preternatural energy, I was almost caught up in all of my classes, English included, though my teachers had the pesky habit of assigning new work.

  As I made my way out of class, Mrs. Levy passed back my journal. “Glad to see you’re writing again. You have a real knack for the gothic. Those vignettes —”

  “They’re not fiction.” Flipping through, I was pleased to see all “plus” marks.

  At her startled expression, I added, “I didn’t mean that exactly. Of course they’re fiction. But they came to me as dreams. I wrote down what I remembered.”

  “Dreams?” my teacher repeated. “With that level of detail? That’s remarkable. You reference the bowie knife specifically. Do you have a background in weapons?”

  “I . . . no, I don’t.” That was weird.

  “You do know that it’s one of the knives mentioned in Dracula?”

  “Oh.” I shoved the journal in my backpack. “That must be it. I’ve been reading Dracula.” Though, come to think of it, the nightmares had begun before I’d started the novel, and I didn’t recall any knives in the story. “You’ve read it?”

  Mrs. Levy raised an eyebrow. “Ah, yes, Eastern Europeans. Scary.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Is it true that the count was related to Attila the Hun? He seemed awfully proud of that.”

  “What do you mean by true?”

  Zipping up my pack, I said, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I hate the book. It’s even worse than ‘The Lottery.’ All the girls die.”

  “Not Mina,” Mrs. Levy replied. “Mina Harker doesn’t die.”

  “But didn’t Mina drink Dracula’s blood?” I asked. “Lucy died and became undead, and it’s not clear if she even drank. But she had to have, right? And anyway, how could Mina drink and survive? That’s impossible.”

  “You’re not done reading it yet?” Mrs. Levy asked.

  “I gave up. It was obvious where it was going.” Or so I’d thought.

  “But if you haven’t finished,” my teacher began again, “how do you know about the bowie knife? It’s not mentioned until the end of the story.”

  After Chem, I left another message for Zachary and then tried Sanguini’s main line. When Nora replied that he hadn’t been in yet, I asked if she and Freddy were angels.

  She chuckled. “That boy, he told me that you were wise to his game. Just as well. You could both use someone to talk to. As for Freddy and me, we’re huma
n, through and through. But it’s nice of you to ask, hon. I’m flattered.”

  I couldn’t just sit around waiting for Zachary. Shutting my cell, I jogged across the school parking lot to The Banana and nearly flattened two innocent squirrels on my way down Congress Avenue, through the Fairview neighborhood, and back to the Morales house.

  Grateful that no one was home, I hurried upstairs to Kieren’s bedroom and grabbed Dracula. Then I launched myself onto the water bed and picked up the story where I’d left off. It wasn’t long before I saw it.

  Mina is still making suicidal noises about having become a proto-vampire, and Van Helsing says, “Until the other, who has fouled your sweet life, is true dead you must not die. For if he is still with the quick Undead, your death would make you even as he is. No, you must live!”

  I read it over and over. If I understood right, Van Helsing was saying that until Dracula was destroyed, Mina needed to stay alive. Otherwise, if he was “still with the quick Undead” when she passed away, she’d become a vampire like him.

  So — flipping the logic — that also meant that if Dracula were destroyed before she died, then Mina would . . . might . . . be cured of the demonic infection and live on as a human being.

  Van Helsing tries to bless Mina by touching her forehead with a holy wafer. But the wafer burns her skin, which only freaks her out more.

  I set down the book and lifted Kieren’s turquoise-and-silver crucifix from my chest. Bending my neck forward, I touched the metal briefly to my forehead.

  Nothing happened.

  The vampire hunters identify a house in Piccadilly as one of Dracula’s lairs. Arthur and Quincey leave to find and “sanctify” more boxes while the others wait at the house for the monster. Shortly after the two men return, Dracula arrives, only to escape again, though Jonathan almost stabs him with a kukri knife.

  Later, Mina goes to Van Helsing. “I want you to hypnotize me!” she says. “Do it before the dawn, for I feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time is short!”

  Mina is psychically linked to Dracula, and by hypnotizing her, they discover that the count is leaving the country.

  It’s kind of a letdown. The legendary Count Dracula’s master plan to evade Dr. Van Helsing’s crack team of vampire hunters is to mail himself home in a box.

  Mina can’t understand why they don’t just say good riddance. “But why need we seek him further, when he is gone away from us?”

  Van Helsing explains, “Time is now to be dreaded, since he put that mark upon your throat.”

  Back to the bite again. Hmm, maybe the transformation process from human to undead worked the same for Carpathians as for regular vampires — by blood ingestion or transfusion — but Van Helsing didn’t really know what he was talking about.

  Or maybe he was being ridiculously cryptic or poetic or both.

  Anyway, there was still time to save Mina.

  Ever more vampy, she joins the chase, helping to track the count via Van Helsing’s hypnosis. The heroes worry that the mental connection works both ways, so Dracula can spy on them through her. But finding the villain fast matters more.

  It was profoundly disturbing to consider. Despite my flickering fear that the vampirism was simply costing me my sanity, I couldn’t help feeling more and more that Brad was truly whispering into my mind, invading and manipulating my dreams and maybe even my waking thoughts. I felt a chill, realizing that — from a certain point of view — he might be with me here and now. Within me here and now.

  Before leaving, Mina again asks for promises that, if it comes to it, they’ll destroy her — using the same staking-beheading-garlic ritual that freed Lucy’s soul. She’s damned enthusiastic about the whole thing: “‘Euthanasia’ is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.”

  After more hypnotism, much lapping water, a fair amount of hand-wringing, and a great chase, we’re back at the castle in the Carpathian Mountains. Van Helsing manages to dispatch all three of Dracula’s dentally (and otherwise) endowed groupies.

  The heroes finally intercept the box containing the count, fight off some gypsies, and voilà! Jonathan shears through the count’s throat with his kukri knife, Quincey Morris stabs the heart with his bowie knife, and the Nosferatu collapses into dust.

  Bradley told me once that any well-established vampire — over fifty or so — can turn to dust and regenerate, but . . . whatever. Our heroes think they’ve won.

  There’s a price, though. Uncle Quincey. He dies from a battle wound. But not until noticing that the holy-wafer scar on Mina’s forehead is gone.

  Her life and soul are saved.

  “Oh, God!” Quincey says. “It was worth for this to die.”

  Would slaying any vampire free those he’d infected but had yet to transform? Would slaying Bradley cure the baby-squirrel eaters who’d tasted his blood?

  Or did it only work that way with Carpathians?

  I couldn’t wait to talk to Zachary. He’d admitted to not being all-knowing, and okay, I got that. But he had to be some kind of expert on the undead. Why else would — had he said “middle management”? — heaven itself assign him to me?

  I logged on to the Web, found the searchable text of Dracula, and double-checked. Neither knife had been mentioned earlier in the book. I’d read kukri and bowie for the first time today. Skimming back over my notes, I circled the references.

  I’d seen Bradley with a bowie knife once before the nightmares had begun. That day he’d drugged my Cabernet, carried me to his basement, dressed me in the gauzy white nightgown, tied me to the bed frame, and tasted me with his fangs.

  “Yes.”

  Him again. Fiercely ignoring the voice, I remembered being hungover when I arrived at his house. I remembered mentioning his collection of clocks and how we’d chatted about time . . . about how neither us of believed in squandering it. But I’d noticed the knife, too, hanging box-framed over his fireplace. And I — who’d known nothing much about weapons — had recognized it as a bowie knife.

  Me. Quincie P. Morris. I had specifically identified it.

  Could it have been the same knife as the one mentioned in the novel?

  I’d bet Sanguini’s on it.

  Bradley had acquired the bowie knife that Uncle Quincey had plunged into Dracula’s heart. And worse, even before I’d died, he’d somehow been affecting my mind.

  Like the count had affected Lucy and Mina’s. But how?

  He wasn’t a Carpathian. And I would know. He’d made me, and I could cross water, sleep in a clean bed, and wear a crucifix — no problem.

  Sporting my school clothes, I arrived late to work, asked Yani to reassign Zachary’s tables, and invited him and Freddy to meet me in the private dining room.

  I didn’t love telling them about my “dreams” and the whispering voice or showing them my notes and journal. But I felt wacko-nuts-ridiculous explaining my theory that Bradley had created some kind of psychic link between him and me — like Dracula had with Mina — and that, furthermore, Brad had somehow scored the bowie knife my generations-ago uncle had used to kill the count. Which, come to think of it, seemed awfully coincidental. It sounded a whole lot more far-fetched out loud than it had in my head.

  The Chicagoans listened without interrupting, though, until after close that night.

  I’d wanted Nora there, too, but she was busy in the kitchen.

  I wanted Kieren there, for so many reasons, but that was never going to happen.

  As I spoke, Freddy stood up to pace on the midnight-blue carpet. He’d taken off his black silk jacket, taken out his red contacts and fake fangs.

  “What do you think?” I finally finished.

  Zachary tore off a hunk of fresh, warm Italian bread and dipped it in olive oil. “I can only guess what you went through with this Brad —”

  “You can guess?” I asked, more defensively than I’d intended.

  “It’s just that,” he began again, “you’re sev
enteen years old. Your entire existence has been turned upside down. It would be only normal if —”

  “I’m having some kind of post-traumatic brain melt?” I struggled not to lose my patience. “Think about it. How would I recognize the type of knife?”

  “Your father was an archaeologist,” the angel said. “When you were younger, he might have shown you a picture. Or maybe you saw one in a museum, and —”

  “I get that it sounds strange, vampires who can play mind tricks —”

  “No, some can,” he informed me. “Neophytes, even. Miranda . . .” He cleared his throat. “It’s not that uncommon.”

  Freddy, who’d said nothing up until that point, stopped pacing and pushed up his wire-frame glasses. “The ability to enthrall their victims, face-to-face, yes. And granted, there’s a mystical connection between eternals and those humans they’ve blessed — like an invisible preternatural umbilical cord. But, Quincie, what you’re talking about . . . and I don’t say this lightly . . . is a power of Dracula Prime.”

  Hadn’t I just told them that?

  Freddy drew his slender frame straighter. “It’s long been debated whether the count was truly or at least wholly eliminated by Van Helsing and his friends. A legend among eternals states that Dracula’s uncanny abilities somehow survived his presumed destruction — split and lingering within the weapons that killed him.”

  “The knives!” I exclaimed.

  “And,” he continued, “if Brad managed to find a spell that would let him access those powers, even just the half housed in Morris’s knife —”

  “Is that possible?” Zachary asked, dropping the bread. “Not the spell — I’ve seen my share of magic — but the part about the weapons. You’re saying Drac Prime’s psychic skills have been trapped all this time in the Morris knife?”

  “It’s not unthinkable,” Freddy replied. “Count Dracula studied sorcery. He took being an eternal to a far more horrifying level, spawning a new, more insidious breed.”

  “The Carpathians,” I said, relieved to have at least that much confirmed.