“Cool,” said someone. Devonte. He-who-was-to-be-guarded.
Someone moved and it attracted his attention. Her terror flooded his senses like perfume.
Prey. He liked it when they ran.
Then she lifted her chin and he saw a second image, superimposed over the first. A child standing between him and two smaller children, her chin jutting out as she lifted up a baseball bat in wordless defiance that spoke louder than the her terror and the blood.
Not prey. Not prey. His. His star.
It was all right then. She could see his pain—she had earned that right. And together they would stop the monster from eating the boy.
For the first few minutes after the change, he mostly thought like the wolf, but as the pain subsided he settled back into control. He shook off the last of unpleasant tingles with the same willpower he used to set aside the desire to snarl at the boy who reached out with a hand . . . only to jerk back, caught by the strap on his wrist.
David hopped on to the bed and snapped through the ballistic nylon that attached Devonte’s cuff to the rail and waited while the boy petted him tentatively with all the fascination of a person touching a tiger.
“That’ll be a little hard to explain,” said Stella.
He looked at her and she flinched . . . then jerked up her chin and met his eyes. “What if the Linnfords ask about the restraint?”
It had been the wolf’s response to seeing the boy he was supposed to protect tied up like a bad dog, not the man’s.
“They haven’t been here,” said Devonte. “Unless they spend a lot of time in hospital prison, they won’t know it was supposed to be there. I’ll cover the cuff on my wrist with the blanket.”
Stella nodded her head thoughtfully. “All right. And if things get bad, at least this way you can run. He’s right, it’s better if the restraint is off.”
David let them work it out. He launched himself off Devonte’s bed and onto the other—forgetting that Devonte was already hurt until he heard the boy’s indrawn breath. David was still half-operating on wolf instincts—which wasn’t very helpful when fighting vampires. He needed to be thinking.
Maybe it had only been the suddenness of his movement though because the boy made the same sound when David hopped through the almost-too-narrow opening in the ceiling and onto the track in the plenum space between the original fourteen-foot ceiling and false panels fitted into the flimsy hangers that kept them place. The track groaned a little under his sudden weight, but it didn’t bend.
“My father always told us that no one ever looks up for their enemy,” Stella said after a moment. “Can you replace the panel? If you can’t I—”
The panel he’d moved slid back into place with more force than necessary and cracked down the middle.
“Damn it.”
“Don’t worry, no one will notice. There are a couple of broken panels up there.”
She couldn’t see any sign that her father was hiding in the ceiling except for the bed. She grabbed it by the headboard and tugged it back to its original position, then she did the same with the chair.
She’d forgotten how impressive the wolf was . . . almost beautiful: the perfect killing machine covered with four-inch-deep, redgold fur. She hadn’t remembered the black that tipped his ears and surrounded his eyes like Egyptian kohl.
“If you’ll get back, I’ll see what I can do with the wall,” said Devonte. “Sometimes I can fix things as well as move them.”
That gave her a little pause, but she found that wizards weren’t as frightening as werewolves and vampires. She considered his offer, then shook her head.
“No. They already know what you are.” She gathered her father’s clothes from the bedspread and folded them neatly. Then she stashed them—and the plastic bag with Devonte’s clothes—into the locker. “Just leave the wall. We only need to hide the werewolf from them, and you might need all the power you’ve got to help with the vampire.”
Devonte nodded.
“Right then.” She took a deep breath and picked up her catch-all purse from the floor where she’d set it.
Her brothers had made fun of her purses until she’d used one to take out a mugger. She’d been lucky—it had been laden with a pair of three-pound weights she’d been transporting from home to work—but she’d never admitted that to her brothers. Afterwards they’d given her Mace, karate lessons, and quit bugging her about the size of her purse.
Unearthing a travel-sized game board from its depths she said, “How about some checkers?”
Five hard-won games later she decided the vampire either wasn’t coming tonight, or she was waiting for Stella to go away. She jumped three of Devonte’s checkers and there was a quiet knock on the door. She turned to look as Jorge, the cop who’d gotten babysitting duty today, stuck his head in.
“Sorry to leave you stuck here.”
“No problem. Just beating a poor helpless child at checkers.”
She waited for him to respond with something funny—Jorge was quick on his feet. But his face just stayed . . . not blank precisely, but neutral.
“They need you down in pediatrics, now. Looks like a case of child abuse and Doc Gonzales wants you to talk to the little girl.”
She couldn’t help the instincts that brought her to her feet, but those same instincts were screaming that there was something wrong with Jorge.
Between her job and having a brother on the force, she’d gotten to know some of the cops pretty well. Nothing bothered Jorge like a child who’d been hurt. She’d seen him cry like a baby when he talked about a car wreck where the child hadn’t survived. But he’d passed this message along to her with all the passion of a hospital switchboard operator.
In the movies, vampires could make people do what they wanted them to—she couldn’t remember if the people were permanently damaged. Mostly, she was afraid, they just died.
She glanced down at her watch and shook her head. “You know my rules,” she said. “It’s after six and I’m off shift.”
Her rules were a standing joke with her brothers and their friends—a serious joke. She’d seen too many people burn out from the stress of her job. So she’d made a list of rules she had to follow, and they’d kept her sane so far. One of her rules was that from eight in the morning until six in the evening she was on the job, outside of those hours she did her best to have a real life. She was breaking it now, with Devonte.
Instead of calling her on it, Jorge just processed her reply and finally nodded. “All right. I’ll tell them.”
He didn’t close the door when he left. She went to the doorway and watched him walk mechanically down the hall and through the security door, which he’d left open. Very unlike him to leave a security door open, but he closed it behind him.
“That was the vampire’s doing wasn’t it?” she asked, looking up.
The soft growl that eased through the ceiling was somehow reassuring—though she hadn’t forgotten his reservations about how well he’d do against a vampire.
She went back to Devonte’s bed and made her move on the board. Out in the hall the security door opened again, and someone wearing high heels click-clicked briskly down the hall.
Stella took a deep breath, settled back on the end of the bed and told Devonte, “Your turn.”
He looked at the board, but she saw his hand shake as whoever it was in the hallway closed in on them.
“King me,” he said in a fair approximation of triumph.
The footsteps stopped in the doorway. Devonte looked over her shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Stella inhaled and took her first look.
She’d thought a vampire would be young, like her father. Wasn’t that the myth? But this woman had gray hair and wrinkles under her eyes and in the soft, white skin of her neck. She was dressed in a professionally-tailored wine-colored suit. She wore a diamond necklace around her aging neck, and diamond-and-pearl earrings.
“Well,” said Stella, “No one is going to think y
ou look like a cuddly grandma.”
The woman laughed, her face lighting up with a cheer so genuine that Stella thought she might have liked her if only the laughter didn’t showcase her fangs. “The boy talked, did he? I thought for sure he’d hold his tongue, if only to keep his own secrets. Either that or broadcast it to the world, and then you and I wouldn’t be in this position.”
She gave Stella a kindly smile that showed off a charminglymismatched pair of dimples. “I am sorry you had to be involved. I tried to get you out of it.”
But Stella had been dealing with people a long time, she could smell a fake a mile away. The laughter had been real, but the kind concern certainly wasn’t.
“Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room where her father could drop on top of her, but how?
The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a—” she took a deep breath, “—werewolf.”
The news didn’t seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be over-matched. He’d been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.
“Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren’t so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”
The vampire sneered right back and, on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”
David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire’s voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.
Patience, patience, he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.
If the vampire’s theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he’d tried to drive her father through the wall.
The vampire had no trouble grabbing it . . . or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.
She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn’t see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.
“Now,” whispered Stella diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.
Even though Devonte’s chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella’s motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling redgold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire’s look like toys.
For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother’s lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf’s bulk—until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.
With an inhuman howl the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she’d had of her face, Stella saw something terrible . . . evil.
“Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.
She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urban smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing though fabric but not skin.
Something buzzed between them, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.
It took a moment for her to properly understand what she was seeing. The bent chair leg was stuck into his ribcage, just to the left of his sternum. Blood began spitting out like a macabre fountain.
“Honey?” Hannah Linnford stood in the doorway. Like Stella, she seemed to be having trouble understanding what she was seeing.
Muttering, “Does no one remember to shut the security doors?” Stella pulled the mini-canister of Mace her youngest brother had given her after the mugging incident out of her pocket and sprayed it in the other woman’s face.
If she’d been holding Linnford’s knife she could have cheerfully driven it through Hannah’s neck: These people had taken one of her kids and tried to feed him to a vampire.
Thinking of her kids made Stella look for Devonte.
He was leaning against the wall a few feet from his bed, staring at Linnford—and his expression centered Stella because he needed her. She ran to him and tugged him to the far corner of the room, away from the fighting monsters, but too close to the Linnfords. Once she had him where she wanted him, she did her best to block his view of Linnford’s dying body. If she could get medical help soon enough, Linnford might survive—but she felt no drive to do it. Let him rot.
Mace can in hand, she kept a weather eye on the woman screaming on the floor, but most of her attention was on the fight her father was losing.
They fought like a pair of cats, coming together clawing and biting, almost too fast for her eyes to focus on, then, for no reason she could see, they’d retreat. After a few seconds of staring at each other, they’d go at it again. Unlike cats, they were eerily silent.
The vampire’s carefully arranged hair was fallen, covering her face, but not disguising her glittering . . . no, glowing red eyes. Her arm flashed out in a jerky movement that was so quick Stella almost missed it—and the wolf twitched away with another wound that dripped blood: the vampire was still virtually untouched.
The two monsters backed away from each other and the vampire licked her fingers.
“You taste so good, wolf,” she said. “I can’t wait until I can sink my fangs through your skin and suck that sweetness dry.”
Stella sprayed Hannah in the face again. Then she hauled Devonte out the door and away from the vampire, making regrettably little allowance for his broken ribs. Dead was worse than in pain.
It’s working, David thought, watching the vampire lick his blood off her fingers. Though he was mostly focused on the vampire, he noticed when Stella took the boy out of the room. Good for her. With the vampire’s minions here, one dead and one incapacitated, she shouldn’t have trouble getting out. He hoped she took Devonte to her home—or any home—where they’d be safe. Then he put them out of his mind and concentrated on the battle at hand.
He’d met a vampire or two, but never fought one before. He’d heard that some of them had a strange reaction to werewolf blood. She seemed to be one of them.
He could only hope that her blood lust would make her stupid. He’d heard that vampires couldn’t feed from the dead. If it wasn’t true, he might be in trouble.
He waited for her to come at him again—and this time he stepped into her fist, falling limply at her feet. She hit him hard, he felt the bone in his jaw creak, so the limp fall wasn’t hard to fake. He’d wait until she started feeding, and the residual dizziness from her blow left, then he’d take her.
She fell on him and he waited for her fangs to dig in. Instead she jerked a couple of times and then lay still. She wasn’t breathing and her heart wasn’t beating—but she’d been like that when she walked into the room.
“Papa?”
Stella was supposed to be safely away.
He rose with a roar, making an audible sound for the first time so the vampire would pay attention
to him and leave his daughter alone. But the woman’s body rolled smoothly off of him and lay on the floor—two wooden chair legs stuck through her back.
“Are you all right? Jorge left the security door open, I knew it when the Linnfords came in. We broke the legs off Jorge’s chair and used whatever he used to toss the furniture around to drive them into her back.”
The soldier in him insisted on a full and quick survey of the room. Linnford was dead, the abused chair was the obvious cause of death. A woman, presumably his wife, sobbed harshly, her face pressed into Linnford’s arm: a possible threat. Stella and Devonte were standing way too close to the vampire.
They’d killed her.
For a moment he felt a surge of pride. Stella didn’t have an ounce of quit in her whole body. She and the boy had managed to take advantage of the distraction he’d arranged before he could.
“Everyone was gone, Jorge and everyone.” He looked at the triumph in Stella’s face, not quite hidden by her worry for her friends.
She thought the vampire was finished, but wood through the heart didn’t always keep the undead down.
“Are you all right?” Stella asked. And then when he just stared at her, “Papa?”
He’d come here hoping to play hero, he knew, hoping to mend what couldn’t be mended. But the only role for him was that of monster, because that was the only thing he was.
He pulled the sheet off the bed and ripped it with a claw, then tossed it toward Linnford’s sobbing woman. Stella took the hint and she and Davonte made a rope of sorts out of it and tied her up.
While they were working at that, he walked slowly up to the vampire. Stella had called him Papa tonight, more than once. He’d try to hold on to that and forget the rest.
He growled at the vampire: her fault that he would lose his daughter a second time. Then he snapped his teeth through her spine. The meat of her was tougher than it should have been, tougher than jerky and bad tasting to boot. His jaw hurt from the hit he’d taken as he set his teeth and put some muscle into separating her head from her body.
The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told Page 5
