by Chism, Holly
“Would it?”
“Why wouldn’t it?” I asked, my voice low, still pacing. “He’s older than me. He’s got more experience actually being a vampire. Doesn’t that give him a better chance? Doesn’t that mean he’s stronger?”
I turned to face him when the silence stretched on. The thoughtful look on his face made me stop pacing, drift back to the other chair by the fire, and sink into it. “I’m…not so sure,” Risto said. “I’m not sure at all that that’s accurate. You see, no one has ever determined exactly what makes one vampire stronger than another. Some have argued age, but that has been proven wrong more than once—Robert is quite a lot older than Williams, for example, but they’re near equals in power.”
I frowned. “You’re saying you think I might be strong enough.”
“No,” he replied. “I’m certain you are. I’m certain that you’ve been stronger than him possibly from day one. Otherwise, you never would have been able to flee when you rose. You’d have gone to him, and become his slave, as happens often in cases with a vampire that has gone insane who makes a child. You would never have been able to go against him when he invaded your dreams. You absolutely wouldn’t have been able to bring harm to him, even in your dreams.”
I considered it. He was physically stronger than I was. That was a given. He was male. And bigger than I was.
But.
I’d fought him off in my dream. Yes, I’d been hurt, and yes, it had been as much his own actions and luck as anything else permitting me to hurt him. But I had. I’d hurt him, too.
“Tell me, Risto. Are there any ways you can kill a vampire from a distance?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always used a blade. Perhaps your friend’s suggestion might work. However, if I recall correctly, shotguns are quite loud. How would you avoid notice?”
“I’d stop breathing,” I said wryly. “I disappear from any living perception when I do that. And so does anything I’m holding.”
Risto rubbed his index finger over his upper lip. “It may be possible,” he said slowly. “It may be possible that, were you to never start breathing, people might not even register the sound of the shot.”
I took a deep breath. “Sounds like a plan,” I said, my voice thread and tight.
I wanted ass-face dead. I wanted to kill him. But.
But.
I did not want to be close enough to him to take his head off with a shotgun. I was already unhappy with him being in the same county—I didn’t want to get closer.
Damn it.
It was me, or it was Andi. And I was a lot sturdier than she was.
Aria
I waited until long after Andi went to bed. And then, I went to the attic—the one I hadn’t shown Andi how to get into. It wasn’t well insulated, and there wasn’t much flooring, either. I felt around in between the rafters, just off to the left of the rafters framing the entry hole. My hand landed on freezing cold metal, and I pulled out the shotgun I’d managed to buy from an individual ten years ago, when there’d been a few farmhouses broken into. I’d slept with it next to me until they’d caught the perp. Then, I’d set it aside for future need.
I’d need it tonight.
The box of shells was next to it. I brought both awkwardly down. Considering the shotgun was almost two thirds of my height, and I was trying to carry it and a box bigger than my hand down a ladder, it was very awkward.
Richmond and Risto were discussing things quietly in the library when I came back down, cradling the twelve gauge in my left elbow, still wrapped up against the moisture that I thought it’d get exposed to through spring and summer humidity.
“Is there something the matter?” I asked as I stepped into my library and laid my things out on the table.
“I think this is rash. Absolute foolishness,” Richmond said, his voice tight and angry.
I shrugged. “I think sending prey against the predator that’s proven he can wake when he senses danger is worse,” I said mildly.
“I failed. Risto failed. What makes you think you can succeed?” he demanded.
I shrugged again. “I don’t know that I can. But I have to try. I really don’t want to lose one of the best friends I’ve ever had in life or in unlife, because I was too scared to try.” I opened up the bag and pulled the gun out. Dry as a desert, but a little oil would take care of that. Everything else about the gun looked good. I pulled the little drip-bottle out of the pocket of the bag I’d stored the gun in, setting it next to the receiver.
The ammo I wasn’t so sure of. The box was nearly crumbling. However, buying ammunition at Walmart was an easy option, and could be done before I went hunting for ass-face. “And I’m a sneaky, mean, cowardly bitch that doesn’t fight fair,” I added after a few moments of silence.
“Excuse me?”
The shocked dismay in Richmond’s voice was pretty funny, but I couldn’t find it in myself to laugh. I smiled, instead. It did the trick to hide my nerves. “I don’t plan to get within beheading distance,” I explained. “I plan to turn his brain to mush, and his skull with it, from a distance he might not note, while he’s sleepy.”
“I beg your pardon,” Richmond said. “How is a firearm—something so inexact that you just aim in a general direction and hope for the best—supposed to do something like that?”
“This isn’t the same type of firearms you have familiarity with,” I said, considering going into business with Andi later to start an overnight shooting range somewhere for vampires. Something to come back to, but something that seemed like it might be a good idea. I moved to my desk and scribbled a note so that I didn’t forget. Then I pulled up the new gun video site, and looked around for a few exemplars of what my shotgun was capable of. “Here. Watch.”
I moved back to the table to let the two much older males have the desktop for a few minutes. And I smirked as they watched watermelons exploding, and watched three gun competitions to see how precise even a shotgun could be. I quit watching their reactions after a bit, and turned my attention to working to put the gun back into shooting shape. And wishing I’d been able to retrieve the shotty my granddad had left with my mom, the one I’d learned to shoot with. This was similar, but it just wasn’t Granddad’s.
Half an hour later, just as I was finishing up cleaning and oiling the gun, Richmond gave up and went downstairs. “He doesn’t approve,” Risto said quietly as he joined me.
“I don’t approve of sending my friend into danger that neither she nor
Ray can fight effectively,” I shot back. “Now, I need to see that floor plan that he and Ray were figuring things out on.”
“I have it right here,” he said, pulling papers out of his pocket. He spread them out on the table, looking them over. He stopped moving, stopped breathing, when he noted where the mark denoting ass-face’s daytime resting place was. “How…peculiar,” he said, finally. “That is precisely where I found him.”
“Huh.” I considered things. “I’d be willing to bet that that’s where he’ll go to sleep tomorrow, too. I think I’ve got an idea. A good one.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I said, a grin spreading across my face. “Let me leave a note stuck on the front door for Andi, and then I’ll go.”
“We will go,” he corrected. “If you go on your own, it’s murder. If I am with you and working with you, then it’s a rightful execution.”
“I stand corrected,” I said absently. I started to scribble a note, then remembered Andi couldn’t read my writing and typed it, instead. I folded it up and stuck a piece of tape on it. Wrote her name on the outside. “We will go, then. And if you’re going with me, I can fill you in on the way.”
Richmond was just coming up the stairs from my apartment when I stuck the note on the door. “You’re continuing this stupidity to its inevitable conclusion, then?” he said coldly.
I rolled my eyes and didn’t answer with more than a single finger as I went back for my shotgun.
Risto
followed me out to my car, climbing into the passenger seat. “Are you going to share your ideas with me?”
“I thought I’d go in through the entrance farthest from where he typically sits, go through the store, have you buy the shells I point out, then go up to the upper area where he’s been hiding his corpse. I’d wait ‘til he came up, and then I’d blow his head off.”
“And in the daytime?” he asked.
I shrugged. “If it’s safe for him…”
“You’re only safe if you’re not out,” he reminded. “And we all die with the dawn. I can’t help you, there.”
“Huh. Yeah, bad plan,” I said. I thought quietly for a few moments, and snorted. “I really don’t want to shoot him where he sits on the bench. Endangers too many others. Innocent bystanders. Overpenetration is a thing, even with shotguns.”
“I see,” he said. “And if you can prevent that?”
“I would shoot him here or there, I would shoot him anywhere,” I said drily.
He missed the reference. “I thought as much. Tell me: how do you do under pressure?”
“Not well,” I said. “I tend to freeze up. Or rabbit, if I can.”
He blinked, then snorted. “I’m sorry. I just pictured the most adorable mini-lop with fangs,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, sure. Just call me Bunicula,” I groaned, trying to repress the smile at the image.
“Having him chase you into the parking lot likely wouldn’t work, then.” He stared through the windshield. “I do believe sneaking up behind him and putting the gun in his ear might well be your best bet,” he said, when we were nearly at city limits.
“Yeah,” I breathed. “That was kind of my thoughts.”
I was shaking as we pulled into the back of the Walmart parking lot. I parked next to the missing stop sign—the one I’d snapped off to hit Richmond with when we’d met. It stuck out of the plowed snow mountain at a crazy angle that worked to serve its original purpose. I wondered if someone who’d been sent out to deal with fixing it had done it intentionally as a temporary fix, then shoved the thought away.
And I pulled my freshly oiled shotgun out of the back seat. I followed Risto through the store, then took the lead in Sporting Goods, pointing out the box of shells I wanted. He bought them for me without a word, and I took them and loaded the shotgun, then put the rest of the box in my coat pocket.
The walk through Walmart with a loaded shotgun and the intent to commit justifiable homicide—even as uncrowded as it was at two in the morning—was surreal. Since I wasn’t breathing, no one saw me. A couple of women manning (peopling?) the registers eyed Risto with some appreciation, but otherwise, we walked through without any issue.
Openly carrying a loaded shotgun.
As I said: surreal. Nobody was screaming.
And ass-face didn’t notice me coming, either. I continued not breathing—pointedly not breathing—as I got within a good range. He didn’t notice me at all. I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t breathing, and was focusing all of my attention on being unseen, or because his attention was taken. His entire being was focused as I circled around to get him between me and the RedBox rental vending machine as a back stop, then raised the shotgun to my shoulder. I glanced around to see what had his attention so firmly fixed, and realized it was a woman. Around my height, around my build, dark hair longer than her shoulders, pale complexion.
His next victim.
He stayed focused entirely on her as I circled. I’d never seen such single-minded focus outside of a cat stalking a bird.
I wasn’t gonna let him rape her and kill her. I wouldn’t. Not another one. Not another one whose death I’d see. I snugged the shotgun harder into my shoulder, and took up the little bit of slack in the trigger.
Didn’t take a breath.
And Risto got too close. He wasn’t in view, but I could feel him. So could ass-face sensed him, spun, and froze, staring directly into my eyes. He scowled and lunged toward me.
My hand jerked, hard, and the gun leaped out of my hands as ass-face dodged up and over the shot. The RedBox caught everything just fine—no one was hurt.
I wish I’d had the sense to run past ass-face, and out the door—there was plenty of room for me to have dodged past—but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, I ran as fast as I could the wrong direction—toward the back of the store, down the main aisle that separated groceries from sundries. I could hear ass-face cursing, pounding after me, and dodged between some stupid-tall displays in the middle of the aisle, ducking down for good measure. Hiding. Focusing on being unseen and unheard, even by ass-face. Hoping it would work.
And I wondered distantly how it was that terror could drive me so hard when my heart didn’t beat and my adrenal gland didn’t spur me on.
I heard ass-face pound down the aisle past me, and I slipped around to the end of the display, and waited until I heard him crash into the doors into the employee-only section, then crash into a display of wine and cringed at the sound of the bottles breaking before I rabbited back up the aisle. I heard him come scrambling after me on the other side of the displays from where I was running, crashing into things and people that got in his way.
I heard the screaming start at the front of the store as Risto, a vampire who could not make himself unseen and unnoticed, picked up my loaded shotgun. I prayed he’d keep his finger off the trigger as I booked it as quietly and quickly as I could back to the front of the store. The screaming dimmed fairly quickly, so he’d either vacated the premises, or he’d hypnotized the screamers.
I was ahead of ass-face by about fifteen or twenty feet, when I looked back in the entry. I didn’t see Risto anywhere, and the screaming inside had died down (though there were some shaking and crying. I felt like shaking and crying, but I wasn’t in the clear, yet). This was so out of character for ass-face: he doesn’t chase down those hunting him. He runs. He was supposed to run, if he did anything. Out into the freezing temperatures, where my plan B was for him to freeze solid overnight, and make it easy to find and kill him before he found his next victim sometime after the really cold snap ended.
Then I realized why he was chasing me. I was smaller. He was my sire, I wasn’t supposed to stand against him, wasn’t supposed to exist, really, and he was going to rip my head off with his bare hands after the way I’d defied him, and hurt him.
I put my head down and tried to run faster, to get out, get away, hide—anything. And I wished I hadn’t dropped the shotgun.
I told Risto I didn’t do well under pressure.
I ran as fast as I could. My habit of breathing had me panting like a bellows, partially from exertion, partially from the terror that he was gaining on me. I could hear it as I ran, sliding on patches of ice, scrambling back to my feet to sprint and slide on the next patch, down the parking lot toward where I’d left the Toyota.
An electric blue 1969 Mustang swung around a corner, fish-tailed on a patch of ice, and hit ass-face at a speed of perhaps forty miles an hour—way too fast for a parking lot that wasn’t iced over, I thought dimly.
He went flying, wrapping backwards around a streetlight post, just above the cement footing, and landing in a crumpled heap in the pool of light beneath the post he’d impacted against. I gagged at the crackling sound of his spine and ribs shattering on the impact.
He twitched. Managed to push himself up onto his arms, his legs dragging. Looked up at me, his mouth forming words that he wouldn’t breathe to utter. Not could not, would not. Reached toward me, malice glittering in his eyes. He had survived. And he would survive, unless he was killed here. I looked around, hoping someone would step in. Then realized that I was the only one that could see him. Because Andi was still in her car, ass-face wasn’t breathing, and I had no clue where, exactly Risto was.
It was down to me. I would have to put him down. Or he’d continue with his pattern, or else break pattern and become impossible to predict.
And I didn’t know how to kill him with anything other t
han fire.
Then I remembered he needed to lose his head. Grabbed the stop sign that I’d nearly run past—the one I’d parked next to (had I really crossed the entire parking lot that fast?)—and swung down, hard, with the edge of the sign. I felt a brief moment of resistance, then impact with the iced-over pavement.
I felt nothing other than that. No regret.
Scratch that. I felt a massive sense of relief.
Andi screamed (still in her car, thank God), then shut the engine off. She lunged out of her car, both fists pressed to her mouth. “Oh, my fucking God,” she said breathlessly against her hands. “Meg! Are you okay? I saw you running. I didn’t see him. I didn’t see him. I didn’t see him. I didn’t see him, and I hit him with my car.”
I held up a hand to be helped up (when had I gotten down on the ice?). And pulled her into a firm hug. “You couldn’t have seen him,” I said, half-hysterically. “He wasn’t breathing.”
Drink, Drank,…
There was a body in my trunk.
I got Andi seated safely in my car’s passenger seat, turning the key to idle it while she sat in my car and calmed down enough to cry instead of hyperventilate (yes, I’d given her a paper bag—which I kept a supply of in the car for bloody wet-wipes—and yes, the bag was fresh and clean). Risto took her beautiful, classic Mustang with the brand new dent in the front end and radiator, and drove it away. I’d be picking him up on the side of the road on the way home in a few minutes, where he’d find and arrange a deer to disguise the damage to the front end.
I went back into Walmart. Andi was shaking, I was shaking, and I had a half-dismemebered, mostly decomposed body in my trunk. I had access to powdered blood and assurances that I could mix it with alcohol, drink to drunk, and not throw up to the point of damage.
I fully intended to get as close to blackout drunk as I could, after tonight’s upsets. I also fully intended that Andi was going to join me.
Because there was a fucking body in my trunk. A nasty, mummified corpse that should have stopped walking long ago.
