Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  I let Grandma fall asleep on the couch—once she got agitated like that it was lucky if she could get to sleep at all, and I wasn’t going to rouse her—and sat at the computer, resisting the urge to jump up and look out the window every time a car went by from the direction of the theme park.

  Fun Land was a strong contender for being the worst place in America at living up to its stupid generic name. It had been a Six Flags for a little while just after I graduated high school, but they’d sold it off again less than three years after they acquired it. Official word was that modernizing it was just too expensive to make sense, and I kind of believed that. The only people who ever showed up, besides people from town and the city kids that the Baptists bussed in when the washed-up Christian rock acts played, were antique rollercoaster buffs who wanted to photograph the rickety wooden monsters that still rattled through the summer. When they weren’t down for maintenance after yet another “accident.” How many times could someone get maimed or killed there before they were no longer allowed to use that word? An accident was something you didn’t expect, but we’d come to expect our allotment of death and dismemberment from Fun Land every summer.

  But the whole local populace flocked to it anyway—partly because everyone in town was related to someone who had a summer job there and got the discount coupons, partly because there was damn little else to do. Was that what had driven Adriana back there? Pure boredom? If so, I had to be sympathetic.

  I glanced down to check the time. One in the morning. How the hell had that happened? Fun Land had been closed for hours, and though I knew what kids Adriana’s age did after it closed—there were plenty of places to park out in the boonies in that direction, plenty of fields to party in when the weather was this nice—I was still starting to get the brain weasels. If she had died, the police would be here by now for sure, though. Right?

  By the time I heard the car pulling into the driveway, I wasn’t sure if I was going to hug Adriana until she couldn’t breathe or chew her out, or do both at the same time. That’s probably why I didn’t register that the car had come from the wrong direction until the knocking at the door started.

  Shit. Cops. The bad news again. I felt like my brain left my body and went to hang out on the TV stand while I walked to the door.

  So when I saw Scott and Emily on the porch in their matching down vests, my brain wasn’t there to help me figure out what the hell to say. I just stared.

  “Hey,” Scott said. “Did we wake you up?

  “No.”

  “Good, good. We were trying to go up to Toronto and we got turned back at the border. I was wondering if we could just stop over for the night.”

  “Scott, this is stupid,” Emily said. “We can get a hotel room.”

  “No, no.” Like an idiot, I smiled and stepped back from the door, waving them inside. “We have plenty of room.”

  Scott had been here half a million times, but Emily stared at my stepdad’s hunting trophies as though she were in a wax museum.

  “Do you guys need a drink or anything? We’ve got beer, Jack Daniels, Dr Pepper.”

  “Water’s fine,” Emily said, and followed me into the kitchen.

  “I have to warn you,” I said as I turned on the tap, “we have well water. It tastes a little funky. You might want to go with the Dr Pepper.”

  Emily shook her head. “I don’t really drink soda.”

  Of course not, I thought. Scott had trailed us into the room by now and she took the glass and scooted back to his side. “I’ll take you up on the beer,” he said.

  I pulled two Labatts from the fridge. We’d both drunk classier stuff in college but this was what I could afford now, and at least it wasn’t Genny.

  “So you got turned back at the border? How’d that happen?”

  “It was the weirdest thing. The computer pulled me up as having been deported in 1997 for trying to work in Canada without a visa. So now apparently I’m a no-go.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” I sipped my beer. “Bummer about that. What were you headed up there for?”

  “Going to Montreal,” he said, and had the decency to look uncomfortable for a minute. “It’s our anniversary.”

  “Staying at Angelica Blue?”

  He nodded. Emily shot him a look.

  “It’s a nice place.”

  “Yeah, it is.” He stared down at his beer for a moment, then made a show of looking around the room. “Say, where’s Ronin?”

  Goddamn it. “He got run over. About a month after I moved back here.”

  “Oh, that sucks.” To my surprise, Scott sounded genuinely sorry. He’d always complained about the dog fur that would get on his clothes when he stayed over, back when Ronin was alive.

  “My mom had my cat put to sleep a month ago,” Emily said. “She had diabetes and wouldn’t stop peeing on the couch. The cat, not my mom.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and slugged more beer.

  “So yeah. Losing a pet is terrible. Their lives are too short.”

  Platitudes reminded me that I was tired. “Let me get the air mattress for you guys. If you need to use the bathroom, remember to jiggle the handle after you flush, or it’ll run all night.”

  While I was digging the air mattress out of the back of the closet in Grandma’s room, I heard Adriana come in. She slammed the door and crossed the living room floor as though she were a herd of elephants, not a 98-pound teenage girl; I braced myself for Grandma to wake up and start flipping out again, between the hour and the actual strangers now in the house. But she didn’t.

  When I came back downstairs, she’d found Scott and Emily in the kitchen. She’d opened herself a Labatt, which I was pretty sure she didn’t need at this stage of the evening. The halter top she was wearing exposed about half of the tattoo, and the red streak in her hair was freshly dyed. She must have touched it up this morning before work. Emily was clinging to Scott’s arm like she was in a horror movie.

  “You’re all set up in the guest room,” I announced, and Scott and Emily headed for the stairs at the fastest walk they could manage, tossing “goodnights” and “thank yous” over their shoulders. I grabbed another beer and took the seat where Emily had been, across the kitchen table from Adriana.

  “Fun Land, huh?” I tried to keep my voice neutral but that had never worked before and it didn’t work now.

  “Stop being a bitch,” she said. There was a bit of a slur going but not as bad as I had expected. “How do you expect me to investigate if I don’t go to the scene of the crime?”

  “It won’t do any good,” I said. “Even if you find out what actually happened, we’d have to be able to afford a lawyer to…”

  “We don’t need a lawyer, we need an exorcist.”

  I tried to take the beer from her hand, but she was gripping it tight. “I met this guy at the Alligator while I was working, he was telling me that there’s a curse. On Fun Land, on the whole town. He was super cute, too.” She giggled. “So I said I’d go on a date with him when I got off work, if he’d explain the curse thing to me. And I did. And he showed me.”

  “A curse.” I tried to get a look at her pupils; they looked normal.

  “Yeah. Why do you think people are always dying?”

  “Because Fun Land is a dilapidated shithole run by irresponsible, greedy bastards?”

  “Yeah, but they don’t just die at Fun Land, do they? Dad died on Route 20, and Grandpa electrocuted himself fixing the pump, and Erik Anderson died in that barn fire, and Mrs. Gowalski fell down the stairs in the library, and those are all just people who lived on this stretch of the road.”

  “Those are all things that could’ve happened anywhere. Do happen anywhere.”

  “All the time?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.” But I’d always wondered myself why it wasn’t enough that this place was poor and insular and full of morons, why we had to be plagued with bad luck, too.

  Adriana shook her head. “I know he’s right. I can feel it. Laugh if yo
u want. But I’m going to figure out a way to stop it.”

  “Okay, Buffy,” I said. But she rolled her eyes at me and took another swig of beer.

  “I should go to bed. He’s coming to pick me up super-early tomorrow, like before-sunrise early. He wanted me to stay at his place, but I said you’d lose your mind if I didn’t come home.”

  “That’s not fair. I’ve never interfered with your love life, have I?”

  “You kept leaving condoms in my room every time you were home from when I was thirteen to when I got my own driver’s license.”

  “And was I wrong to do that?”

  “Well, you don’t have any nieces or nephews. But it kind of counts as interfering.”

  “Someone had to give a damn, and Grandma only would have given you a lecture.”

  She reached across the table and pulled me into an awkward hug that almost made me spill my beer.

  “That said, I don’t think you should go with this crazy curse-guy any place that’s not public. And I think you should take your own car.”

  “I have to go, if this is for real, it’s important. It would mean no one else would die like Cody.”

  After she went up the stairs I poured myself a whiskey and wondered, until I couldn’t stay awake any more, how I was going to get her off this particular crazy train before she got her heart broken in a way that a tattoo needle couldn’t stitch together—again.

  Normally, I believed Adriana when she said she was going to get up early almost as much as I believed her when she said she was going to get her act together and finish her GED. But sure enough, when I finally got out of bed she was gone, though her car was still in the driveway. Scott and Emily’s car was not, but their bags were still in the guest room. Grandma was in the living room, eating Frosted Flakes and watching her talk shows. She seemed entirely back to normal, and oblivious to the fact that anything had gone on last night. I didn’t bring it up.

  Scott and Emily were the first to get back, before I even got sick of editing rich-kid papers. Scott said that the border guards were looking into his problem and might have it fixed by tomorrow, could they stay one more night? Emily elbowed him, but I said sure. Then he dragged her off to show her around town. Apparently she’d never visited home with him before. Lucky her. Five minutes after they left, Grandma asked if that wasn’t the boy I used to date. Something about her voice seemed even more disconnected than usual.

  Adriana returned just after lunch, looking shaken—in fact, she was so rattled that Grandma looked up during a commercial and told her that she’d better take a vitamin, but still in that slow, checked-out voice that almost made me miss her lectures. I tried to talk to Adriana, too, but she told me she was tired and went up to her room. Just before she slammed the door she yelled down to me that I was right, she should have taken her own car, but she was fine. The slamming door should have brought on a lecture, too.

  I spent the afternoon with a sense of impending doom that made it hard to even edit.

  Towards dinner time, Emily got back. Her mascara was blurry and she had gigantic sweat-stains under her arms, and Scott was nowhere in sight.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, looking up from the stove. It was a dumb question.

  “He took me to see Fun Land.”

  “And?”

  “And we ran into this guy in the parking lot. Red hair, kind of pale, on the scrawny side. Never took his sunglasses off. Scott said he didn’t know him, but the guy talked to Scott like he did.”

  I racked my memory of high school, but I couldn’t think who would have met that description. “And then they left together, and I waited and waited, and now I’m really scared.”

  “Left together?” I glanced out the window. Scott’s car was in the driveway.

  “In the other guy’s car. Thank God I have my own set of keys to Scott’s.”

  “Indeed.” It seemed out of character for Scott—for anyone, really—to go off with someone like that. I thought of Adriana’s tall-tale-telling stranger and his insistence on using his own car.

  “Has he ever done anything like this before?” Emily looked at me for the first time as though she was really interested in my answer.

  “He stood me up on a date once in tenth grade. But that was because his dad had to go to the hospital.”

  She didn’t seem to see the humor. “He wasn’t acting like it was an emergency. Should we call the cops?”

  “Scott’s a grown man. I think we have to wait twenty-four hours.”

  “No point calling the police,” Adriana said from the top of the stairs. “You guys, we need to take a walk.”

  Emily stared at her like she thought Adriana was on crack, but I started putting on my shoes. If nothing else, it would be better for all the nervous breakdowns that might potentially happen to happen outside, and not disturb Grandma from her game shows. It was a miracle of deafness and dementia that she wasn’t up and yelling already. I turned off the burner under the Kraft Dinner and left a note on the table on the off chance she would get up and start wondering where we were, but she’d probably just fall asleep in front of the TV again.

  Once we were outside, I headed towards the lightning tree just by force of habit. Adriana was ahead of me before long—she’d gotten taller than me over the past couple of years, and had legs that made thoroughbreds feel dumpy. Emily had a harder time keeping up and I dropped back to make sure she knew where she was going.

  “I thought the dangerous part was going to be having him sleep in a house with his ex and her hot baby sister. Not the boring tour of his hometown crap.”

  I glanced at her sharply, but it didn’t seem like she was trying to be mean. “We broke up for a reason,” I said. “I’m not after him.”

  She stared at Adriana’s butt and didn’t say anything.

  The woodpecker flew up and away from the trunk as we approached. It had been working along the scar some more, and now there was a basketball-sized hole, dark against the dark of burned wood, which I only saw as I got close.

  Adriana stretched up and grasped the bottom edge of the hole, almost beyond her reach. Almost effortlessly, she ripped off a chunk of flaky, rotting wood nearly as big as the phone book.

  “What are you…” Before I could finish my question, a snake slithered out of the hole in the tree and down the trunk. It was huge—as big as the boa constrictor that Adriana had owned for a while after she dated a Goth kid in twelfth grade—and like the woodpecker, it was black and white and red. I was pretty sure it wasn’t native to the area, or maybe the world.

  That suspicion was confirmed when it reached the ground, coiled up, and transformed into a redheaded woman in a black dress, taller than Adriana and far curvier as well. Emily gasped, and the next thing I knew, I was holding her up because she had slumped against my shoulder.

  “All right,” Adriana said, sounding not nearly surprised enough. “Here we are.”

  “Took you long enough,” the woman said. “If your sister had gotten the tattoo I could have been out of there weeks ago.”

  “No, you couldn’t,” Adriana said. “She can’t reach that high.”

  “She pays more attention, though.”

  “Anyone up for explaining what’s going on?” I asked as I settled Emily on the ground with her head between her knees.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the redheaded woman said, mock-graciously. “I’m Calla. I’m here to help you avenge your brother, lift the curse from your hometown, drive off the vampire prince, and just generally be a hero.”

  “Why?” Yeah, I could have asked for an explanation of the curse or the vampire prince but honestly, the first rule of life is don’t just take favors from talking snakes without checking for strings attached.

  “Oh, you are the smart one. Cui bono? The reason, as it happens, is because the same person—if you want to call him that—responsible for Cody’s death also shut me up in that tree, and I have my own scores to settle with him. Also, I rather resent them taking out a member
of what I’ve come to think of as my family.” She smiled at me like she expected me to be flattered, and that silly grin did more to convince me that she was telling the truth than anything in her actual words. I figured that at this point, additional skepticism would just be pissing into the wind anyway.

  “Not just one,” Adriana said. “He got my dad, too.”

  “Oh, the little boy who was here when I arrived? That’s a shame. I wish I had known, but until recently I was more or less asleep.”

  Emily lifted her head. “He’s also got my boyfriend. At least, if he’s a guy who looks like he could be your sickly cousin.”

  “Good,” said Calla. “Then we’re all on the same page.”

  Emily frowned, and struggled to her feet. I let her grab my arm to help. “We should go get him before something awful happens.”

  Calla laughed. “Yes, we’ll just walk right into Fun Land and challenge a vampire prince on his own turf. I’m sure that will work out just as well as it did the first time I tried it.”

  “Well, what do we do, then?”

  “We get his heart.”

  “Oh, that’ll be a piece of cake,” I said.

  “Well, he doesn’t keep it on him. Someplace he has access to, obviously, some place he can feed it easily when he has new victims, but not inside his chest where just anyone might look for it. We get hold of that, he’ll be in the mood to talk.”

  “Is that a normal thing for vampires?” No wonder Adriana hadn’t taken my Buffy crack to heart. Whatever curse-boy had told her, she was way ahead of me and Emily.

  “Only the ones smart enough to see that when you’re staked, having your heart elsewhere gives you the last laugh.”

  I nodded. “That still seems like it involves a fair amount of challenging him on his own turf, though.”

  “Not if we use bit of trickery, I think. He’ll have gotten spoiled, all these years. Who here doesn’t mind snakes?”

  Adriana raised her hand. She was smiling in a way she hadn’t since Cody had died. I felt like a bit of revenge might cheer me up, too.