by Mary Hughes
The pack of them pretended to be a normal humans, but little things gave them away, like the violet glow and the extra-long canines. Besides, small town, secrets? Get enough vampires in a small close-knit city like ours, and soon almost everyone knows. Especially three v-curious twenty-somethings in an apartment nicknamed the Fangtastic Flat.
Rebecca dashed from the front door to the bar, where my granny had stripped down to her Humvee timing chain bra. She gently scooped the old woman off and settled her on the floor.
Then the vampire woman pulled out her machetes and flickered mind-numbingly fast back to the front door.
Where a mob of red-eyed, fangy vampires pushed to be first through.
Rebecca whirled her blades like a blender through rogues, a combination of punks, suits, and military types. With meaty thuds, the knives struck home. Blood spurted, vampire parts flying.
That was when I realized we were under attack. My heart surged double-time, fight or flight seizing my body. I flung my tray onto the bar and grabbed my granny’s arm, tugging her away from the carnage, through the patrons sure go be stampeding for the louvered door in back…except they were all just sitting there.
“Miss?” To my left, a blond poodle of a man held up a pitcher. “Refill?” he asked hopefully. At another table, a woman poked a man. “You had all four top trump, and yet you took a partner? You damned mauerer.”
I swiveled a shocked survey—not only were they just sitting there, they were still drinking and playing cards.
Were they insane?
“Customers!” I may have shrieked it. “Please move quickly and quietly out the back.”
“Ante up,” the card-playing woman said. “Miss?” The man waved the pitcher. No one else paid any attention to me.
“Customers, please listen—”
“Niemanners!” Granny bellowed. “Listen up.”
Heads rose.
“Take shelter in the rear, now.” She pointed toward the backroom. I reinforced the gesture with urgent, swooping hands.
Folks rose from their tables and started shuffling back—but not before snatching up their pitchers and glasses. I beat back a frustrated screech. Meiers Corners. I should’ve been grateful they didn’t stop to collect their sheepshead cards and nickels.
Jenny, just emerging through the swinging door, caught my gestures. Her eyes widened on the violence erupting in front. Immediately, she mimicked my flight-attendant moves.
Behind the bar a door opened, entrance to a private stairwell. Camille sashayed through—and stopped.
“Get the fuck out of my bar!” Dropping her coy, seductive act, she sailed like a Valkyrie out from behind the counter, pulling twin blades from thigh sheaths and wading into the fray at the door.
The tension in my body eased a bit. Sure, the two Meiers Corners vampires faced over a dozen rogues, but I’d gathered that our vampires were fast and lethal. This fight was as good as over.
Yeah. Ever hear the old adage, “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched?”
Eggs? Meet abacus.
Big hands shoved aside fighting vamps. “What’s wrong with you pansies? Can’t take care of a couple girls? Kill them!”
A broad, scary vampire strode through the mob, shoulders like a bench and cheekbones like plates. Beefy, the kind of chunky muscularity you only see in a serious bodybuilder, wearing a dark business suit.
One-handed, he grabbed Rebecca by the cheeks, giving her a smooshy-face just with his grip.
My heart leaped into my throat and banged triple-time. I started waving bar patrons toward the back like a berserk puppet.
The suited vampire jerked Rebecca’s head, too far, crack. My heart plummeted from my throat to my bowels. That snap of bone will haunt me forever.
She fell under the rail and stayed down. The rush of terror and sick nearly took me out at the knees.
In front, Camille struggled valiantly but alone against all those rogues. If she faltered, the humans just starting to exit through the back door were so much fresh blood cattle.
Me among them.
One of the rogues slipped past Camille. I broke out in a hard sweat and started shoving at bar patrons with anxious hands. “Please move faster!”
Then Granny said, “I forgot my clothes.”
And tottered back into the barroom.
My heartbeat thrashed in my ears. All thoughts boiled down to one: Save Granny. Legs trembling, I grabbed for her with both hands.
She jagged at that instant to avoid the rogue. I missed and came face to face with slavering vampire fangs.
Instinct fueled me. I grabbed my empty tray from the counter where I’d left it and whapped him in the face.
The metallic clang was augmented by a double crunch, his fangs shattering. He shrieked and reeled back.
But two more rogues had broken past Camille.
One grabbed Granny.
I roared and shoved aside the injured vampire.
“I’ll save her!” Jenny cried. “Duck.”
A whoosh of air alerted me. I dropped.
Jenny’s tray guillotined the air where my head had been. She sailed past me, whapping tables, pitchers and stray body parts indiscriminately.
Granny swept a beer pitcher from the bar and brought it down on her captor’s head. Camille doesn’t have us carry nice light plastic pitchers. Those things are heavy glass.
The vampire’s eyes rolled back into his head and he went down without a sound.
Buddy popped up from where he had apparently taken refuge behind the bar and tossed Granny her clothes—she’d finally learned to throw them behind the bar after old Mr. Crahn stole her orthopedic fishnet stockings once too often.
She grabbed the bundle and tottered toward me. I seized her as she passed with worried hands, petting her to make sure she was all right. She grinned and tottered toward the louvered exit door.
“Help…” The cry disintegrated into a gurgle.
I spun. The bodybuilder vampire in the suit had grabbed Jenny. She struggled against him. He slapped her. It stunned her just long enough for him to grab her more securely. One hand around her forehead and an arm around her shoulders, he bent her like a drink straw.
Exposing her neck.
I had to do something, anything. Holding my tray with hands steady as boulders, I smashed it like a battering ram in rogue faces, fighting my way toward her.
Bodybuilder Suit opened his mouth, low light glinting off long fangs like knives.
Acid flooded my veins. Even as noses squished and my tray dented, I knew I’d never make it to Jenny in time.
“Hey!” Behind the bar, Buddy, the bartender, pointed the seltzer spray at the vampire. “Let her alone.” He jammed his thumb against a button.
Normally, the seltzer has three settings, water, stream, and spray. He’d apparently found a fourth setting, rocket power. He shot the suit in the face.
As Mr. Bodybuilder hacked up seltzer, I fought my way to Jenny. Ramped on adrenaline, I whacked the vampire’s imprisoning arm until he let her go.
Released, Jenny fled past where Rebecca lay, against the bar under some stools. The vampire woman’s head was still attached, good, but her features looked awfully pale. Bad. Worry scraping at my nerves, I flung my tray onto the bar and fell to my knees to see her better.
A beefy hand seized me by the throat and jerked me back to my feet—then off them.
My air was cut off. My lungs tried to suck in oxygen, fought uselessly. My vision blackened, spots whirling. My ears filled with white noise as terror seared me.
Automatically, I dug fingers into his hand and lifted my weight off my neck. My chin tucked and my neck muscles tightened courtesy of hundreds of self-defense drills. Vision cleared just enough for me to see I was face-to-stale-breath with Mr. Scary Suit.
“A blood-doe just gambols right up to me. How lovely.” His grin was the bastard child of Dracula and The Joker. “Meet your doom.”
The line was canned, but his gaping
red mouth, coming fangs-first for my neck, shocked a scream from me.
Air whooshed. Suddenly, I was free, the vampire flying backwards from me as if a pile driver had thrown him. His body smashed through the front window in a crystalline ching of shattering glass and the crack of breaking wood.
“Cutter.” Thor stood beside me, and his voice had gone from warm whiskey to cold ice. “Never touch her again.”
Welcome relief cascaded through me.
The suit scrambled to his feet and, framed by the jagged hole in the window, grinned that terrifying grin. “Thorsson. I was wondering when you’d throw your wet blanket on the fun.”
“Me? I’m nothing but fun.” The metallic zip of fighting stars drawn from inside his vest and winged into Cutter’s forehead contradicted Thor’s words. The Viking’s expression was hard as granite—and frankly, that granite had been having a bad day.
Cutter reeled a moment before falling out of sight.
“Banter is good.” Camille twirled her blades in and out of vampire bodies, blood flying in arcs. Her once white peasant blouse was ruined, and her red leather dirndl and vest was wet with the stuff. Hopefully, she’d used fabric guard. “Sexy And Fun. Banter is definitely fun. Keep it up. It’s good for business.”
Thor threw her an incredulous look. “Rogues attacking, not even bothering to hide the fact they’re vampires, and all you can think is that it’s good for business?”
“We’ll hypnotize the humans after. Banter, Thor, banter. Oh, and if you want to ‘accidentally’ rip the bodice of a barmaid’s costume, that’s fine, too. Just don’t do my leather.” Mid-slash, she pointed one of her knives at me. “I have an idea. Give the sober one more cleavage.”
“Hey.” Inanely, I grabbed my tray and slapped it as cover over my poor breasts.
“And risk getting bashed by her lethal beer tray? No thanks.” He drew blades with a shing and disemboweled the nearest rogue. Or not disemboweled so much as gouged and circled, coring out the rogue’s heart like a particularly tough apple.
Yeah, my legs went weak again at that, and I sagged against the rail. The Viking did a second, cutting through solid bone, then tossed the hearts into the tip jar, even more amazing. That thing was almost twenty feet away.
I shook myself. While Thor and Camille fought vampires, I stumbled to kneel next to Rebecca.
Her head was already at a less-unnatural angle. A shiver of alien rumpled my skin. Sure, I’d seen vampires get cut or bruised a time or two, trying to play human, and those cuts and bruises healed supernaturally quick. But she was in the process of healing a broken neck, an injury that would be fatal to a human. Incredible.
Still, even incredible becomes fact if it smacks you in the face. To help, I gingerly took her head and straightened out her neck. Never move a human who’s suffered a spinal injury, but really, if Rebecca had been human, she’d have been dead already. The bones crunched, moving into place.
Thor quickly helped mop up the rest of the rogues. I glanced up in time to see Cutter reappear in the starburst of broken window, staggering as he plucked ninja stars from his skull. He caught sight of his forces getting steamrollered, and his eyes widened.
“You owe me, Cutter,” Camille shouted. “You and your boss owe me for the window.”
“Try to collect.” Tossing the last of the stars, he gave her a little salute and ran away.
Next to me, Rebecca roused. Her head was still a little floppy, but her eyes opened and her chest began rising and falling. From what my roomies and I had gathered, vampires didn’t have to breathe to live, but breathing and a beating heart did seem to help them move.
Camille sheathed her knives with a double flirty flick of hem. “All right, let’s wipe the noncombatants.” She spoke to Thor, who was sliding his knives into his vest. “This is serious enough that we’ll have to do each individually. You take the women, I’ll take the men and the staff.” She pointed at the humans blinking through the half-open back door of the bar, my granny among them.
Thor waved the crowd back in. “Why did they attack here? Why now?”
“You got me.” Camille passed a hand before my eyes and said to me, “You only saw a normal bar fight.” Her voice echoed in that weird way I’d come to associate with vampire compulsion.
I sat straighter and put a little glaze to my gaze. I’d also come to realize that I was immune, but no sense broadcasting that fact. That was how my roomies and I got our best peeks into the vampire world.
I should mention the incident that made me realize I was immune happened soon after I’d returned to the Corners, the first time I’d come with Granny to Nieman’s and saw she was stripping. She’d tripped on the bar and her industrial garters catapulted her off like a geriatric slingshot. I really thought she’d die, but a big blond Viking appeared from nowhere, streaked in like lightning, and caught her. The whole bar was shocked—until Camille said, “Good thing Thor was standing right there” in a loud, echoing voice. Just as I was about to utter a shocked denial, I saw everyone going back to their drinks and cards, behaving as if what she said was true.
After that, I was torn, freaked out at Camille’s compulsion and Thor’s unnatural speed but also grateful and sort of turned on by how he’d rescued Granny. When I returned to my flat that night my roommates got the story out of me, and they told me Camille’s compulsion hadn’t affected me because I was immune, and I wasn’t the only one. They were too, and they’d been gathering information for a while, but it was okay because our vampires were good guys and basically I didn’t have to freak.
Now, as I sat in pretend stupor, Thor gently guided a female patron to a stool, sat her down, and waved a hand in front of her face. In a deep, hypnotic voice, he told her she’d only seen a bit of roughhousing.
“Roughhousing,” she echoed.
“Did you make any video or audio recordings?”
“No.”
“Good. It’s strange.” The last was to Camille, in a conversational tone. He turned from the woman, his brow wrinkled and that sexy glint to his eyes he got when his brain was turned on über high. “All of our kind is careful about not getting discovered, careful to preserve the masquerade. Yet these rogues attacked when the bar was full—with dozens of witnesses. That doesn’t sound like Cutter or his boss.”
He left unsaid why vampires avoided the limelight, but I’d already worked it out. Despite the number of fangy dudes in Meiers Corners, vampires were a drop in the human ocean. If we knew about them, we’d Van-Helsing them extinct.
“Between you and me,” Camille said, “Cutter’s boss has gone downhill since I left. Way downhill. You ask me, his revenge rage is making him careless.”
“This careless?”
She shrugged. “They’d have to know we’d wipe any witnesses. Sera,” she said to me. “Clean up spilled drinks and broken glass. Kurt Weiss, come here.” She crooked a finger at the blond poodle of a man shivering in the corner with one arm around his wife and the other hand clamped on a pitcher of beer. When he sat, without the wife but still glued to the beer, Camille used her echo voice on him.
“You ask me, Cutter looked strange. Grinning a little too much, and a bit wild-eyed.” Thor took the wife. “This was a simple bar fight. And what if we hadn’t wiped the humans for some reason? Why court disaster?”
“Cutter’s an ass. I wouldn’t trust him to sit the right way on a toilet. If he had his own comedy show, it’d be called The Big Duh Theory.”
“Harsh, considering you used to work with him.”
“Not for five years, I haven’t, and believe you me, I don’t miss him or any part of that boy’s club. Besides, he didn’t waste time bidding for my place.”
As I played zombie barmaid, shuffling around in an apparent daze to clean up, I listened closely, trying to pick up clues. There’s some sort of “us” versus “them” among vampires. I didn’t know the details, but Camille was with “them” until five years ago. Now she’s with “us,” though our vampires don’t re
ally trust her. Thor works for her, but I think even he’s on the fence about her loyalty.
I’d have asked directly, but everyone treated it like a big secret, so I wasn’t totally sure which humans were in the know. And with the vampires, well, there was the whole possible people-smoothie issue.
“Speaking of lieutenants,” Camille said. “ You remember my onetime allegiance with the Coterie?”
Camille’s old organization, the “them”, was the Coterie, based in Chicago. “Us” was the Alliance, based for some reason in Iowa.
Thor snorted. “We were adversaries for years. How can I forget?”
“Yes, well, I’ve still got an ear inside the Coterie—”
“You mean a mole.”
“Please, darling. Mole is so negative. My source had information about the pretty blond twins—Luke and Logan Steel.”
Logan I knew. He was a vampire who’d married a Corners’s woman.
“What information?” Thor asked.
“About Luke Steel’s wife, the one who died. There’s more to her death than we thought. Get word to him for me, will you? Those boys don’t take my phone calls anymore.”
Thor shook his head. “That’s not the kind of information that goes well over the phone. I’ll give it to him next time I see him.”
“Oh, well, I’ve done my duty. And it’s already been a few centuries. A few more months won’t matter.”
Camille and Thor continued to hypnotize us humans, ending when Camille did her echo voice on Jenny. She never did Buddy. I filed that away in my mind.
As Thor and Camille worked, Rebecca got to her feet and started cleaning up body parts. She grabbed the snow shovel we use for clearing the front walk and shoveled them out the door onto the sidewalk. When she was done, she carefully wiped the blade of blood and put it away, but I was never using that shovel again. Then Buddy handed her the tip jar. Shrugging, she emptied it of its hearts by upturning it out the broken window, the wet, meaty pock-pock-pocks ensuring I’d never use my stomach again either.
