Biting Oz: Biting Love, Book 5

by Mary Hughes

But at what cost? I sluiced goo off my shirt. Aunt Hattie scooped cheese off her neck, tried to flip it into the gutter, but the stuff stuck like snot. She had to practically shake her hand off her wrist to get rid of it. My dad and Otto looked like ads for LLAMA facial masks or cheese zombies. Everybody was covered with cheese goo and bits of cheese turds, except Toto.

  Toto, his coat pristine, trotted a zigzag to pee indiscriminately on cheese balls, the forgotten spray can and the broom.

  Until he trotted up to Otto, still on the sidewalk. Toto tilted his little head at Otto and I could see the evil little light enter his doggy eye. He glanced at his own hindquarters, then glanced back at Otto’s face.

  Lifting his hind leg, he exposed his little doggy faucet.

  Hattie, shaking cheese slop, flung a gob at Toto, catching him square in the nuts. He yowled.

  Yep, Aunt Hattie’s aim had definitely improved.

  Twyla called soon after with the news that her cousin had identified the addictive drug in the GObubbles and was formulating an antidote. Twyla was with her now and would drive the stuff back when it was done.

  Fortified with that good news and the bratwurst, I could almost face the doom that was Plan B. Without insurance the PAC couldn’t open. Without the PAC we couldn’t perform.

  Or could we?

  My insane plan was actually quite simple, and on some level beautifully poetic. The PAC wasn’t insured, but the musical was. And so was Fangs To You.

  It took a while to convince Director Dumas et alia (musical term for the rest of the gang) but what alternative was there? Finally I just forced the issue.

  “Everyone grab something and follow me.” I hit the pit for my stand and music. “We’re taking this show on the road.”

  Nixie grinned. “Invading Camille’s!”

  “Blowing down her doors.” And when Twyla brought the GObubble antidote, I’d back up Plan B with Plan 2-B, a soliloquy hopefully worthy of Shakespeare, designed to bring the good folk of Meiers Corners back to their senses.

  I sure hoped Twyla got there pretty soon.

  We headed out. Julian followed with two stands, cello, bass clarinet and alto sax. Besides being strong, vampires were apparently quite dexterous. “Camille won’t like it,” he cautioned.

  “Yeah.” I grinned back at him. “Icing on the cake, isn’t it?”

  The vampire guards at Fangs To You were bigger and tougher than normal, and weren’t going to let us pass.

  But Julian and his lieutenants, Elena’s husband Bo and his lieutenants, and Glynn, stood in a line—and smiled.

  Seven versus two. It didn’t hurt that Team Emerson’s fangs were way longer. Still, I thought we’d have trouble until Glynn went toe to toe with the biggest and grinned down at him. “Please tell me you’re going to put up a fight.”

  The bouncers stepped aside.

  “Too bad.” Bo shouldered his way in, toting a tree costume. Since he was a big, blond Viking, shouldering the door meant it slapped open like a storm hit it. “I was hoping for some action.”

  “There’ll be plenty, don’t worry.” Glynn set down my sax and nodded at the parting crowd.

  Camille sauntered through.

  A gold, sequined tube top stretched over big round breasts. Gold lamé skinny pants shimmered on her slim hips. The whole outfit was at least five hundred bucks of overpriced yellow—the color washed her out. She was more of a winter.

  Her mouth moved. No words came out.

  Or rather, words came out, but we couldn’t hear them over the roaring. Not roaring of the crowd, though. She grimaced, made a cut motion across her throat. A guy juggling chainsaws on the raised marble walkway caught them, stopped them and slunk off through the door marked Storage.

  She resumed her smile, strained, and her saunter, cocking a hip two inches from Glynn. “Darling. So good to see you again. You can stay.” Then she hissed at the rest of us. “You will leave,” and underlined her Ms. Nasty Buns status by kicking Toto. Yipping, the dog fled.

  I detest mean people. I jammed my stand under my arm in lance position, blade out. Dropping my head, I pushed off and hit ramming speed.

  She dodged. I bulled past her like I’d missed.

  Headed for my real objective, the raised walkway under the second floor gallery. With its stars-in-the-ceiling lights and the steel, glass and marble walls throwing the sound out, it would make a dandy stage.

  Camille dashed in front of me, blocking my way. “You’re going nowhere, slut human.”

  I got the impression “human” was a more deadly insult than “slut”. I glared into her red eyes. “Sorry, got a show to do. Move.”

  “Make me.” She folded her arms and glared back.

  “Sure. Just remember you asked for it.” I reviewed my hapkido. Grab and throw? Pressure point attack? Hapkido’s primarily defensive. If she’d grabbed me first, I’d have had a lot more options.

  Glynn solved the problem for me by picking her up and tossing her across the room. When I goggled, he shrugged. “The show must go on.”

  That just made me one happy slut human.

  But as much fun as one-upping Camille was, we wouldn’t win anything unless Twyla got here with the antidote. I kept casting glances at the door, but a watched pot never boils. Well, unless you’re an X-visored Cyclops.

  Our actors and crew set up the stage while the vampire lieutenants organized the floor to make a rough audience. The pit set up to one side, Julian positioning his open cello case on its back like a big tip jar, a hopeful twenty tossed in for seed.

  Camille screeched the whole time, alternating between threatening bloody war and flaming lawsuits. She had to be physically swatted down a couple times. The last time she retired to her upstairs domain, shoving rudely through a clump of Munchkins to get to the elevator. In retaliation, Toto peed on her leg as she passed.

  Good thing she was wearing the gold. Didn’t show the, er, dirt.

  And then, without scenery or mood lighting or anything but ourselves and what we could carry, we put on the best damned show of our lives.

  The mixed audience of MC natives and tourists was cold and unresponsive at first. Camille had infected them with a nasty sort of cynicism coupled with a jonesing for superficial highs.

  But then Twyla banged in. She raced through the crowd, armed with several cans of aerosol. Giving me a brief thumbs-up, she sprayed the front row. Frowns turned puzzled. Cleared. Smiles broke out. Twyla covered the whole room.

  Within moments feet were tapping to the Scarecrow’s zombie ditty, “Brains Ain’t Everything (Unless You Don’t Got One),” and laughter followed Toto’s antics. The aerosol must have been lighter than air because even Camille came down from on high to watch Dorothy skip off to Oz. She was almost smiling. By the end of the first half, the audience was detoxed and cheering. Good deal, because I had that 2-B pitch to make.

  Before the applause died down at intermission, I stood. This would be the hardest sell of my life. I’d known some of these people since childhood, but thanks to Camille, they were as much strangers as the tourists. I could only hope their personality damage, without the addictive GObubbles, was reversible.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. Let me introduce myself. I am Gunter Marie—”

  “We know who you are, Junior,” someone yelled rudely from the bar.

  “Okay. So you know me.” I blew my frustration out as a stream of air. “A lot of you know me, have known me all my life.”

  “Since diapers you were wearing!” someone else shouted from the back in crude imitation of the mayor.

  “Diapers.” I whirled toward the voice. “You not only know me, you know about Mayor Meier. You know everything about everyone in town, the good and the bad. Why is that?”

  “Because this is Meiers Corners!” A dozen people raised beers high.

  “Exactly.” I hid a grin of triumph. They’d played right into my hands.

  But now came the tricky part. I tried to read faces, but thanks to Fangs To You’s goth lig
hting, they were only shadowy red clumps. “Could someone raise the floor lights, please?”

  A moment passed, and then a moderate white light clicked on. Tables of folk blinked, shaded their eyes.

  “We all know each other’s secrets.” I scanned the crowd, gauging them. “That’s one of the bad things. Change is ice-age slow. You’re remembered in your diapers, frozen forever in time. You can grow up and become a responsible adult and everyone still remembers you blowing up the toilet in ninth grade with a cherry bomb that wasn’t even yours.”

  “Whose cherry bomb was it?” shouted Mrs. Gelb from the bar.

  “Nix—never mind!” Sheesh. I got to the point. “There’s no place like home!”

  “So why would you want to live there?” yelled Anna Versnobt from the back. Several people snickered.

  “Because there are good small-town things too. People aren’t just nosy for titillation. They’re nosy because they care.”

  “One good thing, whoop-di-doo,” Versnobt said.

  “There’s more. We make eye contact driving at a four-way stop and wait for the other guy rather than just bulling through.”

  Someone shouted, “That’s so important?”

  “It is,” I shouted back, letting my anger show. “In Meiers Corners, you’re not a number in a crowd. You’re an individual worthy of simple courtesy.”

  The laughter died.

  Still, Versnobt made one last attempt. “Everybody knows everything…including crap that should stay private.”

  “Meiers Corners’s greatest strength of all. Despite knowing each other’s weaknesses, we’re friends anyway.” I looked around the room, meeting eyes. Some slid away in shame, but I kept going.

  “We know the dirt, but we’re still friends.” I thought about the Cheese Dudes that morning. “Sometimes fighting friends.”

  My parents exchanged a glance.

  “The point is, you’re doing it wrong. There are good and bad things about a big city, and good and bad things about a small town. If you want big city, good and bad, live in a big city. You’re just taking what’s good about Meiers Corners and corrupting it. Killing it.” I paused for effect. “We care about each other. We love each other. Act like it.”

  Someone applauded. Anna Versnobt, of all people. Others joined her. More.

  I smiled my relief. And capitalized on the moment by waving my hand toward the open cello case and its lone twenty…which was gone. Dammit, someone had stolen the seed money.

  Anna Versnobt, face red, slunk up to the case and put the twenty back.

  More applause broke out, harder.

  Dumas, bless his performance timing, took that as his cue to start the second half of the show.

  At the end, when Dorothy tapped her heels together and said, “There’s no place like home” I heard a few sobs.

  After that, the five thousand dollars collected in the cello case seemed almost anticlimactic.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We were playing the bows and almost home free when the doors slammed open and thugs flooded the club. In hoodies and Matrixy sweeping black leather, they were dozens of the meanest vampires I’d ever seen.

  I’d known Camille would call for backup, but hoped the two-hour show would be too short for the Coterie to gather help. Or no, the thug branch was called something else.

  “Lestats,” Bo bellowed.

  Oh yeah. The Lestats’ vampire muscle attacked with mundane switchblades and guns, but their hard-shell faces, red eyes and pointy mouths were definitely not. Audience screamed and ran. Cast, crew and pit froze at the sight of so many armed and fanged attackers. Rocky turned sheet white. Another call to Iowa would be in order.

  As if the good-guy vamps had trained for it (and maybe, considering General Ancient, they had), Mishela and Gretchen’s husband Steve gathered the frozen humans and escorted them out while the remaining six Alliance vampires, in a rather compelling show of cool, clicked open switchblades and calmly met the charge.

  Elena roared, “Kill the Lestats!” and threw something at Nixie before whipping out her even-way-bigger gun. Nixie caught the tube Elena threw her (was that a bazooka?) and, yodeling like Xena, waddled into the fray.

  I knew I’d better get in there and fight because it was eight of us and thirty-plus of them with Camille and her goons. Several of the younger Lestats fell almost immediately, but the odds were still more than two to one. Besides, I needed to get my feet wet since vampire Armageddon would only be worse.

  But how, without a weapon?

  From what I knew, and the size of guns Elena and Nixie were wielding, vampires were hard to stop. The head-chopping Glynn had done on Shiv wasn’t easy. Necks were thin, sure, but bone and meat weren’t easy to manage on a cooked chicken, much less a raw, bloody…yeah, getting gross even for a sausage queen.

  Anyway, I probably needed major equipage. Something big and scary that would cut— I snapped my fingers, remembering the extreme juggler.

  I ran for the doors behind our impromptu stage. Fangs, Blood, The Dungeon and…I found the door marked Storage and flung it open.

  The lights cut.

  I froze. Emergency lighting clicked on, glowing softly behind me.

  The storage corridor remained pitch black, except for the red exit light above me. Shoot me, I didn’t remember which door was Props. I hunted with my hand, found and flicked the light switch just in case it cued the emergency light. Nothing. I wondered if the blackout was coincidental or a tactic by Camille to gain the upper hand. The vampires might not care much, but Elena and Nixie would definitely be at a disadvantage.

  And me.

  Still, I’d be helpless without a weapon. I inched in as far as I could without closing the outer door. Still couldn’t see, so with a deep breath I let go. The door swung shut with a fatal-sounding clang.

  In the dark, all sounds intensify. My rasping breath filled my ears. The whoosh of my speeding heart thundered. The adrenaline pumping through my system didn’t make it any easier to think. Air circulation was nonexistent. Sweat popped on my scalp, trickled between my breasts. I tried to picture where the doors were through the rush of blood but couldn’t.

  I took a deep breath, pressing it out slowly to ease my heart rate. Thumpity-thump slowed from hummingbird to chicken.

  Outside, the sound of fighting seemed closer, the defenders falling back. Not good. Ready or not, I had to move. I took a step.

  And promptly went sprawling over sharp cardboard edges. Pain nicked my shins, my flailing palms. A thud, followed by a muffled crash-tinkle-tinkle and the sting of liquor biting my nostrils told me the bottles weren’t packaged nearly as well as our sausage. Hopefully only the cheap stuff had spilled.

  Very hopefully it wasn’t the “Bomb your blood!” Vamka. I’d looked up mannitol hexanitrate. It was a vasodilator for heart conditions, which explained the blood part of the slogan. But the bomb part was quite literal too. Mannitol hexanitrate was an active ingredient in explosives.

  I righted myself. Waving my hands in front of me, I advanced again, bumping another stack of boxes with a more expensive-sounding crash before finally hitting a door.

  My hands slid down and found knob. I twisted it and cracked the door, was overjoyed to see dim emergency light, just enough to make out the cases marked Gorgon’s Ola—I was nasally sucker-punched.

  “Piquantly Pungent” my ass. This stink was Limburger eaten by a skunk and excreted into a vat of cow farts. In fact it smelled like—I mentally slapped forehead. GObubbles, G-O as in tiny chips off the old Gorgon’s Ola block. My eyes were watering from the fumes. I breathed through my mouth and my tongue started to bleed. Not really, but in massive quantities the stuff wasn’t enticing in the least, but toxic with a capital Ick. I couldn’t imagine how it was the Cheese Dudes’ big seller unless they used it as paint stripper.

  I backed out and slammed the door. I needed to destroy that stuff. I mean, what if the military got hold of it? Or worse yet, LLAMA? Cow-fart cheese balls with a h
allucinogenic side effect? Definitely Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  The fighting was rattle-me loud. Okay, destroy killer cheese later, hunt weapon now. I felt along the wall for the next door, knocked into another stack and nearly puked at the crash tinkle. I hate the sound of product breaking. To a retailer, it’s as bad as car metal crunching. So I was inordinately grateful when I located a knob, opened the door and saw The Chainsaw.

  It was in back, resting on the top shelf of a rack full of juggling saws, just under the emergency light. Huge, gleaming, The Chainsaw was the kind of equipage that conjured up a full soundtrack of messily dying violins.

  I ran in, wrestled over a ladder, clambered up it, grabbed that sucker and raised it high. Now I’d get me some vampires. Bone and meat was easy with this little—I lowered it and took a gander at its label. Well, talk about things going my way. With this little FRDe 5000.

  Hugging Freddy, I started out, realized I’d be blind in the corridor again unless I could prop the door open and went back to deposit Freddy on his shelf. Back at the door, I popped it open with my hip and scanned the hallway for something to…hell.

  The boxes I’d knocked into had been a tiny bit bigger and an eensy mite fuller than I’d thought.

  Liquor streamed from broken bottles, pooling on the floor. Soaked bottom boxes sagged, stacks of product leaning like old drunks. Oily strings of vampire rotgut glistened malevolently on liquid and cardboard. Without fresh air, the alcoholic fumes topped by residue de stinkbomb was overwhelming. Feeling faint, I dropped my head to my knees.

  Naturally that was when the battle broke through the outer door.

  Clawing, yowling, stabbing vampires rolled in, red eyes flaming and talons slashing. The shrieking balls of destruction were headed straight for me.

  I jerked up. Ran for Freddy. The door swung shut behind me.

  It slammed opened. I spun.

  Oh, God.

  The dark form of a vampire filled the door, eyes glowing red, huge chest sawing like bellows.

  I was too far from the chainsaw. I was going to die.