The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  “I need you to go back,” I said. “Get him help. I can’t take him with me—there’s no telling what else Whitney will try to pull, and he could get hurt or killed if I put him in the car. Would you?”

  He kissed me lightly and faded away in a golden blur on the hot, still air. I crouched down and grabbed the man—whose name I still didn’t know—under the arms and dragged him across the road to a narrow strip of shade, as far out of the way as I could get him without moving him into the swamp. Then I put down a layer of protections around him that soaked into the ground, a kind of keep-away perimeter for all of the biting insects and bigger, more predatory killers that lurked out here, including the snakes. It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep him safe and comfortable for a while.

  Best I could do. Whitney had hoped to weigh me down with responsibility, but that was the advantage of having David—we could split the responsibility. He’d return in only a few moments, and I could keep moving.

  I got back in the car, geared it up, and took up the chase. The Bugatti was, of course, well out of sight, so I let myself slide out of my body just a little, taking advantage of the aetheric to get a look at the power signatures at work in front of me. It was a kind of supernatural heads-up display, in a confusing array of colors and patterns that didn’t necessarily reflect the real world I lived in, but I’d learned how to process the information as effectively as anyone born human could.

  She was ahead of me, still driving, and the Bugatti was a hot silver scar on the riot of color and life around it. Djinn were difficult to see on the aetheric, but the Bugatti had its own signature, and a distinctive one at that. She wouldn’t be able to slip away quite that easily.

  And, frankly, she wasn’t even trying. Maybe she was just enjoying the chase.

  I concentrated on making up for lost time. In a sense, I was a little glad she’d brought this chase on, selfish as that was; I loved being so tightly bonded with the machine I was driving, feeling the power of the engine and the press of acceleration thrumming through my whole body. It gave me a sense of purpose, of control, of fierce joy that wasn’t like anything else I did. Not even working the weather.

  The weather.

  I was an idiot. David would have every right to say so when he caught up to me. Of course, working the weather patterns and driving like a bat out of hell on treacherous roads, in pursuit of a supernatural enemy, was a bit of a stretch, but what the hell. Whitney and I had a lot in common when it came to ambition.

  As part of my consciousness handled the necessary mechanics of the road, I split off part of it to do something that sprang from instinct, aptitude, and power—reading the flows of energy that moved through the air, the currents of disturbance and calm. Today was a beautiful day in Florida, which was (now) a little unfortunate; there wasn’t a lot of potential energy to work with. Not impossible, though. Never impossible, in a world where action always brings a reaction, and if you’re clever, you can create a storm out of a breeze without destroying the entire balance of the system.

  I didn’t say it was easy, okay? Just possible.

  Once you get a certain amount of air disturbed and bouncing off of other, less excited air, you get energy. Every collision of molecules creates energy, and that energy has to go somewhere—in the creation of heat. Heated air pushes on cooled air. Wackiness ensues.

  That’s an obvious simplification, but if you’ve ever seen a storm form from the collision of a warm front and a cold front, seen those clouds boil up and turn dark and tower up into the heavens … well. That’s how it works.

  And you can start a forest fire by rubbing sticks together, if you’re using the right kind of sticks and the right amount of force. The trick is being able to contain the beast you create, because once you get enough energy together, the dynamite is going to go boom. All you can do is direct the force the way you want it to go.

  Needless to say, this is not a job for the timid.

  The other complication was that Whitney could have known what I was doing … but then again, if, as David had implied, she was really young for a Djinn, she wouldn’t think of everything. She couldn’t. Someone like David on the run … that was something that was a much harder target. Whitney, in her see-me-from-space bikini and one-of-a-kind sports car? Not so much.

  But damn, I hated the idea of hurting that car. Which was why my first lightning strike came down on the road in front of the Bugatti, as close as I could nail it without actually hitting it, and I watched in the neon energy trails of Oversight as the sports car wavered, skidded sideways, and then started to straighten out again. That was okay. The lightning had been a diversion, anyway.

  What I was really doing was blowing out her tires with needle-sharp shards of black ice lined up on the road like shredder strips.

  Whitney hit them at a reduced speed, thanks to my lightning feint, which saved her from a fiery matinee-worthy crash. I zoomed in on Oversight and saw the wheels explode—both front tires, then both back. And the Bugatti instantly went from a precision racing machine to a hunk of metal clumsily trying to plow the pavement.

  Ouch. That was really going to hurt, but it was better than the alternatives.

  My radio spit static, and Whitney said, surprised, “You bitch ! You are so sneaky!” She laughed, long and loud, and then said, “I think I like you.”

  Right about then, David blipped in on the passenger seat of the car.

  “The guy on the road?” I asked.

  “Safe in the hands of emergency help,” he said. “He’s stable. You blew out her tires?”

  “Had to try something. Are you ready to spank this little brat before she gets somebody killed?”

  “I’d better let you do it. You’d accuse me of enjoying it too much.”

  David knew me all too well, and it made me laugh as I pressed the accelerator and gained ground on our fleeing Djinn.

  She was trying all kinds of tricks now, including forming new tires out of random shreds of rubber left on the side of the road by other luckless drivers, but David was focused entirely on undoing whatever she was up to, and I was completely locked into the car, the acceleration, the chase. Overhead, the weather darkened, and clouds formed to block out the hot sun. We were going to get rain, as a consequence of my actions, but it was a good rain. A washing shower, not a flood.

  Suddenly, the Bugatti stopped. I could see it now, the silvery gleam of it unreal against the violent greens and dull browns of the swamp, like some crash-landed alien spacecraft. “What’s she doing?” I asked.

  “She,” said my radio, “is thanking you very much for completely following the script, sugar. Hang on, now. It’s going to get interesting.”

  And then everything changed, completely, because Whitney was not an idiot, a compulsive thief, or a sociopath after all—or if she was those last two things, she certainly wasn’t the first. Because Whitney had been taking us somewhere, and we had just arrived.

  I coasted the Viper to a stop behind the tire-less Bugatti—the shreds of rubber had fallen apart again—and David and I jumped out to check inside. No sign of Whitney. David turned in a circle, scanning, and then pointed off into the swamp. “There,” he said. “She’s there.”

  It’s useful to have a Djinn along for a run through the Everglades … there’s no good footing, but plenty of stinging, biting, and eating things to take an interest in your passage. I was an Earth Warden in addition to my Weather and Fire powers, but Earth was definitely my weakest skill set, and I was relieved I didn’t have to manage it on the run. David simply created a firm, dry path out of the swamp, straight as an arrow, and made sure that any creatures with an eye to taking offense at our passage were kept otherwise occupied. I saw a couple of alligators eyeing us coldly from the water, but they stayed as motionless as floating logs. The hot, humid air felt like running a treadmill in a sauna, and I was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath in a humiliatingly short time.

  We ran into Whitney about five seconds before I was su
re I would drop of heat stroke and exhaustion, and I bent over, bracing myself on my knees, gasping and coughing. Whitney, of course, looked perfect. She was still wearing the diamond bikini, which just could not be comfortable on a cross-country trek; I was getting chafed, and nothing I was wearing came in measurements of carats.

  Whitney put her hands on her barely clad sparkly hips, and gave me a superior look that made me want to throw up on her high-heeled shoes. “Sweetie, you’re gonna want to pace yourself,” she said. “We ain’t there yet.”

  “Where?” It came out as a cross between a howl and a whine, which wasn’t very heroic, and I blamed it on the urge to vomit. I swallowed, straightened up, and clawed hair away from my damp face to try again. “Where are we going?”

  “There.” Whitney nodded.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You will.”

  David, who’d been about to say something that I was fairly sure would scorch Whitney’s exposed buttocks good, checked himself and spun around, staring upward. I didn’t know why, but then I heard it.

  The abused whine of jet engines, getting louder.

  David shouted something in a language that I didn’t recognize, but there was no mistaking the command in it, and Whitney lifted her hands to the sky along with him.

  A four-engine jet burst out of the clouds, trailing smoke and fire from one wing. Way too low for where it was, which was miles from any decent airport capable of handling an emergency landing. It was an enormous plane, and as I launched myself up into Oversight I saw the black buzzing cloud surrounding it.

  Impending death. Terror. The fear of more than three hundred souls, all preparing for the end.

  The two Djinn were grabbing hold of the plane, straightening its flight, and I warmed air beneath its swept-back wings, trying to provide lift. It was a huge, ungainly weight without the right balance of physics to support it, and I could sense the terrified but determined pilots trying everything they could to keep it in the air.

  “Clear a landing strip!” I yelled to David. “We can’t keep it up!”

  He and Whitney had already determined that. Whitney kept her arms up, channeling power to the plane, but pieces were breaking off of it now as the structural flaws began to shatter along fault lines. One of the engines imploded, streaming metal and fire that plunged down toward us. Whitney didn’t flinch, so neither did I. I felt the impact of the twisted metal like a physical shock as it slammed into the water not ten feet from us, sending a tsunami of muddy green toward us. I didn’t bother to stop it. We had more important things to do than stay pretty.

  David’s power was breathtaking and precise, and he wielded it quickly—dangerous, for a Djinn, because like Wardens, they had to be concerned with balance. He formed a solid pack of earth, a berm that ran straight through the Everglades, and knocked down enough of the cypress growth to provide a window for the plane’s wings.

  “Coming down!” Whitney yelled, and I felt the hot burn of the exhaust as the jet roared right over our heads, so close that I swear I could count the treads on the landing gear, which was winching its way down. The plane wavered, slipped sideways, and Whitney and I clasped hands instinctively and merged our powers, applying force to the side that needed it, bringing the jet back into a semistable glide.

  Twenty feet.

  Ten.

  Down.

  The tires hit the packed earth with more force than normal, and I saw one of them blow out in a mist of rubber and smoke. David flung out a hand and kept that side of the plane up as the pilots applied brakes.

  Whitney and I changed the thickness of the air flowing along the flaps, adding to the drag, burning off speed at about twice the normal rate, until the plane was coasting, then a smoking, scarred wreck sitting motionless on the makeshift runway.

  Whitney took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and the doors on the plane popped open. Yellow emergency chutes deployed. I could hear screaming from inside, but there was also shouting, people imposing order onto chaos.

  I turned toward Whitney. “How did you know?”

  She opened those eerie purple eyes, and for a second, I saw the woman she’d once been … infinitely tired, frightened, and burdened under all that glitter and gleam. “Once you’ve died that way, you know it’s coming,” she said. “It’s just how it is.”

  I said, “I thought you died alone.”

  Whitney studied me for a few silent seconds, then nodded. “I did,” she said. “I was in a plane that went down in the water. I lived. I lived a long, long time. And nobody found me. Nobody ever will.” I was still holding her hand. She glanced down at our linked fingers. “This don’t make us engaged, you know.”

  I let go, feeling a little off balance after all of this craziness. It wasn’t often that someone threw me, but Whitney had, in every possible sense. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  “Why didn’t you just tell us about this, if you knew it was coming?”

  She shrugged, which set off lots of glittering waves from the diamonds. “What kind of fun is that? I got you here, didn’t I? I just did it my own way.”

  “Your way is insane. Go do something useful,” David told her. “Send up a flare for the emergency rescue parties. They’ll be on the way by now.”

  She gave him a smart little military salute, which was very weird considering her outfit, and executed a perfect turn to march away.

  “Wait!” I said. “The guy you threw in our way on the road. Who was he? Why did you do that?”

  She glanced back at the plane. Smoke blew away from the fuselage, and I saw a long, ragged hole, with the fragile metal skin peeled away. “He’s the man who put the bomb on board,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d care if you didn’t stop in time. I wouldn’t have.”

  And then she vanished in a mist of diamonds. Gone. I looked over at David, who was shaking his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She took the bikini,” he pointed out. “And nobody’s going to get it back. That’s her price for altruism.”

  I laughed. I could hear emergency sirens back toward the road, and I could just see Whitney standing out there glittering like a diamond convention, pointing the way for all the rescuers.

  “I think I like her style,” I said.

  David rolled his eyes. “ You don’t have to be her boss,” he pointed out. “Now. Let’s see to the wounded.”

  In the end, there were remarkably few, and most of the injuries were minor. MIRACLE FLIGHT , they called it on the twenty-four-hour news channels, which featured interviews with everybody possible: people who’d been anywhere in the flight path of the plane, the crew, the passengers, and the director of Whitney’s failed commercial shoot, who somehow managed to take high-definition footage of the aircraft on its dramatic flight and landing. He did a documentary. It won an Emmy.

  The Case of the Missing Million-Dollar Model occupied headlines for many months, along with positively drooling pictures of Whitney leaning against the Bugatti Veyron with just enough diamonds on her lady parts to make her legal. She was spotted in Rio de Janeiro, and then in Cannes, and then in Argentina and—on the same day—in Shanghai. I think she enjoyed playing Where’s Waldo.

  David and I never got our beach picnic, but back home, many hours later, we made do. We moved the furniture out of the way, put down the blanket, and had wine and cheese and bread and each other, and somehow, that was still utterly blissful. As we lay there wrapped in each other’s arms, lit by candlelight, I felt the rumble of suppressed laughter in his chest.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking,” David said. “Whitney. She’s just insane enough to make a good second in command for me, don’t you think? If Rahel can’t do it?”

  Rahel was a longtime friend and a very formidable Djinn. I couldn’t imagine any set of circumstances under which Rahel wouldn’t be able to step up to the plate, so I shrugged. “I suppose,” I said. “She’s certainly not the obvious choice.”

&
nbsp; He kissed me, long and sweetly. “That’s what everyone said about you,” he told me, and traced his thumb across my damp lips. “I think my instincts are pretty good.”

  “And I think you have a weakness for girls in bikinis.”

  “You’re not wearing one now.”

  “I’m not wearing anything .”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed soberly. “I do have a weakness for that.”

  And he showed me, all over again.

  IN VINO VERITAS

  Karen Chance

  The bottom half of my longneck shattered, splashing golden liquid all over my jeans and the bar’s floor. The mirror in front of me, already pockmarked with chips, now also had a hole courtesy of the bullet that had drilled through to the wood. The cracks spidering out from the center showed me back my own short brown hair and startled black eyes, and the joker with the gun backlit in the doorway.

  I couldn’t see him very well, just a dark silhouette against the rusty evening light spilling down the stairs of the basement bar. But I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway. Most of my varied acquaintances wouldn’t have taken the shot, and the rest would have made damn sure not to miss.

  “That’s gonna cost you five bucks,” I said, swiveling around. My own gun was out, but I didn’t return fire. The guy hadn’t taken the second shot, which meant he wanted to chat. Since I was still recovering from a near death experience all of two days ago, I was up for it. And if my vampire sense was anything to go by, a handgun wasn’t going to be much use against this joker anyway.

  “You want to stay out of our business,” I was told, as everyone else scattered to the four winds. The large shape moved into the bar and resolved into a good-looking Asian guy in khakis and a brown leather jacket. The ensemble looked more weekend-in-the-Hamptons than biker chic and clashed badly with the orange and black tiger tat prowling around the right side of his face.

  The tat told me a lot, none of it good. The Chinese don’t like tattoos. In ancient China, they were used as punishment, branded on criminals before exile to ensure their easy identification should they ever return. They are still seen by many as a defilement of the body and a sign of generally poor taste. That attitude is changing among the young, but despite the glossy black hair and unlined face, this guy hadn’t been young in centuries.