The Vampire Files Anthology

by P. N. Elrod

  I guess being married involves holding your tongue a lot. No wonder most men think it's so rough.

  The smile that spread over her face was worth keeping my big mouth shut. That's my Kat, all fire one minute and softness the next. "I'm not mad, I guess." She was only in a tank top and panties, both candy-cotton pink. Matching the room.

  The woman just has no mercy.

  "I'm not a field agent, anyway. I'm an intelligence analyst, I track migrations and collate reports. That was my first time staking."

  Are you trying to kill me? "Your first time?"

  "Well, I did okay." She pushed her hair back. Her knees were on either side of my hips, and her weight on me was incredibly distracting. "Now it's time for you to get up and read the paper. Breakfast's still warm. You want coffee, don't you?"

  "Coffee can wait." I got both hands on her shoulders and brought her mouth back down to mine, and things were heading in a very satisfactory direction before she broke away again. "Goddammit, woman. You're going to kill me."

  "Maybe," she agreed cheerfully. "But not until after you read the paper."

  "Screw the paper." I caught her mouth again and ran my fingers over the slim arches of her ribs, my fingers scraping off green herbal paste dried against the wound. Argentum believe in old-fashioned cures. Mugwort and holy water do wonders for bloodsucker wounds.

  I went cold all over, touching it, and she laughed, a particular low husky chuckle that just about turned me inside out before she let me do what I was dying to do each time I saw her.

  The sunshine had moved on the bed before I stopped breathing heavy, my face in her hair and the little shudders going through both of us. "Nice," she whispered into my neck. "I like that."

  "Me too." Better each time, actually. I guess waiting for marriage was worth it. "What do you say we do it again?"

  "You're a menace." She shivered again, a delightful little movement. The air-conditioning had kicked on. "Move over, I'm cold."

  "Delighted to." Something crackled as I finally got her under the covers and cuddled up against me, her panties gone and her tank top discarded too.

  She didn't snuggle nearly long enough before fishing around with one hand and bringing up something I blinked at. It was the county seat's daily, the Cotton Crossing Register. "Jesus." I managed a moan. "You just don't quit, do you?"

  "A couple of minutes ago you were happy about that." She spread the paper out one-handed, awkwardly. "Take a look."

  "I don't want to." I brushed her hair back, the golden floss tangling around my fingers like seaweed. "All that's in there is who tipped whose cow or quilted someone else's corn or something."

  "Shows what you know, Fido."

  "Are you going to keep calling me that?"

  "Until you live the other night down, yes. Since you won't read, I'll tell you all about it." She snuggled down, her hip bumping me. "Police blotter says four kids disappeared two nights ago. Their car was found up at Lover's Leap."

  "Disappeared? In a town this size?"

  "You were the one who wanted a road-trip honeymoon; this town is bigger than the last one you subjected me to. At least it's a county seat. By the way, if our children have tails and floppy ears you're going to be making the explanations."

  "The change doesn't happen until puberty. Protective coloration. And I liked the idea of pulling over whenever you wanted to act like a teenager at the drive-in." I sighed, settling her head on my shoulder more securely. "Four kids?"

  "Remember that car? The one that happened by just after we staked those two sanguine?"

  "Ford. Four-door. Rounded headlights." Right after you almost gave me a heart attack by vanishing under a hundred and a half pounds of spitting bloodsucker. A thin thread of unease worked its way through me.

  "Was it? I couldn't see, you were in the way. Anyway, their car was unlocked and just sitting up there, the paper says. What does that tell you?"

  "That someone's going to have to explain why they left Daddy's car up on the ridge?"

  She nudged me with her hip. "No, idiot. It means there's a nest around here."

  "Good God." I hadn't gotten past the two bloodsuckers we'd killed. I'd been too worried about Kat. "You think so?"

  "I don't think, I know. Guess why it made not just the blotter this morning, but also the second page."

  I didn't want to know. "Why?"

  "Because two kids disappeared last week too. Boy and girl, a nice couple. She was a cheerleader; he was the local football star. Want to put even money where they probably disappeared from?"

  FOR A TOWN OF THIRTY THOUSAND PEOPLE, IT certainly looked like a fifties movie set of the proverbial one-horse burg. Kat outright refused to stay in a place with less than two stoplights. I'm not the only urban creature in our relationship.

  Of course, Kat's first stop was the local library, a brick building sandwiched between a feed store and Cotton Crossing's City Hall, such as it was.

  Scratch an Argentum Astrum, and you'll find both an over-achiever and a great believer in law and order, not to mention a dyed-in-the-wool research nut.

  "Shhh." She laid her finger against my lips before turning back to the screen. "Will you be quiet?"

  "There's nobody in here." Libraries make me itchy, all that quiet and dust in the air. Librarians always look like they could eat you alive if you make too much noise.

  Kat rolled her eyes. The muscle in her shoulders flickered as she moved. "It's the principle of the thing, Mitch."

  "You and your principles. How did you get to be a Silver Star?" My leather jacket creaked a little. It was ninety degrees in the shade, but I wasn't about to give up the pocket space. Besides, we weren't going to be strolling around outdoors, and in this part of the country, air-conditioning was the rule rather than the exception.

  "They recruited me in high school. My mother was one before she died." She spun the dial on the microfiche machine, pushing a little lever and staring at the screen. "Huh. Interesting."

  "I love to hear you say that." I ran my fingers under her hair, touched the back of her neck. She shivered, but not enough to disturb her concentration.

  "So what do you shift into?" She moved the lever again, glanced over her shoulder at the bookcases. Checking to make sure nobody heard us, or checking her blindspot like a nervous Argentum?

  Nice change of subject, Kat. "Timber wolf. I'm a Sunrunner."

  "Loup-garou." She made a note on her ever-present little journalist's pad. The design stamped into the leather cover—a cross inside a circle—made sense now. "Or are you dents-soleil? Sunrunner is probably dents-soleil. So you're allergic to ash wood."

  She'd done her research, all right. The only wonder was that she hadn't noticed before. But we're careful, we Sunrunners. We have to be. "Only if it's introduced under the skin, sweetpea, and I've had my shots. It won't kill me. Just gives me a stuffy nose. Like the dust in here."

  "Then go wait outside." She made another note while I stared at the fall of her hair, paleness streaked with pure gold. "You're being a nuisance."

  "You're breaking my heart. I'm hungry." My stomach gurgled. She'd been at it for hours. I shifted in the hard wooden chair. Why didn't these places ever have comfortable chairs? "Really hungry."

  "Whiner. I suppose you want to try that greasy-spoon diner you've been looking at so longingly." She closed her notebook with a snap and turned off the machine. "We might as well. I can't work with you poking at me like this."

  "I thought this was a honeymoon."

  "It is." She turned in her chair and gave me one of those dazzling smiles. The kind that hits right below the belt and spreads like a supernova. "But we can't just let a nest breed out here, you know. We're in the area, we need to do something about it."

  "The population can't support more than a few suckers out here. They're creatures of opportunity." I'm surprised we're not hearing more about cattle mutilations, actually. Or pigs getting bled out.

  "Look, we killed two last night. Those kids disappe
ared afterward. That's just too much of a coincidence. It's a statistical outlier unless there's a nest out here. A nest will breed if the population starts rising, which it has been—did you look at the bed-and-breakfasts around here? This is a town on the edge of being a city. A stubborn nest in this area when the population explodes is a recipe for disaster. We have to do something." Her eyes shone with optimism.

  "An analyst and a single Sunrunner against a nest? Talk about a recipe for disaster. We usually hunt in packs, you know. Two Sunrunners to a sucker is about a comfortable margin." My shoulders hunched. If I ran across a lone sucker in the city, I knew my way well enough to get rid of it. It's what I was bred for. A mongoose doesn't need to know what to do when it sees a cobra. It's pure instinct.

  But the thought of a nest, with its stink and claustrophobic, sweltering heat, and my Kat in the middle… She pushed herself up, scraping the chair back along green linoleum. "I think we'll be all right. We can't just let a nest mushroom out here, Mitch."

  Now what could I say to that? I settled for hooking my arm over her shoulders. "I'm hungry. Let's go eat." We're only here for another night, anyway.

  "I told Mrs. Evans we'd be staying another week." She slid her arm around my waist and did the trick of moving someone twice her size for the door. "We'll hit the fiche again after you have your corn-fried lard. There's some interesting things here. Did you know this town's been here since 1784?"

  My Kat. Put an obstacle in her path and she just rolls right over it without noticing.

  I was going to have to find some other way of keeping her out of trouble.

  THE DINER WAS ON THE MAIN DRAG, A cheerful little place with red-checked curtains in the window and air-conditioning working overtime. Most of the customers were truckers or locals, and no few of them stared when Kat waltzed in the door, with her white cotton tank top and skintight jeans, her hair a bright banner and a thin silver semanario jangling on her wrist. They probably hadn't seen anything this good since the local goober queen got inducted.

  Kat paged back through her notes. "Kids have been disappearing around here for a while. I've found an average of one disappearance a month for as far back as the newspapers go on microfiche. Which, granted, isn't far, only until about 1932. There was some sort of fire that destroyed old records."

  I took another bite of my burger, chewed thoughtfully. Next to her I felt even scruffier than usual. Stubble had broken out along my jaw and my eyes felt sandy after all the dust. My jacket creaked, and my sneakers were almost worn through. The heat was already wet and clinging, a fine sheen of sweat standing out on Kat's skin, and I liked it. With a higher-than-human metabolism fueling denser muscle and bone, heat bleeds. I spent one winter in Maine and almost froze my ass off unless I was wearing my fur.

  "Howza food?" The waitress was probably forty but looked more like fifty-five, with aggressively-large hair reeking of Aqua Net and bourbon. "Freshen up yah coffee?"

  "It's great. Thank you." My words sounded clipped and unhelpful next to her down-home drawl. We waited until she was gone. "That's a lot of kids missing," I said thoughtfully. "I didn't know they had that many around here."

  "I hear they have them in job lots, but still. You'd think someone would say something. But it's on the back pages, never makes a lot of news, and I can't help but think…"

  "It seems a nice little town." And Cotton Crossing was, quiet in a prosperous way. The Appalachian kitsch mixed nicely with antebellum graciousness, to the tune of columns and Confederate flags as well as public buildings from the New Deal era.

  Kat took a mouthful of fries and poked at her French dip. "There's enough grease in this to clog my arteries just looking at it." She took a long pull of her orange juice and made a small face, probably reminded of her first Southern iced-tea debacle. They drink it sweet enough to rot teeth down there. "Yes, it's a nice little town. But the media should be ail over kids disappearing. And teenagers are statistically higher at risk for—"

  "Well hello there, good-lookin'." A heavyset man passing the table tipped his hat to Kat, who smiled and nodded. She gets that a lot.

  It was enough to make a man feel territorial. But then Kat turned her baby blues back to me and promptly forgot about John Doe Hick, dropping her voice to a confidential murmur. "It's just weird. Do the math, Mitch."

  Almost a thousand kids. I know humans are sometimes careless with their pups, something no Sunrunner understands. But this… "It's a little more than weird. It's downright ugly." I met the man's eyes as he sauntered past, marking him in memory—brown and brown, plaid shirt over yellowed wifebeater, jeans riding below his paunch, work boots caked with black dirt, John Deere baseball cap. A walking cliché. "I suppose you want to spend the whole afternoon in the library too."

  "No, just a couple hours. Then we're going to the courthouse to check out birth and death rates, since this is a county seat." She took a ladylike bite of roast beef. "We'll go back to Mrs. Evans's and crunch some numbers."

  "Numbers." I tried not to moan. "Come on, Kat."

  "You'll like it. Crunching numbers makes me want to undress you."

  I suddenly couldn't wait to get through with lunch.

  STICKY JASMINE-LADEN AIR BREATHED AGAINST MY NECK AND back, my T-shirt immediately clinging like Saran Wrap. Kat leaned against the porch railing, framed by trellises full of green leaves and little white star-shaped flowers. Dusk was a purple bruise in the sky, and Kat's white sundress a floating ghost, straps creasing her tender shoulders.

  I rested my elbows on the railing next to hers and leaned against her despite the heat. "Hey, pretty lady."

  "Hey, Rover." Her smile took the sting out of it. "Look at that."

  The garden spilled away in regimented rows, flowers nodding as nightly exhalation came off the mountains and down into the valley cupping Cotton Crossing. From here you could see the dusty curve of the road and Lover's Leap, a crag of sharp rock thrust out from summer growth under the worn-down nub of the mountain. It pointed at the town like an accusing finger.

  "Still mad?" I didn't think she was, but with Kat you could never tell. I hadn't even known she'd consider dating me until that night in the bar, when I'd bounced a couple of drunks hassling her and her coworkers. I'd thought she just came in after that with said coworkers, but later she'd poked me in the ribs and told me she came to see me.

  Guess I'm a lucky man.

  "No. But you're still not going to live this one down for a while."

  "I'm going to have to find a cute little nickname that rhymes with Argentum."

  She shifted, her hip bumping mine. She was barefoot, and holding a tall thin glass that smelled suspiciously like mint julep. "I think more time at the library should help you with that."

  I should know better than to open my mouth. "Very funny. I'm still sneezing from the dust this afternoon. And you promised me an undressing."

  "Did I?" A mock-serious questioning tone. She twirled the glass in her slim fingers. "That's right, I did crunch some numbers. Once you factor in the disappearances, this place has a crime rate comparable to a much larger and more aggressive city."

  "Isn't that odd."

  "With the amount of lard in the food I'm surprised it's not higher." She yawned prettily, took another hit off her julep. "If you count the disappearances as murders and factor in the percentage of missing-persons that could be just kids getting itchy feet or even running across normal foul play, there's still a significant statistical outlier."

  "I love it when you talk accountant." Under the cloying of jasmine lay her smell; fabric softener, female, and her cedary perfume. I dropped my head a little and leaned in so I could take a deep breath of her instead of the garden. Water chuckled behind the house, the creek a shadow of itself. "So what does that tell you, Kat?" I had the sinking feeling I wasn't going to like her answer.

  "It's not just a nest. It's something else." She took another swallow of julep. "Which is terrible news. I should call for reinforcements."

  I
t never even occurred to her to leave the damn thing alone. "Kat. We're on our honeymoon."

  "You really think we can handle it ourselves?" She stared out at the garden, unseeing, a sharp line between her eyebrows and her mouth pulled down at the corners.

  For Christ's sake. Do you always have to throw yourself in headfirst? I swallowed what I wanted to say and decided to go for tact. "Why don't we head out tonight, and once we cross the county line we can call it in to the Argentum? You're on vacation, you know." I don't like the thought of you getting mixed up in this, even with me for backup.

  I could only classify the wide-eyed look she gave me as shocked. The brownish mint-smelling liquid in her glass sloshed as she straightened and turned to face me head-on, her skirt swishing a little and her baby blues big as plates. "But I've done all the preliminary investigation and made all the contacts. I can't leave now."

  Christ in a casket. "Kat. It's our honeymoon. I can think of better ways to spend it."

  "Like running and hiding?" Her tone suddenly got very sweet, and very soft.

  Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. "That's not necessary."

  She lifted her glass, took a mouthful, and made a face, wrinkling up her nose. "Sorry." To give her credit, she did sound sorry. "But we can't leave."

  I was afraid she was going to say that. "Can you at least call for reinforcements?"

  "I'm not sure there are reinforcements to be had. What about you? Can't you call in the Puppy Brigade or something?"

  I took a firmer hold on my temper. "I'm not related to anyone out here. I'm not even sure there's any Sunrunners in the area. Those suckers last night were awful incautious." You might not understand it, sweets, but Sunrunners kill suckers because they're a danger to our pups. Not because they're a danger to humans. We can only take care of ourselves. The Dark Ages taught us that.

  Now wasn't the time for a history lesson, though.

  "Then we might be on our own after all." She slid her arm through mine and steered me away from the porch railing. "Let's take a walk. I'm sorry, Mitch. Really."