Everyone stopped what they were doing when I stumbled into the basement room; they just stood there staring at me for what seemed like a full minute as I stood in the doorway.
Then Dom starting laughing. Hard. So hard he had to sit down on the floor and hold his stomach. No one else moved.
For some reason that irritated me.
“When you’re done laughing at me, maybe you could go upstairs and stake my ex-fiancé for me. Or maybe someone else could do it?” I glared around the room. “He’s locked himself in the last room on the left.”
“I’ll go,” John offered. “I need to get away from that smell.” I could see him trying to hide a grin as he swept past me and trotted up the stairs, taking them three at a time.
“Show-off,” I muttered. Then I leaned my back against the nearest mirrored wall and slowly slid down it until I was sitting with my knees tucked up under my chin.
Tony was by my side in an instant, tugging the t-shirt away from my neck.
“Let me see what you’ve got here.” I recognized his soothing, I’m-a-professional voice. “Mmm,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s going to need stitches.”
“Great,” I said.
Dom wiped the tears of laughter out of his eyes. “Hey, Elle?”
“What?” I was still angry.
“I take it that’s Deirdre’s head you’ve got over there?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Any particular reason you brought it with you?” He dissolved into laughter again.
Reason? I looked down at the head. I was still clutching it by the hair. I untangled my fingers and peeled them away from the clumps of hair, now sticky with blood.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, looking back up at Dom. He seemed to swim in my vision, like he was receding into the background. I felt cold suddenly.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Tony said, pushing me over so that my head was between my knees. “You’re not going to pass out on us.”
“Oh, I think I might,” I said.
“Nope. Malcolm, do you know where the kitchen is in this place?”
“Yeah.” Malcolm looked pale. His throat moved convulsively.
“Then go get some juice or something,” said Tony. “And grab a blanket while you’re at it. She’s lost a lot of blood and she’s going into shock.”
Malcolm disappeared from my view.
“He didn’t look so hot,” I said to Tony.
“Yeah, well, neither do you,” he replied.
“I think maybe he was about to throw up.”
“The sight of severed heads will do that to some folks,” Tony said.
I looked back down at the head on the floor beside me.
“I guess it is kind of disgusting,” I said. “You think I should close her eyes? Maybe that would help.”
Dom and Nick stood over me now, looking at me with concern.
Behind them, I saw one of the humans on the mattress start to move. A pale young woman with long brown hair, so long that it almost touched the floor, stood up and stretched her arms above her, yawning.
“Hey, Dom,” I said, jerking my chin toward the woman. The motion made my head spin again so I closed my eyes and dropped my head back down between my knees. When I opened my eyes again, I could see Dom reflected in the mirror, walking toward the woman with his hands out.
“It’s okay, Miss. I just need to talk to you,” he said.
I saw her turn to look at him, and she smiled, and then… then her reflection slowly faded away. I thought for a second that my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I realized that I could still see Dom, still moving toward her, still talking.
I jerked my head up and yelled, “Dom! Watch out!”
Dom, confused, turned back to look at me. Luckily for Dom, Nick caught on much more quickly, and was already pulling his crossbow up to shoot. The bolt hit the newly-made vamp right in the chest as she leaped at Dom.
I looked in the mirror again and hissed through my teeth as I realized that every single human we had carefully spared earlier either already had awoken or was in the process of waking up. And every last one of them, as they regained consciousness, lost his or her reflection.
And gained a lovely new set of fangs as a parting gift.
“Well, hell.” I muttered. I started struggling to get up.
“No,” said Tony. “You are not going to participate in this one.”
“Fine. But I am going to stand up so that I can at least defend myself if one of those vamps decides to ignore my doctor’s warnings.”
Behind him, Nick and Dom were holding the vampires at bay, Nick by shooting his crossbow every few seconds and Dom by waving a crucifix at them while Nick reloaded.
“Okay,” said Tony. “But unless they come over here, you are to lean against this wall. And that’s it. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Tony helped me stand up.
“That okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Now go help them.”
He sprinted off, stopping long enough to bend over and scoop up another crossbow and a bag of wooden bolts from the floor.
I concentrated on retaining my balance.
It really didn’t take the guys very long to finish off most of the new vampires. I had to admire their efficiency. Nick and Tony alternated shooting and reloading the two crossbows. Dom made sure the vampires who were down were really dead by running another stake through them.
Malcolm came back in the middle of the new fight. He walked in and, in his surprise, dropped the glass of orange juice he’d been carrying for me. The liquid splashed across the floor and mingled with the blood that had leaked out from the stump where Deirdre’s neck used to be.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Can I have the blanket, though? I’m really cold.”
“Sure,” he mumbled. He handed me the blanket without looking at me. I don’t think he was looking at anything. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders.
I think he might be in shock, I thought.
And then I passed out.
* * *
When I came to, I was sitting on the last bench seat in the van, leaning against Dom’s shoulder. In fact, we were all in the van, and headed back into the city. By all, I mean me, Nick, John, Dom, Tony, and Malcolm. And a strange young man tied up in the back of the van. Hog-tied. With a gag shoved into his mouth.
“Who’s that?” I asked no one in particular.
“Tony’s lab experiment,” Dom said.
“Yeah? Where you planning to keep him?”
“I’ll lock him in one of the rooms,” Tony said.
“In the shop?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Couldn’t we kill him first?”
“We already went through all this while you were out,” John said from the driver’s seat. “Tony wants to see if he can figure out how the vamps tick—he wants to check out how much poison they’ve got, how they deliver it, and what exactly hurts them. He needs one alive to do that.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess.” I snuggled back down into the blanket that was still wrapped around me. “Are we going to kill it when you’re done?”
“That’s the plan.”
I nodded and closed my eyes again. They snapped open again a moment later. “What did you guys do with Deirdre’s head?”
“We left it where you dropped it,” Nick said from the front seat. “I didn’t think you needed it any longer.”
“Won’t someone find it?” I asked. “Like the police or something?”
“I’m guessing that at least some of those humans upstairs will stick around long enough to clean up after us. They don’t want the police finding all those dead bodies any more than we do.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Is she okay?” I heard Malcolm whisper to Tony.
“I think so. She’s in shock, and that neck wound needs stitches. But other than that, I think she’s fine.”
“You don’t think that business with the head was a little,” Malcolm paused for a long moment, “…weird? I mean, you don’t think she’s lost her mind or anything, do you?”
“I heard that,” I said.
“I think she’s going to be just fine,” Tony said. I could hear a smile in his voice.
When we got back to the shop, John helped me climb out of the van and into the elevator. Dom and Nick carried the bound vampire by sliding some sort of stick—it looked like a broom handle—through the ropes and swinging him from it. They looked like the old pictures of people who had gone hunting for boar. When they got to the elevator, they slid him off of the pole and onto the floor. He bounced and grunted. Malcolm winced.
“Is it really necessary to hurt him?” he asked. The elevator door closed and I felt us begin our ascent.
“He’s a vampire,” Dom said. “Who cares if we hurt him?”
“Yeah, but he used to be a person,” Malcolm said. “I kind of got to know him over the last couple of days.”
“He’s not a person anymore,” Nick said. “And he’s certainly not the person you knew. If we let him, he’d kill every last one of us. Drain us dry. You can’t think of him as a person; he’ll use it against you if he can.”
The vampire glared up at us. His eyes, totally black, promised death. Nick was right. He wasn’t a person.
* * *
I called first dibs on the shower, since I was far and away the filthiest one of the group, but Tony insisted upon stitching up my neck first.
“You’re going to end up with a lot of battle scars,” he commented as he pulled the thread through the numbed skin around the wound.
“I guess I’m just going to have to give up my dream of becoming Miss America,” I said. Tony didn’t laugh.
By the time I got to the shower, much of the blood on my body had dried. I had to stand in the shower for a while to soften up my t-shirt so I could peel it off. I dropped it directly into the trash can. It took a long time to scrub the encrusted blood out from under my fingernails. And no matter how hard I scoured my skin or how hot I ran the water, I just didn’t feel clean. In the end, I borrowed a bottle of isopropyl alcohol from underneath the sink and poured it directly onto my body. I found a lot of little scrapes I hadn’t noticed until then that way—the alcohol burned like fire.
Cleansing fire.
I stepped out of the bathroom feeling better than I had in weeks. Better than I had since I had come home and found Greg in the arms of a vampire.
In fact, I felt so good that I didn’t even think to wonder about Greg until the next morning. I was pouring coffee in the kitchenette when John wandered in, and suddenly it hit me.
“Hey. John. Did you kill my ex for me last night?”
“Oh, that’s right. You were out when I got back.”
“So?”
“Nope. I didn’t find him. It was pretty much full dark by the time I got up there, so he probably took off. You worried about him finding you?”
I considered that. “You know what? I’m not. I mean, maybe I should be—he does know where I live, after all—but I’m really not. Do you think I should be?”
John laughed. “After last night, I don’t know anyone who should be less worried. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of you throwing open that basement door and standing there swinging that head at us.”
“Is that really what it looked like?” I asked.
“Yeah. I half expected you to let out some wicked warrior yell.”
I snickered. And before I knew it, John and I were both howling with laughter, holding on to the counter and wiping tears away from our eyes.
It wasn’t even that funny. I think we were laughing more from relief than anything. We had taken on Deirdre and her vampire army, and we had won. It was a fabulous feeling.
Later that day, Nick pulled me aside.
“Elle, Pearson wants to talk to you again,” he said.
“What does he want?”
“I think he wants to offer you a job.”
“Really? What kind of job?” I was honestly confused.
“Here. With us. Killing vampires.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I hadn’t considered it.”
Nick just shook his head. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“Understand what?”
“How rare it is to find someone who is willing to do what it takes to survive in this business.”
“Business?”
“You know what I mean, Elle. Quit stalling.”
And I did know what he meant. I didn’t know if I really did have whatever it was he was looking for in a vampire-killing employee—at least, not in the long term—but I did know that I felt stronger and more alive, right then on that day, having hunted and killed who knew how many vampires the night before, than I had ever felt before in my life.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, my voice serious. “Give me a few days and I’ll get back to you on it.”
Nick nodded.
* * *
Malcolm stopped me in the hall on my way back to my room. “I don’t really know how to put this,” he said.
I frowned and leaned back against the wall. “I can handle whatever you need to say, Malcolm.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I know we’re not dating or anything. But I think you know how I feel about you. How I felt about you.”
Ouch. I didn’t like the switch to the past tense.
“But after everything that’s happened, I think that maybe…” he paused and took another deep breath. “I think that maybe it would be a good idea if we didn’t see each other for a while. I just don’t know if I can handle all of this.” He waved his hand around. I knew he meant the shop, the guys, all of it.
“I did my part,” he said. “I went back in there. And now I’m out and it’s over and I think I need a break from all of it.” The last sentence came out in a rush of words, and then he was silent. Staring at me. Waiting for me to say something.
Finally I nodded. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay? That’s it? Just okay?”
“I don’t know what else to say, Malcolm. I didn’t want any of this either. But it’s here and I know about it and I can’t do anything about that. And Nick’s offered me a job—a permanent job—with these guys. I don’t know if I’m going to take it, but I am thinking about it.”
Malcolm just stared at me.
“Because the thing is,” I said, “the thing is this: there are monsters out there. Real ones. The ones who eat people up. The kinds that the police won’t find. And nobody knows about it. But I do.”
I took a deep breath. Suddenly I realized that I had already made my decision. “I can make a difference here,” I said. “I can do something that’s real, that’s important. So yeah, if you need to get away from ‘all this’”—I waved my hand around in an imitation of his earlier gesture—“then you’re right; you do need to take a break from seeing me. And the only thing I can think of to say is ‘okay.’”
I pushed myself up from against the wall.
And then I went to find Nick to tell him what I had decided.
* * *
I found Tony before I found Nick. When I pushed open the door to his lab, he was looking down speculatively at the unconscious vampire strapped to the examining table.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine.” He didn’t even look up.
“Problems?”
“I’m having a hard time figuring out what to use to knock him out tonight. I moved him onto the table this morning while he was still out for the day, but I want to get some work done tonight, and I don’t want to get my hand bitten off.” He didn’t look up at me as I left.
A few seconds later, I opened the door again and tossed him the stun baton I’d taken from the weapons room. Startled, he reached into the air and caught it seconds before it landed on the vampire.
“Stun him,” I said. “It’ll knock him out for at least a few minutes. Any time he gets any ideas about biting you, stun him again. He might eventually get the idea and lie still.”
Grinning at me, Tony said, “Thanks,” and I pulled the door closed behind me.
I was still smiling when I knocked on Nick’s office door and he called out for me to come in.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“Okay. I’ll do it. But we need to talk terms. I still want to finish my doctorate.”
A smile creased Nick’s face. “No problem.” He leaned back and kicked his feet onto his desk.
By the time I headed back to my room, I was an employee of Calvani Investigations, a subsidiary of Forster, Pearson, and Sims, Attorneys at Law.