Nick called three days later to tell me that Alec Pearson refused to meet with me.
“He says that the attack at Fordham must have been some sort of unlucky accident—he doesn’t believe that it had anything personal to do with you at all.” Nick’s voice sounded strange, tight and stressed.
“Really? And what do you think?” I asked. “You think my ex-boyfriend-turned-vampire just happened to be waiting for me? Do you think it’s all just bad luck in the vampire lottery?”
Nick sounded defeated. “I guess so.”
“Toeing the company line, Nick? That doesn’t really seem your style. I don’t believe that attack was any accident, and I don’t believe that you think it was, either.” My own voice rose to a higher pitch. “Greg was waiting for me. For me, Nick. And you know it.”
There was a little silence at the other end of the line, then Nick sighed.
“Whatever I might believe, Elle, I can’t force Alec to tell me anything he doesn’t want me to know. And I can’t force him to meet with you.”
“So what you’re saying is that I’m on my own?”
“Not exactly. Look, I’ll help you any way I can. But I can’t help you meet with Alec. And I can’t tell you anything or… or help you do anything that might…” he paused again, “run counter to my boss’s orders.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “So if I were to find out anything on my own…”
“I wouldn’t know anything about it. And I wouldn’t want you to tell me about it.”
“But if I happened to discover something entirely by myself, without any help from anyone at the law firm, and I needed to, say, take out a vampire or two just to keep myself safe, what then?”
“Hey. Killing monsters is what I do. If you find out anything on your own, you just give me a call and we’ll go take care of it.” Now I heard a grin in his voice.
“Okay, okay. I got it. I’m on my own until I figure this out. I’ll call you if I need you, Nick.” I was still angry, but I really couldn’t blame Nick too much—especially since I might need his help later. I couldn’t afford to alienate him now.
“And Elle—keep watching your back.”
I hung up the phone. Seconds later, it rang. It was Nick, calling me back.
“It’s not enough,” he said. He sounded almost angry.
“What’s not enough?”
“Just telling you to watch your back. You’re right. If he’s hunting you down, you need help. I still can’t tell you anything without Pearson’s permission, but I can at least help you figure out how to defend yourself against these things.”
I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I don’t think I had realized how terrified I was until that moment.
“Thanks, Nick.”
“No problem. And hey, maybe we can test your chopstick theory.” He gave me an address in Manhattan and we set a date for a training session the following Tuesday.
After we hung up, I stood staring at the floor of my apartment. I couldn’t rely on Nick for information. Don’t get me wrong—I was glad for the impending self-defense lessons. But I had to figure out what Alec Pearson knew. I didn’t want to do it alone, though.
I considered all the people I knew. It’s not like I didn’t have friends—I knew lots of people in the history graduate program, people I sometimes met for lunch or an afternoon drink.
I considered them one by one. Jenna, with her flowing skirts and vegetarianism and neo-hippy-flower-child cheerfulness. Justin, a tall thin gay man with a penchant for suspenders. Lita, who chain-smoked, waving her cigarette around as she intently pronounced the dangers of “allowing the patriarchy to control our actions.” Carla, small and blonde and round, anxious to make sure everyone around her was happy.
Not one of them was the sort of person to whom I could say “Hey, remember Greg? My fiancé? Well, he’s an evil vampire now. I need help killing him.”
Any one of them would start trying to convince me to seek professional help. And they couldn’t even begin to imagine how much therapy I was going to need when this was all over.
Nope. None of them could help. And I didn’t want to destroy their lives. I was fairly certain that they were safe so long as Vampire-Greg didn’t connect them to me. It should be easy enough. Greg had never been one to hang out with my friends. I doubted he even remembered their names, much less what they looked like. So I could probably keep them all safe by keeping my distance from them.
I closed my eyes. Oh, God, I thought. I can’t face this thing alone.
I opened my eyes again, struck by a sudden thought. There was one person who had already been seen by Vampire-Greg, who had offered his help when I needed it.
Malcolm Owens.
I knew it wasn’t fair to drag him into this. He didn’t have any connection to me. He didn’t have any reason to be willing to help. For all I knew, he was in league with the vampires.
But if he wasn’t connected to the vampires, he might already be in danger—especially if Vampire-Greg had any way of finding out who he was.
Okay. So I knew I was rationalizing.
But I really, really didn’t want to be alone with this stuff any longer.
And if I was going to try to get information about what Greg had been working on when he was attacked, I needed help—I’d met several of the younger lawyers in Greg’s firm when he worked there, so I couldn’t just walk in; someone would almost certainly recognize me. I needed someone else to go undercover for me.
I dug Malcolm’s number out of the inner pocket of my purse without giving myself any more time to think about it.
I was trying to figure out what I’d say when his voicemail picked up, so I left a simple message: “Hi, Malcolm. This is Elle Dupree. I decided to go ahead and take you up on that offer for lunch. Give me a call when you get a chance.” I left my number and hung up.
* * *
I finally made it back to classes on Monday.
“Hey,” said Jenna as I slipped into the seat next to her. “Where were you last week?”
I looked at her for a long moment. “Greg and I broke up,” I said.
“Oh, honey,” she said, putting her hand out and touching my arm. “I am so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Let’s grab coffee after class,” Jenna whispered as Dr. Sanchez walked into the room.
Coffee turned into lunch as I told Jenna as much of the story as I felt like I could. Minus the vampire bit, of course.
“I walked in on him with someone else,” I said, leaving her to draw her own conclusions.
“Who was she?” Jenna asked. “Did you know her?”
“It was a man,” I said. I stared down at the ground. I probably looked miserable, but I was also trying to hide the pleasure I took from giving her that little detail.
“Oh, no,” Jenna said. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Well,” she said, settling back into her seat and taking a sip of her coffee. “I know this is hard to hear right now, but if that’s what he wants, it’s better to know it now than after you’re married.”
I nodded in agreement. “I know you’re right. It’s hard, though. But listen,” I leaned forward and held out my scraped palms. “If you see Greg, get away from him. He hit me after I caught him. Pushed me down.”
“Elle!” Jenna said. “You have to make a police report.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t think he’ll be back. But just in case I’m wrong, don’t let him get close to you. Promise me.”
Jenna looked dubious, but she nodded. “I promise. I still think you should go to the police, though.”
“And will you cover for me if I have to miss class again?” I asked. “I’m having a hard time with this.”
“Of course I will,” she said. She rubbed my arm. “And so will everyone else. I’ll tell them, if you want me to. So that you don’t have to. I know how hard this is for you.”
Oh, if only you did, I thought. But what I said was “Yes. Please. And thank you.”
* * *
The address Nick had given me turned out to be some martial arts training facility in Manhattan. It was in what looked like a regular office building, with a FedEx and a Starbucks on the bottom floor.
Nick was already there, stretching and warming up on the wooden floor. He was awfully flexible for such a muscled man; when I walked through the door, his right leg was forward in split pose, and he was touching the ground with his inner thighs. I don’t know that I had ever before met a man who could do the splits.
As far as I could tell, we were the only two people in the small suite of rooms. When I asked Nick about it, he said, “I’ve rented the dojo out for the next three hours.”
Three hours. I didn’t think my occasional afternoon workouts at the campus gym had really prepared me for this.
I was right. I warmed up with him, stretching out on the floor in a variety of unlikely poses. Luckily for me, I remembered enough of my childhood dance and gymnastics lessons—the kind that practically every girl my age had taken as a child—to keep up with him. More or less.
Then we got into the lesson itself.
“When you’re fighting vamps,” Nick said, tossing me a sharpened stake, “you really only need to know two things: how to hit them in the heart and how to keep them from grabbing you. We’ll start with staying away from them.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes learning to duck and weave without dropping my pointy stick.
“Vamps are fast,” Nick said, “but even they usually telegraph their next movement. It’s a bad idea to look at their eyes, so you have to watch the way they sway, watch for twitches that might indicate which way they’re going to move next.”
He demonstrated several moves, and I copied them over and over until they felt almost natural. I was again thankful for early dance training.
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s see you do that against an opponent.” He moved across from me and grabbed at me. I ducked and spun away from his hand. He nodded approvingly.
I was still basking in that approval when he reached out and snagged my arm. He twisted it up and behind me until I winced in pain and dropped the stake in my hand. As soon as this was over, I was going to sign up for yoga lessons. I clearly needed to be able to twist my body in unnatural directions.
“You can’t quit watching a vamp, even for a second,” he said.
“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.” I pulled away from him and rubbed my arm. I was ready the next time he grabbed for me and I twisted away, dropping down to a crouch and sliding away by shifting my weight. This time I didn’t wait for his approval, but danced around behind him. We did this for another half hour, and he rarely caught me.
“Now let’s add the stake,” he finally said. He rummaged around in his black gym bag at the side of the room and pulled out a vest of some sort. When he strapped it on, I saw that it had several red circles painted on it.
“Body armor,” he said when he noticed me watching him. “It’s new—both bullet- and knife-proof. If vamps were smart, they’d start wearing these. It would be almost impossible to kill them if they did. Lucky for us they haven’t figured it out yet.
“These targets,” he said, pointing to the red dots, “are kill zones. If you hit a vamp hard enough with a correctly-angled stake at any of these spots, you’re almost guaranteed a killing strike. So. Hit me.”
I thrust a stake at his chest, hitting slightly below the heart target. Nick reached down and corrected the angle of the stake.
“Don’t hold back. If you can knock the wind out of me, then you’re hitting hard enough to kill a vamp.”
It took me four or five tries to finally hit him in a way he found acceptable.
“You’d be dead by now if I’d really been a vamp,” he said.
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I muttered.
“I’m not here to encourage you. I’m here to teach you to kill vampires.”
After about thirty minutes, I was fairly consistently hitting the kill zones.
“Okay. Let’s put it all together now,” Nick said.
By the end of the three hours, I could dance and spin around Nick as he lunged for me. And about half the time, I could actually kill the “vampire” attacking me.
“Nice work,” he said. He tossed me a towel from a stack by the door. “I always like teaching these techniques to women. They may not have as much upper body strength as the guys on my team, but they tend to be better at the movements.”
I wiped my face on the towel. “You’ve taught this stuff to women before?”
“Used to have a woman on my team,” he said. “Scarlett. Ex-cop. Damn good fighter.”
“What happened to her?” I almost dreaded hearing the answer. If he said she’d been killed by a vampire, I might never leave my apartment again.
“She quit,” he said shortly. I didn’t pursue it—his tone didn’t invite curiosity.
Nick began packing his gear back into his bag. “Okay. Let’s go kill some vamps.”
“What?” My voice squeaked out of me.
“You wanted to learn how to kill vamps. You’ve got the basics. Now let’s put it into practice.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
As we walked out of the building, the last of the sun’s rays stretched out across the sky. We climbed into the van and Nick pulled away from the curb.
“This should be a fairly easy job,” he said. “Just two vamps holed up in an apartment on the upper West side. Normally I’d handle it by myself, so it seems like a good training opportunity.”
I still wasn’t sure I agreed that I was ready, but at least I felt marginally safer with Nick along.
We pulled up in front of a building near Morningside Park on a dark winding street. The buildings of Columbia University glowered over us from the top of a hill, negating what little sunlight filtered down to the streets below. Nick parked the van and got out, swinging his gym bag. As we approached the front entrance, he handed me a couple of stakes. I gripped one in each hand and hoped I wouldn’t need more.
“Stay behind me. Don’t engage with them unless you have to, but be prepared to fight.”
I nodded nervously, and he walked in the main entrance. It had had a buzzer at one time, but the lock had been broken open. The building wasn’t abandoned, though. There were stained welcome mats in front of a few of the apartment doors, and I could smell something cooking, something spicy, like curry. From a floor somewhere up above, I could hear a baby crying.
We made our way up two flights of stairs. Nick walked to a door and without hesitating, kicked it in.
I’d never seen someone kick in a door before. It’s pretty impressive. I guess the vamps inside thought so, too, because when I followed Nick into the apartment, they were cringing against the far wall, hissing and growling.
This was the first really good look I got at a vampire—I’d been too busy killing the first one and running away from the second one to get more than a fleeting impression of what they looked like when they were alive—or undead, anyway. I realized that these vampires didn’t look like the vampires I’d seen in movies. In movies, the vampires look fairly human; they just have some long pointy teeth up top.
These vampires looked fairly human, too, until they opened their mouths. Unlike movie vampires, they had long pointy fangs both top and bottom—upper and lower fangs. Once they opened their mouths, they looked utterly inhuman. They looked like animals. The sort of animals who will eat you for dinner.
Nick stepped slowly across the threshold, and I followed behind him.
Black painted plywood covered the windows, but from the single bulb dangling in the hallway I could see that the apartment was a mess. A yellowed carpet full of small cigarette burns covered the wooden planks of the floor. There were several stained blankets on top of the carpet, but no furniture. Ashtrays overflowed onto the floor and onto the body of a young woman.
Very young. Sixteen or seventeen, at the most. She lay on her side, as if she’d gone to sleep. But her skin was white and bloodless, and her eyes were open. She was totally naked and had bite marks all over her body. All over. Up and down her arms and legs, on her neck, I could even see one in her armpit. She was thin, with stringy brown hair. In fact, she was thin to the point of emaciation, like she hadn’t eaten well in a long time. Probably a runaway.
A red haze crossed my eyes, and when it cleared, I was furious. I couldn’t stand the thought of these two leeches bringing that poor defenseless girl up here and draining her dry. Her life might not have mattered to anyone else, but suddenly it mattered to me.
Nick had told me to stay behind him.
I had every intention of staying behind him.
Really.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I flew past him in a rage, screaming that same wordless scream I’d howled out when I’d seen Greg dangling from a vampire’s grip.
I wanted them to die. Painfully.
And then they were away from the wall and I was in between them, spinning and dancing and jabbing at them with my stakes.
I don’t think they even ever knew what hit them, really. They had stepped away from the wall to attack us as soon as they realized that the light streaming into the darkened apartment was from a light bulb and not the sun. But instead of jumping us, they found themselves set upon by a screaming banshee with a stake in each hand.
I took the first one out almost instantly. I slammed a stake into his heart, up under the ribcage, just as Nick had shown me. I flipped the other stake from my left hand into my right and turned to face the second vampire.
He grabbed at me, but I swerved away from him and spun back to smash the second stake into his heart, as well.
I stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, looking around for something else to hit with a stake.
The only possible target was Nick, and he was still standing in the doorway, his mouth hanging open in surprise.
I let my hands drop to my sides and stood up straighter.
“They pissed me off,” I said.
“Apparently,” he replied. And then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard that he bent over and held his stomach.
“What?” I growled.
Nick controlled his laughter with some difficulty and looked up at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “You just call me if you ever need backup, okay?”
Nick pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and called his team in to help with the clean-up. When they got there, the three guys looked around.
“Nice place,” Dominick, the shortest of the three, muttered.
“Good kill though,” John said.
“It’s not mine,” Nick said. “It’s hers.” All three of them turned around to stare at me.
“By yourself?” John asked me. “Again?”
“I got angry,” I offered. It sounded lame, even to me.
Dominick let out a low whistle. “Wow.”
Tony didn’t say anything, just looked at me appraisingly.
Nick and I left before the other guys had finished their Merry Maids routine. I wondered what they did with the dead bodies, but I didn’t ask. Nick drove out to the Bronx and dropped me off at my apartment.
“Call me if anything important comes up, okay? See you later, Dixieland.”
“Dixieland?”
“Yeah. You know. New Orleans. Dixieland.” He grinned and waved.
I waved back and went inside, happy to be home. And even happier to know that the first time hadn’t been a complete fluke. I could kill vampires.
It made me feel a little safer.