Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast (8 page)

“Can you feel that?” His hand lingered on mine and I wanted him to hold me like he had earlier.

Suddenly, the cold sluggishness of fear crept through the door and made ribbons up my arm. I tried to pull away, but Alek wouldn't let me. Rage and disgust followed. Their hot nails tore at my flesh, though the only marks they left were in my mind—on my soul. Alek let loose my hand and repeated, “We're going in there. Remember, trust me. I'm your protector.”

As soon as he finished his sentence we were on the other side of the door.
I really wish he would warn me before he popped us places.
Alek nudged me toward the stairs and back into the reality I was trying unsuccessfully to escape. Like ghosts, we slid noiselessly up to the second floor. With each step the suffocating stench of smoky fear grew stronger. I wanted to vomit. At the top of the steps Alek took the lead. I let out a tiny sigh. Okay, right. He was my protector. Besides his superpower of zapping us places and kissing me into being a weird kind of vampire, he also must be super strong (as well as super hot). With him in front he could beat up any ancient boogey monster things lurking in the dark.

We walked into a room absent of all furniture except a metal table, the kind that morticians put dead bodies on. The cold room stank of bleach and blood, and the mixture became red and white ribbons of smoke that bit at my eyes. I scanned the room, amazed at how easily I could see through the smoke and shadows.

It was in one of those shadows that I saw her curly brown hair. I tore out from behind my protector and flew to her side. “Mom?!” The silence burned my ears. “Mom! Mom!” The soft vanilla I'd seen surrounding her earlier barely lingered within the rust-colored tendrils of hopeless-ness and panic, blinding me with fear. Tears washed my face, and my throat was hard and dry. “Alek, she's not moving. And I don't know what's wrong!” He was immediately at my side. I scrubbed at my eyes, wiping away tears and blinking through the otherworldly mists. He picked up my mother's limp body. She looked so unnaturally still and helpless it made my stomach roll. Mom was never helpless! She couldn't be!

“She's breathing. I'm sure she'll be fine.” Alek began to reassure me, but like a bad horror movie, that was exactly when the predator entered.

“Oh, look. It's a party. Jenna, you didn't tell me you wanted to watch. That could have been arranged. I like an audience.”

The man approaching me looked like the Paul I knew only briefly. Then my eyes grew hot and his body wavered, like heat rising from a hot summer road, and his true form was revealed to me. The smoke that swirled in and out of his body was terrible. It made his evil naked, and bared, he was fully exposed to me. I saw the sick creature he truly was. The souls of the people he had murdered shrieked purple ribbons of smoky agony from within him and tried to claw their way out from beneath his gray flesh. His eyes were fixed on me, but they wriggled in sockets swimming with parasites.
Putrid lie-filled glop fell from his scorched lips and ate the ground where it landed.

Thanks to my new superpowers, I knew him for who he was—Alastor. A Greek demon who led others to sin and murder.
He's the serial killer, and he was hunting my mom.

He had stopped moving toward us, and his body shimmered again, changing back into the Paul my mom had been tricked into caring about. “So, Mommy first, or you and your boyfriend?”

And it hit me. The rest of my new gift became clear. I turned to Alek, and in a commanding voice I barely recognized as my own I ordered, “Alek! Get her out of here! Call 911!”

Then I turned and faced the demon. “How about you start with me, asshole?” As I spoke I threw my arms wide and all of the tendrils of emotion swirling in the room rushed to me, wrapping around me, filling me with an incredible surge of power. I felt the dark emotions that had shimmered around Alastor enter my body and I knew the anger and hatred and awful strength of pure evil.

My mouth grew teeth I didn't know I had and my body began to vibrate with the power of the emotions I'd absorbed. I didn't think. I just felt and acted. I launched myself at the man my mother had trusted, wrapped my hands around his throat, and tried to tear off his suit of flesh. I had never felt so wild and so free. It was good to feel his flesh tear, to see his eyes bug out, to hear his whimper of terror. I was bloated with it, filled with darkness, and I wanted to rip him to pieces.

But before I could, Alek was pulling me from my opponent. He threw me against the wall so hard that, had I been alive, I would have surely died. By the time I shook off the shock and got to my feet, Alek had already finished him. He'd snapped his neck.
Let him off easy.
I threw myself at Alek, knocking him back. My fangs cut into my bottom lip and the amber blood that trickled onto my tongue only made my rage grow as Alek regained his balance. But instead of hitting me back, he calmly wrapped his arms around my anger-bloated body, and held me tightly. The hollow sound of his chest and the autumn air that was his scent surrounded us, and like a cool fall rain following a baking hot summer, his presence washed the anger from me, leaving me so weak that I began to cry.

“You can't let it control you. That's where the horror stories of vampires came from—that's why so many of us have inspired bad B movies and the nightmares of humans. It's what happens to us when we lose control. If we let our powers overwhelm us, then we become the monsters we've been created to hunt.” He set his chin on my head and I could feel him inhale the dried amber blood in my hair. “Feeding off him was enough. Don't let him taint you. You have to learn to keep the energy and let the evil go. His soul is back below in a far worse place than you could ever imagine, let that be punishment enough.”

I looked up at him and suddenly understood. “You called yourself my protector, but you're not here to protect me from them. You're here to protect me from me.”

“Yeah, that's right. Are you better now? Feel more like yourself?”

His voice was so deep, so incredibly gentle, and his eyes so warm that I lost myself in them. And then I saw the mist that surrounded him. It was a bright, brilliant amber—the same color as my blood. It reminded me of a clear and early dawn and new beginnings. The tendrils of gold wrapped around me, around us, and I couldn't help myself. I tiptoed and kissed him gently on the lips.

His blue eyes opened wide in surprise. Then he bent and kissed me back and I sank into him, finding my anchor, my center, my protector.

“Jenna, what's happening?”

At the sound of my mom's weak voice Alek and I sprang apart and I ran to where she lay just outside the room of death. I felt Alek move behind me, shielding her view of what used to be Paul.

“It's okay, Mom. It's gonna be fine,” I said, reaching out to hold her and breathing a sigh of relief as I saw the vanilla mist that surrounded her, once more cream-colored and healthy, completely free of the taint of death.

Alek stayed by my side, holding my hand and helping to strengthen me, keeping me from becoming overwhelmed by all of the tendrils of urgency, pain, and fear that surged with the presence of the police and EMTs and the neighbors who had started to mill around the front yard like worried sheep. He guided me to my mom, through the chaos that was invisible to everyone else but that I saw as mist within
fog, so thick and swirling it was overwhelming. Mom was completely conscious, though she had a nasty bump on her head. I was still feeling a little sick with worry until I heard her tell an EMT that if she could just have a few Xanax and a glass of wine she'd be fixed right up and could go on home.

“Miss, you can ride with your mother if you'd like,” the EMT called to me, still smiling at my mom's request for drugs and alcohol.

“Yeah, I'm coming,” I said, then I turned to Alek. I looked into his blue eyes and saw a future so different than anything I could have dreamed that I suddenly felt shy. “Uh, I'm going to ride with her since, ya know, she's hurt.” I giggled nervously. “Well, of course you do, you were—” He pulled me close and kissed my babbling lips. Leaves swept around my feet and wind rushed through my matted hair.

“I know.” His breath tickled my nose. “I'll follow. You still have a lot to learn.”

I jumped into the back of the ambulance and watched his cute butt as I walked all the way to his car. When he got to the bright green thing he looked back at me and his eyes glowed softly. “Hey,” he called. “I think you were right before. I think we do match.”

I grinned like a fool as the doors to the ambulance closed and my mom started pestering me with
who is that tall boy?
questions. As I tried to make up believable and not-get-me-in-trouble answers, I watched through the little glass windows while tendrils of caressing amber clung to the ambulance, guiding . . . protecting . . . ushering me into a whole new life.

 

 

 

 

L
iving in West Texas is sort of like living in Hell, but without the favorable climate and charming people. Living in Morganville, Texas, is all that and a takeout bag of worse. I should know. My name is Shane Collins, and I was born here, left here, came back here—none of which I had much choice about.

So, for you fortunate ones who've never set foot in this place, here's the walking tour of Morganville: It's home to a couple of thousand folks who breathe, and some crazy-ass number of people who don't. Vampires. Can't live with 'em, and in Morganville, you definitely can't live without 'em, because they run the town. Other than that, Morganville's a normal, dusty collection of buildings—the kind the oil boom
of the '60s and '70s rolled by without dropping a dime in the banks. The university in the center of town acts like its own little city, complete with walls and gates.

Oh, and there's a secluded, tightly guarded vampire section of town too. I've been there, in chains. It's nice, if you're not looking forward to a horrible public execution.

I used to want to see this town burned to the ground, and then I had one of those things, what are they called, epiphanies? My epiphany was that one day I woke up and realized that if I lost Morganville and everybody in it . . . I'd have nothing at all. Everything I still cared about was here. Love it or hate it.

Epiphanies suck.

I was having another one of them on this particular day. I was sitting at a table inside Marjo's Diner, watching a dead man walk by the windows outside. Seeing dead men wasn't exactly unusual in Morganville; hell, one of my best friends is dead now, and he still gripes at me about doing the dishes. But there's vampire-dead, which Michael is, and then there's
dead
-dead, which was Jerome Fielder.

Except Jerome, dead or not, was walking by the window outside Marjo's.

“Order up,” Marjo snapped, and slung my plate at me like a ground ball to third base; I stopped it from slamming into the wall by putting up my hand as a backstop. The bun of my hamburger slid over and onto the table—mustard side up, for a change.

“There goes your tip,” I said. Marjo, already heading off to the next victim, flipped me off.

“Like you'd ever leave one, you cheap-ass punk.”

I returned the gesture. “Don't you need to get to your second job?”

That made her pause, just for a second. “What second job?”

“I don't know, grief counselor? You being so sensitive and all.”

That earned me another bird, ruder than the first one. Marjo had known me since I was a baby puking up formula. She didn't like me any better now than she had then, but that wasn't personal. Marjo didn't like anybody. Yeah, go figure on her entering the service industry.

“Hey,” I said, and leaned over to look at her retreating bubble butt. “Did you just see who walked by outside?”

She turned to glare at me, round tray clutched in sharp red talons. “Screw you, Collins, I'm running a business here, I don't have time to stare out windows. You want something else or not?”

“Yeah. Ketchup.”

“Go squeeze a tomato.” She hustled off to wait another table—or not, as the mood took her.

I put veggies on my burger, still watching the parking lot outside the window. There were exactly six cars out there; one of them was my housemate Eve's, which I'd borrowed. The gigantic thing was really less a car than an ocean liner, and some days I called it the Queen Mary, and some days I called it Titanic, depending on how it was running. It stood out. Most of the other vehicles in the lot were crappy, sun-faded pickups and decrepit, half-wrecked sedans.

There was no sign of Jerome, or any other definitely dead guy, walking around out there now. I had one of those moments, those
did I really see that?
moments, but I'm not the delusional type. I had zero reason to imagine the guy. I didn't even
like
him, and he'd been dead for at least a year, maybe longer. Killed in a car wreck at the edge of town, which was code for
shot while trying to escape
, or the nearest Morganville equivalent. Maybe he'd pissed off his vampire Protector. Who knew?