Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock) (7 page)

Loriann had left him water, and he forced himself to drink every time he woke. Toward what he judged was midafternoon, the drugs wore off and the nerves in his muscles and flesh began to protest, itching and burning, tight with the futile resistance of the night before. He stood and began to stretch, trying to remember the moves his youngest sister had made when she took up yoga and vegetarianism at age thirteen. Surprisingly the slow stretching helped. When he could move without too much pain, he shoved an edge of his sheet between the shackle and his skin, and began to walk the length of his chain. It clanked hollowly as he moved; the dust beneath him was fine, almost soothing, as it slid around his feet.

Pulling the chain to its full length, Rick searched the parts of the barn he could reach. He found a rake head, the kind with five thick tines for throwing hay. One tine was broken, but he could wrap the fingers of his left hand around the handle's base and slide those of his right through the tines. It was a pretty good weapon against a lesser being than a vampire. For Isleen, the handle would have made a better weapon, a stake to plunge into her black heart. But there was no handle.

I could kill the girl, though.

The thought shocked, like a bucket of icy water. He stood unmoving, his thigh muscles trembling, his stomach cramping with hunger. The iron cool between his fingers.

A weapon. He could kill Loriann. Kill her and take her key. And go to
the Master of the City. He turned the rake head over in his hands. The iron was hard and deadly, rusted at the break. The tines were sharp, still showing flakes of green paint between them.
I could kill the girl.

The nuns had made it clear to them that all men could kill. Cain and Abel had been objects of lecture—the very first sibling rivalry and the very first murder.
I could kill the girl. Grab her. Throw her to the ground. Plunge the
tines into her abdomen, just below her rib cage.
The idea turned his stomach. But . . .
I could kill the girl.

He swiped experimentally at the air. It was a clumsy weapon. If he killed Loriann, her little brother would likely die before Rick could get to Pellissier and convince the MOC to go after one of his own. And, of course, he'd have to live with himself after.

I could kill the girl.

Rick took the weapon and sat on the black stone, trying to use the remaining tines to pick the lock on the shackle. They were too big for the tiny keyhole, but a nail might work. Excitement buzzed through him. Horses were shod with nails.

He set the rake head aside and fell to his hands and knees, his fingers sifting through the fine dust. He concentrated on the area near the walls, as a good farrier would never leave a shoeing nail lying in the center of the barn, where it might injure the tender part of a horse's hoof. But if one went flying, it might land in the shadows, lost. He felt his way along one wall before his fingers found something hard and slender in the dust. His heart gave a single hard thump. A nail.

But it was larger than might be used for shoeing a horse—a tenpenny nail, too thick to fit into the keyhole.
I could kill the girl.
Tears gathered in his eyes, burning. His nose ran. He laid his head against the wood and closed his eyes as tears leaked slowly from his eyes and trickled through the dust on his face.
I could kill the girl. Hail Mary, full of grace,
he thought.
I could kill the girl. Hail Mary, full of grace . . .

A measure of peace fell into the air with the words to rest across his shoulders and settle into his heart. The words of the Apostles' Creed came to him, as clear as if Sister Mary Thomas were standing over him in the barn, ruler in hand, tapping his skull each time he forgot a word. She had never hurt him, but that ruler was a constant threat. Eyes closed against the falling light, he whispered, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth. . . .” Murmuring the creed and starting the rest of the rosary, he searched the barn to the reaches of his bindings.

By the time he was done, he had found three more tenpenny nails and discovered the boards of a stall wall that had been replaced. The carpenter had dropped the nails during his repair job. Rick placed the nails with the rake head, a metal button, a buckle, part of a leather bridle with two rusted rings, a broken plastic spoon, and a dog collar. Nothing that would kill a vampire.

He was filthy, his sheet so full of dust that he looked as if he had been rolling around on the ground. Which he had. Sister Mary Thomas would have smacked him with her ruler if he'd come back in from recess looking like this. Nuns, especially the older ones, still believed in corporal punishment, although not to the black-and-blue state. And back when he was in school, he had figured they practiced punishment searching for perfection—though whether they hunted for the perfection of the method of chastisement or perfection of the souls of their charges, he had never decided. When he was a lot older and a little wiser, he figured he had been a pain in the nuns' collective butts and had brought the punishment on himself.

It was late afternoon when he thought to use the rake tines to pry and chop a stake from the old wood. And felt so stupid that he started laughing. “I'm an idiot,” he said. “A damn fool idiot.”

He chose a board low down on the wall that could be hidden in piled dust, and felt along it with his fingers, searching out a weak spot. He found one in the corner, damp from long contact with the ground. Rick pried into the grain with the tines and started to chop.

•   •   •

Rick stopped chopping before dark and hid his tools, tucking the rake head into the shadows of the stall wall across from his work site and covering it with a natural-looking pile of stall dust. He stepped back and, seeing his footprints, knelt and brushed them away. When it still didn't look totally natural, he picked up handfuls of dirt and tossed them into the air. They made a convincingly haphazard pattern when they fell, and he repeated the dirt-tossing everywhere. It left him sneezing but feeling safer.

He had decided during the slow course of his labor that he couldn't kill the little witch. She might deserve it, but she was as trapped as he was.
And maybe he didn't have premeditated murder in him. When it came to humans. But if push came to shove, he'd find a way to kill himself before he'd let Isleen bind him with black magic. And he had the weapon, nicely hidden, that would do the deed easily. If he couldn't get away in twenty-four hours, then . . . then he'd find the pulse point on the inside of his elbow and puncture his artery with a sharp tine. Or he'd fall on the tines. Something. He'd be dead meat when Isleen came for him, which brought grim satisfaction.

Just having a plan was enough to raise his spirits and help him to face another night bound to the stone. Well, a plan and the first of his weapons. If he'd had half a brain, he would have been ready to put the plan into action tonight, but he'd moped away half the day and had only part of the tools he needed.

He had excised two stakes from the bottom board of the stall wall; he hefted them in his hands, feeling for weight and balance. They were short, maybe too short at only eight inches, give or take.

A good stake needed to be wide enough at the base to provide stability in one's grip and strength in a thrust but narrow enough to slide between ribs. Vamp hunters each had their own preferences as to length and circumference, based on hand and grip size and upper-body strength. For most, fourteen inches was way too long and increased the chance that the vampire might bat the weapon away before it hit home or twist his body and cause the tip to miss the heart. Anything smaller than ten inches was considered too short. Rick's stakes were only around eight inches long, shorter than most, which put him at a disadvantage. Not that he'd planned it. He had been trying to pry out a single long stake with the objective of making two twelve-inch stakes from the one. It had broken, teaching him patience he hadn't wanted to learn.

The effect of the day's labor on his infected wounds was obvious. They were bigger and more painful, and his arm from fingertips to elbow was now a constant throb of infection. But he'd worry about the arm later. If he survived.

He tested the heft of the stakes, making sure he could grip with his swollen hand. The stakes were as big around on the blunt end as his thumb, and nicely pointed. Stakes needed to be about the circumference of a drumstick to pierce through skin, pass between ribs, and puncture a heart
without snagging on muscle, cartilage, or bone, and without breaking. His were rough and full of splinters, which might catch on tissue instead of sliding through and between. Tomorrow he would smooth them as much as possible with the few metal scraps he had uncovered.

Rick had never killed a vampire. He'd never killed anything but deer and a few turkeys. He'd never forgotten his first kill—a buck that got hung on a downed limb in a bayou near his house and was being attacked by gators. He couldn't save the deer. So he'd stolen his daddy's shotgun and put it out of its misery. It had taken four rounds, and he'd cried for days.

But killing a vampire, killing Isleen, he figured he could do. And he wouldn't cry a single tear. He'd probably be laughing his head off when he buried his stake in her black heart.

He studied the final stake, now only half-removed from the wall. It was longer, a bit wider, and the wood was paler, with a tighter grain. Tomorrow night Isleen would have a problem when she showed up. Tonight . . . tonight he was going to be in a spot of discomfort. As the sun set and golden rays poured through the slats of the barn, he shook as much of the filth out of the sheet as he could, then used a stake to stretch to the hose and turn on the water Loriann had showered him with. Lastly he hid the stakes in different spots and covered his tracks. When the little witch showed up at his barn door, he was clean and dry and waiting.

•   •   •

That night was worse than the previous one, as much because of his psyche as the fact that the injured skin was being worked on again. And, of course, the throbbing of infection. He bled more, he had to work harder to control his breathing, and Loriann didn't drug him this time, so he felt everything. Including a whole lot more pissed off.

Somehow it had been easier to accept being tattooed against his will when he'd woken up chained. Having to lie down like a willing sacrifice and be shackled to the black stone sucked, especially when he'd sworn he'd never do it again. The only break the witch gave him was when she transferred her tools to the other side and started work on his other arm. It was some kind of circular design. He'd thought at first that she was tattooing Christ's crown of thorns on him, but when he asked, she shook her head and said, “Shut up. I'm working.”

So much for casual conversation. There was no more getting-to-know-
you conversation either. In fact the only sound was his breathing like a bellows, his occasional gasp, and Loriann mumbling under her breath. Spell casting, he figured.

But at least he knew what the big tat was. Cats. Which made some sense from her original question—cats, horses, or wolves? In her oblique way, she had had been asking him to pick his tat. He could make out a mountain lion and what looked like a house cat.

His mom would be royally ticked off. His parents had long ago proclaimed that no child of theirs would come home with a tattoo. But if he had to have a tattoo, Loriann did good work.

Two hours before dawn, Loriann packed up her torture implements and allowed him to wash off and eat a meal. Near dawn Isleen appeared in a whoosh of air, creating her own wind, and stood there bent over him, fully vamped-out, fangs exposed and fresh blood on her mouth and chin. Her fingers were almost warm—though still cooler than a human's—where she traced the tattoos, and they grew warmer when she slid her fingertips up to touch the pulse point in his throat.

Her body was bent weirdly, as if her spine was more articulated, snakelike. Her fingers were spread, and bloody claws were out, held wide, fingers curved as if to catch prey. Rick couldn't help the hard thump of his heart or the way it raced when she bent lower, folding herself in two, and licked the trace of his blood from his skin with a dead, cold tongue. A shiver raced over his skin, and Isleen laughed, her vamped-out eyes blacker than the doorway into hell.

“You have done well, little witch,” she whispered, her chilled, fetid breath blowing across Rick's face. “He tastes . . . lovely.”

“Thank you, mistress,” Loriann whispered, her face averted from the vampire.

“You will be finished tomorrow?”

“Before the moon rises, mistress.”

“Good. I shall be here. The ceremony will go forward.”

“And Jason?” Loriann whispered even more softly, as if the words strangled in her throat.

“Who? Oh.” Isleen stood and flicked her fingers as if brushing something inconsequential from her. “The child. You may have him when the work is completed.”

“Will you bring him when you come?”

Isleen tilted her head to the side, that lizard-movement thing again that vampires never did in front of humans because they knew it creeped out their dinner. “I suppose I can bring him. Perhaps seeing him will convince you to work well and finish the project on time.”

“Yes, mistress.” But the witch was watching Rick through her dyed tresses, some meaning in her expression.

“Before midnight, then, witch, for the ceremony.” And Isleen was gone. Loriann unlocked three of his shackles, gathered up her belongings, and walked to the door just as the sun rose over the horizon. Framed in golden light in the doorway, she stopped. “You'll have only a moment,” she whispered. And then she, too, was gone.

Rick rose and wrapped himself in the clean sheet she had left folded on the black stone. Pressed into the dirt by the rectangular shape of the kit that carried her needles was a knife, its sturdy blade about four inches long, and a rasp, a kind of sanding implement used by farriers when they needed to reshape a horse's hooves. It was perfect for smoothing rough wood implements. The kind one might make with a knife, from boards in a barn, to kill vampires.