Crossed (28 page)

“I think I left my stake in the car.” I waved at Lisette. “Be right back.”

“Tuez-la!”
Grandma yelled in French, but I knew what she meant: Kill her.

In this part of downtown, newly refurbished buildings stood side by side with old ones, and the trees that once lined the streets were mostly gone, replaced by iron grids over sad-looking mulch.
Wood. Wood. Wood. I need wood.
I could punch through a wall, try to find a two-by-four. . . . I rolled through the glass of an abandoned furniture store with a lease sign in the window before I could change direction. I had a new plan . . . and it was much more fun.

The injured gargoyles came after me as expected. I ran out through the back, feet covered in cuts and glass, but they
weren’t holy wounds, so the pain was small and fleeting. The rear fire door wrenched free of its brick moorings when I hit it, and up the fire escape I went. One tiny jump for a vampire . . . At full speed, the edge of my vision blurred and I imagined a sonic boom (or maybe it was real, but I suspect it was only in my head). A series of rapid-fire jumps conjured a further image, one of Ricochet Rabbit from those old cartoons.

Gargoyles followed in slow motion. Each footstep hurt less and less as the particles of glass reached their maximum depth. Rooftops vanished below me as I raced back in the direction of Lisette, raised up my arms, and did a swan dive from about five stories up.

Her head came up at the final second, but she did the human thing: she reacted with surprise instead of moving.

“Qu’est-ce—?”

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” See! Now why hadn’t Dad been there to hear that?

I hit Grandma in the wings, driving her to the ground, smashing her face against the street. She threw her arms out in front of her. Bones snapped. Some hers. Some mine. Black ichor, zombie nastiness, flowed out from the wounds. It pooled at my knees and around her chest. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t give her time to heal. I forced her over onto her back, her left wing ripping as she rolled onto it at an unnatural angle.

I hit the sweet spot over her sternum just right, popped it, and went straight for the heart. Grandma’s chest cavity was rotten on the inside. The obsidian flesh of her uber vamp body was full of rancid meat and pus. In the middle of it all, one organ was beautiful and full, untouched by corruption: her heart. It came free with a wet snap, more easily than a human’s, and I leapt up, ignoring the pain in my knees, attempting to run on legs that’d broken.

“What on earth?” Talbot looked at me, eyes wide, nostrils
flared, and smelling like fear. A grunt of annoyance passed my lips when my broken legs wouldn’t support my weight.

Gargoyles hit the ground behind me and Talbot leapt forward to engage them, silver claws gleaming in the night.

“Greta, run!”

“I’m trying!”

Seizing Grandma’s heart between my fangs freed up my hands, and I began to crawl. Her blood hit my tongue with all the heat of tobacco and none of the taste, kicking my regeneration into overdrive. Shards of glass pushed out of my feet as I stood on knees reknitting with audible pops and snaps. She tasted like Dad.

Now all I had to do was get Grandma’s heart to a piece of wood so that I could impale it. If you can’t bring Muhammad to the mountain . . .

A cry of rage broke through the night, and the street filled with the scurry and screech of rodents (winged and otherwise). Clumps of rats erupted from the sewer drains. Bats, a billowing cloud of them thick enough to block out the moon, descended upon the street. There was nowhere to run, and I could not get away. Vermin came from everywhere, tearing at my skin, gnawing, ripping, and biting. I struggled against the tide, smashing some with my arms and others with my fists, but there were too many. Vanishing under the wave of living fury, I smiled before my face was torn away.

Good girl, Grandma,
I thought.
Very cool. You think you have me? Then come try to stake me. I need a stake anyway.

Soon, my nerve endings gone, the pain faded and I waited. Rats fought over the tender morsels within my skull and it made me want to watch
Tatsu 7
something fierce. A hazard, I suppose, of watching anime from inside a human skull too many nights in a row.

Come on, Grandma.

The body is just an interface. Except for Dad, most vampires don’t see with eyes or hear with ears, not really. They can, but if vampires adapt, if they give in, all of those senses are really activated by the magic that makes them undead. Maybe that’s why I’m hungry all the time. Living like I do, always on when I’m awake, consumes the blood that powers me faster than other vampires. They let the meat be more than it is, and I don’t.

Do you really think it’s muscle that lets a vampire be superstrong, that human muscle, somehow supercharged by blood, lets us move so fast and grow claws? No, the body is just an interface. Since Grandma could still use her powers with her heart ripped out, I knew she knew, but what I was counting on was that, despite all that knowledge, she didn’t truly understand. Hardly any of them do.

If I concentrated, I could feel little pieces of myself in a thousand different stomachs, catching glimpses of my nearly bare skeleton. I looked so . . . thin. Concentrating on holding back my regeneration and on keeping my bones together, concentrating on keeping her heart locked in my jaws (though the rodents refused to touch it), I waited.

If the rats noticed my bones didn’t pull apart as they should have once the tissue was gone, they didn’t say anything or give any warning in a language Grandma understood. I lost track of Talbot, but from the sound of things, he went toe-to-toe with Grandma and lost. I heard a scream like a skinned cat and assumed it was him. Poor kitty. He wasn’t part of the plan, though. I didn’t need him.

“Avez-vous mon baton?”
Grandma asked. I barely made out her words over the screech and scrabble of my furry little diners.

“Oui, madame.”
A single out-of-breath gargoyle gasped through clenched teeth. I couldn’t hear any others.
Good job, Kitty.

Vermin parted to reveal Grandma, one end of a wooden
baton in her hand. She had transformed back into her human form again, but her clothes were ripped and torn. Her hand shook as she approached, baton held like a dagger. She’d broken it into a rude approximation of a traditional stake. Her hands blurred as she jabbed it where she thought my heart would re-form.

Poor stupid Grandma.

With skeletal hands, I grabbed her wrist, pulling the stake directly into my waiting mouth, right through her own heart, which I’d been holding so carefully for so long.

My mouth opened wide and the clamped cardiac muscle (and intruding stake) fell free, only to be caught in my still skeletal phalanges.

“I bet you weren’t expecting that one, Grandma.”

Her body fell backward among the scattering rats with a sickening
splurch.
I tried to smile, but couldn’t, due to the lack of flesh. It produced an uncomfortable phantom sensation and perhaps, in the gullet of some rat or other, my severed cheek muscles twitched.

A lone remaining gargoyle stared as I pulled the tire iron from my cracked sternum, careful not to accidentally free Grandma’s
memento mori,
and stuck it down into Grandma’s still gaping chest cavity. My eye sockets flared red.

“Boo!” I took a step toward the gargoyle and it ran. With Grandma and her
memento mori
incapacitated, her hold over the crowd fell away and the screams started, first one, then another, and the crowd descended into panic.

I like screams . . . but they’re
so expensive.

My fangs sank into Grandma’s heart once more and my flesh re-formed in a violent explosion of regenerative magic. I lifted Grandma’s body with one arm and headed down the street toward the concert, still gnawing at her heart-on-a-stick. Six blocks down, a police cruiser waited, sirens blazing, lights flashing. Talbot stood there next to Captain Stacey.

In Void City, vampires and other supernaturals have to pay “fang fees” if they pull stupid stunts the Veil of Scrythax can’t cover up on its own. Captain Stacey is the person who hands them out, and he’s a Mouser. He’ll even do “off the clock” jobs for the right price. Last year, Auntie Rachel had paid him off to help her capture New Mom and Talbot during the whole demon-trying-to-steal-Daddy’s-soul thing. He’s much more fun to be around when he’s just writing tickets and doing day job stuff. Captain Stacey pointed to a mage casting some sort of spell in the distance, and Talbot cringed. Both Mousers were shaking their heads. Talbot was writing out a check with a lot of zeroes in the amount.

Men and women in Public Works uniforms worked their way through the crowd, only a few of them bothering to look up at me as I approached. I dumped Grandma’s body next to the police car, holding the heart-on-a-stick in one hand and the
memento-mori
-on-a-tire-iron in my other.

Now all I had to do was wait until tomorrow so that I could read Grandma a third time and figure out the one true way to kill her.

“Hey, cool,” I said by way of greeting. “Do I get to ride in a police car?”

    28    

GRETA:

DEATH OF THE PARTY

An hour later, Grandma’s body, her still-staked heart, and her pinioned necklace were safely ensconced in Fang’s trunk. A dozen new pink “Welcome to the Void” baby-doll T-shirts sat on the back seat next to thirteen new shirts for Dad: ten black, two of the new white ones, and one royal blue, all purchased by Talbot from a lucky vendor. I was wearing one of mine along with a pair of low-rise jeans, decorative chains hanging from either side, a studded black belt, and a pair of pink Skechers. Talbot had sent Magbidion for my clothes when I’d decided I didn’t want to put the dress back on.

Magbidion, Talbot, and I stood in the front row, waiting for Winter’s set to begin. A thousand or more people crowded around the stage, some sitting on the grass, others in lawn chairs. Part of the grassy area at center stage had been cordoned off with blue velvet ropes overseen by a group of bouncers from the Artiste Unknown. Somewhere else in the city, maybe at the Highland Towers, maybe back at the Pollux, Lord Phillip wanted to speak with me again, but I didn’t care.

“Can I eat that guy over there? The one with the nummy looking tats?”

“Not if you want to see the show.” Talbot grabbed Magbidion’s arm and held his exposed forearm in front of my face. “Do you need to take a hit off Mags?”

“Hey. Ow.” Magbidion pulled halfheartedly against Talbot’s grip. “Damn it, Talbot.”

“No,” I said. Talbot released Magbidion’s arm. Mags breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “Not from there.” And then I bit him. Sudden, hard, and fast, my fangs sank into Magbidion’s throat. He started, but didn’t struggle, so I kept things to a quick sip or two, following up with a bloody kiss on the cheek, leaving perfect red lip marks.

“Shit.” A shortish teen with tri-toned highlights and a leash in her hand gave the collared girl next to her a subtle tug. “We’re right next to a fucking vampire and her thralls.” Her taller, thinner girlfriend—the one on the leash—nodded, heart speeding up, part thrill, part fear.

“Do you think she knows Winter?”

“Ladies—” Talbot wanted to warn them away or move them along, but I liked them. They smelled like grassy fields, sweat, sunlight, and the ghost of perfume applied in the early morning hours and worn away by the day’s exertions.

“You like vampires?”

“Greta.” Talbot’s words had no wind to them, so dim they could have been a subvocalization. “I wrote a check for two million dollars to cover the excitement from earlier. Eric had that much liquid, but barely.”

“Shhh.” I hissed at him. “I know.”

Two million dollars is a whole lot of money, but when I told Dad I’d killed Lisette for him, ended her forever, he wouldn’t be mad. It was a great homecoming present.

Worried confusion flittered across the faces of the two foods . . . um, girls . . . young women.

“I asked you a question.”

They looked at each other, then answered together, “Yes.”