Crossed (31 page)

“Why?”

“He said to stop the Mouser and shake its paw.” John held out his hand to help Father Ike out of the white plastic chair in which he sat, but Ike waved him away.

“And then?”

“That’s it. I’ve given up arguing with him if his requests don’t seem too unreasonable.”

Father Ike cleared his throat. “You coming?”

“What?”

“To the movie, Talbot,” Father Ike intoned. “Are you coming?”

“Sure.”

John reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small walkie-talkie. “Melvin?”

“Area secured,” a voice called back after a hiss of static. “The path is cleared, Rockstar, you may proceed.”

And so, we jogged.

    30    

GRETA:

AND THEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED

I woke, frantic to find Telly’s skull. I’d gone to sleep holding it, but when I opened my eyes, it had vanished. After jumping out of the bed and stumbling as I caught my foot in the blankets, I looked around the floor of Dad’s Pollux bedroom. Sheets and bedding hit the walls as I shook and discarded each article without finding the skull. I crawled around the floor on my hands and knees once before checking the obvious place. There he was, hiding under the bed.

“It’s day three,” I told him. “Now I can kill Grandma.” I planted a quick kiss on his bullet hole and stowed him safely at the center of Dad’s bed. Quickly pulling on one of Dad’s “Welcome to the Void” T-shirts (one that smelled of him and of New Mom) I slipped into the same jeans I’d worn the night before and dashed barefoot down the hall to the stairs.

The two girls I’d met last night looked up at me from the lobby, struggling with a green futon frame between them. Oranges lost her grip. I rocketed down the stairs and caught the whole thing up over my head by one side, tearing it out of Apples’ grasp.

“Don’t
you dare scuff up Daddy’s floor with that crap!” Apples fell to the floor and Oranges took two steps toward the foyer. “Who said you could bring this in here?”

“Calm down,” Apples spat from her spot on the floor. “Damn, we were just—”

I locked eyes with her and shoved a command into her head. “Exhale for two minutes!” Vampires can still command humans if we want, but we don’t automatically win unless they’re our thralls. It’s a will versus will thing, and mine was stronger than Apples’ hands down.

Unless a human knows circular breathing or is a freaking astronaut or something, even trying to exhale for two minutes will make her pass out. It took Apples way less than two minutes. Her face went red with strain, then her eyes rolled up and she went down. Oranges stayed put.

“I asked a question,” I snapped.

“Talbot”—Oranges’ voice was calm and steady, impossible to be angry with—”said if we put floor protectors on the bottom, we could bring the futon in and set it up in the sitting area for a couple of days, Mistress.”

“Oh. Well, that’s fine then.” I carried the futon down to the sitting room and set it up against an empty wall. Oranges followed me down, then stood as if at attention, her thin metal leash hanging loose from the studded collar around her neck.

“How old are you, Oranges?” I took the red leather handle of the leash in my hand. Her eyes tracked the motion, but she made no move to resist.

“Twenty-one last week, Mistress.”

“Do you want to live forever, Oranges?”

“If it pleases you.” No fear. No hesitation. And no back talk. I could see what Apples saw in her. Oranges was shorter than me by a few inches, five foot ten at the most, with a lithe build that reminded me of Mama Irene, before Daddy tried to kill her. In the light of the fluorescent bulbs, she was strikingly
beautiful. She had a fresh clean look beneath the makeup. Her black hair was now streaked with blue; the chemical smell still clung to it.

“Why were you afraid of me last night and not now?”

“I didn’t know how to react last night, Mistress. Now, I do.”

“Do you want to be my thrall?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Even if I decide not to keep Apples?”

“She’s a fat sow, Mistress.” Oranges wrinkled her nose. “Do as you wish with her.”

“Why don’t you always say ‘Mistress’?”

“I assumed if I said ‘Mistress’ after every sentence, it would annoy the hell out of you. Do you want me to say it every time?”

Oranges is fun without Apples!

“How about just when I give a command?”

“As you wish, Mistress.”

“This is so cool!” I opened my mouth to give another command, make her do jumping jacks or bark like a dog, but the desire to be done with Lisette closed my mouth. “Okay. I’m going to go check something and then I want to feed. I haven’t decided whether I want Apples’ or Oranges’ juice for breakfast, so drag Apples out of the way and then wait for me at the concession stand.”

“Yes, Mistress, but where are you going?”

“I’m going to kill my grandma.”

That got Oranges’ heart to thumping. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. Dad’s better at sussing out emotions than I am, but I know fear. This was close . . . maybe it could have been fear, just not of me.

“Don’t worry, Oranges, she’s not my really real Grandma.” I bounded up the stairs. “I’ll be back.”

On my way out the front doors, I heard Oranges curse and the sound of a cell phone being dialed. Had I hurt Apples
more than I’d meant to? Oh well. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t already decided to kill her when I came back in. Oranges was fun and in shape. Apples had cursed at me, which I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t have done, not if she wanted to be my thrall.

Magbidion sat on a lawn chair, watching some horrid morning show featuring a bubbly blondish woman who should have been killed twenty years ago when she’d still been pretty and some old stocky guy with what might have been a hairpiece. They were interviewing the Blind Alley Rabbits, though, so I guess that made them kind of cool. He’d set a stool right next to Fang so he could keep an eye on Dad’s car and the television.

“Hi, Greta. Good morning.”

“Where’s Talbot?”

“I’m supposed to say he went to go see Dezba.”

“O-kay. Well, whatever then.”

I tiptoed up to the trunk and rapped lightly on the metal. Fang opened up and there was Grandma, right where I’d left her, bundled up with her disembodied heart next to her face and the killer necklace (and the tire iron I’d run through the center of it) lying in her open chest cavity. I concentrated on the necklace first.

How do I destroy you?

The answer came through garbled, as if announced by a man with a mouth full of marbles, singing underwater, while being strangled.

“Damn.”

“Damn?” Magbidion asked.

“I have to de-tire-iron it before I can get a good reading.” I pulled Squidly out of the trunk. “I was afraid that might happen.”

“What? Reading? What reading?” Mags jerked up out of his chair. “Wait! You’ve captured her. Why not wait until Eric gets back and let him kill her? Then you can figure out—”

I threw him the tire iron.

“Just jam that through it if I need you to.”

“Kill you! End you! Make you mine!” Squidly’s voice rang out in my head, but having fought it once before, the second time was easy-peasy.

It clawed and pulled at me with eight golden tentacle-like chains, and according to Magbidion, two more tendrils I couldn’t see. I walked around to the front of Fang, to be sure it couldn’t unstake its mistress with one of them, and focused on how to destroy it. Images of fire filled my mind, the necklace tumbled into a volcano. I could drive it to a smelting plant or something . . . but then I saw an image of Lisette standing at the lip of the volcano calling it back, the still bubbling metal sliding up the rock and re-forming. Okay, so just like a
memento mori
can call back its Emperor, the Emperor, given time, could call back his or her
memento mori.
Good to know.

Squidly was winning the physical battle, its gaping beak headed right for my chest again.

“Magbidion!”

He ran for me, tire iron over his head, and I felt the pressure decrease as Magbidion began to stick it and move as if he were avoiding the unseen tentacles, which had released me.

“Greta, it’s stronger than I am. I can’t.”

“Fang—” I was going to tell Fang to do something, help Mags or something, but when I said the name, a new image washed over my thoughts like a cool rain. A
memento mori
could destroy another
memento mori.
Sweet!

I dropped to the ground, wincing as my head hit the concrete.

“Fang, roll over me and eat the necklace!”

Fang backed away.

“Do it or it’ll get inside my head again! Please! If you have to eat me too, I’ll be okay. That’s not what it takes to end me. I—” Before I could even finish my sentence, Fang rolled over me.

Being eaten by Fang hurts like the dickens! I mean, serious serious owie territory. I felt pain in places I’d never been hurt before, places that I didn’t even know had nerves. My head hit the undercarriage hard, splitting my nose and ramming Squidly into my chest, where its beak jabbed deep, piercing the sternum and my heart.

Squidly filled my head again, but this time, I took him to another memory. In my second happiest memory, Dad was on top of me. I was naked and his fangs pierced my neck. The mild disappointment that he wouldn’t bite me in his favorite feeding spot was washed away as he thrust his wrist into my mouth and I died but didn’t go away. The pain, which would have made me scream as my bowels voided themselves, didn’t happen, because that’s what high colonics are for. I hadn’t eaten anything in three days, either, so the hunger that took hold of me when I transformed wasn’t new, just a change in need.

Salt water blew open the door of Dad’s bedroom at the old Demon Heart and then vanished, literally fading away before the wetness could hit me. Dad’s eyes were filled with the flow of bloody tears, so much so he didn’t seem to even notice the door or the water. I’ve never asked him, but I’m certain they were tears of joy.

And then I was awake again, in the trunk, a raw naked skeleton lying atop Grandma. I latched on to Magbidion’s offered arm and fed, but not too much. I regenerated, clothing my bones in flesh, using Magbidion’s blood, and smiled when he looked away, embarrassed by my nakedness. Once I had a nose again, it was filled with the smell of burning rubber.

Thin traces of new gold chased the rims of Fang’s tires, and the power radiating from him was so strong even I could feel it . . . and technically I’m blind to it.

“What made you think of that?” Magbidion asked as he handed me his terry-cloth bathrobe. It was too short in the sleeves, but it felt hot—fresh out of the drier hot—so I put it on.

“What?”

“Feeding one
memento mori
to another.” Magbidion cupped one hand to his eye like a tiny telescope. “Fang’s aura is twice as strong. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Now for Grandma.” Fang’s trunk was still open. I reared back a fist. “If she’s part zombie . . .” I punched down through the side of her skull, shards of bone lodging in my knuckles. I spread the hole wider with my claws and scooped the putrid insides out, dumping them one glop at a time onto the concrete surface of the parking deck, then stomped each smelly pile flat, like Lucy and Ethel in that episode where they’re in the big vat of grapes making wine.

An immediate change came over the body. The stink faded and the brains on the ground bleached into a healthier color, for all that they were flat and smeared. Dark black zombie goo turned normal organ color. Even the fluid and brain spatter that had covered the lower edges of Magbidion’s robe, as well as my feet and legs, turned a more normal color.

“And now that she’s just another Vlad,” I whooped in Magbidion’s ear, “I can totally end her sorry ass!”

A lightning bolt hit me when I reached for the stake. I tried to disconnect from the pain, but it followed me, equal parts physical and mental agony. Bolt after bolt struck, jerking my body so violently I couldn’t control it. I never even felt the crossbow bolt tear through my chest and slam home into my heart.

A blur with metallic gold claws and white and orange fur whipped past my falling body and struck Magbidion, hurling him against the side of his RV with the sound a sack of melons might make if you dropped them off the roof.