Fang Girl (13 page)

It was Ebon’s headless corpse. Upright. Walking.

I stared at it, rooted to the spot for an instant of sheer disbelief—and nearly lost my own head. I felt the blade score a thin line across my shoulder as I flung myself out of the way.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” I said, circling. Ebon’s—corpse? Zombie? Unholy freak of nature?—had disappeared into the bushes, though I could hear it crashing about. The wound in my shoulder had already closed.
Was it possible that Ebon could heal his decapitation in the same way?

“Pretty soon it’s going to be two on one,” I said to the hunter, hoping it was true. “So if you’ve got any more moves, now’s the time.”

The vampire hunter’s eyes gleamed above the curve of his ax. Keeping his gaze fixed on me, he lifted the blood-edged blade—and licked it.

“EWW!” I recoiled. “What kind of a pervert are you?”

“This kind,” he said with a twist to his lip. And then he shut his eyes.

This was weird enough that I wasted a whole two seconds gaping at him before I realized I should probably be taking advantage of his stupidity. With a mental shrug, I launched a punch at him that would have caved in his rib cage, if it had connected.

Except it didn’t. He waited so late to dodge that I swear my knuckles skimmed the front of his T-shirt, but somehow he still managed to get out of the way. In a blur of superspeed, I struck at him again—but again, at the last nanosecond, he wasn’t
there
. Now I was the one who was flailing, spinning as I tried to follow him, while he barely seemed to move. No matter how fast I was, how hard I pushed myself … he seemed to respond
even before I’d started to swing, despite the fact that his eyes were still shut tight.

Panicking, I swung too hard at his head. My fist whistled through empty air, carrying me off balance. I stumbled—and the hunter was suddenly inside my guard. I grabbed at the ax, catching the shaft more by luck than judgment and managing to rip it out of his hands. Even as it clattered away into the darkness, he was still attacking, driving his shoulder into my chest. We both went down.

He landed on top, jamming his forearm across my mouth. Immediately, I bit down, only to have a horrible grating sensation reverberate through my jaw as my teeth skidded across a metal bracer hidden under his sleeve. I raked at his eyes with my nails, arching my spine—but he reared back, keeping his face out of reach while still keeping my head and shoulders pinned against the ground. His face had gone calm and still, looking oddly preoccupied as though trying to solve an algebra problem in his head. The world spun as he flipped us over somehow, in a movement too fast and complicated for me to follow. Before I could even think of using the momentary opening to break free, he was straddling me, his arm still jammed agonizingly into
my mouth while his knees pinned my own arms down.

That left him with one free hand. A hand that was suddenly holding a wooden stake, pointed directly at my chest. The last thing I saw before my world narrowed to that sharp, wicked point were his calm green eyes: relentless, remorseless.

He drove the stake through my heart.

W
e both looked down at the stake through my heart.

Funny. I would have thought that should hurt more.

From the look on the vampire hunter’s face, he thought it should hurt more too.

I shoved him off me, this time easily flinging him aside. “You staked me,” I said stupidly. I prodded at the protruding end. I could feel the wood wobbling around, deep inside. It was like when I was a kid and had a loose baby tooth that I could wiggle right around with my tongue: not painful, but awesomely disgusting. “I can’t believe you actually staked me.” Anger started to swell within me, displacing bafflement. I grabbed the lapels
of his coat, hauling his stunned face close to mine. “I was lying there helpless, and you staked me, you—you—you total
dick
!”

A terrified squeak escaped from his throat. He fumbled inside his pocket, then shoved me hard enough that I lost my grip. As I staggered back, I felt liquid splash over my clothes and face. My eyes and nose stung at the acrid, bitter scent. I gagged, trying to scrub my eyes clear. “What the—”

I heard the soft
click
of a lighter.

“Oh shi—”
I dived, but it was too late. Heat roared up around me, hiding everything in a curtain of fire. I flailed frantically at my clothes, but the flames shot through the oil soaking me. I could feel it like near-scalding water pouring over my skin, matched by an equally urgent heat shooting through my veins.

Like the stake, it was surprisingly painless. I squinted through the smoke and light, trying to look at myself. As fast as the flames gnawed at me, my body was healing itself; patches of skin shimmered as they blistered and nearly instantly reformed.

Okay. So now I was pissed off
and
on fire.

“YOU ARE IN FOR A WORLD OF PAIN,” I roared, shaking off my disintegrating top. The flames
around me started to die down, running out of fuel. “I am going to rip your heart out, do you hear me?” I slapped out a last tongue of flame from my shoulder, then curled my hands into fists. “I’m going to rip your heart out, and then I’m going to eat it raw in a bun with
ketchup
!”

I had to admit, the hunter had guts. Even faced with a homicidal, half-naked, smoking vampire, he still attempted to raise his ax. It shook so badly that he nearly took his own head off, but it was pretty impressive, under the circumstances.

Something blurred between us; a loud
smack
rang out, and the vampire hunter spun in two complete circles before collapsing into a heap. Ebon skidded to a halt, his eyes wild and his hair standing on end and his head very firmly attached to his neck. “Xanthe!”

“Ebon!”
I gaped at him.

He ignored this, grabbing me by the shoulders. His frantic gaze searched my face. “Be thee hart?”

I blinked. “Huh?”

“Me haid warn’t anigh, I couldn’t find ’ee in time....” he moaned mystifyingly. His French accent was totally gone, replaced by the broad, drawling tones of … Somerset? He sounded more like a farmhand than a
vampire. “Be thee hart? Thee peer—” He looked down at my chest and stopped dead.

I looked down too. My flesh had closed up around the stake, leaving a four-inch stub of wood sticking up from my skin.

My totally naked skin.

I yelped, crossing my arms over my chest. I hobbled over to the unconscious vampire hunter and tipped him out of his coat as fast as I could manage. It felt like an age before I could finally swirl its heavy weight over my shoulders. The coat was still warm from the vampire hunter’s body, and it smelled of sweat. With it covering me from neck to ankle, I was able to summon the courage to look round at Ebon again.

He was still frozen in place, staring at me. My face went instantly scarlet.

“Uh …” I dug my hands into the pockets of the coat, encountering numerous mysterious objects. Something sharp strapped into the lining dug into the small of my back. “Hi. So … neat trick with the head. Can I do that?”

Ebon swallowed. “Stake,” he croaked, pointing at my now safely covered chest.

“Oh. Right. Yeah, he got me too.” I loosened the coat
enough to peer down at the stub. “I guess it’s gotta come out. Can you give me a hand?”

“Stake?” he repeated, his voice going high and wobbly.

I gave him a level look. “Don’t tell me you’re squeamish about blood.”

The whites showed all around Ebon’s eyes.

Obviously, there was no help from that corner. Bracing myself, I wrapped my hand around the stub, and yanked. It took quite a bit of force to part it from my body, but at last the wood slid out with a horrible
slurp
. Almost immediately, I could feel the bones spring back outward, new flesh welling up to fill the gaping hole.

Glancing up at Ebon, I summoned a weak smile. “Good thing that myth isn’t real, right?” I said, tossing the bloodstained stake to clatter near his feet.

Ebon’s eyes rolled up in his head. Perfectly rigid, he toppled over in a dead faint.

I stared from the prone vampire hunter to Ebon’s unmoving form, and back again. With a sigh, I pulled my slightly scorched mobile out of the ruins of my jeans, and stalked off in search of a signal. I had to go nearly to the other side of the Ring, but at last I found one. I dialed.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “Um … can you come pick us up?”

T
he next evening found me having breakfast with a ridiculously hot guy. It was typical of my life that this would only happen when said guy was tied up.

I stirred my tea, contemplating the vampire hunter across the kitchen table. “Not only do you try to kill me, you have to go and get me grounded for the rest of my existence,” I said resentfully. Thanks to the hunter’s little trick with the oil and the lighter, my dad had turned up to find me dressed only in a borrowed trench coat, with two unconscious men. There’s really no way to put a good spin on that sort of situation. “I hope you’re happy.”

The vampire hunter did not look happy. This
probably had something to do with the fact that he was duct-taped to his chair. He should count himself lucky. Mum and Dad were still out in the garage, hunting among the unpacked boxes from the move and arguing about where the handcuffs and spreader bar had been stored. I really,
really
didn’t want to know.

“So, Brains,” I muttered to the fish, who was eyeing the hunter with distinct interest from its tank on the work surface. “Got any ideas about what we do now?”

The silver goldfish sucked in water, somehow contriving to make its perfectly round, toothless mouth look positively horrifyingly.

“I’ll bear that in mind.” I drained the last of my tea, and rose to loom with what I hoped was ominous menace at the hunter. “Okay,” I said, showing him my fangs. I felt awfully dumb. “Are you going to talk, or am I going to feed you to my childe here?”

The vampire hunter glowered at me, radiating unyielding determination. Oh, joy. I wished Ebon were awake to deal with this, but he got up a lot later than I did, presumably due to his greater age. In the meantime, it was up to me to interrogate this guy, and I wasn’t sure how to begin. In the stories I’d read or seen, only bad guys ever had people tied up and helpless. Should I
slap him? Threaten to electrocute him with the toaster? Offer him a cup of tea? I was the heroine—wasn’t he supposed to have a change of heart and spontaneously come over to my side, having fallen hopelessly in love with my unique specialness?

I couldn’t help casting a speculative eye over the hunter’s impressive muscles, wondering if maybe a little vampiric seduction might work in this situation. Unfortunately, for his part, the vampire hunter looked more like he was checking me out for vulnerable spots rather than appreciating my irresistible charms. I sighed, giving up the idea. Probably for the best, given that the only seduction I’d ever attempted had gone downhill after my initial
DO U FANCY ME Y/N?
text message to the boy in question. I’d been
really
glad to change schools in the wake of that disaster. He and his friends were probably still laughing about it even now.

Well, at least I could find out the vampire hunter’s name. His coat was draped over the table in front of me; spreading it out, I started going through the pockets.

This turned out to take some time.

There were a
lot
of pockets. The whole inner surface of the coat was covered with them, each precisely sized for the item inside. They were even labeled, the words
embroidered on the same sort of ribbon that parents used to sew name tags into their kids’ school uniforms. This guy made my categorizing obsession look
normal
.

Some of the items were about what one might expect to find in a vampire hunter’s outfit—a couple of crucifixes (they didn’t seem to bother me, which made me wonder why he was carrying them around), a whole load of stakes, a few flasks of oil (one missing)—but there was also a whole row of pockets marked
PAPER CLIPS
. Also another for
SEEDS
, and yet another marked
FLOUR
.

“At least you don’t seem to have a pocket labeled ‘tortoise, live,’” I said absently, examining the handful of small rubber balls I’d just taken out of a pocket helpfully labeled
BALLS, BOUNCY
. “I’m not sure I could have coped with that. Shouldn’t you be carrying some actual, you know, weapons?”

The hunter didn’t say anything. He glared.

“Look, you’re going to have to start talking sometime. And believe me, I’m by
far
the sanest person around here. My name’s Jane.” I finally found the pocket labeled
WALLET
, and flipped it open. “And you are—” I stopped, reading the name on his bank card. “Oh, come on. Don’t you have any imagination?”

“No.” His voice was a rough, dry rumble. He glowered at me.

“No kidding. That’s gotta be the worst pseudonym ever. Don’t you get a lot of comments?”

“Yes,” he said in tones of deep resignation. “Because it’s my real name.”

I stared at him. “You’re joking.”

His face was a study in stoicism.

I flipped through his driver’s license and bank cards. There it was, on every one. “Van Helsing? Your actual name is actually
Van Helsing
?”