Hag Night (41 page)

She was angry at Megga for confusing her with things she did not necessarily understand. Things that got in the way of the feeding. Still gripping her arms, she threw Megga to the floor and crept over to her.

As the beldam’s shadow fell over her, Megga knew she had seconds.

T
hreatening her with Wenda hadn’t been enough. It had saved her throat for a few seconds but that was all. The vampire made ready to strike, her ragged claws tearing into the material of Megga’s parka, her scabrous face hovering over Megga’s own, a ribbon of pink drool hanging from her lips. She looked like a human vulture and smelled like one, too…stinking like something that slept with the dead and fed on their bones in cobwebbed crypts, plucked eyeballs from crusty sockets on lonely dark highways.

From somewhere that seemed impossibly distant, Megga heard Morris cry out, but the beldam’s eye
s had her. They held her. She was transfixed by them. They were haunted tombs, black sink holes, shattered nebula sucking in light, life, and sanity, leeching the room of anything decent and warm.

The beldam had her and she knew it.

She would have fought if there were something to fight
with.

But she was drained, emptied, laid absolutely bare on some essential level and there was no fight in her. She breathed and her heart pumped and her nerve endings tingled madly, but other than that and the fact that her cells s
till divided, there was nothing. She was a juicy slab of red meat waiting to be fed upon.

Then a voice.

It came from somewhere. A silver needle in her head, piercing and poking, bringing pinpoint eruptions of pain but also a fuzzy sort of awareness. It wanted something from her. It
demanded
something from her and although it was not Griska’s voice, it had nearly as much immediacy and power behind it.

Megga! Fight! Fight! Don’t just lay there!

Her eyes blinked and she saw the beldam hovering over her. She had no idea that only bare seconds had passed since she’d been thrown to the floor. Time was elastic and formless in her head.

I said fight! Fight! Fight!

Oh, but I can’t, don’t you understand that I can’t?

She wanted to, she wanted nothing better than to obey that voice. She felt her limbs coming to life and her blood flowing, then her muscles bunching, but it was too late because there was no way she could avoid those teeth coming for her throat. She could already feel the cold breath of sepulchers against her neck.

That’s when the beldam screamed.

She let out a cry that punched into Megga’s head like
an awl. She turned and Morris—
Morris
of all people—had grabbed the burning stick from the fire that Megga herself had dropped. He had it in his hand. He jabbed the burning end into the beldam’s hair and flames rose up on the side of her head along with twisting plumes of smoke. The air was filled with the nauseating stench of her scorching hair. The beldam rose up to take care of Morris and he stuck the burning stick right in her face.

As the vampire screamed again, Megga rolled away and climbed drunkenly to her feet. She saw legions of plump sewer rats gathered around, squeaking and rubbing their forepaws together, their serpentine tails rattling on the floor.

The beldam took hold of Morris and tossed him aside.

He struck the wall next to the hearth and went down, dazed. The beldam turned towards Megga again. Having tasted her, she was not about to concede defeat. She was going to milk her dry and bathe in her blood. She screamed with a wrath that was deafening.

Megga, rats or no rats, made to run and she almost got away, but then a hand grabbed her shoulder blade and pulled her back. Off balance, she tripped and fell sideways, landing on a dozen rats that squirmed and squealed beneath her. Then the beldam reached down and gripped her with a cold and slimy hand, yanking her to her feet like she was weightless.

There was no escape and as the
vampire brought its face in closer, offering a sunken grin, it said,
“Isn’t this what you wanted, pretty Megga? Isn’t this what you’ve always longed for? Haven’t you always wanted to sleep with the rats and the worms in dirty, foul, low places?”

Yes, yes, yes, Megga realized, as she tried to pull away from the creature and found that she was mired like a mammoth in a tar pit.

It was true, it was all true.

She’d always wanted to be among the undead, to sleep in dark beauty and sip at soft white throats as midnight thunder clashed and boomed. It was the need to be dangerous, to be offbeat, to be the vamp that made every man burn with heat and every woman smolder with jealousy. Not one of the many, but one of the
few.
But now that she was faced with the reality grinning sardonically behind the fantasy and it had unmasked itself, showing her the true and malefic nature of itself, she wanted nothing to do with it. This was deadly, this was eternal, this was a hideous death-in-life.

The hag moved in for her kiss and her sup.

Megga heard Wenda cry out. She saw the lips of the beldam and she did not recoil from them because there were red and plump and succulent, the face behind them young and high-cheekboned, eyes blue and deliciously Nordic. It was Bailey and Megga needed to see no more: she was pulled in and she opened her mouth so that she could put her tongue in Bailey’s mouth.

But Bailey screamed.

Screamed because Morris was attacking her again. With that same burning log, he was beating her savagely about the head and when the beldam—because, dear God, it
was
a beldam again, embalmed face and lurid grinning mouth and glaring, beady rodent’s eyes—made to lay him open with her claws, he swung the log again and she slapped it out of his hands and took hold of him.

He might have cried out.

He might have screamed in abject terror.

But all Megga heard as the beldam’s jaws seized his throat was a sound like a tongue sliding into the juicy pulp of a plum.

Before she could be stopped, the beldam drained him. She lifted him off his feet and sucked at his throat with a wet, slobbering sound. Not just feeding on him, but gulping his blood, guzzling from his throat, slurping the red sap until it ran down her chin and pissed from every orifice and Morris, his bloodless face and glazed eyes staring up at the ceiling, seemed to shrivel in her death-grip, making a sound almost like an aluminum beer can crushed by a fist.

She tossed him aside.

And Megga…uplinked as she had been with Wenda…felt every second of his defilement.

She felt th
e vampire seize him as if it were seizing her.

She felt the iron grip of its clawlike hands. Then, and worse, she felt its cold face pressed up to his warm, pulsing throat like the muzzle of a wolf. The lips felt like raw meat. The vampire let loose with a growling, hungry sound, its saliva spraying against the side of his throat…and then the teeth went in. Like surgical steel scalpels they perforated the skin of his neck and punctured the jugular beneath. They slid in, then out, in
, then out, assuring that the vein was open and would stay open so the mouth and tongue could do their work.

It was agonizing.

The impalement was explosive and resounding to his nerve endings, it made waves of white-hot agony rip through his head.

Then…nothing.

Maybe there was an anesthetic quality to the spit of the vampire and maybe he just sank into darkness from the sheer trauma. Like the suctioning mouth of a leech, the vampire’s lips fastened tightly to his throat in an unbreakable seal, gulping down the dark, rich flow of blood, filling itself, gorging itself until he was like a spring that ran dry and his veins collapsed and his heart fluttered in his chest and stopped cold and dead.

A dozen bloated rats twining her legs like hungry cats, the beldam turned on Megga. She had taken in too much blood and she was swollen with it, engorged like a leech. It ran in scarlet rivers from her mo
uth and nose, it filled her eyes until they looked like huge yolky blood-eggs. The front of her filthy, ragged burial dress was dyed red with it and it ran in a stream from between her legs and pooled on the floor. She stood there, an ensanguined human sponge.

But it wasn’t enough.

She would feed again.

She was gluttonous for it and she’d fill herself until she popped like a water balloon. As she came for Megga,
she was bloated like a blood-fattened tick.

H
er right foot left a bloody print on the floor. The blood-ova of her eyes were luminous like fissionable materials. Her voice made a hissing, gulping sort of sound as it tried to talk through the hemoglobin that gushed from her lips. One breast had worked itself free of her cerements and it expunged droplets of crimson milk.

Megga did not try to escape.

The rats were all over her, crowding on her body like maggots on carrion, not feeding, but encompassing her, enveloping her, burying her in their greasy, lice-hopping pelts and flabby, warm bodies.

The beldam came for her and there was nothing that could stop it.

12

A rat flew through the air like it had been shot from a gun and hit Wenda full in the chest. She almost went over, the air forced from her lungs with the impact. The rat that hit her hung on by its teeth, which were sunk into the front of her parka. She knocked it free by bringing her fist down with a strength that even amazed her because she distinctly heard and
felt
its spine snap.

It dropped writhing to the floor.

Another stormed in, sleek, glossy black, and about the size of a Rottweiler puppy, it seemed. As she kicked it, five or six others took its place. One of them climbed her leg and bit into her thigh. She grabbed it by its hairless tail, yanked it free, and swung it with everything she had towards the wall. It hit hard and fell to the floor, back legs kicking.

More of them bit into her legs, right through her snowpants.

One got on her back and bit her ear.

You won’t win, you dirty crawly little bastards! I won’t let you! I will not allow it!
she thought as she waged war on them, plucking them free, tearing them free, crushing and stomping and smashing them as more poured forward to fill the gap.
Don’t think I don’t know what this is about! Don’t think I don’t recognize this as the diversion it’s supposed to be! But it won’t do any good!

She
fought with horror and repulsion and rage. The rats climbed her legs and jumped on her back and tangled their claws in her hair, yet still she fought. She tore them free and kicked them aside, smashing them beneath her boots and laying them open with the silver butcher’s knife. They kept coming, crowding forward in ranks but she was not about to go down beneath them and she knew they weren’t strong enough to take her, not unless her own fear overcame her.

The knife.

They feared the silver blade.

When she hacked one with it, a dozen more skittered away in terror. She knew very well what was going on with Megga and Morris, but the rats kept her from doing anything about it and she supposed that was why they had been sent.

As one bit into her cheek, she ripped it free and snapped another’s neck as it nuzzled into her throat. She killed a dozen and still they came, but when she swung the knife they scattered like wheat chaff before a scythe. And this became her strategy, though she hardly had the time to recognize it as such. She kept the others at bay by swinging her knife in arcs. And while she did so, she tore the other ones free, punting and stomping at them. She ripped a final one from the back of her parka and charged forward, the rats retreating in waves.

Splattered with ratblood and ratmeat, she reached Morris just as the beldam finished with him and bore down upon Megga.

Except the beldam was no beldam…soaked in blood and stinking of it, she was younger. Her face was smooth and unlined, her eyes bright, her hair a luscious shade of red. Coils of it were plastered to her face with sticky venous fluid.

She did not see Wenda
coming.

Not until it was too late.

Megga was dazed and out of it, barely on her feet by that point, probably in shock from what she had just seen and what was about to happen. While Rule fought the rats with a poker from the fireplace, eight or ten of them hanging off of him and more leaping at him all the time, Wenda went after the beldam.

Outside the house, at that very moment, there rose a howling discord of dozens of disembodied voices screeching into the night. It was a cacophony of anguish and fury and incarnate hysteria.

Wenda brought the knife back in both hands like a sword. She swung it. The beldam caught wind of it. She turned, whirling around, blood spraying from her. Droplets of it spattered against Wenda’s face.

The beldam snarled.

She screamed in wrath.

And the blade came around with irresistible force, every ounce of strength and weight Wenda had bringing it to bear. It entered the hag’s throat just beneath the jawline and split her neck like black oak, cleaving her head free which spun end over end, landing in the hearth, right in the blazing heart of the fire, casting flaming sticks and glowing coals over the floor.