Helens-of-Troy (45 page)

“That sounds good. I like pina coladas.
You don’t have anything stronger to put in it, do you?”

Helena put a few loose leaves into the
cup and poured the boiling water over them. “No,” she said
adamantly.

“You can’t blame a guy for trying. I
just thought if anyone had any well aged rum lying around, it would
be you. No offense.”

“None taken,” she lamented, unplugging
the appliance. “I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on, so that’ll
get you off the hook as far as the “thow shalt not blab” rule goes.
Helen is a problem right now. She’s starting to come around, but I
don’t think I can afford to wait until she remembers how to be a
clairvoyant. Right now her focus is sporadic at best. I had the
same problem getting her to practice the piano.”

“I know!” Willie agreed. “You’d think
that being as anal as she is, she’d be one of those practice makes
perfect types. But no.”

Helena looked at him suspicously. Just
how long had he been hanging around her family she wondered? “I
fear that Ellie is in danger,” she continued, walking back over to
the seating area.

“She is in danger. I told Helen that.
Seriously, sometimes that daughter of yours is thick as a brick.
You know what you’re going to have to do, Helena,” Willie
responded, sitting up on the couch. “I really don’t understand why
your are delaying the inevitable.”

“Gaspar has become like family to me,”
Helena acknowledged, handing Willie a cup of the herbal tea. She
sat down in a chair across from him. “I know I’m going to have to
deal with him, but I can’t help but wonder where I went
wrong.”

Willie gagged on his tea.

“Well he has,” she insisted. “What’s
wrong? Is the tea too hot or was that your reflex opinion of my
child rearing abilities?”

“The tea is fine. As for the
other….didn’t you teach him about the Black Veil?” Willie asked,
taking another sip of the brew. “The thirteen rules of House
Sahjaza are said to pretty much govern modern vampire
communities.”

“I’m surprised you know about that,”
Helena commented.

“
That vampire woman,
Michelle Belanger, you know the one—she keeps popping up across the
cable networks—she was on a reality tv show and I googled her. I
like that woman’s revision of the doctrine. She’s kind of the David
Suzuki of their kind. You could have just sat Gaspar down in front
of that flatscreen of yours and said ‘learn something from her.’
Kind of like the way you taught Helen sex-ed with all those medical
books you have. Say what you will about the tv genre, it keeps
people like me informed. Love it.”

“That is not how I taught Helen the
facts of life. Not that it’s any of your business,” Helena
insisted. “And I did teach Gaspar the rules. Although I might have
also said that personally I thought they were hardly better than
the Boy Scout’s oath. It doesn’t look like it did any good. I’m
pretty sure he’s broken all of them, despite my insistence that he
toe the line.”

“Regardless,” Willie said flatly. “It’s
clear that your young man did not grasp the meaning of the decree.
Don’t take it to heart. It’s never easy to raise children. Or so
they tell me. It’s not like I’ve had a lot of experience with it. I
can’t imagine raising somebody elses.”

“It’s not all his fault,” Helena
protested.“The rules don’t cover the mentally ill. He is ill,
Willie. That child has had issues since his birth.”

“Helena, that philosophy doesn’t wash
any better with vampires than it does with humans. Not every entity
with a disorder in their chemical makeup is a natural born killer.
On the other hand, some very sane people are. We all have free
choice, even the non-dead.”

“I suppose…” Helena said with sorrow in
her voice.

“Ultimately, he’s not your
responsibility, Helena,” Willie offered. “Your backyard is not
zoned for half-way houses for the demonically disturbed.” A smile
crossed his face. “Despite that kick-ass fourth of July
party.”

“Shut up, Willie.”

“Alexander made a right mess of things,
didn’t he?”“We’ve all made a right mess of things.”

“Have you told Helen yet? You know,
that her father crashed your party and started a supernatural
scandal that they’re still talking about at the spirit bar—did you
hear the one about Alexander and the exorcism?” he laughed. “I know
you haven’t told her. Please let me be around for that one. Just
name your price.”

“That man,” Helena said angrily. “This
whole thing is his doing, and once again I’m stuck here cleaning it
up. That is so Alexander.I don’t know what possessed him to try it
in the first place. He’s never been a man of the cloth. And he
never could hold his booze.” She looked sternly at Willie. “If you
say one word about this to Helen, I’ll, I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” he smiled.

“I won’t be very happy,” she screamed.
“And I’m not a very nice person when I’m not very happy.” She
picked up his coffee cup and threw it against the wall just inches
above his head. “I’m going through a lot of these lately, just for
the record.”

“Calm down, Helena,” he cautioned. “I’m
not the bad guy this time.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
she shouted at him. “That stupid, immature, blood-sucking kid I
gave refuge to, is terrorizing this town, making my boyfriend’s job
a living hell. Now he wants to take on the rest of my family.” She
paced back and forth in the limited space her office gave her.
“This is really pissing me off.”

“You’re going to have to do what you
should have done in the first place,” Willie said to her. “That
vampire has pushed all of your family ties to the max. He’s fully
cognoscente of what he is doing. He’s going to have to suffer the
consequences.”

“Sometimes, Willie,” Helena responded,
her anger starting to subside as she took deep breaths, “you are
such a downer.”

She knew Willie was right. Gaspar was a
vampire after all, and with all vampires it was only a matter of
time before they couldn’t help themselves. She had hoped that the
recently human part of Gaspar’s DNA would have knocked some sense
into him. That was her first mistake.

“Kill him before he kills again,”
Willie told her.

“It’s not that simple,” she
replied.

“It really is,” he
responded.

Helena started to say something then
reconsidered. She was, after all, a natural born killer herself.
Not the kind that randomly killed innocent people, but she doubted
most people could make the distinction between the two. She had
been called upon to kill

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Through the tiny opaque windows at the
top of the washroom ceiling, Ellie could see that the storm had
worsened against the night sky. The whiteness illuminating from the
pile of snow against the pane of glass was almost brilliant. The
precipitation would make rescuing her next to impossible, if anyone
had even thought to try to do that.

She imagined her mother and her
grandmother would be at home right now, arguing about something
silly—like, is it better to use sugar, get fat and die from a
massive heart attack, or endure a slow, painful death from chemical
substitutes—and it would probably be her grandmother’s boyfriend,
the Chief, who would finally put two and two together and say
something like “that’s why I like my coffee black. How does Ellie
take hers? And by the way, isn’t it kind of late for her to be
out?” The Helens would then stare blankly at each other, and
eventually come to the conclusion that something was terribly
amiss.

Then again, they could also think she
had just left the house to escape them—like she had the past few
mornings—and not even bother looking for her until she didn’t show
up for breakfast.

“What the hell is wrong with them?” she
asked herself. “Why isn’t anyone coming to save me?”

She reached around to the side pocket
of her jeans, wondering whether her cell phone was still there. Had
the vampire frisked her while she lay unconscious on the floor?
That was a creepy thought. He could have touched her everywhere and
she wouldn’t even have known. She was only slightly comforted to
feel a vibration against her leg. Someone was trying to call her,
but she had thankfully switched her ringtone off the other night at
the movie. She pressed her thigh into the floor to drown out the
slight buzzing sound, glancing at the vampire as she did so. If he
had heard anything, he wasn’t letting on.

“I’ve got to get a message to my
mother," she thought to herself. She put her fingers to her temple
and tried to send a telepathic message. She didn’t know if she
really believed the Helens the other morning when they said they
were witches/not witches, but it right now it sure as hell was
better than thinking they weren’t. She did know her mother had an
uncanny ability to play hide and seek with her when she was
younger. She always found her no matter what size of hole Ellie had
crawled into.

“Mom, come find me in this hellhole,”
she whispered.

“What’s that?” the vampire asked,
suddenly taking an interest in her again.

“Don’t you have to go crawl back under
a rock, or the earth or something?” Ellie asked.

“Why? Does that turn you
on?”

“Hardly.”

“That’s not very nice,
Poppet.”

“Will you quit calling me that?” she
protested. “I hate that. My name is...”

“Don’t say it!” he ordered. “I don’t
want to know. If you insist on telling me, I’ll kill you right
now.” He stomped his foot to the ground, like a three-year old
throwing a tantrum.

“Why? Is it easier for you when you
don’t know our names? You called Brooke ‘Dorothy’, what did you
call Kevin?” Ellie taunted. She had been analyzing the vampire for
what seemed like hours now, and she knew that the more she annoyed
him, the more he walked around in circles and seemed to forget she
was there. “Maybe it’s time you took your nap.”

“Shut up, Poppet. You are really
beginning to get on my nerves,” he yelled, starting to pace the
floor. His right arm moved across his chest, he held his left arm
by the elbow, and he cupped his chin in his left palm while
pondering God knows what.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Ellie
interrupted.

“So go to the bathroom,” he said, not
looking at her but continuing his steady cantor. “I won’t look, I’m
busy thinking.”

“Can’t you chain me up in the girls
bathroom?” she yelled loud enough to break his train of
thought.

“Use the stall.”

“No.”

“You can make it, the chain is long
enough,” he sighed, stopping dead in his tracks. She was looking at
him like he was out of his mind. “You are one bitchy broad, do you
know that? What difference does it make?”

“If you must know, I’m PMSing. It’s
only going to get worse. I need the GIRLS bathroom.”

Gaspar looked at her, horrified. “That
can’t be possible. How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen, asshole.”

He crept closer towards her. “You are
not,” he replied, shaking his head in disbelief. “Fifteen year old
girls are more...mature than you are.”

“Nice. I swear to God—or whatever pagan
idol that works for you—that I will be sweet sixteen in a matter of
months. Why do you find that so shocking?” she asked, as she
watched his gaze go from her eyes to her chest and stay there.
Great. Another boob guy. She was stuck in a hellhole with a
teenaged blood sucking murder/tit gawker, and there wasn’t anything
she could do about it.

“Because it’s a problem. A huge
problem,” he said, waiving his arms over his head in an overly
dramatic fashion. “It’s like a lactose intolerant thing. It means I
can’t use you for food.”

“That’s tragic,” Ellie said cynically.
“And hello, I’d appreciate it if you would look me in the face when
you talked to me.” She self-consciously tugged at the sweater she
had borrowed to make it cling less to her body.

Gaspar sighed and slowly sat down
beside her. This was not part of his plan. Now what was he going to
do with her? He only killed for food, he wasn’t a
murderer-murderer, despite what they all thought. But the feeding
book had clearly stated that until his second set of canine teeth
came through, signaling his maturation as a vampire, he would be
unable to handle the blood of an adult. The adult blood would be
too hard for him to digest. It would tire him, making it almost
impossible for him to hunt at all, and he would eventually starve
himself into oblivion. Not death, oblivion. That would be tragic.
One didn’t come back from oblivion.

“But you look so young,” he said,
wondering to himself why the book had not said anything about
drinking teenaged blood. Child. Adult. It had been specific.
Nothing about pubescent pixies of the Goth kind. Or maybe it had.
Even as a child he had always been one to skip over pages and read
the ending first. Would it be worth the risk to try to feed on her?
Would the hormone crazy blood of a girl his own age be more than he
could handle? He found himself salivating at the
thought.