The Awesome (11 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I
FLOUNCED TO
my room, stomping my feet, slamming my door, and pulling a diva-scale tantrum. I propelled myself onto my unmade bed, face buried in a pile of pillows. I decided I wouldn’t think about any of this tonight, I’d go to sleep, it was better to leave dramatically so Mom would know exactly how upset I was—in case I was so subtle she didn’t understand it the first time.

The only problem with this plan was I couldn’t sleep when riled. I rolled over so much I wore a Maggie-shaped indentation into my mattress. When I heard footsteps downstairs followed by the closing of the front door, I willed my mother to come smooth things over now that corpse-boyfriend was gone. That usually happened when we quarreled, anyway. Neither of us liked to go to bed mad. We always made up before sleep time, regardless of the reason for the squabbling. This time it didn’t happen. Even an hour later, she kept to herself, choosing the company of the TV over me.

Desperate to make things right, I decided I’d be the bigger person, I’d make the first peace offering. For a few minutes, I had myself convinced I was some great Samaritan, the reincarnation of Mother Teresa. I tiptoed downstairs, careful not to do anything that might be construed as a declaration of war, like stomping my feet or cussing arbitrarily. I hovered around the sixth step, peering at her in the living room. It was dark save for the TV casting flickering shadows over the wall. I knew she could see me standing there like a dumbass, but she didn’t lift her head. She sipped her beer and watched whatever was on late night cable.

“Hi,” I said.

No answer.

“Whachya watching?”

Silence.

I shuffled my weight from one foot to the other, clearing my throat as I tried to figure out how to broach the beast. “I saw this lamer soft core porn on Skinemax last night. I don’t get why they can show, like, all the boobs in the world but we don’t get to see one wang. If I wanna see boobs, I’ll look at my own.”

I dared to step down a few more stairs and paused on the landing. She’d adopted a strange, mechanical routine since I started talking: lift beer bottle to lips, take a long drink, put bottle back in lap, lift remote control, hit the channel button, drop the remote, grab the bottle again, rinse, repeat. I knew what this meant; making nice-nice was not going to be easy. She was fond enough of the vampire that we’d argue about him.

Awesome.

“Look, we should talk.”

“It’s not always about you,” she snapped, jerking her face up toward me. She was so angry her eyes were rimmed red, and a vein pulsed along her temple. “You’re embarrassed by what I did, fine. I apologized. It was stupid. But I’m embarrassed, too. You were a rude little shit to a good friend of mine. Worse? He gave me a list of elders in the area tonight who might be looking for us after the Plasma kill.” She lifted up a manila folder, waving it around before letting it drop onto the coffee table. The insides spilled out in a fan of papers and pictures. “He might have saved your ass and you were a bitch.”

The Mother Theresa thing flew out the window. If she wanted a fight, we’d have a fight, and I’d win because I could point out the obvious flaws in her logic, like the part where The Sex with vampires was okay. Not that she brought that up right then, but I wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

“Oh, come on! I wasn’t that bad! And you should have told me about him before so I had time to process. You dumped him on me out of nowhere. I didn’t realize necrophilia was your thing.”

“SEE? That’s
why
I couldn’t tell you!” She stomped towards the steps, her fingers wrapping over the stair rail as she leaned forward. I walked backwards until my back pressed against the wall. I’d never seen my mom so mad before, and even though I was mad too, she freaked me out. She wouldn’t hurt me or anything, but no one stood next to a bubbling volcano without getting burned, and right then she was Mount Vesuvius on the cusp of blasting a big lava load.

“I couldn’t tell you because everything’s black and white with you. There’s no room for gray. Everyone’s an asshole, everything sucks, everything’s this way or that, never in between. Well, that’s not life, Margaret Jane. Nothing is ever absolutely one way or the other. Jeff’s a good guy.”

“He’s a vampire! He sucks blood to live! From living people! He’s a glorified leech, and
he’s dead!
”

That was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes did a creepy bulging thing, and there was a sound reminiscent of a cat with its tail stuck in a door. I expected her to scream, but instead she turned around, went back to the TV, and adopted the beer/remote control rotation again. She dismissed my presence like I’d become a ghost. I stood there with my back to the wall, unsure of what to do. I’d done some amazingly stupid stuff in the past, but she’d never gotten this furious with me. A small, lizard part of my brain suggested I should apologize, but if I was too pissed off to think straight, the sorry wouldn’t mean much. Besides, someone should know what they’re apologizing for before they made amends.

I crawled up to my room, letting Mom do her seething anger thing. Hopefully, she’d be over it tomorrow. I’d have a crappy night’s sleep in the meanwhile, but maybe when we were both less wound up, we could talk. As I slid between the sheets, feeling lower than crap, I convinced myself that we’d find some common ground in the morning, this was a minor setback in the scheme of things.

Whoa, was I wrong.

M
OM WAS GONE
when I dragged my carcass out of bed. I stumbled through the living room, catching sight of the MF list hanging from the edge of her desk. It had today’s date on it and a circle around a two star goblin job in Hanson with the words ‘I’m here’ written in Janice’s hen-scratch. Apparently, she was mad enough to leave me behind on jobs I was more than qualified to handle.

“Shitty shit, shit!”

I wadded the list into a ball and threw it at the trash bin, missing by a mile not because of lack of skill, but because I have the motor function of a squirrel with brain damage in the mornings. It didn’t help that I was exhausted. My sleep was terrible, partially thanks to my mom problem, but also because I had nightmares about Allie’s leprechaun buddy all night. I dreamed he chased me around the house with a fireplace poker. It wasn’t conducive to proper rest and relaxation.

On the bright side, at least my shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. There was some tightness when I moved a certain way, but my answer to that was to not move that way again, problem solved.

I consoled myself with a bowl of Lucky Charms, saving all of the marshmallow bits for last. My second bowl was not because I was hungry, but because I figured if I ate so much I exploded my mother’d be sorry she left me behind. I was about to dig in, but a knock on the door interrupted my marshmallow heaven. Considering we were visited by precisely no one, I found it strange, but I chalked it up to UPS or the postman. I patted my bedhead into place and made for the door.

Being greeted by a wall of ghoul before ten was not what I expected.

Ghouls were human servants who did their vampire master’s dirty work during the day. It wasn’t that vampires couldn’t go out, more that they shouldn’t. Post dawn, their powers were diminished: they were lethargic, got terrible sunburns, and—funny enough—they were as blind as bats in bright light, cliché totally intentional. They functioned better at night, so they kept a stable of humans to run around and do their vampire business for them when the day star burned. In this instance, vampire business entailed two strangers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in my doorway looking weird and intimidating respectively.

To be fair, I didn’t immediately know they were ghouls. It’s not like they wore signs around their necks or scratched it into their foreheads, though I should have guessed what they were by the way they looked at me. It was an amalgam of pity, intensity, and curiosity, like they had a vested interest in me. Considering I was about as interesting as three-day-old bread, it should have set off alarms.

The guy on the left, the previously mentioned weird one, was tall and thin, with a helmet of black curly hair, dark skin, and a series of strange marks peppering his face and neck. They weren’t zits or measles, more like chicken pox that had been scratched until they scarred. He wore big clothes on lean bones, so both shirt and pants looked precariously close to falling off if he moved the wrong way.

The other was a woman with shoulders as wide as a refrigerator. Her hair was bleached shock platinum, a kerchief covering her dark roots. A sweatshirt, jeans torn before they saw a store rack, and a smear of thick makeup completed her look, which was... I honestly don’t know. Fashionable hobo? Hooker-chic? Admittedly the only thing trampy about her was the cosmetics: eye shadow as blue as a summer sky, red lips that would have done Bozo proud. It looked out of place on such a big lady; she wasn’t fat, just huge. One of her hands could have palmed my face like a basketball. She had to be six and a half feet tall.

“Is Janice home?” She asked with a thick accent my television education suggested was Russian. She didn’t bother to smile or look me in the eye, instead using her impressive height to peer into the house over my head. The only way I could have stopped her was to jump up and down like a hyperactive poodle, which I was not about to do. Besides, I was too full of Lucky Charms to bounce anywhere.

“Uh. Who are you?”

“Does not matter. You are Maggie, yes?”

Anyone unwilling to give their name was not someone I wanted or needed to talk to. I started to close the door, intending to double bolt it and find myself something explodey or pointy, but the woman jammed her booted foot in at the last second, her hand gripping the side.

“Let go!”

“I am sorry, but you need to come with us now.” She pressed forward, and my feet slid over the hallway tile. Not only was she enormous, she was
strong like bull
.

“Screw you!”

“Please. This is nothing bad, just a meeting. Let us do this easy. We will have you home by supper, I am promising.”

“Fuck. Off.” I didn’t have a lot of time to mull my options. The weapons were all in the breezeway, I was losing ground, and the skinny guy swiped for me with his spindly arms. My brain filtered through six zillion Janice-teachings, trying to pick the right one for the given situation, but none of them resembled ‘giantess shoving her way into your house and demanding you go for a joy ride.’ The best I could do was ‘any encroaching enemy should be sized up, and if you’re feeling out-manned, run like Forrest Gump.’

Considering I’d developed a justifiable fear of huge Russian women, I felt pretty confident turning tail and screaming through the house like my underwear were on fire. I heard the strangers coming, her lumbering like an ox, him moving fast. Way too fast, like vampire-from-Plasma fast. His arms locked around my chest and he slammed his knee into the back of my leg, destroying my balance. I tumbled forward, but before I could greet the floor face-on, he rolled with me, positioning his body so he’d take the brunt of impact on his back. He wasn’t much of a cushy thing to land on being all thin-skinned and angular, but it was far better than busting my nose on the tiles.

Russian hooker lady collected me from him, looping one arm around my torso, the other around my legs. I kicked, I squirmed, I thrashed—it didn’t matter. All the hand-to-hand training in the world did nothing against her strength. If I had the smallest window of opportunity, I could gouge at her eyes or hit a pressure point in her neck, but she had me so effectively locked down, I was pretty sure she’d done this kidnapping thing a time or twelve before.

“What are you, werewolves?” I demanded.

“Nyet. We serve Maxim.”

My clever brain jumped to ‘men’s magazine with boobs on the cover’ and ‘pads’, but I swallowed both musings AND a near hysterical bubble of laughter. “That’s the vampire elder, isn’t it?”

“A prince.”

“Wait, a vampire prince?”

“Da.”

I figured out two things then. First, Mom and I hadn’t nuked any elder’s first born—we’d done a prince’s first born, and princes were like territory leaders. They acted as liaisons between their communities and the human communities, and as such had a lot of pull. We were in much deeper crap than we’d anticipated. Second, my kidnappers were ghouls. I didn’t know much about the hows and whys of the vampire/ghoul bond thanks to that whole ‘while a virgin, no vampire stuff for you’ clause, but at least I was familiar with some basics. The bond between a master prince and his human servants was mutually beneficial: the vampire got some lackeys to do his grunt work, the lackeys inherited a few supernatural tricks for their veneration. In this case, it was improved strength and speed, though I’d read about some ghouls with telekinesis, telepathy, and shapeshifting.

I glanced back at the skinny guy. He slithered along behind us, stopping when we hit the threshold to close the front door of the house. He hadn’t said a word, letting my Amazonian captor do all the talking, though when I stared at him, he smiled. I would have smiled back except for that whole
being terrified and pissed off and wanting to bite off his face and maim him for life
thing.

We piled into an SUV with tinted windows, me crammed tight to the woman’s chest like an overgrown infant. Before I could holler my head off for one of the neighbors to call the police, she shoved my face into the side of her boob, stifling my cries. I dug in my teeth to give her one to remember me by, but her sweatshirt was too thick to get through. Not only was I frustrated, but now my tongue was all linty, too. It sucked.

The door closed shut and the car moved. As the two ghouls were in back with me, a third person chauffeured, but there was a privacy shield between driver and passengers so I couldn’t see who it was. It hit me then that I was going to see a vampire prince, that I had been taken from my home and was now considered the victim of a monster attack. The lady said I was safe, that I’d be home by suppertime, but she probably lied and I’d be bitten and bled dry. I never should have been a pain in the ass about the journeyman thing, I should have waited ‘til Ian did me right, this was all my fault.