The Awesome (21 page)

I titled our dinner Assault on Eggroll Mountain. Cartons lay scattered on the floor, looking like the broken victims of a horrific food holocaust. I had grease all over my face and duck sauce in my hair. I’d Genghis Khan’ed the
crap
out of that Chinese food, and now I was tired and bloated. Lauren, however, was totally fine, and she picked up the carnage armed with garbage bags and paper towels. I was impressed; I’d watched that chick mainline fifty pigs worth of spareribs. That she could move at all was nigh miraculous.

“Ugh. If you keep being polite and, like, helpful Janice’ll kick me out and keep you. You’re making me look bad.”

“Sorry,” she said, though I could tell by her smile she didn’t mean it. I followed her out to the kitchen, so stuffed I practically waddled. We were packing the dishwasher in companionable silence when we heard the knock on the front door. I looked at the clock—half past midnight. It was way too late for it to be anyone good. For that matter, the last time someone knocked on the door it was a pair of ghouls who tried to suffocate me to death in Lubov boobies.

Lauren peered at me, then at the door. I yanked on her sleeve to keep her by my side. I won’t say I was scared, but I may have been nervous that the ghouls were back. I vacillated between wanting to duck out the back door and make a run for it or heading upstairs to get a weapon from the closet. Normally it’d be a no-brainer—arm myself, shoot, ask questions later—but to get to the stairs I’d have to pass the door, and I was pretty sure Lubov could bust her way in if she wanted.

“You look like you’re going to puke,” Lauren said. “Are you okay?”

“If it’s them, it means they know I told on Max.”

“Them?”

“Ahmad and Lubov. Either Max knows or Mom didn’t do the werewolf job. She went to...” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Janice wouldn’t have done that; she wasn’t stupid enough to charge off to Boston by herself. Attempting to take on a prince, never mind a prince with live-in super ghouls, was dumb. She wasn’t suicidal. Rash, yes, but not suicidal.

Whatever the scenario, the end result was something I wasn’t equipped to handle. The knocking started again, this time accompanied by a loud, shouted “Hello? Maggie? Are you home?” These were not the dulcet Russian tones of a kidnapping giantess. No, this voice belonged to one Jeffrey Sampson, resident pain in my ass and fang bang extraordinaire.

Since the revelation that he sexed my mom, his name was enough to send me into a raging bitch-fit. I made the exception this time, though. I’d even go so far as to say I was
happy
to hear from him. My stomach lurched itself back into place having spent an inordinate amount of time around my knees. Gone, too, was the fear that I’d paint the kitchen walls with undigested General Gau’s. Jeff wasn’t my cup of tea, but he definitely wasn’t Max’s category of bad guy either.

I made my way to the door and opened up. Jeff stood there, pale and seemingly out of breath, one of his arms propped against the side of the house like he needed help standing. He gave me a long look, his cheek twitching and pulsing with strain.

“Get dressed. He has her.”

“... what?”

“Max. He has your mother.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HE FIRST QUESTION
that popped into my head was ‘Why does Jeff know where Mom is?’ I should have assumed Mom asked him to go with her, but my gut reaction was more along the lines of ‘all vampires are dicks and he works for Max and STAB STAB STABBITY STAB.’ I must have telegraphed my distrust all over my face, too, because Jeff shook his head.

“Your mother asked me to act as an intermediary, but Maxim refuses to speak to her without you there. He wanted to send his ghouls, but considering what happened last time, Janice suggested I come instead. I’m not much better than they are, but... well.” His shrug finished the sentence for him.

I let him stand in the doorway as I mulled that over. It was a logical explanation, yes, but he could be lying. Who knew if she was there at all? Or, if Max did have her, Jeff could have set her up in the first place. For all I knew he was Max’s bestie. I could see the two of them snuggling up on the couch watching human actors on the TV the way Mom and I watched the Food Network.

Yeah, screw that. Screw him and screw vampires.

“Maggie.” Lauren cleared her throat, looking between me and Jeff and back again. “If Janice is in trouble, shouldn’t we go to her?”

She believed Jeff, but why wouldn’t she? Calling him a monster would make her feel pretty self-conscious considering her circumstances, plus she wasn’t jaded by years of Janice’s ‘vampires are twisted bastards’ diatribes. I wished Mom had never delivered that particular spiel forty thousand times; it made having to work with her boff buddy more difficult.

“Maggie,” she said again, this time clasping her hand on my shoulder to give me a squeeze. That simple touch was all I needed to get my ass in gear. I ran for the stairs. Even if this was a trap, I couldn’t leave my mom in Max’s clutches. Vampires weren’t known for being charitable when they’d been crossed, and who knew how Mom had behaved going in. Max hadn’t been kidding when he said she’d killed a lot of his kind over the last twenty years. If she’d launched a grenade at some of his folks, he’d be out for blood.

“Shit. SHIT.” I stomped into my bedroom, ripping through my drawers for jeans and a sweatshirt. I strapped on some sneakers, slipped a few stakes into my waistband, and picked out my two favorite knives, wedging them into my back pockets. I headed to Mom’s room to pick through her stuff when Lauren crested the top of the stairs.

“I want to go with you,” she said, watching me pull a bag of water balloons out of Mom’s closet. I crammed the package into the pouch on my sweatshirt before rummaging through Mom’s arsenal.

“No.”

“Janice has been good to me.”

“You’re not trained. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“What’s the worst they can do to me? I’m already dead. I can help.”

“How?”

I grabbed two of Mom’s Glocks, weighing them in my palms to see if I liked their feel, when I heard the squeal of something being dragged across the floor behind me. I turned around and stared, because
how could I not stare?
Lauren had hoisted Mom’s dresser off the floor, her muscles barely flexing as she held it suspended three feet off the ground. The top of the enormous oak chest scraped across the ceiling. I knew that thing was crammed full of clothes and had to weigh at least a couple hundred pounds, yet she handled it without the slightest bit of strain.

Despite feeling sick to my stomach with worry (and, admittedly, Chinese food) I managed to find a smile. “Point made.” She put it back onto the floor, adjusting the drawers that slid out during the jostling. As soon as she turned my way, I threw the bag of balloons at her. “Down on the side porch is a bunch of water jugs. Fill some of these, but not all the way. Keep ’em small. Wait, are you bad with holy water?”

She shook her head. “No. Janice tested me yesterday. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Good.” She ran off to do as I say, her feet pounding down the steps so hard one of the pictures on the wall went off-kilter. It was an album cover autographed by all the members of Aerosmith, one of Mom’s favorite bands. I fixed it, my eyes stinging at the prospect of her being in danger because of me.

“No tears. No. No.” I shouldered into a holster, choosing the smaller of the Glocks and two rounds of silver-tipped ammunition. The crossbows worked better—more silver in their arrowheads—but I didn’t have the same comfort level with them as I did with guns. When I tromped downstairs, Jeff stood in the living room with his arms folded across his chest. He eyed me, I eyed him, and he nodded at the couch.

“We should talk.”

“Then talk,” I said, though I ignored his invitation to sit down, instead adopting his militant posture.

“Fine. If I had to make a guess, he’s going to use mind tricks on you and your mother to work something out regarding the Plasma situation. He’s good at it. He could make you believe you’re poodles if he so chose. I’m not sure if it will work on the zombie...”

“Lauren,” I said. “She has a name and it’s Lauren.” It was convenient the times I decided to be sensitive with my labeling. But by then I itched for a fight and I didn’t particularly care which vampire accommodated me. Jeff would kick my ass, of course, but getting gnawed on by his piranha fangs had to be better than the awful foreboding gurgling in my gut.

“Lauren. Yes. The point is, he could convince your mother to put one of her guns into her own mouth and pull the trigger. What do you think you’d do if he chooses to give her that command? You’re his ghoul. You are blood bound to him, and you cannot betray your master. He could cut your mother in front of you and you’d be forced to watch without lifting a finger to stop it.”

At some point during his speech I started shaking. And then I started heaving. I turned around to puke all over our television screen, and man, that chicken chow mein took flight. Every point Jeff made, every sentence was another kick in the craw. He was right. He was right and I knew he was right and him being right made me sick.

I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t handle my
vampire master
. I was some jerk-off kid who thought she was hot shit because she had a gun. In all reality, I was in over my head. I’d let myself get ghouled because I was stupid. This was big league stuff, my mom’s league, and she was in trouble. I could call Allie Silva and Tiny Tina and ask them for help, but they’d tip the feds and Max would kill my mom on principle.

“I don’t know what... how...”

I felt a hand on the small of my back, tentative at first, but then it rubbed in circles. Jeff tried to comfort me. Under normal circumstances, I’d tell him to screw himself, but for the moment it was okay. It was nice to have someone feel sorry for me. Not that I wasn’t doing an adequate job of pitying myself, but help was always appreciated.

“There’s a way,” he said quietly. “But you won’t like it.”

I looked at him over my shoulder, running the sleeve of my sweatshirt across my mouth. “How.”

He stepped back, eyeing me like he expected me to stake him for whatever he was about to suggest. Or yuke at him. “I ghoul you and overwrite Max’s tag.”

“Fuck you.”

“Listen to me.”

“No!” Another wave of nausea made the room spin. Frantic, I looked around for something better to puke on. I liked my TV, and I didn’t want it to smell bad for the rest of its existence. Under the supposition I ever got to veg out in front of it again, that is—I wouldn’t be couch surfing much if a vampire ate my liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. “Oh, God.”

“Maggie, please. Listen. It’ll break Max’s hold over you. He won’t sense anything’s awry. You were ghouled when you left, you’ll return a ghoul, so he’d have no reason to be suspicious. His blood would still be in your system, too, so he’ll feel you, but he won’t be able to keep you in his thrall. My blood would assure immunity to his mind games.”

I lunged for the paper bag our Chinese food arrived in, retching like I detoxed from some noxious drug. I didn’t spew anything, but my body tried hard, sounding a lot like a backed-up garbage disposal.

Jeff tugged his blond hair out of his ponytail, shaking his head so the gold sheen fell past his ears to brush his chin. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me to suggest. I want to help your mother. I can handle Max, but it’s getting Janice out before he does something to her that worries me. If he hurts her I don’t... I don’t know what I’ll do.” The plaintive lilt to his voice stopped my heaves. I peered at him over the top of my brown paper bag. He sounded so human when he talked about my mother, like he cared about her. Like he had feelings. Like if he’d been a person I’d have said he was head over heels for her and ready to tattoo her name onto his butt.

“Do you love her?”

The question surprised me as much as it surprised him. I didn’t know where it came from. Who cared if the fang loved my mom? It shouldn’t make any difference. He was dead and she was not and...

Aww crap.

Him loving her made all the difference in the world. If Jeff loved Janice, he’d never hurt me intentionally, because that’d hurt her. Him offering to ghoul me was a real, honest-to-God solution to a real, honest-to-God threat. Risky, yes. Stupid on some level, oh yeah. Viable, absolutely. If everything he said was true, I’d show up tagged by Max, but Jeff’s claim would mean I could act independently of the prince’s command. I could shoot him or holy water him or do whatever was necessary to help my mom.

“Yes,” he said, his voice soft. “Undoubtedly yes.”

At least he was big enough to admit it. I wasn’t thrilled he was giving my mom the cold stiff one, but knowing he cared about her meant I couldn’t reject his offer as some self-serving agenda crap. Of course, it also opened up a whole slew of new questions for me, the primary one being, “How? How did this happen? She’s always such a hard ass about vamps. Like, she stakes first, thinks second. How’d she get past that with you?”

He watched me stand, his eyes flicking from me to the clock on the wall and then to the door. “It’s a long story.”