The Awesome (8 page)

Another one of Mom’s arrows took the vampire in the shoulder. She staggered back, screeching, rabid in her fury and need for a Maggie-snack. But before she could regain her bearings and lunge for me again, a second vampire appeared. He wrapped his arms around her to haul her away. My attacker didn’t like that. Her heels raked over the pavement, her head thrashing back and forth as she jerked and writhed.

A handler
, I thought to myself, thankful for the second vampire’s brute strength. The first vampire used her claws to shred at him, tearing his shirt apart and digging bloody furrows into his forearms, but he took it all in stride, lifting her off of the ground like she weighed nothing at all.

“Stop, Lizzie.”

“I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking hunt you down and kill you!” She spit at me. “I’ll drain you!”

Mom kept one arm up, holding the crossbow, while the other put the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life. Mom handed me the weapon. As soon as I had a grip, she peeled off the curb and tore down the street, her hands locked at the ten and two position, knuckles white where they throttled the wheel.

“How bad are you hurt?”

“I’m bleeding,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“Claws or glass or what?”

“Glass, I think. I couldn’t see it, but it hurts.”

“Fuck.”

I wasn’t sure if she was bemoaning my injury, or the fact that we weren’t all that far away from the vampire and the street light in front of us turned red. A steady stream of two-lane traffic forced us to stop at the intersection. Mom’s eyes flicked to the rear view, watching like she expected the vampire to gnaw our back bumper. She wasn’t all that far off the mark. Screams erupted from the street behind us. It was a terrible sound—a baying, shrill thing that made me wince, my hold tightening on the crossbow. It got closer and closer as the fang barreled our way. My eyes swung to my mirror, waiting for the blur of motion that would herald the vampire’s arrival.

Yes, vampires appear in mirrors. Books and movies screw up a lot of the finer details.

“Hold tight,” Mom said. I had enough time to brace a leg against the dash before Mom jerked the van into reverse and put the pedal to the floor. We careened backwards, propelled as if launched from a cannon. I let out a startled shriek, unsure of what the hell was going on. Then there was a thud and another scream as we hit something solid. Mom stopped, put the car into drive, went forward a few feet, and then went into reverse again, hitting that same lump over.

And over. And over.

“Bitch wants to threaten my kid? Let her eat grit.” Mom snagged the crossbow from me and got out of the car, loading another arrow as she moved. Despite my terror, I followed, my legs quivering like Jell-O. My mother’d run over someone to keep me safe. It seemed stupid to let her finish it without me despite every instinct I had telling me to
run and hide and get away now.

The smears along the pavement stretched for twenty or thirty feet. Viscera covered the road, puddles of blood and gore soiling the asphalt. Nothing should have survived a trauma like that, yet the vampire gurgled like her guts weren’t strewn all over. That her middle was flattened and divided in half hadn’t caught up to her brain.

“Sometimes the best thing to do is to cut your losses,” Mom announced in her ‘I’m giving you a lesson so pay attention’ voice. She raised the crossbow. “When they’re too far gone to back down, when all they see is meat, we end them. Period. No second chances.”

“Wait!”

A man’s voice, the handler’s voice, tore our attention away from the shuddering meat pile. He stood there with his torn shirt and shredded arms, fists balled at his side. At first I thought he was angry, like he held himself back from attacking us for hurting her, but then I noticed how his shoulders trembled, the way his tongue slicked over his lips. He wasn’t mad, he was
scared
. “Her sire will pay. He’ll pay well. She’s young and inexperienced. Let her go. Please.”

“Why’d
you
let her go, dipshit?”

“She said she was fine. She said she needed a drink. I thought...”

“You thought wrong.” Mom fired an arrow into the fledgling’s head. Whatever you may have heard about vampires needing to be staked and beheaded and ‘that’s the only way to kill them’ is crap. Silver works wonders on them, too, a noxious poison that collapses their veins when put somewhere important, like brains or hearts. The vampire’s screams cut short, her mouth falling open as white, foamy spittle pooled at the corners of her lips. Her ravaged body shuddered—even the parts separated from her torso—and then it went still, collapsing with a squish.

“Get a couple balloons,” Mom said. “Head and neck. I’ll stake the heart for good measure and phone this into the clean-up crew.”

“Okay.” I did as I was told, trying not to stare too long at any one gob of vampire flesh as I holy watered the corpse. The dead flesh fizzled and smoked, filling the air with a distinctly bacon-y smell. It did nothing for my queasy stomach.

“ No. Why?” The handler ran his hand over his face. “How... why? She was helpless. You didn’t have to kill her.”

Mom snorted. “Helpless? My ass. I’m a federally registered hunter, and your charge threatened me and my partner not once, but twice. The moment she came after us a second time, it was over. Don’t like it, talk to the DoPR.”

“But... “ The handler went to his knees before the biggest pile of fanger goo. “But she was an elder’s first born. This can’t happen.”

That gave my mother pause, though if you didn’t know her you wouldn’t be able to tell—a slight tension around her eyes, crow’s feet where there normally weren’t any. She collected herself quickly, shrugging her shoulders and heading back to the van. “He can make another.”

“Not another first born.”

“Sucks to be him then, don’t it?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
STRADDLED THE
toilet in the bathroom, my sweatshirt cut open from shoulders to waist, my bra hanging off my biceps. Mom didn’t want me lifting my arms because she didn’t want me to unclot, so she dismantled my outfit with a pocket knife and a pair of scissors.

“Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.”

“Bad news first.”

“You’re the Big V. I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with penis again.” I stared at the wall in front of me, finding Mom’s attempt at humor lacking, all things considered. Pancaking an elder’s first progeny was a punch to the ovaries; there was no way the elder would take it well, and an eye witness meant our involvement couldn’t go ignored. The handler probably painted us as whores of Babylon to a butthurt, powerful superior.

Not good.

Mom peeled the sweatshirt away to run a damp cloth over my cut. “The good news is I hit you with holy water and you’re not screaming. It’s not a vamp tag. I’m going to clean you and super-glue you to be sure, but you should be good to go.”

“Super glue me?”

“Yeah. I don’t think you need stitches, but we’ll glue you shut in case.” I wouldn’t ask. Mom had been performing first aid on herself since she started hunting with my grandparents twenty years ago. The only time she
hadn’t
mended her own cuts and bruises was the year she took off to be pregnant with me. If she said I needed to be glued, glued I would be.

She prodded the tender, broken flesh of my cut, and though I swore I wouldn’t cry, my eyes welled up anyway. It stung. Mom couldn’t see me, but she must have been able to tell I wanted to snivel like an infant because she made conversation to distract me. “If that vampire was an elder’s first child, we might have some complications. The elders tend not to bite any old meat sack. She might have been someone, you know, important.”

“So we’re moving again,” I said, used to this routine. Any time Mom thought a monster might come after her, we relocated to stay one step ahead.

“Not necessarily. It’s always a possibility with this business, but the ball’s in the elder’s court now. He might take it out on the handler’s ass for being a moron and letting her go at us a second time. It’s not like we hid that we were hunters.”

Mom reached for something in the medicine cabinet. I kept my eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of me, following the printed ivy pattern as it twisted its way toward the ceiling. She poked and squeezed, I cringed and swallowed my whimpers. I was tough, damn it, even if my nerve endings demanded I curl in a corner and thrash like I’d diddled an electrical socket.

Eventually, something cold touched my skin followed by a flat, steady pressure as Mom put her palm against my back to hold the skin together.

“Promise me something?”

“What?”

“You’ll go on that date tomorrow, and before you get all pissy-pants over the suggestion, listen to me, Margaret Jane.” She pulled away her hand to sit on the edge of the tub, peering at me from beneath her too-plucked eyebrows. I sniffled, wiping my runny nose against my shoulder. “I’m not telling you that so you’ll throw your panties at your date. I tell you that because life goes on despite our jobs. It’s too short not to have fun while we can. Sitting at home with guns and silver expecting the worst is no way to live. Trust me on that. I know.”

The sweatshirt worked its way down my front, and I shifted to wrap an arm across my chest so my boobs didn’t join the conversation. Moving strained my cut some, but not enough to rip me open. Whatever Mom did back there helped. “Listen to you, being all Mom-like and crap.”

She flinched. “Cut me some slack, will you?”

“What? You aren’t offended by that. Come on.”

She shrugged, though it wasn’t an easy, fluid thing like she didn’t care. It was more like she cared too much and didn’t want to show it. “I know I’m a fuck-up. I wasn’t raised normal, and I sure in Hell didn’t know how to raise a kid, so I had to wing it. It’s not a lot, but I’m trying over here.”

“It’s enough, Mom. Seriously.” She stood, escaping the bathroom with a stack of bloody towels. “Mom, it’s enough,” I called after her, feeling like a jackass. Sometimes, I wished I did that thing where I thought
before
I spoke. Unfortunately for me and everyone else, I had a perpetual case of diarrhea of the mouth.

“Wait.” I left my toilet perch to follow her, catching her as she was about to descend into the pit of our basement to do laundry. “Please wait?”

“What?”

“... I’ll go on the date.”

She forced a smile, taking the basement steps two at a time to get away from me.

H
AVE
I
MENTIONED
that I’m a dink? Because if not, let me say it here: I’m a dink. Some girls get the butterflies-in-stomach thing over important stuff like their prom or their first boyfriend. I got them over seeing a guy I’d already pseudo-banged, and screw the stomach butterflies, these were stomach pterodactyls. This felt like an execution, not a dinner date.

I picked a black shirt in case my cut split open—visibly bleeding to death would slash my appeal factor in half—a pair of jeans, and a pair of sandals I borrowed from my mom. The best part was when Mom insisted on painting my toenails the same color as the turquoise beads along the sides of the sandals. I couldn’t bend, so she did it for me. They looked cute in a dorky way, and her offer to give me a pedicure meant that the tension from earlier was officially off the map.

“You look great,” Mom said from the couch, her bare feet propped on the coffee table. She had a bowl of popcorn perched on her lap. I watched as she threw a fistful at her face, catching more kernels than not, though a few fluffy pieces peppered her pink hair.

“Thanks.”

“Do I get to meet him? Or are you hiding me away like your dirty secret?”

I checked my face in the hallway mirror, ensuring my makeup hadn’t smeared to make me look like a KISS groupie reject. “If he comes in you can, but he seems shy. I’m not dragging him out of his car if he beeps.”

“I’d pay twenty bucks to see you dragging your date into the house by his hair. It’d be reverse Tarzan and Jane.”

“Whatever.” I grabbed my purse right as a silver BMW pulled in my driveway. I didn’t know if Ian was super spoiled or if his parents just liked nice cars, but I had to admit I was impressed—them be nice wheels. “Whoa.”

“What?” Mom came to stand beside me, staring at my flashy chariot with envy all over her face. “That’s an M3. You can kill him and take his car if you want. I’ll help you hide the body. Soylent Green for everyone.”

“It’s probably his mom’s.”

“If so, I want to shake that woman’s hand. Maybe make out with her.” Mom had something of a car fetish, and would stare at glossy magazine photos of Aston Martins and Bugattis like a pervert stared at nudie centerfolds. It went without saying Ian’s BMW, borrowed or not, scored him immediate awesome points in her book.

“No killing my date. I might need him later.” I hugged her with one arm before heading for the door. “And no making out with his mom. That’d weird him out. Me, too, for that matter.”

“Oh, fine. Have fun. Don’t do anything I would do,” she called after me. “And be careful with that back. It’s glued, not stitched.”