A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters (24 page)

The silver knife was surprisingly sharp. The mouse’s head came right off. It helped, a little, that it didn’t have time to suffer. Its fur had just started to smolder when Mike began the chant.

 

The rat things were getting bolder. She’d killed two more and had just given thanks that they didn’t hunt in packs when she saw a large shadow moving through the building across the road. Back home, a lot of predators hunted at dusk and dawn. It figured, Vicki noted silently, that would hold true here as well.

No, not
moving
through the building.
Slithering.

All things considered, she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised by giant snakes. “And no fucking sign of Samuel Jackson when I could really use him,” she muttered rubbing the back of her neck. She could feel the dawn approaching. The shelter she’d built would give Ren and the kids a chance against the rat things, but giant snakes were a whole different ballgame.

“What are you looking at?”

Vicki glanced down the road to where the portal wasn’t, and shook her head. “Nothing.”

 

The portal wasn’t opening.

The stone under the symbol remained solid.

He should have known this magic shit wouldn’t have a hope in hell of working. Charging around the crypt, Mike smacked the wall with both palms. “God damn it! Open up!” And again. And then with his fists. “Open the fuck up!”

There was a whoosh behind him.

He turned to see the mixing bowl melting in the heat of the flames.

Turned again to see the center of the circle flare white, then gray under a smear of blood.

 

“All right, you’re going to have to . . .” The flash of light she caught in the corner of her eye had probably been nothing more than an indicator that dawn was closer than she thought, but Vicki turned toward it anyway.

“Is that?” Ren’s fingers closed around her arm hard enough to hurt.

“It is.”

“But what if it doesn’t lead home!”

Vicki took another look across the road. She couldn’t see the snake. Probably not a good thing. “Trust me, we’ll still be trading up.” It was hard to find the Hunter this close to sunrise but somehow she managed it. “Gavin! Star! Wake up and come here. Quickly!”

Still wrapped in her imperative, they did as they were told.

Vicki shoved Ren out into the road and the other two out behind her. “Get them through the portal,” she growled. “Get them home.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’ll be right behind you.” She could
hear
the slithering now. “Run!”

To her credit, Ren grabbed her friend’s hands before she started to move.

They’d made maybe twenty meters when the rush of wind at her back had Vicki spin around and squeeze off five quick shots.

Giant snake.

With arms, of a sort.

And no visible eyes.

The bullets dug gouges in the charcoal gray scales. It paused, head and arms weaving about three meters off the ground, but seemed more puzzled than injured.

“Vicki!”

“Keep running!” Next time she ended up on another world with teenagers, she’d add
don’t look behind you.

On the bright side, the giant snake thing had to be keeping the rat things under cover.

Fifty meters further and hunger apparently won over annoyance. Vicki felt air currents shift as the snake lunged. She dropped, rolled, came up, and grabbed the nearest limb above the . . . well, fingers, given their position, snapping it at the elbow.

Leaping clear of the flailing, she raced down the street and hauled Gavin back up onto his feet. He’d torn his jeans and his palm was bleeding and desperate times . . .

She dragged her tongue across the torn flesh and shoved him toward Ren adding what should have been a redundant, “RUN!”

Pain did not seem to make the creatures of this world cautious. If forced to guess, Vicki’d say the snake thing was pissed.

Diving under its charge to the far side of the road, she got a grip on its other arm, braced herself against a piece of broken pavement, and hauled it sideways. There was a wet crack at the point where the arm met the body.

And more flailing.

Ren had shoved Star through the portal and was working on Gavin by the time the snake got moving forward again.

Another time, Vicki might have admired that kind of single-minded determination. But not right now. She grabbed the polished leg bone of the creature she’d killed when they arrived, made it between the snake and the portal just in time, and slammed it as hard as she could on the nose.

“Vicki, come on!”

A glance over her shoulder. The kids were through.

And the portal was about twice as big around as the snake.

The snake didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word
quit
.

She hit it again.

“Vicki! It’s closing!”

Mike.

The portal was still bigger than the snake.

And the sun was rising.

She threw the bone. It skittered off the scales. When the snake lunged, she stood her ground and emptied the Glock into its open mouth. Changed magazines, kept firing. Ignored the pain as a fang sliced into her upper arm.

Stumbling back, she could smell burning blood.

A hand grabbed her shirt, then she was on her back, on the floor of the mausoleum, still firing into the snake’s open mouth.

The portal closed.

The snake head dropped onto her legs.

“Vicki!”

She felt Mike pull the weapon from her hand. Grabbed his hand in turn, and sank her teeth into his wrist. Mike swore, she hadn’t been particularly careful, but he didn’t pull away. One swallow, two, and she had strength enough to tie up a couple of loose ends. “Star, Gavin, forget this night ever happened!”

“I don’t . . .” Ren began.

Vicki cut her off. “Your choice.”

“I want to remember. Well, I don’t really want to remember but . . .”

A raised hand cut her off and Vicki managed to growl, “Sunrise.”

“Got it covered.”

She was heavier than she had been but Mike lifted her and dropped her into the open crypt. The open, occupied crypt.

And then the day claimed her.

 

“Okay, I’m impressed with your quick thinking . . .” Vicki shimmied into the clean jeans Mike had brought her, “but waking up next to a decomposed body was quite possibly the grossest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“At least the body didn’t wake up,” Mike pointed out, handing her a shirt. “Given our lives of late, that’s not something you can rule out.”

“True.” She shrugged into the shirt and moved into his arms, head dropping to rest on his shoulder.

“You need to feed.”

The wound in her arm had healed over but was still an ugly red.

“Later.” She needed more than he could give and right now, she needed him. “The kids?”

“They’re all home. The two you told to forget are . . .” She felt him shrug. “I don’t know . . . teenagers. The other girl, Ren, she’s something. You’re going to have to talk to her.”

“I know. Cameron?”

The arms around her tightened. “Teenagers run away all the time.”

She could tell he hated saying it. “I was too late to save him.”

“Yeah, Ren told me.” He sighed, breath parting her hair, warm against her scalp. “There isn’t enough crap in this world; they had to go looking for another.”

Vicki shifted just far enough to press the palm of her right hand over his heart. “There isn’t enough love in this world; they had to go looking for another.”

A
lovely onyx fountain pen landed with a small thud on my desk, bouncing slightly on a pitifully thin manuscript printed for editing. The latest Tess Noncoiré fantasy novel was taking its own sweet time getting written. I picked up the pen. The nib was gold, broader than I liked, and the body fatter than my hand wanted to fit around. I ran my thumb over the smooth stone, absorbing the slight coolness. It nestled more comfortably in my grip, conforming to my hand. I’d held one like it before. I knew that. My memory refused to jog the image loose.

Layers of color spiraled around the pen’s heavy body, ranging from dark red to light cream, like the desert spires that filled the Valley of Fire outside of Las Vegas. A place of mystical beauty and terrible danger. Did the pen share the danger or just the beauty?

I knew words would flow easily from this pen. Beautiful words that melded together into a story.

Something tickled the back of my mind. An idea? A sentence, then a paragraph filled my head. I touched the nib to the pristine page of a new notebook. Ten words. Two dozen.

Then nothing. My mind pulled back to reality. Where the hell had the pen come from? I pondered the mystery as I wiped the blue ink off the pen with a tissue.

I looked up at the ceiling. Lacking a large glowing hole in the ceiling, the pen clearly had dropped out of thin air. That left one option.

“Scrap?” I demanded of the ether.

A low hum skirted the back of my mind, lodging at the top of my spine.

I jabbed with the pen into the air. “Scrap, where did this pen come from?”

Dahling, I found it,
Scrap replied from elsewhere. Scrap was an imp. He could transform himself into my Celestial Blade when danger demanded it. He could slip between dimensions and times. Today he chose demure and invisible.

“Spit it out, buddy,” I searched my cluttered office for a glimpse of his translucent gray-green body. I detected motion. A hint of a barbed tail twitched between an American English dictionary and a French lexicon on the top shelf of my book case.

I crept away from my station at the computer and latched onto that tail, winding it around two fingers in a special grip that kept him from popping out into another dimension.

Ah, Tess, you didn’t have to do that
, he cajoled, trying to yank his tail out of my grasp. I held firm.

“Tell me about the pen. Where’d it come from?”

“Where?”

I tightened my grip as Scrap tried to slither up my arm to my shoulder.

“Cuddling won’t persuade me to relent,” I told him firmly.

Finally he crossed his arms and pouted at me from the edge of the bookcase. I could almost see the book covers through his half-present body. The blue and black leather bindings faded and brightened with Scrap’s attempts to disappear.

“If
you
found it, then it’s more than a fancy pen.” I looked down in my opposite hand. It still held the pen. Hadn’t I put it down? “Who dumped it and what was it used for?” I looked beyond the graceful lines of the onyx and the tiny slit that revealed the empty ink reservoir. I’d drained it writing my feeble paragraph.

Tiny flecks of rusty brown stained the gold nib. I’d wiped it clean. I knew I had.

Ugh, great. Dried blood. Someone had used the pen to sign in blood. I’d done that once. Blood contracts were irrevocable.

The details of signing the contract poured back into my mind. The pen. This pen. I had used it.

Someone, or something had buried that memory pretty deep so it wouldn’t surface easily or often. Probably me.

My blood on the nib.

Well, you see, the Powers That Be don’t like to use a pen more than once. In case the blood mixes between two clients and there’s crossover in their contracts
, Scrap explained in a gush of words. Straight words, no drawled “dahlings” or endearing “babes,” not even a flick of his hot pink feather boa—which was missing from around his neck.

“So they discard the pens after each use. Go through a lot of them, do they?”

“So why did this one get dumped instead of smashed or burned or whatever?”

Scrap shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to look clueless and innocent.

I tugged on his tail.

“Why? Why’d you grab it?”

“For what? I’m not about to sign any other blood contracts.”

“Like?”

“Interesting idea. But first I’d have to draw blood from someone I really didn’t like. I wouldn’t do something like that to a friend. Or even a casual enemy.”

“I might with a human. I doubt that itty bitty nib would penetrate demon hide. Bullets shot from an AK- 47 won’t penetrate demon hide. If I’m close enough to a demon to stab it with a pen, I’d rather just use you in blade form to take them out. We’ve killed a fair number of demons in our day.”

“Explain? Why would I need to stab someone with a pen when you aren’t around? You are always only a thought away.” Most of the time, anyway. There were a few instances . . .

The lump in my throat sank to form a solid mass in my gut.