Legally Undead (28 page)

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Good.”

She slid her cheek along mine, her breath gliding along my neck. I bent my head to the side to give her better access. Her mouth gently caressed the skin above my jugular, then slid back up to my ear.

“I missed you, too.”

Then, ever so delicately, she traced the outline of my ear with her tongue.

That made twice in one night that some vampire had licked my ear. Gross.

Looking back on it, I’m ultimately glad that she made that one mistake, because it broke some of her hold over me. I might crave her bite, but that didn’t mean that I would put up with the whole ear-licking business. I knew Greg had to have picked that up from someone else; I certainly didn’t teach him that little trick. Yuck.

I didn’t step away from her, but I reached into the back of my jeans and pulled my crucifix out. I brought it up in front of her face, forcing her to draw back from my neck a little.

She shook her head.

“I’m not Christian, dearest. Your religious icons don’t frighten me.”

“So why did you make me hand over the crucifix I was carrying the first time we met?”

“I told you then, it was a symbol of your willingness to negotiate. Symbols have meaning, sweetness, but only if we give them that meaning.” She smiled.

I didn’t move the crucifix, but I brought the knife up between us, sliding it to a point over her left breast. She glanced down at it, then rested her face in the crook of my neck and laughed.

“Knives can’t hurt me either, darling,” she said.

I shoved it, hard, and it sliced through her skin and into her body.

“Even if it’s got wood on it?” I asked.

She got that surprised look, but she didn’t crumple to the ground. Instead, she took a step backwards and stared down at the hilt sticking out of her chest.

“That hurt,” she said. She sounded more petulant than anything. She plucked the knife out of her body and tossed it on the ground. “You’re going to pay for that,” she said.

I hit her heart. I know I did. I had the right angle on it. I felt the knife slide in and enter the flesh. I’d just spent all afternoon staking vampires and I knew how it felt when I hit the heart.

She hadn’t reacted to it at all.

I was learning all sorts of new things about vampires today.

I ran. At that moment, I was convinced it was my only option. I wasn’t even halfway down the hall before she caught me, though. Actually, she didn’t so much catch me as suddenly appear directly in front of me, much as if she had teleported there.

Okay. Running: bad idea.

“Elle, sweetest, why are you doing this?” she asked. She sounded sad, almost disappointed. “You know what you want. Why don’t you just let me give it to you?”

I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I was trapped.

“Okay,” I said. My shoulders slumped in defeat. I turned and walked back into the dark bedroom, where I sat down on the edge of the bed.

Deirdre appeared beside me as if by magic. She stroked her hand across mine.

“There. Isn’t that better?” she said soothingly.

“Yeah.” I sounded like a disgruntled teenager.

Deirdre laughed and buried her face in my neck. I arched my back in pleasure as I felt her teeth graze across my skin. The hand that she’d been stroking clutched at her arm.

Just as she sank her fangs into my neck, I brought my other hand across my body and jabbed the Taser directly into her side, pushing the button as hard as I could.

Modern technology is such a beautiful thing.

Her teeth snapped together convulsively and I screamed as pain coursed through my entire body. Pulling the Taser away from her, I pried her jaws apart and pushed her away from me. Blood flowed down across my shirt. I grabbed the bedspread and wadded it up against my neck. Hoping that I wouldn’t bleed out and die before I could finish the job, I poked the Taser into Deirdre’s stomach and buzzed her again, just to make sure.

She’d already proven that a stake to the heart wasn’t enough to kill her. The sun had gone down. I didn’t have many options left. So I took the only one I knew.

I beheaded her.

That sounds a lot neater than it really was. It was actually a bloody mess. A stinking-of-rotten-vampire-blood bloody mess. The only thing I had to work with was my little knife. Granted, it was sharp, and that was helpful when I sliced through her neck. But then I reached her spine and I had to use both hands to cut through it. My hands were slippery with blood by that point—my own clean, red blood and her foul-smelling, blackish-red, rotten blood—and I was having a hard time holding onto the knife. I was also finding it difficult to keep the bedspread bunched up against my own neck.

I ended up breaking her neck—again, something that sounds easier than it actually is. I had to grasp the spine in both hands and twist. Even using all my strength, it took three tries before I felt it crunch. By the second try, I was sobbing from frustration and sheer horribleness—my eyes were clouded with tears and I couldn’t wipe them because everything was covered in gore. My hands kept slipping in the blood. And then I had to cut through the spinal cord. It made a snapping noise and I whimpered.

By that time, the bed and I were both covered in the blackish vampire blood. My shirt was so soaked in blood—my own and Deirdre’s—that it clung to my body. I could feel tears making tracks down my face. My arms were streaked with red and black up to the elbows and my hands were beginning to feel glued to my knife. And I smelled even worse than I looked. I smelled of vampire blood, fetid and decayed and decomposing.

I didn’t bother to clean my weapon. I just peeled it away from my fingers and shoved it into a pants pocket. These clothes were ruined anyway.

The bedspread was soaked, too, so I dropped it. I picked up Deirdre’s head by the hair. It dangled from my grasp as I walked out into the hall and stepped into the dressing room. I had planned to take my clothes with me. Instead, I just picked up the shirt I’d left behind last time and held it against my neck. I was beginning to feel dizzy. I moved back into the hall and toward the stairs.

And of course, that’s when I found Greg.

He was backing away, I presume in horror, from the scene in Deirdre’s bedroom. I’m sure it looked pretty gruesome from his perspective in the doorway, what with Deirdre’s limp, headless body leaking blood onto the bed and all. He’d been in the room across the hall from me when I killed Deirdre—the only room on the floor that I hadn’t gotten around to checking.

He literally backed into me as I reeled out into the hall. He spun around, took one look at me, and backed up several paces. I’m sure I looked like a crazy woman, covered in blood, clutching a shirt to my neck with one hand and dangling a severed head in the other.

We stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Neither of us moved. I didn’t think I had the strength left to fight him if it came down to it. But I didn’t want him to know that. Finally, I spoke.

“Okay, Greg,” I said. “Here’s the deal. You. You don’t ever fuck with me again. Ever. Got it?” My voice was harsh and raw. “If you do, I will hunt you down. And this—” I waggled Deirdre’s head at him “—this will look like an easy out. Understand?”

Greg nodded, silently, eyes wide as he stared at the head in my hand.

I took a step backward, toward the stairwell, and he turned and bolted back to the room he’d been hiding in. I heard a lock click as he shut the door.

I turned and trudged down the stairs, still swinging Deirdre’s bloody severed head. That made—what, three times now?—that I’d broken up with Greg.

Chapter 24

Everyone stopped what they were doing when I stumbled into the basement room; they just stood there staring at me for what seemed like a full minute as I stood in the doorway.

Then Dom starting laughing. Hard. So hard he had to sit down on the floor and hold his stomach. No one else moved.

For some reason that irritated me.

“When you’re done laughing at me, maybe you could go upstairs and stake my ex-fiancé for me. Or maybe someone else could do it?” I glared around the room. “He’s locked himself in the last room on the left.”

“I’ll go,” John offered. “I need to get away from that smell.” I could see him trying to hide a grin as he swept past me and trotted up the stairs, taking them three at a time.

“Show-off,” I muttered. Then I leaned my back against the nearest mirrored wall and slowly slid down it until I was sitting with my knees tucked up under my chin.

Tony was by my side in an instant, tugging the t-shirt away from my neck.

“Let me see what you’ve got here.” I recognized his soothing, I’m-a-professional voice. “Mmm,” he muttered under his breath. “That’s going to need stitches.”

“Great,” I said.

Dom wiped the tears of laughter out of his eyes. “Hey, Elle?”

“What?” I was still angry.

“I take it that’s Deirdre’s head you’ve got over there?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Any particular reason you brought it with you?” He dissolved into laughter again.

Reason? I looked down at the head. I was still clutching it by the hair. I untangled my fingers and peeled them away from the clumps of hair, now sticky with blood.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, looking back up at Dom. He seemed to swim in my vision, like he was receding into the background. I felt cold suddenly.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Tony said, pushing me over so that my head was between my knees. “You’re not going to pass out on us.”

“Oh, I think I might,” I said.

“Nope. Malcolm, do you know where the kitchen is in this place?”

“Yeah.” Malcolm looked pale. His throat moved convulsively.

“Then go get some juice or something,” said Tony. “And grab a blanket while you’re at it. She’s lost a lot of blood and she’s going into shock.”

Malcolm disappeared from my view.

“He didn’t look so hot,” I said to Tony.

“Yeah, well, neither do you,” he replied.

“I think maybe he was about to throw up.”

“The sight of severed heads will do that to some folks,” Tony said.

I looked back down at the head on the floor beside me.

“I guess it is kind of disgusting,” I said. “You think I should close her eyes? Maybe that would help.”

Dom and Nick stood over me now, looking at me with concern.

Behind them, I saw one of the humans on the mattress start to move. A pale young woman with long brown hair, so long that it almost touched the floor, stood up and stretched her arms above her, yawning.

“Hey, Dom,” I said, jerking my chin toward the woman. The motion made my head spin again so I closed my eyes and dropped my head back down between my knees. When I opened my eyes again, I could see Dom reflected in the mirror, walking toward the woman with his hands out.

“It’s okay, Miss. I just need to talk to you,” he said.

I saw her turn to look at him, and she smiled, and then… then her reflection slowly faded away. I thought for a second that my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I realized that I could still see Dom, still moving toward her, still talking.

I jerked my head up and yelled, “Dom! Watch out!”

Dom, confused, turned back to look at me. Luckily for Dom, Nick caught on much more quickly, and was already pulling his crossbow up to shoot. The bolt hit the newly-made vamp right in the chest as she leaped at Dom.

I looked in the mirror again and hissed through my teeth as I realized that every single human we had carefully spared earlier either already had awoken or was in the process of waking up. And every last one of them, as they regained consciousness, lost his or her reflection.

And gained a lovely new set of fangs as a parting gift.

“Well, hell.” I muttered. I started struggling to get up.

“No,” said Tony. “You are not going to participate in this one.”

“Fine. But I am going to stand up so that I can at least defend myself if one of those vamps decides to ignore my doctor’s warnings.”

Behind him, Nick and Dom were holding the vampires at bay, Nick by shooting his crossbow every few seconds and Dom by waving a crucifix at them while Nick reloaded.

“Okay,” said Tony. “But unless they come over here, you are to lean against this wall. And that’s it. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Tony helped me stand up.

“That okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Now go help them.”

He sprinted off, stopping long enough to bend over and scoop up another crossbow and a bag of wooden bolts from the floor.

I concentrated on retaining my balance.

It really didn’t take the guys very long to finish off most of the new vampires. I had to admire their efficiency. Nick and Tony alternated shooting and reloading the two crossbows. Dom made sure the vampires who were down were really dead by running another stake through them.

Malcolm came back in the middle of the new fight. He walked in and, in his surprise, dropped the glass of orange juice he’d been carrying for me. The liquid splashed across the floor and mingled with the blood that had leaked out from the stump where Deirdre’s neck used to be.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Can I have the blanket, though? I’m really cold.”

“Sure,” he mumbled. He handed me the blanket without looking at me. I don’t think he was looking at anything. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders.

I think he might be in shock
, I thought.

And then I passed out.

* * *

When I came to, I was sitting on the last bench seat in the van, leaning against Dom’s shoulder. In fact, we were all in the van, and headed back into the city. By all, I mean me, Nick, John, Dom, Tony, and Malcolm. And a strange young man tied up in the back of the van. Hog-tied. With a gag shoved into his mouth.

“Who’s that?” I asked no one in particular.

“Tony’s lab experiment,” Dom said.

“Yeah? Where you planning to keep him?”

“I’ll lock him in one of the rooms,” Tony said.

“In the shop?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Couldn’t we kill him first?”

“We already went through all this while you were out,” John said from the driver’s seat. “Tony wants to see if he can figure out how the vamps tick—he wants to check out how much poison they’ve got, how they deliver it, and what exactly hurts them. He needs one alive to do that.”