Charming (13 page)

Sig shrugged angrily, a you-can-do-what-you-want gesture. “What my friends and I do is already dangerous. You can hear and smell trouble coming. You can walk in front of us and heal from wounds that would kill anyone else. You can take
out three vampires with a busted-up broomstick and a bottle of holy water. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

I did, and I disagreed. “I lived with a woman years ago. One day her car exploded.”

Sig didn’t seem surprised or impressed by this information.

“It’s not like it was an accident either,” I continued. “The knight who was after me knew that I was always careful about checking my car before I got in it. But Alison always drove when we went to visit her sister, and I didn’t always check her car because I didn’t ride in it very often, and I didn’t really believe deep down that the knights would intentionally kill an innocent woman just to get to me.”

I spat. “I thought they still had
honor
. But the geas only keeps them from taking
supernatural
life unnecessarily.”

“Why weren’t you in the car?” Sig wondered.

“I was going to be,” I said. “Alison got a run in her stockings, and it was easier for her to run down to the drugstore and buy a new pair that matched her dress than to change her outfit.”

Sig went back to her original subject. “I know you two don’t like each other, but if Stanislav gives his word to keep your secret, he’ll keep it.”

“Why would he give it?” I countered. “Because you’re emotionally blackmailing him?”

“It’s not blackmail,” she said angrily. “You might be an ass, but you’re not evil. If he turns you in to the knights, it’s for one of two reasons: he either doesn’t really trust me, or he does believe me and he’s so jealous he’s willing to murder a basically good man. Which one of those people am I supposed to live with?”

I shook my head. “That’s between you and him. But I know what it’s like to have to keep a promise against your will.”

She didn’t have an immediate response for that, and some
of the anger seemed to drain out of her, leaving something sad and awkward behind.

We sat there a little longer. Then the hairs on my neck rose up and my back muscles tightened. I almost growled. I could feel something in the air around us, something that made the temperature drop slightly without creating any currents.

Sig didn’t seem disconcerted. She was staring at the air in front of her and nodding. Then she turned to me. “Stanislav says the house is clear.”

And the guy called me a freak.

“Then let’s make sure there’s nothing hiding in the ground,” I said, rising to my feet.

One of the creepiest things about vampires in a long list of hinky is that all of them can burrow like sand crabs. This is another thing you don’t see in movies or generally read about, but it’s a survival trait. Digging burrows is a way to escape sunlight in a pinch, and that’s not even considering how many vampires wake up to their new existence buried eight to ten feet beneath the earth. Some claim that vampires don’t need to breathe, but that’s just silly… stolen blood doesn’t do them any good if their lungs and hearts aren’t moving to pump it through their veins. They just don’t have to breathe as much or as often. Fortunately vampires generally prefer to roam in cities where concrete infrastructures render their ability to burrow mostly moot.

Mostly.

Sig fished two flares out of the canvas bag, lit them, and tossed them into the crawl space. I got that creeped-out feeling again… as if invisible fingers were playing my spine like a xylophone. It was the presence of the ghosts Sig had mentioned.

There was a ladder at the back of the basement, and it led to a hole that had been torn into the ceiling and covered with plywood from the floor above.

I turned to Sig. “Something isn’t right here.”

Sig uttered something I won’t repeat. Let’s just say it involved my grandmother and a highly inappropriate act of animal cruelty and leave it at that.

“Listen,” I said, indicating the plywood. “It’s like you said about the pile of dirt… these vampires are sloppy. So how have they survived this long without being discovered? Because I’m telling you right now, there are a lot of bodies buried in that dirt floor.”

Sig brushed this observation off. “Worry about that later. Are there any vampires hiding in the dirt?”

I grimaced. She was right, but the feeling that I was missing something wouldn’t go away. I just hoped that whatever I wasn’t seeing didn’t wind up biting me on the ass. Or the neck. Or anywhere, really.

Then I caught the scent, woven in with the other smells like a small bright-red thread in some hideous dark tapestry. Blood breath. Something had expelled carbon dioxide into that cold room full of dead air recently. Something waiting beneath the surface of the cool ground. I waited a while longer and smelled it again, but I didn’t catch any breaths with different signatures.

“There’s nothing in there,” I said finally, nodding my head in a big emphatic yes and holding up one finger.

Sig reached into the canvas bag and removed a CD player. “Then do you mind if I put on some music? I still have to look this place over, and it’s creeping me out.”

“Go ahead,” I told her, not that she really needed my permission.

Sig flicked a switch, and some kind of death metal music with a heavy bass and a lot of shrieking emerged. I found myself hoping that Sig had just bought it to frighten away predators.

Then a high-pitched squeal drove into my eardrums at a frequency too high for a normal human’s hearing. Somebody
in Sig’s group was messing around with LRADs (long-range acoustic devices) and gearing them toward a vampire’s audio range. Sig didn’t seem to notice the sound that was making me clench my teeth at all. I didn’t protest, though. I could handle having my hearing become a painful disadvantage if it meant that any vampires around had to deal with the same distraction.

Lastly Sig removed a sword from her canvas bag, sliding it carefully so that her body was shielding it from the sight of the outside world. It was a custom-made blade with a weighted tip that made it look like a Roman spatha, except that it was longer and edged on both sides as well as pointed.

With a sudden flick of the wrist Sig sent her blade into the crawl space, where it anchored tip-first in the dirt floor. That was one advantage to having a weighted tip that had never occurred to me. Then she dropped onto her rear end in front of the opening before I could stop her, stuck her feet through it, and grabbed the edge of the frame with her hands. Her upper body strength pulled Sig through the opening as if she were being shot through a torpedo tube.

Sig landed on her feet roughly seven feet in front of me, and the sword was in her hands even as a vampire erupted from the dirt floor. The vampire was female and dressed in a sleeveless black T-shirt and panties, and it was flailing its long black hair and hands in every direction, spraying dirt all about. Fortunately the vampire was facing the opening that I was watching through, not Sig. It tried to whirl and grab her legs, but Sig lopped its left forearm off at the elbow. The vampire shrieked and leaped completely out of its hole, sending a blinding spray of dirt up into the air that forced Sig backward.

As soon as the vampire turned its back to me, I dove into the crawl space. I caught my fall on my fists with my sword in my hand and pointed outward, away from my body. Rolling
forward onto my back and then to my feet, I came up in a boxing stance with the wakizashi held in a reverse grip in front of me. A right hand came flying at me, and I batted it aside—but there was no vampire attached to it.

I watched as Sig delivered the kind of high front kick that martial arts schools teach but that you should never actually do, the ones that are way too easy to grab—provided the opponent has hands to begin with. Sig’s foot caught the vampire square on its chest, and it literally flew eight feet across the room and smashed into the cement wall, causing cracks and clouds of dust. The vampire somehow stayed on its feet as it bounced off the wall, waving its handless stumps around and screaming mindlessly before Sig took its head off with a two-handed swing of her sword.

How did that Lewis Carroll poem about the Jabberwock go? Something about a vorpal sword going snicker-snack.

A shadow flickered across the floor, and I looked up to see one of Dvornik’s nephews peering into the opening with a machine pistol in his hand. For some reason the pistol was trained on me. I made a turning-down gesture with my hand, and he obligingly turned the music off. Sig was leaning on her sword at this point, and she said something to him in Croatian that made him lower his pistol. After another long moment he left.

I didn’t say anything or move for a time. Fights stir up a lot more than adrenaline and dust, and it’s best to let someone who’s just been in one have whatever space they need. Sig kept her hand on the hilt of her sword and continued to lean on it, pressing the tip into the ground. Her eyes eventually lost their hyperfocused quality, and her breathing became normal again.

After a while she looked up at me. “The ghosts are still here. We’ll have to give them a proper burial.”

“This vampire didn’t kill them,” I offered. “It’s newly turned. Look at it. It’s still human-looking.”

Vampires don’t turn everyone they bite into vampires. Creating a new undead is an intentional act that takes time and planning, not a side effect or an impulsive accident. I don’t know all the steps involved in a vampire’s creation, but I know that it takes multiple bites over an extended period—some legends say three bites over three days, but legends say three times about almost everything. The act also requires an exchange of blood—the victim has to drink the vampire’s life fluids as well as donating their own—and the victim has to be buried for days—again, most legends say three. I don’t know why the burial aspect is important except that we’re talking about magic here, and putting things in the earth has obvious symbolic significance. You bury things when they’re dead. You also plant things in the ground to make them come to life.

If I was right, the vampire Sig had just killed had come out of the ground for the very first time today.

Sig nodded tiredly. “I recognize her. I spent a lot of time talking to prostitutes when I was trying to figure out why the ghosts of butchered women were wandering around town. She said her name was Vicki.”

I thought about that. “Why would a vampire want to turn someone like that?”

Sig shrugged. “She was still attractive in a way. Bad teeth. Great body. Maybe one of the vampires knew her from its previous life.”

We stayed quiet for a while.

“You go ahead and check the house out,” Sig said finally. “I’m going to see if I can learn anything from these ghosts.”

I peered at her closely. It was hard to read her expression with
the light of the flares casting shadows over her face. “I thought you couldn’t talk to them.”

She hesitated. “I want you to picture something for me, OK?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

“Imagine an open doorway. It’s dark beyond that door and you can’t see what’s on the other side, but you can see a hand clutching on to the door frame where someone is trying not to get pulled all the way in.”

“OK,” I said.

“A ghost is like that hand,” Sig asserted. “It’s not the whole person. It’s just a very small part of them that won’t let go. And the worse the death, the less effectively a ghost communicates. Some of them can’t even think, much less speak. The worst of them are just residual echoes.”

“And these died badly,” I said. It might have been the most obvious statement I’d ever made.

Sig winced. “I can still examine them. Maybe identify who they were later.” Her face hardened then. “And put their killers down if that will help lay them to rest.”

No wonder she had bags under her eyes. Something occurred to me. “Can Dvornik see ghosts too? When he’s… you know…” I made a butterfly out of my hands and pretended that it was flapping out of my chest and taking off over my head.

“Yes,” she said.

I nodded slowly. That would make for one hell of a bond.

“You did the right thing,” I said.

“The woman I met was a lost soul even before she was undead, but…” Sig trailed off and didn’t finish whatever she’d started to say. Probably that it was harder to destroy a vampire when you’d personalized them, even just a little bit… even
when you disliked the person they’d been. Instead, she said simply: “We live in a very ugly world.”

It was hard a point to argue with, standing in the middle of an improvised burial mound, lit by the hellish red light of road flares and surrounded by dismembered body parts. I tried anyhow. “We live in a world that has very ugly things in it. And you just put one of them down.”

“I did,” Sig agreed. Her voice didn’t contain any noticeable enthusiasm and her expression was unknowable, but she was looking at me steadily.

“Damn straight,” I said, stepping up and slapping her shoulder lightly. “Now stop trying to seduce me and soldier up.”

It took a moment for that to register. “What?” she said.

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing,” I said. “You know tomorrow night’s a full moon…”

“Are you still going on about the full moon tomorrow night?” she interrupted, a bit more animated now. “News flash: you don’t turn into a wolf. Quit whining already.”

“We live in a very ugly world,” I said in a falsetto voice, batting my eyelashes.

She laughed reluctantly, then punched me in the upper arm. It wasn’t all that light a punch. “Get out of here,” she said.

“Do you need to get out of this hole for a while?” I asked her seriously.

She shook her head. “No, I don’t want to have to come back. I just want to get this over with. I’m not some princess who needs rescuing. You go do what you need to do in the house.”

So I did.

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