Charming (3 page)

Showing my teeth, which were standard human size, by the way, I moved my face closer down to his. “If you push this, I’ll end you and to hell with the consequences.”

The vampire and I had both moved faster than was humanly possible, and because the Pax was already in play, none of the normal customers were noticing anything although some of
them would be having nightmares and odd shivers and twitches for the next few days. The blonde was watching us, and she seemed both outraged and stunned, but she stayed seated. Even among supernaturals—hell, especially among supernaturals—there are rules: rules about hospitality, rules about mating, rules about territory, rules about oath-taking, and rules about oath-breaking. One of the most basic rules is that you don’t step into the middle of someone else’s fight.

As for the fight itself, people who specialize in Brazilian jujitsu or aikido will talk about different kinds of submission locks and choke holds and so on, but I generally don’t try to immobilize anyone who’s truly dangerous for longer than it takes to disable or kill them. I released the vampire’s hand and shoved him off the bar in the same motion. He traveled a few feet but quickly regained his footing with insect grace. We locked stares again, and he attempted to hypnotize me. I could tell because I got a little itch right behind my forehead.

The vampire’s bloodshot eyes widened when he realized that his mental compulsion wasn’t going to work, and my hand came up from behind the bar holding the baseball bat Dave keeps there. He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest the way a lot of your more savvy vampires started doing after they became available online; one quick smack against the side of the bar and the bat would do for a stake. It was only a few nights until a full moon, and my heart was pumping blood and adrenaline through my body several times faster than a normal human’s; God help me, I wanted him to try something.

But the vampire wavered, smelling something new that made him hesitate, probably the blonde. His nostrils puckered, his body stiffened, and then he took a step back, physically and symbolically.

“Get your hunger under control,” I whispered, knowing he
would hear me. “Figure out a way to get what you need, but if I hear about any strange deaths in the next few days, I will find you.”

He abruptly turned and walked toward the restrooms at the side of the bar. Becoming supernatural doesn’t magically make you braver in the face of danger—it just means that there are fewer things that are dangerous to face. Vampires don’t have any moral qualms about coming back with friends if they meet someone powerful enough to be a threat either, but vampires don’t often have friends. They sometimes have hive mates, but even then they’re hesitant to ask those hive mates for help because vampires are very image-conscious and cruel to one another. I doubted that someone like Baldy had any hive mates in any case.

I was wrong, of course.

The blonde sprang to her feet and moved to follow the vampire.

“You. Vampire Hunter Barbie. Hold it.” I pitched my voice so that she could hear me even with normal human hearing, but nobody else could.

Sig adjusted her path and stalked toward the bar, moving at an angle that put me between her and the direction the vampire was moving in. When she spoke, her voice was low and strained. “You still have a chance to avoid getting tangled up in this. I suggest you take it.”

“I don’t care what you do,” I assured her. “Just do it away from my bar.”

Sig gave me her full attention. I didn’t know it then, but she always became calmest at the prospect of imminent violence, a kind of awful and solemn calm that didn’t fool anyone. Her eyes became large and serious, her voice soft. “And how are you going to stop me?”

“You just have normal human hearing, don’t you?” I asked.

“Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“Because,” I said, “I’ve already stopped you.”

The bathrooms had windows facing out on a side alley, and vampires move fast.

With a curse, the blonde rushed toward the restrooms, shooting me a look that left blister marks. I raised my hand and sarcastically waggled my fingers at her. Goodbye, whatever you are. Forget to write. Nice ass.

Wait… did I write that last part out loud?

As soon as it was clear that the blonde wasn’t coming back, I scrounged behind the bar counter until I found a bottle of olive oil. Just to be safe, I sprayed myself a glass of water and then dribbled a drop of olive oil into it. The drop floated there on the surface of the water just the way it was supposed to. She hadn’t really tried to give me the evil eye after all, at least not literally.

You can’t be too careful.

3

T
here were some very good reasons to be concerned when Sig stormed back into the pub ten minutes later, from the murderous frustration written all over her face to the fact that I still didn’t know what she was or even what her name was yet. Another excellent cause for anxiety was that Sig had discarded her ignore-the-bartender policy and was headed straight for the countertop I was working behind. But the main reason I should have been worried was that I wasn’t worried. When I saw her, my chest felt inexplicably lighter. I’m a little stubborn about some things, and it was only then that I admitted to myself that I had been hoping to see her again, common sense to the contrary.

A few people had come to sit at the bar while the blonde was gone, so I slid farther down to a spot where we could talk with some degree of privacy. This also put me closer to the special knife I keep hidden behind the bar. I grabbed a pot of coffee so that I could throw hot liquid into her eyes and dive for the knife if she tried anything.

“Can I help you?” I asked, reaching for a mug—I had to have some excuse for the coffeepot.

The blonde made a noise from the depths of her throat that was hard to identify. It was half a growl and half something that sounded like “You’d better be right.”

I didn’t see a Bluetooth device or a cell phone. On the other hand, talking to invisible people isn’t necessarily a sign of insanity in my world.

Sig didn’t sit down. Instead, she rested her fingertips on the edge of the bar that separated us and stood on the balls of her feet so that she could vault over or push herself off the counter as quickly as possible. Forgoing any social pleasantries she said, “If a woman dies tonight, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

I thought this over while I poured coffee into the mug and slowly slid it over to her. “Millions of women die every night,” I pointed out. “You’re not giving me very good odds. Cream or sugar?”

She had a very expressive face, and I watched her consider doing something violent with the coffee cup, then watched her wrestle the anger down and decide to try to communicate again. It was a close call. “Both,” she finally said grudgingly.

I provided her with the cream and sugar. When I was growing up, me and the other squires—aspiring tough guys each and every one of us—used to call any coffee that wasn’t black
commie coffee
. But that was back when everybody liked Ike and loved Lucy. God knows what we would have called decaf. “I take it you lost him,” I said.

The knives her eyes were throwing at me became chain saws. “He. Is. A. Vampire.” Her teeth were clenched.

She had a point. “I know,” I said.

“You also knew that he was heat seeking!” she accused in a low, throttled voice. “And you let him go.”

In answer, I pointed to the white dry-erase board that nobody ever reads. I had known that either she or the vampire might return, and I had taken a red marker and hastily scrawled the words
NO SOULS, NO SERVICE
upon it.

Sig closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I struggled heroically not to steal a glance at her chest. Like all heroic struggles, it was a losing battle against overwhelming forces.

Her eyes were still angry when they opened again. “You’re not being charming,” she said, and I tried not to give any sense that my blood had just gone cold. Had her use of my name been an accident? “You sent a vampire off to find a new hunting ground!”

“No,” I said without inflection as I erased the red marker with a swipe of a bar rag. “Vampires don’t have to kill to feed. I reminded him that there were risks involved with the kind of choices he was making.”

“People in this area have gone missing recently,” she informed me. “All female.”

“It hasn’t been in the paper,” I said.

“The
Tablet
?” she exclaimed derisively. This was the name of Clayburg’s local rag, and again, she had a point. I’ve moved around enough to know that there are two kinds of small-town papers—the ones that aspire to be bigger than they are and aggressively report on local news as if every house fire and high school game were a matter of national importance, and the ones that are little more than brochures designed to attract tourists and textile companies. Despite Clayburg’s being a college town, the
Tablet
was of the latter variety.

“The police haven’t said anything either,” I pointed out.
“When they start making public warnings, bars are right up there with schools, churches, and hotels on their visiting list.”

She looked at me more carefully.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m pretty
and
smart.”

Her lips pressed together even more tightly. I couldn’t tell if I’d annoyed her further or almost amused her. I’m not sure she knew.

“These aren’t the kind of women who have a stable lifestyle,” she said by way of an answer. “They’re the kind who move from loser to loser or pimp to pusher because they don’t have steady jobs and their kids are in foster homes. The ones who have been kicked out of their families and are hard to contact because their names aren’t on any rent leases and they keep changing their phone service instead of paying their bills.”

“Then how do you know they’re missing at all if the police aren’t taking it seriously?” I asked.

“I’ve seen their ghosts wandering around town,” Sig said simply, and for a moment she looked sick. Something I didn’t have a name for seemed to drain out of her then. There’s a reason we refer to having bad memories as being haunted. “They all died recently, naked, with their throats ripped out.”

I nodded soberly. I won’t lie, a part of my mind was busy running through a list called “Clues to What the Blonde Is” and checking a box that said “Sees dead people”—but I was genuinely disturbed by her words.

The thing about the women being naked… vampires generally don’t have sexual feelings, at least not the kind involving genitals. They’re dead. Well, OK, they’re undead, but the point is, they’re not alive. Their bodies don’t produce sperm or viable eggs, and while they do have a biological urge to reproduce, the method involves their fangs, not their crotches.

On the other hand, sex isn’t just about reproducing, and psychologically, vampires still remember parts of their former
existence, and they still have emotional needs although most of these are submerged by the one great need that defines their existence. Because of this, the taking of blood occasionally becomes a kind of psychosexual thing with some of them, particularly the males who spent their whole life defining themselves by their ability to get an erection. The rush of blood through their body can… well… send blood rushing through the part of their body that used to experience this as a form of arousal. This is why some vampires will have sex the old-fashioned way directly after feeding. It’s a case of striking while the iron is… hard.

These sexual predators are the sorts of vampires who begin actively targeting people who they might have found attractive in their former life. The ones who only view humans as takeout couldn’t care less about things like appearances—all they care about is whether or not their victim has the right blood type. And yes, while it is true that vampires’ bodies convert the blood they feed on into something else, something with more antibodies and a higher degree of oxygenation, something colder that goes further but can’t replenish itself—it is also true that the rules of blood transfusion still apply. Vampires can accept blood only from someone who matches their original blood type (unless the victim is a universal donor or the vampire was AB positive when he or she was mortal). Vampires can also identify blood types by smell. That’s not something you generally see addressed in movies and legends because it would make for some inconvenient plot maneuvering, but it’s true.