Dead and Everything (Eve Benson: Vampire Book 2) (35 page)

She
wanted
to glare back, but didn’t. It was just too hard, in the moment.

“If
it had been
just
about him, or even other Greater Demons, I would have.
The fact is that you nearly won out there, Eve. Alone, against an ancient and
powerful force. Now we just need for you to get back on your feet, and finish
the job. How are you planning to do that?”

“Um,
excuse, me, but I think I’ll start by cursing your name.
Asshole
. You
let me be crippled for… What? So that you wouldn’t piss off the Council or some
stupid shit like that? I swear, if you try to claim this was just some kind of
advanced training, I’ll kick your ass.” She lifted her head, sending pain down
her middle, and looked where her right leg should have been. “Just as soon as I
grow a foot, I mean.”

Zack
laughed, but looked at the leg too. Where there wasn’t one.

“No,
this isn’t training anymore. It hasn’t been for a while now. This is the real
deal, and you have to stand on your own, and be seen to be able to. If I’d
tried to save you, then a dozen Greater Demons would all be taking turns trying
to kill you tonight, in order to force me into a position where I might be
taken out. This way, they know that trying to take you won’t gain them anything
with me, and will possibly cost them a lot. Still you need a plan. Healing up,
increasing your energy stores, and working on your telekinesis, but also, who your
target is going to be. I’ll warn you, you probably won’t be allowed to kill
Fram. Not forever. Trapping him won’t free Maggie either. If you want to break
her out of it, he has to die, but you’ll need to be able to bring him back.”

Taking
a deep breath, she looked down at her body again. It was ruined. Even if she
could manage to heal, it seemed a bit rich to be lying there in the moment,
pretending like she had any power in the situation at all.

“That’s
hardly fair, setting me against a Greater Demon like that.” She felt a slight
sense of despair, since it was pretty close to an impossible thing to do,
wasn’t it?

Zack,
her pal, smiled at her.

“Well,
he’s not a very good Greater Demon, and you
are
a decently kick ass
Vampire, so if you do it right, and use the resources you have… I think you can
take him out. The real trick there is that we really
don’t
want him to
be gone forever. He’s insane, but it’s kind of a gentle thing with him. We
don’t want him to be replaced with something worse.”

Zack
kept eating, and just sat there, while she thought for a bit. No one else came
in, so finally, she looked up, and took a breath that didn’t really hurt,
compared to the rest of her.

“Can
you call Lenore for me? We should have this place staffed. I don’t know what
happened to Barb and Becky…”

He
ate more of the food, and shook his head.

“Nope.
It’s only a phone, you can get it yourself. Barb and Becky are fine. They took
off in the rental that Becky has. No one followed them or anything, I made sure
of that. It would work a bit too well, for a minor actress to be killed right
now. Especially by Vampires. You should set Barb up as her bodyguard while
she’s in town.”

Eve
nodded, since it made sense that she, the newest little Vamp girl, would be
doing any of that. Focusing she tried to find the phone in its cradle in the
other room, and float it carefully to herself. She heard it thump against the
wall, feeling heavier to her mind, as she threw more energy at it, just to keep
it in the air. When it was in front of her, Zack snatched it from the air, and
held it away from her.

“
Don’t
just throw power at it like that! Increase your attention on it. You can move a
hundred times more than you have been, with very little more energy, if you do
it right. Now, pull it from my hand.”

“
Fucker
.”

The
Greater Demon that had pretended to be her friend for years nodded.

“Damn
straight. I actually want you to be alive in a few weeks time, so we can’t really
play around anymore, Eve. If you’re going to fix this, you have to be a lot
more than you have been. I was hoping that you had time, or that someone else
would fix it all for you, but now it’s clear that you need to step up. To do
that
you’re going to need legs, and the ability to move. So, for now, take the phone
from me, then we’ll work on the rest of it. Flying, and all that.” The grip he
had on the cream colored hand piece looked pretty tight, at least to her eyes.

“Is
this the best use of our time? We really should have someone else in here.”

He
wiggled the phone a bit, taunting her with it.

“Then
call? One hundred pounds of force is all that you have to come up with. Without
using too much energy. Go. It’s all in the concentration.”

It
was, she found, about more than just that, since she had to see and bend the
faint lines of energy in the air, the pink stuff of life reaching out in
tendrils like they were. It was? She had to wrap the thing up totally, then
using a hundred little threads take it from Zack, moving his body first.

After
only two hours of trying, she had it though.

The
Greater Demon got up to make himself another snack, as if they hadn’t just done
anything impressive.

Leaving
her to try to push the buttons with her mind. That was a different adventure,
but she figured out how to wrap each of the buttons and move them, one by one.

On
the third ring, Lenore answered, her voice relaxed sounding. She was probably
kicking back and doing needlepoint, or whatever people as old as her did to
unwind.

“Hello?”

“Hey,
Lenore… We have an emergency here at the mall.”

“Oh?
Is it anything you can’t handle?”

“Eh…
Yeah? The East side is gone. Princess Pretty Nail was blown up, and part of the
power lifting Gym is gone, I think. I didn’t get a good look at it. Um… It was
Maggie Sims. She’s been turned into a slave, by Fram. She probably has been for
a while. We kind of fought, and uh, she has some pretty awesome fire based
powers? So, the long and short of it is that I have no arms or legs. No one is
really watching the embassy here either. I can answer the phones, but not a lot
else yet.”

There
was a sound of movement, and two gasped words.

“I’m
coming!”

Eve
hung up, using a lot of focus, and then just had to wait. It occurred to her, a
few minutes later, that she should be filling her time trying to heal faster.
Fram had mentioned that working, and if she applied what Zack had just made her
figure out, maybe she could improve the speed of things a bit? The trick would
be doing it without crippling her energy links. The poor cows. She needed more
lines coming in, somehow.

For
the time being though, she just tried to heal, using what she had.

It
took twenty minutes for Lenore to get in, but Edom was right behind her, with
Bey. They all gathered around her, to get the full report. It was nice of them
not to make her do it a bunch of times. Zack stayed too, eating the whole time,
smiling a bit. It was a grim thing, but still, not a frown. Bey looked troubled
though.

Horribly
so.

“She
is, Jasmine, Maggie Sims, as you know her, is my maker. It saddens me that we
will have to destroy her.” There was real remorse in the words.

The
Greater Demon shrugged.

“Don’t
worry. Eve is all over this one. All she has to do is find Fram, The Bold, kill
him
and bring him back to life. That will break the links and save
Maggie.”

The
very funny thing,
Eve
thought it was humorous anyway, was that he didn’t
seem to be joking. She knew that he wasn’t, but that kind of thing wasn’t just
tossed out lightly, was it? Not most days.

Edom
glared at the Greater Demon, which might not be the wisest thing ever, but was
appreciated.

“You’re
sending her up against one of your own kind? Why don’t
you
deal with it?
Isn’t that your job?”

There
was a quick flash of red plastic spoon, and vanilla base product disappearing
before he replied.

“Yep.
Normally that would just be the case. It might end up being one of us that does
it, but Eve might pull it off, and really, I can’t think of a better way to
keep her safe.”

The
others all looked away, so she ignored the stupidity of that statement, and
went back to healing. She had real work to do, and no matter what Zack, or her
other friends, if she could call them that, had planned, she wanted limbs for
it. Go figure, but she missed them already.

There
was much staring and a bit of muttering, until a laughing Demon left the room,
and the others went to do various things. Ed manned the front of the embassy,
while The Bey and Lenore both went to see who all had died.

Focusing,
and trying not to kill any cows, Eve pushed herself. She didn’t really know if
it was going to be enough, but she had to try to do something, and just lying
there, worrying about what was coming next, that wasn’t going to help anyone.
The least of which would be her.

So,
for the next hours she tried to make her broken and battered crispy corpse heal
up. She really
did
smell like barbeque, as it turned out, but there was
no way she was going to take a shower yet. So, instead, Eve stayed in place and
tried her best.

Then,
once she knew that it was going to work, she called the Council and passed the
message. It wasn’t her job not to deliver it, after all.

The
thing there, was that they were all polite to her, including Gene.

Which
meant what? That he was in on it? Or that they all felt bad for her being
beaten up like she was? None of them really explained it to her, so she didn’t
know for certain.

After
that, well, for a while she probably wasn’t going to be expected to do much by
anyone else, but it occurred to her that being able to get up in a few days and
take care of business was going to work a lot better than dying, or taking
years to heal up would. She might even get something like the element of
surprise back that way.

Setting
herself, she did it, knowing that Zack, even if he was being a prick at the
moment, had been right. Not about her killing Fram and leaving him alive. That
wasn’t
her
responsibility. If he wanted something that complex done, he
could do it himself. Darla could do it, too, if it was a thing that anyone
really cared about. Really, she wasn’t even going to plan to save either of
them.

Maggie
had betrayed her. Oh, she might not be able to help herself, but that didn’t
make it sting any less. Fram was even worse, since he could have come up with a
dozen ways to do the same thing that didn’t bother her at all, much less make
the mess that his orders had created.

As
far as she was concerned, they were both dead.

That
it was insane to even think that wasn’t lost on her in the slightest, but that
would just have to do for the moment. As soon as she could get up, and start,
those two were both going down.

The
idea didn’t thrill her, since the most likely outcome was her own death. She
looked down at her right arm, the stump pink at the end, a full inch showing
that hadn’t been there before, even a few hours earlier. Taking her arms and
legs like that, it had been pointed, and done on purpose. Not just to keep her
from being too dangerous either, but to make her feel helpless.

That
had Fram written all over it. He’d taken that information from her and used it
to mess with her head. It had worked too, she knew. Even if it wasn’t showing
on the outside, she was afraid. Terrified really.

That
wasn’t going to get the job done though, so she made a point of not thinking
about it, while she got back to work.

First
she would make herself better. Then stronger. After that, well, then she was
probably going to end up dead, but even if that was the case, it would be on
her terms, not anyone else’s.

Forcing
a smile, she got back to it.

There
was too much to do now, to be left sitting around.

Other Books by P.S. Power from Orange
Cat Publishing:

If
you enjoyed these books, why not find out the rest of the story? It’s more than
worth the time, and there’s more to it than anyone could possibly imagine.

Keeley Thompson:

Follow
this interesting tale of a young girl who discovers she’s something much
different than she was ever led to believe. Keeley isn’t just a straight A
student, as she learns from the head Cheerleader of her new school. No, she’s a
Greater Demon, and that means that reality will never be the same again.

Demon
Girl

Keelzebub

Mistress
of Souls

Demon
Trap

Demon
Bait

Other Places
(Zack Hartley, in the Eve Benson
continuity)

Zack
is insane, and knows it. It’s not hard to figure that out when your own mirror
talks to you, and tells you to get off your butt and go get a job before you
starve to death. Worse, when you can see the holes in the world, and walk
through them, it become pretty hard to separate what’s real, from what might
just be in your own head.

If
he can pull it off, it will be a miracle.

Shortcuts

Road
Blocks

Detours

Other books in the same universe:

Christmas
of the Vampire

When
a young girl is in trouble, having been taken captive by a Greater Demon, she
reaches out to the only beings she knows of that might be able to help her.

Santa
Claus, and Richard Swirlin, America’s only openly vampire politician.

Now
Richard has to not only save five year old Macy from Ma’at, The Puzzler, but
save the spirit of Christmas itself!

To
do that, he’s going to need a bit of help, which will mean making some deals
with things even darker than the Greater Demon that has Santa and Macy.

Because
only one thing in existence can beat a Greater Demon. One of their own kind.

Friendzoned
(Becky Hoader,
before
she
becomes the famous actress, Krista Hall! Warning, this book is a young adult
coming of age tale, not fantasy.)

Becky
has loved Mitch for years, but he barely even seems to notice her. A bit over
weight, and kind of boring, she turns to her new friends, Darla, Keeley, Hally,
and Eve, to help her finally get out of the friend zone. If they can at all.