Autumn Bones

Jen’s arm, yanking her away from me. “Car keys in your purse?”

“Hey!” I protested.

“You can call someone for a ride,” Bethany said over her shoulder, already dragging Jen toward the stairs. “This is a family matter.”

“Bethany!” Geoffrey said in a thunderous voice. “I do not grant permission for this!”

“I don’t need your permission anymore,” she retorted. “Unless her ladyship forbids it, I’ll be back before dawn.”

He shot Lady Eris a look of appeal.

She shrugged. “I’ll allow it.”

By the time he got his protest out, Bethany and Jen were halfway up the stairs, and by the time I pushed my way through the vampire throng in the crypt, they were out the door, leaving a puzzled-looking Cody in the foyer.

“I take it the rising worked,” he said. “Should I have stopped them?”

“Probably,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

He glanced toward the courtyard. “Should we go after them?”

“Definitely.”

The taillights of Jen’s old LeBaron were already vanishing in the distance when we set out after them in the cruiser, which didn’t really matter since I was pretty sure that Bethany was headed for the Cassopolis home. Cody put on the siren and the lights and we took off at a good clip, which also didn’t matter since apparently being turned into a vampire also meant driving like a . . . well, like a bat out of hell. I guess lightning-fast reflexes and a total lack of fear of dying will do that to a person. I hoped Jen was okay.

The Cassopolises’ place was a dingy ranch house on the outskirts of East Pemkowet. We arrived to find the front door standing wide open and lights on inside the house. Cody took the lead and I followed him, drawing dauda-dagr as a precaution.

Jen’s kid brother, Brandon, was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, looking sleep-disheveled and shell-shocked. Without a word he pointed down the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, where we could hear shouting.

I didn’t have a whole lot of love for Jen’s father. Mr. Cassopolis was a mean drunk with a bad temper. He hit his wife, and the only reason Jen still lived at home was because she worried that he’d start in on Brandon.

Still, it was disconcerting to see someone I knew as a parent pinned up against his own bedroom wall inches above the floor, clad in a pair of light-blue pajamas, his bare feet kicking futilely.

Bethany held him effortlessly in place, one hand clamped around his throat. “...understand me, Dad?” she was saying. “If you ever, ever lay a hand on Mom, or Jen, or Brandon, or . . . fucking anyone, I will kill you.” She bared her blood-crusted teeth and sharp fangs at him. “I will drink you dry. Understand?”

His eyes bulged. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have replied either way. I had a bad feeling that newly risen vampires weren’t entirely aware of their own strength.

Bethany gave her father a little shake, using her free hand to bat away Jen’s efforts to pull her off, ignoring her pleas. Their mother was pulling at her own hair and screaming; just screaming, over and over, like a police siren.

“Understand?”

“Bethany!” Cody shouted, drawing his gun. “Let him go!”

She laughed. “You gonna shoot me? Go ahead. I’m not finished here. Not until he agrees.”

Cody and I exchanged a glance. Shooting Bethany with a service pistol wouldn’t do much except slow her down and piss her off. Vampires don’t die easily and they heal incredibly fast. Sunlight works, but that whole stake-in-the-heart thing is a myth. You pretty much have to cut off their heads to kill them.

Unless you have a magic dagger.

I planted the tip of dauda-dagr between her shoulder blades. “He can’t talk, Bethany! You’re fucking strangling him!”

She stiffened. “Don’t. Just . . . don’t.”

“Let him down!”

“You’re killing him, you fuckwit!” Jen shouted at her sister, helpless tears in her eyes. “Jesus! Is this your idea of helping?”

“I spent eight years waiting to get to this point!” Bethany shouted back at her. “Eight fucking years!”

Mr. Cassopolis’s feet were kicking more feebly. I hesitated.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Cody growled at Bethany, green phosphorescence flaring behind his eyes. “Don’t make me rip your throat out.”

“I’d like to see you—”

“Daisy?” It was a new voice, a voice I recognized but couldn’t place. “Shit!”

There was a click, and bright light flooded the Cassopolises’ master bedroom. Artificial sunlight, full- spectrum lighting.

Bethany howled in agony, dropping her father. He crumpled, wheezing. She scrambled across the floor, eyes screwed shut and swollen, striking out blindly over and over.

“Ow!”

A sharp snap, like a stick breaking. Also, the very bright light went out.

I turned around.

Lee Hastings was huddled on the floor, his leather duster pooling around him, the light box strapped to his chest cracked and dented. He was cradling an obviously broken forearm and blinking owlishly. Bethany looked sort of scorched, her skin bubbly and flaky. Cody was wrestling his half-shifted features back under control, breathing hard, looking annoyed and disgruntled. Mrs. Cassopolis had stopped screaming, settling for clutching at the neckline of her nightgown. Twelve-year-old Brandon was peering around the door of his parents’ bedroom, his expression uncertain.

I looked at Jen.

She looked back at me. “Well, that went well.”

Thirty-one

So I guess Lee really was kind of an all-purpose genius, since it turns out that artificial sunlight can do serious damage to a vampire, at least at close range. The downside is that being in close range to a vampire puts you at risk for sustaining some serious damage yourself. Lee was lucky it was just a broken arm.

“Where the hell did you come from?” I asked him while Cody checked on Mr. Cassopolis and Jen ushered her brother away from the scene. Mrs. Cassopolis was sitting, catatonic, on the side of her bed, staring blankly at her oldest daughter. Bethany, surprisingly calm, was leaning against a wall and squinting at herself through swollen eyes, picking off ashy bits of skin. The pale skin underneath looked whole and unharmed.

Lee grimaced. “You didn’t see my car? It was pulled off by the side of the road just before the driveway to Twilight Manor.”

Bethany gave him a sharp look—well, as sharp as possible with swollen eyelids—and bared her fangs.

“Sorry.” He coughed. “The House of Shadows.”

“How did you even know this was going down?” I asked. “I didn’t say anything about it.”

“Are you kidding?” Lee nodded toward Mrs. Cassopolis. “They got a freaking invitation. It was the talk of the town. Everyone knew.”

“Tell your mother I said to thank her for the Bundt cake recipe,” Mrs. Cassopolis said in a distant voice.

“Right,” I said to Lee. “So you decided to . . . what, exactly?”

He sighed and rested his head against the wall. “I just thought I’d drive out and lurk around the outskirts. Just in case.” He patted the busted light box with his good hand. “I wanted to know if it would work. When I saw