“Anyway, the thing is, it has been a crazy couple of years. For me, I mean. First there was the whole 'you are the queen' thing, which I was so not prepared for. And, I might point out, a lot of people were telling me to kill all you guys when Nostro – when you ate Nostro – but I didn't. In fact, I saved you.”
“For imprisonment and slow starvation.”
“I'm getting to that.” I lowered my voice. “Okay, so then there was a serial killer – more than one, come to think of it – and then my half sister turned up, who was the daughter of the devil. The devil! I mean, please!”
“Yes, please,” one of them said. “Let us end this.”
“But I'm not finished! And then – before then, actually – all these ghosts started showing up looking for favors, like in that movie? Never mind, you didn't see that movie.”
One of them was rubbing her temples. I sped up the This Is My Life portion of our program. “Then my friend got sick, lethally sick, and I had this wedding to plan, and all these werewolves showed up, and my dad and step mom died because I wanted a baby, and I had to kill a librarian, and it was just – just a crazy, crazy time. I mean, totally nuts.”
“So. Essentially,” Sandy – or was it Benny? – said, “you forgot about us.”
“Well.”
“Do not,” Sinclair said through gritted teeth.
“Kinda,” I admitted. “But I had all these really good reasons! I – yeek!” Sinclair had shoved me into the curtains as seven enraged vampires launched themselves at me.
Chapter 17
It's hard to even describe the fight. With enhanced strength, speed, and reflexes, everything happened so fast, and then it was all over but the bandaging.
The first one that got near Sinclair dropped, and so did the next one. One got past him and got a good grip on my hair (must have been a female killed in the 1920s... that was the hair-?pulling era, right?), but I brought my head forward in a blur of coolness and broke her nose with a satisfying crunch. The blow made me stagger, and I wiped her blood off my forehead... sluggish, nasty dark stuff.
And the screaming! All the screaming! Wait. Only one person was screaming. Marc was screaming.
I shoved Hair Puller at the fireplace, peripherally noticing the ceramic tiles rain down on her stupid face as she hit the floor. Then I ran toward the shrieking Marc, who was on his back fighting off flashing fangs and teeth (Clara? Benny? It was going so quickly I couldn't tell).
Before I could get to them, Tina leaned over them, grabbed Clara/Benny by the hair and yanked him (ah, a guy, I saw it now) off Marc. She had something long and shiny in her other hand, and I recognized it, as she swung the Wusthof butcher knife (Jessica's pride and joy, she had a whole collection in the butler's pantry, and they were wicked sharp), hard enough to decapitate Benny. His headless body fell with a thump, and Marc scrambled back on his hands, so the thing wouldn't fall on him.
Tina had dropped the head and was turning to see who else she could decapitate, when a wooden spoon burst through her chest.
“This?” the Ant demanded. “This is how you spend your time? Squabbling with people who don't bathe?”
“Not... now!” I ran to Tina, nearly tripping over the body of a Fiend Sinclair had killed, and yanked the serving spoon out of her heart. Then I grabbed her head and screamed into her eyes, which had begun to gloss over. “Don't you dare die on me, you efficient bitch, don't you dare!”
“I – I'm fine. I'm all right, my queen.” We both looked down. The wooden serving spoon, about nine inches long, was now ash. I had turned it to ash. And Tina was all right.
No, I didn't know how.
And then the door was slamming, the other Fiends were gone, and the fight was over.
Chapter 18
We'd killed two of them: Sinclair had killed Trippy; Tina had killed Benny. Marc was wounded, bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, but it looked mostly superficial. Jessica, who had been keeping a terrified Garrett from fleeing down the tunnel, drove Marc to the ER. Marc's last delirious comment was, “Will I become a vampire now? Cool!”
By then, the rest of the Fiends had fled, and Nick had regained consciousness. “Yeah, that'll show 'em,” he said groggily, as he caromed from one wall to another, trying to stagger out the door. It looked like he had a broken nose, but I hoped that was the worst of it. We offered to call an ambulance, but he tagged along with Jessica, who I knew would tell him the whole story.
Sinclair carried Tina upstairs to the hot tub room, dunked her in (over her protests; we were pretty sure I'd cured the wound), and, after ten minutes, let her out.
About the water thing: for some reason, when vampires are grievously hurt, water speeds up the healing process. I had no idea why. Maybe because our undead bodies didn't have much moisture? I didn't know. So much of being a vampire was like magic to me. And not the cool kind, either.
Tina shook the wet hair out of her eyes and grinned at me. “Two down. Five to go.”
“You were nuts, launching yourself at that guy.”
“You and the king had your hands full,” she said dryly. I handed her a robe, and she snuggled into it. Not a mark on her, thank God.
“But you were stabbed with wood,” Sinclair said, looking ashen. “I saw it.”
Tina looked at me, and I winked. So she shrugged and said to the king, “It must have missed my heart.”
Oooooh, she's actually lying to the king of the vamps! Somebody write down the date and time. And I had to admit, it was nice to be the one keeping secrets for a change.
“But I saw – ”
“Come on,” I sighed. “Let's make smoothies. Or something.”
Chapter 19
We visited Marc later that night. Sure, two o'clock in the morning isn't considered optimum visiting hours, but this wasn't the first late-?night trip to this hospital for me. Or even the tenth. I knew who to sidestep, who to put the vampire mojo on, and who didn't give a tin shit if Bin Laden was on the floor, as long as he or she could snag an extra hour of sleep in the on-?call room.
“Disgusting,” Marc informed me cheerily from his bed, as he played with the tilt settings and television remote control at once. “This hospital's about as secure as the men's rooms in the Target Center. But thanks for coming to see me so fast.”
“After my second smoothie, you were all I could think about.”
“Tell the truth,” he said soberly. “My hair looks awful, doesn't it?”
“Well...” If he considered most of the hair on the right, which was clotted with blood and hopelessly snarled to be awful, then... “At least you've got your health. Oh, wait.”
“Aren't you funny.” He stretched out his bandaged arms and looked at them. After being stitched up (fifteen stitches in his left arm, twenty-?six in his right, thirty-?one in his right leg, eighteen in the muscle just below his right nipple, seven stitches to the left of his belly button) , he'd been admitted for overnight observation. “It looked worse than it was, in case you were wondering.”
“Actually, I was wondering if you could pull the blanket up a little more.”
