Vampire$

was still mad at Jack and likely to stay that way. “Jack!” he repeated disgustedly.

Carl Joplin was the weapons man and the tool man for the team. He made the crossbows for Jack and Cat’s wooden knives and everything else they took with them into battle, but did he ever get to go into battle? Hell, no! “Too valuable,” Jack would always say. Somebody had to be free and clear of the fight at all times to make sure the fight could go on. Carl could buy that. It made sense. But how come it had to be him every goddamn time?

But it was. Sure, he was a little overweight and maybe pushing sixty but that was no reason not to let him duke it out just once. Just one time, baby!

The detector was his best chance. Joplin had actually come up with a vampire detector based on the presumed electromagnetic energy of any object and/or critter able to totally absorb all sunlight. It was an ingenious gadget but it required a vampire to test it. Carl knew damn well they could never hope — or, for that matter, be so stupid as to try — to capture a fiend and bring it to him. Ergo, he would have to be there on sight to run the buttons and knobs the rest of the peckerwoods were too damned ignorant to follow in the first place. He’d get into it one way or the other, by God!

And in the meantime he went back to rubbing his great belly and snarling and refusing to see Annabelle’s smile when he did it. Which reminded him: how come he was sloppy drunk and she wasn’t? How come she never was? Huh? Explain me that!

Cat, weaving his way back through the tables from the rest room, was wondering the very same thing. He had never in all of his whole entire life seen Annabelle drunk. And she drank as much as anybody, didn’t she? Well, didn’t she?

Did she? He thought back. Yup. She did. In fact, she was the one who had really gotten the serious stuff going with that schnapps shit. Waitaminute! Schnapps! She always drank schnapps! Maybe if I drank schna… Waitaminuteagain! I am drinking schnapps. I’ve been drinking it. That’s how I got so polluted.

He plopped back down on his stool thinking: Mystery of the Universe!

“I need a vampire,” said Carl once again at Cat’s reappearance.

“In a minute,” Cat finally retorted.

And they hissed at each other.

Annabelle smiled again. But not too much or she was certain she’d lose her balance, keel backward off the stool, skirts flying, and crack her head on the side of the bar like a ripe grapefruit.

And then, she giggled silently to herself, little purple butterflies would sparkle out.

She had never been so thoroughly plastered in her life. She doubted if anyone had. And the thought of actually being able to sit down and pee was her notion of heaven. But do women pee? Sure they do. No. They dew. Horses sweat, men perspire, and women dew. Right? No, that was something else.

But urinate sounded so dreadful. So unladylike.

And if she didn’t risk weaving to the rest room in front of the men she was about to do something a lot more unladylike. Being a lady — setting the standard — was paramount. She bore the entire responsibility, she was quite certain, for Team Crow.

In a very real sense, more than she would ever fully comprehend, this was quite true. Annabelle O’Bannon was more than a simple regal beauty who kept her raucous men in line. She was their symbol for the rest of the world they were surely going to die trying to protect. She was why they kept going out to fight knowing damn well they would eventually lose. It had happened to everyone else. It would happen to them. But this way it wouldn’t happen to Annabelle.

They didn’t know this, her men. That is, they had never consciously voiced it, even inside their own heads. But it was so. It was so because she, Annabelle, was so. Just so.

She had that way with men only certain ladies and other magical creatures possessed. A way of making them sit down and eat their porridge or drink their drink. Of making them shut up and listen to someone else talk.

She could make them wear ties.

She also possessed the unique ability to actually stop violence, like the time she made Jack put that Harley down — and not on that poor moaning biker like he wanted.

None of this was getting her off the barstool and into the ladies’ room. And she simply had to go. Then a thought occurred.

“Young man,” she called to the middle-aged bartender, “I’ll have another.” Then she slid off the stool and landed, thank God, on both high-heeled feet and had weaved her way several steps toward sweet release before Carl and Cat could get over the shock.

The two men looked at one another. Another drink? Another-goddamned-drink? She was going to have another round and here they were, the two of them big tough guy Fighters of Evil trying desperately to focus on their cocktail napkins for balance, for chrissakes, and she’s having another…

But what could they do? What choice did they have? It was awful and grisly to do it but the alternative was worse, giving in was worse.

Carl gulped, said, “Me too.”

The bartender, bright, sober, and sadistic, asked Cat, “Another all the way around?”

And Cat, his face gray and his life passing before his eyes, nodded dully.

Annabelle’s timing was, as always, exquisite. She had made it almost out of sight while the men were occupied with machismo. She paused at the entrance to the bar and, with apparent unconcern, spoke back over her shoulder, “Young man,” she called sweetly to the bartender, “I guess not after all.”

All three men turned toward her, the bartender with hands full of fixings. “You don’t want another, lady?”

Annabelle smiled. “I guess not.”

The bartender’s annoyance barely showed. “You’re sure?” he pursued.

She paused, seemed to take the question of chemical suicide seriously, then shook her pretty head again. “I guess not,” she repeated and then she was gone.

Her men all but leapt at the opening she had provided.

“I guess not, too.”

“Me either, now that I think about it.” Both burst out in the rapid staccato of machine-gun fire.

The bartender stared at them, glanced at the rest of the lounge, which was completely empty, and sighed. Too good to be true, he thought. He’d known that just three people making his overhead for the day was too good to be true. But still, they’d almost made it.

Annabelle neither heard nor cared about any of this. She was too busy stamping her awkward path to the ladies room door, bashing it open with both hands and part of her hairdo, jerking herself awkwardly into a stall, unsheathing herself, and then reveling in one of those mini-orgasms reserved for those lucky creatures made in God’s image.

Later she thought: I’m so tired.

It had been a busy two weeks for her. With Jack in Rome it was left to Cat and Carl and herself (meaning her) to handle all the arrangements. Contacting the next of kin had been easier than it might have been. Crusader types, she had long ago discovered, had a tendency to be loners.

Except for Anthony. She had gone to San Antonio to tell Mrs. Beverley in person. When that sainted woman had opened the door and seen her she had known. The two of them had held each other and rocked and cried and rocked and cried for two straight hours, their minds filled with the rich memories of the sweet, handsome, brave huge black Anthony they had loved so, much. No loss, except of her husband Basil, had ever touched her so much. And she had known right then that when Jack’s and Cat’s time came — as it certainly would — that would be all for her.

She knew it was up to her to keep going. She knew that Carl Joplin, as amazingly competent as he truly was, would need her desperately. Would fail, probably, without her help.

She knew this and she didn’t care. When Jack and Cat went, that would be it. Even the hinted image of that loss, so wickedly brutal, so thoroughly devastating, was intertwined with one of herself sitting quietly in her room lining up the pills to swallow. Interesting enough, it bad never occurred to her that she might die another way. Vampires? She had never seen one, never wished to, and could think of no reason in the world why she ever