I really do have one. Dad bought me one when I was eight.
“What do you think of this? Be gone, demon of the night!”
Ned was wild-eyed. “What else do you have in there?”
“All sorts of things to deal with you, Dracula Junior!” I popped the top off the vial of holy water that pastor’s daughter Jo Kemp had blessed during study hall, flinging it at the undead target. I sprang forward…
From there, events would take their natural course. Either Ned would attack, or maybe take Vince as a hostage. We’d have to dispose of the desk clerk, and eventually we’d get Ned staked, or melt Ned with holy water, or something cool. I was hoping I might get a chance to use my Febreze trick.
“Abby?”
Dad paused the film. Frozen on the big screen television, Dad raised a stake above the chest of a deadly peasant barkeep.
“Yes?” I pulled my hand out of the bowl of popcorn I was eating on autopilot.
“Did you hear anything I said?”
I hadn’t, but I hazarded a guess. “Make-up for the Anvil Wolfman took three hours to apply? It was still a big improvement on the Universal technique where they nailed Lon Chaney Junior’s hand to a board and glued on one hair at a time?” Whoops. Flashback to the wrong film.
“All right,” said Dad. The remote clicked as he placed it on the coffee table. He picked up a mug of root beer. “What’s on your mind?”
“Dad, how old were you when you fought your first vampire?”
Dad settled back onto the couch. The leather sofa squeaked like a low note on a trumpet. “Thank goodness,” he laughed. “I thought you were going to ask me about boys.”
“No.” I rolled my eyes. Abigail Rath doesn’t have time for boys. Just evil. “How old?”
“Thirty-two. I slayed a lot of fake vampires before that. Two, three hundred. I slayed Lee Christopher thirty times alone.”
“How’d it happen?”
“It was a classic staking. I took the stake and-”
“No, Dad. I mean, what happened that made you fight your first vampire?”
Dad’s forehead creased right above his nose. “It…was an accident. I stumbled into the wrong room and saw something I thought was part of a movie. It wasn’t. In order to save the vampire’s victim, I staked her.”
“Her?”
“Yes.”
My father, man of action! “And you never looked back.”
“Abby, I’ve looked back often,” Dad said. He subjected me to intense scrutiny. “Why are you asking?”
“Oh,” I said, “Career report.”
“Really?”
I nodded and tried to convince Dad with wide-eyed sincerity. I am not a bad liar. I’d get a score of seven out of ten if there were a liar Olympics. “Can’t write about monster hunting, of course, but it made me curious how you got into the profession.”
Dad picked up the remote. “What are you going to write about?”
“Special effects,” I said. “Mostly makeup.”
“Good girl,” Dad said. “There’s more future in that than acting.”
Dad was gonna be pretty proud of me tomorrow night. If Mom were less thrilled, I was sure Dad would bring Mom around.
Vince came over Monday after school. He attends public school, so he always gets home a little earlier than I do. Mom decided I would attend Wolcroft, a private school for exceptional girls. I like it, so I don’t complain too much. My uniform is awesome and the teachers are really smart. I do miss getting to wear jeans and play football, but I can do that after school, so it’s all good.
My mom dresses like a stereotypical librarian, hair strangled back from her head, and tiny pince-nez perched on her nose. “What’s up for today?” Mom asked, looking up from a cutting board full of chopped carrots. The kitchen smelled like pot roast.
“Chemistry experiments,” I said, helping myself to a cookie from Dad’s weekend baking binge. Vince bobbed his head. Yes, that was us, two young persons in constant pursuit of knowledge. Mom would approve.
Vince and I went to Mom’s study, which wasn’t in anyway to be confused with Dad’s man cave. Dad’s domain had lots of old movie posters, row upon row of horror DVDs, and a huge stack of books on vampire lore, actual and fictional. On the other hand, Mom’s study was full of uncomfortable antique furniture. There was a bust of Pallas Athena with her helmet on its own accent table. The table near the window was covered with weird science equipment, various magical braziers and bottles and things that would bubble if heated up. Mom was technically an occult researcher, but I knew she cast simple magical spells from time to time, which is what Vince and I were going to do today.
“Here we are,” I said. “Did you get anything of Ned’s?” Today’s exercise hinged on whether Vince had something from the person we were trying to locate. If Ned counted as a person.
“My dad had some old stuff.” Vince handed me an aged envelope, the flap ripped half off. The writing was brilliant red, like the kind of red you notice on an English paper when the teacher gives you a C, which is much worse than blood.
“Hey Charlie,
Hope you’re doing well. Give my regards to the girlfriend.
I’m not going anywhere. You never know when I might show up to exact my revenge.
Ned”
“Exact my revenge” was underlined three times, I noticed. “Did you read this?”
Vince nodded.
“Did your parents have something to do with Ned becoming a vampire?”
“Ned thinks so,” said Vince, “in the letter.”
There’s nothing considered worse among monster hunters than abandoning someone to the fate of monster conversion. While Vince’s parents weren’t
