Sex, Lies, and Vampires

sprinted toward the van, calling back to Adrian, 'We'll take them with us! I can't leave them to be tortured, not when it's my fault they're walking around.'

The mummies turned in my direction, the pitch of their nonstop mewling growing higher and more desperate as I raced away from them. I reached the side of the van, praying for a miracle.

It was locked.

'Damn,' I swore, jerking the charm book out of my pocket.

Adrian and Damian reached me just as I found the unlocking charm and opened the door.

'Nell, what the hell are you doing?' Adrian demanded, shoving me to the side as a bullet whined past. 'Why are you attempting to get us killed for a few mummies?'

'You can't be killed, remember? And the mummies are my responsibility, so I can't leave them.' I lifted my voice so it could be heard above the sound of sirens, now multiplying in alarming numbers, joined by shouts from the museum guards and occasional bullets that zinged off nearby cars. 'Mummies! Heed My Voice!'

They moved a lot faster now, and by the time I jerked the rear door open, they rounded the back of the van. 'In!' I commanded, jumping in and hoping they'd follow me.

Adrian, smart man that he is, knew when he'd been outmaneuvered, and with only a quick fulminating glare at me, he tossed Damian into the van, scrambling over the kid to get into the driver's seat. Luck favored him better than me, because a set of keys was hidden under the seat and he quickly found them.

The mummies may not have been sentient, but they were smart enough to figure out that if I was in the van, they needed to be in the van, too.

Unfortunately, they all tried to cram into the same seat with me.

'Ack!' I yelled as Ginger lunged onto my lap. Another mummy, one bound totally in gauze, fell onto my shoulder, his face pushed into mine, the horrible mewling noise coming from lips that were dried and lifeless, and he smelled strongly of resin and age. I pulled away from his unintentional embrace, trying not to notice the black holes that were his empty eye sockets.

Adrian gunned the motor, looking over his shoulder as the last mummy, a bit more regal with its cartouches of a long-dead pharaoh painted on his wrappings, lunged toward the back seat, struggling to lift his withered legs high enough to get into the van. Adrian jumped out, grabbed a handful of gauze wrappings, and threw the mummy into the van, slamming the door behind him.

'Argh! What is this, pig-pile-on-Nell day? Get off!' I was covered with mummies. They moved feebly against me as I tried to push them off, but the force of the turn Adrian took as he swung the van into motion threw us all against the side of the van, me beneath the mummies.

Buried as I was, I didn't see the escape Adrian enacted to get us out of the museum parking lot, but if the amount of swearing under his breath and sounds of gunfire were any indicator, it was more than a little hair- raising.

'Police, Papa!' Damian said helpfully as I removed a withered elbow from my mouth, gently shoving a mummy aside enough so I could peer out through tangled bodies.

The police had indeed arrived, their cars pulling up outside the parking area.

'Get down!' Adrian ordered as his foot slammed down on the gas pedal. Damian crouched as we swung around, fishtailing madly, the rear of the heavy van slamming into a small police car blocking the street outside the parking lot. The mummies and I went flying to the floor in a heap, their cries taking on a happy, cooing sound as three pairs of ancient hands stroked the nearest of my body parts.

'I'm glad you guys are happy to find me, really I am, but this is too weird for words,' I told them as I struggled out of the pile of mummies, pulling myself to my knees behind Damian's seat. Adrian had used the impact of the van to clear away one of the obstacles, the force of the van reversing at a high speed doing the rest of the job. He slammed on the brakes, yanked hard on the steering wheel, and jammed his foot down on the gas, effectively spinning the van around clear of the blockade. We burst out into traffic with a squeal of tires on asphalt, the mummies flying backward with the acceleration. I clung to the back of Damian's seat, damn near jumping out of my skin when a black shadow at the edge of the road threw itself onto the passenger-side front window.

Adrian's face was plastered up against the window, his eyes almost white with fury.

'Onkel Saer!' Damian gasped, lapsing into German as he flung himself back in his seat, one hand thrown up protectively as if to ward off a blow.

Adrian snarled a curse, yanking the steering wheel to the side in an attempt to dislodge Saer. We spun through a red light, barely missing a big lorry, the sounds of crumpling metal and breaking glass that trailed us through the intersection giving testament that others weren't so lucky. I sent up a little prayer that no one was hurt as I scrambled under the van seat until my hand closed around a familiar-shaped object. I opened the leather-bound volume, squinting in the dim light provided by the street-lamps to find the charm meant to stop an ejection curse. I found the pertinent words, grabbing Adrian's shoulder to tap into the blackness inside him.

'Adulterinus succenturio!' I yelled, throwing every ounce of purpose I had into the demand that Saer be displaced. I had forgotten that I still wore the ring. Adrian was right about its powers—not only had it protected me earlier so I felt not even the slightest sense of strain when charming Damian's curse, now it took a simple ejection curse and added the equivalent of a nuclear-powered wallop to it. One moment Saer was slamming his fist through the windshield, grabbing for a screaming Damian, the next he was flung to the side, splatting against a wall of the museum.

Adrian looked back at where I knelt on my pile of mummies, the charm book clutched in my hands. 'Remind me never to make you angry while you're wearing that ring,' he said.

I started to smile at him, but saw through the cracked windshield another familiar figure as it stepped into the street before us. 'Adrian!' I shrieked, pointing.

His eyes narrowed as he beheld the figure of Christian, standing in the middle of the street holding up a hand in a command for us to stop. The van jumped forward as Adrian stomped on the accelerator, clearly intending to run down the other vampire.

'No, you can't!' I yelled, jerking on his shoulder. 'Don't kill him!'

'Why not?' Adrian growled, his fingers tense on the steering wheel as the van hurtled directly toward Christian. The stupid man just stood there, inviting Adrian to run him over, but I couldn't stand that. Not that I cherished any warm feelings for him—he'd done his worst to try to kill Adrian—but when we were so close to regaining Adrian's soul, I wasn't about to let him blow it on a hasty act of revenge.

'Because you don't have your soul yet!'

'I told you—that was because Asmodeus's curse continues to bind me. If that was removed, I could reclaim my soul.'

'Not if you go around…' I glanced over to where Damian was crouched against the back of his seat. His eyes were wide with horror as he watched Christian loom up before us. 'Not if you kill someone without just cause. You can't run him down, Adrian. Please, don't do this. Don't risk everything for a fleeting moment of pleasure.'

'Papa?' Damian asked, his face a mask of worry as the van approached Christian.

The vampire just stood there, as if he were giving Adrian the choice to kill him or not.

'Verdammt noch mal!' Adrian spat in German, jerking on the steering wheel at the very last second. The van's tires, not used to such driving, screamed on the asphalt as we spun around in almost a 180-degree turn. Inside the van, both Damian and I screamed, the mummies' high-pitched shrieks cut off as the van sideswiped three parked cars with a great crashing and squealing of metal upon metal. The engine coughed, sputtered, then died in a glorious silence.

A silence that was quickly filled by the sound of sirens racing toward us.

'Quickly, you must come with me!'

I pushed off the mummified body that lay across my head and looked in utter disbelief at the man who yanked open Damian's door and pulled the boy out of the wreckage.

'What—' I started to ask as Adrian lunged across the seat—the driver's side of the van was crumpled in, effectively locking the door—and threw himself on Christian with a snarl of rage so intense it raised the hairs on the back of my head. 'Adrian, don't you dare kill Christian! I forbid it! Dammit, Ginger, stop hugging my legs. I need them. Let go of me, all of you!'

The mummies protested with distressed little noises my climbing over them to the passenger-side front door. I ignored them, half falling from the van to stagger over to where Adrian held Christian by the neck.