“Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.
She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urbane smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing through fabric but not skin.
Something buzzed between them, hitting Linnford in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.
It took a moment for her to properly understand what she was seeing. The bent chair leg was stuck into his rib cage, just to the left of his sternum. Blood began spitting out like a macabre fountain.
“Honey?” Hannah Linnford stood in the doorway. Like Stella, she seemed to be having trouble understanding what she was seeing.
Muttering, “Does no one remember to shut the security doors?” Stella pulled the mini-canister of Mace her youngest brother had given her after the mugging incident out of her pocket and sprayed it in the other woman’s face.
If she’d been holding Linnford’s knife, she could have cheerfully driven it through Hannah’s neck: these people had taken one of her kids and tried to feed him to a vampire.
Thinking of her kids made Stella look for Devonte.
He was leaning against the wall a few feet from his bed, staring at Linnford—and his expression centered Stella because he needed her. She ran to him and tugged him to the far corner of the room, away from the fighting monsters, but too close to the Linnfords. Once she had him where she wanted him, she did her best to block his view of Linnford’s dying body. If she could get medical help soon enough, Linnford might survive—but she felt no drive to do it. Let him rot.
Mace can in hand, she kept a weather eye on the woman screaming on the floor, but most of her attention was on the battle her father was losing.
They fought like a pair of cats, coming together clawing and biting, almost too fast for her eyes to focus on, then, for no reason she could see, they’d retreat. After a few seconds of staring at each other, they’d go at it again. Unlike cats, they were eerily silent.
The vampire’s carefully arranged hair was fallen, covering her face, but not disguising her glittering . . . no, glowing red eyes. Her arm flashed out in a jerky movement that was so quick Stella almost missed it—and the wolf twitched away with another wound that dripped blood: the vampire was still virtually untouched.
The two monsters backed away from each other and the vampire licked her fingers.
“You taste so good, wolf,” she said. “I can’t wait until I can sink my fangs through your skin and suck that sweetness dry.”
Stella sprayed Hannah in the face again. Then she hauled Devonte out the door and away from the vampire, making regrettably little allowance for his broken ribs. Dead was worse than in pain.
It was working, David thought, watching the vampire lick his blood off her fingers. Though he was mostly focused on the vampire, he noticed when Stella took the boy out of the room. Good for her. With the vampire’s minions here, one dead and one incapacitated, she shouldn’t have trouble getting out. He hoped she took Devonte to her home—or any home—where they’d be safe. Then he put them out of his mind and concentrated on the battle at hand.
He’d met a vampire or two, but never fought one before. He’d heard that some of them had a strange reaction to werewolf blood. She seemed to be one of them.
He could only hope that her bloodlust would make her stupid. He’d heard that vampires couldn’t feed from the dead. If it wasn’t true, he might be in trouble.
He waited for her to come at him again—and this time he stepped into her fist, falling limply at her feet. She hit him hard, he felt the bone in his jaw creak, so the limp fall wasn’t hard to fake. He’d wait until she started feeding and the residual dizziness from her blow left, then he’d take her.
She fell on him and he waited for her fangs to dig in. Instead she jerked a couple of times and then lay still. She wasn’t breathing and her heart wasn’t beating—but she’d been like that when she walked into the room.
“Papa?”
Stella was supposed to be safely away.
He rose with a roar, making an audible sound for the first time so the vampire would pay attention to him and leave his daughter alone. But the woman’s body rolled smoothly off of him and lay on the floor—two wooden chair legs stuck through her back.
“Are you all right? Jorge left the security door open. I knew it when the Linnfords came in. We broke the legs off Jorge’s chair, and Devonte used whatever he used to toss the furniture around to drive them into her back.”
The soldier in him insisted on a full and quick survey of the room. Linnford was dead, the abused chair the obvious cause of death. A woman, presumably his wife, sobbed harshly, her face pressed into Linnford’s arm: a possible threat. Stella and Devonte were standing way too close to the vampire.
They’d killed her.
For a moment he felt a surge of pride. Stella didn’t have an ounce of quit in her whole body. She and the boy had managed to take advantage of the distraction he’d arranged before he could.
“Everyone was gone, Jorge and everyone.” He looked at the triumph in Stella’s face, not quite hidden by her worry for her friends.
She thought the vampire was finished, but wood through the heart didn’t always keep the undead down.
“Are you all right?” Stella asked. And then when he just stared at her, “Papa?”
He’d come here hoping to play hero, he knew, hoping to mend what couldn’t be mended. But the only role for him was that of monster, because that was the only thing he was.
He pulled the sheet off the bed and ripped it with a claw, then tossed it toward Linnford’s sobbing woman. Stella took the hint and she and Devonte made a rope of sorts out of it and tied her up.
While they were working at that, he walked slowly up to the vampire. Stella had called him Papa tonight, more than once. He’d try to hold on to that and forget the rest.
He growled at the vampire: her fault that he would lose his daughter a second time. Then he snapped his teeth through her spine. The meat of her was tougher than it should have been, tougher than jerky and bad-tasting to boot. His jaw hurt from the hit he’d taken as he set his teeth and put some muscle into separating her head from her body.
When he was finished, the boy was losing his last meal in the corner, an arm wrapped around his ribs. Throwing up with broken ribs sucked: he knew all about that. Linnford’s woman was secured. Stella had a hand over her mouth as if to prevent herself from imitating Devonte. When she pulled her eyes away from the vampire’s severed head and looked at him, he saw horror.
He felt the blood dripping from his jaws—and couldn’t face her any longer. Couldn’t stay while horror turned to fear of him. He didn’t look at his daughter again as he ran away for the first time in his long life.
When he could, he changed back to human at the home of the local werewolf pack. They let him shower, and gave him a pair of sweats—the universal answer to the common problem of changing back to human and not having clothes to put back on.
He called his oldest son to make sure that Stella had called him and that he had handled the cleanup. She had remembered, and Clive was proceeding with his usual thoroughness.
Linnford was about to have a terrible car wreck. The vampire’s body, both parts of it, were scheduled for immediate incineration. The biggest problem was what to do with Linnford’s wife. For the moment she seemed to be too traumatized to talk. Maybe the vampire’s death had broken her—or maybe she’d come around. Either way, she’d need help, discreet help from people who knew how to tell the difference between the victim of a vampire and a minion and would treat her accordingly.