No, they didn’t have lives. SOFs weren’t expected to have lives. You were a SOF, you stayed very fit and you didn’t have a life. A bit like running a family coffeehouse really. Maybe that was why they felt we should be kindred spirits. And our SOFs had dinner at the coffeehouse more nights than they didn’t, and a lot of the staff from our county SOF headquarters, which was only about a half a mile away north of Old Town, came by some time in the mornings for coffee and a cinnamon roll. Relax, Sunshine.
I tried to relax. They released the name of the poor bod that had got sucked: nobody any of us knew. He lived in our city, but not around here. Nothing else happened. No more dry guys, at least none left for us to find. By three days later when things appeared to be back to normal I managed to say, “Hey, how’s it going,” in an ordinary voice when I found Jesse and Theo sitting at the table next to the door when I walked in for the evening dessert shift. Paulie had been in the bakery all afternoon, and he was eager to leave. I was still letting him have most any evening he wanted off, letting him put his hours in during the days; I was chiefly interested in that second morning a week I didn’t have to get up at three-forty-five. I was used to not having a life, and I wanted to hold on to Paulie. He was the first apprentice I’d hired who both had a brain and liked playing with food. Also he was the first guy who didn’t seem to think his manhood was under threat by having to learn stuff and take orders from someone of my age and gender. He still had to live through his first August in the bakery with the ovens on, but I was hopeful.
We emptied out a little earlier than sometimes, especially surprising on a three-day-weekend Sunday. We’d be open tomorrow while most of the rest of the working world was celebrating the birth of Jasmin Aziz, the famous code-breaker of the Voodoo Wars and why we still have Michigan, Chippewa, and most of Ontario instead of the biggest smoking hole on the planet. But she had been nicknamed Mother Durga, “She Who Is Difficult to Approach,” long before she was a hero, and the name stuck. Ha. Even if Charlie’s didn’t stay open automatically for three-day weekend Mondays, we’d’ve had to stay open for that one.
I’d pulled the last trays out of the ovens a while back, racked or frozen what wasn’t going to get eaten that night, started roll and bread dough for tomorrow morning, and had come out front to sit at the counter and gossip for the last few minutes with Liz and Kyoko, who were on late that night, and Emmy, who had recently been promoted to assistant cook and wasn’t sure she could take the pace. (I was slightly insulted by this, since I’d been using her in the bakery between apprentices, and felt that I must be at least as merciless and temperamental a taskmaster as anything the main kitchen crew could do.) Theo showed occasional signs of wanting to get fond of Kyoko, but she knew about SOFs, and she wasn’t having any. Charlie was there, prowling; he didn’t know how to sit down. Mel was closing down in the kitchen, which included preventing Kenny from sloping off early. A quiet night gave you time to catch up.
It was warm, and the front doors were open. There were still a few people sitting at one of the outside tables; another couple had drifted off with their cups of coffee to sit on the flower bed wall and smooch. One of the last closing-up rituals was to have a sweep through the square for coffee cups, champagne glasses, and dessert plates. If you paid your bill beforehand, we didn’t stop you taking your sweetheart and your sweet thing on a plate to a quieter spot. (Your bad luck if you chose a spot already occupied by a wino or a hype head, but hey.) This was probably illegal too, by civil regulation 6703.4, subheading Behavior of Clientele at Eating Establishments and Potential Broadcasting of Crumbs to Deleterious Effect, viz., the Vermin Population, but no one had stopped us yet.
It was so quiet. Peaceful. Even the SOFs looked pretty relaxed, for SOFs.
And I heard a familiar goblin giggle.
Did I hear it? I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I knew it, one way or another, however it got to me. And I had picked up a table knife and bolted out the door long before any poor following-on function like rational thought had a chance to kick into gear.
No human has ever destroyed a vampire by thundering down on it brandishing a table knife. In the first place, vampires are fantastically faster than humans. You can’t race up to a vampire to do anything, because it’s done it several times already, waiting for you. And you can bet it’s not going to stand there waiting to be staked.
In the second place, a table knife is a real bad choice. You can do it with wrought iron, although no one in their right mind is going to haul a wrought iron stake around with them when wood works better and weighs a lot less. But stainless steel, forget it: it slithers off, like a swizzle stick on an ice cube. You have as much chance of punching a hole in a vampire with stainless steel as you have racing up to it and getting it to hold still while you try.
Wood will break through that little layer of whatever-it-is, the electricity of the undead, and let your stake penetrate. You still have to ram it in hard, and you have to know where it’s going, and it has to reach and enter the heart, or you’ve just died as the vampire rips your head off. A sucker repelling a staking doesn’t bother to be cool about it. (Note that while a vampire may have to ask permission to suck your blood, it can kill you any time it likes. It just won’t get a square meal out of the experience.) Macho SOFs will go straight in through the breastbone, but the more sophisticated approach—as well as the more likely to be successful—is up underneath it. The notch at the bottom of the breastbone is a useful road marker—so I’m told. It’s still not at all easy to do. There are lots of dead people who have tried. There have been a lot of studies done about the best wood for stakes too. Turns out it’s apple wood—and not any old apple, but a tree that is home to mistletoe. Retired or invalided-out SOFs (this latter category a small number: SOFs tend to live or die with nothing in between) often end up tending SOF orchards, and making sure the mistletoe is happy. Mistletoe is cranky stuff, and nobody knows why it sometimes grows and sometimes doesn’t. Makes you wonder what the druids knew—or Johnny Appleseed. Of course the druids are a fairy tale and Johnny Appleseed never existed. They say. But then, they also say that no human has ever destroyed a vampire by charging at one flashing a table knife.
Maybe no human ever had.
I did have one advantage. He wasn’t expecting me.
I had time to see the look on his face. I probably didn’t figure out what I’d seen till later, but this was what it was: he was looking for me—for me—but he wasn’t expecting to find me. He was working under his master’s orders, all right, but privately he thought his master had a wild hair up his ass, and he wasn’t going to find me, because I was dead. He didn’t know how I was dead, or where I had disappeared to, but I had to be dead. Therefore I was. I understood this point of view completely.
Maybe it was just the surprise of seeing someone thinking they could do anything with a table knife.
He paused. The girl he’d been pulling under stood swaying and stupid while he turned to me. We stared into each other’s eyes for the last time fragment, my last few running steps, before I thudded into him…
…and slammed the table knife up under his breastbone, and into his heart. I remember the hot evil smell of his last breath on my face…