“Aim away from me, how ’bout it.” Before they could laugh, I said, “Yours is here.”
The female was rustling grass nearby. I bent my knees and moved toward the sound, away from the three men. Behind me now, the male vamp attacked the men. The shotgun roared. A vamp and a human screamed. Silent, I rounded the house. A thump sounded from somewhere close, but I couldn’t place it in the aftermath of the shotgun blast. Dull moonlight lit a dry yard, dead grass in the corners and along the foundation, a fence mostly gone, wood planks still standing here and there. Something white and rusted in the dirt. A washing machine? Otherwise, the yard was empty.
A whisper of sound alerted me. Air displaced. Drawing on Beast’s reflexes, I ducked. Whirled the stake up. A weight crashed into me, driving me down. The stake caught her side, too low. Fangs latched on to my forearm, biting into muscle as I hit ground. My left arm and the cross were pinned beneath me. We rolled. She was feral. Gnawing on my arm. Agony like fire. My blood splattered over me, hot and tangy. Her eyes were vamped, bloody and black, crimson and darker than night as they caught the faint light.
Beast rose in me. I could shift now if I had to, but it was harder, pain like death itself, without the ritual. I held her off, but took the strength and speed she shared.
My turban fell, bounced, fell apart. The stake went with it. My braids tumbled around me, tangling. I undulated, a dance move. Brought up the cross and slapped it onto her chest. Steam and crackling of burned vamp flesh misted the air. She didn’t notice, gulping my blood with desperate hunger. I released the now-glowing cross, leaving it in her skin. She ground down with her teeth. Pain sizzled into me like lightning. Hand useless, I dropped the knife.
She settled, sitting on my torso, sucking my arm. A parasite predatornonhuman thing. My skin crawled. I slid my left hand into my jog bra and pulled out a stake. Awkwardly slapped it open. She didn’t react. Too busy feeding. I rammed the stake into her side. She stiffened. If she had been even a few days older, she would have rolled away. I adjusted the angle of the stake and shoved it in. Hard. She gasped. Released my right arm, her fangs clicking back, snakelike.
Her eyes focused on me. The vamp eyes bled away into human white. Just for an instant. “What . . . ?” she said. Slowly, the life eased from her eyes. Her vamp-black pupils contracted to human size. In the night, I couldn’t see the color of her irises, except that they were pale. Gray, maybe. In a café au lait face that had once been beautiful.
Without a sound, without a human exhalation, in a silence that always left me nonplussed, the vamp died. She fell toward me. Using the momentum of her fall, I pushed her to the side and rolled from beneath her, to my knees and to my feet. Crap. She had bled all over my new shirt. Beast hacked a laugh deep in my heart.
I looked at my savaged arm and tried to make a fist. Three of my fingers wouldn’t close. Tendon damage. It didn’t hurt as badly as it should, which meant nerve damage too, though blood wasn’t pulsing from the wound. She’d injected enough vamp saliva to spasm most of the arteries and veins closed. I turned my arm over, inspecting it, still breathing hard. A human would require major surgery and months of rehab to recover from such an injury. As soon as I could shift, I would be healed. But I had to live long enough to get to someplace safe.
Unlike in fiction, real-world vamp saliva doesn’t cause clotting. It causes a spasm of the artery or vein, sealing it tight around vamp teeth, and when the teeth are removed, the same spasm seals the wound shut, so it can clot and heal. The same effect happens on the skin, a localized spasm sealing a flesh wound so tight it’s no larger than a pimple. Well, unless the victim has been chewed by a newbie. Of course, vamp predators’ evolution didn’t require that the prey of the young ones stay alive for long.
But the pain was growing. I had to get out of here and shift. I found my turban and unwound it onto the bare ground, clumsily refolding it into a pressure bandage.
“Need help with that?”
I stiffened. Palmed the stake that had rolled away from the turban.
“It’s okay, Jane with the weird last name. I’m cool.”
He was behind me. A scuff let me know another one was back at the battle scene. I breathed in the night air. The male vamp was dead. I smelled human blood as well. And human feces. One of them had crapped his pants in fear or in death.
Afraid that Beast had bled into my eyes, I kept my face turned away, forcing her down sufficiently for me to appear completely human, but keeping her close enough to the surface to use her reflexes. I listened for the slightest sound. “You’re cool?” I said, my tone asking for clarification. “You mean you won’t jump me?”