I hooked the scythe between the top two rails of the fence and around the vampire’s neck, just under her jaw.
I never, ever thought that mowing that field with a scythe would be useful to me. Who uses a scythe in the era of lawn mowers and tractors? To make that exact point, Bran had parked a new, wide-swath, riding lawn mower just outside the field. He wanted to rub in the fact that all the sweaty, backbreaking work I was doing could have been done in an hour on the riding lawn mower. By the time I’d finished, I’d had blisters, muscles in my arms and back in places I didn’t know I had muscles—and I’d learned a lot about how a scythe worked.
The first rule of cutting grass with a medieval farm implement is that the blade has to be sharp, or when it hits the grass, it will bend it over instead of cutting it. The sharp side of the blade is on the side nearest the scytheman, so he hooks the grass and pulls it with a smooth motion that uses his whole body, like a golfer. I think. I don’t golf, but the motion a golfer makes when hitting the ball looks a lot like the one I developed by trial and error to cut waist-high grass.
The same motion I used on the vampire. I caught her totally by surprise because her attention was on the werewolves.
Evidently, Jitka knew about keeping her scythe sharp, because it slid through flesh like a hot knife through butter. It was easy, only a little hesitation as the blade hit the bone, and it was done. Expecting a more difficult task, I used too much force and overbalanced myself, put a foot on the edge where the sod had been cut, and rolled and fell on my butt in the dirt.
I was too worried about cutting myself with the scythe to try to roll, but I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could. Or almost as quickly as I could, because I found a little more speed when I realized that the head had landed right next to me.
Pretty much anything that is decapitated dies and stays that way, even the kinds of things that are otherwise immortal. Vampires’ bodies turn to ash when they are dead, mostly—though I’ve learned over the past few years that isn’t always true. There are apparently some strains of vampirism that don’t do that at all. Younger vampires tend to have bodies just like real people. But vampirism is magic-fueled, and magic doesn’t follow the rules all the time like science does.
What that means is this: if I decapitate Wulfe someday, he will probably turn to ash because he is very old. If he doesn’t turn to ash, I’ll burn his body and his head. Either way, I will take his ashes and scatter them in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—salt being a pretty effective deterrent to magic. I don’t know of anything that decapitation followed by burning doesn’t kill, but with Wulfe, I wouldn’t take any chances.
I was comfortable that the vampire I’d scythed was dead. The eyes staring at me were blank and fogged. I didn’t know her well enough to know if I should have been as scared of her as I was of Wulfe, so I assumed not.
While beheading the vampire had only taken seconds, the fight had gone on without us. I didn’t think anyone had noticed what I’d done—the vampire hadn’t made much noise, and the other combatants were fully engaged in their own battles. Moving fast requires a lot of focus. It takes a Charles or an Adam to pay attention to anything more than the fight in front of him.
Jitka had a knife in one hand and something I couldn’t see too well in the other. Maybe it was a screwdriver. The vampire she was fighting had a short sword. Jitka hadn’t been exaggerating her competence. Despite the inequality in weaponry, the battle was not going in the vampire’s favor.
Martin had incapacitated one of his opponents. The big male vampire wasn’t going anywhere with his back broken and his body spasming helplessly under the randomized signals his nervous system sent out.
Short swords must have been the weapon of choice, because Martin had one that he was using to engage the short sword his second vampire opponent had. The wolf must have taken the sword from the disabled vampire, because he hadn’t been carrying it with him on the motorcycle. I’d have noticed.
The vampire jumped back out of the way of Martin’s strike and staggered. I hopped on the top rail of the fence and brought the point of the scythe over his shoulder and into his abdomen. The blade stuck—maybe it caught on a belt buckle. I tried to throw myself backward off the fence to use the weight of my body to force the blade deeper. Had the vampire panicked or frozen, I’d have eviscerated him. But he grabbed the shaft of the scythe, and I had to let go or risk his pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I could not afford to let him get a shot at me.
When I hit the dirt this time, I rolled to my feet and took a quick step back before I figured out that the vampire wasn’t going to be coming after me—or anyone—again. Martin had taken advantage of the vampire’s distraction and used his sword to do what I hadn’t managed. He’d broken the blade doing it, but he’d cut the vampire—pretty messily—in half from belly through collarbone and out the top of the shoulder. The end of the sword had lodged in a rib and broken off. Martin brought the broken blade down on the vampire’s neck and decapitated him.
Jitka’s final opponent went boneless and dropped to the ground, a screwdriver sticking out of one eye. Face grim, the werewolf took the sword the vampire had been using and struck off his head as if she’d worked for years decapitating vampires on an assembly line—the stroke was that precise and emotionless. The dead vampire crumbled to ash in a flash of heat that ate the clothes he was wearing but left the shoes untouched. About that time, the female I’d killed just sort of faded into dust—a lot less dramatic than her comrade.
Jitka took the sword and looked around, her body language relaxed. She walked to the spasming vampire, looked closely at his face with a frown, then beheaded him. Without a guillotine or, evidently, a scythe, beheading someone isn’t as easy as the werewolves made it look, which is why most human-strength people are better off hammering a wooden stake into a sleeping vampire’s heart.
Martin and I were both watching Jitka, so we jumped when the vampire who was wearing the scythe burst into flame, scorching the grass, the fence, and the scythe, but not quite getting Martin, who’d been standing too close.
The scythe fell to the ground, a third of its blade blackened.
Jitka looked at me. “Do you know how long it’s going to take to sharpen that blade after this?”
I touched it with my toe, and the blade broke in half. “Huh,” I said. “When a job can’t be done, does that mean it will take forever—or no time at all?”
She laughed. “You fight good,” she said. “And smart, which is rarer.”
Martin said, “I think we might have a problem.”
She turned to look at him.
“Did you recognize any of them?”
She snorted and nodded at the vampire Martin had disabled and she had killed. That one had done the creepy thing where one moment it was a body and the next the body had become ash, which blew away.
“I would know that idiot,” she said, “if I were blindfolded. Someone should have rid the world of him fifty years ago. Ivan Novák.”
“What if I told you that the vampires who attacked the bakery were from Kocourek’s seethe?”
It certainly told her something more than it told me, because she stiffened and grunted. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and go inside before someone looks out of the big house and wonders what we are doing.”
—
JITKA’S HOUSE WAS MORE OF A STUDIO APARTMENT than a house. The bedroom, kitchen, and living room were all one space. She sat on the bed, and Martin and I each took one of the kitchen chairs. There wasn’t any more furniture in the room than that. Jitka was not a cluttered person—except for the wall of plants that were set about two feet from the north-facing windows.