“You think you’re insulting me? Not a chance. I’m in love with Vinnie and think the world of her grandmother. And yeah, it took me a while to figure out what I was feeling for Vinnie, but now I can think of nothing but loving her. And we’re going to have children together too. Raise them up to be loving and kind. They’ll know they’re loved too.” She snorted at him. Things like that just didn’t happen to her kind. “You won’t be able to see them, however.”
“Like I’d ever want to. Having my own was bad enough. To touch another one now? No, thank you very much.” She looked at her mother when she tisked at her. “You said having a child would change me. You said that having a baby of my own would make me happy. Well, you didn’t tell me the half of it. Yes, it changed me. Took away my free time. Made it so I could no longer come and go as I pleased. And worse yet, she went on believing that I liked her. Never. Not one day of her entire life. And when she killed my husband and mate, I knew then she was going to die by my hand.”
The pain took her breath away. Amber looked down at her chest and touched the wooden spike coming through her left breast. When the burning started, making her dizzy and weak, she turned to see who would have done such a thing to her and was startled to see her mother standing there.
“You should know that I have the full permission of the council to do this. Crimes against your own kind. Theft from your own family. Murder. Death of a human without cause...the list is long, Amber, and you are paying for your crimes.”
Amber couldn’t speak. There wasn’t enough air in the world, much less her lungs, to draw even a short breath. As she fell to her knees, the flames burned the spike enough that it fell to the ground, the fire going out on the damp grasses almost as soon as it touched it. But the fire in her, the burning up of her body, wasn’t going to be so easy to quench. Just as she felt her mind explode with more pain, she saw her daughter smile at her. Then there was nothing more.
~~~
“When the time is right, you’ll have to kill my mate as well. I’ve been thinking that she’s going to be—” He knew what it was as soon as he felt it. Stake through the heart. As he fell forward to his knees he held his breath, hoping he’d be able to get out of this house before he was—
“Are you all right?” Horrie looked at the man he’d been working with. The man who was going to get him into the house no matter what. “You hurting or something? Way you fell there, I thought for sure that you’d been hurt. But the dead, we don’t get hurt. We can get gone but not hurt. You ever heard tell of a man named Bennett? Him and his men, they’ll run you off faster than a zipper can come down in a whore house. Been hearing about them men of his for—”
“I’m not sick. I’ve been staked.” The man—Rudy, he thought his name was—only shook his head at him. “I swear to you, I thought for sure I’d been staked. Right through my heart.”
“Nah. Maybe you have some indigestion. Never heard of it happening to those peoples like us, but you never done know about some dead.” Rudy looked him over both front and back. “You don’t appear to have no meat on you. You thinking that something hit you real hard like?”
“No, a stake, not a steak.”
“That clears things up,” Rudy said sarcastically.
“You know, a wooden spike through my heart kind.” Ruby told him he done don’t have a heart now...it took him several seconds to work that one out, and when he did he asked if that was true.
“Sure enough it’s true. What you have a need for a heart fer? You can’t die from it. Got no reason to be pumping that red juice through you no more. I’m thinking that you just got yourself a little pain, that’s all. I think they call it phantom or some shit like that.” Ruby laughed again. “We being a phantom and all and getting some pains like that is sort of funny. Don’t ya think?”
He rubbed his chest as he stood up. Horrie knew that he’d felt it. Still did. But he was feeling hollow now, like something important had happened and it had torn a hole in the fabric of his being. As Ruby continued to tell him what he had planned for the house, Horrie realized what it was.
“My mate.” Ruby told him he had it down to kill her as well. “No. I think she’s dead. I think...I think someone killed her.”
“Afore me? Well, if you had somebody else doing it fer you, you should have done told me. I got to rearrange my whole strategy now.” Ruby shook his head and just started cussing. “You have any idea how much I been looking forward to that? Killing me a vampire would have been great, don’t you know.”
“Well, you can go ahead and kill my daughter if you want.” He nodded, but didn’t look none too pleased with that. “She’s a vampire too, you know.”
“Yeah, but that mate of yours was older. Much older.” Horrie wanted to point out that being the mom of his daughter that was the only way it would work, but didn’t. The man looked really depressed. “I’ll do it, but like I was telling you, I’m going to have to do it my way. No hurrying up for me. I take my time.”