I gave an elaborate shrug. “Your reputation’s spread, Meg. I told the little pisher I was you, and he tripped over his own feet trying to get away.”
“I wondered why he was running,” Megan answered. “And like Tash, I also wondered what you were playing at, standing there and talking to him instead of sending him to hell. You sure he wasn’t using a little glamyr on you without you knowing?”
There it was in her voice again, that repressive tone that she’d seemingly inherited with her life mission of vamp killing, but now it was accentuated with a marked coolness. Not surprising, given our recent contretemps in the club, I supposed. I extracted my car keys from my purse.
“Believe it or not, sister dear, the rest of us aren’t totally incapacitated when we’re facing the undead. In fact, I’ve always suspected I’m a little less susceptible to vamp wiles than you are, but to answer your question, no, his glamyr didn’t work on me.” I turned to unlock my car, adding casually, “He seemed so inept all round it’s a wonder he wasn’t staked a decade or so ago. Since he was a local boy, it positively dented my civic pride.”
I began to get into my MINI, but Megan’s hand shot out and clamped around my arm. I stiffened. She removed it but didn’t apologize. “A local vamp who’s been around for decades? Not possible,” she said flatly. “Maplesburg wasn’t infected until Zena arrived here.”
“So we believed,” I answered. “Apparently we were wrong.”
“You’re wrong,” Tash snapped. “That would mean Maplesburg had already turned when—”
She stopped and I finished her sentence for her. “When Daddy lived here, sweetie? Yes, that’s exactly what it would mean.” I looked away from her frozen face and met Megan’s hard gaze. “If you don’t want to take my word for it, use the resources of Darkheart & Crosse to locate a woman named Bitsy. As a teenager she worked at Hazlitt’s Drugstore before it went out of business, so she’d be in her thirties now, at least. Ask her about a boyfriend she had who was into AC/DC and Clearasil.”
“I will,” Megan said coldly. “And if I find out you’re yanking our chain over this, Kat, you’ll be sorry.” She strode to her car and got in. Tash was already sitting in the front passenger seat. Megan started the ignition and then rolled down the window. “Take this,” she called to me, her tone expressionless. “I always keep a couple of spares in the car. You really shouldn’t be out after dark without one.”
I caught the stake she tossed my way. Even as my fingers closed around it, she was revving her MINI out of the parking lot. I saw the car’s taillights flare red as she came to the stop before the road, and then my sisters were gone.
Ten minutes ago I hadn’t trusted myself to drive. Now I was stone-cold sober. I began again to get into my MINI, and for the second time in as many minutes didn’t complete the action.
From the far end of the parking lot came the growl of a car engine starting up. It caught and became a full-throated roar. I heard the solidsounding thunk of a transmission dropping into first gear, heard the roar immediately ease into a deep rumble and then saw a pair of headlights flare to sudden life. Dazzling tunnels of light cut through the darkness and early evening ground mist as the car began slowly heading my way.
It passed under one of the lot’s two feeble lights, and my heart sank. The vehicle’s windows were black—not merely tinted, but blotchy black, as if someone had applied the contents of a can of matte paint to the interior of the windows. That could only mean one thing.
“Shit.” I was too tired to bother translating my comment into French. “Vamp transport.”
It had to be. The car had moved out of the pool of light and was now rolling through the dark again, a hulking, dated silhouette. A certain type of vamp seemed to go for vintage vehicles; probably, as Megan’s Mikhail had once informed my sisters and me, because the trunks of older cars were roomy enough to make a comfortable daytime resting place if necessary. “Also,” he’d added with a significant glance at the matching MINIs that had been Popsie Crosse’s most recent birthday gifts to us, “because those old Detroit tanks can ram most newer vehicles off the road. At that point, sitting in a ditch in your car, you’re the equivalent of a can of Dinty Moore beef stew to a hungry vamp.”
“Which means that making a run for it in the MINI might be a teensy bit rash,” I told myself out loud as the car rumbled closer. “I’ll never make the three miles to town before he catches up with me, so what other options do I have?” I forced a casualness to my solitary conversation, hoping to keep my growing terror at bay. “The obvious one is to stake him. On the plus side, I was Grandfather Darkheart’s star pupil when he was training Megan and Tash and me in the finer points of vamp sticking. On the negative side, when it came down to doing it for real during the battle at the Hot Box with Zena and her followers, I—”
I didn’t finish my sentence, but I couldn’t shut off my thoughts. I had been Anton’s star pupil, so much so that I’d been secretly sure I was the Crosse triplet who’d inherited my mother’s vamp-killing legacy and would be the next Daughter of Lilith. My first kill had ripped that fantasy from me forever.
When Zena had loosed her pack of undead on us that night, I’d taken up a fighting stance like a vampire-killing Joan of Arc, knowing I was fulfilling the destiny that had been written for me long before my birth. The first vamp that had rushed me hadn’t stood a chance. I’d been so confident of my powers that I’d let him come close enough to grab me, but as he’d leaned in to slash at my throat I’d thrust my stake into his heart. In triumph I’d looked into his eyes, wanting to see him die.
Instead, I saw him being born.
It had been like watching a movie, except I wasn’t watching it, I was living it. And although only a split second could have elapsed between the time I staked him and the moment he fell away into dust, I experienced his whole life. I stood in the delivery room as he came into the world. I was on the sidewalk watching him take a tumble from his trike, inside the pet shop as he pointed out the puppy he wanted, with him on his first day at school when he wet his pants and tried to hide it.
I saw him fall in love.
I saw him graduate.
I saw him being attacked in an alleyway one night by the vampire who turned him.
I saw his first kill, his final kill…and then I saw myself standing over him, my hand still on the stake lodged in his body. Terror and agony ripped through me, both overwhelmed by an agonizing sense of loss. In the moment that he turned to dust I knew the truth. His death was mine. Part of me would follow him down to hell.
I forced myself to take on the second vamp who came at me, a female, and went through the whole process all over again, but during my third kill something broke in me and Zena made her move against me. Since her move consisted of sending me to hell, I don’t think it’s too surprising that for the most part I’ve blanked out that unpleasant interlude. I don’t have any trouble remembering what happened when I finally came back to full consciousness, however: the battle was over, Zena had been vanquished and Megan had proved herself to be a true Daughter of Lilith.
I’d received proof, too. I’d walked into the Hot Box wanting only to kill vampires. When I left hours later I finally understood a favorite quote of Popsie’s, one he’d told me he’d read in an old cartoon: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
I’d seen the enemy. I’d felt the blood tie between me and them—a blood tie forged years ago when a queen
