AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Open the door! Open the door!”
Lozen was shouting at Saber, who was sitting at the table in her living room with her laptop open. She rushed to open the door, and Lozen came in carrying a load of books that looked like they were about to drop. Another bag of books hung from her arm.
“Woah,” Saber said, watching as Lozen rushed to drop her heavy load on the big dining room table. “What’s this?”
“Books, Saber. Maybe you should spend a little less time on your phone and a little more time—”
“Whatbooks?”
“Books from thereallibrary, from the college at UW.”
“How did you get them?”
“I went there and got a membership and checked them out. If I lose them, I’ll owe a ton of money.”
“We won’t lose them.”
Saber picked up a book.
“Monsters and Madness: 17th Century Folk Horror.Wow, Lozen, this is amazing.”
Saber flipped through it.
“To ward off a vampire, villagers would begin by fixing two crossed hawthorn branches over their doorway. They would fill the mouths of the newly dead with bread soaked in honey and a type of local brandy. Then they would pile rocks on the lid of their coffin before the dirt during burial.”
“Easy peasy,” Lozen said.
“Driving a stake through a vampire’s heart has been one of the understood methods of killing a vampire for almost a thousand years. In some early legends, the stake was made from hawthorn, but that did not seem like such a requirement in later texts.”
“So we have to do it the old-fashioned way,” Lozen said, picking up some books. “Come on, let’s go to your room.”
They carried the stacks of books up to Saber’s bedroom and stayed up half the night reading, looking for anything they could really use. Lozen, aspiring valedictorian that she was, wrote lists and made charts.
“What’s the plan?”
“A lot of things to try,” said Lozen. “The old ‘stake through the heart’ seems to be the most consistent, certain method. Big surprise.”
“So we know how to kill them,” Saber said, laughing a little.
“Is that our goal?”
“That’s what Doug said, to him it was a simple matter of good versus evil.”
“Seems reasonable to me,” Lozen said. “Classic us versus them scenario, kill or be killed.”
Now, though, Saber thought of Ansel.
When they said they would kill vampires, were they talking about him?
No, of course not.
He was different.
On Sunday morning Saber woke up to a text from an unknown number as Lozen still dozed beside her.
Hi Saber, it’s Elijah. If you want to discuss things further, reach out.
“Huh,” she said, checking the time stamp. Had he sent it late at night, or early this morning?
