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“She looks pretty fucking awake,” Lozen said. “What do we do?”
Laurel, or the creature whousedto be Laurel, started sitting upright in the trunk, trembling as it moved in a freaky, disjointed way, like it was not used to its own body. It was, Saber realized, averynew vampire.
“We have to dosomething,” Elijah said, his voice rising.
Saber, moving on instinct, pulled the thick, rough, jagged stake from the front pocket of her overalls.
“Doug,” she cried, her hands shaking as she stepped toward the steamer trunk. “Give me the mallet.”
He wordlessly handed her the heavy mallet, and the heft of it in her hand was comforting. She stepped toward the vampire again, watching as it tried to sit up, fluttering its eyes as though confused about the light.
Saber looked the vampire square in the face when she pressed the stake to its chest and pressed it down, trying to force it back into the trunk. It was struggling and strong in a mechanical way, not like a living thing, but like an automaton. She felt the crucifix swing away from her chest as she knelt, and she saw the vampire’s strange, unfocused, milky eyes dart around, then fix on the little symbol. The sight of it made the vampire shriek and collapse back into the trunk, convulsing.
Saber took her chance, and pressed the stake firmly against the place where she knew Laurel’s heart once beat. With a fluid, instinctive motion, she swung the mallet hard and true in an arc so that it slammed with considerable force against the top of the stake, sending it through and cracking ribs and soft, unsettlingly mushy flesh with a damp crunching sound that would haunt Saber for the rest of her life.
It screamed, and for a moment, Saber heard Laurel’s old voice screaming almost in unison with the vampire’s high, shrill one. It was terrible, and she reached up to cover her ears. The thin, black lines of the vampire’s veins seemed to swim and jitter beneath its white, transparent flesh, and it seemed to bleeda black, sticky, tar-like substance from the stake wound. Then, its skin seemed to contract against its bones, withering, then its eyes sank and shuddered closed. It seemed to burn, then, from an internal fire, trembling all over. When it was over, there was nothing but a blackened, charred form that was barely recognizable as ever being human.
Saber let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“We have to go,” Mia said. “The sun is setting. I don’t know when they can emerge. We have to go. We have to gonow!”
When they came up from the basement, Saber happened to look through a window to see a car winding down the long, twisting driveway.
“Fuck, someone’s here,” she said. She’d forgotten that Elijah was with them, now, though she was glad he was. He would no longer need to be convinced that the vampires were real.
None of them would.
They ran to the back door, Mia in the lead, Doug in the rear, as though making sure they all got out safely. Elijah had left the sliding door open when he came in, and they left it open again when they left, but it was when they were behind the house that they realized there was no easy way to cross the lawn without being seen.
“We just have to go into the woods,” Lozen said, looking up at the trees behind the house, “and go around to the car that way, through other people’s yards.”
“If they walk into the kitchen, they’ll see us crossing the backyard.”
“That’s why we’re going to run for it,” Lozen said, and everyone nodded.
Saber was glad to have brave Lozen back. They all looked at each other, then sprinted madly across the back lawn to the tree line, not stopping until they were well into the woods.
Once in, they ran parallel to the yard. Saber only stopped once to make sure Doug was ok. He had run with them, but the exertion had been difficult, and now he struggled along behind them.
“Wait for Doug,” she said. “I think we’re ok.”
Mia stopped, but the way she looked around the darkening wood worried Saber. Mia did not seem to agree that they were “ok.”
“I’mfine,” Doug said, a hint of a growl in his voice.
They trudged through loamy earth thick with pine needles, and Saber felt like she was moving entirely by force of will, not thinking a single coherent thought except “I killed a vampire.”
It wasn’t until they’d run down the road back to the car and piled in that any of them seemed to take a moment to breathe.
“Well,” Lozen finally said. “That was interesting.”
“Can we…” Elijah’s voice had a high, breathy quality. “Can we, like, go somewhere that sells beer? And I feel like if I don’t eat something I’m going to throw up. I might throw up anyway.”
He retched, covering his mouth.
“Oh my god, yes,” Lozen said, leaning forward. “Saber, pizza.”
So Saber the newly-minted vampire slayer started her car, put her hands on her steering wheel, took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment, then drove her new friends to get pizza.
