Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(86)

“Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room, where her father could drop on top of her, but how?

The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a”—she took a deep breath—“werewolf.”

The news didn’t seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be overmatched. He’d been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.

“Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren’t so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”

The vampire sneered right back, and on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”

•   •   •

David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire’s voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.

Patience, patience, he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.

•   •   •

If the vampire’s theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he’d tried to drive her father through the wall.

The vampire had no trouble grabbing it . . . or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway, where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress, and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.

She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn’t see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.

“Now,” whispered Stella, diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.

Even though Devonte’s chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella’s motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling red-gold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire’s look like toys.

For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother’s lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf’s bulk—until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.

With an inhuman howl, the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she’d had of her face, Stella saw something terrible . . . evil.

“Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.

She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urbane smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing through fabric but not skin.

Something buzzed between them, hitting Linnford in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.

It took a moment for her to properly understand what she was seeing. The bent chair leg was stuck into his rib cage, just to the left of his sternum. Blood began spitting out like a macabre fountain.

“Honey?” Hannah Linnford stood in the doorway. Like Stella, she seemed to be having trouble understanding what she was seeing.

Muttering, “Does no one remember to shut the security doors?” Stella pulled the mini-canister of Mace her youngest brother had given her after the mugging incident out of her pocket and sprayed it in the other woman’s face.

If she’d been holding Linnford’s knife, she could have cheerfully driven it through Hannah’s neck: these people had taken one of her kids and tried to feed him to a vampire.

Thinking of her kids made Stella look for Devonte.

He was leaning against the wall a few feet from his bed, staring at Linnford—and his expression centered Stella because he needed her. She ran to him and tugged him to the far corner of the room, away from the fighting monsters, but too close to the Linnfords. Once she had him where she wanted him, she did her best to block his view of Linnford’s dying body. If she could get medical help soon enough, Linnford might survive—but she felt no drive to do it. Let him rot.

Mace can in hand, she kept a weather eye on the woman screaming on the floor, but most of her attention was on the battle her father was losing.

They fought like a pair of cats, coming together clawing and biting, almost too fast for her eyes to focus on, then, for no reason she could see, they’d retreat. After a few seconds of staring at each other, they’d go at it again. Unlike cats, they were eerily silent.

The vampire’s carefully arranged hair was fallen, covering her face, but not disguising her glittering . . . no, glowing red eyes. Her arm flashed out in a jerky movement that was so quick Stella almost missed it—and the wolf twitched away with another wound that dripped blood: the vampire was still virtually untouched.