"Leech, I want you to set off the traps on the stairs and then come gently back to my hand."
"Payment," it whispered.
"Blood, as always."
"Fresh blood," it asked.
She offered the blade her naked arm, but it remained unmoving against her skin. "What do you want, Leech?"
"Fresh blood."
"I'm offering it to you."
"Fresher blood, new blood."
Milon said, "Oh, no, no."
Sidra said, "I agree. You are my weapon. You taste my blood, no one else's."
"When we kill, I taste blood."
"I will not sacrifice Milon to feed you."
She could almost feel it thinking, weighing its options. "A taste, a fresh taste, just a nick, just a bite."
Milon said, "No, absolutely not. That steel monster is not going to taste my blood."
Sidra sighed and said, "Then I will attempt to remove the traps."
He gripped her arm. "You said you couldn't do it."
"I said that I didn't see how I could do it without getting killed."
"It's the same thing."
"No, it isn't."
"I can't let you be killed."
She just looked at him, waiting for him to make up his mind.
He shuddered and held out his arm. She unlaced the sleeve and pushed it back to bare the pale skin. The sword chuckled. "Just a taste, just a bite, just a nibble." She held the sword firmly two-handed, for she didn't trust it, and placed it against Milon's arm. The sword bit deep and quick like a serpent's strike. Milon cried out, and opened his eyes to stare in horror as the blade lapped up his blood. The wound quickly closed and the sword sighed, "New blood, fresh, good, yum."
Sidra felt that the last was added for Milon's benefit. Milon took it very seriously. He yanked down his sleeve and said, "Yum or not, that is the last of my blood you ever get, you bloodsucking toothpick."
The sword laughed.
Sidra pulled Milon back up the stairs and then released the blade. It settled onto the first pressure point. A rain of poisoned darts filled the hall like black snow.
Leech floated back to her, obediently. "I have cleared the way, O master." Sidra ignored the sarcasm and led Milon to the landing. It was not trapped. But the door was.
The poisoned darts were soon removed. And the well-oiled lock clicked under her pick. The door opened into a short straight hallway. Doors dotted the walls in geometric lines to right and left. Torches were set at regular intervals along the walls. In the still air there was the sound of chanting.
Milon started to blow out the lantern, but Sidra stopped him. She spoke close to his ear so the sound wouldn't carry. "We may need light if we have to leave quickly."
The sword started to hum in time to the chanting and she hushed it.
Sidra stared at the floor and said, "Place your feet exactly where I place mine."
He nodded to show he had understood and then concentrated on following her over a five-foot-wide area of floor. She let out a breath of air as if she had been holding it. He relaxed as well, stepping back just a half step. The floor fell out from under him and he was tumbling backward helplessly. Sidra caught his arm, but his weight pulled them both downward. He was left dangling over a pit, and she on her stomach, holding him by one arm. The torches glimmered off silvered spikes set into the floor of the pit.
She hissed, "I told you to walk where I walked."
"Let us argue this later. Pull me up." She did, rubbing her shoulder. "You're lucky you didn't dislocate my arm."
He shrugged an apology and picked up the fallen lantern.
The chanting seemed to be coming from the last door on the right-hand side. They were only three doors away from it when Sidra stopped the bard with a hand movement and knelt to study the floor. She shook her head, sending light bursts from her helmet to the walls. She said, "When I say jump, leap forward as fast as you can."
"Why?"
She stared at him a moment and then looked upward.
He would have missed it, but with her gaze to direct him, he saw the portcullis spikes ready to come crashing down. He swallowed and said, "When do we jump?"
She stood beside him and said, "Now." They stepped forward and flung themselves across the stones. Sidra rolled easily, coming to her feet before the spikes had bitten into the floor. They were trapped.
There was a swimming in the air near the torches in one corner. Sidra pointed Leech at it and concentrated. Illusions bled near fire. A demon stood at the end of the hallway.
He was perhaps eight feet tall, fairly short for an ice demon. His scales were the color of new frost and winked in the light like diamond glints on snow. His teeth were ivory daggers. His four arms were crossed over his chest and his tail rustled over the floor. He grinned and said, "Welcome."
His bat-ribbed ears rolled into tubes and then unrolled. "I would speak with you before we fight."
Sidra found herself staring into its smooth blue eyes, no pupil, just empty blue like a frozen lake. Peaceful.
Milon gripped her arm and pulled her back. "Sidra."
She shook her head roughly and faced the demon in a fighting crouch, shield close, sword ready.
He said, "Perhaps you are right. Enough talk, let us fight." He strode forward and said, "And you, bard, I know the rules; by touching her, you gave up your safe conduct."
"I do not regret what I did, ice demon. You cannot harm me if you are dead."
It chuckled, then, low in its chest.
Sidra whispered to the sword, "I want you to burn for me and aid me in slaying this ice demon."
It said, "Price will be high."
She had expected nothing less. "When is the last time you tasted demon blood?"
The sword paused and said, "Demon blood."
"If we kill it, then all its blood is yours to consume."
It gave a nervous expectant giggle. "All that demon blood, all of it. You won't remove me until I have drunk my fill?"
"I won't remove you."
It snickered. "Payment is more than generous. I will do as you ask."
The ice demon strode forward, still laughing to itself. Its claws clicked together with a sound like breaking ice. Sidra kept Leech half hidden behind her shield as if she meant to only cower before the demon. Leech burst into flame with its blade like a wick in the center of the good orange fire.
The first threads of cold oozed round her shield and she knew, magic weapon or not, the first blow must be a good one. Milon simply stared up at the creature with his back pressed against the fallen portcullis. The demon stood almost directly in front of Sidra, and she kept her head down as if she could not bear the sight of him. He spoke to the bard. "Your protector is not doing much protecting, but be patient. When I have finished with her, you will have my undivided attention."
Sidra forced Leech up while the demon was looking at Milon. The sword took him through the chest, burning brightly as the demon blood gushed over it. The blade bit through a clawed hand and sent fingers spinning. The demon screamed.
A casual swipe of the tail knocked her to the ground, and a claw raked along the shield. The nails left grooves in the metal. A hand caught her helmet and sent her head ringing back against the floor. Leech moved of its own accord, bringing her hand with it. The blade shot through the demon's throat, and blood poured out acrid and stinking. Sidra struggled to her knees, gagging from the stench. She fought upward with the blade and shield. A claw slipped past the edge of the shield, and she felt claws sink into her thigh. Leech bit into the demon's arm, half-severing it. And it began to fade. It was running as a proper demon does when it is hurt badly enough and has the choice of leaving.
Leech screamed after the fading creature, "No, no!"
It flamed in her hand a while longer and then faded back to normal. "Cheated."
Sidra leaned against the wall, favoring her wounded leg. "It was not my doing that the demon left. I kept my part of the bargain."
The swo
rd was dangerously silent. Sidra was almost relieved that all its magic was spent for the day. It was never reliable when it was pouting.
The last door was not locked. It opened easily to reveal the wizard in the middle of a spell. A protective code chased the edges of a pentagram, and the wizard stood in the center of it all. He was short, balding, and did not look like a demon master or an evil man. But standing outside his magic circle was no mere demon but a devil.
It was why the wizard had not aided his ice demon. It was death to abort the spell. He was trapped as if in a cage until he released the devil to its home plane. Now their only danger was the devil.
It was still only half formed, with the bottom half of its body consumed in a strange black smoke. Its upper half was vaguely manlike, with shoulders and arms. It resembled the demon they had banished, with its bat-ribbed ears and teeth, but it was covered in black skin, the color of nothing above ground. High above it all, suspended from the ceiling, were the two earthenware jars on the end of a white pole.
A rope held the pole in place and the rope was tied off near the door around a peg. Sidra smiled. She raised the sword and chopped the rope. The wizard seemed to notice what she did. But he could not stop to plead with her. If he stopped, then the devil would be freed and it would kill him. Devils were very reliable that way, or unreliable, depending on the point of view.
The pole came crashing to the ground, but the jars did not break. They were spelled against such mundane accidents. Sidra stepped toward them carefully, one eye on the devil. She sheathed Leech, for fighting devils was not a matter of swords.
She untied the two jars from the pole and passed one out to Milon. The other she balanced under her sword arm. Just before she passed out of the room with his precious power, the wizard broke and shrieked, "No."
The devil laughed. "Take your pots and go, warrior-thief. Your business is finished here."
The floor quivered. Sidra turned to Milon and said, "Run."
They ran only as far as the fallen gate. It blocked their way completely, and the floor shivered once more. "There must be a hidden lever that will raise this. Search." They felt along the walls to either side, and Milon found something that he pressed. Slowly the gate rose upward. The walls lurched as if someone had caught the tower and twisted it.
They ran full out. There would be no more fighting, no more trap finding. It was a race to the surface.
Milon said, "The pit, what about the pit?"
"Jump it."
"Jump it?"
"Jump it or die."
He ran harder to keep up with her longer legs and he tried not to picture the spikes on the floor of the pit. It was there suddenly and they were leaping over it. Sidra went down, betrayed by her wounded leg, but was up and running with the blood pumping down her leg. The floor twisted under their feet and cracks began to form on the walls.
The stairs were treacherous. The lantern was a bouncing glow that showed widening cracks and falling rock. They came up into the tower room.
The door had healed itself shut. The tower gave a shudder as its foundations began to crumble. Sidra drew Leech from its sheath and pointed it at the door. She decided to bluff. "Open, door, or I'll burn you again." The door whimpered uncertainly and then it swung outward. They raced through the door and kept running across the ash circle and into the trees. With a final groan the tower thundered to its death. The world was full of rock and dust.
They lay gasping on the ground and grinning at each other. Milon said, "Let me look at your leg."
She lay back in the grass, allowing him to probe the stab wound. "Deep but not bad. It will heal. Now will you tell your minstrel what was so important about two earthenware jars?"
Sidra smiled and said, "I have a story for you, Milon. A story of a little girl and a vow she made to a god."
THE GIRL WHO WAS INFATUATED WITH DEATH
Well here we are, at the last story. This is Anita very solidly in her world, as it appears in the books. We have Jean-Claude on stage, and a distraught mother, a missing teenage girl, and a vampire who's about to get himself killed, but doesn't know it yet. This story is set before the novel Narcissus in Chains. This is back when Anita is fighting the good fight to try not to give in every time she gets too close to her vampire boyfriend. Ah, how the mighty have fallen.
IT was five days before Christmas, a quarter till midnight. I should have been asnooze in my bed, dreaming of sugarplums, whatever the hell they were, but I wasn't. I was sitting across my desk sipping coffee and offering a box of Kleenexes to my client, Ms. Rhonda Mackenzie. She'd been crying for nearly the entire meeting, so that she'd wiped most of her careful eye makeup away, leaving her eyes pale and unfinished, younger, like what she must have looked like when she was in high school. The dark, perfect lipstick made the eyes look emptier, more vulnerable.
"I'm not usually like this, Ms. Blake. I am a very strong woman." Her voice took on a tone that said she believed this, and it might even be true. She raised those naked brown eyes to me, and there was fierceness in them that might have made a weaker person flinch. Even I, tough-as-nails vampire-hunter that I am, had trouble meeting the rage in those eyes.
"It's all right, Ms. Mackenzie, you're not the first client that's cried. It's hard when you've lost someone."
She looked up, startled. "I haven't lost anyone, not yet."
I sat my coffee cup back down without drinking from it and stared at her. "I'm an animator, Ms. Mackenzie. I raise the dead if the reason is good enough. I assumed this amount of grief was because you'd come to ask me to raise someone close to you."
She shook her head, her deep brown curls in disarray around her face as if she'd been running her hands through what was once a perfect perm. "My daughter, Amy, is very much alive and I want her to stay that way."
Now I was just plain confused. "I raise the dead and am a legal vampire executioner, Ms. Mackenzie. How do either of those jobs help you keep your daughter alive?"
"I want you to help me find her before she commits suicide."
I just stared at her, my face professionally blank, but inwardly, I was cursing my boss. He and I had had discussions about exactly what my job description was, and suicidal daughters weren't part of that description.
"Have you gone to the police?" I asked.
"They won't do anything for twenty-four hours, but by then it will be too late."
"I have a friend who is a private detective. This sounds much more up her alley than mine, Ms. Mackenzie." I was already reaching for the phone. "I'll call her at home for you."
"No," she said, "only you can help me."
I sighed and clasped my hands across the clean top of my desk. Most of my work wasn't indoor office work, so the desk didn't really see much use. "Your daughter is alive, Ms. Mackenzie, so you don't need me to raise her. She's not a rogue vampire, so you don't need an executioner. How can I be of any help to you?"
She leaned forward, the Kleenex wadded in her hands, her eyes fierce again. "If you don't help me by morning, she will be a vampire."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"She's determined to become one of them tonight."
"It takes three bites to become a vampire, Ms. Mackenzie, and they all have to be from the same vampire. You can't become one in a single night, and you can't become one if you're just being casual with more than one."
"She has two bites on her thighs. I accidentally walked in on her when she was getting out of the shower and I saw them."
"Are you sure they were vampire bites?" I asked.
She nodded. "I made a scene. I grabbed her, wrestled with her so I could see them clearly. They are vampire bites, just like the pictures they passed around at the last PTA meeting so we could recognize it. You know one of those people lecturing on how to know if your kids are involved with the monsters."
I nodded. I knew the kind of person she meant. Some of it was valuable information, some of it was just scare tactics, and some of it was racist, if that
was the term. Prejudiced at least.
"How old is your daughter?"
"She's seventeen."
"That's only a year away from being legal, Ms. Mackenzie. Once she turns eighteen, if she wants to become a vampire, you can't stop her legally."
"You say that so calmly. Do you approve?"
I took in a deep breath and let it out, slow. "I'd be willing to talk to your daughter, try to talk her out of it. But how do you know that tonight is the night? It has to be three bites within a very short space of time or the body fights off the infection, or whatever the hell it is." Scientists were still arguing about exactly what made someone become a vampire. There were biological differences before and after, but there was also a certain level of mysticism involved, and science has always been bad at deciphering that kind of thing.
"The bites were fresh, Ms. Blake. I called the man who gave the lecture at our school, and he said to come to you."
"Who was he?"
"Jeremy Ruebens."
I frowned now. "I didn't know he'd gotten out of prison," I said.
Her eyes went wide. "Prison?"
"He didn't mention in his talk that he was jailed for conspiracy to commit murder--over a dozen counts, maybe hundreds. He was head of Humans First when they tried to wipe out all the vampires and some of the shape-shifters in St. Louis."
"He talked about that," she said. "He said he would never have condoned such violence and that it was done without his knowledge."
I smiled and knew from the feel of it that it was unpleasant. "Jeremy Ruebens once sat in the chair you're in now and told me that Humans First's goal was to destroy every vampire in the United States."
She just looked at me, and I let it go. She would believe what she wanted to believe; most people did.
"Ms. Mackenzie, whether you, or I, or Jeremy Ruebens approve or not, vampires are legal citizens with legal rights in this country. That's just the way it is."
"Amy is seventeen; if that thing brings her over underage, it's murder, and I will prosecute him for murder. If he kills my Amy, I will see him dead."
"You know for certain that it is a he?"
"The bites were very, very high up on her thigh"--she looked down at her lap--"her inner thigh."
I would have liked to have let the female vamp angle go, but I couldn't because I was finally beginning to see what Ms. Mackenzie wanted me to do, and why Jeremy Ruebens had sent her to me. "You want me to find your daughter before she's got that third bite, right?"