Bone Crossed

It was strangely intimate, Stefan holding me as he drank from Adam’s wrist, and Adam leaning harder into me as Stefan fed. Intimate with an audience. I turned my head to see that my mother still held her gun in a steady two-handed grip, pointed at Stefan’s head. Her face as calm as if she saw burnt bodies appear out of nowhere, then rise from the dead to sink fangs into whoever was closest to them all the time, though I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure she’d ever even seen one of the werewolves in wolf form.

“Mom,” I said, “the vampire is Stefan, he’s a friend of mine.”

“I should put the gun away? Are you sure? He doesn’t look like a friend.”

I looked at Stefan, who was looking better, though I still wouldn’t have recognized him without my nose. “Truthfully, I’m not sure how much good it would do anyway. Bullets, if they are silver, may work on werewolves, but I don’t think any bullets do much to vampires.”

She tucked the Glock, hot, into the holster inside the waistline of the back of her jeans. “So what do you do to vampires?”

Someone knocked on the door. I hadn’t heard anyone drive up, but I’d been a little distracted.

“Don’t let them in your home in the first place,” suggested Adam.

Mom, who’d been on the way to the door, stopped. “Is this likely to be a vampire?”

“Better let me get it,” I said. I wiggled my arm, and Stefan released me and took a better grip on Adam. “Are you all right, Adam?”

“He’s too weak to feed fast,” Adam commented. “I’m good for a while yet. If you’ll get my phone out for me and hit the speed dial, I’ll call for some more wolves, though. I doubt one feeding will be enough.”

With Mom watching, I behaved myself while I dug his phone out of the holder on his belt. Instead of taking the time to sort through his contacts, I just punched in his house number and handed him the ringing phone. Whoever was outside was growing impatient.

I straightened my shirt and took a quick look at myself to make sure there wasn’t anything that said, “Hey, I have a vampire in my house.”

I was going to have a bruise on my forearm, but it wasn’t too noticeable yet. I slipped past Mom and opened the door about six inches.

The woman standing on the porch didn’t look familiar. She was about my height and age. Her dark hair had been highlighted with a lighter shade (or her light brown hair had been striped with a darker color). She wore so much foundation that I could smell it over the perfume that a purely human nose might find light and attractive. Her grooming was immaculate, like a purebred dog ready to be shown—or a very expensive call girl.

Not a person you’d expect to find on the porch of an old mobile home out in the boonies of Eastern Washington at night.

“Mercy?”

If she hadn’t spoken, I’d never have recognized her because my nose was full of perfume and she didn’t look anything like the girl I’d gone to college with. “Amber?”

Amber had been my college roommate Charla’s best friend. She’d been studying to be a veterinarian, but I’d heard she’d dropped out her first year in vet school. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d graduated.

When I’d last seen Amber she’d been wearing a Mohawk and had had a ring in her nose (which had been bigger) and a small tattooed hummingbird at the corner of her eye. She and Charla had been best friends in high school. Though it had been Charla who had decided they shouldn’t room together, Amber had always blamed me for it. We had been acquaintances rather than friends.

Amber laughed, doubtless at the bewildered look on my face. There was something brittle in the sound, not that I was in any position to be picky. My manner was stiffer than usual, too. I had a vampire feeding from a werewolf behind me; I wondered what she was hiding.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, after a short, awkward silence.

I joined her out on the porch and shut the door behind me, trying not to look like I was keeping her out. “What brings you here?”

She folded her arms over her chest and turned to gaze at my scraggly-looking field where a rusty VW Rabbit rested on three tires. From where we stood, the graffiti, the missing door, and the cracked windshield weren’t visible, but it looked junky anyway. The old wreck was a joke between Adam and me, and I wasn’t going to apologize for it.

“I read about you in the paper,” she said.

“You live in the Tri-Cities?”

She shook her head. “Spokane. It made CNN, too, didn’t you know? The fae, werewolves, death ... how could they resist?” For a moment there was a flash of humor in her voice, though her face stayed disconcertingly blank.

Lovely. The whole world knew I’d been raped. Yeah, that might have struck me as funny, too—if I’d been Lucrezia Borgia. There were a lot of reasons I’d never bothered to keep in contact with Amber.