The Austin mall was a well-oiled machine. All the gears were moving in the usual half-asleep speed of its morning workers. A handful of elderly mall walkers in jogging suits shuffled along the paths outside the locked gates of the stores, having conversations about their lap dogs and grandchildren. Music blasted from store to store on the second level, a rotten garble of conflicting songs as the employees waged war against each other with the sound waves.
Mindy Stern was running late. She parked her beat-up mid-nineties Civic at the far end of the lot so her car would be in the shade. The shade would be worth the hike by the afternoon, but as it was summer, it didn’t matter that it was still only eight-thirty in the morning; she was sweating by the time she reached the entrance. It would have made more sense for her to be wearing a sundress with sandals, but that was the opposite kind of look her job required.
A Styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand prevented her from opening the doors. She thrust her combat boot against the button that opened the doors for wheelchairs and was blasted with a welcoming gust of air conditioning. She passed two elderly women and muttered, "Good morning."
Neither responded with words but raised their penciled eyebrows as they surveyed her appearance and lifted their noses in the air. Mindy rolled her eyes as the sound of the women’s windbreakers swished away. She imagined the snotty old bitties taking a wrong turn into her shop and falling over dead with shock and outrage.
She climbed the escalator, which hadn’t been turned on yet, and strolled down to Hot Topic. She had only been the assistant manager for a month, but she found the small amount of power agreeable on most days. Rachel was already in the store, and Mindy was keen to question her, since the last Vampire RPG they had hosted together had ended
strangely
. Mindy had tried to reach Rachel through calls, texts, emails, and Facebook, but Rachel had fallen off the radar for the whole weekend.
Mindy set her coffee cups down, opened the gate halfway, grabbed her coffees, and kicked the gate back down behind her. She instantly hesitated at the soft uneven sounds of crying coming from the back of the store. She sighed, realizing the day would be filled with drama as she walked through the store and turned into the back room.
Rachel sat on the floor, her checkered stocking-clad legs stretched straight out in front of her. Mindy blinked, instantly alarmed at her friend’s appearance. Her heavy eyeliner ran down her cheeks and her thick black hair hung in a greasy mess. She was wearing the same purple lace corset and banana yellow skirt that Mindy had last seen her in. Worse than the fact that she’d obviously not changed her clothes or bathed in three days, she looked sick. Pale, waxy, and anemic. Her hands shook as she sorted through a box of small miscellaneous clearance items.
"Rachel?"
"Pandora!" Rachel sobbed.
"Huh?"
"I’m legally changing my name to Pandora. I told you that."
"Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot."
Rachel dropped a marked-down jar of Edward body glimmer to the floor and put both hands over her face, her shoulders shaking with tears.
Mindy sat down beside her and patted her knee. "What’s wrong?"
Rachel picked the jar back up and thrust it in Mindy’s face. "That’s what I wanted."
Mindy raised one eyebrow. "Then buy it, it’s only a dollar."
"No, I wanted
that
." She pointed to the label, her finger tapping Rob Pattinson’s face.
Mindy’s raised eyebrow shot up a bit further. "Yeah, well, get in line."
"No, no. You don’t understand," Rachel wailed. "I finally meet a real vampire but does he want to fall in love with me? No! Is he tortured by abstaining from my alluring smell? No! Does he want to steal me away from everyone and everything and protect me? No! No! No! I wanted Edward, or Stefan, or Eric Northman, and what did I get? Dracula, that’s what! Old black and white horror movie Dracula!"
"Uh, Rachel, have you been experimenting with drugs?"
"Drugs? No. Why?"
"Well, first of all, you look like hell. Second, you obviously haven’t bathed in a while. And third,
real
vampires?"
"Look!" Rachel pulled up her sleeve. Her arm was covered in bruised bite marks.
"Holy shit!"
"And here." She moved her hair aside and pulled down her collar, exposing the top of her shoulder.
Mindy took a deep breath. "Okay, Rachel, have you thought about calling the cops? Why would you let some sicko do this to you?"
"I didn’t let him!"
"Really?"
"Okay, I let him the first time cause he was so hot, but then it was like I had no choice. He tells me what to do, and I flippin’ do it! I can’t seem to disobey him." She erupted into tears again, covering her face with her hands.
"Is he staying at your apartment?" Mindy asked.
"Yeah."
Mindy pulled out her phone. "Okay, well, I’m going to call the cops and have them go over to your place."
Rachel quickly grabbed her hand, crushing Mindy’s finger’s painfully around the phone. "No, you can’t!"
"Why not?"
"He’ll kill them all! He told me he would kill anyone who tried to take him away from me."
"Yeah, all the more reason to call the cops. He’s threatening you and others. He’s a psycho!"
"No, you don’t get it, Mindy. Leith’s not a psycho, he’s a vampire. A
real
vampire."
Mindy sat back and rolled her gum around in her mouth. She looked at Rachel’s arm again and winced. Her friend was in serious trouble, whether she was telling the truth or not. She knew Rachel
believed
she was telling the truth, and obviously, Rachel hadn’t been biting herself. Someone was preying on her, and he had to be stopped.
"Okay, let’s suspend reality for a second here and say I believe you. The bottom line is there is a man assaulting you and squatting in your apartment. Who may or may not be a killer. We have to find a way to get rid of him. Do you want me to call Danny and have him go over and rough this guy up?"
"No! Danny’s big, but Leith would smash him. I’m sure of it. I don’t want Danny getting hurt." Rachel pulled her knees up and rested her head against them sobbing quietly.
Mindy looked at her watch and huffed in exasperation. She had to open the store. And she had to help her friend. Rachel was in no shape to work, but Mindy couldn’t send her home while there was whack job with overdeveloped jaw muscles there.
"Look, I have to open the store now. I don’t want you on the floor today. Just stay back here and do inventory," Mindy said.
Rachel nodded and turned her attention back to the box of clearance items.
"I don’t want you going anywhere. Okay?"
"Huh?"
"I’m going to help you, somehow, but I need to know that I can trust you not to sneak off and go back home."
Rachel sighed listlessly and twisted a strand of greasy hair around her finger. "I promise."
Shoppers were light through the store that morning, and the quiet time allowed Mindy to do some web searching for possible ways to eradicate a "vampire." She also had to ask Rachel questions frequently about her vamp’s habits and weaknesses. Mindy was surprised that the nut ball claimed the sun would kill him. Nowadays, the sun issue was so old school. She became frustrated very quickly as 99.9% of what she found was about online gaming or RPGs. Finally, she gave her iPhone to Rachel and told her to sift through the mire on the web. The store manager, Scott, had agreed to come in and cover for her at lunch so she could try to sort out Rachel’s problem.
In the food court, Mindy plunked a huge double bacon burger in front of Rachel, while she stuck to sucking down a diet soda. Rachel was still surfing the web on Mindy’s phone.
"Have you found anything?" Mindy asked.
"Maybe. See what you think." Rachel handed the phone back and dubiously eyed the burger on the table for a second. Mindy was about to point out how feeble and anemic Rachel looked but before she could say anything, Rachel picked it up and tried to swallow the half-pound mound of meat whole.
Mindy looked down at her phone and what Rachel had found. She snorted loudly. "Craigslist? Really, Rachel?"
"Just read it," Rachel said through her mouth of food. "And it’s Pandora."
"Yeah, yeah," Mindy said absently, reading the classified listing.
Real vampires hooked their teeth in you? Experienced, legitimate vampire slayer. Have weapons, will travel. Reasonable rates. Free phone consultation. Call Forest. (812) 555-9344
Mindy looked up at Rachel.
"Maybe it’s bogus. But we could call and see what we thought then?" Rachel said.
"We’re not calling from my phone!" Mindy said severely. "I don’t want this person having my phone number."
"So block the number. What’s the big deal?"
"With my luck, they’d be able to crack right through that, and the next thing I know I’ve got a "vampire slayer" stalking me. Where’s your phone?"
"I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find it since Leith came home with me. I think I lost it. There’s a payphone on the lower level."
"Okay, we’ll call from there."
****
Forest slumped in a chair in the corner of her bedroom with her chin resting on her chest, her eyes half open. A loaded shotgun lay next to her feet atop a pile of shells and empty ammunition boxes. She’d been holding her nine millimeter for so long it felt fused to her hand. Various other weapons littered the floor around her: knives, a hunting bow and quiver, a mace, and even a replica of a Viking war hammer that she’d bought at a renaissance fair. It was lucky for her that vampire’s bodies fell to ash a few hours after death; otherwise, she would have been hard pressed to dispose of all of the bodies in her condo. As it was, the recent purchase of a commercial sized ShopVac proved to be money well spent.
She stretched and yawned. The pain was worse today. The only thing Forest had found to take the edge off the agony of being so far away from Syrus was sleeping. But Queen Christiana’s antics had made sleeping something of the past for Forest. Her whole chest felt like a huge open mouth. She had no way to feed it. No way to close it. No way to ignore it.
I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take this anymore.
Those words never seemed to stop repeating inside her head since she’d been banished from Regia… from Syrus. But she had no choice but to take it. Take it, and take it, and take it.
When Forest did sleep, her dreams were filled with Syrus, and for those fleeting moments in her subconscious there was peace and passion laced with a sweet aching. In her dreams, they were together back at her cottage. She'd see flashes of his smiles, hear his voice, feel his lips on her neck where no scars stood between them. Being enveloped in his arms, resting her head against his chest with his heartbeat pounding next to her ear, and then waking up alone, more alone than she’d ever been in her life was an unspeakable torture. Opening your eyes after sleeping, your heart choking and tears soaking your pillow was even less of an incentive to sleep than being caught off-guard by one of Christiana’s assassins.
Forest had been forced to kill at least two assassins a day, sometimes more since she’d been shoved back here. Oddly enough, she didn’t find pleasure in killing vampires anymore. Mating with Syrus had caused her to change sides. Vampires were her people now. There was only one she wanted to kill: Leith. Forest didn’t really even want Christiana dead; she just wanted her to stop. She imagined her hands around Christiana’s little neck more than a few times, but in reality, even if she had the chance, Forest’s love for Syrus would stop her from killing his mother.
Forest knew something had happened to Syrus. She knew he was alive, she could feel it, but he hadn’t broken through her banishment yet. Someone or something had tied his hands. He was surrounded by darkness that had nothing to do with his blindness. Redge told her that even he couldn’t find Syrus, but he knew he was in the castle, somewhere.
She had to do something to take back control of her life but she had no idea how. Banishment effectively ended her job with Fortress. She didn’t need to worry about money, but she feared her sanity was starting to jitter like a Chihuahua, seeing as she had nothing to do except wait for the next sucker to fall through her ceiling. She got out occasionally, but when she left, the assassins began to add up, and it was a chore to hack through them all. Moving might have been the logical thing to do, but she was afraid if she left, Syrus wouldn’t be able to find her.