The Vampire's Revenge (5 page)

I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of fresh blood. “You know why you can’t kill Connie. If you do, you’ll wreck some kind of ancient prophecy, and that’ll put you on the shit list of the whole pantheon of voodoo gods and goddesses.”

Melaphia was perfectly aware of all this. And I knew her well enough to know that she had gone over the situation from every angle. If she could have figured out a way to avenge William and not be relegated to the far corners of the underworld, she would have offed Connie already. She just needed more time to make her peace with the situation—and with the Slayer.

“She’ll kill you, too, you know,” she said solemnly, peering into her cup as if she could see the future there.

“Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. Time will tell.”

“And who will protect us then?” She said this calmly, but I could feel the emotion coming off her in waves of raw pain and fear.

I groped for an answer, but none came. No good one anyway. “Mel, all I can tell you is that I’m going to do the best I can.”

She worked her mouth but said nothing. Still the unspoken question hung in the air.
What if your best isn’t good enough?

“Dex came here today,” Melaphia said, still not looking at me.

“What?” I nearly dropped my drink. Renee’s father hadn’t been around since she was an infant. “What did the sperm donor want?”

“Don’t call him that,” Mel said sharply. “He heard I’d had a nervous breakdown.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, or the implications. Melaphia had almost lost her mind when Renee was kidnapped awhile back. William had to go to England to rescue her, and Mel was nearly catatonic on and off while they were gone. “And?”

“And he wondered if he should try to get custody of Renee.” Mel stifled a sob, and I sat down at the table beside her and took her hand.

“I’d like to see him try,” I said fiercely. “William keeps the best lawyers in the south on retainer. There’s no way in hell—”

“He says he can do it. He says he can take her from me legally.”

“No, he can’t. Not after we prove that he’s been an absentee father who’s never been much more than indifferent to Renee. Besides, surely he can see that you’re better—I mean, that you’re fine . . . now.”

“He dredged up a lot of ancient history.”

Dex hated the fact that Mel worked as a “domestic,” as he called her. He thought having the mother of his child working as a housekeeper was bad for his academic career. He’d divorced Melaphia after Renee was born when she refused to leave William’s house-hold. But Melaphia had known she had a destiny to fulfill that Dex could not be a part of. He had no idea that Melaphia was the most powerful
mambo
in this hemisphere or that his child was fated to inherit the same ability. And, of course, he didn’t know about the vampires she was living with.

“Let me deal with him,” I said. “Tell him if he wants Renee back, he’ll have to go through me.” I cupped Mel’s chin in my hand like I did when she was a little girl and kissed her on the forehead.

“Thank you, Uncle Jack,” she said. Even though Mel and I looked about the same human age, I had helped William raise her from an infant after her beloved mother died. I felt, as William had, like she was my own daughter.

As I turned to go to the basement, Mel said, “Wait. There’s one more thing I have to tell you.”

I could tell by the tone of her voice that it was something bad. Was there any end to bad news around here? She handed me a newspaper clipping. It was Tilly Granger’s obituary. “Oh, no,” I heard myself whisper.

“She died right about the same time as William, poor old thing. We missed the wake because of everything that was going on. I called her staff and gave them our sympathies. I’m going to have a gourmet food basket sent over from Paula Deen’s place.”

If Diana, William’s human wife, was the love of his life, Tilly was a close second. He’d offered her the gift of immortality when she was a blushing Savannah debutante in the roaring twenties, but she’d turned him down.

Tilly had aged like any other mortal while William remained perpetually young. After she rejected his proposal, he’d had to stay out of the country for a few years in order to fool Savannah society into thinking he was his own son. In fact, that was how Melaphia had decided we should handle William’s death. We would simply tell people he was on an extended tour of Europe.

I didn’t really see the point in not having William declared dead. If we did, Mel and Renee could legally inherit everything. But I think in her heart of hearts, Melaphia still harbored the hope that she could someday figure out how to conjure William back to life. Gods knew she’d worked feats almost as miraculous in the past. Maman Lalee’s word was law, though, and she had been crystal clear about the issue. William could never return from the underworld.

But like I was saying, Tilly had been one of the few constants in his life. It was somehow poetic that they had died at nearly the same time.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, staring at the paper. “I mean, I know she was nearly a hundred and all, but I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea of her being gone.”

“Sometimes I think you forget that not everyone’s immortal like you.”

I looked at her in amazement but said nothing. How wrong she was. I never forgot the fleeting nature of my human loves. I was as terrified at first to hold Mel as a newborn as I’d been with her mother before her. I would peek into her crib, marveling at the musical sound of her little cries, the tissuelike delicacy of her skin, the sweet freshness of her newly minted human scent. When I finally worked up the nerve to lift her up and hold her against me, she seemed so fragile, so helpless.

My succession of human daughters were like butterflies, all beauty and color, floating on summer air with delicate gossamer wings. And their lives seemed just as short. Summer turned into winter in the blink of an immortal eye and they were gone from me forever.

Human lives were brief enough without the
non
human threats that Melaphia and Renee faced on a regular basis. I only hoped I could survive long enough to help them reach a ripe old age.

I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing them fly away from me, but humans always did.

Three

I woke to someone banging on my coffin lid. I pushed the lid open and the sight that greeted me convinced me I was dreaming. It wasn’t until Reyha started growling that I admitted I was awake. Reyha slept with me in her daytime dog form, guarding me as she had guarded William. I blinked a couple of times as I tried to understand what I was looking at.

Otis stood outside my coffin in his fey Stevie Sparkle persona, complete with his trademark spangly blue getup. Otis had hidden himself in plain sight in the seventies, showing his real nature as the front man in a glitter rock band. After that phase was over he had to go back to disguising his true form. Any human who saw him up close and personal would be totally freaked out by his otherworldly appearance. There was no way he could pass for human unless he cloaked himself in glamour.

He had a very nervous red tabby cat perched on his shoulder with its back arched and its tail puffed out.

I grabbed the coffin lid and tried to shut it again. Otis-Stevie latched onto it and held it fast. Those faeries are strong shiny little sumbitches. I cursed him, his cat, and their interruption.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s still daylight,” Stevie told me.

“Reyha, go upstairs,” I ordered. She whined and jumped onto the floor. With one last snarl at Rufus the cat, she trotted upstairs.

“What are you two freaks doing in my boudoir this time of day, and why are you decked out in your faerie finery, Otis?”

Otis sniffed. “Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep. You told us to find Eleanor, remember? And I do my best tracking when I’m in my true form. My human nose was all stuffed up because of the snuff.”

“You’re supposed to put it between your cheek and gums, not snort it, doofus,” I told him incredulously.

“Not where I come from.”

I wanted to argue some more, but there was no time to get bogged down in smokeless tobacco issues. I had to focus. “Did you find her?”

“Yeah. As a matter of fact, we did. Didn’t we, Rufus?”

The cat issued a trill and kneaded Otis’s shoulder.

“Ow,” said the faerie. “You need a manicure.”

“Not to mention a bath. The both of you smell like you’ve been rolling in a cat box.”

“It’s no wonder. We’ve been crawling through back alleys and lowlife dives all over this city trying to sniff her out,” Otis said.

I got out of the coffin and went to pull on my boots. “I take it you found her in a place I can get to from the tunnels. I’m not that into sunbathing.” Savannah had a system of tunnels that was left over from the time when the city’s street level was raised as a defense against hurricanes. It was a right handy way for sun-sensitive creatures like me to get around in the daytime.

“Yeah. Believe it or not, she’s holed up in that house that William was building for her, even though it’s only half finished.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I muttered as I buttoned my shirt and pulled on my jacket. “That was the last place I would have looked for her. It was too obvious.”

“She knew that, so that’s exactly where she went. If we hurry we can make it there by sundown so you can surprise her when she comes out in the night to feed.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Let’s roll.” Then I stopped short, thinking about what Otis had just said.
When she comes out to feed.
“Dammit,” I spat. “I can’t believe I didn’t think—”

“What is it?”

“I have no idea if she’s still a vampire.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. She’s in Ginger’s body now. Ginger wasn’t a vampire.”

Otis followed me out the door that led to the tunnels, and Rufus trotted along by his side. “But she
smells
like a vampire, Jack. That’s how we found her.”

I swore bitterly. Poor Ginger. I wouldn’t wish the life of a blood drinker on anybody. Sure, I had chosen it, but I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that I was dying, and a charismatic man in a Confederate captain’s uniform had asked me if I wanted to live. I was, what—thirty years old? Of course I’d said yes. Would Ginger even want to go back into the body of a vampire?

As we made our way through the tunnels, I tried to remember what Eleanor had looked like when I last saw her, the night of William’s death. William was bleeding from an injury he got in the earthquake and she said she smelled his blood. She’d been clearly terrified of the Slayer. Eleanor had fought William briefly before Connie killed him, but was it with vampire strength? He was gravely hurt but threw her off easily before she ran away into the night like a coward.

Was Eleanor holed up in her under-construction house because she couldn’t go out into the sunlight or because of habit? As a madam, she had worked through the night and slept during the day anyway.

Whether Ginger’s body was undead or alive, I was about to find out. We’d reached the heavy metal door that William had installed between the tunnels and the basement of Eleanor’s house. “We’ve got to be quiet, you two,” I said. “If Ginger’s body is a vampire’s, Eleanor will be able to hear the slightest noise.”

On cue, Rufus the cat made a noise like he was about to cough up a hairball the size of a small sheep.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” I demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Otis insisted. “Do I look like a cat herder?”

Rufus hissed and began to stretch, but not in the slow, languorous way that a cat usually stretched. It was in the horrifying way a wereanimal began to shift. I winced when I heard long bones reforming and ligaments popping. Living with Reyha and Deylaud, I’d recognize those noises anywhere. The brutal sounds of shape shifting signaled the beginnings of Rufus’s daily metamorphosis.

“The sun is out,” I said. “He’s about to turn.”

Otis looked toward the floor in disgusted fascination. “Whoa! That’s really ugly.”

“Ain’t it?” I averted my eyes.

“You should watch this.”

“I’ve seen enough weres shift to last me a lifetime. Listen, you stay here and watch over him until he rears up on his hind legs. He’ll be defenseless mid-shift. I’m going to go and try to get the drop on Eleanor before she leaves the house.”

“Okay,” Otis agreed, still mesmerized by the sight of Rufus’s turning. “Wow, this would make some crazy reality show.”

I looked at the faerie and the mancat. “You remind me of Beauty and the Beast,” I said.

I opened the metal door as quietly as I could. Good thing it was new so the hinges didn’t squeak. The basement had been finished in the last couple of days, so no light from the rising sun shown in. I saw a form covered in cloth near the far wall and could sense that it was Eleanor. As I crept closer I saw that the cloth was the silk shawl William had given her to use in her voodoo rituals.

I slipped up on her silently and grabbed her from behind, catching her around the shoulders and pinning her to my chest. Instantly awake, she flailed against me with all her strength. Her heels struck my kneecaps and her head banged against my collarbone, but I held her fast.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you for what you did to William,” I hissed into her ear.

“William deserved everything he got for sending me to the tortures of hell.”

“You need a new song. I’ve heard that one too many times. Try again.”

She struggled in vain to free her arms but only managed to claw at my thighs with her long nails. “Okay, how about this one? You and I both know you can’t kill me because I’m the only one who can get your little birdbrain friend back into a human body. Your voodoo witch could study all the old spells she can find and she won’t be able to help.”

“So we’re at a Mexican standoff. If you have any ideas, I’m listening.”

“I’ll let Ginger have her body back if you protect me from the Slayer.”

Eleanor’s proposal surprised me. It seemed too easy. What made her think I could protect her? She probably figured that since I had managed to keep Connie from killing
me
I had some influence over her. I wasn’t about to set Eleanor straight on that point. And what made her think I wouldn’t double-cross her? There was something missing here and I couldn’t decide what it was.