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She scratched at my face, but I buried my eyes in her back and she couldn’t reach me. She was making small, helpless sounds because she didn’t have enough air to make big ones.
Her hands scratched at my right arm, but the sweater was thick. She pushed the sleeve up, exposing my bare arm, and began to shred the skin with her nails. I buried my face deeper into her back and squeezed until my arms shook and I was gritting my teeth. Everything I had was in that one arm, pressing into her slender throat.
Her hands stopped scratching me. They beat against my arm like dying butterflies.
It takes a long time to choke someone into unconsciousness. The movies make it look easy, quick, clean. It isn’t easy, it isn’t quick, and it sure as hell isn’t clean. You can feel the pulse on either side of the neck pounding against your arm while you squeeze the life out of it. The person struggles a lot more than in the movies. And as far as choking someone to death, you better hold on for a long time after they stop moving.
Marguerite went slowly limp, a body part at a time. When she was just dead weight in my arms, I let her go, slowly. She lay on the floor unmoving. I couldn’t even see her breathe. Had I squeezed too long?
I touched her neck and found the carotid pulse strong and even. Just out of it, not dead. Good.
I stood and walked back towards the bed.
Yasmeen went to her knees beside Marguerite’s still form. “My love, my only one, has she hurt you?”
“She’s just unconscious,” I said. “She’ll come to in a few minutes.”
“If you had killed her, I would have torn your throat out.”
I shook my head. “Let’s not start this shit again. I’ve had about all the grandstanding I can take for one night.”
The man in bed said, “You’re bleeding.”
Blood was dripping down my right forearm. Marguerite may not have been able to do any real damage, but the scratches were deep enough that some of them might leave scars. Great; I already had a long, thin scar on the underside of my right arm from a knife. Even with the scratches, my right arm had fewer scars than my left. Work-related injuries.
Blood was dripping down my arm rather steadily. The blood didn’t show on the black carpeting. A good color if you pla
Yasmeen was helping Marguerite to her feet. The woman had recovered very quickly. Why? Because she was a human servant, of course. Sure.
Yasmeen walked towards the bed, towards me. Her lovely face had thi
“Control yourself, Yasmeen.”
“You have not taught your servant good ma
“Leave her alone, Yasmeen.” Jean-Claude was standing now.
“Every servant must be tamed, Jean-Claude. You have let it go far too long.”
I looked over Yasmeen’s shoulder at him. “Tamed?”
“It is an unfortunate stage in the process,” he said. His voice was neutral, as if he were talking about taming a horse.
“Damn you.” I pulled my gun. I held it two-handed in a teacup grip. Nobody was taming me tonight.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone stand up on the other side of the bed. The man was still under the covers. It was a slender woman, her skin the color of coffee with cream. Her black hair was cut very close to her head. She was naked. Where the hell had she come from?
Yasmeen was about a yard from me, tongue playing over her lips, fangs glistening in the overhead light.
“I’ll kill you, do you understand that, I’ll kill you,” I said.
“You’ll try.”
“Fun and games aren’t worth dying for,” I said.
“After a few hundred years, that’s all that is worth dying for.”
“Jean-Claude, unless you want to lose her, call her off!” My voice was higher than I wanted it to be, afraid.
At this range the bullet should take out her entire chest. If it worked, there would be no resurrecting her as the undead; her heart would be gone. Of course, she was over five hundred years old. One shot might not do it. Lucky I had more than one bullet.
I caught movement from the corner of my eye. I was half-turned towards it when something flattened me to the ground. The black woman was on top of me. I brought the gun around to fire, not giving a damn if she was human or not. But her hand grabbed my wrists, squeezing. She was going to crush my wrists.
She snarled in my face, all teeth and a low growl. The sound should have had fur around it and pointy teeth. Human faces weren’t supposed to look that way.
The woman jerked the Browning out of my hands like taking candy from a baby. She held it wrong, like she didn’t know which end of the gun went where.
An arm came around her waist and pulled her backwards off me. It was the man on the bed. The woman turned on him, snarling.
Yasmeen leapt for me. I scooted backwards, putting the wall at my back. She smiled. “Not so tough without your weapon, are you?”
She was suddenly kneeling in front of me. I hadn’t seen her come, not even a blur of motion. She appeared beside me like magic.
She had her body up against my knees, pi
“Yasmeen, no!” It was Jean-Claude coming to my aid at last. But he was going to be too late. Yasmeen bared her teeth, raised her neck back for the strike, and I couldn’t do a damn thing.
She pulled me in tight against her, arms locked behind my back. If I’d been pressed any tighter I’d have come out on the other side.
I screamed, “Jean-Claude!”
Heat; something was burning inside my sweater, over my heart. Yasmeen hesitated. I felt her whole body shudder. What the hell was happening?
A tongue of blue-white flame curled up between us. I screamed and Yasmeen echoed it. We screamed together as we burned.
She fell away from me. Blue-white flame crawled over her shirt. Flames licked around a hole in my sweater. I shrugged out of the shoulder holster and pulled the burning sweater off.
My cross still burned with an intense blue-white flame. I jerked the chain and it snapped. I dropped the cross to the carpet, where the flames smoldered, then died.
There was a perfect cross-shaped burn on my chest, just above my breast, over the beat of my heart. The burn was covered in blisters already. A second-degree burn.
Yasmeen had ripped her own blouse off. She had an identical burn, but lower down between her breasts because she was taller than I was.
I knelt on the floor in just my bra and jeans. Tears were trailing down my face. I had a bigger cross-shaped burn scar on my left forearm. A vampire’s human followers had branded me, thinking it was fu
A burn is a bitch. Inch for inch, a burn hurts worse than any other injury.
Jean-Claude stood in front of me. The cross glowed a white-hot light, no flames, but then he wasn’t touching it. I looked up to find him shielding his eyes with his arm.
“Put it away, ma petite. No one else will harm you tonight, I promise you that.”
“Why don’t you just back off and let me decide what I’m going to do?”
He sighed. “I was childish to let it get so far out of hand, Anita. Forgive me for my foolishness.” It was hard to take the apology seriously while he cowered behind his arm, not daring to look at my glowing cross. But it was an apology. From Jean-Claude, that was a lot.
I picked the cross up by its chain. I had broken the clasp getting it off. I’d need a new chain before it could go around my neck again. I picked my sweater up in my other hand. There was a melted hole bigger than my fist in it. Right over the chest area. The sweater was ruined. No help there. Where do you hide a glowing cross when you aren’t wearing a shirt?