Dead Is The New Black. Harper Allen
“I guess we are at that, seeing as how you’re about to go straight to hell, vamp. Step away from her, Tash.”
I heard a door slam and the sound of a dead bolt shooting into its lock. Glancing sideways, I saw old man Schneider had decided discretion was the better part of valor and had closed up shop for the evening. Which was understandable enough, since his clientele had melted away into the darkness during the past few seconds, leaving only me and Brooklyn and the muttering derelict Brook had called Crazy Joe, who’d returned and was now pawing through a garbage can, oblivious to the drama being enacted a few feet away from him. My humiliation at Megan and Kat finding me here was replaced by anger.
“The dude with the nail gun that shoots silver-tipped nails is Kat’s ex-con main squeeze, Jack Rawls. And the wolf’s a shapeshifter named Mikhail. Rumor has it Megan lets him sleep on her bed if he’s been a good dog,” I told Brooklyn, loudly enough for Megan to hear. I switched my attention to my sisters. “No one’s going to hell tonight, Meg,” I declared. “I hear you’ve patrolled this alley before, so you know damn well that the vamps who come here don’t feed off humans. Take your pointy stick and go home, and tell the rest of your little gang they’re not wanted, either. That includes you, Kat.”
“There’s no such thing as a vamp that doesn’t feed off humans.” Beside Kat, Jack’s finger tightened on the nail gun’s trigger. “Only vamps that haven’t fed off humans yet.”
“Sweetie, you know your killer instinct’s one of the things I adore about you, but you’re aiming at my little sister,” Kat drawled. “If you dust her I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth, so dial it down, comprendes? Megan, Tash was just being her usual bratty self with that remark about Mikhail. Lower your stake before Darkheart gets here.”
“Grandfather’s with you?” I thrust my bag of blood at Brooklyn, almost spilling it in my agitation. “Take this. No, don’t just hold it in front of you for everyone to see, stash it somewhere!”
She stared at me. “What’s with you? Your big sisters show up and ten seconds later you’re emotional wreckage?”
“They’re only my big sisters by a matter of minutes,” I said distractedly. “We’re triplets. Just hide the blood, okay, Brook? Kat, I can’t believe you let Megan do this! I’ll bet I know what this is about—our Daughter of Lilith sister’s decided I’m not pulling my weight at Darkheart & Crosse and she’s trying to get me booted from the agency. But since she doesn’t have the guts to Trump me herself, she accidentally-on-purpose arranged for Grandfather Darkheart to see how far down Vamp Avenue I’ve travelled in the past few weeks so he has to tell me I’m fired! All I can say is that when Grammie and Popsie finally come home, you two are going to be in major shit, so there!”
My arms folded across my chest in triumph, I turned to Brooklyn. “Darkheart & Crosse was my brainwave,” I informed her. “After Zena got dusted I figured there’d be a need for an agency that specialized in vampire-related investigations, and I was totally right, but since Megan became a Daughter it’s all about her. She can’t stand that the business I thought up is threatening to overshadow her Daughter of Lilith activities.” I waited for Brooklyn’s reaction but when it came it wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Too bad, babe.” In her ice-green eyes I saw a glimmer of something that looked like disappointment. She held out my bag of blood. “I’m outta here.”
“So am I,” I said, glancing defiantly in Megan’s direction. “You want to hit an after-hours club together, maybe see if we can find a couple of interesting guys? Or in your case, girl,” I amended.
“I thought I had,” Brooklyn said. “Looks like I was wrong. Stay out of the sunlight, Mata Hari.” She turned to go, but then she hesitated. “I sometimes wonder why I got vamped, you know? Like why me, a nice Jewish girl who was good to her Bubbe, kind to small children, only bought lattes made from fair-trade coffee beans? Hell, I’ve got a sister, too—a twin, and except that she’s straight the two of us could be clones. Yet I got turned and Xandra didn’t. I haven’t figured it out yet.” She shrugged. “But if life’s supposed to be more than just a series of random shitstorms, maybe the reason why you received this fun bonus from fate is because being a vamp is your only chance of becoming a real person. I really hope that happens for you, babe. Vamp or not, the little I saw of who you could be was a hell of a lot more intriguing than the bratty younger sister of the Daughter and the Healer.”
In my own defence, I’d like to point out that it had been a long night, what with chickening out of killing myself, playing tug-of-rat with a cat and nearly getting bitten by Stud-Tongue. Not to mention receiving a wicked uppercut to my jaw from my new best friend, finding and losing the man of my fantasies and having my sisters discover I’d progressed to drinking blood. All in all, I wasn’t in the mood to thank Brook for her assessment of me and thoughtfully ask myself if any of what she’d said could be true. I was more in the mood to yell the meanest things I could think of at her as she walked away from me.
Which is what I did, and to this day I wish I could call back the words I flung after her.
“You mean I won’t have to think of a polite way to tell you I don’t appreciate being pawed on the slightest pretext by another woman, babe?” I gave a short laugh. “News flash, Punk-girl—that’s not a tragedy, that’s a relief! Even if I were gay, you’re so not my type, with that dark-root look you’ve got going with your hair and that Salvation Army look you’ve got going with your clothes!” I raised my voice as she slipped into the shadows between two buildings and disappeared from my view without ever having looked back. “And another thing—”
Something brushed against my hair and fell to my shoulders. Startled, I looked down at myself and saw the starry shapes of small, white flowers against the black of my trenchcoat. Then the nausea hit me, ten times more powerfully than it had in reaction to old man Schneider’s garlic breath, and I realized what the flowers were.
“Wild garlic!” I choked the words out as I fell to my knees. “Get it off me!”
“Is unfortunate necessity, Granddaughter.” As the Russian-accented words reached my ears, my blurred vision made out the bulky shape of a caped figure reeling in the excess length of his wild-garlic lasso as he approached me. “Do not worry, this is not trap to stake you,” he said with hearty reassurance.
“Tha’s…good to know…” I mumbled as I pitched face-forward onto the ground and lost consciousness at Darkheart’s feet.
“It’s worse than we thought.” As I struggled upward through the fog surrounding me, I heard Kat’s worried voice coming from a long way away. “She keeps her shoes in a plastic garbage bag—Manolos, Jimmy Choos, all jumbled up together in a big pile! How could she?”
“What more proof do we need that she’s totally deteriorated? And if you think that’s bad, take a look at what I found under her bed, covered with dust bunnies.” Megan didn’t sound worried, she sounded pissed off. “My cream Chanel jacket, the one she swore she hadn’t borrowed.”
“Refrigerator is disaster area. Bag of stale doughnuts, two cartons take-out Chinese food, old slices pizza. In cupboards are cookies and candy bars.” The fog around me lifted enough for me to hear Darkheart sigh heavily. “Is typical symptom. She fights blood hunger but other cravings come upon her.”
They’d brought me to my own apartment, I realized, and while I’d been dead to the world my sisters and my grandfather—I couldn’t hear Mikhail or Jack, so I assumed they’d been left on patrol—had been searching the place. Outrage flickered in me but I still felt too lethargic to move.
“You mean she gets the munchies?” Kat’s tone went from worried to appalled. “The poor sweetie, she’s going to blimp out if she keeps this up. Honestly, Meg, if I can’t attempt a Heal on my own sister—”
Her words were like an icy wind blowing the last of my grogginess away. I sat bolt upright, realizing as I did that I was no longer bound by Darkheart’s garlic lasso, and the next moment I was racing across