That’s where Eleanor has been waiting. Not only is she smart, but she has titanium balls. Even when she was on fire and running through the boarded-up front doors, she never let go of the flamethrower. The other bloodsuckers fall back as she opens up.
The shot back at the market was her just introducing herself. This one is a “fuck you very much and good night” just for me. Eleanor pulls the trigger and doesn’t let up until the gun is empty.
Stabbed and cold-cocked, I’m still not dumb enough to just stand there. I dive to the right, behind a row of seats. Fire wraps around them like it’s reaching for me. I’m getting burned from above and below, steaming like a pork bun in my leather jacket. Even when the flamethrower is empty, the burning seats keep right on cooking me, and the two-by-four shot left me too dizzy to move very fast. I stagger over to the wall and try to run up the aisle, but I’m tripping on the garbage snowdrifts and land face-first in candy wrappers, needles, and malt liquor bottles.
I’ve turned into Buster Keaton and Eleanor and her friends are getting a real kick out of me gimping along on all fours. She’s burned beyond any human recognition, but she’s a juicer and they get over pain pretty quick. I do, too, but I’m not there yet. Not even in the same time zone. I give up and lie down on the sticky-sweet carpet to do what I should have done in the first place.
I press my right hand down into the broken glass and put my weight on it. The jagged bottle shards slice deep into my palm and I keep pushing until I feel glass hit bone. Most hexes don’t need blood to work, but a little of the red stuff is like a nitrous afterburner when you want a hex to come on hard and fast.
Eleanor takes the two-by-four from the boy bloodsucker and thumps it on each seat as she strolls over to me.
“Hey, Speedy Gonzales. You like chasing things? Why don’t I knock your head across the street and you can chase that?”
“Get him, Nellie. Look at that scarred piece of shit. He’s too ugly to drink. Waste that faggot.”
It’s one of the boys talking. The one who got me with the chunk of wood. He has a southern accent. Somewhere deep, old, and hot. You can almost hear the kudzu wrapped around his words.
Eleanor says, “Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot.”
Everyone laughs but Jed.
While Eleanor does an “Evening at the Improv” thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion’s guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I’m moaning.
“Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does Daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything.”
The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they’re the ones unsteady on their feet.
Even though I can’t read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor’s. I can’t tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten’s name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She’s gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn’t been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can’t figure out what’s happening.
Mommy is in her head, too, a black hole of anger and fear. Eleanor might even have gotten herself bit just to spite her. She has a secret, too. She thought it would save her in the end, but now she’s having her doubts.
A gust blasts down the aisle like an invisible fist, knocking all five of them ass over horseshoes into the air. Eleanor loses the two-by-four and lands on top of me. I can smell the fear through her burned skin. The wind keeps going, moving up from Hurricane Katrina to space shuttle exhaust.
With all her strength, Eleanor pushes herself off of me.
“It’s him! He’s doing it!” she yells. “What do we do?”
Jed Clampett hauls his ass up off the floor and pulls himself to me using seat backs like crutches. I’ve changed the chant, but he hasn’t noticed yet.
The wind shifts from a wind tunnel to a swirling twister. I haul myself to my knees and shrug off my leather jacket. The twister rips the carpet from the floor, throwing a junkyardful of broken glass into the air. The shards circle us like a million glittering razor blades, which doesn’t do much more than annoy Eleanor and her friends. They bat the glass away like flies. Each of their hundred cuts heals before the second hundred happen. But I’m getting cut, too. In a few seconds I’m the fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel and all that broken glass is doing a water ballet in my blood.
The swirling air turns pink as I bleed out, which Jed and his girlfriend think is goddamn hysterical. They stick out their tongues and catch drops of my blood like kids catching snowflakes. About ten seconds later they’re both screaming and tearing open their throats with their fingernails. Then the other three start to feel it. They try to run, but the wind and glass are everywhere. It’s one big Veg-O-Matic in here, spraying my tainted blood down their throats and onto their million wounds.
Eleanor already looks like a Chicken McNugget, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on with her, but the others are starting to sizzle and glow from the inside like they swallowed road flares on a bet and lost. That’s what happens to vampires dumb enough to drink angel blood.
It doesn’t take long for them to go catatonic, then flare fast and hot. Human flash paper. They sizzle for a few seconds and cook down to a fine gray ash. I growl the end of the hex and the air grows still. The vampires are all dead, except for Eleanor. She hunkered down and held on to me during the twister. My body blocked enough of the wind for her to survive, but just barely. She moves her cracked lips like she’s trying to talk. I lean my ear close to her.
“When you see Mutti, tell her I’m sorry. I only did what I did to scare her like she scares me and Daddy sometimes.”
When you’re hired to kill someone, the last thing you want is to have to give them absolution. You want them dead fast, not lying there asking you to be their therapist. Worse, you don’t want to hear anything that might make you feel sorry for them. I don’t want Eleanor’s mommy trauma in my head. She’s a monster just like me, but I want her to be a dead monster like her friends. She lets go of my leg and gives me a Say Good Night, Gracie sigh. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to stick her on a spit and toast marshmallows on her while she burned. Now I cover her eyes with my hand and get out the black knife.
“Don’t move.”
I jam the blade between her ribs. One clean, surgical, pain-free thrust up into her heart. Eleanor stiffens, flares, and ashes out. The dead girl is finally dead.
I look around, making a quick mental map of the bodies and checking that we’re still alone. I can hear voices outside. Now that the wind has died down, some curious civilian is going to stick a nose in here soon. I have to work fast.
Eleanor’s clothes are pretty much gone, but I give her a quick pat-down. She’s wearing a gold locket that’s half-melted into her blackened chest. A couple of rhinestone rings have fallen off her fingers, so I grab those. No money in her pockets, but there’s a flat metal thing, about the size of a rodeo belt buckle. One side is blank. There’s a snarling demon encircled by a spooky monster alphabet on the other. Junk. Goth bling. That’s the other problem with baby Lugosis. Eleanor’s friends were brainless street kids and she wasn’t a vampire long enough