Martin Greenberg: The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

Her rules were a standing joke with her brothers and their friends-a serious joke. She’d seen too many people burn out from the stress of her job. So she’d made a list of rules she had to follow, and they’d kept her sane so far. One of her rules was that from eight in the morning until six in the evening she was on the job, outside of those hours she did her best to have a real life. She was breaking it now, with Devonte.

Instead of calling her on it, Jorge just processed her reply and finally nodded. “All right. I’ll tell them.”

He didn’t close the door when he left. She went to the doorway and watched him walk mechanically down the hall and through the security door, which he’d left open. Very unlike him to leave a security door open, but he closed it behind him.

“That was the vampire’s doing wasn’t it?” she asked, looking up.

The soft growl that eased through the ceiling was somehow reassuring-though she hadn’t forgotten his reservations about how well he’d do against a vampire.

She went back to Devonte’s bed and made her move on the board. Out in the hall the security door opened again, and someone wearing high heels click-click ed briskly down the hall.

Stella took a deep breath, settled back on the end of the bed and told Devonte, “Your turn.”

He looked at the board, but she saw his hand shake as whoever it was in the hallway closed in on them.

“King me,” he said in a fair approximation of triumph.

The footsteps stopped in the doorway. Devonte looked over her shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Stella inhaled and took her first look.

She’d thought a vampire would be young, like her father. Wasn’t that the myth? But this woman had gray hair and wrinkles under her eyes and in the soft, white skin of her neck. She was dressed in a professionally-tailored wine-colored suit. She wore a diamond necklace around her aging neck, and diamond-and-pearl earrings.

“Well,” said Stella, “No one is going to think you look like a cuddly grandma.”

The woman laughed, her face lighting up with a cheer so genuine that Stella thought she might have liked her if only the laughter didn’t showcase her fangs. “The boy talked, did he? I thought for sure he’d hold his tongue, if only to keep his own secrets. Either that or broadcast it to the world, and then you and I wouldn’t be in this position.”

She gave Stella a kindly smile that showed off a charminglymismatched pair of dimples. “I am sorry you had to be involved. I tried to get you out of it.”

But Stella had been dealing with people a long time, she could smell a fake a mile away. The laughter had been real, but the kind concern certainly wasn’t.

“Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room where her father could drop on top of her, but how?

The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a-” she took a deep breath, “-werewolf.”

The news didn’t seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be over-matched. He’d been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.

“Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren’t so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”

The vampire sneered right back and, on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”

David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire’s voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.

Patience, patience , he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.

If the vampire’s theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he’d tried to drive her father through the wall.

The vampire had no trouble grabbing it… or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.

She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn’t see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.

“Now,” whispered Stella diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.

Even though Devonte’s chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella’s motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling redgold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire’s look like toys.

For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother’s lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf’s bulk-until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.

With an inhuman howl the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she’d had of her face, Stella saw something terrible… evil.

“Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.

She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around-Linnford. Gone was the urban smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing though fabric but not skin.

Something buzzed between them, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.

It took a moment for her to properly understand what she was seeing. The bent chair leg was stuck into his ribcage, just to the left of his sternum. Blood began spitting out like a macabre fountain.

“Honey?” Hannah Linnford stood in the doorway. Like Stella, she seemed to be having trouble understanding what she was seeing.

Muttering, “Does no one remember to shut the security doors?” Stella pulled the mini-canister of Mace her youngest brother had given her after the mugging incident out of her pocket and sprayed it in the other woman’s face.

If she’d been holding Linnford’s knife she could have cheerfully driven it through Hannah’s neck: These people had taken one of her kids and tried to feed him to a vampire.

Thinking of her kids made Stella look for Devonte.

He was leaning against the wall a few feet from his bed, staring at Linnford-and his expression centered Stella because he needed her. She ran to him and tugged him to the far corner of the room, away from the fighting monsters, but too close to the Linnfords. Once she had him where she wanted him, she did her best to block his view of Linnford’s dying body. If she could get medical help soon enough, Linnford might survive-but she felt no drive to do it. Let him rot.