Charlaine Harris: Crimes by Moonlight

Rather than herd their hostages back to Cappelini’s, Dahlia decided to surface at the closest access point. Lakeisha used her cell phone to call the two vampires guarding that spot, their signal to alert the police that there were prisoners to deliver.

Instead of feeling triumphant, Dahlia found herself doubtful. Surely there should have been more Fellowship people in hiding?

“Wait!” she called at the first flight of stairs. She turned. Taffy, right behind her, was carrying the man whose ribs she’d broken. He was groaning, the noise irritating her. To make sure a rib didn’t puncture the human’s lung, Taffy was carrying the man in front of her. Dahlia looked into his unshaven face.

“What’s your name?” she asked, and the man began to recite some membership number the Fellowship had allotted him.

“That’s even more irritating than the pain noises,” she said. “Shut up, asshole.”

He cut himself off in mid-number.

The practical Lakeisha extracted a wallet from his pants. “This particular asshole is named Nick DeLeo.”

“Ever talked to a vampire before, Nick?”

“I don’t deal with hell spawn,” the man said.

“I was not spawned by hell. I met with something much older than myself in Crete, more years ago than you can imagine. I will still be here when your children are dust, if anyone deigns to breed with you.” That seemed doubtful to Dahlia. “Where are the others?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you that,” he said. It was hard for him to look formidable when a woman was carrying him, and he gave up the attempt when Dahlia came even closer. He flinched.

“Yes,” Dahlia said with some satisfaction. “I’m truly frightening. You can hardly imagine the pain I’ll cause you, if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

“Don’t tell him, Ni-aaargh!” A scream effectively ended another hostage’s exhortation.

“Oh, Roscoe, is he hurt?” Dahlia asked with patently false concern.

“Hard to lend his buddy moral support with a broken jaw,” Roscoe said. “Oops.”

Dahlia smiled down at Nick. “I have ripped people apart with my bare hands. And I enjoyed it, too.”

Nick believed Dahlia. “The others have gone to get the firefighters who fished the vamps out of the Pyramid,” he said. “It’s easier to get the firefighters; they’re not armed. Three of us are going to each station around here that responded. They’re going to shoot until their weapons are empty except for one bullet, and then they’ll kill themselves. Holy martyrs to the cause.”

“That’s a terrible plan,” Lakeisha said. “You think this will discourage people from helping vampires? Make them want to join your stupid Fellowship? The slaughter of public servants?”

“We have a new goal,” Dahlia said. “We deposit these losers with the police. We go to the places they’re going to attack. They have a head start on us, so let’s be quick.”

Up the stairs they swarmed, to be met by media galore. The police knew a good photo op, too. As soon as possible, Dahlia and her nest mates faded away into the shadows. The others had their own assignments, but Dahlia herself ran full tilt toward the corner of Almond and Lincoln.

Four of the Pyramid conspirators were converging on the Thirty-four Company.

At least the big doors were shut. The firefighters inside were cooking, sleeping, playing video games-until the first rifle shot whistled through the upstairs window, missing one of their drivers by a hair. Then shots were pouring into the station from all directions. There was screaming and cursing and panic.

Until, one by one, the rifles stopped firing.

The newspaper photographers would have liked to take a picture of the four Fellowship members piled in a heap on the concrete in front of the station with Dahlia standing on top of them. But Dahlia was too clever for that. Instead, the next day’s paper had a wonderful picture of tiny Dahlia in her black leather jumpsuit in the center of a huddle of firefighters, hoisted up on the shoulder of Captain Ted Fortescue.

Any tendency the fire company might have to rhapsodize sentimentally over Dahlia’s one-woman antiterrorist action was dampened when they got a good look at the broken bones and bloody injuries the five foot nothing vampire had inflicted-though all four gunmen were alive, at least for a while.

The newspapers were happy with their pictures, the firefighters were happy to be alive and mostly uninjured, the Fellowship fanatics were secretly glad to be out of the tunnels and to anticipate reiterating their inane credo at their trials, Cedric was happy that his vampires had obeyed his direction, and the vampires felt they had at least made a beginning on their revenge for the Pyramid bombing.

Happiest of all was Melponeus the half demon, because he and Dahlia celebrated the victory until Melponeus had to crawl back to his demon brethren with weak knees and a silly grin.

As for Dahlia, she developed a strange new habit. She felt she had established a relationship with the men and women of Company Number Thirty-four.

She began to drop in from time to time. By her third visit, the humans were matter-of-fact about her presence. Ted Fortescue absentmindedly offered her some chili instead of the Red Stuff they’d started keeping at the back of the refrigerator.

When the city council of Rhodes voted to give Dahlia a special commendation for her defense of the firehouse, everyone from the Thirty-four Company attended.

“I feel like they’re my pets,” Dahlia confided to Taffy.

Taffy wisely hid her smile.

And when one of the shooters was released on a technicality, and every firefighter in the Thirty-four sounded off about it while Dahlia was there learning how to play Grand Theft Auto, none of the firefighters were surprised when the shooter vanished twenty-four hours later.

“Dahlia’s like, our mascot,” said one firefighter to Ted Fortescue.

“She’ll be around a lot longer than we are,” Ted Fortescue said. “Especially if you ever say anything like that where she can hear you.”

But no one was foolish enough for that.

A couple of miles outside the little town of Citadel, Wisconsin, the gravel road dropped into a tree-shaded hollow, and beyond that lay marshland. As soon as he cleared the trees, D‘Angelo saw the cabin. It sat back from the road a full quarter mile. The turnoff was marked by a wood-burned sign that read “Hams. Smoked and Honey Cured.” He drove his new ’53 Studebaker Starliner down a narrow dirt causeway between sinister-looking pools of dark water full of cattails gone brown. The high ground where the cabin stood also held a sturdy barn, an animal pen, and a large garden plot littered with stubble from a recent harvest. In the backyard, a young woman paused in hanging the wash and watched him come. The sheets on the line hung heavy in the still air, white against the gray of the overcast sky and the brown of the marsh reeds and the black of the water. An old man sat in a rocker on the front porch. When D’Angelo got out of the Studebaker, he saw that the old man’s lap was crossed by the barrel of a shotgun.

“Far enough,” the old man said before D’Angelo had even taken a step.

“Greet all your customers this way?”

“Until I’m sure they’re customers.”

“A wonder you sell anything.”

“No wonder once you taste the product. You a customer?”

“What do I look like?”

“A man who answers a question with a question.”

D’Angelo smiled. “Heard in town that you make the best hams this side of the Mississippi.”

“Any side of the Mississippi, mister.”

“You smoke the hams yourself?”