Anthony Francis - Frost Moon

I looked up, and a dark figure hurled a white barrel straight at my head.

I raised my hands to defend myself, but I was too slow: with a tremendous CRACK the barrel broke against my face, knocking me backwards and splashing me with white, sticky goop. The impact lifted my feet off the ground, and I was momentarily airborne; then my back slammed into the sidewalk and all the air left my lungs with a WHOOF, leaving me in a red haze, choking for oxygen through a mouthful of sludge.

I coughed and spat and scraped the stinging muck from my eyes, lying back, wheezing for breath. The hull and contents of a splintered five-gallon paint barrel lay splattered around me. Dully I saw marks on the side of the barrel where it had been scored with a razor, and realized it had been meant to burst. Meant to splatter paint-all over me. I held my shaking hands up: the religious symbols and the yin yangs were covered in a thick layer of white paint. In terror I looked up at my assailant.

Transomnia stood over me, eyes twin red coals.

"Let's see you use your marks now," he said, and kicked me in the ribs.

I cried out. My body thudded backward against the wall of a nearby car, but before I could get up or roll away he kicked me again-and again, and again. In the ribs, in the face, cracking against the side of my knee. Not savagely, not with vampire strength, but deliberately, methodically, so the pain built, as I scraped and skidded across the pavement and he casually, oh so casually, savaged me.

"Can't kill you-" CRACK "-can't drain you-" CRACK "- can't even rape you-" CRACK! "-but I can make you pay for humiliating me."

I started to say something. I don't know what it was. He kicked me in the teeth, and when my hand instinctively went to my face he seized it with immense strength and pinned it to his knee, prying my fingers apart and then crushing the little fingers and thumb underneath his viselike hand so my index and middle fingers waved helplessly in the air.

Then he pulled a pair of pruning clippers from his long black coat.

"Oh, God-"

Transomnia backhanded me casually with the hand holding the clippers, gashing my forehead. "I want some souvenirs," he said, grabbing my fingers within the V of the clippers and squeezing down so hard I squealed in pain and twisted my head into the pavement, bawling.

"Look at me," he said. I twisted my head away, and his grip tightened, making my trapped knuckles pop. Then he squeezed again, and I felt the clippers draw blood. "Look at me. Do it, or lose them."

I looked up, saw my fingers in the curved beak of the pruner, and his unsmiling face. His makeup was gone, making him look older, leaner, meaner. I looked into his cold red eyes-and knew he could do anything.

"That's right," he said, releasing his grip on my hand but keeping my fingers trapped between the blade and hook of the pruner. "According to this little thing-" and he grabbed my protective collar so hard I began choking "-I supposedly 'can't' even maim you. But I can. I can walk away from here with ALL your fingers and leave you with stumps. I'll put them in the blender when I get home, one by one, and think of your stumps. You'll never tattoo again."

He released my neck, and I croaked: "Duh-don't take my haands-"

He backhanded me, hard, and I felt a tooth loosen in a warm, metallic flow of blood. "Don't speak to me. Don't ever presume to speak to me again. Got that, bitch?"

I nodded, slumped on the pavement, staring at his boots.

He twisted my hand back and forth a bit, squeezing experimentally. I cringed. Finally he said, "You're not worth it," and released me-kicking me, vampire hard, in the gut.

My dinner spewed out onto the sidewalk. I alternately coughed and gasped for breath. Finally I just lay there at Transomnia's feet, dry heaving staring at my bloody, twisted hand.

Distantly I heard voices, running, shouting-and the savage barking of a dog.

"'Oh, look, the cavalry!'" Transomnia mocked, pocketing the clippers, looking off in the distance. "But if I'd meant to maim you for life, you'd be lying there wearing a bloody pair of meat flippers now. And I can have you again, anytime I want, and nobody can stop me-not that dandy or his maid or her Queen of de Nile. You're my bitch, anytime I want-bitch. And next time I will get creative. So never cross me again. Ever. Ev-er."

I let out a low moan. But I nodded.

The barking dog was almost upon us now, but I never saw it arrive: the last things I remember were Transomnia casually kicking the side of my face, a spray of blood, and one of my teeth skittering out across the pavement.

The fingers of my right hand were bandaged-all of them, one two three four five.

Thank God.

I lay back in a fuzzy haze. Bright lights shone in my face. A man was asking me to count. I looked aside, and a doctor was talking to a nurse. I asked, "What?"

They looked at each other. "She won't remember any of this."

Now my knee was itching something fierce. I picked up my hand again, staring at the bandaged fingers. I seemed to see Andre Rand through them, hunched over the edge of the bed, praying, but when my hand fell to the bed, I saw Special Agent Philip Davidson.

"What?" I said again, looking around. It was a hospital room. Emory Hospital.

Philip sat up abruptly. "You're awake before me," he said, blinking sleep from his eyes. "Good. That's promising."

He'd been sitting backwards in an armless hospital-issue guest chair, hunched over the backrest, staring at my knee. I reached down, cautiously, with my bandaged hand-it hurt, but I could move it- and pulled the sheets aside to reveal a white bandage on my right knee.

"What?" I asked again, then marshaled myself. "What the hell?"

"That's my Dakota," Savannah said.

I gasped. Savannah stood there in the sunbeams in a red leather dress-the red leather dress, the one I liked, simple and asymmetrical, peaking high over her right breast and sweeping down over the curve of her left. The bottom hem was cut at a similar angle, exposing her right thigh and sweeping down, mirroring the angle of the sunlight shining down on the bare flesh of her delicate bare calf and ankle.

"Savannah," I said, caught with sudden horror. "The sun-"

"S'alright," she said, smiling, adjusting her bomber goggles. "I'm a daywalker. Besides, the glass soaks up a lot of the UV." She held up a light monitor she carried around her neck-and if I knew Savannah and the red dress, the monitor and the goggles were the only other things on her curvy body. "As long as I keep an eye on the levels, I'm safe."

"You look… spectacular," I said.

"You look like crap," she responded. "Just this shy of Roadkill."

'Roadkill' had been my costume at the last Halloween we'd spent together-layered makeup and printed tire tracks that had actually made Savannah nauseous-and now that she'd pointed it out I winced, feeling what must be stitches on my forehead and some crusty crap on my cheek. In fact, aches and pains were popping up all over my body, there was a gap where two of my back left molars should have been, and my left eye didn't want to open all the way. No wonder I reminded her of 'Roadkill.'

"So this really is your girlfriend?" Philip said, a half smile on his face.

"Ex-girlfriend," Savannah and I said simultaneously.

"Your ex here used a little social engineering to waltz straight through our police barricade."

"I didn't lie," Savannah said, scowling but embarrassed. "I said I was here as her girlfriend. There's no statute of limitations on girlfriendiness, is there?"

"I'm not going to give you shit," Philip said, chuckling, smiling at me. "I completely understand your desire to be beside Dakota-"