Part Five

Amber felt someone bump against her shoulder again. She pulled her arms in front of her chest to lean on the bar and take up less space. In all her visits to bars and clubs with Rochelle, she’d never been anywhere that Vicky couldn’t stand out. But just the people gathered around the bar made the vamp’s simple black skirt and peasant blouse seem bland by comparison. Leather was a more popular choice with the men and women in the club, and everyone seemed to glow with an unnatural whiteness. With many people, she could tell it was makeup, but with quite a few others, she wasn’t so sure.

After attempting to wander around, Amber decided that the bald hulking bartender was the safest thing to look at. She had to use the term thing because she wasn’t quite sure if the bartender was a man or a woman. There were too many piercings in their face to figure out what they really looked like, and their corpulent body carried just enough fat in all the right places to render them androgynous.

Somewhere behind her, she heard a paddle slapping bare flesh, and a woman cried out before making a pleased moan. The bartender’s bright grey eyes wandered toward the ‘spanking post’, but their look of interest said very little about their true gender. Amber had already found several women staring at her, and she wasn’t sure if they watched with an erotic interest or mere hunger. Both possibilities made her feel squeamish.

She jumped as a hand closed over her shoulder then gave a low sigh. “Please, don’t do that, Marcus.”

“Wrong name again.”

Amber rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, Jenny. That still doesn’t change my point. We’re stuck in a club where I’m not sure if I need to be afraid of the daemon or the clientele. I really don’t need you sneaking up on me.”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I called you twice, but you ignored me,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, I guess the difference in your voice is still messing me up.”

Jenny shrugged and gestured for Amber to wander through the crowd toward the back of the club. Amber couldn’t help but stare, and part of it was jealousy that Jenny had nicer legs than she did. Jenny’s tiny black skirt and silk blouse blended in perfectly with most of the people in the club, while Amber stuck out for her blue jeans and bright pink top. No, she corrected herself. Her current set of ‘hand me downs’ were also Jenny’s clothes. Amber knew she would have shown up in a grey sweatshirt and baggy faded jeans if she’d been picking an outfit from her own closet. Short of a full makeover, she would never blend in with the club’s patrons. She smiled at a sudden thought. -Who in their right mind would want to blend in here?-

Jenny waved for her to come closer. “Vicky asked me to come and find you. You really shouldn’t have run off like that, you know.”

“Yeah, but…” Amber shuddered. “Doesn’t it bother you to watch her feeding off of someone?”

“Amber, I’ve nearly been killed several times today. If I thought it would help get us out of this mess alive, I’d let Vicky feed off of me.”

Amber bumped shoulders with a slender woman in the hallway leading to the back exit. She turned around to apologize and instead whimpered when she realized the woman’s eyes were black. She stumbled back into Jenny, but the daemon was faster, catching her around the throat with one hand. Amber was driven back against the wall before being lifted her up off of her feet. The daemon balled up its other hand into a fist to drive a punch under Amber’s ribs.

Amber pounded on the possessed woman’s arm to no avail. She was starting to wheeze when Vicky stepped into the hallway. The vamp closed her hand loosely over the daemon’s upper arm and flung it back at the door. Amber was thrown into the alley outside along with the daemon, who never released hold of her throat. They tumbled around each other upon landing, but the daemon was still able to stay on top of her.

“Damn, he’s pesky isn’t he?” Vicky muttered and leaned over to grab the daemon around the chest. When it still resisted her, Vicky set a foot down on Amber’s stomach and stepped down to pry the daemon off.

Amber grunted only a little louder than Vicky did, but at last the vamp had the daemon loose. Before it had a chance to react, Vicky  turned  to sling it into a set of wooden palettes angled against the side of a dumpster much further down the alley.

Jenny leaned over to help Amber up. “Are you okay?”

“No, I think my guts have been rearranged,” Amber complained and turned to give Vicky a dirty look. Instead her eyes widened in shock. “Vicky, look out!”

She had barely started to turn when the daemon sank a thick chunk of splintered wood through her back. Vicky made a tiny grunt before she fell forward. “Well what do you know?” it asked and cackled. “It really does work.”

“Move,” Jenny said and shoved Amber down the alley.

Amber’s ankle protested with every step, and she knew she was slowing down instead of speeding up. She heard the footsteps of the daemon gaining on them and she turned as soon as she spotted an open door. Inside was the kitchen of what she guessed was a Chinese restaurant. A chef turned around to jabber at them as they slid to a stop, but he stopped and ran out of the kitchen when the daemon crashed into Jenny.

Amber looked around frantically before she limped to a table to start throwing anything she could get her hands on. The bottles thumped off the daemon's head and back, but nothing she tried prevented it from continuing to throttle Jenny. The hot sauce and soy sauce bottles were quickly expended, and she closed her hand around a canister of salt. She hesitated and looked at the can doubtfully before she hurled it as hard as she could.

She didn't expect it would help, so she was that much more surprised when a black cloud erupted from the mouth and nose of the woman the instant the side of the can split. The dark mass condensed into a vague humanoid shape, but it seemed impossibly large and oddly proportioned.

Amber’s eyes sank down to the spilled salt, and then over toward Jenny, who still laid seemingly unconscious under the lifeless woman. She dropped to the floor and crawled forward to grab a handful of the salt even as she saw thick scales forming on the legs of the daemon. She looked up at a pair of leathery black wings curling around the daemon’s body. It turned around to glare at her, and she sat back on her butt, her eyes going wide when the creature’s elongated snout opened to reveal a wide row of pointy teeth.

She drew back her hand to throw the salt, but she froze as a familiar looking chunk of wood slammed into the daemon’s chest.

Vicky stepped into the kitchen and hoisted Amber back to her feet with one hand. “There’s two things you ought to remember for your next attempt, asshole. One, the stake has to be made of oak; and two, my heart is on the other side.”

Amber heard the sound of a fire roaring before she saw the flame lined portal opening behind the daemon. A foul smelling black smoke spilled into the room, and Amber had to drop to her knees to avoid breathing it. She looked up at Vicky, who seemed completely unfazed by smoke or by her wound.

Her gaze wandered back to the portal behind the daemon, a pitch black hole which was surrounded by a ring of fire. The light from the kitchen barely penetrated the air beyond the fire before being absorbed by the thick smog inside. Finally recovering from her shock, Amber drew back her hand again to throw the salt. Even as she did, the daemon was falling back through the portal, and the rift quickly closed in on itself an instant later. Most of the handful of salt ended up on the floor.

Amber stared at it before she turned to gape at Vicky. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s nothing a few weeks in the coffin won’t fix.” Vicky shrugged and made a disappointed face. “This is gonna be hell on my typing speed.”

“Shouldn’t we go to a doctor for you?”

“Nope.” Vicky knelt down to push the woman’s body over and scoop up Jenny in her arms. “Come on. We’ve got to drag the queen out of here before the cops show up.”

***
 
Amber paced in front of the couch. Every few minutes she glanced over at Vicky, and then looked away again. Her discomfort was only partly over Vicky being topless. Though she wasn’t normally inclined to look at breasts, she kept glancing back to confirm that Vicky’s nipples really were a pale blue color.

She didn’t know that such a thing was possible, but then she also wasn’t sure how it was possible for Vicky to bend both of her arms back to stitch her wound closed by feel. “Hey couldn’t you just, you know, regenerate from that?”

“Sure, if I drained off four or five humans in one sitting,” Vicky replied casually and smirked at Amber. “It’s easier living off of little drinks. There are so many humans who think being fed on is ‘the coolest’, so it’s not like I have to kill to survive these days. Don’t worry about me, kid. It’s just a hole, and holes heal if you give them a little time.”

Amber turned around at the sound of the bathroom door opening. “Back to Marcus now?”

“Yeah,” he agreed as he shuffled to the couch with a noticeable limp. “I haven’t been tackled like that since my last game of smear the queer back in high school.”

“Sorry about that. I would have been there sooner to help, but I really didn’t expect the bastard to recover that fast,” Vicky smiled at Amber. “Still it seems you’ve found a handy weapon against the daemon. I wouldn’t have thought to use salt. Holy water, maybe, but then it doesn’t work on me. I can’t imagine it would work on daemons either.”

“Someone used holy water on you,” Amber said and stopped pacing to stare at Vicky.

“Uh-huh. Marcus, be a sweeties and snip the knot for me, please.”  She lowered her arms when he did, and both of her shoulders made sickening pops as they settled back into the sockets. Vicky glanced around for a place to set the needle before she shrugged and slipped it into the skin of her upper forearm. “Now, here’s the plan for-”

“Do you practice this?” Amber blurted out in an agitated voice. “Two days ago, I was a normal college student living with my family, and now…”

“Now you’re the victim of a daemon, and you’re living with a mage-slash-drag queen and a vampire,” Vicky said and smiled wider at her. “Ain’t life a bitch?”

“Amber, just give up,” Marcus said as he patted the couch cushion beside him. “Logic never works on her anyway.”

“Now, as I was about to say, we have a good chance of being able to lure this daemon out into the open. You two can run to the store and buy us a few high power water pistols and some water balloons tomorrow. Then we’ll hose the fucker down and see if that doesn’t convince him to back off.”

“Salt water?” Amber asked.

“Bingo.” Vicky stood up and stretched her arms out lightly before she went to her room. She emerged minutes later dressed in tight black jeans and a tighter sleeveless Lycra top. If she was suffering any pain from her wound, she didn’t show it as she slipped on a heavy leather jacket and tugged her long blue black hair out from under the collar. “I’ll be back before dawn. You kids have fun.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“First, I’m going to drop by a friend’s house for a quick bite, and then I’m off to work.”

“So what is it you do?”

“I ‘do’ data entry for a hospital billing department,” Vicky said and laughed quietly. “The pay is lousy, but the hours are great.”

Amber looked back at the clock and groaned. “Right, you work the graveyard shift.”

***

Marcus turned off the TV and sighed. “So let’s see… so far today, we’ve indirectly killed six people.”

“The woman at the club was all Vicky,” Amber said. “I think she probably had a few internal organs rupture when she slammed into those pallets.

“Yes, but we still get credit for the new edition of ‘Blood on the Highway’.” Marcus sighed and tossed the remote over onto the end table beside the couch. “I’m not going to school tomorrow. The trip to the store could end up being fatal as it is, and I want to limit my exposure given my delicate condition.” He paused to frown at Amber’s soft giggle. “Anyway, I think I want to make our shopping run sometime close to sunset so we can phone for backup if we need to.”

“We can take the salt along for protection,” Amber said.

“Sure, and we’ll just toss it on the cars before they crash into us, right?” Marcus asked and groaned as he got up from the couch. “The drivers are possessed, not the cars, and it’s the cars that will render our complexions pasty, as it were. Maybe your problem is sleep deprivation, but lately, all of your ideas have sucked.”

“Like Vicky’s plan was much better. We didn’t find any new information, and we all got banged up for nothing.”

“Vicky was talking to a psychic out back before the daemon attacked. She could have gotten us in touch with a coven, but she split when Vicky got staked.” Marcus grabbed her wrists, pulling her up slowly from the couch. “It’s been a long day, and we’ve both obviously contracted some form of stupid. Let’s just go to bed.”

“I need to clean up first,” Amber said and limped to the bathroom to shower. She was washing her hair when she heard a knock on the door. “What?”

The door opened. “I’m just leaving some clean clothes,” Marcus declared before the door closed again.

She stepped out of the shower and smirked at the long pink sleep shirt on the counter. -Well at least he’s got good taste in clothes.-

Marcus was already laying in bed when she came into the bedroom, and she flicked off the light before moving carefully in the dark. She had just settled into bed when Marcus reached out to pat her arm. “Hey, Amber?”

“What is it?”

“Earlier tonight, Vicky called you my girlfriend, and you didn’t object.”

“Oh.”

“It’s okay if you’re not, but I was just… well, I was wondering.”

Amber rolled onto her other side to face him. She watched his profile from the light seeping in around the blinds, and she reached out to pat his shoulder. “Marcus, it’s a little too early to be hitting on me, okay?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t-”

“You should at least wait until our third date.”

There was a long pause. “Uh, how many have we had so far?”

“One. We went to a club, remember?”

“Right.” Marcus sighed. “Hey Amber?”

She made a soft laugh. “Yes?”

“Next time, can we just go see a movie instead?