Part Seven

Amber shivered and pulled her jacket tighter around her chest. “It’s got to be fourteen degrees out here. What’s taking this jerk so long?”

“Maybe he decided that he didn’t want to play after getting his ass handed to him by a lowly vamp,” Vicky said and laughed. “This could do wonders for my reputation. How can I still claim to be evil after this?”

“So why are you helping us?” Amber asked.

“I really didn’t have any vested interest in you, to be honest. But a human like Marcus is hard to find. Do you know how many times I’ve had to try explaining my coffin only to be sent away? I had to live in a storage closet for six years because no one would have me.

“Marcus’s only question was whether I could pay my bills on time, and though I end up freaking him out every once in a while, he tolerates me. In exchange, I keep his secret about sometimes being a her, and it’s almost a perfect relationship.”

“Yeah, but there’s no sex,” Amber said and giggled when Vicky and Marcus exchanged looks of disgust before shuddering in almost perfect unison. “What? I suppose vampires don’t have sex?”

“Of course we do. How else would we be born?” Vicky gestured at Marcus and grimaced. “But he’s just repulsive.”

“He’s not that bad,” Amber said.

“No, by her standards, I am repulsive. It’s okay, because the feeling is mutual.”

“Love you too, honey,” Vicky said.

“Right back at you, buttercup.” Marcus stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at Amy. “When you say I’m not that bad, do you mean I’m ugly, or just plain?”

Amber shrugged. “No, you’re nice, but just not handsome. You’re kind of pretty, and that confuses me. When I met you before, you were kind of smelly, and you had acne.”

Marcus sighed. “Yeah, after Kathy left, I was a bit of a mess. I just let myself go for a while, and among the guys I normally hang out with, it’s not something they care about.”

“I guess I just caught you at a bad time back then.” Amber’s expression became awkward. “Rochelle said to me that there were some whack jobs that weren’t so bad, and after meeting the two of you, I can see what she meant.”

“I hope you aren’t inferring that I’m a good kind of whack job,” Vicky remarked.

“No, you’re both kind of bad, really. It’s just now I have perspective on the guys who would ask me to dress up in anime costumes.”

Marcus shrugged. “If that’s your thing, I can stand watching an anime fashion show.” He grinned at her. “We can even take turns.”

“Yeah, or-”

“Uh, guys, we have a serious problem.” Vicky interrupted Amber and hooked her thumb over her shoulder. “It looks like our friend was gone for so long because he was looking for the biggest freak he could find in the area.”

Amber glanced back at the giant who moved behind them. Even with the hulking man keeping to the shadows and avoiding the streetlights, she could see his wide, bloody grin. “Oh… my goddess. He’s got to be seven feet tall.”

“Yeah, give or take an inch.” Vicky grimaced. “I had trouble with a thin girl who had enhanced strength, but that honcho back there is a walking battle tank.” She flicked her head to the side for a split second and sighed before dropping her eyes to the sidewalk. “And now he’s pulling a knife.”

Amy slipped her bag off of her shoulder to grab a canister of salt. She was opening the bag when Vicky shoved her aside. Amber spun with the force of the throw, seeing the knife that barely missed her side. In the giant’s huge hand, the blade looked like a tiny pocket knife, but she knew it had to be at least eight inches long.

She had an absent thought that she had been in the air for a very long time when she slammed into the side of a parked van. Her lower back popped, and a numbness stole the strength from her legs. Amber started searching for her bag and uttered a faint groan of dismay when she found it beside the giant. -Of course,- she thought bitterly. -Where else could it be?-

Vicky was busy trying to keep the giant at a distance by using low kicks. The giant would try to step in range for an attack, and she would lash out to stomp at his shin and throw him off balance before she would back up. The giant made a slashing attack at her leg, and she shifted it around his arm to lay a devastating high kick to the side of his jaw. For all the force of the kick, the giant was only stunned for a fraction of a second, and Vicky’s face seemed to be set with a look of grim resignation. Vicky could already see that she wouldn’t win, and she was only borrowing time before the daemon wore her down.

Amber rolled over onto her stomach and slowly started to crawl across the street. When she looked back up, she saw the giant was finally tired of playing with Vicky. Instead he spun to leap at Marcus, who held the medallion out in front of his face while his mouth flapped open and closed. If it had any effect on the daemon, Amber didn’t see it.

Time seemed to slow down as the giant sank the blade into Marcus’s stomach. The tip slid out through his back, but the giant didn’t pull away to stab him again. Marcus was hefted easily on the side of the giant’s balled fist before he was lobbed across the street.

Amber saw him connect with the same van she’d hit, but her instincts were screaming at her to turn her head back in front of her. She did and uttered a short scream just before a black steel toed boot slipped between her arms to connect with her chest. She hit the van in the same dent she’d made with her first impact, and then flopped forward. She put her arms in front of her face, a pained yelp escaping her when her head slammed into her forearm hard enough to make her hand tingle.

She raised her head slowly, and through her blurred vision, she saw the giant pause to lick Marcus’s blood off of the blade. Behind him, Vicky was grasping at a bus stop sign and wobbling it back and forth rapidly. The metal made a low thrumming sound before the concrete around the base fractured and she pulled the sign free. She took a few wide steps until she was almost directly behind the giant and slammed the concrete covered end of the pole into the side of his head.

“Home run!” Vicky shouted. She looked over at Amber. “Hey, grab Marcus’s medallion. You were supposed to say something to bind this guy.”

Amber blinked. “Yeah, but did Ellen ever say what it was I was supposed to- look out!”

Vicky sidestepped the knife attack. “Just make something up. Please hurry!” She gripped the sign post like a staff and whirled away from another sloppy attack before she drove edge of the sign into the giant’s side.

He didn’t seem to acknowledge the wound at all, and Amber forced herself to look away from the fight to arm crawl her way closer to Marcus. She got close enough to see that he was breathing shallowly, and his eyes were open. He looked at her and weakly held out the medallion.

Amber closed her fingers over his. She looked up at his pained expression and shook her head. “No, not this time.” She took the medallion and held it in front of her while she propped herself up with her forearm. “Annul, I command you to drop that body and show your true form!”

The giant stiffened, and the daemon spewed from his mouth before he fell to the ground. Vicky backed up quickly as the daemon became solid. She bent over to grab Amber’s bag and tugged out one of the water pistols. “Okay, Annul, now it’s time to play.”

The daemon moved into a crouch and leapt high into the air. Amber’s mind went blank again, but she recovered herself and took in a deep breath. “Annul, stop moving.”

-What are you doing?- a voice hissed inside her mind.

Amber smiled weakly, because she could sense fear in the daemon’s projected thought. The daemon plummeted and hit the ground on its side, snapping the right wing in several places.

“I’m making a deal with you,” Amber said. “But first, I’d like my associate to discuss our terms.”

Vicky fired a single shot, streaking a line of salt water over the daemon’s chest. Her smile fell and she stumbled back as the daemon raised its voice in a deafening roar.

Amber clamped her hands over her ears. She looked up to see a portal opening behind the daemon and she shook her head “No, stop!” Instead of falling back into the portal, a pair or red hands tipped with black talons reached out to pull the daemon back inside. “No!”

With a final flickering flame, the portal was gone. Amber slumped back onto the ground and whimpered.

Vicky leaned over to shake her. “Amber?” She had to repeat herself several times before Amber heard her, and she gestured at Marcus. “Talk to him. I have to go find a phone and call an ambulance for both of you. Before they get here, you need to make up a story explaining that corpse over there, and it can’t involve me.”

Amber sighed. “Sure, piece of cake.” She watched Vicky run quickly up the street, and she leaned over Marcus before she took his hand. “Hey, hang in there, okay?”

“Yeah, ‘kay,” Marcus whispered. “Do you think it worked?”

“I don’t know, but if he decided to try for another round, you and I could be wiped out pretty easily.”

“I wouldn’t have been so easy to hit, but I really didn’t have a clue what to say once I had the medallion out,” Marcus confessed.

“Yeah, now you know how I felt when I came up with ‘uh, amen’.”

He smiled and gave a tiny nod. “So what are we telling the cops?”

“We’ll say that we were out on a date when he attacked. He’d gone insane like all the others, and we were rescued by a huge truck driver who ran off right afterward.”

Marcus grimaced. “That’s awful.”

“Hey, can you come up with something better?” Amber shook her head. “Of course you can’t. It’s either that or we tell them that a daemon infested giant attacked us, but we were save both by your vampire roommate and by a medallion that I made from a halfling’s earring.”

“It does stretch credibility somewhat,” Marcus said and winced. “Damn, I hope that ambulance is coming soon.”

“You have to hang on for me and Vicky both, okay? Just keep thinking about that.”

“I’ll be able to hold on if you concede that this really was our second date.”

Amber could only stare at him before she started laughing quietly. “Marcus, are you sure you want to press your luck on a third date?”

He nodded without hesitation. “Yeah, but I’m going to insist on something more sedentary. It may also involve wheelchairs.”

***

Amber took a long breath and looked up from her hands toward detective Benton, who stood by the foot of her bed. “And that’s how we ended up out in the street where the paramedics found us.”

Peter frowned at her with a look of skepticism. “You and your boyfriend were very lucky to just have someone show up out of nowhere like that.”

“Were we? See, I can’t feel my legs, and Marcus has a new body piercing that I don’t think will become popular with most people. You’ll excuse me for taking an attitude here, but I don’t feel very luck at all.” Amber shrugged. “Still, I can see your problem. I’m unlucky enough to have run across multiple crazy people in the same week. It does make my story seem a little weak.

“I shouldn’t be playing up my injuries for sympathy either. I’m not permanently crippled, so it’s not all bad. The doctors tell me I’m suffering from something they called a stinger. My legs could get back their feeling in a few hours, or in a few days. Marcus has got a hole running all the way through his gut, but as a wise friend of mine observed, holes heal if you give them enough time.”

Peter nodded and stepped back from the bed. “For your sake, I hope this is the last time we have to meet.”

“I can agree with that. Now if you don’t mind, I’m riding a rather lovely high from the painkillers, and I think I’d like to get back to sleep.”

“Sure. I’ll call you later if I need anything else.”

Amber watched the detective leave and turned to look out the window at the rising sun. She thought of her family, and her chest ached faintly for them. She wondered why she couldn’t feel anything more substantial for them, but it occurred to her that they had just become a statistic in her mind. Annul had taken so many victims without consequences, and her family had become just another set of bodies in a very large pile.

She hoped that she wouldn’t have to talk to the police again either, but she had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to go back to living a normal life. The police would never have understood the threat that people faced from a daemon, and with more time to hone her skills as a magic user, she knew that she could help protect other people when the cops could not. She didn’t know if Annul planned to continue hunting her, or if he would move somewhere else to avoid dealing with her. But she knew that if he planned to come back again, she needed to be better prepared for the next encounter.

Amber frowned, trying to pin down the thought to a logical conclusion. But she hadn’t lied about being high and tired, and she was still searching for an answer when sleep overcame her racing thoughts.

***

Marcus opened his eyes, and smiled up at Vicky. “Hi,” he whispered softly.

 “Welcome back to the land of the living. I brought along some company.” Vicky stepped back and gestured toward Amber.

Marcus frowned at her. “The wheelchair isn’t permanent, is it?”

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.” Amber rolled closer to the bed before he repeated himself. She smiled and shook her head. “No, probably not. The doctors said there didn’t appear to be any permanent damage to my nerves. My lower half just decided to take a really long nap.”

“I think my whole body is making the same plan,” Marcus said before his eyes fluttered shut.

Vicky stepped away from the bed and dropped into the chair beside it. “How do you like that? We waited two whole hours to get a few sentences out of him.”

“Yeah, but not everyone can take getting stabbed like a vampire,” Amber said. “Come on. You can take me to the cafeteria and watch me eat.”

Vicky smirked and shook her head. “No, you can roll your pale ass to the cafeteria by yourself.”

“Excuse me? You can talk about pale asses?” Amber laughed and shook her head. “I put up with your feedings, so you can watch me chow down on some normal food.”

Vicky smiled and got up to push Amber’s chair out of the room. “It doesn’t really bother me in the same way that I bother you.”

“Yeah, but I’m going to look for something with garlic.”

Vicky laughed. “Nope, that doesn’t really work either.”

“No?” Amber looked up to see her shake her head. “So sunlight-”

“Is extremely painful, but generally not fatal,” Vicky said. “Please don’t start asking which methods could be used to kill me. It is usually considered a rude topic to discuss among friends, don’t you think?”

“Well, we might some day run into a vampire who’s… you know, evil- er, than you.”

“If we manage to find a man, I will take care of him using my own rather charming ways. Then again, I may still end up charming them if it ends up being a woman. I have been alone for a fairly long time.”

Amber laughed softly. “Life was so much less complicated when good and evil could be lumped into groups.”

“I’m not really evil anyway. I’m just not fit for human standards. Since they tend to outnumber people like us on a grossly unfair scale, I try to make compromises.”

Amber looked up at Vicky and grinned. “People like us… I like that.”