The living room branched off into a sitting room, where I found Kelly huddled in the corner, with Dickson tied to a chair. His head was down, eye
s closed. I ran to Kelly and grabbed her arm.
One shoe was gone and her makeup was running, but she looked up at me and struggled to her feet. “I thought you were dead,” she hiccupped. “He has Joe and David. David’s leg . . . his leg is . . . gone. . . .” She started crying again, and I forced her to follow behind me as I went to Dickson.
He was harder to wake up. It took a couple of slaps, but then he bolted upright. Straining at the ropes, he loosened them a bit as he thrashed from side to side, and then I was able to get him free. “We gotta get out of here,” he kept saying. “We gotta get out of here.”
“You two, go,” I insisted, pushing them to the door as soon as the last rope fell away.
“But what about Joe and David?” Kelly asked. “It’s horrible.”
“I’ll find them. Just go. I don’t need the two of you to worry about.”
Dickson grabbed Kelly’s hand and they took off. One minute they were right there, standing next to me, and the next, their boas were flapping behind them as they scrambled out the front door. I turned to the kitchen. Two down, two to go.
Or so I thought.
The boy, it turned out, had not listened to me.
As soon as I entered the kitchen, I came face-to-face with the resurrectionist sitting on top of him, holding him down. David was in the corner, minus a leg. Just like Kelly had said.
The resurrectionist looked awful. Bloated skin and mismatched arms. Even though he was crouching, I could tell that one limb was drastically shorter than the other. It didn’t reach the ground. In fact, it almost looked like a woman’s leg.
“So, I have a question,” I said, holding the crystal behind my back and clutching it with all my strength. If it was torn out of my grip, it could be the end of me. “Are you technically a man, or a woman? I mean, you’ve pretty much replaced all the important parts, right?”
As I spoke, I felt the crystal growing warmer in my hand. It was absorbing my energy, and I’d need that to help me take this big boy down. “In the Name of God, the God of Israel,” I chanted quietly, “may Michael be at my right hand, Gabriel at my left—”
“Why do you do that?” the resurrectionist said, looking over at me. “That does not stop me.”
The demon inside him had taken on the voice of a young boy.
“What is with the demented children’s voices?” I asked, stopping my chant. “Do you creatures want to scare me off from ever having kids of my own one day?”
The resurrectionist turned his head to one side with an unearthly calm.
Almost time. “Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the presence of God!” I said.
He just looked confused.
“The protection spell is for me, dumb-ass. It might not be able to stop you, but this can.” Holding the crystal out in the flat of my hand, I said, “Return to the center of the circle, from whence you came. No man shall come upon you, until the end of time. So mote it be!”
I waited just long enough for the demon to start separating from the man he’d possessed. The room filled with an angry swirl of black haze, and I couldn’t see. I had to time it just right, or he wouldn’t be captured in the crystal. And I wouldn’t be going home at all tonight.
“So mote it be!” I screamed, as the black smoke was sucked into the center of the stone. I smashed the crystal down onto the wooden floor as hard as I could.
It shattered to pieces.
The empty shell of the man that the resurrectionist had been possessing fell over, long dead generations ago. His skin was molting off of him in little flakes, and his eyes were a filmy blue. The boy on the floor just lay there, quivering under the hulk of rotten flesh.
“It’s all fun and games,” David said suddenly, hysterically. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a leg. He took it! He took my leg!”
I glanced over at the crude chop job that had severed his right limb just below the knee. Luckily, one of the side effects of being a vampire was that they bled very slowly. What should have been a torrential stream from opened veins and arteries was only a slow trickle. The leg in question, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I wasn’t going to stick around to find it. Resurrectionists usually traveled in pairs.
“You’ll be fine,” I told him. “Now you’ll have a story to tell all the other vamps at the convention.” I leaned over to give the boy on the floor a hand up. “Since you didn’t take my advice and get out while you could, you’re going to help me carry this whiny bloodsucker all the way back to the car.”
The boy didn’t say anything, but moved when I pushed the body of the former resurrectionist off of him. I rigged David in between us, and a loud whimper came from the cabinets to my left.
“What . . . ?” I turned to glance at it.