She seemed as nonplussed as the rest of us, which was understandable.
Jack pointed to the door. “Guys? Bad vampires, coming after us.”
Ginny had been carrying a mason jar tucked under her arm. She set it on the counter, and Aaron poked at it. “What’s this?”
“It’s holy water,” she said. “I stopped at a church—”
All three of us scrambled away from her, stumbling over furniture and bumping into walls, as ungracefully as we possibly could.
“What’d you bring something like that for?” I yelled. I had never actually seen in person what holy water did to a vampire, I’d just been told stories. Horrible stories. It wouldn’t kill us. It would just hurt. You’d think as a vampire I would be a little better about handling pain.
“I thought it’d be useful.” She was exactly right, of course.
“Wait a minute,” Aaron said. He went back to his pile of Nerf weapons and held up one of the little darts that went with one of the guns. The spongy little darts. Oh, that could work…
He found a pair of ancient rubber dishwashing gloves under the kitchen sink. Must have been left there by the last tenants. Ginny was helping him, searching cupboards for a stray bowl they could use for soaking the darts.
I watched her. She had the look of profound concentration I imagined she wore while gaming.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked out of the blue. “This isn’t your fight.”
She shrugged. “Because I put myself in the middle of it? Because they’re bad guys and it’s the right thing to do? Because I like you?”
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” I said.
“I’m already in this. They know who I am, they were already coming after me.”
I had to smile. I felt gooey. This was so weird. “Um. That thing you said, about being here. You said you wanted to move closer to downtown, right? You want to move in?”
She chuckled. “I’ve known you for like a week. This is only the second time I’ve seen you face-to-face.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I said.
“Sam, no!” Aaron said, horrified.
Jack added, “Aaron’s got a point, what exactly are you thinking here—”
I found a paper towel in the kitchen and the Sharpie Aaron had been using to label boxes. Sharpie on paper towel—lots of bleed. But I wrote out three lines of a sublet agreement: Ginny can live here if she promises not to mess things up too bad and maybe pays a to-be-agreed-upon rent.
I signed, then shoved the towel at Jack.
“Sign this.”
“No! I don’t want her moving in here—”
“Just for a couple of days, until we’re not being attacked by vampires anymore.” He stormed off. Shit. We all of us had to agree to it.
Jack said, “Someone around here has to be practical. Does someone maybe want to help me rig up a booby trap for the door? Aaron, you have any rope in that hoard of yours?”
“Yeah, I think so—”
He did. Miles of it. I didn’t know where he got all that rope—was rope a desirable commodity on eBay?—but he had a lot of it. Jack found the pieces of broken wooden table, and together they built something. Had no idea if it was actually going to work, but at this point we had to try everything.
Even the lunchboxes. I dug in a couple of kitchen drawers, the ones where all the junk ended up, until I found a roll of duct tape. The all-powerful duct tape. “I’m really sorry, Aaron.”
“Hey, what—Sam!”
“I won’t tear them up, they probably won’t even get hurt, not unless someone actually stabs at us. But you know, if they actually stab at us, you’ll be glad I’m doing this.”