Strange Candy (Vampire Hunter 0.5)
Sidra whispered to the sword, “I want you to burn for me and aid me in slaying this ice demon.”
It said, “Price will be high.”
She had expected nothing less. “When is the last time you tasted demon blood?”
The sword paused and said, “Demon blood.”
“If we kill it, then all its blood is yours to consume.”
It gave a nervous expectant giggle. “All that demon blood, all of it. You won’t remove me until I have drunk my fill?”
“I won’t remove you.”
It snickered. “Payment is more than generous. I will do as you ask.”
The ice demon strode forward, still laughing to itself. Its claws clicked together with a sound like breaking ice. Sidra kept Leech half hidden behind her shield as if she meant to only cower before the demon. Leech burst into flame with its blade like a wick in the center of the good orange fire.
The first threads of cold oozed round her shield and she knew, magic weapon or not, the first blow must be a good one. Milon simply stared up at the creature with his back pressed against the fallen portcullis. The demon stood almost directly in front of Sidra, and she kept her head down as if she could not bear the sight of him. He spoke to the bard. “Your protector is not doing much protecting, but be patient. When I have finished with her, you will have my undivided attention.”
Sidra forced Leech up while the demon was looking at Milon. The sword took him through the chest, burning brightly as the demon blood gushed over it. The blade bit through a clawed hand and sent fingers spinning. The demon screamed.
A casual swipe of the tail knocked her to the ground, and a claw raked along the shield. The nails left grooves in the metal. A hand caught her helmet and sent her head ringing back against the floor. Leech moved of its own accord, bringing her hand with it. The blade shot through the demon’s throat, and blood poured out acrid and stinking. Sidra struggled to her knees, gagging from the stench. She fought upward with the blade and shield. A claw slipped past the edge of the shield, and she felt claws sink into her thigh. Leech bit into the demon’s arm, half-severing it. And it began to fade. It was running as a proper demon does when it is hurt badly enough and has the choice of leaving.
Leech screamed after the fading creature, “No, no!”
It flamed in her hand a while longer and then faded back to normal. “Cheated.”
Sidra leaned against the wall, favoring her wounded leg. “It was not my doing that the demon left. I kept my part of the bargain.”
The sword was dangerously silent. Sidra was almost relieved that all its magic was spent for the day. It was never reliable when it was pouting.
The last door was not locked. It opened easily to reveal the wizard in the middle of a spell. A protective code chased the edges of a pentagram, and the wizard stood in the center of it all. He was short, balding, and did not look like a demon master or an evil man. But standing outside his magic circle was no mere demon but a devil.
It was why the wizard had not aided his ice demon. It was death to abort the spell. He was trapped as if in a cage until he released the devil to its home plane. Now their only danger was the devil.
It was still only half formed, with the bottom half of its body consumed in a strange black smoke. Its upper half was vaguely manlike, with shoulders and arms. It resembled the demon they had banished, with its bat-ribbed ears and teeth, but it was covered in black skin, the color of nothing above ground. High above it all, suspended from the ceiling, were the two earthenware jars on the end of a white pole.
A rope held the pole in place and the rope was tied off near the door around a peg. Sidra smiled. She raised the sword and chopped the rope. The wizard seemed to notice what she did. But he could not stop to plead with her. If he stopped, then the devil would be freed and it would kill him. Devils were very reliable that way, or unreliable, depending on the point of view.
The pole came crashing to the ground, but the jars did not break. They were spelled against such mundane accidents. Sidra stepped toward them carefully, one eye on the devil. She sheathed Leech, for fighting devils was not a matter of swords.
She untied the two jars from the pole and passed one out to Milon. The other she balanced under her sword arm. Just before she passed out of the room with his precious power, the wizard broke and shrieked, “No.”
The devil laughed. “Take your pots and go, warrior-thief. Your business is finished here.”
The floor quivered. Sidra turned to Milon and said, “Run.”
They ran only as far as the fallen gate. It blocked their way completely, and the floor shivered once more. “There must be a hidden lever that will raise this. Search.” They felt along the walls to either side, and Milon found something that he pressed. Slowly the gate rose upward. The walls lurched as if someone had caught the tower and twisted it.
They ran full out. There would be no more fighting, no more trap finding. It was a race to the surface.
Milon said, “The pit, what about the pit?”
“Jump it.”
“Jump it?”
“Jump it or die.”
He ran harder to keep up with her longer legs and he tried not to picture the spikes on the floor of the pit. It was there suddenly and they were leaping over it. Sidra went down, betrayed by her wounded leg, but was up and running with the blood pumping down her leg. The floor twisted under their feet and cracks began to form on the walls.
The stairs were treacherous. The lantern was a bouncing glow that showed widening cracks and falling rock. They came up into the tower room.
The door had healed itself shut. The tower gave a shudder as its foundations began to crumble. Sidra drew Leech from its sheath and pointed it at the door. She decided to bluff. “Open, door, or I’ll burn you again.” The door whimpered uncertainly and then it swung outward. They raced through the door and kept running across the ash circle and into the trees. With a final groan the tower thundered to its death. The world was full of rock and dust.
They lay gasping on the ground and grinning at each other. Milon said, “Let me look at your leg.”
She lay back in the grass, allowing him to probe the stab wound. “Deep but not bad. It will heal. Now will you tell your minstrel what was so important about two earthenware jars?”
Sidra smiled and said, “I have a story for you, Milon. A story of a little girl and a vow she made to a god.”
THE GIRL WHO WAS INFATUATED WITH DEATH
Well here we are, at the last story. This is Anita very solidly in her world, as it appears in the books. We have Jean-Claude on stage, and a distraught mother, a missing teenage girl, and a vampire who’s about to get himself killed, but doesn’t know it yet. This story is set before the novel Narcissus in Chains. This is back when Anita is fighting the good fight to try not to give in every time she gets too close to her vampire boyfriend. Ah, how the mighty have fallen.
IT was five days before Christmas, a quarter till midnight. I should have been asnooze in my bed, dreaming of sugarplums, whatever the hell they were, but I wasn’t. I was sitting across my desk sipping coffee and offering a box of Kleenexes to my client, Ms. Rhonda Mackenzie. She’d been crying for nearly the entire meeting, so that she’d wiped most of her careful eye makeup away, leaving her eyes pale and unfinished, younger, like what she must have looked like when she was in high school. The dark, perfect lipstick made the eyes look emptier, more vulnerable.
“I’m not usually like this, Ms. Blake. I am a very strong woman.” Her voice took on a tone that said she believed this, and it might even be true. She raised those naked brown eyes to me, and there was fierceness in them that might have made a weaker person flinch. Even I, tough-as-nails vampire-hunter that I am, had trouble meeting the rage in those eyes.
“It’s all right, Ms. Mackenzie, you’re not the first client that’s cried. It’s hard when you’ve lost someone.”
She looked up, startled. “I haven’t lost anyone, not yet.”
I sat my coffee cup back down without drinking from it and stared at her. “I’m an animator, Ms. Mackenzie. I raise the dead if the reason is good enough. I assumed this amount of grief was because you’d come to ask me to raise someone close to you.”
She shook her head, her deep brown curls in disarray around her face as if she’d been running her hands through what was once a perfect perm. “My daughter, Amy, is very much alive and I want her to stay that way.”