Chaos Bites Part 4

CHAPTER 4.

Megan, who'd been leaning closer, reared back. Faith gave a ho of surprise. I waited for her to start screaming; instead she peered up at Megan then went back to chowing on my friend's hand. Lucky the kid didn't have any teeth yet.

"Let me-"

Megan scrambled to her feet, putting the chair between us.

"-explain," I finished.

"D-don't touch me. I'll . . . Luther!" she shouted.

The kid came to the door, mouth greasy with chips. "Mmm?"

"You know how to kill her?"

His eyes widened and met mine. "Liz?"

"Megan, calm down," I said.

"Oh, you'd like that wouldn't you? Calm down so you can . . . whatever it is you do to people before you kill them."

I sighed. "I'm not evil." Or at least I wasn't right this minute. I lifted my hand to the jeweled dog collar around my neck. "Didn't you notice this?"

"Of course. I figured you'd gone Goth."

Considering the collar looked like something you'd find on a poodle, that made no sense at all.

"She went vamp." Luther let the door bang behind him as he came outside.

I shot him a glare. "Don't help me."

Luther shrugged.

"You're a vampire?" Megan shrieked. The baby started to mew. She sounded more like a kitten now than when she'd been one.

"Keep it down," I said. "You're going to freak out the kitty-cat, and believe me, you don't want to. The lungs on that kid will puncture your eardrums."

"I don't care," Megan snapped, although she did lower her voice. "Just tell me what happened before I cut off your head and stuff your mouth with garlic."

I lifted my eyebrows. She'd been studying ways to kill a vampire. Good for her.

"It's a lot harder than you think to cut off someone's head." Without the proper tools it was d.a.m.n near impossible. Right now the only thing nearby was a b.u.t.ter knife.

Megan scowled at Luther. "Why haven't you killed her?"

He popped half a cupcake into his mouth, chewed three times, and swallowed. "Because she isn't evil, as long as she's wearing the collar."

"And if she isn't wearing the collar?"

"Hide," Luther said.

Megan gnawed on her lip, contemplating first me, then Luther, then me again. The baby began to fuss in earnest, and Megan automatically bounced her, which for some unknown reason seemed to work. If I were cranky, bouncing would really p.i.s.s me off.

"How did you become a vampire?" she asked.

"I told you how I absorb powers."

She wrinkled her nose. "You slept with a vampire?"

"Yes and no."

"That's a yes or no question. Pick one."

"It's not that simple."

"Never is with you." She sat in the lawn chair, glanced at Luther. "Go play on the Internet. Computer's in the living room."

"Sweet." Luther headed for the house.

"No p.o.r.n!" Megan called. "I have munchkins."

"Yeah, yeah." The door banged behind him.

Megan faced me again. "Spill."

"It all started with the woman of smoke."

Megan paled. She'd met the Naye'i, or woman of smoke, a Navajo evil spirit witch and former leader of the darkness. She was also Sawyer's mother, which had explained a lot about Sawyer.

The Naye'i had been jockeying for the position of Antichrist. She would have gotten it, too, if I hadn't killed her. As it was, she opened the gates of h.e.l.l and all the fallen angels that had become demons flew free. They'd had a field day repopulating the earth with Nephilim before I'd managed to put them back again. Now we were seriously outnumbered.

"I thought you killed that b.i.t.c.h," Megan said.

"I did. But in order to be strong enough, I had to-" I took a breath. "-become as evil as she was."

"Hence the banging of the vampire."

"Yes and no," I repeated. I had slept with a vampire, but that wasn't how I'd gained an inner demon. "Jimmy is a dhampir."

"Part vampire, part human," Megan said. I couldn't remember if I'd told her that or if she'd found it out for herself. It didn't really matter. "Stronger. Faster. Better."

Sounded like she was advertising The Six Million Dollar Man.

"Why couldn't he kill the Naye'i?" She frowned. "For that matter, why couldn't you? Considering what you've told me about you and Jimmy, you've gotta be a dhampir, too, by now."

"I am." Megan knew me so well. "But dhampirs, as powerful as they are, aren't quite powerful enough. They're only part demon."

"Ticky-tac," she muttered. "You should have just nuked her."

"Wouldn't have worked. There's usually one way to kill these things and one way only. For the Naye'i, I had to toss evil to the four winds."

"How did you manage that?"

"Tore her into four pieces and sent them express air"-I flung my arms to the sky, releasing my fingers as if I were throwing something away-"to the farthest corners of the world."

Silence settled between us. Finally Megan broke it. "I wish I could have seen that."

"No, you don't."

I'd been a vampire at the time-mad with fury, l.u.s.ting for the kill, bathed in the blood.

"If you didn't sleep with a vampire then how did you become one?"

"Dhampirs can become vampires by sharing blood with other vampires."

Jimmy's daddy had made him a chip off the old block just a few months back.

"Ew." Megan wrinkled her nose.

"Yeah." I peered up at the blazingly blue sky, remembering when it had been dark, with a full moon shining down, as I became a monster for the sake of the world.

"Sanducci was okay with this?"

"Not really. He refused to cooperate. So I . . . seduced him." He still hadn't forgiven me. I wasn't sure he ever would, could, or even should.

Jimmy had begged me not to become like him. He'd said it was d.a.m.nation-for both of us. But that was a risk I'd been willing to take.

"Liz," Megan said quietly, and I looked up. Her gaze was sympathetic. She'd always been able to hear what I was unable to say.

I'd been forced to choose between Jimmy's "soul" and the lives of millions of people, which wasn't really a choice at all. Jimmy had wound up broken inside. He could barely stand to look at me. I had to live with what I'd done, as well as the knowledge that if given a second chance, I'd do it all over again.

"You still love him," she said. It wasn't a question, so I didn't bother to answer.

I hadn't talked about Jimmy much, but Megan knew the truth. No matter what he did, no matter what I did, no matter how many others we might love, too, I'd feel the same way about Jimmy Sanducci until the day I died as I'd felt about him when I was seventeen. I couldn't help myself.

Jimmy and I had shared similar childhoods, even before I'd come to Ruthie's at twelve, straight from another foster home that didn't want me. I'd also spent time on the streets, preferred it in fact to the parade of homes I'd been through. The streets might be rough, but they were honest.

Jimmy was the boss at Ruthie's, and he didn't much like having to move in with some of the other boys so I could have his bedroom. To welcome me, he'd left a gra.s.s snake between the sheets. I'd put the snake in a cage, named him James, then loosened a few of Sanducci's teeth.

What followed was five years of living in the same house, pretending to loathe each other, while what we felt in truth was developing into something much different. Not long after the l.u.s.t erupted, we fell in love. Jimmy would have done anything for me. It wasn't until years later that I'd found out he had.

"Doesn't matter." I spread my hands. "Every time he sees me he remembers things he'd rather forget."

"Which explains why you're working with Luther instead of Sanducci these days."

That actually wasn't the reason. Jimmy and I had worked together after the Naye'i. What had separated us had been something else entirely.

"Someone's gotta train the kid," I said, and with Sawyer dead, that someone was me.

"Explain why you haven't bloodsucked your way through Milwaukee and started on Chicago."

Faith's eyes had gotten heavy. She was nearly asleep in Megan's lap.

"I have a control." I tapped the dog collar. "Be-spelled. When this is in place, I'm me. The demon is contained."

Megan nodded as if she heard tales of magical necklaces every day. "And the tattoo?"

I really wished my hair was longer. I was going to have to stop hacking at it with any sharp implement I could grab whenever it grew half an inch. At least let it spill past my shoulders and cover up the image of a phoenix inked onto the back of my neck.

"That's a long story," I said.

Megan checked her watch. "We've got fifteen minutes. Talk fast."

"My mother-"

"Whoa! Thought she was dead."

"She rose." Then she'd gone around lifting others out of the grave, too. They'd been called revenants, and they'd all been eager to do her bidding.

"From your expression, that wasn't a good thing."

"It rarely is." Really, how many times had the raising of the dead been good beyond the one time? "To make this long story short, she was evil, had to kill her." Along with her zombie-like friends.

"That seems to happen to you a lot."

"And it's probably going to keep happening," I muttered. "Right now I'm a dhampir, a vampire, and a skinwalker." I tapped my tattoo with one ginger finger. "I can shape-shift."

Understanding flashed in Megan's blue eyes. "Like the baby?" I nodded. "But she isn't yours?" I shook my head. "Yet you slept with her father."

I spread my hands and didn't answer.

"The tattoo allows you to become a bird," Megan said. "Handy."

"So far."

In the distance, a doorbell rang. Megan stood and handed me a sleeping Faith. "Showtime," she said.

"I have to leave early and head west, talk to Faith's dad."

"Why don't you just call him?"

"He's dead."

Megan rubbed a thumb between her eyes. "That doesn't even surprise me."