Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,168

fire ants inside there. I can’t stand it!

Hissing with pain, the soucouyant threw off her burning skin and stood flayed, dripping.

Calmly, Granny entered Jacky’s room. Before Jacky could react, Granny picked up the Jacky-skin. She held it close to her body, threatening the skin with the sharp, wicked kitchen knife she held in her other hand. Her look was sorrowful.

“I know it was you, doux-doux. When I see the Lagahoo, I know what I have to do.”

Jacky cursed and flared to fireball form. She rushed at Granny, but backed off as Granny made a feint at the skin with her knife.

“You stay right there and listen to me, Jacky. The soucouyant blood in all of we, all the women in we family.”

You, too?

“Even me. We blood hot: hot for life, hot for youth. Loving does cool we down. Making life does cool we down.”

Jacky raged. The ceiling blackened, began to smoke.

“I know how it go, doux-doux. When we lives empty, the hunger does turn to blood hunger. But it have plenty other kinds of loving, Jacky. Ain’t I been telling you so? Love your work. Love people close to you. Love your life.”

The fireball surged toward Granny. “No. Stay right there, you hear? Or I go chop this skin for you.”

Granny backed out through the living room. The hissing ball of fire followed close, drawn by the precious skin in the old woman’s hands.

“You never had no patience. Doux-doux, you is my life, but you can’t kill so. That little child you drink, you don’t hear it spirit when night come, bawling for Carmen and Michael? I does weep to hear it. I try to tell you, like I try to tell you mother: Don’t be greedy.”

Granny had reached the back door. The open back door. The soucouyant made a desperate feint at Granny’s knife arm, searing her right side from elbow to scalp. The smell of burnt flesh and hair filled the little kitchen, but though the old lady cried out, she wouldn’t drop the knife. The pain in her voice was more than physical.

“You devil!” She backed out the door into the cobalt light of early morning. Gritting her teeth, she slashed the Jacky-skin into two ragged halves and flung it into the pigeon peas patch. Jacky shrieked and turned back into her flayed self. Numbly, she picked up her skin, tried with oozing fingers to put the torn edges back together.

“You and me is the last two,” Granny said. “Your mami woulda make three, but I had to kill she, too, send my own flesh and blood into the sun. Is time, doux-doux. The Lagahoo calling you.”

My skin! Granny, how you could do me so? Oh, God, morning coming already? Yes, could feel it, the sun calling to the fire in me.

Jacky threw the skin down again, leapt as a fireball into the brightening air. I going, going, where I could burn clean, burn bright, and all you could go to the Devil, oui!

Fireball flying high to the sun, and oh, God, it burning, it burning, it burning!

Granny hobbled to the pigeon peas patch, wincing as she cradled her burnt right side. Tears trickled down her wrinkled face. She sobbed, “Why all you must break my heart so?”

Painfully, she got down to her knees beside the ruined pieces of skin and placed one hand on them. She made her hand glow red hot, igniting her granddaughter’s skin. It began to burn, crinkling and curling back on itself like bacon in a pan. Granny wrinkled her nose against the smell, but kept her hand on the smoking mass until there was nothing but ashes. Her hand faded back to its normal cocoa brown. Clambering to her feet again, she looked about her in the pigeon peas patch.

“I live to see the Lagahoo two time. Next time, God horse, you better be coming for me.”

TACKY

Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris, a native of Mississippi, wrote the lighthearted Aurora Teagarden mystery books and the much edgier Lily Bard series. Now she’s working on a series about a lightning-struck young woman named Harper Connelly. But the thirteen novels featuring Sookie Stackhouse (which blend mystery, humor, romance, and the supernatural) became an international phenomenon when Alan Ball based the HBO series True Blood on them.

Although she appears only briefly in the novels, the petite and beautiful vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers is featured in a computer game and a growing number of short stories set in the “Sookieverse.” “Tacky” is the first story in which Dahlia played