Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,186

lamashtu. And I had to catch the white man’s bloodsucker disease.”

Mahasti spoke without lifting her head, or her gaze from the man’s meticulous work. The lotus taking shape on her skin was a thing of beauty. Depth and texture. No blood pricked from her skin to mar the colors, which were dense and rich. “You could be an iron-fingered demon. If you were a Cherokee. Which you aren’t.”

“Details,” he said. “Details. First I’m too Indian, then I’m not the right kind of Indian? Fuck you very much.”

“Billy,” Mahasti said, “Shut up and let the man work or we won’t be ready to go when the sun sets.”

She was a desert demon, the sun no concern. It was on Billy’s behalf that they stalled.

The dog’s barking has escalated to something regular and frantic. A twig cracked in the yard.

Mahasti looked at the man, at the cold baby curled sleeping in the corner of her arm. She lifted her chin and stared directly, unsettlingly, at the woman. “Mommy?”

The mother must have been crying silently, curled in her corner of the couch, because she stammered over a sob. “Yes?”

“You’ve been such a good girl, I’m going to give you Alan back. You and Billy can take him in the back. I know you’re not going to try anything silly.”

The woman’s hands came up, clutched at air, and settled again to clench on the sofa beside her bare legs. “No.”

Mahasti looked at the man. “And you won’t do anything dumb either, will you?”

He shook his head. Under the lights, his scrawny shoulders had broken out in a gloss of sweat. “That’s good, Cathy,” he said. The eye contact between him and the woman was full of unspoken communication. “You take Alan and put him to bed.”

“Here,” Mahasti said, offering him up, his heartbeat barely thrumming against her fingertips. She tingled, warm and full of life. “He’s already sleeping.”

Billy sat crosslegged on the unmade bed, his bootheels denting the mattress. The woman pulled all the toys and pillows from the crib and lay the baby on his back atop taut bedding. She moved tightly, elbows pinned to her ribcage, spine stiff. He slouched, relaxed. Until the front door slammed open.

“Fucking vampire hunters.” He was in the hall before the words finished leaving his mouth, the woman behind him bewildered by the fury of his passage. A spill of sunlight cut the floor ahead, but the corner of the wall kept it from flooding down the corridor.

Billy paused in the shadow of the hall.

Three men burst into the front room—one weedy, one meaty, and one perfectly average in every way except the scars. Mahasti moved from the chair, the disregarded needle blurring a line of white across her wrist, destroying the elegance of the artist’s design. The artist threw himself into a corner behind the counter. By the time he got there and got his back against the wall, the fight was over.

The perfectly average man was fast enough to meet her there, in the sunlight, and twist her un-inked right arm up behind her in a bind. The silver knife in his left hand pricked her throat. An image of a Persian demon, inscribed on the blade, flashed sunlight into Mahasti’s eyes.

“Well, fuck,” she said.

The meaty one grabbed her free hand and slapped a silver cuff around it.

“Silence, lamashtu,” the vampire hunter growled, shaking her by her twisted arm. “Call the other out, so I can burn him too. You’ll terrorize no more innocents.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s not coming out when there’s daylight in the room.”

“Really?” he laughed. “Your protector thinks so little of you?”

“I’m my own protector, asshole,” she said, and kicked back to break the bone of his thigh like a fried chicken-wing.

She threw the meaty one down the hall to Billy, and ripped the throat out of the weedy one while the perfectly average one was still screaming his way to the floor.

She shut the door before she killed him. The noise was going to bring the neighbors around. Then she went to help Billy drag the third body up to the pile, and make sure the woman hadn’t run out the back in the confusion.

She was still crouched by the crib. Mahasti left her there and met Billy in the hall. “See?” he said. “More fun if you don’t use ’em up all at once.”

Mahasti said, “He had a knife with an image of Pazazu etched on it. That could have been the end of all our fun.”

“He got prepared