Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,90

brothers close in. They get close, but ghouls are sharper than they seem. The one feasting twitches upright. The one searching turns, the motion jerky but impossibly fast, and the fight begins.

Theo swings his sword, but the ghoul twists out of its path and surges forward, gnarled hands and snapping teeth. Several rows over, Apollo slashes out with his ax, but he’s off-balance, and the blow is low. It passes through the ghoul’s stomach, lodges somewhere around his spine. No—the tombstone behind it. He twists the blade free, falls back with the force of the motion, and rolls up into a crouch.

She watches her brothers, marveling at Theo’s grace, so at odds with his size; at Apollo, a blur of speed and force. But then a flash of movement catches her eye. Not from her brothers or from the ghouls they’re fighting. The motion comes from the graves to her right.

A ragged shape moving too quick through the dark.

And Cal realizes she was wrong. There aren’t two ghouls in the graveyard.

There are three.

The third is twice the size of the others, a rotting mess of limbs and teeth.

And it’s heading for Theo.

Theo, who’s too busy trying to carve up his own monster to notice.

Cal doesn’t think.

She jumps from the angel’s wing, hits the ground hard, pain lancing up her ankles as she runs.

“Hey!” she shouts, and the ghoul turns just as she swings the tire iron at its head. It lands with a crack, the creature’s face jerking a little as the bar glances off its skull. And for a second—just a second—Cal’s blood races in the best of ways, and she feels like a hunter.

But then the ghoul smiles, a horrible, open-jawed grin.

Cal dances back, away, out of its grip, and remembers the dagger. She pulls it from her pocket, rips the sheath off with her teeth as the ghoul shuffles toward her.

She drives the blade into the creature’s neck, but the dagger is barely long enough to cut its throat. It gets stuck somewhere around its collarbone, tearing out of her grip as the ghoul’s fingers scrape her skin.

She scrambles backward, but her boot catches on a broken grave and she goes down and the ghoul is on top of her. Up close, it reeks of rot, sickly sweet, and the fear is sudden, wrenching. It slams into her like a wave and she has to fight the urge to scream.

It gnashes, making a terrible chattering sound as it snaps its jaw. She drives the iron bar up between its teeth, forcing its head back and away as its bony fingers claw at her, leaving trails of its latest meal. She kicks out, trying to drive it back, but it’s strong, impossibly strong for something made of sinew and bone, and the fear is a high whistle in her head, a fever in her blood, and her hands slip on the bar and she is going to die, she is going to die, she is going to—

Theo’s sword slices through the monster’s neck, the blade so close Cal feels the breeze on her face.

The ghoul’s head rolls into the weedy grass.

The rest of the ghoul collapses into a heap of sinew and bone, and then her brothers are there, kneeling before her, walls blocking out the horror of the world beyond. Cal grips the bar hard to stop her hands shaking.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Theo’s saying, low and rhythmic.

Apollo rises, hefting his ax, and ambles over to the ghoul’s severed head.

Cal swallows.

“Of course I’m okay,” she says, as Apollo drives the ax down into the monster’s skull. It bursts like a rotting pumpkin under the blade.

Cal doesn’t puke. It feels like a victory.

It feels like a failure.

Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

Apollo kneels to collect Cal’s dagger from what’s left of the ghoul’s throat.

“Should have given me a sword,” she mutters as Theo hauls her to her feet.

* * *

Her brothers buzz all the way home.

They’re wound up, riding high in the aftermath of the hunt, and Cal is buzzing, too, but for all the wrong reasons. For missing the third ghoul in the tally, for taking on a dead thing with a five-inch knife and an iron bar, for tripping, for scrambling, for getting twisted up in fear.

Apollo doesn’t give her shit. Theo doesn’t lecture. They don’t chew her out. They don’t say anything about it, and maybe they’re trying to make her feel better, but they don’t. It makes her feel like a kid thrown into time-out, and she