fear and adrenaline. She struck him again on the skull, this time jumping higher to reach the tall man’s tousled, wet head. The scattered nails sunk their rusty points.
Sainvire shook and turned to look at the soggy, undersized vampire rustler with a piece of wood in her hand. The head of a pitiful looking dog peered out of her backpack. Avoiding the vampire’s angry gaze 88
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illuminated by the headlights of the Vespa, Poe lunged again, aiming for the face. Sainvire had enough.
“No more!” he ordered with barely controlled cool. The imposing vampire intercepted the beam and broke it in half on his knee, leaving Poe with a handful of splinters.
That’s really it. The shithead Sainvire is going to finish me off. Her messed up JKD moves learned from DVDs seemed laughable at that moment. She wished for her lost Uzi. In an epiphany, Poe remembered the dart thrower around her neck containing whittled down toothpicks dipped in garlic oil.
She put the device in her mouth and blew. The first dart hit Sainvire’s forehead while the second hit his neck. The vampire caught the third with his deft fingers mid-air.
“Enough!” he roared with the tone of a man truly annoyed. The scar above his lip was as white as her own. Poe obeyed, defeated. It occurred to her what was off about the vampire. His right shoulder was slightly warped and stuck out a little too forward.
The rain pounded harder than ever, eviscerating the scent of waste and animal feces. Sainvire pulled the pathetic darts and flung them threateningly to the ground.
A weak “Shithead” was the only thing she could think to say.
She assumed the fighting stance that almost all the martial arts disciplines taught in the numerous videos she had studied. Left leg lifted slightly for a block or parry, Poe cursed the man silently, vowing to go down fighting. She didn’t kick her punching bag and metal rod in the bunker thousands of times over the years to cultivate leg calluses for nothing.
“C’mon,” Sainvire commanded. “We’ve got to leave this place.”
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Unable to order the vampire to go jump in the dirty L.A. River without churning up a bout of stuttering, Poe punched at the rain and kicked at the flooded street.
“F-fffuck off!” she managed to say. Short, sweet, and to the stuttering point.
Anger left Sainvire’s face, replaced by a patient, Andy Griffith smile. His expression further pissed off Poe, who believed the vampire was making fun of her speech impediment.
The near grin left his face, however, as the squalling of a flock of livid vampires filled the air.
What happened next was a blur. Like a bad Sam Peckinpah movie, Poe watched Sainvire efficiently hack to pieces five undead with his elongated talons where they stood, leaving a litter of heads and limbs on the flooded ground. She couldn’t help but notice his teeth growing to monster size in the hazy light of the moon.
“Scary fucker,” Poe said under her breath as she watched him demolish Trench’s brood.
Before the corpse of a fifth vampire even ate cement, Sainvire secured his claws around Poe and propelled them both skyward.
Dizzy and in awe of the fight, if it could be called that, Poe held on to the vampire’s marble arms. Her bladder threatened to burst.
“P-put me down, or I’ll kill you,” Poe threatened feebly, her hand automatically reaching for her only weapon, the candy bar in her pocket. Her stomach was in her mouth.
If his fellow vicious dead failed to scratch Sainvire, what made her think she could? It was common knowledge that vampires couldn’t carry another human in flight. They could drag them up a few feet from the air a short time. If Sainvire could 90
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soar over the city like Superman with an embittered and suicidal Lois Lane as baggage, then Poe was truly screwed.
“Afraid I can’t do that right now,” Sainvire explained. “You’ll go splat if I do.”
She said nothing else. The flight and the burning tightness around her ribs from the pressure of the vampire’s hold brought on vertigo and something akin to claustrophobia.
Within minutes, Poe caught a view of the pyramidal tower of the Los Angeles Central Library that bled into a long and deep structure of eclectic Egyptian Mission design. The massive library, over 100,000 square feet, had been a monumental part of her childhood.
Her parents had religiously taken them down most Saturdays to tinker with the computers and listen to volunteer grandparents read boring stories years below their grade