The Girl Who was Infatuated with Death by Laurell K Hamilton, now you can read online.
THE GIRL WHO WAS
INFATUATED WITH DEATH
Laurell K. Hamilton
This short story occurs in the interval between BLUE MOON and OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY.
IT was five days before Christmas, a quarter ’til midnight. I should have been asnooze in my bed dreaming of sugarplums, whatever the hell they were, but I wasn’t. I was sitting across my desk sipping coffee and offering a box of Kleenexes to my client, Ms. Rhonda Mackenzie. She’d been crying for nearly the entire meeting, so that she’d wiped most of her careful eye makeup away, leaving her eyes pale and unfinished, younger, like what she must have looked like when she was in high school. The dark, perfect lipstick made the eyes look emptier, more vulnerable.
“I’m not usually like this, Ms. Blake. I am a very strong woman.” Her voice took on a tone that said she believed this, and it might even be true. She raised those naked brown eyes to me and there was fierceness in them that might have made a weaker person flinch. Even I, tough-as-nails vampire-hunter that I am, had trouble meeting the rage in those eyes.
“It’s alright, Ms. Mackenzie, you’re not the first client that’s cried. It’s hard when you’ve lost someone.”
She looked up startled. “I haven’t lost anyone, not yet.”
I sat my coffee cup back down without drinking from it and stared at her. “I’m an animator, Ms. Mackenzie. I raise the dead if the reason is good enough. I assumed this amount of grief was because you’d come to ask me to raise someone close to you.”
She shook her head, her deep brown curls in disarray around her face as if she’d been running her hands through what was once a perfect perm. “My daughter, Amy, is very much alive and I want her to stay that way.”
Now I was just plain confused. “I raise the dead and am a legal vampire executioner, Ms. Mackenzie. How do either of those jobs help you keep your daughter alive?”
“I want you to help me find her before she commits suicide.”
I just stared at her, my face professionally blank, but inwardly, I was cursing my boss. He and I had had discussions about exactly what my job description was, and suicidal daughters weren’t part of that description.
“Have you gone to the police?” I asked.
“They won’t do anything for twenty-four hours, but by then it will be too late.”
“I have a friend who is a private detective. This sounds much more up her alley than mine, Ms. Mackenzie.” I was already reaching for the phone. “I’ll call her at home for you.”
“No,” she said, “only you can help me.”
I sighed and clasped my hands across the clean top of my desk. Most of my work wasn’t indoor office work, so the desk didn’t really see much use. “You’re daughter is alive, Ms. Mackenzie, so you don’t need me to raise her. She’s not a rogue vampire, so you don’t need an executioner. How can I be of any help to you?”
She leaned forward; the Kleenex waded in her hands, her eyes fierce again. “If you don’t help me by morning she will be a vampire.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She’s determined to become one of them tonight.”
“It takes three bites to become a vampire, Ms. Mackenzie, and they all have to be from the same vampire. You can’t become one in a single night, and you can’t become one if you’re just being casual with more than one.”
“She has two bites on her thighs. I accidentally walked in on her when she was getting out of the shower and I saw them.”
“Are you sure they were vampire bites?” I asked.
She nodded. “I made a scene. I grabbed her, wrestled with her so I could see them clearly. They are vampire bites, just like the pictures they passed around at the last PTA meeting so we could recognize it. You know one of those people lecturing on how to know if your kids are involved with the monsters.”
I nodded. I knew the kind of person she meant. Some of it was valuable information, some of it was just scare tactics, and some of it was racist, if that was the term. Prejudiced at least.
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s seventeen.”
“That’s only a year away from being legal, Ms. Mackenzie. Once she turns eighteen, if she wants to become a vampire, you can’t stop her legally.”
“You say that so calmly. Do you approve?”