From The Nights Before Christmas © 2010 by Kerry Allen
Chapter Three
Bowe’s idea of a good time wasn’t being locked in an office with three vampires while what sounded like a hell of a party roared to life just outside. She’d pass on the mulled plasma or whatever that crowd was drinking to make them so rowdy, but she’d take the laughs and dancing. Maybe some thoughtful reveler would wrap up a stapler or something so she wouldn’t be left out of the gift exchange. A good time would be had by all.
Instead, she got to spend her evening stuck on the phone with a series of crotchety Council Elders, trying to clear up the obvious error in her orders.
During one of the many times she’d been placed on hold, she suggested, just in case Scowly-vamp turned out to be the right Harvey Doyle, he go out there and get his Christmas groove on.
He responded by using a bookcase to barricade the door.
She became a wee bit suspicious at that point he might be the right Harvey Doyle.
The drone of the Council Elder so closely matched the snooze-inducing hold music, she didn’t realize he had picked up the line and asked her a question until he repeated it at a crankier pitch. “What is the basis of your questioning that this vampire is the object of your assignment?”
Bowe made every effort to sound crankier, as well, since no one seemed to have heard her the previous two times she answered the same question. “Maybe he objects to the retailization of what should be a sacred occasion. Maybe he’s Jewish. Or, just a hunch, maybe he’s not keen on celebrating a holiday conceived by people whose hobbies include setting him on fire while he sleeps. You might as well ask me to bring peace to the Middle East in the next twenty-four hours.”
The Elder recited the usual speech, the gist of which was, if they’d given her an easy task, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment and blah-blah-blah.
She hung up on him in mid-blah, having received the message loud and clear. She had angered the wrong people and been sentenced to humiliation and death. Council law required them to grant her an opportunity to redeem herself before execution.
Nowhere did it specify the opportunity had to fall within the realm of possibility.
Part of her burned with the desire to pull it off so she could stand before the Council and rub their snooty faces in her victory. Another part—the part that knew they’d strike her down at 9:01 p.m. on December 24 even if Harvey Doyle transformed into a jolly fat man who hung out with flying reindeer and broke into houses to gorge himself on cookies and milk—thought her time would be better spent stuffing her face with junk food, chugging hard liquor, brawling, gambling, and getting laid. Harvey wouldn’t be any less of a miserable bastard, but at least she’d die happy.
Mason half-sat on the corner of the desk. “So every eight hours, your clothes will shrink until you’re wearing nothing but a fur-trimmed red bikini?”
Bowe gave him a quick visual appraisal. Adorable in a choirboy-gone-bad kind of way, he no doubt got a lot of illicit blood on the side from motherly types happy to give him a cuddle and a hot meal. He’d know all the best places around here to raise some hell.
To put the icing on the final-countdown cake, if she took off with him, Taffy’s jealous little head would explode, splattering blood, eyeliner, and neon green hair all over Harvey’s obsessively tidy office.
She leaned forward and squeezed her elbows against her sides to maximize Mason’s view of her cleavage. “The dress will shrink at the end of every shift until my bones snap and puncture my internal organs. But if it’s any consolation to you, sometime between my starting to bleed from every orifice and being cut in half by the belt, my tits should pop out.”
Taffy snagged her black-tipped fingers in Mason’s collar and yanked him off the desk, planting herself between him and Bowe like a territorial, radioactive badger. “You were dead.”
“Now I’m not, and I have a wicked craving for braaaains.”
Mason laughed. Harvey maintained his Scowly-vamp facade—he’d be safe in a zombie invasion because the humorless undead would mistake him for one of their own.
Taffy, equally unamused but too feisty to pass for a zombie, slapped her hand down on the desk. “How are you no longer dead? It’s not a curable condition.”
True only for those who failed to qualify for the Council’s special brand of subsidized health insurance. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
If Harvey’s expression grew any darker, he’d become a negative of himself. “An immortality hex. That explains it.”
Mason shook his head at the older vampire’s dreary appraisal. “Immortality sounds like more of a blessing.”
Bowe preferred to believe he was young and naive rather than terminally stupid. “I strongly recommend you do not enter any binding contracts—particularly those signed in blood or negotiated by people named The Devil—without the advice of a reputable lawyer.”
Harvey might have been around the block enough times to know better. More likely, he emerged from the womb, swept his new world with those sky-blue peepers, and declared everything and everyone in it deserving of suspicion with his first fractious cry. “Its purpose is torture, not sparing the victim’s life.”
It made a hell of a deterrent to suicide, though. “I can die, as we’ve demonstrated this evening, but I won’t stay dead. The kick in the ass is, instead of being revived to a state of living, I’m revived to the state of dying, complete with whatever injuries killed me the first time. I was able to overcome blood loss because every time I was resurrected, I generated a little more blood until there was enough to sustain me. Having my insides squeezed to pulp isn’t so easy to fix. The hex will keep bringing me back to the moments before death, I’ll die again, it’ll bring me back, I’ll die again—like a bratty kid flicking a light switch, only with more excruciating pain alternating with periods of deadness, until the end of time.”
Even Taffy looked a little woozy at the prospect of such a gruesome fate.
“Needless to say, I have a keen interest in skipping that part, so cheer the fuck up, Harvey.”
His lips thinned to a severe line, as they did every time she swore. She found it endearingly prudish and had been peppering her speech with more foul language than usual in hopes he’d snap and spank her or wash her mouth out with his tongue.
She squeezed her knees together before she fantasized herself into atingling. Fantasizing about her imminent and infinite demise if she failed to complete her mission would be better motivation—unless, of course, she said to hell with it and decided to go out in a blaze of sinful glory. If she timed her indulgences right, she could be buzzed with a full belly and limp in the afterglow of great sex for her execution.
She challenged anyone to come up with a less-awful way to spend eternity dying.
She remained unenthused about the dying part. She picked up a pen and flipped to an unsullied page of Harvey’s desk calendar.
“What are you writing there?”
She put the finishing touches on a lewd doodle and covered it with the intervening months before he got a look at it. “My birthday, so you don’t forget how your being a sourpuss killed me.”
“I’m dubious that you’re entirely blameless for the fate awaiting you.”
Dubiousness aside, he looked not at her but at the wall behind her while redistributing the blame. He didn’t enjoy his involvement in this scheme.
Then again, he didn’t seem to enjoy much of anything. Even if she couldn’t resolve his holiday doldrums, she felt obliged to do something to loosen him up a little. The only thing more pathetic than a gloomy vampire was one who shopped at Hot Topic. “So what’s your problem with Christmas? Dog died, wife left you, traumatized for life by Billy Idol’s Christmas album? Give me something to work with here.”
He retreated a step under the weight of triple scrutiny—his coworkers evidently didn’t know him any better than Bowe did. “There was no inciting event. The season is simply too bright, too noisy, and too crowded for my liking.”
She tapped the pen on his desk. “You don’t like crowds.”
“That is correct.”
“You don’t like being around a lot of people.”
“You have lapsed into redundancy, Miss Winderowe.”
“Well, damn, Harvey, who doesn’t like a buffet?” She tossed the pen into the cup he used to hold such implements. It landed tip up, whereas the others were down. “I think I see your problem.”
His eyes fixed upon the disorderly pen. “In view of your predicament, I would say you are the one with a problem.”
“My problem is your problem, and your lack of awareness of your problem is itself a symptom of the problem.” She rose from his chair and gave her hem a tug. For as long as possible, she’d rather make like Victoria and keep her undies a secret. “You’ve been domesticated, assimilated into human society. You’ve been brainwashed into viewing them as neighbors, coworkers, lovers, fellow cogs in the big machine instead of what they’re meant to be: prey.”
He glowered at her as she circled around the desk. “It is attitudes like yours that have led to our kind being hunted to the brink of extinction.”
She sauntered toward him. “On the contrary, it is conciliatory wussiness like yours that has allowed a weaker species to legislate your numbers, where you can live, what jobs you can hold, what and how often you’re permitted to eat. You’re an apex predator living the life of a pet gerbil.”
If anyone spoke to her in such terms, she’d twist out the offending tongue at its root, but she feared no reprisal from Harvey. At worst, he might submit a written complaint, but in all likelihood, he’d do nothing—he couldn’t very well object when she spoke the truth.
She smoothed the lapel of his jacket, pleasantly surprised the chest beneath wasn’t as soft as she’d expected of a pencil pusher. “Now, if we’d handled things my way from the moment humans started walking upright, I’d be queen of this realm instead of running around in a getup that provokes charming remarks like ‘Ho-ho, ho, how much for a blow?’”
He closed his hand around hers and lowered it to her side. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to do as nature intended.” She wrapped her other hand around his wrist so he couldn’t get away. There was nothing like forced hand-holding to inject a little romance into a relationship. “I know your dirty little mind is conjuring up all sorts of naughty possibilities involving you and me and the exchange of bodily fluids, but I’m referring to your nature as a vampire.”
Taffy made a phlegmy sound in the back of her throat. “What do you know about being a vampire, elf?”
“A damn sight more than you do, tiresome child.”
Harvey’s grip tightened—a warning, perhaps, not to become violent with his underlings. He should have known better than to hint at any protective inclinations. It was her nature to exploit such weaknesses.
For the moment, however, she found it sweet. “I remember when vampires lived as they chose, when the sun was the only power they bowed to, when they were revered by humans as deities.”
“Yeah, livin’ large.” Mason waggled his eyebrows. “Hell, if he won’t go, take me.”
Harvey shifted his glare to someone other than her for a change. “No. What she proposes is dangerous and probably criminal.”
Just like that, sweet became useful.
Bowe raised up on her tiptoes and whispered in his ear, “Humor me, Harvey, or I’ll corrupt the young one in your stead.”
He turned his head, his frown even more thunderous with his pinched brows at such close range. “How would that accomplish your objective?”
“It wouldn’t, but if I’m doomed to fail, I might as well drag someone you care about down with me.”
“You would resort to blackmail.”
Somebody needed to brush up on his racial studies. “I’m an elf. What do you expect me to do, serenade you with my pan flute?”
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From The Nights Before Christmas © 2010 by Kerry Allen
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