Chapter 20
Sera
She walks in first.
Blonde, curly hair piled into a bun. Oversized SpongeBob T-shirt, the yellow faded from too many washes, SpongeBob's smile peeling at the edges like he's tired of being so damn cheerful.
Jeans with a hole in one knee. Combat boots.
And threaded through the disaster of her bun, tucked in like a hair stick, is what I am almost entirely certain is a bone.
A bone.
My hackles go up before she's cleared the threshold.
Behind her come the men.
A shaggy-haired blond, glasses sliding down his nose, with a white button-down tucked into pressed slacks.
Behind him, a taller one with lean muscle, short dark hair, and a smirk that glimmers in his golden eyes.
And behind him, filling the doorway the way James fills a doorway but even bigger, is a huge, bronze-skinned man, with black curly hair, his arms and pecs inked with suns and moons that dip down below the waistband of his jeans. He has to duck to come in.
He’s clearly violating the No Shirt, No Service rule, but I let it slide.
They're not from around here. Not even close. They move like people who have been to places the map refuses to label.
The woman drifts up to my counter, and she has the same golden eyes as the rest of them. She's smiling, but it's not a friendly one. It's intimidation behind too many teeth.
"Hi," she says. "Cute store. Love the lighting. Very anxiety-inducing."
"Thanks," I say flatly. "We work hard to make sure our customers know we're all dying on the inside."
She grins, real this time, quick and startled, like I surprised her.
"I have a question," she says, leaning an elbow on the counter.
The bone in her hair shifts, and I try not to look at it. She notices me not looking at it, and her grin widens.
"And it’s a weird question, but I promise I'm not a cop."
I don’t say a word, but my hackles bristle even more.
She taps her nails on the counter, which have chipped black polish on them and bitten cuticles. I find myself relieved they’re not painted red.
"So. Your house."
My spine freezes. I let my face go to the blank setting and wait.
"I went knocking, but nobody appeared to be home," she says, friendly as arsenic. "Your house had a thing in it for years. It still has a thing in it, but now it’s different. It can leave and go to its own home, but it isn’t."
I say nothing.
"See, normally," she continues, "I don't have to do the driving-across-three-states part of the job, but a certain self-important dude with horns and an extremely bad management style has noticed that one of his, uh, long-term employees has been off the clock for a century, and he'd like a word with the thing from your house. "
I keep my face still and run through my options.
Option one: lie. Tell her I don't know what she's talking about. Play dumb. Play normal. Play the bored gas station clerk who just wants to go home and watch bad television.
Option two: call her crazy. Laugh. Ma'am, this is a Gas N' Go.
Option three—
The lights flicker, then deepen, the hum dropping an octave.
The shadow behind the beer cooler detaches from the wall.
The shadow in the corner by the hot dog roller stretches upward.
The shadow beneath the counter at my feet crawls up my legs like a familiar cat and then past my waist, past my shoulders, pouring into the air behind me like smoke from an invisible fire.
Daddy arrives.
He doesn't bother with a body. He comes as a column of cold black that rises from the floor to the ceiling tiles and bends them, frost crawling across the panels in fractal lace.
The temperature in the gas station drops thirty degrees in a breath.
The window behind the slushie machine fogs, then ices. The fluorescents buzz like wasps.
The woman doesn't flinch.
Her three men don't flinch either, but their eyes do something.
All four sets, at the same instant, flash red, a quick, bright, arterial red, there and gone.
The blond man pushes his glasses up his nose.
The muscular one rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck.
The bronze one crosses his enormous arms and settles in like he's getting comfortable for a long conversation.
Vampires.
My brain offers the word up, immediately dismisses it, then slowly reels it back in. If shadow daddies exist, why not vampires too?
Daddy growls.
The whole gas station vibrates. The chip bags rustle on their racks, the Slim Jims tremble in their plastic, and the coffee in the pot ripples like something dropped a stone in it.
The growl rolls out through the walls and into the parking lot and down the street, and somewhere in the distance a dog starts barking, and another, and another, a chain reaction of animals noticing that something has made itself known.
From next door, a police car siren pierces the air.
Eddie is working a case somewhere across town, and James is currently selling his van for a better, less pedo-looking vehicle at my request.
It’s just me and Daddy, but I’m not too worried.
One word, pressed through the bones of the building, erupts from Daddy: "STAYING."
The woman regards him coolly. She tips her head, assessing, mildly interested but unimpressed.
"Well," she says, "I'll pass that along, Azhrael. But I can't make any promises, and you should’ve just answered the door when I rang the doorbell at your house. It would have saved us both some time. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me soon.”
He knows her. Or she knows him. She used his name, his real name, like she's said it before, or said the names of a thousand things like him, and none of them scared her.
"He's mine." The words are out of me before I decide to say them.
The woman's already half turned toward the door. She stops and turns back, one eyebrow quirked.
"He helped me make this city safer," I hear myself say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like the voice I used in the basement when I killed Red Hands and Vincent. "And I won't let him go."
The shadows respond and tug at the edges of my ribs, the cold that lives in my own marrow since the pact, since I let him into me and he decided to stay.
Tendrils peel off Daddy's column and whip around me, tentacles of black that curl around my wrists, my waist, my throat like phantom jewelry.
The cold eats up into my eyes, and I can feel them go all black.
The woman regards me, indifferent, but her men close ranks around her.
"Safer, huh?" she says.
Daddy wraps himself around me, the whole column of him folding down and in, cold pouring over my shoulders like a cloak.
"MINE," he says through the walls.
"I'm Daddy's," I say, my voice both his and mine.
"Well," she says breezily, "maybe Downstairs Daddy doesn't need to know."
Behind her, the blond man makes a sound like a cat choking on a hairball. The muscular one looks at the frosted ceiling like he's begging it for strength. The giant bronze one puts a massive hand over his face.
"Jesus, Belle," the blond mutters.
"That's a phrase," the muscular one says. "That's a phrase you actually said."
"Out loud," the giant rumbles in a velvet voice that could tame snakes. "In public."
"What?" the woman says. "Downstairs Daddy might as well be his title. He'd love it. He'd put it on a plaque and make everyone call him that."
The muscular one pinches the bridge of his nose. "He absolutely would."
"For the love of all that is unholy, you can’t tell him about this," the giant warns her.
"I'm going to need a minute when we get back in the car," the blond says, pushing up his glasses. “You know, so I can scrub out my ears.”
"I think it’s kind of a brilliant nickname," the woman informs them, and then she turns back to the counter.
Her eyes land on the pickle jar I've stationed next to the register, one I bleached clean and taped a printed photo to of a certain smiling woman. The sign reads: FOR AMY. MEDICAL + RELOCATION. ANY AMOUNT HELPS.
Amy, Michael Devlin’s ex-girlfriend, is out of the hospital, but still needs physical therapy.
Her boyfriend is in the ground, burned in the house fire that James and I started.
I’ve visited her twice since Vincent’s death, and we talked for hours about the past, but we mostly focused on the future and what that might look like, for both her and for me.
The woman with the bone in her hair reads the sign, and her mouth softens so briefly I almost miss it. Then she digs in the back pocket of her jeans, pulls out a thin wallet, plucks out a folded bill, and slides it through the slot in the lid.
It's a hundred-dollar bill.
"Have a good evening, Sera," she says, her gaze dipping to the nametag on my work shirt.
She turns to leave. The men fall into formation around her. Blond on her right, muscular on her left, giant at her back. They move like a unit that has done this a long time.
"Wait," I say.
She stops at the door and looks over her shoulder, one hand on the handle.
"Who are you?" I ask.
She grins, a real one that’s sharper than anything I've seen in my mirror. "Downstairs Daddy's little errand girl."
"Slayer," the muscular one corrects. “She’s the slayer.”
The slayer… So…a vampire slayer who’s a vampire herself?
The bell over the door rings on their way out. They pour out of the gas station into the parking lot, four silhouettes loading into a black SUV that I didn't hear pull up and don't hear pull away.
Daddy is still wrapped around me. I can feel his cold in the hollow of my collarbone, in the arch of my foot, in the spaces between my teeth.
Slayer.
Vampire slayer. As in the thing that hunts them. As in the thing Downstairs Daddy apparently keeps on a leash and sends across state lines when a very old employee has gone AWOL for a very long time.
She knew his name, and she wasn't afraid of him. Her men were vampires, and she was something worse, or better, or different, and she took one look at the two of us, me and my column of dark, and decided to kick the problem back downstairs.
Maybe Downstairs Daddy doesn't need to know.
Does that mean she won’t tell? Does that mean my daddy can stay?
For some inexplicable reason, I trust she’ll keep our secret safe.