Part 13 (2/2)
She pushed away and twisted up a handful of his s.h.i.+rt-front as he gasped for breath.
”Rawr!” she rawred.
”I missed you,” said Foo.
”Your suffering has only begun,” Abby said. She wore a red tartan miniskirt over a black leotard with a low swooping neckline, a spiked dog collar, and her lime-green Converse Chuck Taylors, which she sometimes referred to as her ”forbidden love Chucks” for no reason that he could ever figure out.
”You're kind of crus.h.i.+ng my ribs.”
”That is because I am nosssssss-feratu and my powers are legion and stuff! Tres Tres cool, huh?” cool, huh?”
Foo realized then that she had actually done it-she had somehow managed to change herself into a vampire. Her nose, eyebrow, and lip rings were gone, the piercings healed. The spider tattoo on her neck was gone as well. ”How?” he asked, immediately trying to calculate her odds of survival. He'd talked to her yesterday on the phone and he was sure she would have mentioned the transition if she'd made it already, so she was in her first twenty-four hours. She might still be one of the ones who went insane and self-destructed, and even though Abby was short neither on insanity or self-destruction, it didn't mean he shouldn't try to save her.
She kissed him again, hard, and as nice as it felt, he was hyper aware of whether she had broken the skin on his lips, or hers. So far, so good. She pushed him back, but then caught the back of his head again so it didn't bang the floor. She actually seemed a little more considerate now that she was dead, although not that much quieter.
”Be patient, my love ninja, I will use you like the delicious manga-haired man-wh.o.r.e that you are, but first we have to try out my powers. Let some of the rats out of their cages and I will command them with my vampire psychic thoughts. I'll see if I can get them to clean the kitchen.”
Okay, maybe they weren't out of the insanity woods quite yet, Foo thought. He said, ”Yes, and then we'll see if we can get bluebirds to tie a ribbon in your hair.”
”Snark not, Foo! You must obey me! I am the Countess Abigail Von Normal, queen b.i.t.c.h of the night, and you are my groveling s.e.x slave!”
”Are you a countess or a queen? You said both.”
”Shut up, grommet, before I suck you dry!”
”Okay,” said Foo. A wise man picks his battles.
”Not that way, Foo. I mean that I will dominate you and you will do my bidding!”
”Which will be different from any other day, how?”
”Cease your ba.n.a.lity and nerdardious questions, Foo. You are totally hars.h.i.+ng my heady power over the night.”
”It sounds like you bought a flashlight.”
”That's it. I am going to beat your ninja a.s.s.” She leapt off of him and made the ”crouching tiger, rip your heart out” kung-fu posture that everyone who has seen a martial arts movie knows.
”Wait! Wait! Wait!”
”'Kay,” said Abby, relaxing to the much less dangerous ”slouching tiger chillin' with a bag of Cheetos” stance, which is known by all who have ever snacked.
”You need to feed, get your strength up first,” said Foo. ”You're a vampire noob. You need to grow into your powers.”
”Ha,” said Abby. ”You speak like a mortal who can't possibly grasp the depth of the dark gift. I jumped over a car on the way here. And I totally ran faster than the F train. My Chucks are still warm with residual speediness. Go ahead, feel them. Lick them, if you must. Even now I can see this aura thing around you, which is like bright pink, and doesn't go with your fly hair and manly bulge.”
Foo looked down. Yes, his bulge was betraying him. He said, ”You should take it slow, Abby.”
”Oh yeah, watch this!” In an instant she was across the loft at the kitchen counter, and in another instant she had shot back across the living room and hit the plywood covering the windows.
There was nothing Foo could do. She might have lifted the couch, leapt up fifteen feet, and grabbed the open ceiling beams, or even turned to mist, if she'd figured out how to do that, but what she had decided to do to show her powers was blast through the quarter-inch plywood and land catlike on the street below. And that would have been bada.s.s, to be sure.
What Abby didn't know was that while she'd been gone, the window guy had called, and he wouldn't be able to come out to fix the windows for two weeks, so Foo had replaced the quarter-inch plywood with three-quarter-inch plywood, and instead of it just being tacked at the corners with small nails, he had screwed it down with stainless-steel screws, so as not to leave any vapor gaps for the rats to make an escape.
Foo cringed and covered his eyes.
She was fast, and preternaturally strong, but ninety pounds of vampire is still only ninety pounds.
Did she hit the plywood Wile E. Coyote style, then slide down? Wah-wah-wah. Oh no.
She hit the plywood, which bent precipitously, then splintered a bit before springing back and rocketing her all the way across the loft to the back wall, and there, she made a pet.i.te Goth girl impression in the sheet rock before falling forward, flat on her face, and saying, ”f.u.c.ksocks,” into the rug.
”You okay?” asked Foo.
”Broken,” said Abby into the rug.
He knelt over her, afraid to turn her head to see what damage she might have done. ”What's broken?”
”Everything.”
”I'll get you some blood out of the fridge. You should heal pretty fast.”
”'Kay,” said Abby, still face-down, not having moved since the initial impact. ”Don't look at me, okay?”
”No way,” said Foo, already in the kitchen. He took one of the plastic pouches of blood from the fridge and worked it back and forth. ”Just a second. Don't move, Abs, you might have broken bones.” He quick-stepped into the bedroom, grabbed a capped syringe off the cabinet where he kept the chemicals, flipped off the cap, and injected the sedative into the bag.
”Here you go, baby. Just drink this and you'll be fine.”
Ten minutes later he heard someone coming up the stairs and realized that Abby had forgotten to lock the door.
Jared bounded into the loft, stopped when he saw Foo kneeling over the prostrate Abby, who had a sizable pool of blood around her head, and began screaming.
”Stop screaming!” barked Foo. ”It's not her blood.”
Jared stopped screaming. ”What did you do to her?”
”Nothing, she's fine. Would you move the maze off the bed and help me get her in there?”
Sometime during the debacle, Abby's skirt had flipped up and Jared pointed at an oblong lump that ran across her bottom and partly down her leg under the black leotard.
”What's that? Did she p.o.o.p herself?”
”No,” said Foo, wis.h.i.+ng he didn't know what it was, but he had already checked for himself. ”It's a tail.”
”Whoa. Weird.”
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