Biting Oz: Biting Love, Book 5 (40 page)

Before the applause died down at intermission, I stood. This would be the hardest sell of my life. I’d known some of these people since childhood, but thanks to Camille, they were as much strangers as the tourists. I could only hope their personality damage, without the addictive GObubbles, was reversible.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Let me introduce myself. I am Gunter Marie—”

“We know who you are, Junior,” someone yelled rudely from the bar.

“Okay. So you know me.” I blew my frustration out as a stream of air. “A lot of you know me, have known me all my life.”

“Since diapers you were wearing!” someone else shouted from the back in crude imitation of the mayor.

“Diapers.” I whirled toward the voice. “You not only know me, you know about Mayor Meier. You know everything about everyone in town, the good and the bad. Why is that?”

“Because this is Meiers Corners!” A dozen people raised beers high.

“Exactly.” I hid a grin of triumph. They’d played right into my hands.

But now came the tricky part. I tried to read faces, but thanks to Fangs To You’s goth lighting, they were only shadowy red clumps. “Could someone raise the floor lights, please?”

A moment passed, and then a moderate white light clicked on. Tables of folk blinked, shaded their eyes.

“We all know each other’s secrets.” I scanned the crowd, gauging them. “That’s one of the bad things. Change is ice-age slow. You’re remembered in your diapers, frozen forever in time. You can grow up and become a responsible adult and everyone still remembers you blowing up the toilet in ninth grade with a cherry bomb that wasn’t even yours.”

“Whose cherry bomb was it?” shouted Mrs. Gelb from the bar.

“Nix—never mind!” Sheesh. I got to the point. “There’s no place like home!”

“So why would you want to live there?” yelled Anna Versnobt from the back. Several people snickered.

“Because there are good small-town things too. People aren’t just nosy for titillation. They’re nosy because they care.”

“One good thing, whoop-di-doo,” Versnobt said.

“There’s more. We make eye contact driving at a four-way stop and wait for the other guy rather than just bulling through.”

Someone shouted, “That’s so important?”

“It is,” I shouted back, letting my anger show. “In Meiers Corners, you’re not a number in a crowd. You’re an individual
worthy of simple courtesy
.”

The laughter died.

Still, Versnobt made one last attempt. “Everybody knows everything…including crap that should stay private.”

“Meiers Corners’s greatest strength of all. Despite knowing each other’s weaknesses,
we’re friends anyway
.” I looked around the room, meeting eyes. Some slid away in shame, but I kept going.

“We know the dirt, but we’re still friends.” I thought about the Cheese Dudes that morning. “Sometimes fighting friends.”

My parents exchanged a glance.

“The point is, you’re doing it wrong. There are good and bad things about a big city, and good and bad things about a small town. If you want big city, good and bad, live in a big city. You’re just taking what’s good about Meiers Corners and corrupting it. Killing it.” I paused for effect. “We care about each other.
We love each other
. Act like it.”

Someone applauded. Anna Versnobt, of all people. Others joined her. More.

I smiled my relief. And capitalized on the moment by waving my hand toward the open cello case and its lone twenty…which was gone. Dammit, someone had stolen the seed money.

Anna Versnobt, face red, slunk up to the case and put the twenty back.

More applause broke out, harder.
 

Dumas, bless his performance timing, took that as his cue to start the second half of the show.

At the end, when Dorothy tapped her heels together and said, “There’s no place like home” I heard a few sobs.

After that, the five thousand dollars collected in the cello case seemed almost anticlimactic.

Chapter Seventeen

We were playing the bows and almost home free when the doors slammed open and thugs flooded the club. In hoodies and
Matrix
y sweeping black leather, they were dozens of the meanest vampires I’d ever seen.

I’d known Camille would call for backup, but hoped the two-hour show would be too short for the Coterie to gather help. Or no, the thug branch was called something else.

“Lestats,” Bo bellowed.

Oh yeah. The Lestats’ vampire muscle attacked with mundane switchblades and guns, but their hard-shell faces, red eyes and pointy mouths were definitely not. Audience screamed and ran. Cast, crew and pit froze at the sight of so many armed and fanged attackers. Rocky turned sheet white. Another call to Iowa would be in order.

As if the good-guy vamps had trained for it (and maybe, considering General Ancient, they had), Mishela and Gretchen’s husband Steve gathered the frozen humans and escorted them out while the remaining six Alliance vampires, in a rather compelling show of cool, clicked open switchblades and calmly met the charge.

Elena roared, “Kill the Lestats!” and threw something at Nixie before whipping out her even-way-bigger gun. Nixie caught the tube Elena threw her (was that a
bazooka
?) and, yodeling like Xena, waddled into the fray.

I knew I’d better get in there and fight because it was eight of us and thirty-plus of them with Camille and her goons. Several of the younger Lestats fell almost immediately, but the odds were still more than two to one. Besides, I needed to get my feet wet since vampire Armageddon would only be worse.

But how, without a weapon?

From what I knew, and the size of guns Elena and Nixie were wielding, vampires were hard to stop. The head-chopping Glynn had done on Shiv wasn’t easy. Necks were thin, sure, but bone and meat weren’t easy to manage on a cooked chicken, much less a raw, bloody…yeah, getting gross even for a sausage queen.

Anyway, I probably needed major equipage. Something big and scary that would cut— I snapped my fingers, remembering the extreme juggler.

I ran for the doors behind our impromptu stage. Fangs, Blood, The Dungeon and…I found the door marked Storage and flung it open.

The lights cut.

I froze. Emergency lighting clicked on, glowing softly behind me.

The storage corridor remained pitch black, except for the red exit light above me. Shoot me, I didn’t remember which door was Props. I hunted with my hand, found and flicked the light switch just in case it cued the emergency light. Nothing. I wondered if the blackout was coincidental or a tactic by Camille to gain the upper hand. The vampires might not care much, but Elena and Nixie would definitely be at a disadvantage.

And me.

Still, I’d be helpless without a weapon. I inched in as far as I could without closing the outer door. Still couldn’t see, so with a deep breath I let go. The door swung shut with a fatal-sounding clang.

In the dark, all sounds intensify. My rasping breath filled my ears. The whoosh of my speeding heart thundered. The adrenaline pumping through my system didn’t make it any easier to think. Air circulation was nonexistent. Sweat popped on my scalp, trickled between my breasts. I tried to picture where the doors were through the rush of blood but couldn’t.

I took a deep breath, pressing it out slowly to ease my heart rate.
Thumpity-thump
slowed from hummingbird to chicken.

Outside, the sound of fighting seemed closer, the defenders falling back. Not good. Ready or not, I had to move. I took a step.

And promptly went sprawling over sharp cardboard edges. Pain nicked my shins, my flailing palms. A thud, followed by a muffled crash-tinkle-tinkle and the sting of liquor biting my nostrils told me the bottles weren’t packaged nearly as well as our sausage. Hopefully only the cheap stuff had spilled.

Very
hopefully it wasn’t the “Bomb your blood!” Vamka. I’d looked up mannitol hexanitrate. It was a vasodilator for heart conditions, which explained the blood part of the slogan. But the bomb part was quite literal too. Mannitol hexanitrate was an active ingredient in explosives.

I righted myself. Waving my hands in front of me, I advanced again, bumping another stack of boxes with a more expensive-sounding crash before finally hitting a door.

My hands slid down and found knob. I twisted it and cracked the door, was overjoyed to see dim emergency light, just enough to make out the cases marked Gorgon’s Ola—I was nasally sucker-punched.

“Piquantly Pungent” my ass. This stink was Limburger eaten by a skunk and excreted into a vat of cow farts. In fact it smelled like—I mentally slapped forehead. GObubbles, G-O as in tiny chips off the old Gorgon’s Ola block. My eyes were watering from the fumes. I breathed through my mouth and my tongue started to bleed. Not really, but in massive quantities the stuff wasn’t enticing in the least, but toxic with a capital Ick. I couldn’t imagine how it was the Cheese Dudes’ big seller unless they used it as paint stripper.

I backed out and slammed the door. I needed to destroy that stuff. I mean, what if the military got hold of it? Or worse yet, LLAMA? Cow-fart cheese balls with a hallucinogenic side effect? Definitely Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The fighting was rattle-me loud. Okay, destroy killer cheese later, hunt weapon now. I felt along the wall for the next door, knocked into another stack and nearly puked at the
crash tinkle
. I hate the sound of product breaking. To a retailer, it’s as bad as car metal crunching. So I was inordinately grateful when I located a knob, opened the door and saw The Chainsaw.

It was in back, resting on the top shelf of a rack full of juggling saws, just under the emergency light. Huge, gleaming, The Chainsaw was the kind of equipage that conjured up a full soundtrack of messily dying violins.

I ran in, wrestled over a ladder, clambered up it, grabbed that sucker and raised it high. Now I’d get me some vampires. Bone and meat was easy with this little—I lowered it and took a gander at its label. Well, talk about things going my way. With this little FRDe 5000.

Hugging Freddy, I started out, realized I’d be blind in the corridor again unless I could prop the door open and went back to deposit Freddy on his shelf. Back at the door, I popped it open with my hip and scanned the hallway for something to…hell.

The boxes I’d knocked into had been a tiny bit bigger and an eensy mite fuller than I’d thought.

Liquor streamed from broken bottles, pooling on the floor. Soaked bottom boxes sagged, stacks of product leaning like old drunks. Oily strings of vampire rotgut glistened malevolently on liquid and cardboard. Without fresh air, the alcoholic fumes topped by residue de stinkbomb was overwhelming. Feeling faint, I dropped my head to my knees.

Naturally that was when the battle broke through the outer door.

Clawing, yowling, stabbing vampires rolled in, red eyes flaming and talons slashing. The shrieking balls of destruction were headed straight for me.

I jerked up. Ran for Freddy. The door swung shut behind me.

It slammed opened. I spun.

Oh, God.

The dark form of a vampire filled the door, eyes glowing red, huge chest sawing like bellows.

I was too far from the chainsaw. I was going to die.

The vampire spoke. “What the
hell
are you still doing here?”

Blessedly, thankfully, stuff-my-heart-back-down-my-throat, it was
Glynn
. My first reaction was to leap for him and throttle him with a hug.

But the way he reached for me, he was going to grab me and skedaddle.
Not
going to happen. I was born to carve up vampires and this was my chance.

I swayed just out of reach. Faked right, then scrambled up the ladder. Or more staggered, since I was still under the effect of fumes so toxic my brain was slime, but I managed to snag Freddy and yank the starter rope just as Glynn shimmered to my side.

He scowled great thunderstorms at me. “What the fuck is that?”

I swung it up to show him—and shoved a couple hundred rotating steel teeth of death right in his face. He gave an infinitesimal flinch. Oops, but that flinch proved I could do some vampire hurt. I grinned. “It’s a chainsaw.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m going to decapitate vampires.”

“The hell you are.” His tone was quite mild, but his teeth were clenched.

“No, really, I am. Elena has a huge gun and Nixie has a bazooka. I’m going to use Freddy here. Zip, zip.” I demonstrated with a figure eight, nearly slicing off both his arms and my leg. He was nimble; I was just lucky.

“Junior.” His mouth clamped so tight his fangs drilled holes in his lower lip. “Guns and bazookas kill from a distance.
You
would have to get close. As a human, that’s not possible.”

I considered that. “You could get me close though, right?”

Blood trickled from his lip. I could practically hear enamel cracking.

“Please?” I batted my eyelashes. When that ad campaign didn’t work, I turned off Freddy. I needed better marketing.

One-handed, I lifted my top.