Authors: Jeri Smith-Ready
We stride down the walk, passing sample headstones of every size, shape, and shade,
all engraved with
MILLER
(the most common surname in this county, on account of all the mills). We’re too
close to the small brick building now to see if Captains Fox and Henley and Agent
Rosso have arrived. We’ll have to trust them.
Shane crosses the threshold first, stopping to check for an ambush behind the door.
But everyone’s inside: Kashmir, Billy, Bruce, and Leon.
And my mom, gagged and bound to a chair by her arms and ankles.
I run toward her. I can’t help it.
Kashmir grabs me by the throat, in a movement so deft, it was as if he were picking
up a saltshaker. He swings me backward, into Billy’s arms. Bruce and Leon seize Shane,
and just like that, Kashmir and the Magnificent Seven Minus Four have three hostages.
This is part of the plan,
I remind myself. I force my breath to stay steady.
But that breath brings one distinct scent that floods my brain and sears my veins.
Blood.
Not from my mother, though the rope is scraping her ankles. This is from a wound that
must have flowed like a waterfall. It’s all over Billy behind me—his mouth and neck.
In the far corner of the shop lies a shadow. A hand pokes out of the shadow, palm
up, fingers curled limply. As my eyes adjust, I see a dark-haired middle-aged human
man. A mustache, a checkered shirt.
Johnny Crosetti.
Billy killed him in front of my mother. By the pool spread around Crosetti, already
drying, it looks like he did it by tearing out his throat.
“Mom, I’m sorry.”
“She didn’t know about vampires, did she?” Kashmir goes to the worktable to her left,
where a large stone slab is sitting faceup. “Shame she had to find out this way.”
“Why’d you have to kill him?”
“Once he let us in and showed us how to work the equipment, we didn’t need him anymore.
With him here, it was too many people to keep track of. A tactical risk.” He smiles
past me. “Besides, Billy was thirsty.”
Billy chuckles into my hair. It tickles and makes me want to shove an elbow through
his solar plexus. But it’s too soon to start a fight.
Shane speaks first. “Jim was my friend, too. I didn’t want to kill him. I had to.”
“You don’t know anything about Jim.” Kashmir caresses the smooth granite slab. I strain
to see the name engraved on it.
JAMES ESPOSITO, JR.
Below his name are three dates: his birth, his turning, and his final death.
Kashmir’s face is reflected in the shining gray stone, but the dark mottled surface
of the slab erases the reflection of his teardrop scar, as if it doesn’t exist in
more than one reality. “Did you know that graphite and diamonds are chemically identical?”
he asks me.
“Graphite is like coal, right?” I remember the line from that ’80s movie
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,
something about Cameron, one of the characters, being “so tight, if you shoved a
lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.” Shane is probably thinking
the same thing, since it’s one of his favorite movies, and
why am I thinking about this now?
The vampiric compulsions are not serving me well at the moment.
“The word ‘graphite’ comes from the Latin
graph,
meaning to draw,” Kashmir continues. “These days, only four percent of graphite is
used to make the thing we draw with most.” He slides open a shallow drawer in the
small table nearby and pulls out . . .
. . . a single, sharpened pencil.
“Funny thing about graphite. It’s so very soft. To keep it in one piece, it must be
encased in wood.” He gazes at the tip in wonder, eyes softening. “Such a simple implement,
to cause so much pain. Shane McAllister, did you ever wonder why wood through the
heart can kill a vampire?”
Shane remains still and silent, held tight by his two captors. Only his chest rises
and falls with his steady, rapid breath.
Finally he says, “It’s life. Literally.”
Kashmir blinks slowly. “That’s my guess as well.
When our hearts are pierced by life, they cry out in joy, recognizing all they’ve
lost. And a moment later the wood leaves us, and our hearts shriek. We turn inside
out with sorrow. But for that one beautiful moment”—he taps the pencil point against
his own chest—“our hearts are home.”
He’s dropped the Big Bad Villain façade and looks like any other sad, vulnerable young
man who’s lost the most important person in the world.
“But Jim didn’t have that beauty for just one moment. Six months he lived with wood
inside him. It was agony, he said in his letters. Every time his heart beat, he’d
feel the press of the earth’s life.”
His words weave a sticky web of melancholy around my mind, like an early Leonard Cohen
album played on repeat.
“One other thing you don’t know.” Kashmir turns the pencil over and over in his fingers.
“That life and pain in his heart changed him. It changed him for good.”
23
No Sunlight
A chill runs over my entire body, like someone’s drawing a chalk outline around my
corpse. “ ‘Changed him’?”
“Not metaphysically. It’s not as if he became alive and human again. But it made him
what you would call a better man.”
“What are you talking about?” Shane says, low and threatening. The vampires holding
him tighten their grips.
“Adrian told me you wondered how Jim escaped a maximum-security facility. You thought
someone in the Control must have helped us get him out. Adrian didn’t have the heart
to tell you the truth.” Kashmir twirls the pencil among his fingers as he speaks,
faster and faster. “Jim was still in custody as punishment for what he’d done to you,
Ciara. But he was making progress. He’d earned his way to minimum security. Breaking
him out was a piece of cake.”
“Are you saying Jim was being rehabilitated? That when he got out, he wasn’t coming
for us?”
“Oh, he was coming for you, all right. To make
amends.” He says the last word with a curl in his lips. “Rather weak of him, if you
ask me. Between your stupid radio station and his time with the Control, he’d become
a shadow of himself. But your boyfriend didn’t save you by killing Jim. He didn’t
save anything at all.”
His eyes slide over to meet Shane’s, and they share a long look of grief. Then Kashmir’s
harden to flint. In a flash he flings the pencil across the room. My strangled shriek
mixes with my mom’s.
Shane gapes down at his chest, where the pencil protrudes just below his collarbone.
Too high.
Kashmir opens the drawer wider and withdraws an entire handful of pencils. “Maybe
I’ll take better aim this time.” He throws another pencil, plunging the orange spear
two inches deep into the flesh near Shane’s armpit. “Or the next.”
Shane grunts as each pencil strikes his chest. When it’s all over, they form a heart-shaped
ring around his heart. From here I can’t tell if any struck home.
Kashmir turns to the wide, empty table beside him, its surface made of metal rollers
instead of flat wood. A blue steel beam arches over the table, leaving a clearance
of at least a foot, enough room for a headstone to lie underneath. An object extends
from the beam, covered by a dust-resistant tarp.
“As I was saying before, graphite is soft, a one or a two on the hardness scale. But
its chemical twin, the diamond, is a ten. Diamonds are the only stone that can cut
every other stone.” He switches on a work light above the machine, then gently takes
off the cover to reveal what looks like a rotary saw. The teeth of its blade glisten
in the light. “Diamond can cut granite, marble, slate.
Even vampire flesh, which sometimes feels as tough as stone.”
He reaches for the machine’s switch. The blade shrieks to life. Kashmir grips the
handle and looks at my mother.
“No!” I slam my heel into Billy’s shin and twist my body. He curses in pain, almost
letting go. To my left, my mother screams, and to my right, Shane shouts and curses,
held tight by Bruce and Leon.
Billy secures his grip again and walks me forward toward Kashmir. He forces me to
my knees in front of the table, then grasps my wrist and extends my right arm. I gasp
with relief when I realize it’s me who’ll get cut and not Mom, and it’ll be my hand
instead of my head. For now, at least.
Kashmir takes my hand in his, binding my four fingers together. “You’d be better off
holding still.”
“Mom, don’t look!” I slam my own eyes shut as she screams.
“Nooooooooo!”
The blade is so sharp, I don’t feel it sever my thumb. There’s just a slight tug,
then the splatter of blood on my forehead and the bridge of my nose. Shane’s roar
of anger turns to a gurgle as someone chokes him.
Mom shrieks and bangs her feet against the chair. Kashmir holds up my hand for her
to see. A few seconds later, when my blood stops flowing and the skin heals over my
wound, she goes deathly silent. There’s no sound but the whir of the diamond-bladed
stonecutter as she looks at my hand, then at me.
“Ciara?”
She faints, thankfully, before he starts on my other
fingers. Before my endorphin rush expends itself and the bone-rippling pain sets in.
Before I start to scream.
At least we were right: he wanted to torture us first. He wouldn’t give us the mercy
of a quick death like Shane gave Jim last week. Though even that may not have been
mercy. If Kashmir was telling the truth, Shane killed a repentant man.
Through the red haze of agony I see a shadow move over the floor of the back room.
Under the shouts of Shane, I hear the click of a loaded crossbow.
Kashmir hears it, too, but too late.
An arrow whistles above my head, shot by Agent Rosso from the rear doorway. Billy
seizes and shudders, then drops my arm. When he falls beside me, I yank the arrow
from his chest with my left hand. I don’t wait to see if he’s been hit in the heart
but instead launch to my feet, flinging blood over the machine and Kashmir and the
wall behind him.
Elijah picks up my unconscious mother, chair and all. “Come on, Griffin.”
Kashmir jumps between us, but Elijah shoves him away with the legs of Mom’s chair.
Her limbs flop at the impact, but she seems otherwise unharmed.
Henley has reached Shane already, and the two of them are fighting with Bruce and
Leon.
“Griffin, move out!” Agent Rosso holds Kashmir at bay with a holy-water pistol. “You
and Fox take your mom. We’ll follow!”
I can’t bear to leave Shane, but Kashmir’s severed all but my pinky from my right
hand. I can’t hold a weapon, much less throw a punch.
I lurch out the door after Elijah, then pass him on
the walkway, leaping over headstones like hurdles so I can get to the car first and
open the back door for him.
Somehow he angles Mom’s chair to fit her in. The sky is getting scary light now.
I point to it with my intact left hand. “What do we do?”
He checks his watch as he opens the driver’s-side door. “Plenty of time to get to
the station. Too dangerous to stay here.”
We climb into the car, which still has the keys in the ignition, and peel out of the
parking lot. I feel like I’m leaving my own heart behind with Shane, but we have to
save my mom.
I watch Crosetti’s Monuments disappear in my side-view mirror, then awkwardly pull
my cell phone out of my right jacket pocket with my left hand. “Come on, baby. Call
me.”
“He will.”
“If he’s alive.”
“Henley and Rosso got it in hand. Speaking of which . . .” He nods at the bloody mess
at the end of my right wrist. “How’s that feel?”
“Better than it did a few minutes ago, when I thought I’d lose all ten.” The adrenaline
surge is starting to fade, and the chills are beginning. “I guess you know how it
feels, after that zombie ripped your arm off.”
My mother moans in the backseat, tipped over on her side. I probably shouldn’t have
mentioned that in front of her.
“Mom, just hang in there. We’ll untie you when we get to the station.”
“Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine. Ish. Fine-ish.” I wipe as much blood as I can from my hand, but smearing
it on my jeans doesn’t help my claims of fine-ishness.
Just as our car turns onto the long gravel driveway to the station, my phone rings.
Shane’s number.
Please be him and not Kashmir calling to gloat over his death.
“Shane?”
“We made it.”
“Oh, thank God.” I put the phone to my chest and yell at Elijah. “Slow down! If you
go too fast on this driveway, you’ll break the car and we’ll be stuck.”
“Okay, okay.”
I put the phone back to my ear. “All three of you are safe?”
“Yeah,” Shane pants. “But dammit, we were only able to stake Bruce. Kashmir and Leon
got away with Billy. It looked like his wound wasn’t fatal.”
“What about yours? The pencils in your chest?”
“Gone. Hurt like a motherfucker, but they all missed. On purpose, I guess. Anyway,
I gotta drive. I’ll see you in a minute.”
We hang up. After a moment of no sound but the gravel banging on the undercarriage
and the squeak of shock absorbers, my mother says one word softly.
“Surprise.”
• • •
A few minutes later, we’re safely indoors with my mother untied. David’s applying
an ice pack to her swollen, bruised ankle, while Monroe wraps my disaster of a hand
with a bandage. Regina’s pacing by the front door, muttering, “Drive faster, Shane.”
I wonder how many months or years it’ll take for my fingers to grow back. At least
they left me the hand that holds my engagement ring, and someday soon a wedding band.
Assuming Shane survives the next ten minutes.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Marjorie yells.
“Mom, I promise I’ll explain everything once we get past this. But the short version
is, everyone in this room except David is a vampire, including me.”
Her jaw looks permanently agape. “Which one is David again?”