A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [73]
“So how was it supposed to be?” she asked from just behind the girl’s left shoulder.
Ren flinched but kept her gaze locked on the road outside the entrance to their shelter. “How was what supposed to be?”
“This. You told me that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. So . . . ?”
“It was supposed to be . . .” She swiped at her cheek with the palm of her left hand. “I thought it said, it was the home we always wanted.”
Vicki waited.
“My grandma died,” Ren continued after a moment. “I hadn’t seen her since we moved to Toronto, like four years ago, but she wanted me to have her Bible. My mom, she checked to make sure there wasn’t any money in it but totally missed this piece of stuff like leather that had writing on it. Probably because it was in Greek and my mom never learned to read Greek. My grandma taught me when I was little.” She paused to swallow a sob and rub her nose against her sleeve before repeating, “I thought it said this was the home we always wanted.”
“What was wrong with the homes you had?” The look Ren shot her suggested she not be an idiot as clearly as if the girl had said the words out loud. “So no one cared that you were sneaking out at night?” None of the kids looked like they’d been starved or beaten but Vicki knew that didn’t have to mean anything as far as indicators of abuse went. “And no one’s going to care if you never make it back?”
Ren snorted. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Actually . . .” Vicki didn’t bother finishing and Ren clearly didn’t need her to.
“This is my fault. I told them about this. I convinced them to come.”
“You didn’t force them to come here.”
“I didn’t tell them we were coming here.”
“True.”
“You’re not very comforting.”
“Not my . . .”
The skittering returned.
Pulling Mike’s Glock from where she’d tucked it up against the small of her back, Vicki whirled and blew the head off something that looked like a cross between a rat and a rottweiler seconds before it took a bite out of Star’s leg.
“. . . job,” she finished, ignoring Ren’s scream in favor of grabbing the rat thing by the tail, carrying it outside, and whipping it about forty meters back toward the flock of scavengers. On her way back inside, she scooped up a double handful of gray sand from where the building met the road.
She could feel Ren watching her as she scattered the sand over the blood and brain spatter on the floor.
“You have a gun. What kind of vampire carries a gun?”
“One that’d like to keep us all alive until morning,” Vicki told her, rejoining her at the door. With any luck the bang had scared off the rat things and hadn’t attracted anything else. “The gun’s Detective Celluci’s. He must’ve tossed it through as the portal was closing.”
They turned together to face back down the road where the arc of ribs stripped clean of flesh gleamed in the spaces between the black birds.
Vicki could hear Ren’s heartbeat and breathing speed up. “We’re never going back, are we?”
“Please.” Given the light levels, Vicki made sure the eyeroll could be heard in her tone as she stretched the truth a bit. “This isn’t our first portal; Mike’ll work it out.”
“The cop?”
“He’s got resources.” He’d probably been on the phone to Tony before Vicki’d hit the ground on the other side and Tony’d know how to fix this. Tony had to know how to fix this.
“But he’s a real cop?”
“He is.”
“And you’re a real vampire?”
“I am.”
“Oh man, that’s totally like a bad romance novel!” And this time, Vicki could hear the eyeroll in Ren’s voice.
She grinned, thinking of Henry. “Kid, you don’t know the half of it.”
Something skittered in the background but didn’t come close enough to shoot. Ren’s shoulder pressed up against hers, although Vicki doubted the girl had consciously