Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [104]
Sebastian wrapped the scarf that he’d brought with him around her throat to hide her wound. Then he and Eliana washed Nicole’s blood from their faces and hands. They stood side by side in the adjoining bathroom.
Back in the bedroom, he slipped a few trinkets into his pockets and grabbed a messenger bag from the closet. Eliana said nothing. She hadn’t spoken since before Nicole’s death.
“There are clothes in the closet that would fit you,” he suggested.
She changed in silence.
He took the bloodied clothes and shoved them into the bag, lifted Nicole into his arms, positioned her head, and carried her as he had done earlier. In silence, they walked downstairs and out the door. A few people watched drunkenly, but most everyone was too busy getting lost in either a body or a drink.
Eliana was more disturbed by murdering Nikki than she had been by being murdered by her—mostly because she’d enjoyed killing Nikki.
She closed the door to the house behind her. For a moment, she paused. Can I run? She didn’t know where she’d go, didn’t know anything about what she was—other than dead and monstrous. Are there limitations? There were two ways to find out if the television and book versions of vampire weaknesses were true: test them or ask.
Instead of following Sebastian, she sped up and walked beside him. “Will you answer questions?”
“Some.” He smiled. “If you stay.”
She nodded. It wasn’t anything other than what she expected, not after tonight. She walked through the streets in the remaining dark, headed back to the graveyard where she’d been murdered, escorting the corpse that she’d murdered.
Inside the graveyard, they walked to the far bottom of the hill, in the back where the oldest graves were.
Sebastian lowered Nikki to the ground in the middle of a dirt-and-gravel road in the far back of a graveyard. “Crossroads matter, Eliana.”
He pulled a long, thin blade from Nikki’s boot and slit open her stomach. He reached his whole forearm inside the body. His other hand, the one holding the knife, pressed down on Nikki’s chest, holding her still. “Until this moment, she could recover.”
Eliana said nothing, did nothing.
“But hearts matter.” He pulled his arm out, a red slippery thing in his grasp.
He tossed it to Eliana.
“That needs buried in sanctified ground, and she”—he stood, pulled off his shirt, and wiped Nicole’s blood from his arm and hand—“needs to be left at crossroad.”
Afraid that it would fall, Eliana clutched the heart in both hands. It didn’t matter, not really, but she didn’t want to drop it in the dirt. Which is where we will put it. But burying it seemed different than letting it fall on the dirt road.
Sebastian slipped something than his pocket, pried open Nikki’s mouth, and inserted it between her lips. “Wafers, holy objects of any faith, put these in the mouth. Once we used to stitch the mouth shut, too, but these days that attracts too much attention.”
“And dead bodies with missing hearts don’t?”
“They do.” He lifted one shoulder in a small shrug.
Eliana tore her gaze from the heart in her hands and asked, “But?”
“You need to know the ways to keep the dead from waking again, and I’m feeling sentimental.” He walked back toward the crypt where the rest of their clothes were, leaving her the choice to follow him or leave.
She followed him, carrying Nikki’s heart carefully.
“Killing on full or new moon matters,” he added when she caught up with him.
She nodded. The things he was telling her mattered, and she wanted to be attentive to them, but she’d just killed a person.
With his help . . . because of him . . . like an animal.
And now he was standing there shirtless and bloodied.
Is it because I slept with him? She listened to the words he said now, trying to remember the words he’d said then. Those words mattered, too. He planned this. He knew she’d kill me.