Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [96]
I kicked the ball as hard as I could. It soared up into the air and Noah caught it, in his hands, like a goalie. He looked at me, still holding up the ball like an idiot, and he was crying. They cry blood. It doesn’t look nice. They look like monsters when they cry.
“So,” I said. “Hudson Bay.”
Transition
by Melissa Marr
TOMORROW
Sebastian lowered the body 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 and slit open the stomach. He reached his whole forearm inside the body. His other hand, the one holding the knife, pressed down on her chest. “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 the 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 from letting it fall on the dirt road.
Sebastian slipped something from his pocket, pried open the corpse’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, 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.
TODAY
“Back later,” Eliana called as she slipped out the kitchen door. The screen door slammed behind her, and the porch creaked as she walked over it. Sometimes she thought her aunt and uncle let things fall into disrepair because it made it impossible to sneak in—or out—of the house. Of course, that would imply that they noticed if she was there.
Why should they be any different from anyone else?
She went over to a sagging lawn chair that sat in front of a kiddie pool in their patchy grass. Her cousin’s kids had been there earlier in the week, and no one had bothered to put the pool back inside the shed yet. The air was sticky enough that filling it up with the hose and lying out under the stars didn’t sound half bad.
Except for the part where I have to move.
Eliana closed her eyes and leaned her head back. One of the headaches she’d been having almost every day the past couple months played at the edge of her eye. The doctor said they were migraines or stress headaches or maybe a PMS thing. She didn’t care what they were, just that they stop, but the pills he gave her didn’t help that much—and were more money than her aunt felt like paying for all the good they did.
On to Plan B: self-medicate.
She tucked up her skirt so it didn’t drag in the mud, propped her boots on the end of the kiddie pool, and noticed another bruise on her calf. The bruises and the headaches scared her, made her worry that there was something really wrong with her, but no one else seemed to think it was a big deal.
She closed her eyes and waited for her medicine to arrive.
“Why are you sleeping out here?” Gregory glanced back at her empty front porch. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She blinked a few times and looked at him. “Just another headache. What time is it?”
“I’m late, but”—he took her hands and pulled her to her feet—“I’ll make it up to you. I have a surprise.”
He’d