In The Echo - Sierra Aguirre-Stoker, Pete Jemison, Shane Barrett

“How long has she been like this?”
“Maybe two days.” Pete’s sister looks almost as haggard as the five year old in the blanket burrito on the couch. “They were all out playing in the snow, you remember.”
Sierra certainly does. She’d holed up inside, in a stolen sweater from Pete’s mother and a mug of coffee in her hands, while Pete ran around with his nieces and nephews acting like three inches of snow was the best thing since garlic toast.
Everyone except the California and Texas visitors had seemed thrilled that they might actually have a white Christmas this year.
Now, there’s only one thing any of them are wishing for.
“Was she ever out of your sight?” Sierra asks.
“We were playing snow forts, she was hiding for a while but everyone was hiding from Linc’s slush-balls.” Pete shakes his head. “We were in and out of the tree line, but it was still so light out I never really thought…”
“What kind of monster bites a five year old kid?” Shay’s voice is too loud in the small cabin, and everyone flinches collectively.
“One that’s about to find out they picked on the wrong child.” Sierra pulls out her phone. “No way can we wait for backup from Gatlinburg.” She quickly texts Lawson the basics. Venom poisoning in a five year old, suspected to be a couple days old, vitals and temperature rapidly dropping.
The post-infection mortality rate in anyone under ten is a glaring seventy-four percent. Sierra’s pretty sure Pete’s already running the additional numbers for his niece in his head. Size matters, and she’s petite.
Whatever result he gets from his mental math, it won’t be good.
Sierra’s phone pings with an incoming message.
I’ll take care of things with Gatlinburg. Find that vampire.
Sierra and her team might get in trouble for operating in another agency’s jurisdiction, but there will be no repercussions for what they’re actually going to do. Any vampire who infects a minor, intentionally or not, is unilaterally staked. Even with new trial requirements, this exemption still stands. There’s no time to waste when a vulnerable life is on the line, one where every minute counts.
Which means they need answers. Now.
“For her not to say anything about it…” Sierra looks at Anna. “Does Rosie normally get really upset if she’s hurt, or is she quiet about things?”
“She’s always calm, but she never doesn’t come to me if she gets stung by a bee or a thorn in her foot,” Anna says. “If she was bitten, I would have expected her to tell someone.”
“Then either she’s been so numbed by the saliva she never felt it, or she didn’t think she needed to tell anyone.”
“For a vampire to bite her it had to get close. But we’ve always told Rosie to be careful of strangers.” Anna’s husband, Dale, says, hands on his wife’s shoulders. “Even out here, things happen.”
“Then it’s someone she knew. Someone she trusted.”
No one mentions the elephant in the room. Or rather, the vampire.
“She was always talking about her imaginary friend. Tobias. She started right after she first went to school. First I thought he was a classmate, but she kept saying such strange things, about him talking to ravens and making fog in his hands, I decided she’d invented him.” Anna wrings her hands together, her face set in the same distressed frown Sierra sees on Pete a little too often. It’s usually my fault, too. “Maybe he wasn’t actually someone she made up.”
“Does she play outside after dark?”
“She likes to catch fireflies,” Dale says. “But she was always with our dog. Rex was old, but he would have protected her from anything.” He shakes his head. “She hasn’t been out without him since we lost him in October. She took it hard.”
Maybe the dog didn’t see the vampire as a threat. Some animals react badly to them, but others tolerate or even actively befriend them. Sierra swears every stray cat in a four block radius from the apartment knows Shay.
“Can you tell me about this Tobias?” Pete asks his niece, voice level.
Rosie’s voice is shaky, but her eyes are clear, even as she shudders and burrows deeper into the quilt wrapped around her. “He’s tall. Like him.” She points to Shay.
For a split second, Sierra thinks Pete’s whole family, maybe Pete included, is going to turn on Shay, accuse him of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, gaining their trust only to stalk their children in the night.
Then she remembers that all three of them were in LA over the past few months, when this Tobias was luring Rosie in.
You’re being paranoid. Not everyone thinks of Shay as a monster first and a person second.
Rosie’s eyes start to flutter closed, and Pete gently twines his fingers into her cold, bluish ones. The two tiny pinpricks visible on her wrist are scarlet now. “Anything else about him? Anything at all?”
“He lives in the Echo.”
Sierra glances at Pete. “The Echo?”
“It’s an old mine in the holler. If you yelled in it, it would echo back to you, so that’s what the kids always called it.”
“Could someone have been buried in there?”
“Maybe in the cave-in.” Mrs. Jemison says. “Ten years ago, the mine collapsed when some high schoolers were inside partying. Three kids died, and what was left of the mine was so dangerous that no rescue crew was ever even sent to recover bodies. Almost no one goes around there anymore because they claim it’s haunted by those dead teenagers.”
“Well, it might be by at least one of them.” Shay frowns. “One must have been infected. When he died, he turned in there, and that’s his home earth.”
“So that’s where we need to go.” Pete stands up. “This is what I do for a living. We’ll get him.”
Sierra says what she’s fairly sure the rest of her team is thinking. “He could come back for her.” That kind of long-term grooming suggests a sire who chose a victim carefully. Someone who might be intending to welcome a new member into a coven.
Pete wordlessly hands his sister a wooden stake. Anna stares at it like he’s given her a venomous snake, but then Serena takes it from her and tucks it into the waistband of her jeans with a small nod.
“Shouldn’t she be in a hospital?” One of the twins (Sierra still can’t tell them apart) says. She knows one of them is Mark and one is Matt, but even though Pete’s told her everything about his brothers three times over on stakeouts, she can’t remember which of them is going to Chapel Hill and which just got in from Vanderbilt. If she could, the school spirit sweatshirts would tell her who she’s listening to.
“They’ll put her straight in an isolation ward. She’ll be cut off from every reason to keep fighting to stay alive,” Shay says. “If you want the best chance, she should be with her family. If she gives up, it’s over.”
Sierra nods. “There’s nothing a hospital can do for her now that you can’t. Keep her warm, try and keep her awake and talking.” She checks her phone. “We’ve got four hours to sunset. Pete, how far is the Echo?”
“About an hour and a half by truck. It’s a roundabout way but we’d be slower on foot through the hills.”
Sierra nods, reaching for her coat. And gloves. And scarf. And hat.
Pete tugs a green Carhartt jacket over his flannel shirt and digs a pair of yellow work gloves from the pockets, scattering an assortment of wire nuts, screws, and Bit-O-Honey wrappers on the floor as he does. He grabs a set of keys off the wall rack, to what must be the pickup parked nose-in to the split rail fence by the barn, given that it’s the only key here without some sort of electronic attachment to the key.
Sierra turns to Shay, who’s putting on his own (well, not actually his, it used to belong to Pete’s dad) coat.
“We’ll find the vamp that did this. You keep her alive.”
“Why me?”
“Because right now, Pete needs to be doing something or he’ll go crazy, and you know that borderland better than anyone else. Keep her with us. Buy us some time.”
Pete’s mother stops him with a hand on his shoulder as he opens the door.
“What happens if she…”
“She’ll turn.” The harsh truth hangs like smoke in the still room.
“The worst thing we can do is give up,” Shay says, then smiles, as bright and wide as he can without the fangs looking scary. He turns to Rosie.
“What’s your absolutely favorite Christmas song ever?”
“Can you sing the hippopotatamus?”
“Only if you don’t mind me switching to another song halfway through because I really don’t remember the real words.” He turns to Serena. “I think we could all use some hot chocolate. And I know how to make a great gingerbread house. I used to be in construction. You want to learn how to make a really good one that won’t fall over?”
Rosie nods.
“Then we will make the sturdiest gingerbread house in Mill Creek, Tennessee, while your uncle and Sierra go out for a bit, okay?”
Rosie smiles, a weak imitation of the real thing, but it’s something.
Pete opens the door and flinches back instinctively from the swirl of snow that whips inside the moment he does. Somewhere in the past half-hour, the weather has turned. This isn’t a pretty, picturesque drifting of flakes like it was two days ago. It’s a raw, lashing wind driving gusts of icy shards in front of it. There’s already a fresh half-inch on the driveway.
“This wasn’t supposed to come until tomorrow,” Pete says. “It’s going to get ugly.”
“It’s also going to kill our daylight.”
“And our road.” Pete looks from the truck to the end of the driveway. “That’s not a good drive at the best of times.”
Sierra follows him across the yard to the truck, tightening her scarf around her neck and pressing her hands to the heating vents as soon as Pete turns the engine over. This is going to suck. But they have no choice.
The road to the Echo is little more than a two-track rutted path through the hills. The snow is drifted axle-high in places, and even the pickup’s engine is straining. Sierra can hear the tire chains rattling.
“We’re lucky,” Pete says, voice strained. “Dad made sure we had chains ever since the winter it snowed the roads in and three of us got pneumonia.”
She wonders if he’s remembering that now. The dread of being trapped, alone and miles from any resources, knowing the slightest thing could turn the tables between life and death.
Now, the stakes are even higher.
Headlights cut a white-spattered path through already darkening shadows under the trees crowding in on them. Sierra checks her phone again. Sundown doesn’t mean much once the UV saturations drop.
There’s no signal. Either their California-based provider doesn’t have a good network here, or the storm knocked out a tower. Either way, they’re off the grid now.
The app that tells her what the UV rates and sun position are is still working, it’s designed to go offline once it acquires a location, but the last message she sent is greyed out, with a little orange X next to it.
[Tell her she’s doing great. We’re about halfway there.]
She can’t help thinking about the very literal stake in Pete’s sister’s belt, or how Serena had to take it from Rosie’s mother. Anna wasn’t shrinking from the potential of violently protecting her daughter, not if she’s still anything like the sister Pete says once chased off a rabid coyote with a .22 shotgun to keep the twins safe.
It was the realization that she might be forced to use it on her own child if things go wrong that had revolted her.
We can’t fail.
“I knew the Echo kids,” Pete says, out of nowhere.
“What?”
“The kids that died in the cave. They were two years older than me. One of them was a good friend, at least until he got hooked on Oxy. I tried to help him kick it, but he wasn’t having it. I knew better than to stick around him when he started trying to get me into it too. We hadn’t talked for almost a year when he died.” He frowns. “I kept his secret for him too long. I always thought maybe if I’d told his family instead of keeping it to myself like he wanted, maybe he’d have gotten the help he needed. Maybe he wouldn’t have been at that party.”
“Do you think he’s the vampire?”
“Can’t be sure. It would explain why the dog didn’t chase him away. Rex was a puppy when we were friends. They got along like a house on fire. And animals that remember someone before they got turned don’t react the same way as unfamiliar ones. But none of those kids was named Toby or Tobias. Definitely not him.” There’s something Pete isn’t telling her, but she doesn’t push it.
“Do you think maybe there was already a vampire there?” Sierra asks. “A miner or something?”
“I’m sure people died in the mine and their bodies couldn’t be recovered, but…it closed down in the 1880s,” Pete says. “Before Dracula died and the First Circle sent out feelers. I suppose it’s possible an infected immigrant from the Balkans was here, but that would be a long time for them to be living in there.”
He squints through the blinding snow piling up on the windshield faster than the wipers can remove it. “Even ten years is a long time for this town to have a vampire and not realize it.”
“He could have been blood-starved. Waking up undead wouldn’t have done a thing for him if he couldn’t get to one of the other victims to feed. He’d have gone comatose.”
“Then what freed him?”
The truck lurches to the side, a deep thud echoing through the frame. Sierra winces as her shoulder slams against the door. She doesn’t think her collarbone ever healed quite right from the accident in Arizona. And it looks like they’re about to get into another one.
The truck slides and fishtails, tires struggling for purchase as they slide sideways. Then the rear wheels drop completely off the road, the front end tips up, and the engine howls in protest at the inability to move.
“Why did I ask?” Pete says through gritted teeth. “Sinkholes. They showed up everywhere this summer. We lost three out of town hikers, I bet one of them fell down in there. Must have bled enough to wake a vampire up.”
“And then he went hunting.”
Pete shifts the truck down a gear, pulls the steering wheel around, and tries the accelerator again. Truck tires spin uselessly in the snow.
Sierra slams the dashboard and curses under her breath.
“Can we get out?”
“Not without help. And we don’t have time to wait.” Pete shuts off the truck, opens the door and jumps down into the snow. “We’re only half a mile from Conovers’ place. And they have horses.”
Sierra grimaces, opens her door, and steps down, closing her eyes against the blinding, bitter wind. It’s blowing directly into their faces as they head west. Toward the Echo, and toward the monster.
The silence is deafening. Apart from the whistling wind, the snow deadens their footfalls and muffles anything else moving around them. “You said the sinkholes showed up this summer?” She asks, mostly just to hear something other than the wind turning her ears into icicles. “I wonder how many other people in town he’s bitten? No way has he been feeding from Rosie alone all this time.”
Pete shakes his head. He’s hard to see through the snow. There’s only three feet if that between them, but the white flakes are deadening her vision as well as the sound. “Might be easier than you think. When they cracked down on Oxy around here, all the addicts had to start getting their fix elsewhere. Vampires went public just about the same time, and their saliva does the trick pretty well. There’s plenty of hosting going on around here. It’s just not as visible as it is in LA. Didn’t you see those people in the park down by the highway when we drove in?”
“That was a host party?”
“They’re tempting fate. Or at least a hungry vampire. Not that there were many of those around here. Or at least I didn’t think so.”
“If there’s that many people who want to get bitten, why bother with a kid?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t really care,” Pete says, just as a fence post looms up out of nowhere and nearly smacks Sierra in the nose. “We’re here.” He grabs onto the top rail and turns to his right. Sierra follows him.
A couple dark shadows rise out of the greyish gloom, vague shapes of a house and barn. The closer they get, the more details Sierra can pick out. A big red metal bar round-bale feeder, the greenish gold hay inside coated in snow, the dark shapes of horses clustered around it, their backs and manes white with snow and their tails swishing lazily.
They flounder through the drifted snow to the porch, and stumble inside into warmth that feels heavenly when the door opens for Pete’s knock and hoarse shout of who it is at the door.
Sierra notices that there was no verbal invitation.
Maybe this place really isn’t so different from LA.
She warms her hands and face at the fireplace, and with the offered mug of coffee, while Pete gives the Conovers the basic details of what’s going on. It feels like both too short and too long a time before they’re back on the road, now with their faces pressed low to the horses’ necks and the sound of jingling metal buckles adding to the sense that they’re not slowly turning into ghostly apparitions themselves.
Sierra’s glad for the few times she’s ridden on her grandparents’ ranch. At least she won’t fall off repeatedly and slow them down.
Pete’s whispering to himself. It’s the same cadence she hears in Tío’s prayers, the earnestness of knowing you’re heard but hoping what you want is the right thing. The rise and fall of pleading and trust.
She’s never been much good at either, but tonight, she wishes she was. She just listens to Pete and mentally echoes the same sentiment she does when he’s running down a list of his forensic accounting findings for Lawson.
What he said.
The horses’ breath fogs into the air, ice crystalizing on their whiskers and in their manes as they plod through the snow. Sierra and Pete take turns passing the lantern they were handed back and forth between them, holding it up enough to see at least a bit of where they’re going. They can only hold it up for so long before their fingers feel like they’re freezing off.
Sierra is in charge for the moment, and she can’t wait to hand it back and bury her fingers in the thick winter coat on her horse’s neck.
“We’re running out of daylight.” Pete shakes frost-caked hair out of his eyes and points to the west, where the sun, only a pale watery disc showing faintly behind the clouds, is rapidly plunging behind the mountains. “If we lose the light, we lose our shot.”
Sierra hasn’t looked at her phone in a long time now, but she knows they’re almost at the tipping point of UV saturation and daylight. They have at best probably ten minutes. Most likely, closer to five.
It feels like she’s stepped into her ancestor’s novel. The horses, the snowy mountain pass, the lanterns held in their hands to guide the way.
“There it is.” Pete points down into a dip in the landscape, where she can faintly see a dark opening like a mouth, edged with snow-caked rock teeth, on the far side. “That’s the Echo.” Pete slides off his horse, looping the reins loosely over a tree. Sierra does the same. If something goes wrong, she doesn’t want the horses trapped here. And riding down into the valley will make them much too conspicuous.
At least the snow should have hidden the sound of their approach. That might be a point in their favor.
“How do you want to play this?”
“Let’s do it like Motel California. But backward.” Pete glances at her. “I’ll take the lantern.”
Sierra raises an eyebrow.
“He’s just one vamp,” Pete says. “This should be easy.”
He moves away, and practically vanishes into the shadows. If it wasn’t for the lantern, Sierra wouldn’t even know where he is. His clothes blend into the shadows from the trees, and the snow swallows up any sound of his steps.
Sierra moves the other way. The snow isn’t falling as heavily, and the wind isn’t as strong, once she gets down into the valley. She can actually feel her nose and hear her breath again. She keeps her eyes on the cave opening, using it as a landmark. The lantern light, faintly visible through the snow, is moving closer to that black mouth, swinging back and forth.
Sierra blinks. It might be her eyes and the shadows playing tricks on her, but it looks like there’s a figure moving toward that light.
We found him.
The wind is curling in on itself in the valley, turning in the opposite direction, and carrying the sound of the meeting of the two shadows back toward Sierra as she scrambles as carefully and quietly as she can down the side of the valley toward them. She hopes she’s not going to find another sinkhole down into the abandoned mine.
“I should have known you’d take the name of your murdering moonshiner great-grandpappy.” Pete snaps. “Brett wasn’t good enough, huh?”
“So you do remember me.” The voice is eerie, distorted by more than the wind. Sierra takes advantage of the distraction Pete’s providing and slips down the last few feet of the hillside to crouch behind a heap of crushed stone. It’s spread out long and low, like a snake crawling along the bottom of the valley, and it should give her the cover she needs to move in close.
“And you know why I’m here.” Pete snaps. “Why did you come after my family? Why her?” The swaying, wind-buffeted lantern casts odd, horrifying shadows on his face, making him look like he’s the undead one in this conversation.
“She didn’t know me.” The vampire hisses. “Neither did those addicts, they were too blissed out with our venom to care if my face was familiar. But her trust made me feel human again.”
Sierra draws her Bowie knife carefully, fingers pressed around it and held close to the top of the sheath to avoid the blade clinking against the guard.
“So you bit her?”
“Sooner or later she would have realized the truth. Or one of you would have. She has a hunter in her family, it was a matter of time.”
It’s a sick, twisted logic, but Sierra’s heard similar from far too many vampires. They get turned, and then try to bring others with them. Whole-family turnings after one person is bitten are ugly affairs, boyfriends and girlfriends wind up with a far more possessive partner than they’d expected. And sometimes, it’s a mess like this. A vampire who latches onto someone young and trusting, trying to cling to some part of their former life, and then corrupts them too, in a futile effort to preserve the innocence they’re actually destroying.
“You’re a fool, Pete,” the vampire snarls. “Always thought the best of everyone, tried to save them all. Let your heart get the best of you. Your little niece was awfully sweet. Let’s see if it runs in the family.”
It’s the moment Sierra’s been waiting for. The vampire’s full attention is on Pete, and she’s close enough to cover the distance.
She shoves herself up, leaping over the pile of stone, using the downward slope of it to give her both momentum and the right angle as she pushes off of it with one foot, the blade of her knife glinting silver in the lantern’s light. This is the one chance they get, and she has to do it right.
Her knife finds a home in the vampire’s heart just as he tenses to spring onto Pete. Sierra rides the corpse to the ground, grimacing as it literally decays under her, flesh and bone crumbling under her hands.
She jumps back, wiping her knife first on the snow, then on her coat. She’s already going to have to change her clothes and probably burn these.
She was a little worried about her nose having frozen off, but it definitely hasn’t if she can still smell this.
“I didn’t come alone,” Pete says, toeing the rotted bones away from him. “You should have remembered, I always had friends. You used to be one of them.” He turns to Sierra. “Nice work.”
“Idiot. Baiting him like that? Literally?”
“Hey, I usually have to say that to you.”
“You figured it was just your turn to do the reckless thing?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Something like that.”
“I figured you’d have wanted to be the one to stake him.”
Pete shakes his head. “I couldn’t do it. Not after I realized who it was.”
Sierra puts a hand on his shoulder. “You couldn’t have done any more than you did. He chose the friends he ran with. And he didn’t get as lucky as me.”
“I appreciate that. But…It wasn’t that I couldn’t have staked him. No way was I going to hesitate after what he did to Rosie. It’s just…he taught me how to fight,” Pete says with a small, rueful smile. “He knows all my tricks. I couldn’t have gotten him before he got me.”
Sierra laughs. The relief is bubbling up in her, even as they’re standing here in the darkening clearing with the now truly dead body sprawled in the snow between them.
“You know, the snow is growing on me. Not too many times I actually have the advantage of silence sneaking up on a vampire.”
Pete doesn’t look as happy as she’d been hoping.
Then it hits her. They don’t know if Rosie made it this long.
Sierra hasn’t been letting herself think about that possibility. But if Shay and the others weren’t able to keep her with them, if she died before they killed her sire, she’s still going to turn.
And what happens to vampire kids is never pretty.
There’s a whole mansion in LA that houses ‘orphan’ vampires, kids who were turned and abandoned or had their sires killed. They’re learning to control their hunger, their venom, but it’s a long process. It can be decades before it’s safe for them to actually be around humans. Sierra can’t imagine what something like that would do to Rosie’s family.
She checks her phone, even though she knows it won’t do them any good, and catches Pete out of the corner of her eye doing the same.
This part of hunting old-school sucks.
“Let’s go home.”
Her horse almost refuses to let her mount, shying away from the smell of death and decay on her, but she finally calms it and climbs up, turning back toward the cabin.
“Are we going to leave the horses with the Conovers?” She asks. She doesn’t relish the idea of walking all the way back to the house.
“No, we’ve got space in our barn for them. We haven’t had horses since we lost my dad, but there’s still hay in the loft.” Pete pats his own horse’s neck. “They’re going to get treated like kings. Rosie’s gonna be thrilled. She loves to pet their noses.” His voice chokes and trails off.
Sierra doesn’t open her mouth again the rest of the ride.
The snow has finally stopped falling, and the wind is dying down, or at least less noticeable now that it’s coming from behind them. They pass the fenceline of the Conovers’ farm, the snow-covered blue hulk of their ditched (literally) truck, and the mailbox for Pete’s parents’ farm.
There are lights in the windows, and Sierra can hear music and laughter from halfway down the driveway.
She can see the moment the tension goes out of Pete’s shoulders as he angles his horse toward the barn. There’s no rush now.
They curry down their horses in silence, and Sierra doesn’t comment on Pete burying his face in his horse’s fluffy neck for several minutes. If he wants to talk to her about how he’s feeling, he will. She doesn’t need to push him.
They trudge through the snow toward the porch, and about the time they clump up onto the first step, there’s a collective shout of “not again!” and Sierra catches the faint melody of “Jingle Bell Rock” coming from the scratchy radio.
She kicks snow off her boots on the porch, and Pete yells in before opening the door.
Probably wise. Serena might still be ready to stake any unexpected guests.
The first thing Sierra sees as the door creaks open is Rosie is sitting on Shay’s shoulders, giggling as she tries to position an angel who appears to have been crocheted around a toilet paper tube on top of the tree. The angel’s straw halo is threatening to fall off, and her paisley handkerchief wings are droopy, but right now, the whole scene looks perfect.
“Hey Rosie,” Pete says, his voice choked.
“Uncle Pete!” Sierra says. “I made a gingerbread house! It only fell over two times!” She flails around cheerfully, a foot smacking Shay in the face as he tries to help her down, but he just shakes his head in fond exasperation as he sets her on the floor and she runs to Pete.
She stops short, nose wrinkling in confusion. “Did you find a possum?”
“Huh?” Sierra asks.
“Rex brought a possum home once. It was really dead. It smelled like that.”
Sierra groans.
“Saw you come in on the horses,” Pete’s mother says. “What happened?”
“Truck hit a sinkhole and we lost control, went into the ditch. Hopefully we didn’t crack the frame,” Pete says, hanging up his coat as Sierra unwraps her scarf and shakes snow and fragments of ice out the door. At least, she hopes that’s all it is. She’s kind of gone nose blind to what’s left of the vamp on her clothes.
“The Conovers said they’ll help get it out in the morning,” Pete adds. “When we take the horses back over.”
Pete’s mom just shakes her head. “Don’t worry about the truck. That’s not what matters right now.”
Rosie grabs Pete and drags him away to the table to see her masterpiece, and he follows her with a chuckle, gloves forgotten and dropped on the floor. Sierra picks them up, then takes her own coat off and hesitantly sniffs it.
Yuck.
“I’m just going to put these out on the porch,” She says. “And then I’m going to take a long, hot shower.”
“Probably wise,” Mrs. Jemison says with a tight-lipped but genuine smile.
A hand opens the door for her. She looks up to see Shay grinning at her.
“If you say one thing about my clothes, I will punch you in the nose and then you won’t have to smell me anymore.”
“Wasn’t planning to. I sleep in a box of grave dirt, remember?”
Sierra grimaces. “I don’t think the landlord will let you forget it.” She looks back at the crowd around the table. “And is that really the most structurally sound gingerbread house?”
As if to prove her point, a wall collapses and Rosie breaks into a gale of laughter.
“She wasn’t about to wait for the material to properly cool.” Shay shrugs. “But she had fun.”
“And she’s still with us.”
“The chills broke about an hour ago,” Shay says. “She’s been bouncing around on a sugar high ever since. She’s gonna crash hard tomorrow, but it’ll just be normal human kid behavior.”
Sierra tosses her coat, gloves, and scarf onto the woodpile next to the door, then pulls it closed behind her, locking the smell of death, at least for the most part, outside.
“Better?” She asks.
“You specifically told me not to comment on the smell.”
“I’ll take that as a no. But I want a piece of that gingerbread house before Rosie demolishes it completely, so food first, shower later.”
“Good plan. No one will fight you for it.”
“Hey.”
“All I meant was, obviously you just took down a vampire. No one is going to argue with that. Not even me.”
“You’d better not. You can’t even eat human food and you know it. If you steal a piece of gingerbread from me, you’re just being petty.”
Shay grins and follows her to the table.
The gingerbread house is…unique. The walls are skewed, the roof is bowing, and the chimney is laying on the ground in pieces.
“It’s not real pretty,” Rosie says, looking slightly disappointed.
“Are you kidding? It’s so cool! Can I try some? I’m so hungry I could eat a house.”
Sierra isn’t sure if the collective groan is because of her terrible pun or the smell of her clothes catching up with her, but it doesn’t really matter.
All any of it means is, they’re still alive.
Sometimes, miracles smell like horse sweat and rotting bones and molasses.
Those might be the best ones.