Exorcize This, Julie Steimle [best books to read in life txt] 📗

were alive. Nobody did. But if you want to get out of here and be alive, you have got to stop poking things at me.”

He stared more. “Are you freaking kidding me?”

I shook my head. “No. No joke. I came in here because someone has a ghost problem and I need to find the vampire’s feeding grounds, if they exist at all.”

“They exist,” the man murmured, nodding. He tried to stand up, leaning on one leg in particular. I could see now that the other was mutilated with oozing bites. He had a few bites in other places as well, but I could tell he had not tasted good to the vampires. He kind of reeked of garlic to be honest. Maybe he wasn’t a total idiot after all.

“Did you see it?” I asked.

He nodded, “Yeah. A pile of bones. I totally stumbled upon it. I was heading back when it got dark and they attacked me. They ripped me right off the ground and…” He shook his head, closing his eyes as he relived it in his mind. That was some PTSD he was having too. “But they let me go after they started to bite into me.”

I nodded.

“Thank heaven for garlic,” he murmured.

I cringed.

He pulled back. “Your teeth….”

I moaned. “Look. I don’t bite people. My father happened to be a vampire but—”

“Your father?” He stared more.

“But my mom’s not,” I said. I didn’t tell him what my mother was, though. I needed him to calm down.

He nodded. “Ok.”

“So,” I said, stepping towards him, “Hold on to me and let me see if I can carry both of our weights.”

I pulled out my wings farther as he hobbled up to me. The dude had enough sense to realize I was not a threat. His imps also were shouting at him to throw things at me, but they seemed to rejoice that his life was not over yet. They were healthy ones, thank heaven.

The man wrapped his arms around my shoulders, holding on, and I put my arms under him. “Here goes nothing,” I muttered.

Then, with all my strength, I pushed off the ground.

My wings helped, but it was a struggle to get up into the air. The ground stirred up like crazy and I had so much dust in my eyes when I finally was airborne but, but we were up and flying safely back to the park while it was still daylight. I set him down at the swing sets as soon as I could. I leaned against the bar, catching my breath.

Sarah and Jane ran over to me. They were both holding cardboard boxes. Sarah was staring at my huge fleshy wings while Jane gaped at the wounded, stinky man.

“Who’s this?”

“Our missing hiker,” I said to her with a gesture to him, straightening up from the back pain I seriously had now. The man stared at them and started to sob. His imps were cheering and telling him to crack a dirty joke about my breasts, which apparently had been in his face as we were flying.

I slapped the imps away, going to Sarah. “Your dad’s an EMT, right?”

Nodding wordlessly at me, she then looked to the hiker. She quickly got out her cell phone and dialed.

I looked to the sky again. It was getting dark and I had yet to get a single bone from the forest. Turning toward Jane and Sarah, I said, noticing Tiffany and Brigitte come up with more boxes from wherever they were getting them, “Get him and all of you indoors. It is going to be dark soon.”

Jane nodded.

I launched into the sky again, swooping up with my wings in three huge flaps.

Soaring back into the forest, my mind wracked over what was the quickest way to get those bones to the park. I was just one person. Even if I located the bones, how many trips would that be for me to take them back to the town? I had to think of a better way to do this.

Spreading my wings like an eagle, I glided over the trees, flapping only occasionally, I had to think like a vampire. I also had to think like that hiker. There were trails that went in, but long neglected. He seemed the type of guy to be a little adventurous. He probably would try for the uphill hike near the caves. And the vampires, if they truly felt safe from hunters, they would just dump the drained bodies of their victims outside their caves, right?

Following the wind, I whipped through them up to the sheer face of the stone incline. And there, for the first time in my life, I saw the vampire caves. Funnily enough, I felt like I had been there before. They were familiar to me somehow. I briefly wondered why. Had my father taken me here as a baby? Did my memory really go back that far?

But I was not here to call on the vampires. Quite the reverse. I peered down at the cliff bottom. Sure enough, in the valley was what looked like a heap of bones and rags.

It honestly took my breath away, like those videos of Auschwitz.

So many dead.

How many centuries was that? And were these just from the European stock? Or were these from an even more ancient group of vampires? I never knew. I never asked. And I really didn’t want to know.

But that heap was too much for my two arms to carry. Staring at it, I was stumped. How could I, with my two arms, carrying all that in just the short hour I had left to dusk?

The imps next to me laughed. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we just scattered all those all over the forest?”

I shot him a dirty look. It would drive the vampires wild with anger. But it certainly would not be funny for me or those ghosts who were expecting me to help them. And yet from that remark, a notion came to me. Imps only helped out when they caused mischief. And they thought it hilarious to annoy the vampires… and taking those bones would annoy definitely annoy the vampires.

So, looking to the imp on my right, I said, “Can you get your buddies to collect all those bones and dump them in the down park?”

“Dump them?” the imp next to me got excited. My word choice appealed to him.

Nodding, realizing I had to cause trouble to help these ghosts. “Yeah… dump them in a heap in the gazebo. It will annoy the mayor and Mrs. Davish, the chairwoman of LASS, and it would be such an eyesore, and it would freak out half the town—”

The imp zipped off with glee to get more friends.

This just might work.

Soon all the bones were rising from the heap, whipping through the air in a white and gray tornado in the arms of the gathering part of imps. I cheered them on, calling out the kind of mayhem it would cause in the town, telling them to scare any idiot who chose to be out at the park after hours. Drive them back into their houses. The sun was already low.

Not even half the bones were gone when the sun touched the far ocean. I could see the light reflecting orange on the water. The vampires would soon be out and I was not done.

I watched it and the bone removal as the light got less and less. Soon only a glimmer of light was on the shore. At the same time, I could feel eyes staring at me from the caves, waiting for the sunlight to vanish entirely so that the possessors of those eyes could come out. They bore into me with a savage hate. In those dark shadows, I could hear the rustle of their breaths, though not one vampire had a heartbeat.

“Keep it up!” I called down to the imps below. “Clear them all out!”

An imp zipped by me, cackling while carrying a femur. “You’re gonna get it! They are ticked!”

I knew I had brought trouble upon myself by doing this, another reason why the imps were enjoying the upheaval of the vampire boneyard. It was inevitable. I was never going to be able to do all that before sundown. I had been fooling myself. And now it was my job to protect the town. I could not bring my trouble to Cliffcoast.

The last sliver of sunlight vanished the light no longer reflecting off of my pale cheeks. Only moonlight illuminated the forest now.

Then it was like the mountains themselves burst open, the inhabitants charging at me through the air, calling out vampire curses, which I knew nothing about but I could feel yet was able to brush off. I reacted, dodging and spinning on my huge wings while I made myself weigh less than an airborne soap bubble.

“We knew we should not have let you live!” one said with a rather thick Irish brogue, slashing at me with a knife as I went immaterial and it passed right through me without inflicting any harm. “The lass would be trouble, I said!”

“His spawn comes home to desecrate our land?” another shouted, his voice sounding Scottish as he swung an axe at me. I caught it and kicked him in the nuts with a roll in the sky before it could make contact with flesh. The moment he let go in pain, I chucked it to the forest floor.

The weirdest notion came into my head. Were some of our town founder vampires? And did they become vampires before or after they arrived in California?

Five went at me with their teeth.

I knocked them back with my wings, launching higher into the sky. “Don’t make me hurt you!”

“Nah,” one of them said, that young looking one I had met way back when I was fourteen. He was still in the same old musky silk and lace. “We’re going to kill you.”

My heart was booming. I could feel my blood pulse hotly through me as their vampire hearts were silent. The imps that accompanied them shrieked for them to all pounce me at once and drink me dry—as if that were possible. I was sure my blood would make them sick.

“And then we are going to punish this town,” another added, throwing a javelin at me. It looked like it had been stolen from our high school track and field closet.

“You leave the town alone!” I bit out, snatching that javelin and spinning it in my hands as I would my baton.

Several of them backed away from me. But those behind pounced on my back, trying to tear my wings off while biting what they could.

Jerking back to get them off, my fingernails thickened and elongated into claws, digging into the one attempting to bite into my jugular from behind. She yowled. Thrusting up into the air, I threw them off by extending my wings even larger with an enormous flap.

In the faint moonlight, my eyes scoured through the vampire mob swarming around me. I felt a shudder as I realized my birthfather was not among them. Not that I wanted to see him, but… I kind of did.

“He’s not here,” one of them said, knowing what I was looking for.

“Where is he?” I asked, dodging yet another vampire with a claw-swipe while a third grabbed my leg to pull me down from the sky, using her weight to do it. I kicked her in the face then her wrist.

“He had defied the Order of Blood leaving you with those humans,” the large brougish vampire bit out, punching at me with his huge fists. I dodged quicker than he could swing them. “So he was executed.”

“What?” A surge of hot blood rushed though me. My face felt like it was on fire, and I started to shake. They had killed my father.

“You fool” one of them shouted at the other, his red eyes wide in horror. “You forget that’s a vimp!”

Three more vampires sprang on me