There was a lot to occupy her mind, but in truth Sejal was most taken with another figure who had just appeared on the lip of the bowl, a thickset man in an army coat with something in his hands. He slid down the hill behind Stephin.
"Make up your mind, dear," Stephin said, walking toward her, "or I’ll win. I’m a monster, a murderer, and I’ll be worse — I can feel it."
The vampire was close — thirty feet away, maybe twenty.
"Will you run?" he asked, still closer. "You can’t run. I’ll CATCH YOU. PICK UP THE STAKE, SEJAL, I’M—"
His whole frame shuddered, and he halted, mouth slack. Eyes heavy. With his long fingers he touched at the sharp tip of a cone, a cone at the end of a shaft, a shaft of wood that had emerged from the center of his chest.
"Finally," croaked Stephin, and he dropped. Behind him stood the man in the army coat, holding a gun Sejal had seen on TV.
"If he’s a murderer, it’s justifiable," Mike breathed, and tried to make sense of these people in the park. These vampires.
"There’s so many," he whispered with rising panic. "They’re everywhere."
There was the one he’d killed, and then the vampire boy there, on the ground, and maybe another one a little way off. And a fourth, on her feet — wearing a vampire dress. Saying something.
Mike couldn’t hear anything over his own heartbeat, and the scratch of his hands against his coat as he fumbled for another whippit, and a new stake to reload. Then he raised his Redeemer and sighted the vampiress down the barrel.
Doug had been bracing to come between Stephin and Sejal. He was sure of it. But Stephin was gone, and now there was a man, a familiar man with a gun. He saw what was about to happen and forced himself to his feet as the gun hissed and fired.
In another story he might have slapped the stake away, plucked it out of the air and returned it to sender. Or the stake’s coarse point could have found his shoulder, or his arm, but it didn’t.
How could it?
What could it find but his heart?
THROUGHOUT the frigid early morning Sejal sat at Doug’s side. His eyes were closed, he lay on his back, there was a wooden stake in his chest. His breath came like smoke signals. Like empty word balloons.
The vampire hunter, trembling, had keeled over, thrown up on the hillside, and fled. As he ran to his wood-paneled coffin of a car, she thought he called back, "This is his fault," but she wasn’t sure. Doug struggled up into consciousness, gasped for air, and went under again.
Next Victor woke, or, rather, a wolf awoke and stepped out of his clothes. It shook its head and coat and strode silently over to where Doug lay and where Sejal sat. She glared at it, her body balled up like a fist. But the wolf just nosed at Doug’s arm and sniffed the air.
"I can’t take him to a hospital, can I?" she asked the wolf. "Could they help? They will find him out." And then she wondered — should he be helped? Would it be better for everyone if he were gone? No. No, no, no, she thought. She would pluck this wish out by the roots, tear it to pieces.
Victor hung his sleek head and waggled it. It might have been an answer to her question. Then he loped up the hill, and with distance his twitching tail and white legs flickered and then slipped like a nightmare into the sleeping neighborhood. Sejal wondered if she’d see him again. She’d read too many fairy tales to expect a happy ending for the wolf.
The sky had brightened to a sort of tarnished silver before she rose and looked at the distant houses. She’d run to one, a friendly one — that one, trimmed with pink and yellow. She’d pound on the door and explain to whomever answered that her friend in the park had a stick in his heart. Then she heard Doug speak.
"Oh yeah," he whispered. "Forgot."
"You keep passing out," she said. "You wake up, look at the stake, pass out again. But shouldn’t you be dead? I thought a stake through the heart was supposed to kill you."
"It seems like a good…" wheezed Doug, "guess to me."
What Doug didn’t need right now was morals. What he didn’t need was to be taught a lesson, to be put in his place. What he needed was less stick in his heart. Still, Sejal heard herself say "I think…I think sometimes you think you’re the hero of the story, and sometimes you think you’re the victim. But you’re not either."
"That’s…going to change," said Doug, and he tried to lift himself again. He failed. Sejal thought he might have fallen back into unconsciousness, but he rasped, "You know what I think? You know what I bet…Dracula thought…when they stuck that knife in his chest?…I’ll bet he thought…Why me?"
"I have to go get help," said Sejal. "I’ll come back with help."
"No…no, please stay. It’s going to be fine…I’m going to be…fine. The head of the family is dead."
Sejal stayed where she was. She stared at the stake.
"It’ll…just work itself out…like a splinter," Doug said. "I’ll have to hide it…for a while…with — with—" He began to laugh, then to cough smoke like an old train. "Christmas lights. I’ll tell people I’m a Christmas tree holder."
He laughed again, and Sejal smiled at him.
"Not a vampire anymore…I can be good now. I’ll be so good," he said, and went to sleep.
Doug pulls the stake out, the wound heals, he goes about the rest of his natural life in Philadelphia as a graphic designer.
Doug pulls the stake out, he and Sejal marry, divorce, he rises to manager of a Kohl’s department store and is shot and killed while trying to prevent a stickup.
The stake never comes out, Doug files it down to a nub and hides it under his clothes. He finds he can’t readjust to life as a human — each new experience seems pale and flavorless. He never does anything of any importance and dies alone.
He rises, wrenches the stake from his chest, snaps it in two. He now has all the strengths of vampirism and none of the weaknesses. He becomes a celebrated crime fighter and occasional vampire hunter, and a founding member of the League of Champions.
In alternate histories we learn what the world would be like
— if he had become a werewolf
— if he’d been born a Russian
— if he’d lived in Nazi-occupied Europe
— if Jay had become the vampire instead
— if he’d killed Victor
— if he’d killed Stephin
— if Sejal had loved him
He sleeps, in a state like death, for two thousand years while his body heals and his mind clears. He is accidentally unearthed and revived on the construction site of a future prison for poorly socialized clobots. Everyone in the future is either a vampire or a clobot, and his wild anecdotes from the twenty-first century make him a popular talk show guest.
He dies.
It took a long time to get home. There were people to talk to, calls to be made, a story to tell again and again and again. There were the Browns — Mr. Brown bleary-eyed, Mrs. Brown in a mismatched sweater set, stunned and bobbing through the gray police station like a rubber duck in a bathtub. Cat looking hurt. Sejal mouthed a "sorry," to her, sorry for rushing off on her own, sorry for going on a quest without her American guide. The hurt look lingered for an hour, but on the car ride home (during Mr. Brown’s loud and impassioned speech about personal responsibility; hospitality; American values; and then, less clearly, outsourcing and the Marshall Plan), Cat’s hand drifted across the backseat to take Sejal’s own.
They pulled into the driveway as Mr. Brown reached the end of his sermon and started over from the beginning. "Something came for you this morning," Cat whispered at the door.
A half-dozen tags printed with colors and codes were tied to the handle of a bag, a scarlet-pink bag like a huge heart in the foyer.
ADAM REX is the New York Times bestselling author of one other novel, THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY. He lives with his wife in Tucson, Arizona. You can visit him online at www.adamrex.com.