We weren’t in Mexico anymore I don’t think. We weren’t in Missouri for sure. I know that. Wherever we were it was somewhere warm and sunny. We were on a long straight single lane road that seemed to stretch out forever. We had the windows down and were driving along slowly because “driving helps me think” as she explained.
“Where are we now?”
She glanced around like there might be a “you are here” sign explaining “I don’t know, Tunisia maybe.”
“I thought Tunisia was a desert.”
She shrugged “Australia? I don’t actually know where Tunisia is, I didn’t go to school much. If you stabbed your vampire boss in the foot with a magic bone he’s probably holed up somewhere healing. A cave or someplace underground. Vampires don’t have coffins or don’t live in places like that but they do have lairs where they run away to when someone hurts them. What concerns me is that the only way I know to kill vampires is sunlight and it sounds like your guy doesn’t work that way. Are you sure he’s a vampire?”
I thought about it for a moment “I mean . . . no? Are there official monster designations? Who decides what each thing is? I can tell you that he drinks blood and does shadow stuff. Xlade said that you can kill vampires by staking them and cutting off the head but then there was other stuff you had to do also. Do you know about that?”
“No, but that sounds promising, I’ll take us somewhere with cell reception and you can pop Xlade off a text.”
“Uh, I can’t do that on account of he’s dead. Duke killed him. Like not even an hour ago.”
“Hmm. Well that’s an issue. Do you think that bone weapon is still there? Sounded like that worked great.”
“Maybe it is, but the police are probably there too, since it’s a crime scene. They might want to question me for murder. Can you teleport in and take it?”
She slowed down for an animal in the road “No, I can’t actually teleport, it doesn’t work like that.”
I stared at the impassive beast before us blocking the road “Is that an ox?”
“I think it’s a zebu.”
“What’s a zebu?”
She pointed “That is. Maybe.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, well I probably could but I didn’t “Thanks. So what do you normally do with vampires? Don’t you have like a standard plan you use? Maybe we could modify that to take out the sunlight part and just do the rest.”
She took her hands off the wheel and leaned back as the ox-thing ambled over and started licking the hood “I’m going to level with you . . . uh, what’s your name?”
“Ela, one L.”
She nodded like she knew “Right, I’m going to level with you Ela, I dealt with a vampire once in Parma and another time in Santa Carla. But that’s it, I don’t want to make it out like I have a ton of vampire killing experience, this isn’t something I have a standard plan for. For which? Anyway, I’ve faced various things here and my plans have never worked out great. You ever see Indiana Jones?”
I was mildly annoyed “No, I told you, I don’t watch many movies. Most movies suck. You know what I say when someone says ‘Hey Ela, you want to catch a movie?’ I say, ‘No, I don’t like movies, I don’t go to movies, most movies suck’.”
She rolled up her window with a crank as the beast started lumbering towards her door “That’s funny, I thought you were an actress for some reason.”
“No, I do wholesale purchasing of equipment used to calibrate industrial refrigerator thermostats.”
“Yikes.” She saw me scowl at her “Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . sorry. Anyway, in that movie the underage girl Indian Jones is banging asks him what the next part of the plan is and he says ‘I have no idea, I’m making this up as I go’, I think in the military they call that improvisational ingenuity. I’ve come to the conclusion that when you’re dealing with the supernatural that’s the best you can do, or it’s the best I can do anyway. There are too many unknowns. I used to get very down on myself and depressed for being too dumb to come up with a good plan and not saving everyone along the way, but I don’t know if there’s another way.”
“So you’re suggesting . . . what?”
“I’m recommending that we go back to KC, see if we can get that bone, if you know what I mean, and either way then I’ll find your vampire boss and we’ll go from there.”
“Find him how?”
“I’ll cast a spell, magic is how.”
The car rocked and then groaned as the beast rubbed against it “So were like witches, we can do magic?”
“Just me, I’m a special chosen slayer person and also I learned magic, these are two separate things. If you don’t get killed by your vampire boss I can try and teach you how to cast spells but it probably won’t work. There aren’t many people left in the world who can do magic. The guy that taught me magic thought I might be the last person in the world that could learn.”
“So you’re saying you’re a one in a billion monster hunter with second sight and also you’re the last person in the world who can do magic? That seems a little farfetched. That’s like LeBron James also being the world’s greatest opera singer.”
She laughed “Yes, I am hashtag blessed, I live in my car and the last thing I ate was a gas station hot dog.”
I crossed my arms “Apparently that’s still better than industrial refrigerator thermometers.”
She winced “I said I was sorry.”
