“Holy Moses,” Esther said again, cussing in church-speak. “That there blood-sucker is gonna die.”
I opened my eyes.
Esther was looking at Yummy. The vampire’s body was limp, stretched upon the land, her blood scarlet on the green. Ming’s final strike had sliced deeply. Her neck was half-severed. Gouts of blood had emptied onto the earth, feeding the land. Now it trickled. Her flesh was pale as paper, white and bloodless.
“Sister mine,” Mud said. She took my hand. We closed our eyes.
Mud and I were armored, standing in front of Yummy, hands clasped. I felt another hand take my free one. Esther, joining us, a churchwoman fierce and free to act as she needed. I was so proud.
Power slammed through us.
“Sisters mine,” Esther said.
“Sisters mine,” I said.
“Sisters mine,” Mud repeated.
Behind me, I heard the words, “Rule of Three.”
Together we three slid into the body of the one whobelongedto Soulwood. Mud’s vines seized the sliced jugular, guiding Esther’s uncertain hand. I worked on the carotid. With tiny scarlet roots, fine as silk thread, I began to stitch the large artery back together. I had never studied how to make surgical stitches, but I knew how to finish a seam in a dress so it looked pretty, would never ravel, and was extra strong.
The scarlet root of the vampire tree, of the Green Knight, grew thin and thinner in my hand, but with a firm and pointed tip. With the threadlike root, I pierced the narrow-walled vein and guided it over, under, through the root’s circle, creating a loop, pulling the delicate elastic blood vessel together. Next stitch went on the other side, overlapping, then higher, lower, inside and out. Clean and neat, just like the samplers I had embroidered as a child. This was much better work than I had done on the were-creatures. I wished I had thought about fancy sewing stitches instead of knotting off.
Inside of Yummy, her heart beat once.
She was still alive. Or as alive as an undead could be. But she had wood inside her, and wood was dangerous to vampires. She would need blood, and a lot of it, if she woke. While I hated to stake a friend, pulling her underground to finish healing might be smart. I turned and found Esther’s roots, paler than mine, thelovely delicate pink of the walls of her home. I knotted my thread and broke it. With the tip, I patted Esther’s thread.I need to secure her so she can’t hurt us if she wakes,I thought at her.
As if from far away, I heard Esther say, “I can take over for you.” She shaped her root and thrust through the artery wall next to my knot. Her stitches were much more tiny and precise than mine.
I checked in on Mud and then let my thin rootling travel through Yummy’s body, along her blood vessels, to her belly, to the spot where vamps could be impaled with a wood stake, which would make them fall to the ground essentially lifeless. Lifeless-er? Undead-er?
The small area in her flesh, about a four-inch square, was at and below the navel. At that centerline point, a stake would pierce the descending artery that fed the lower body. For reasons never determined, that particular strike would immediately disable a vamp like a potent tranquilizer. Wood was ineffective as a paralyzing agent anywhere else except the heart, and a heart strike could be deadly to a young vampire like Yummy. I intended to create a stake and stake Yummy’s belly from inside.
When I reached the spot, just below her navel, I widened my focus. I spotted a loose tangle of nearly microscopic…things. It was something I had never seen before.
Of course, I had only recently seen a vampire body from the inside. I tightened my mental focus on the twisted things and frowned. It was a slack knot of nerves and neurons, looking vaguely like a pile of yarn half-unraveled from a sweater or shawl, slightly kinked and spiraled with long arms like starfish. Like what I thought brain matter might look like under a microscope.
This supple mesh of nerves was not something I had been told about at Spook School, and had not seen in the postmortems of vampires I had watched there, though working from the outside, the relaxed snarl wouldn’t have been noticeable. The only way to see it was if this particular slice of tissue had been viewed through a microscope. It also was not something humans had, or any animal I had seen butchered for meat. This…this was something new to me. This thin layer of neurons might be why vamps dropped deader when staked. I wondered if even they knew about it.
I followed the nerves from the snarl and they traveled to Yummy’s stomach, then to her heart. There, two long odd-looking nerves branched off and followed her carotids up to her brain. How strange.
I pulled back and considered what to do about Yummy potentially waking up hungry and draining some human to death. Since I had no idea what damage I might do to her while I worked from the inside, I encouraged a root to grow from the ground, outside Yummy’s body. I forced life into the root to sharpen one end, to thicken the stake, harden it off, and then I shoved it through Yummy’s belly, through the bunched nerves and into the big artery. I broke off the part outside, leaving the wood inside her.
Moving back up Yummy’s body, I checked in on my sisters. The carotid and the flesh of Yummy’s neck had been stitched together. All she had to do now was drink blood and heal.
Of course, if I was wrong about wood only doing major damage in the belly and heart, I had just killed my vampire friend, using wood to sew her together. If there had been another vampire or six around, I’d have made sure Yummy was healed in the Mithran way, but that hadn’t been an option and I hadn’t known if Yummy would survive until help could come. So I took a chance. I offered up a prayer for my friend and pulled out of Yummy, trailed by my sisters.
I opened my eyes. At Esther’s porch, Margot was curled against the foundation, human shaped, naked, and steaming in the cold. Panting with pain. Gripping an old iron ax-head. The ax-head the land had spewed up only days past.
The field of battle at the Tulip Tree House had a lot more people than when I started work on Yummy.
T. Laine was bent over Rick, who was lying between two vehicles on the road, shifting shape into human. I gave him a boost of energy to speed the process because he was breathing hard, and seemed to need help.
A few feet away Rettell rolled to her feet, human, naked, armed with a weapon, ready to fight.
Occam, in his cat form, was fighting a human, the two of them dancing as vines tried to trip only the human. Occam bit down, his fangs savaging the man’s leg. The stranger’s blood splattered onto the ground.
Hunger…
