Page 41 of Love Her Ruin
"I think it’s kind of a brilliant nickname," the woman informs them, and then she turns back to the counter.
Her eyes land on the pickle jar I've stationed next to the register, one I bleached clean and taped a printed photo to of a certain smiling woman. The sign reads:FOR AMY. MEDICAL + RELOCATION. ANY AMOUNT HELPS.
Amy, Michael Devlin’s ex-girlfriend, is out of the hospital, but still needs physical therapy. Her boyfriend is in the ground, burned in the house fire that James and I started. I’ve visited her twice since Vincent’s death, and we talked for hours about the past, but we mostly focused on the future and what that might look like, for both her and for me.
The woman with the bone in her hair reads the sign, and her mouth softens so briefly I almost miss it. Then she digs in the back pocket of her jeans, pulls out a thin wallet, plucks out a folded bill, and slides it through the slot in the lid.
It's a hundred-dollar bill.
"Have a good evening, Sera," she says, her gaze dipping to the nametag on my work shirt.
She turns to leave. The men fall into formation around her. Blond on her right, muscular on her left, giant at her back. They move like a unit that has done this a long time.
"Wait," I say.
She stops at the door and looks over her shoulder, one hand on the handle.
"Who are you?" I ask.
She grins, a real one that’s sharper than anything I've seen in my mirror. "Downstairs Daddy's little errand girl."
"Slayer," the muscular one corrects. “She’s the slayer.”
The slayer… So…a vampire slayer who’s a vampire herself?
The bell over the door rings on their way out. They pour out of the gas station into the parking lot, four silhouettes loading into a black SUV that I didn't hear pull up and don't hear pull away.
Daddy is still wrapped around me. I can feel his cold in the hollow of my collarbone, in the arch of my foot, in the spaces between my teeth.
Slayer.
Vampire slayer. As in the thing that hunts them. As in the thing Downstairs Daddy apparently keeps on a leash and sends across state lines when a very old employee has gone AWOL for a very long time.
She knew his name, and she wasn't afraid of him. Her men were vampires, and she was something worse, or better, or different, and she took one look at the two of us, me and my column of dark, and decided to kick the problem back downstairs.
Maybe Downstairs Daddy doesn't need to know.
Does that mean she won’t tell? Does that mean my daddy can stay?
For some inexplicable reason, I trust she’ll keep our secret safe.
Chapter 21
Sera
Myhouseisahouse again.
James replaced all the windows himself. Eddie sanded the front door until it sat flush in its frame, no gaps, no warping, no space for the night to slide its fingers through. And Daddy didn’t break it all down again.
The floors still creak. Bloody footprints still stain the floors, walls, and ceiling. The basement still smells like blood and sex.
But it's solid, and when the wind hits, nothing rattles.
I'm in the living room sorting through the dark web messages James's been filtering, the first trickle of prayers from women who found the door he built in the places only ghosts read, when I hear Eddie's car in the driveway.
The engine cuts, and his door opens and shuts. Then another door, the back one, which is unusual because Eddie doesn't keep anything in his back seat.
Then I hear the nails.
