“I shall take it from here.” Antonia hoisted her sword, twirling it like a Benihana chef while Frusciante’s guitar-gasm reached its peak. She hacked one of Sebastian’s arms off, but he barely noticed.
She swung the sword again, to try and take his head off, and he managed to sidestep and headbutt her. His face caught the side of her blade, but he barely noticed, and he drove the sharp edge into Antonia’s stomach with his forehead. Blood gushed out of her as she fell to the ground, and he caught it in his mouth like rain.
A second later, Sebastian was Sebastian again. “Ah, fairy blood,” he said. “There really is nothing like it.” Antonia tried to get up again, but slumped back down on the floor with a moan, doubled up around her wounded stomach.
I shot at Sebastian again, but I missed and he broke the shotgun in half. Then he broke both my arms. “Nobody is going to come to karaoke night if you shoot people in the face while they’re singing. Seriously.” I tried not to give him the satisfaction of hearing me whimper.
Antonia raised her head and said a fire spell. Wisps of smoke started coming off Sebastian’s body, but he just shrugged. “You’ve already seen what happens if you manage to hurt me.” The smoke turned into a solid wall of flame, but Sebastian pushed it away from his body with a tai-chi move. “Why even bother?”
“Mostly,” Antonia’s voice came from the other side of the firewall, “just to distract yoooooooooo!” Her snarl became a howl, a barbaric call for vengeance.
There may be a sight more awesome than a giant white wolf leaping through a wall of solid fire. If so, I haven’t seen it. Antonia – for somehow she had managed to summon enough of her inner wolf to change – bared her jaws as she leapt. Her eyes shone red and her ears pulled back as the flames parted around her and sparks showered from her ivory fur.
Sebastian never saw it coming. Her first bite tore his neck open, and his head lolled off to one side. He started to zombify again, but Antonia was already clawing him.
“Don’t— Don’t let him bite you!” I shouted from behind the bar.
Sebastian almost got his teeth on Antonia, but she ducked.
“BRAIIINNSS!”
She was on top of him, her jaws snapping wildly, but he was biting just as hard. His zombie saliva and his vampire teeth were both inches away from her neck.
I crawled over to the cooler where I kept the pitchers of sangria, and pulled the door open with my teeth. I knocked pitchers and carafes on the floor, trying to get at the surprise I’d stored there the night before, in a big jar covered with cellophane wrap.
I hadn’t actually buried all of Lou and Jerry.
I pulled the jar out with my teeth and wedged it between my two upper arms and my chin, then lugged it over to where Antonia and Sebastian were still trying to bite each other. “Hey,” I rasped, “I saved you something, you bastard.” And I tipped the jar’s contents – two guys’ brains, in a nice balsamic vinaigrette – into Sebastian’s face. Once he started guzzling the brains, he couldn’t stop himself. He was getting brain all over his face, as he tried to swallow it all as fast as possible. Brains were getting in his eyes and up what was left of his nose. There was no going back for him now.
Antonia broke the glass jar and held a big shard of it in her strong wolf jaws, sawing at Sebastian’s neck until his head came all the way off. He was still gulping at the last bits of brains in his mouth, and trying to lick brain-bits off his face.
It took them an hour to set the bones on my arms and I had casts the size of beer kegs. We put Sebastian’s head into another jar, with a UV light jammed inside so whenever the Red Hot Chili Peppers come on the stereo, he gets excited and his face glows purple. I never thought the Peppers would be the most requested artist at Rachel’s. I never did get permission to open a second bar in Evening Falls, though.
As for Antonia, I think this whole experience toughened her up, and made her realize that being a little bit wild animal wasn’t a bad thing for a fairy princess. And that Anthony Kiedis really doesn’t have the singing range he thinks he has. And that when it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. And that running away from your problems only works for so long. There were a few other lessons, all of which I printed out and laminated for her. She still sings in the bar, but she’s made a couple of trips back to Sylvania during the crescent moon, and they’re working on a cure for her. She could probably go back and be a princess if she wanted to, but we’ve been talking about going into business together and opening some straight-up karaoke bars in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. She’s learning to KJ. I think we could rule the world.
LOOK INSIDE
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
I’m going to tell a little fib to start off with. Don’t worry – I’ll let you know what it was, later on. I’ll leave you with the truth, I promise.
But I’ll tell you the other stuff first.
And I’m pregnant.
* * *
When it started, I’d been out for the evening. A work dinner, which meant a few hours in an Italian restaurant in Soho while my boss rambled about the challenges facing his company in these tough economic times, and was fairly good about not glancing down my blouse.
It wasn’t a long dinner, and even after taking the tube back I was home by half-past nine. I own a very small house in an area of North London called Kentish Town, not far from the station and the main road. Kentish Town is basically now an interstice between the nicer and more expensive neighbourhoods of Hampstead, Highgate and Camden, but before it was subsumed into urban sprawl it had been a place of slight note, open country enlivened by the attractive River Fleet – sourced in springs up on Hampstead Heath but long-ago so snarled and polluted that it was eventually lost, paved over for its entire length and redirected into an underground sewer.
My narrow little house stands close to where it once ran, in the middle of a short mid-Victorian terrace, and is three (and a bit) storeys high with a scrap of garden out back halved in size by a galley kitchen extension put in by the previous owner. Originally, so I was told by said owner, the houses were built to home families of men working on the railway line. It’s remarkably unremarkable except for the fact that one side of my garden is bounded by an old stone wall, inset into which is a badly weathered stone plaque mentioning St. John’s College. A little research turned up the fact that, hundreds of years before, the land that these houses was built on – and a chunk of Kentish Town itself – had belonged to the College, part of Cambridge University. Why a college would have owned a garden a hundred miles away is beyond me, but then I’ve never understood the appeal of reality television or Colin Firth, either, so it’s possible I’m just a bit dim.
Here endeth the tour.
It’s a very small house but I’m lucky to have it at all, given London’s lunatic house prices. Well – not just lucky. Oh, how my friends took the piss, when I bought my first flat and shackled myself with a mortgage straight out of university; but now I’ve been able to swap up to a place with an actual staircase, and they’re still renting crappy two-bed apartments in neighbourhoods where not even hipsters want to live, it’s not so bloody funny, it appears (except to me, of course).