A Demon Lady With Love Read online

Chapter 2

  Accountant Dracula

  I sat up gasping for air.

  The genie was still right there wearing one of those Elvis get-ups made of white vinyl with flared pant-legs and an abnormally large collar.

  “Hi there young fella,” he greeted me with his best Elvis drawl.

  My mind must have been really messed up and hadn’t quite made the transition back to being alive again because I screamed, “Gort! Klaatu Barada Nikto!” at him. Then I remembered that was what the dude told the alien robot in the black and white version of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  I shook my head and flailed around like a mannequin caught on a high-tension electric line. Nothing seemed to work for a bit. Before everything came back to me and my body did what it was supposed to do, there were an awful lot of misfires. The first time I tried wiggling my toes I scratched my butt instead.

  Once all systems were a go, I managed to scream a very respectable, “The hell you what do to me did?”

  Or something like that. I’m still a bit unclear.

  The genie gave me a pouty look through the thick mop of dark hair falling across his face from the Elvis wig he wore. “I’d think you’d be more grateful since I brought you back. I don’t usually do freebies. But I’d always wanted to try that.”

  “Eh . . . what?” I croaked.

  “You were dead,” he said matter-of-factly. “Dead and buried, buckaroo.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him he was full of a select choice of animal droppings when suddenly a great big burp came out instead.

  It tasted like formaldehyde.

  And I threw up.

  “Takes time to pull it all back together,” he told me sympathetically.

  “What the hell is going on?” I screamed before the heaving subsided. Damn I felt weak. I tried to stand up, but all I managed was more retching. I won’t tell you what came out, but when something sits inside of you for lord only knows how long in various states of decay and desiccation, it acquires a very distinctive zing. Finally the retching stopped because the only thing left to come up was my stomach and lower intestines, and I hoped they were still attached.

  Using an unsteady hand, I pushed myself upright and shook my head and groaned. “That’s impossible”

  The portly man beside me just shrugged his shoulders. “Told you, I’m a genie. And this was the only way I could think of to follow my orders, which were pretty specific. I couldn’t really kill you, but I had to remove you from . . . well, your life. So I economized. I brought you somewhere else.”

  Somewhere else? I didn’t like the sound of that. The inflection he put on that last word made me uneasy. I shook my head. He wasn’t making any sense. Hell. About an hour ago my own life stopped making sense. When I looked around, I realized I was in a cemetery. Tombstones stood out across the ground like finely cut marble teeth with the regularity and precision typical of a city of the dead.

  “Fitting place to bring you,” he said, “since I couldn’t allow you to go back to where you came from. Too many awkward questions, and my boss hates those with a passion. But hey, I know somebody here who might—”

  “Where the hell are we?” I interrupted. My head still felt as if it were full of . . . well, embalming fluid.

  With this, the genie’s face brightened. “The only place I could bring you back AND keep you away at the same time.”

  My stomach lurched. My head hurt. This guy wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I wanted to do mean things to him. Between gritted teeth, I said, “I have no clue what you are talking about and I want to go home. Now.”

  The genie clapped me on my back. “No can do, hound dog.”

  A gust of wind blew against my face, rustling dried leaves, sending some to skitter across the ground like petrified crabs. The breeze was cold, causing me to shiver. With it came the scents of autumn, of dried vegetation and a touch of wood smoke. A grey sheet of paper lifted up and somersaulted through the air until it came to rest wrapped around my shin. When I took hold of it, I saw that I held the front page of a newspaper.

  As my eyes skimmed across the headlines, the man beside me said softly, “See? You ain’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  The newspaper page proclaimed in large letters that Washington DC was still too radioactive to remain a principality. The article that followed said that someone named Gamma-Ray Godfrey, the Heretical Nuclear Jew, wanted to claim it as his own. Only, some group called the Vegan Plutonium Al Queda Reformed Movement (Christians, Mormons, and Jews Welcome! Scientologists need not apply!) bragged that it blew the city up for not supporting a ban on all meats human and otherwise. The group thought that the district all the way down to Alexandria should be theirs by right of conquest. But the author noted that the principality next to it belonged to the Enlightened Order of Zombies, and there were going to be obvious clashes of ideology over culinary habits.

  I looked at the genie blankly.

  If this were merely a mean trick, I would still be on the golf course and it would still be summertime—which clearly it was not. The genie sighed. “I had to do it this way, and if you’d just played along I might have been able to make things easier, but nothing’s easy when too many people have a hold on my lamp. Makes me kind of schizophrenic. Gets me all kinds of crazy. Too many miles to Memphis for me to keep myself whole, if you catch my drift.”

  I didn’t. No. Not really. “You really are a genie, then?”

  He nodded his head.

  “And you really killed me?”

  He nodded his head. “Didn’t want to, but I had my orders.”

  I think my face grew pale.

  I know I grew light headed and nearly fell. “You’ll get used to it in time.”

  My head still may have been a bit slow, but it didn’t take long for the gears to start turning.

  My mom . . .

  Dad . . .

  Sister . . .

  I might never see them again. My fists clenched involuntarily. “You son of a bitch,” I growled. “What have you done to me?”

  “You said you’d rather croak than live with a golf course down below,” he said blithely. “I think a little thanks are in order.”

  My voice came out as a hiss. “What did you say? A little thanks?”

  “Son, I didn’t keep you dead. I didn’t turn you into a one-man putt-putt game. And I could have turned you into a toad.”

  Maybe it was his sanctimonious tone that finally did it. I hit him. Right square in his blunt little upturned nose. His eyes went wide and he fell to the ground with a loud grunt. That was when I remembered what had been tickling my memory before he brought me here. According to mythology, genies were physical beings. That meant I could hit him and make it hurt. When he looked up at me with that stupid wig turned askance and a pouty twist forming on his lips, I raised my hand to hit him again. Before I made it to him, the loud pop of inrushing air as the genie disappeared jarred me.

  I looked around, finally alone. I didn’t lower my fist, however. If I caught even a flash of rhinestone or a flicker of anything resembling imitation Elvis I was going to go Samuel L all over his ass before he had a chance to neuter me. At that moment, a noise from behind a tall tombstone caught my attention. I stepped toward it, ready to fight. Whatever lurked on the other side wasn’t too large. I could tell that much. The quick sounds I heard could only have been made by a medium sized animal. This didn’t make me feel any better, though. If genies actually existed, anything could be waiting back there to pounce on me.

  I heard something shaking itself and held my breath. My heart rate increased. Whatever the thing was, it was slowly inching its way around the edge of the monument. As it drew closer, I clenched my fis
t so hard that my knuckles popped. A dark, surreptitious form slowly emerged. At first it hesitated, as if afraid of me just as I was afraid of it. But as more and more of the creature revealed itself, I felt my fear abate. When at last I saw the creature in its entirety, I let my hand fall to my side, laughed, and got down on my knees, patting my thigh, beckoning to the shape to come forward.

  The inquisitive and bearded face of a large schnauzer looked back at me, uncertain whether or not to approach. “Fine,” I said after it became apparent that the dog preferred its cautious distance. “I won’t scratch your ear, then.”

  The dog regarded me for another moment or two, and then chuffed quietly. I still did not get up right away. That animal was the first non-threatening thing I had seen since accidentally triggering the genie’s lamp, and I did not want to alarm it. “I just wish you could tell me where I am,” I absently told the dog, envying its thick coat of fur. “Or how to find something warmer.” I seemed to be wearing a thin suit of some sort.

  The dog cocked its head as if it considered my words, and then gave a series of barks that rang clear into the night air but went unanswered. I watched as it sniffed at me once, and then set off at a brisk trot, disappearing farther back into the cemetery where larger mausoleums sat still like pale, squat elephants in the dark. I stood up and my knees popped. To my left, the sky glowed from the light of countless streetlamps. About a hundred feet away, a road ran on the other side of an iron fence adorned with sharply tipped spires. A lonely sidewalk buffered it from the road, and at this hour the only thing aside from the schnauzer occupying this part of the world was me.

  A snapping twig was the first thing that announced I wasn’t as alone as I thought. Then I heard someone sneaking up on me. I spun in place in time to see a tall figure clad in a dark cloak looming over me. This stranger had a long, pallid, angular face with a narrow chin and short, dark hair. His eyes smoldered with the low crimson light of dying embers. His gaze bore down on me and I felt the hackles on the back of my neck stand up.

  I think I might have screamed, but before I had a chance to do anything else, he raised his arms and as his cloak fell back, revealing two cadaverous hands tipped with long and tapering fingers. He leered at me in a way that promised nothing good was going to come of this meeting. When he spoke, his parted lips revealed two wicked fangs that gleamed with a serpentine menace. I gasped as he crooned in a voice as gritty as the bottom of a grave, “I want to drink your blood.”

  I knew this just wasn’t going to be my night.