Hex Appeal by P. N. Elrod

Author:P. N. Elrod
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-06-09T02:47:14.734000+00:00

Carole Nelson Douglas’s sixty novels include S.F./fantasy, mystery, and romance bestsellers. Her cozy-noir Midnight Louie, feline PI mysteries number twenty-four. Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, began prowling 2013 Vegas-from-Hell in Dancing with Werewolves and was last seen in Virtual Virgin. Carole collects vintage clothing and homeless animals and does dance. Visit her website: www.carolenelsondouglas.com.

OUTSIDE THE BOX

by P. N. ELROD

To paraphrase a line from the movie—it wasn’t in the book—vampires are like chocolates; you don’t know what you get until you open the box.

Not that I was going to dig up a coffin stuffed with a newly made and hungry vamp. My partner and I would watch from a safe distance, the fresh grave bounded by my heavy-duty holding spell. How the vamp got free from its burial would tell us what breed we had on our hands. They were all dangerous, but some more than others.

My name is Marsha Madinia Goldfarb, occupation/vocation/inclination: witch. I register the post-dead and help with the orientation to their new lifestyle. Think you can escape bureaucracy by dying? That would be a no. Sooner or later, however badass a bloodsucker you might be, you will deal with someone from the Company, like me, armed with a clipboard and forms to fill out.

So here I was, my butt parked on a folding campstool in an old cemetery next to an abandoned wreck of an old country church, the sun gone and the darkness thickening.

Meh. It’s a living.

I gave a jump when the custom sound system in the Type III ambulance behind me came to life, blasting the air with the Peter Gunn Theme.

My partner, a vampire named Ellinghaus, began to appear, fading in like old-school special effects: ghostly at first, then forming up and taking on color and solidity. No streaming mist for this guy, he was there or not-there. He timed the fades and formings to the beat of the music. It was his party trick. Not all of them had that kind of control.

Like the rest, his breed of vamp had a special Latin name with the Company geeks, but the informal designation was “Chicago Special.” It coincided with his personal style. He dressed and acted as you might expect from a guy obsessed with the Blues Brothers, complete down to the hat and sunglasses. He even had the accent. On him, it worked. Other vamps ribbed him about it, often not in a good-natured way, but outside the Company people liked him on sight, thinking he was with some nightclub show.

Considering his choice of prime Mancini as his waking-up number for tonight, that was close enough.

Pop-culture packaging aside, Ellinghaus was tough, just couldn’t get around during the day like some of the Dracs could. No shape-shifting, either, but I’d never heard him complain. He’d been in a long, lightproofed storage bench in the back of his home on the road for at least eleven hours and somehow managed not to look rumpled. I could admire that.

His occupation: keeping an eye on the witch so she doesn’t get damaged.

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