The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told by Martin H. Greenberg Page A

smile that showed off a charminglymismatched pair of dimples. “I am sorry you had to be involved. I tried to get you out of it.”
    But Stella had been dealing with people a long time, she could smell a fake a mile away. The laughter had been real, but the kind concern certainly wasn’t.
    “Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room where her father could drop on top of her, but how?
    The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a—” she took a deep breath, “—werewolf.”
    The news didn’t seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be over-matched. He’d been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.
    “Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren’t so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”
    The vampire sneered right back and, on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”

    David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire’s voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.
    Patience, patience , he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.

    If the vampire’s theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he’d tried to drive her father through the wall.
    The vampire had no trouble grabbing it . . . or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.
    She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn’t see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.
    “Now,” whispered Stella diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.
    Even though Devonte’s chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella’s motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling redgold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire’s look like toys.
    For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother’s lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf’s bulk—until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.
    With an inhuman howl the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she’d had of her face, Stella saw something terrible . . . evil.
    “Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.
    She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urban smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing though fabric but not skin.
    Something buzzed between them, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.
    It took a moment for her to properly