Dead to the World

Bubba?”
    “Back to our Wiccans. They need to make three innocent people stand out somehow so we won’t kill ’em.”
    “But he has to come back now. He has to break down the door for me!”
    “But . . .” I was disconcerted at Pam’s reaction. “He can’t go in without an invitation, like you.”
    “Bubba is brain damaged, degraded. He’s not altogether a true vampire. He can enter without an express invitation.”
    I gaped at Pam. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She just raised her eyebrows. When I thought back, it was true that I could remember at least twice that Bubba had entered dwellings without an invitation. I’d never put two and two together.
    “So I’ll have to be the first through the door,” I said, more matter-of-factly than I was really feeling. “Then I invite you all in?”
    “Yes. Your invitation will be enough. The building doesn’t belong to them.”
    “Should we do this now?”
    Pam gave an almost inaudible snort. She was smiling in the glow of the streetlight, suddenly exhilarated. “You waiting for an engraved invite?”
    Lord save me from sarcastic vampires. “You think Bubba’s had enough time to get to the Wiccans?”
    “Sure. Let’s nail some witch butt,” she said happily. I could tell the fate of the local Wiccans was very low on her list of priorities. Everyone seemed to be looking forward to this but me. Even the young Were was showing a lot of fang.
    “I kick, you go in,” Pam said. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, utterly surprising me.
    I thought, I so don’t want to be here.
    Then I got up from my crouch, stood behind Pam, and watched in awe while she cocked a leg and kicked with the force of four or five mules. The lock shattered, the door sprang inward while the old wood nailed over it splintered and cracked, and I leaped inside and screamed “Come in!” to the vampire behind me and the ones at the back door. For an odd moment, I was in the lair of the witches by myself, and they’d all turned to look at me in utter astonishment.
    The room was full of candles and people sitting on cushions on the floor; during the time we’d waited outside, all the others in the building seemed to have come into this front room, and they were sitting cross-legged in a circle, each with a candle burning before her, and a bowl, and a knife.
    Of the three I’d try to save, “old woman” was easiest to recognize. There was only one white-haired woman in the circle. She was wearing bright pink lipstick, a little skewed and smeared, and there was dried blood on her cheek. I grabbed her arm and pushed her into a corner, while all about me was chaos. There were only three human men in the room. Hallow’s brother, Mark, now being attacked by a pack of wolves, was one of them. The second male was a middle-aged man with concave cheeks and suspicious black hair, and he not only was muttering some kind of spell but pulling a switch-blade from the jacket lying on the floor to his right. He was too far away for me to do anything about it; I had to rely on the others to protect themselves. Then I spotted the third man, birthmark on cheek—must be Parton. He was cowering with his hands over his head. I knew how he felt.
    I grabbed his arm and pulled up, and he came up punching, of course. But I wasn’t having any of that, no one was going to hit me, so I aimed my fist through his ineffectually flailing arms and got him right on the nose. He shrieked, adding another layer of noise to the already cacophonous room, and I yanked him over to the same corner where I’d stashed Jane. Then I saw that the older woman and the young man were both shining. Okay, the Wiccans had come through with a spell and it was working, though just a tad late. Now I had to find a shining young woman with dyed red hair, the third local.
    But my luck ran out then; hers already had. She was shining, but she was dead. Her throat had been torn out by one of the wolves: one of ours, or one of theirs, it didn’t really matter.
    I scrambled though the melee back to the corner and seized both of the surviving Wiccans by the arm. Debbie Pelt came rushing up. “Get out of here,” I said to them. “Find the other Wiccans out there, or go home now. Walk, get a cab, whatever.”
    “It’s a bad neighborhood out there,” quavered Jane.
    I stared at her. “And this isn’t?” The last I saw of the two, Debbie was pointing and giving them instructions. She had stepped out the doorway with them. I was