Deaths Excellent Vacation

sure but I thought she was shaking. It was certainly cold enough. Even I was a bit chilled, and stoneskin don’t feel it the way the soft pink ones do. She jangled her keys slightly, sweet music.
    The lights were out here in the corner of the lot. That was the first wrong thing. The next was the thickness in the rainy air, like rancid soup. Last was the shadows crowding around, and the red pinprick lamps of eyes blinking on and off.
    What the hell? I dropped my plastic bags and my trueform shredded out through the mask of disguise. There went another cheap pair of canvas shoes—my real feet tore out through them, claws spreading lightly on concrete. My legs burned a little as I crouched, gathering myself. The darkness reached down from the sky to touch the ground in a thick, wet curtain.
    The Big Bad likes to take its victims in the dark. So Heartkin have infrared and other ways of seeing. She was like a lamp, heat and life shining along my skin, and for a moment it was so bright I was confused but already committed to my leap.
    The thing after her was a kolthulu . I hit in the middle of the nest of rubbery, snakelike tentacles. They’re lined with dry hairy suckers that can strip flesh off bone, but that’s no match for gargoyle skin. They give reluctantly under claws, so just brute force is needed to tear the things apart. There was Kate screaming, but I wasn’t worried about that just yet because it was a terror sound, not a pain sound. And who wouldn’t be terrified in the dark with the sounds of ripping and crunching all around?
    The kind of light she was giving off didn’t cast shadows, so it was a type of blindness all over me. My coat flapped; I dug my hind claws into concrete that gave like butter and pulled . The heartstring of the beast ripped out with a sound of gristle tearing from bone, and the screaming didn’t diminish as the tentacles lost their will and life, and became just twitching meat.
    There were other sounds, too. Soft sliding sounds, and her voice choked off hard.
    Where there’s kolthulu , there’s always bloodsuckers, too. I whirled, the battlefield drenched with directionless illumination that didn’t come in through the regular visual spectrum. The Heart in me gave a single loud knock against my meat and bone, thrilling up into hypersonic, and I tore through their hard, thin bodies. They were clustered around her, and the not-light of her dimmed and faltered.
    Holy shit. It was only then I realized what was happening.
    They were clustering her, and a soft sucking sound echoed against wet pavement and the dark curtain holding the world away. The not-light dimmed even further, infrared taking up the slack in a deep crimson haze. Six of them, one of me, bad odds when I could smell coppery blood.
    But bad odds aren’t something that worries a gargoyle. The Heart always wins , that’s what we say. Even if I fell here, others of my kin would get these things. I’d go into the Heart and come back stronger and better.
    Or so they said. I didn’t want to put it to the test.
    Metal crunched as I flung one of them. A car alarm went off, the sound knifing through the other din that I ignored because it wasn’t the screaming. The screaming had stopped, and that was a bad sign. A snap of greenstick neck-breaking, and the three remaining bloodsuckers fled, one of them limping badly and hissing in their weird piping tongue. They can’t talk right when their teeth are out, the little idiots.
    The darkness fled with them, the Big Bad picking up its toys and going home. I stood, half snarling, stone flexing over my skin and the strength of the Heart thudding underneath it. Regular sight returned, and I looked down.
    Kate lay sprawled on the wet concrete, rain beading on her pale skin. One of them had ripped her shirt open, and there were her breasts in a cheap black-lace bra.
    Hey, I looked. I might be ugly, but I’m not dead .
    “Oh, shit,” I said. My ears tingled, and I stared at her chest. There on the pale slope of her left breast, a sinuous fleur-de-lis curved. The lines were sharp black, as if they’d been inked by a master. But it wasn’t a tattoo. It ran with its own odd light, a dark fluorescence human eyes wouldn’t see.
    She was a Heart candidate.
    And I heard running feet and shouts behind me, as black-looking blood mixed with rain and threaded down from the puncture wounds in her throat. She was bleeding. She was a candidate, and she’d been bitten with a gargoyle