Deaths Excellent Vacation

right next to her, and there were people coming.
    It was a moment’s work to scoop her up and cradle her close. Her purse fell free, its patent-leather strap broken, and her jacket was in shreds. The sole of her sneaker had been almost torn off. Her sharp chin tipped back, the blood on her skin doing funny things to the inside of my head.
    “Jesus!” someone yelled, and I compressed myself like a spring, ready to leap. Situation: One parking lot, people beginning to cluster now that the excitement was over and the cloaking darkness was worn away. One gargoyle, shifted fully into stoneskin and hulking inside his raincoat, his hat knocked off and his hair unraveling away from high-pointed ears. One mortal woman, bleeding from a vampire bite. Her car was a shattered hulk of metal and glass, and just before I sprang I heard sirens in the distance.
    Wow, someone actually called the cops this once? Figures.
    The world turned underneath me. There was a scream as I vaulted over the heads of the gathering crowd, a sound of effort like grinding boulders escaping me, muscles and bone working overtime. I bounded like a springheel jack, Kate’s unconscious head bouncing against my shoulder, and all I could think of was that she might get a concussion if she hit her head on me too hard.
    I’ve never claimed to be the smartest gargoyle in the world. But just that once, maybe I did the right thing.
    On the other hand, she was bitten. And things were about to get even more interesting.
     
     
    MY flight left for Bermuda at five the next morning.
    Instead of sitting uncomfortably in a business- class seat, pouring down the drinks so I wouldn’t think of the empty air between me and the ground, I was crouched in the belfry of Immaculate Conception downtown. The rain beat steadily against the bell tower as I watched the clouds lighten by imperceptible degrees toward dawn.
    Yep. I was at home when my vacation started. Lucky me.
    Once dawn had a good grip on the city, I climbed down the rickety stairs. This particular church was built in 1911, and it’s got the standard architecture—and the winding little stairway behind a painted panel of Saint Stephen in a small side chapel, going down to my cell.
    It’s actually a comfortable little place. I’ve got my hot plate and my little fridge—the gargoyle before me wired the place for electricity. I do all my laundry down the street at the Kleen Kloze Washateria, and I’ve got a toilet and a shower. It’s damp, kind of, since it’s all underground. But that doesn’t matter much to a gargoyle.
    And there, on my barely-big-enough bed, Kate lay. Her chest rose and fell with regular breaths, her thin gold necklace gone but her earrings still there. She hadn’t moved since I’d laid her down and checked her clumsily for concussion. I tried to repair her sneaker with duct tape, too, because it hurt me to see it all torn up like that.
    Now, I touched the supple lines of the fleur-de-lis and felt them quiver against the calluses on my fingertips. The Heart under my skin banged into life, blinding me for a moment, and when vision returned, I caught the lines shifting just the tiniest fraction, settling into the familiar circled fleur—the mark all stoneskin spend their nights fighting the Big Bad for. It means a lot of things. Light. Blessing. Beauty.
    Those things we’re denied, or the things we’re too ugly to be comfortable with.
    The messy double puncture wounds on her throat had finally sealed up, since I’d painted them carefully with the coagulant that works best—gargoyle spit and garlic paste. Chewing that stuff up raw makes my eyes water.
    I pulled my hand back, and not a moment too soon. The mark twitched, her breathing changed, and she sat right up and screamed.
    “Jesus!” I almost went over backward. She scrambled back, producing an amazing kettle whistle of sound, and hit the wall. Tried to keep going, her eyes bugged out of her head and her hands flailing.
    I wasn’t so worried about the sound getting out. The painted panel of Saint Stephen is over a thick shell of rock that only a stoneskin could whisper aside, and there’s the stairs and the other oak door, too. But the sound of her scream burrowed into my head, tugged at the Heart under my skin, and I had to fight against my trueform hulking out and making things interesting.
    She stopped for breath, the scream hitching into sharp little sucking sounds as she tried to get in something to breathe and push