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Faybelle gets the call from her mother when she’s technically off the clock. Since that doesn’t actually mean anything in her line of work, she slides to open the call from her perch on the roof of her apartment building. The evening has just crossed into nighttime, the warmth of what was left of the sun slipping away from her skin. The moon is very full.
“Hey, Mom.” Faybelle inspects her nails as she kicks her legs off the railing. It’s some mark—her mother wouldn’t be calling from this number otherwise—but it’s been only a few days since the last call, which is odd.
That doesn’t mean much in her line of work either.
“Faybelle.” Her mother doesn’t have to say another word. Her tone of voice tells Faybelle everything she needs to know. Ah. “We’ve been having a recurring problem. A pest that keeps coming back.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it. Where?” Faybelle is already unfolding herself and standing up. She kicks at the shoddy rooftop door so it opens and descends the stairs, listening to rustling sounds on her mother’s end of the line.
“The back of the mall. Screams were heard; someone saw a dark shape running by; all very pedestrian. The person meant to be on patrol there is not responding, and I suspect that girl he’s been seeing has something to do with it . . .” Faybelle doesn’t need years of listening to her mother’s frustrated voice to tell she’s very close to snapping and feeding the dipshit patrol stooge to the wolves. And while that might soothe the neighborhood pack for a few moons, Faybelle prefers her diplomacy with a little less infighting. They're supposed to be a united front, after all.
“It’s fine, Mom, I’ll deal with it.” She unlocks her door, breathing an identification spell over the handle that lets the apartment know not to try to eat her when she steps in, and heads straight for her mission cabinet.
“Will you?”
“I’m kind of a professional, you know.” She grabs three stakes and slots them into the belt that doubles as a fashion statement. “Trained by the best, elite operative, all that . . .”
“I happen to remember three times when you’ve come into contact with this mark and failed to complete your duty. Once I could chalk up to incompetence, and twice to bad luck. Thrice, Faybelle, begins to look like defiance.” Faybelle throws in a sachet of salt and, just for fun, a vial of holy water. She doesn’t use it every time—the local parish is irritatingly standoffish to people dressed like her who come in and maybe spend a little bit too much time rummaging around in storage rooms—but it’s better safe than sorry when dealing with a creature of this magnitude.
“Come on, Mom, it’s the oldest one in town. I’m good, but I’m not so good that I can play God with these vermin like that. I’ll get her soon.” Faybelle shuts her cabinet and is already moving out the door, whispering a locking spell so everything is restored to how it was a minute ago. She covers the distance of the hallway in long strides.
“The details are unimportant, Faybelle. As long as you can finally kill it and rid this town of that scourge, I don’t need to know the rest.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll call you when it’s done.” Faybelle disconnects the call before her mother can land another comment on her past with the mark (all very unwarranted, if not completely untrue). Faybelle starts up a light jog, and although it’s barely a warm-up, she can feel her heart racing.
It’s anticipation of the fight. The meeting. It’s what she was made for.
It doesn’t take long to get to the backlot of the mall. Faybelle can sense something’s off immediately. She can’t quantify her intuition, not after so many years of honing it: maybe the lights play oddly off the pavement, or there are a few too many shadows where there shouldn’t be any, or the sounds of the night and the motorway in the distance are distorted. Whatever it is, she doesn’t need intel to know something has gone down.
Then she runs right into a pool of blood, and yeah, everything’s pretty obvious.
There are low moaning sounds coming somewhere off to her right. Faybelle doesn’t even reach for her stakes as she heads in that direction, hoping the sounds aren’t coming from the patrol goon. As much as her mother doesn’t like him, and as annoying as his girlfriend is, it’s not exactly easy to teach people the skills needed in this trade. She mutters a soft-foot spell under her breath.
There are a few cars in the parking lot, probably belonging to late shift mall employees. Faybelle rounds a sedan and there they are, the mark and her victim, locked in a facsimile of a lover’s embrace. If not for all the blood. They’re several slots down, far enough that details are obscured, but she’s seen this scene before.
“What did you even do before malls were invented?” Faybelle asks. She unsheathes one of her stakes and flips it in the air in one long, easy motion. She doesn’t have to raise her voice to be heard, even at this distance. Guess that soft-foot spell wasn’t really necessary. Faybelle crosses the distance between them quickly, making as much noise as she possibly can. "You're always lurking around them."
“Mm,” is her reply, and then she’s met with a lovely brown gaze uncovered by the sunglasses that rest on similarly lovely brown hair. They aren’t needed at night. “Kill rapists, mostly.” Briar Beauty flashes her white teeth. Faybelle thinks she’d call it a smile.
“Super noble and purehearted,” she says, coming to a stop several yards away. “I mean, you should really be canonized, if only you were able to enter a church.”
“I’d make angels weep,” Briar says, casting the body in front of her aside carelessly. “I’m still doing my duty.” She waves a hand at the—well, Faybelle assumes it’s a corpse now. “This bitch’s girlfriend was running away, last I saw her. She didn’t even notice me.” Ah, yep, it’s the patrol idiot. Faybelle guesses her mother had good reason not to like him, although the Dark Fairy isn’t known to make judgments along what any normal person would call typical moral lines. Or any moral lines. She might make a fuss about killing being wrong under all circumstances, but Faybelle knows that’s all a front for her to find some reason to hate Briar’s kind.
“Thanks for taking out the trash,” Faybelle says, “but I do have to kill you now, I’m afraid. You know, family business, I wanted to go into cheerleading but my mother made me stay and follow her dreams; it’s all tragically Disney channel.”
“Oh, please, try your best.” Briar adjusts her sunglasses and smiles. Her fangs peek out, dark with blood. “Fighting a just-fed vampire is the best idea you’ve ever had.”
“Isn’t it more polite to say vamps now? Or have I been on social media too much?” Faybelle catches her stake and spins it around in her hand. She’s moving closer to Briar now, who has stayed still the whole time, not bothering to even clean the blood off her hands or her pink skirt.
“Look at you, socially conscious.” Briar sits back on her heels and daintily adjusts one of the rings on her long, elegant fingers. “I try to stay out of all the infant discourse myself.”
“How mature,” Faybelle says, and slings one of her stakes at Briar’s heart.
She hadn’t expected it to land true. Briar is much too experienced, and much too experienced fighting with Faybelle, to be caught by surprise by some measly stake. She’s standing to the side in a rush of movement too fast for Faybelle’s eyes to comprehend. Ah, she should’ve thought of that.
“You missed,” Briar says cheerfully. She isn’t even coming for Faybelle. The action is infuriating on some level; Faybelle has never liked being thought of as a child. Yet despite her instinctual anger at the words, she knows the fight she wants is coming. She smirks back.
“Had to get you standing somehow,” she says before uttering a sense enhancer spell. Briar waits for her to finish moving her lips before she’s suddenly there, reaching for Faybelle, and Faybelle ducks.
Fighting doesn’t always feel like a dance. Often it’s just a cage match with the cage being the threat of imminent death. Not that Faybelle minds, because the thrill of the fight is always overpowering, but when it’s like this—fluid, reciprocal, almost choreographed in the way both of them read the other—it’s a treat she doesn’t often get to indulge in. She has a stake in one hand and is fingering the cross that dangles off her belt with the other, trying to decide which to make a move with first.
“Too slow, hunter,” Briar says, raking her nails down Faybelle’s leg and grabbing for her pouch of salt. Faybelle manages to fall in pain in a direction that keeps all her goodies out of Briar’s hands.
“Tell yourself that,” Faybelle breathes out, managing to get a healing spell through her lips before she hits the ground. Briar backs up, eyeing for an opening, which leaves Faybelle at eye-level with her shoes. “How the fuck are you wearing those things on your nightly prowls and scrimmages?”
“I’m a being of elegance and poise,” Briar says with a little curtsy. A second later, she’s swiping at Faybelle’s belt again. Faybelle unhooks her cross and narrows her eyes as Briar comes at her again. There. She manages to loop the chain around Briar’s arm when she reaches out again, her own reaction time sped up by the sense enhancer. Briar hisses and backs away, plucking the chain off her wrist and tossing it with careless ease off into the cars. It flies into the abyss, probably never to be seen again. In the time it took her to get it off, Faybelle has uncorked her vial of holy water, replacing the stopper with her thumb.
“Too slow, vampire.” She smiles breezily as Briar paces closer, sporting her own smile in return. She takes out her salt and sprinkles it around her in a circle. “I could do with a breather, though.”
“You’re too young to be tired already,” Briar says. She takes leisurely steps as she circles around the salt ring.
“Tough week at work.”
“I saw that coven you took out a few months back. Grisly stuff.”
“Not my best work.” Faybelle rubs her second stake with her thumb. She can’t throw it over the salt border, but trying to hit a vampire with a projectile is a stupid plan anyway. Hell knows she’s told too many initiates that. Faybelle slips the holy water up her sleeve and whispers a sticking spell.
Then she secures her grip on her stake and lunges out of the ring straight for Briar.
There’s not a lot of punching and kicking involved. It truly is more like a dance, filled with reaching limbs and swiping hands, each movement taking place so quickly it feels like slow motion. Faybelle’s goal is to get a straight shot at Briar’s heart; Briar’s goal is to get at Faybelle’s neck or something. That would be the quickest blow, but the annoying thing about fighting vampires is that they can hurt you pretty much anywhere, while they’re only vulnerable in their hearts.
Faybelle ducks low and considers feinting. She’s tried that already, two skirmishes ago, and Briar had left her limping out of a graveyard. She rolls out of the way of Briar’s kick and pops up.
“I like the pink streaks,” she says, dancing around Briar to make her turn around.
“I played with them in the 80s, but I think they’re coming back,” Briar replies conversationally. She spins and manages to catch Faybelle’s arm. Before she can tweak it, Faybelle drops the stake and catches it with the other hand, and decides now is the moment to stab at her chest.
Briar has another hand too. It locks around Faybelle’s wrist.
“Ah, damn,” Faybelle says as Briar squeezes. The stake clatters out of her hand. Their faces are very close. There's red in Briar's cheeks. “We can’t keep meeting like this.” She undoes the sticking spell and splashes the holy water over Briar.
The effect is much worse than the cross. Briar spits and immediately drops Faybelle’s hands to wring at her clothing, sputtering at where Faybelle knows it stings. That amount of holy water won’t really harm her, but it does buy Faybelle enough time to take out her third stake and really attack.
The third clash is messier, wilder. Briar digs her nails in Faybelle’s arm and wrenches her forward, teeth bared; Faybelle yanks her arm away and kicks Briar in the stomach. Briar tries to break Faybelle’s other arm; Faybelle scrapes the side of her neck with the stake, nearly jabbing it in.
Their dance is coming to an end; both of them can tell. Faybelle can’t get an opening for the finishing blow. She never can. Briar has given up on reaching for Faybelle’s belt of tricks and is now going straight for her, sharp nails and sharper teeth out to draw blood . . . and then draw more, and more, and more . . .
Briar throws herself at Faybelle without warning, catching her off-guard with untapped aggression. They go down in a blur of pink and white (Faybelle’s mother repeatedly tells her not to wear such an eye-catching color; Faybelle does it anyway. Little rebellions.). The world is a blur of dark sky and dark asphalt for a moment as they tumble, and Faybelle can only curl her chin in to protect her neck as they roll to a stop.
Faybelle sticks her limbs out and is suddenly right on top of Briar, propped up over her, close enough that she can smell blood. Briar breathes in deeply, fingers clawing at the pavement, and Faybelle knows she in turn can hear Faybelle’s heartbeat.
Briar’s eyes are so brown. That’s one of the myths that isn’t true: vampire eyes don’t change, even when they drink. They get colder, harder, sharper with age, but that’s something that happens to all humans, really. Briar’s eyes are long-lashed and deep as she looks up at Faybelle.
The weight of her last stake hangs from Faybelle’s belt.
“You’d taste good,” Briar says softly. Every word she says is translated to breath on Faybelle’s lips.
“Shame,” Faybelle says, and goes for her stake.
Briar throws her off in moments and wipes at her lips. She’s holding the last stake in her hand, pink acrylics closing over her fist. A moment later, she darts in and slams Faybelle to the ground—the sense enhancer must be wearing off.
“Good to see you again, Faybelle,” Briar says, a dark shadow looming overhead backlit by the parking lot floodlight. She wiggles her fingers in a goodbye wave and turns on her pink stiletto. In a matter of seconds, she’s completely gone, melting into the night.
Faybelle sighs and rolls her head back so she’s looking straight up at the inky sky. Her mom’s going to be so pissed. About the patrol loafer, but moreso about Faybelle. She’s worth three patrol loafers and the Dark Fairy knows it. Still can’t catch this last mark, though.
Faybelle groans and reaches for her phone. She holds it straight up overhead, auto-dialing her mom’s number, and puts it on speakerphone so she can lie here while she delivers the bad news. The call is picked up on the second ring.
“Hey, Mom,” Faybelle says, flopping one arm overhead and watching the night sky idly. She’s smiling, she realizes a moment later, effortlessly and truly. She holds back a laugh. “Yeah, I have some bad news.”