Page 56 of Midlife Vampire Unexpected

“You don’t want to make the same mistake again,” he had said with no uncertain terms.

I couldn’t say I blamed him. They’d had enough problems chasing a single demon down. There was no way in hell I was going to chase all these wraiths down. I didn’t even have a way to combat them.

As he took off, he didn’t fly with me straight toward the cemetery, which completely surprised me. Instead, he rose high into the sky until we could barely see The Estate anymore. I was ready to scream at him, but I was so terrified I couldn’t say a word. I knew I should be exhilarated by the height, but that was not what happened. I was terrified.

“So, you realize you can shift, right?” Thrain asked.

I looked up and back over my shoulder. “I’m a vampire,” I said. “Not a shifter.”

Thrain laughed. “All vampires are shifters. They just don’t want to be called that. They think it makes them sound like animals. But you are. You can turn into a bat.”

“Seriously, a bat? That is so not sexy.”

“The vampire bat is where all your powers come from,” he shrugged. It’s a venom that’s been passed since the beginning of time.

“Why are you telling me all this now?” I asked, closing my eyes and trying not to look at the distance between me and the ground. The only thing holding me over the ground were the two hands of this damn demon who was starting to sound like he’d gone way off script.

“I’m going to drop you into the cemetery,” he said. “But if I go down there the wraiths will see me and they’ll know exactly what’s up. At the moment they’re feeding on the undead. They won’t notice a small bat if it lands like a little turd plop in the corner of the cemetery.”

“What do you say?” I hissed at him, baring my fangs.

“I’m going to drop you from here and you’re going to shift into a bat on your way down.” Thrain made it sound like I did this every day.

“Why didn’t you tell me when I was on the ground?” I asked in earnest. “I could have done a practice run!”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Thrain explained. “You have to be thrown out of the nest to learn to shift.”

“No!” I cried, but it was too late, because he had already dropped me! I fell through the air screaming. How the fuck was I supposed to turn into a bat of all things? I was going to die. The ground raced up toward me. All I could imagine was my head splattering into the ground down below and the wraiths coming over and filling my corpse with their horrible ideas.

“Bat bat bat bat bat,” I repeated the word in my head, having no idea how to shift. Suddenly it came to me. The pulse! The pulse and the sonar. Those were powers of the bat.

I quickly tuned into the pulse and I focused it down toward the cemetery where all of the enemies were. The pulse came back and hit me so hard it slammed into my body as I descended toward the earth. My body began to shrink and suddenly my shoulder blades extended into wings and I turned into this tiny little black bat with leathery wings.

Holy fuck.

I beat my wings really hard, bouncing around in the sky like a drunken sailor.

A hulking mass hovered next to me and I glanced over to see Thrain. He was smiling at me. “There you go, little bat. That’ll get you into the cemetery safer.”

I glared at him with my little blind bat eyes, but when I pushed the sonar out to him, he didn’t come back as an enemy. Thrain was a friend. He had done this on purpose and it had been the right choice. Never mind that I lost ten years of my life. I was a vampire now, so I was going to live quite a bit longer anyhow.

I looked down toward the cemetery where the wraiths were feeding on the bodies. As a coven member I’d be able to slip in, but I had to go straight down this way.

Entering through the ward was like moving through molasses. Not a single wraith noticed me as I landed in front of Toern’s crypt.

I shifted back into human form and crouched low with the pouch of blood in a crossbody bag across my shoulder that stayed with me thanks to the magic of shifting. I slid up to the demon wall and began tracing the blood outlines of the demon symbols, which I’d been studying since the beginning of the case. I knew the witches were up at The Estate, watching, chanting and giving me strength. We were working as a team. Even though right now it looked like I was working solo, they were all behind me.

Unfortunately, so were all the wraiths, and they were starting to notice me. Two of them had stopped their assaults on the corpses they were hovering over. The screaming became more intense. The shrill shriek of the wraiths was overbearing, but I stayed focused on the symbols. It didn’t matter if I was attacked by a wraith. If I could get the demon symbols done, they would all start going to Undirheim and whatever happened to me, I trusted the coven would be able to put me back together again.

At least I hoped so.

A loud shriek went up from the wraiths closest to me as they looked up.

“Be careful!” I heard Jane’s voice loud and clear in my head. She must be extremely worried if she was violating her own idea of not communicating with people through their psyche. She was good like that. If I had her powers, I’d be busting into people’s brains all the time to mess with them.

I sent her back a message letting her know I was taking care of business, but I could feel the pressure of the wraiths. They were closing in on me.

The nearest wraith attached itself to me and started to pull up my psyche.

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