Page 31 of The Elementalist
Crystal regarded me for a long moment. “That’s incredibly sweet of you, but I am neither as innocent as I appear nor as helpless. This is, however, how I look to everyone. The”—she held up a hand, waving her fingers—“delicateness is from the fey side of the family.”
Well, there’s that. “Okay.” I blink. “Are you reading my mind or assuming what I thought?”
“Yes.” She fluttered her eyes at me.
I sat there a moment, then nodded, not quite sure what to think.
“I’m not evil, Max. I need you to understand that. I do like to have fun, be wild, indulge in certain vices… I’ve never had the patience for an overabundance of rules or beingproper, which only made my family want me around less. They may be pricks, but I still love them—except for Grandmother... she’s been a real bitch to me. Dana was the only one who never acted like I’d become a pariah. We were quite a bit closer than half-sisters ought to have been.”
Hmm. I rubbed my chin, realizing I needed to shave soon. The dead sister hadn’t shunned her like the rest of the family. Perhaps the others objected to this? “Do you think your relationship with Dana is the reason she’d been targeted? I’m getting the feeling the attack wasn’t as random as it appeared.”
She fidgeted at her shirt where it draped in her lap, her expression at an unreadable place between deep thought, an imminent explosion of tears, and wanting to tear someone’s face off. Hopefully, not mine. After a few minutes, she looked up. “I suppose it is possible they targeted her, but I don’t think her simply treating me like a sister she’d grown up with and not an outcast would’ve been enough to have her killed.”
“Do you think she might’ve seen something that night in the woods they didn’t want her revealing?”
“They?”
I shrugged. “A targeted murder is ordered by someone. Whoever did it is thethey. Your family, another family, an as-yet-unknown vampire, perhaps even Piper sent his buddy to attack them… who knows?”
“Well, Dana did say something unusual on the call that I hadn’t told anyone about. ‘Crimony biscuits.’”
“Is that some odd British dessert?”
She managed a weak smile. “No, it’s from a series of bookswe read as children. It’s about this girl and her friend who basically run around solving mysteries. And of course, they run into stuff like mummies and monsters and evil wizards. More often than not, each story has a character in it that seems nice and friendly but turns out to be working for the bad guys—oristhe bad guy. Whenever Drusilla, the main girl, realizes this or sees something dangerous, she always says ‘crimony biscuits.’”
“I’m guessing she says that because they can’t put ‘aww fuck’ in a kids’ book.”
That got a laugh out of her. “Yeah, probably.”
“But, Dana never used that phrase in real conversation. I’m sure she blurted it as a clue of some kind. Either she’d seen something extremely strange and dangerous, or… someone I trust is really a threat.”
“But she didn’t want to say it outright?”
“Maybe.”
“Hmm... perhaps shedidsee something that someone wanted to keep quiet. Question is, what? And who sent Derek after her?”
“I’m sure Piper wasn’t far behind. Two peas in a pod. Both equally psychotic in their own way. Don’t let Piper’s charm fool you. He makes Ted Bundy look like a saint.”
I nodded. That, I could believe. “Perhaps they were the ones who made the decision to kill her?”
“I can’t answer that. But I do think you need to put Piper and Derek out of this town’s misery. My misery, too.”
“Oh?” I sent a cocky half smile in her direction. “Why would a succubus need plain ol’ me to deal with her vampire problem?”
She poked me. “You’re far from ‘plain old.’ And I’m not equipped to deal with vampires. I can outrun them. I’m more or less as fast as they are...” My empty coffee cup appeared to teleport from the dashboard in front of me to her hand. Only the breeze across my face gave away that she’d grabbed it...yeah, that was an awesome display of speed. “But, everything I might do to them—magically speaking, if you want to call it that—they’ll recover from. So, I’m stuck using the same kinds of weapons anyone else would. Wooden stakes, fire—”
“Wooden bullets might work, too.”
Crystal blinked. “Say again?”
“Wooden bullets, and they’re not as crazy as you might think.”
“Wouldn’t they... I dunno... shatter or something?”
“Depends. I did a little looking on the internet. You get a hard enough type of wood and make a big enough bullet, say a 12 gauge shotgun slug, they can be fired. Range is crap, and they don’t have too much stopping power on a normal human… but supposedly they could kill vampires.”
She shrugged. “Wood is wood, I guess. As long as it penetrates the heart. Yet another example of the natural world foiling the unnatural. Who would think something as simple as wood could take down something as vile as a vampire?”
