FOUR

Samuel Campbell hated Christmas.

He had nothing against the holiday itself. He didn’t dare, honestly, since every time he brought it up, Deanna would give him one of her looks and then lecture him about the winter solstice. Many cultures celebrate the death and rebirth of the sun, since the sun gave life, and so on, and so forth.

Samuel understood, truly he did. He understood that it was why Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ at this time of the year. Early Christianity was very good at co-opting pagan and Jewish rituals, all to make conversion more palatable. He had always found it ironic that the early church had been so much better at it than the modern one.

It didn’t even bother Samuel how commercial the holiday had become, with images of Santa Claus on Coca-Cola cans, and department stores doing their best to separate the people from their money.

Nor was he terribly annoyed at the fact that every year, it seemed like the ramp-up started earlier and earlier. The calendar had only just turned to December, and already it was beginning—with commercials on the TV announcing special Christmas bargains and sales.

Even the whole “peace on Earth, good will to Man” notion had been co-opted by the hippies, which left a bad taste in Samuel’s mouth. But still, the sentiment was a good one, if naïve.

No, what he hated about Christmas was the timing. The monsters just loved the solstices, especially the winter one. Nothing they liked better than to come out at night, after all, and the longest night of the year was fast approaching.

And nothing liked the darkness more than vampires. Right now, Samuel was crouched in the bushes outside a remote house that stood alone at the end of an unlit cul-de-sac in Big Springs, just off the turnpike. It was colder than a well-digger’s ass out here, but the information they’d got from Father Callapso said that this was where the vampire lived.

He’d spent the past few days tracking this particular bloodsucker. Most of his victims were girls, primarily teenagers too stupid to say “no” to a man who wanted to bring them home. Of course, in Samuel’s experience, most teenage girls were that dumb, and he thanked the God he didn’t entirely believe in that his fifteen year-old daughter Mary didn’t fit that mold.

Willful, annoying, disrespectful, yes—Mary was all those things. Samuel had hoped for a dutiful little girl, but she’d already seen too much of the ugliness of the world. When you trained a child practically from birth how to defend herself, how to fire a weapon, how to use a knife, and that not only was the monster in the closet real, but it could and should be shot, hoping for “dutiful” was a waste of time.

The roar of a car’s engine sounded in the distance and quickly grew closer. Samuel soon saw the vehicle that made the noise: a gussied-up show-off car with fins of the kind that boys used to impress girls. He didn’t know the specifics—all he knew about cars was that they started moving when he stepped on the gas, and stopped when he hit the brakes.

Most likely Mary would’ve been able to quote chapter and verse, since she’d been spending what spare time she had at an auto mechanic’s shop. Some boy who worked there after school was sniffing around her, and Samuel had been meaning to check him out. He just hadn’t had the time.

His only consolation was that Mary’s own after-school activities would probably keep her too busy to do anything other than talk. The life of a hunter wasn’t exactly built for romance.

He’d tried explaining that to her once.

“But what about you and Mom?” she’d asked defiantly.

“That’s different,” Samuel had protested weakly.

“How?” Mary had pressed, and Samuel had given up, knowing he didn’t have an answer.

The car pulled into the driveway that ran alongside the house. Samuel checked the ground next to him where he’d set the bow and arrows, and the machete. He’d use the arrows to slow the vampire down, and then the machete to cut off his head.

Cutting the engine of his ostentatious muscle machine, the creature leapt out of the driver’s side and ran around to open the passenger door for his victim. The bloodsucker fit the image nicely: tall, dark, and handsome. He had long sideburns, like most kids these days who weren’t hippies, and wore a blue jacket and tie. Despite himself, Samuel admired his clean-cut approach.

Most vampires looked a few years out of date— immortals tended to have a wonky time-sense. Like that one who appeared to be about forty, but talked about fighting “Jerry” during “the Great War.” Plenty of World War I vets still called it “the Great War,” but for anyone who’d fought in World War II—as Samuel himself had—it was all about “the Nazis” or “the Krauts.”

When the vampire opened the door to let the girl out, Samuel heard a familiar-sounding giggle.

“What a groovy house!” Mary said in a much higher, squeakier voice than was normal for her. Even in the gloom, he could see that her eyes were wide, and her mouth fell open.

He had to admit to a certain pride at his daughter’s ability to put on a character—pride which was tempered by the fact that he was using his fifteen year-old daughter as bait for a bloodsucker. But that was the job. This vampire liked teenagers, and Samuel had a teenager for a daughter. So she had to be the one who would lure the creature back to his house without endangering any more innocent girls.

Then he heard the low hum of another engine and turned to see the Campbell family pickup truck moving slowly down the road. There was hardly any moon, and its lights were out, so the truck was nearly invisible. If he hadn’t been expecting it, he might not have seen it himself.

Even knowing it was there, he couldn’t see the driver, but he knew his wife Deanna was behind the wheel.

Reaching down into the brush, Samuel picked up the bow and grabbed an arrow. He’d need to break cover in order to aim the bow—if he didn’t stand up straight, he’d never get a good shot off, and with Mary that close, he couldn’t risk it—so he got to his feet, notched the arrow, and pulled the string back.

The arrow flew free and lodged itself right in the vampire’s back, cutting through his blue jacket and embedding itself in his spine.

The vampire jerked slightly with the impact.

“Ouch,” he said calmly, and turned, frowning, to see where the arrow had come from.

Then he laughed.

“Ah, I see.” He clapped. “Bravo for your excellent skills, sir, but you’ve made one rather critical error.”

Samuel scowled. “I don’t think so.”

“Did you really think this arrow would hurt me?” the vampire continued, grinning.

“By itself? No.”

Suddenly, the creature stumbled.

“What...?”

“But before I came here,” Samuel said, “I dipped the arrowhead in the blood of a dead man.”

Hissing, the vampire fell to the ground, and started to roll on the lawn in front of his house. Dead man’s blood was poison to his kind. As he did so, Mary calmly stepped aside, finding a safe vantage point.

Samuel reached down to pick up the machete.

He heard the door slam on the pickup truck, and spotted Deanna walking toward the house, gas can in hand. In the dim light of a crescent moon, it looked as if she had grown a tail, but that was just the scabbard for Samuel’s Claymore, dangling from her waist. After Samuel cut off the bloodsucker’s head— which would kill it—they’d burn the body.

Suddenly, the front door to the house slammed open, the noise of cheap metal crashing against wood paneling and echoing into the night. Samuel glanced over, only to see five people moving onto the front porch, all of them looking very unhappy.

All five had noticeably pointed incisors.

“Aw, hell, it’s a nest!” he cried, reaching for the bow and arrow once again.

Before he could even notch the arrow, one of the vampires was on him, snatching the bow away.

“I don’t think so, meat,” it snarled.

The arrow, however, was still clutched in Samuel’s right hand, so he shoved it into the vampire’s belly.

Snatching the bow back from the now-stunned creature, he grabbed the quiver and slung it onto his shoulder, yanking out another arrow and quickly surveying the situation.

Two of the vampires were attacking Mary, with the remaining two on Deanna. Both women were fighting back, and the quarters were too close for Samuel to risk a shot.

Grabbing his machete, he sliced down at the neck of the one he’d stabbed in the belly. It didn’t cut the head clean off, but combined with the paralysis from the dead man’s blood, the wound would keep the creature down. They could always finish him off later.

He moved in to help Mary, and as he did so one of the vampires grabbed his arm and pulled him close. He could smell gore on its breath, and he recoiled. That gave it the opening it was looking for.

The vampire moved in to bite him on the neck.

The report of a gunshot echoed in Samuel’s ears, as Mary fired the .22 calibre pistol that she always carried, just in case. The bullet ripped into the vampire’s knee. It wouldn’t kill it, of course—in fact, a knee wound would heal in short order—but the impact was enough to make the monster stumble.

Samuel gave her a quick nod, then turned to face the downed monster while Mary spun to deal with the one that was still plaguing her.

Gripping its knee tightly with its left hand, blood seeping through the wound and staining its fingers, the vampire on the ground looked up and snarled at Samuel.

“You’ll die slowly for that one, baldy.”

With astonishing speed, the creature leapt to his feet and took a swing at Samuel with its right hand. Instinctively, Samuel raised the machete to deflect the blow. The blade cut through the vampire’s flesh and struck bone with a sickening squelch.

While the vampire yanked its arm back in an attempt to free it from the blade, Samuel kicked him in the stomach. The bloodsucker fell backward, and Samuel was forced to let go of the machete’s hilt.

Snarling, the creature—machete still lodged in his forearm—prepared to leap again, but moving swiftly Samuel once again used a poisoned arrow like a spear and stabbed his attacker in the stomach.

Then he elbowed the monster in the face—which hurt Samuel’s arm as much as it did the vampire’s glass jaw—and grabbed for the machete hilt, tearing it loose from the vampire’s flesh with a bloody yank. He felt the hot splash of ichor on his face.

For a few seconds, the vampire flailed, but quickly the dead man’s blood on the arrowhead left him helpless. Samuel beheaded him quickly.

Wiping his face with his sleeve, Samuel looked around to see how the women were doing....

As soon as the five other vampires appeared on the front porch of the house, he saw Deanna drop the gas can. While it hit the pavement with a sharp clank of metal on asphalt, she had reached for the scabbard and pulled out Samuel’s grandfather’s Claymore. Since she was a better swordsman, while he was more skilled with a bow and arrow, he had entrusted the precious weapon to her for that evening’s hunt.

The provenance of the claidheamh mór had been a subject of great discussion in the Campbell family, due in part to the fact that Grandpa Campbell himself told a different story every time you asked him where the basket-hilt sword had come from. Sometimes it came from a member of the Clan who had fought alongside Bonnie Prince Charlie. Other times it was William Wallace’s sword—a neat trick, since the basket-hilt Claymore hadn’t existed in the fourteenth century. Once, Grandpa Campbell claimed that he himself had used it to help steal the Stone of Scone.

In fact, pretty much every significant event in Scottish history, Grandpa tried to tie to his sword.

The only story Samuel actually believed was the one that his grandfather told him on his deathbed, when he bequeathed it to him. By then, Samuel had already learned the truth about the things that go bump in the night. A wraith had literally sucked out the brain of his best friend, and Samuel had narrowly managed to kill it.

But somehow, Grandpa Campbell knew all about the monsters. As he lay in his four-poster bed, staring at young Samuel as intently as he could with rheumy eyes, the cancer ravaging his stomach and sending him into frequent fits of coughing, he told him about the family claidheamh mór, and how since the 1700s, the sword had been used to slay any number of malevolent creatures.

“And now,” Grandpa had said to Samuel between coughs, “I want you to slay your own monsters with it.”

* * *

Deanna pulled the sword out just in time as two vampires attacked her—one from the front, the other from the rear. She thrust the sword upward, impaling the first creature through his rib cage. Hot blood spurted everywhere, and the vampire snarled at her.

She elbowed the other one in the face—a temporary stopgap. Tightening her grip on the silver basket-hilt of the Claymore, she yanked it out of the first vampire’s chest and used the momentum of that to swing it around at the one that staggered behind her.

The sword bit into the vampire’s arm, causing more blood to spurt.

But the first one—unperturbed by the stab wound she had inflicted—grabbed her by her hair. As the roots tugged at her scalp, Deanna struggled to fight the creature off, whilst trying to keep tabs on the second as it stumbled, grasping its bleeding arm.

Predictably, the first vampire went straight for her neck. However, he only got a mouthful of linen, fooled by her thick, flesh-colored scarf. But she knew that would only delay him for a second—as soon as the surprise wore off, he’d tear into her carotid artery.

But a second was all Deanna needed.

She swung again with practiced ease, bringing the sword around in a smooth arc. At such close quarters the Claymore cleaved through the vampire’s neck, even though the angle was awkward.

The head didn’t quite come off, but it was lolling awkwardly as the vampire collapsed to the ground.

“You filthy strumpet!” the other one breathed as he wrapped a meaty hand around Deanna’s neck. Breathing became impossible as the vampire’s grip tightened, and Deanna felt her feet lift off the ground.

“You will pay for what you’ve done!”

Deanna grabbed frantically at the vampire’s wrist with her free hand, while trying to bring the Claymore around with the other.

Neither tactic was successful.

A whistle through the air signaled an arrow; there was a thunk and a jolt as the shaft struck the vampire in his wounded arm. Despite the pain that had to be shooting through its body, it stubbornly maintained its grip on her neck for a few more seconds.

Deanna was beginning to see spots dancing in front of her eyes, when the creature collapsed to the ground. Finally the grip lessened, and she fell in a heap alongside it, just as she found herself able to suck in precious air again.

Clambering to her feet, she finished the job of decapitating the first vampire, then beheaded the paralyzed one who had almost killed her.

Only then did she turn to flash a smile at her husband.

“Nice shooting.”

“My pleasure,” Samuel replied. Then he finished using his machete on the vampires who had attacked him and Mary.

“I think,” Deanna said, “that we need to have a talk with Father Callapso.”

Mary stared at her.

“Why? He was the one who led us to this.”

“His information was wrong,” Samuel explained. “There’s a huge difference between a single bloodsucker and a nest.”

Deanna hefted the Claymore, unwilling to sheathe it until it had been cleaned. Picking up the gas can with her free hand, she approached her husband and daughter.

“It’s not like any of our sources are one hundred percent unimpeachable,” she said. “We just need to make sure what he gives us is as reliable as it can be. Still, we’re lucky that the Father passes information to us at all—and that he doesn’t think it’s all insane.”

Samuel scowled at that.

“Yeah, well, that exorcism we did for him three years back probably helped. He owes us.”

Deanna started to reply, then stopped herself and nodded in the direction of the bloody corpses.

“I really don’t want to start an argument....”

Mary let out a dramatic sigh.

“Oh, come on, Mom—it’s not like I’ve never heard you two fight.”

“She wasn’t talking about you, Little Miss,” Samuel said. “She meant when we have six vampire corpses we need to dispose of, and a house to burn down so it can’t be used again. Once a nest, always a nest.”

“Right on,” Mary said emphatically. “Let’s get this over with, so I can wash the blood off me.”

Deanna reached up to touch her face with the wrist of her sword hand. Sure enough, the sticky sensation of blood was there. For that matter, they were all drenched in it.

“And Dad?” Mary continued. “I’m fifteen now, so can we please stop with the ‘Little Miss’ thing?”

“I’ll think about it,” Samuel answered with a wry smile. Mary just shot him a dirty look.

Deanna shook her head and hefted the gas can.

“Come on, my darlings, let’s get to work.”

Mary always thought it was kind of corny that the mailbox in front of the house said THE CAMPBELLS on it. It was like something out of the good old days, like when she was a little kid.

But the old days weren’t really all that good—indeed, not as good as most people thought. What people saw on their televisions was what they believed was real, but Mary had learned the hard way just how much of a fiction life really was.

The world was changing. Everyone knew that, of course. Thanks to television they all saw what was happening— Woodstock, Kent State, Watts, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington, the assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy, Neil Armstrong on the moon— and no one expected things to stay the same.

Mary, though, had known just how different things were from when she was eleven years old and watched her parents exorcise a vengeful spirit.

The moon landing had only been a few months ago. To Mary, it was a wondrous thing. Neither Deanna nor Samuel seemed all that interested, especially since it looked as if there was a shapeshifter on the loose in St. Louis, and they were preparing to take the truck onto the turnpike to check it out.

“But Dad,” Mary had said back then, “what if we go into space and get away from the monsters?”

Samuel hadn’t had a good answer to that, so he’d just shrugged and continued his preparations.

There were times when Mary wondered what it would be like to have a normal life. Most of the time she was happy not to have one, because the only way to live a normal life was to remain ignorant. Sure, she’d be able to go to birthday parties and hang around with her friends and do all the other things teenagers did, but she wouldn’t have known that at any moment a vampire or a shapeshifter or some icky creature might come and kill her.

No, knowledge was power. She preferred to know what was coming. If that meant fewer dates, then that was fine.

They drove back from Big Springs after burning the vampires and their house. As soon as they arrived, Mary’s first destination was the bathroom. Her long blonde hair was all sticky with vampire blood, and it was just awful. Besides, if she let her mother or father go first, they’d take forever.

She peeled off her blouse and dungarees, tossing them into the bathroom hamper. Once they’d all showered, Deanna would put the clothes in the laundry with that special soap that Xin—a fellow hunter—had turned her on to.

As she stood under the hot water and rubbed baby shampoo into her hair—she’d learned early on that baby shampoo was best at getting out organic stains—she thought about the fact that she’d be following a night of vampire hunting with a day at school and her ignorant classmates.

There were times when she wished she could have it both ways. Have the normal life and still be a hunter. But she knew that was impossible. Sadly, it left her a bit of an outcast at school, both with her fellow students—who thought she was weird—and the school’s teachers and administrators— who were frustrated by her all-too-frequent absences. Much to their chagrin, parent-teacher conferences didn’t seem to do any good.

That was probably why she was spending so much time at the mechanic’s place after school, whenever she could. John Winchester worked there. He was a nice boy, and refreshingly normal. But he wasn’t like so many of the other high-school students, who just seemed so stupid. John was always so thoughtful about everything, whether it was homework, the war, politics....

Plus he didn’t judge Mary the way the other kids did. He respected her privacy and in a time when women were burning their bras and demanding equal opportunity, he treated her like a person, instead of a girl.

Of course, there were times when she wanted to be treated like a girl. Despite the hot shower, she shuddered at the thought of what her dad would say if he knew what she was thinking.

Such thoughts were nothing compared to what some of the girls at school were doing. In fact, some of them really were tossing out their bras, and not shaving their armpits, and doing other far-out things.

Laughing to herself, she turned the shower off. She’d have gladly stayed under for several more minutes, but that wasn’t fair to her parents, who probably stunk pretty bad by now. Toweling herself off, she found herself giggling that she—who’d just spent her evening being bait for a vampire who’d intended to suck her blood—thought that bra-burning and armpit hair were “far-out.”

Normally she’d blow-dry her hair, but she decided to let it air-dry so Deanna could get in next. Wrapping herself in a towel, she opened the bathroom door to a burst of cool air.

Deanna was standing outside, arms folded, foot tapping.

“About time.”

“Sorry,” Mary said, even though she’d moved as fast as she could.

“You’ve got a letter,” Deanna said as she retreated into the bathroom. “I left it on your dresser.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Mary said as she padded down the hall to her bedroom.

Closing the door behind her, she slipped the towel off and tossed it onto the floor. It fell into a crumple near the hamper with all the other dirty clothes that always wound up on the floor instead of in the hamper that her mother had wasted her money buying—as she always put it. Mary opened the top drawer of the dresser to pull out some underwear.

As she did so, she saw the envelope Deanna had left for her.

It had one of the “Plant for More Beautiful Cities” commemorative six-cent stamps for postage, and a San Francisco postmark. There was no return address, but she didn’t need one, because she recognized the handwriting immediately.

She tore open the envelope and read both the letter and the San Francisco Chronicle clipping that it came with. Then she threw on a tie-dyed T-shirt and a fresh pair of bell-bottom dungarees over her underwear.

As soon as she opened the door, she hesitated. Pulling the T-shirt off, she went with a white button-down blouse instead. If she was going to convince her father to go to San Francisco, she needed to do it without wearing what he called “hippie clothes.”

Deanna, as usual, had showered in record time, and was already toweling off by the time Mary left her room. Dressed in her terrycloth bathrobe, she walked downstairs with Mary. They found Samuel seated at the dining room table looking over the Lawrence Journal-World’s sports section. Unwilling to wait for the women to finish in the bathroom, he had chosen to sponge himself off in the kitchen sink, which meant he was clean, but his shirt and pants were water-stained.

Mary plunged straight in.

“There may be a job in San Francisco,” she announced.

Her father looked up from his paper.

“Excuse me?”

“The letter I got in the mail?” Mary offered the letter and clipping. “It was from—”

Samuel winced.

“Do not tell me it was from Yaphet. That crazy hippie is—”

“—in Florida,” Deanna said. “Remember, he went down there last year?”

“No, I don’t remember,” Samuel said with a sigh. “I don’t keep track of bad poets.” Then he turned his attention back to Mary. “So who is it from?”

“Jack Bartow,” she replied. “Remember him?”

Grimacing, Samuel snatched the letter and clipping out of her hand.

“Yeah, I remember him.” He looked as if he’d just stepped in something foul.

“C’mon, Dad, he was cool.”

Ever the diplomat, Deanna joined in.

“He was a very skilled observer of the supernatural, Samuel.”

“And an even more ‘skilled observer’ of our daughter.” Samuel said without looking up.

The Campbells had been in San Francisco a year earlier, tracking a witch who was working her way west on a mystical killing spree. Bartow—who was only a few years older than Mary, and whose family had also hunted until they were killed by a pack of hellhounds—had helped track the witch down.

Mary had thought Bartow was incredibly groovy, which of course made Samuel a little crazy. They had a great deal in common, really, but all Samuel cared about was that Jack was a boy who was interested in her.

Samuel didn’t like anybody anyhow, and he especially didn’t like boys who “sniffed around her,” as he put it. She’d always hated that phrase.

Deanna went over to stand behind him, and she read the letter and clipping over his shoulder.

Then she looked up.

“He thinks it’s a dragon?”

“There’s no such thing,” Samuel said emphatically.

“Maybe,” Mary said, “but something killed those people in a way that sure looks like a dragon did it. The corpses were sliced to ribbons and burned to a crisp.”

Deanna gently took the Chronicle clipping from Samuel’s hand.

“It says here that the first body—the one in the Inner Mission—was found on the morning of the fourth of November.”

Mary was confused.

“So?”

Samuel scowled again.

“November third was the last new moon.”

Abashed, Mary lowered her head.

“Right. Sorry.” Her parents had trained her to know the phases of the moon. New moons and full moons were always rife with supernatural activity. It was stupid of her to have forgotten.

“It may just be a spirit that happens to act like a dragon,” Deanna said. “But it doesn’t help that the second and third killings were both in Chinatown.”

“So will we go?” Mary asked hopefully. She’d enjoyed San Francisco the last time, and she really wanted to see the city again.

Besides, she had a history test tomorrow that she hadn’t had time to study for, and this was the perfect way to get out of it.

Samuel looked up at Deanna, who nodded.

“Fine,” he said, “let’s pack.”

“I’ll call Marty,” Deanna said, referring to Martin Jankowitz, their travel agent. He was always able to get them quick flights relatively cheaply.

Mary ran up to her room. Since it was San Francisco, she was definitely packing her tie-dyed shirts, no matter what her father might say....