Free High Noon at Hot Topic by Christine Pope Page B

man, but
no man I’d ever known moved quite like him. If I’d blinked, I would
have missed his progress from the T-shirt racks at the front of the
store to the section in the back devoted to our more glam apparel.
The music blaring from the speakers overhead drowned out any sound
he made.
    Any sound I could hear, that is. At the very
last second one of the women — the redhead — turned toward him. Her
mistake.
    The sharpened piece of wood pierced her right
through the breast, a scant inch above the edge of her leather
bustier. Blood should have gone everywhere, but it didn’t. Instead,
her mouth opened in a wide scarlet-painted O, her head snapped
back, and then she exploded outward in a shower of dust. Her
clothes — black skirt, leather bustier, platform boots — fell to
the ground.

    The shriek I’d been about to let out caught
in my throat. What the ever-loving hell —
    I heard a scream, but it wasn’t mine. The
black-haired woman screeched with the sound of about a hundred
fingernails being dragged down a blackboard at once, and her
companion spun around. The walking stick he held (an affectation
Joanna and I had laughed about on several occasions) expanded
outward in a lightning-flash of movement, becoming a scary-looking
staff tipped in sharp steel.
    The stranger’s admonition to duck suddenly
sounded like a great idea. Since the two remaining members of the
Trio were focused on him, I took the opportunity to drop to the
ground and begin scuttling across the floor to the relative safety
of the checkout counter.
    An unfamiliar voice. “Gregoire. You
disappoint me.”
    I crawled behind the counter and saw Martine
crouched there, false eyelashes fluttering with such speed I was
surprised they didn’t come flying off. Since she was closer to the
phone, I whispered fiercely, “911!”
    “Wha?”
    “Dial 911. Nine one frigging one!”
    A shaking hand reached up and dragged the
phone off the counter. I grabbed it before it could clatter to the
ground. My own fault; I should have known Martine couldn’t manage
something as simple as dialing three numbers.
    But when I put the receiver up to my ear, all
I heard was a weird, fast dial tone, the kind you sometimes get
after a disaster like an earthquake or something when everyone’s
tying up the lines. Crap.
    I put the phone down on the floor and peered
around the corner of the counter. Martine stayed where she was,
back pressed up against the wall. Not that I expected her to do
anything more than that. At least she hadn’t fainted yet.
    The stranger said, “Not the first time, I’m
sure.”
    The leader of the Trio stood unmoving, staff
still clenched in his left hand. His female compatriot appeared
unarmed, but if I’d had someone wearing her expression facing me in
a club, I would have taken off my earrings and then tried to find
the nearest exit. “You’re slipping, Gregoire. In public?
Really?”
    “Opportunity is everything,” returned
Gregoire. His brown coat flapped open to reveal a wholly
unremarkable white shirt and flat-front khakis. He feinted with the
stake, a snake-like movement toward the black-haired man he faced,
but at the last second he snapped to the right and drove the stake
through the woman’s chest instead.
    Another explosion of dust, this one made more
spectacular by the sudden of flash of the Trio leader’s
steel-tipped staff. I heard a tearing sound; the tip of the blade
caught Gregoire’s lapel, but he stepped back in enough time that
the only damage he appeared to sustain was the rip in his
overcoat.
    “Kill them, if it amuses you,” the
black-haired man said.
    Man ? I decided it was time to stop
kidding myself. Human beings didn’t explode into dust when you
drove stakes into their hearts. No, kids, only vampires were
supposed to do that.
    “It doesn’t amuse me. It’s just what needs to
be done.”
    “Always so righteous. So tedious.”
    These words, delivered in a deceptively
languid tone, were followed by another