“I don’t think it’d be a bad way of life, really,” he said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Well, it is eternal, barring a stake through the heart or an unexpected exposure to sunlight. And the whole vampire lifestyle is a sensuous one. It’s better than some other things I can think of.”
“For instance?”
“Well, I don’t think I’d want to die and take the chance of coming back as a ghost, a spiritual gumshoe haunting the offices of Hell Hound for a couple of hundred years, moaning about all the cases I’ve handled, sitting in my old chair… That would be pretty grim.”
“I guess it would,” she said.
“When I get near my time,” Jessie said, “I’m not going to wait around to die and take my chances. I’m going to find me a cute little vampiress with a nice body, and I’m going to shack up with her for a few days, until I’ve been converted.” He looked at Helena and said, “What about you? What are you going to do, if you’ve got warning that death is coming?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Helena said.
“Oh, but you should!” Jessie said. “It’s as important as preparing a will—more important, actually.”
“I suppose it is,” she said. “I’ll give it some thought.”
Brutus came back from checking the first row of tombstones, and he stared hard at both Helena and Jessie, his red eyes unable to shield his vexation with them.
“Is this all the two of you have accomplished?” he growled, lowering his burly head.
“Well—”
“What have you been doing, screwing between the tombstones?”
“We got to talking,” Jessie said.
“Well, we aren’t here to talk,” the hell hound said. “We’re here to rob a goddamned grave,” he snorted with disgust. A veil of ectoplasm exploded from his wet, black nostrils, rose over his head and floated away across the cemetery, slowly dissolving.
“I’m sorry,” Helena said. “It was my fault.”
“Let’s get going,” the hell hound said. “I’ll finish this row while the two of you start on a third.”
They worked their way slowly along the crest of the hillock, toward the deeply shadowed ravine, reading the names on the stones, few of which they had ever heard of, some of which—in the cases when they were maseni —they could not even pronounce.
The moon came out again for a short while, shedding cold light upon the yard. Then, before long, it was concealed again by clouds, thick and purple-black.
“I have the feeling we’re being watched,” Helena said, as they looked at the stones in the ninth row.
“Watched?”
“I don’t see anyone,” the woman said, “but I sure do feel as if—”
Brutus, two rows of tombstones out in front of them, interrupted her with a long, mournful howl.
“He’s found Tesserax’s grave,” Jessie said. “Come on!”
Chapter Eleven
Jessie gave Helena a hand, pulled her out of the grave and hunkered down to help her brush the wet clumps of earth from her jeans, taking an especially long time to brush off her round little rump, though the seat of her pants was not anywhere so dirty as the knees or the cuffs or the hips.
“Well,” he said, “that ought to be the last time that you’ll have to spell me.”
She sat down by the hole and dangled her legs over the edge, put her arm around the hell hound, who had been watching the two of them take turns in the open grave. She said, “I’m going to be the only well-stacked girl I know who has huge, muscular arms.”
“You’ll be able to scare away unwanted suitors with them,” Jessie suggested. “Just flex your biceps a few times, and you’ll terrorize any would-be rapist.”
“It isn’t funny,” she said, feeling her biceps through her sweater and jacket, as if they might already have begun to swell.
Jessie jumped into the grave and picked up the collapsible shovel he had brought along in the tool satchel with the flashlights. “We’re down to almost four feet,” he said. “And that’s about as deep as they bury them around here. So—”
As he stamped the spade into the hard-packed earth, it rang against a large, metal object.