Pushing myself from the cement to my knees, I look up to see blood leaking down Jonah’s face in huge streams from his now crooked nose.

Ken lets out a breathy laugh. “Your eyes may glow but you still bleed, do ya? I wonder, do your bones break like a human’s too?”

Jonah slowly wipes his nose with his forearm, peering at his stained sleeve as if surprised he could bleed so much, then looks up at Ken’s smirking face and spits a bloody loogie that lands on Ken’s—what looks to be very expensive—leather shoe.

Face contorted in rage, Ken advances again, but this time Jonah manages to sidestep and land a solid punch into his kidney.

I let out a silent cheer, but my celebration is short lived when Barbie grabs a handful of my hair and yanks me to my feet. I let out a gasp of surprise that turns into a breathy wheeze as she pins me to her chest in an iron grip.

“You know,” she says, turning me in her grasp so I can watch as Ken lays into Jonah; grabbing his shirt in both hands and tossing him some ten feet to collide with the light pole. “We weren’t even looking for you. No, today was our day off. It just so happened that when you walked past we caught a good whiff of you.”

Still holding me clasped to her chest, she lifts one hand to sweep my limp hair off my neck.

“His scent still lingers on you. You reek of revenant.” She nuzzles into my exposed skin and I shudder as her lips graze my ear. “There’s just something so enticing about a survivor.”

Her tongue slides up my neck in the same spot the revenant bit me only days earlier.

I struggle to get an arm free, to shake her off, anything, but she only laughs.

“Bringing in your corpse alone would have been enough to get us promoted three levels. But bringing in your corpse along with the boy’s? We’ll go down in Order history! Oh, don’t worry,” she snickers, “I’m sure they’ll make some mention of you too: the green-eyed demon’s whore.”

I grit my teeth and give up on trying to pull her off me. Instead, I shift my focus to a backup plan. Whoever trained Barbie needs a serious job eval because this bitch obviously never grasped the basics of hand-to-hand combat.

Rule number one: stay centered.

Rule number two: don’t wear stilettos unless you plan to use them.

“Honey,” I say, “do me a favor. Shut the fuck up.”

Placing my feet shoulder width apart, I find my center and push as hard as I can with my legs. Sure enough, that does the trick and, caught off guard, Barbie stumbles back and loses her balance when her pink pumps fail to find purchase.

Her back hits the ground hard, unable to catch herself while restraining me, and I roll to the side when her grip loosens. Without missing a beat I jump to my feet and slip the loop of my belt, which I had worked loose during her monologue, around her neck and snap it tight in a makeshift noose.

Her manicured nails scratch at the leather pinching her skin, but unless her acrylic turns to steel there’s no way she’s cutting through that strap.

“At least… with your vocal cords… tied up,” I grit through the effort, “You won’t keep yabbering. All that talk… was making it really hard to think—”

I give the belt a yank, just for good measure, and wince at the crack that sounds in response.

I’m vaguely aware of the fact that Jonah and Ken are still going at it somewhere off to my left, but with the onset of full dark it’s impossible to see anything beyond the spotlight I stand under with Barbie. The only indicators of their continued tussle are intermittent grunts and flashes of red and green that occasionally permeate the darkness.

I hope Jonah can handle Ken because I don’t have time to worry about him. This belt only does so much to inhibit a revenant with four good limbs and a functional set of fangs.

What I really need is something I can stake her with.

I glance around the area quickly, hoping to spot something useful.

There’s lots of lore as to the right way to kill a revenant. Some say it has to be a wooden stake through the heart. Some say silver. Some say you need the bone of a dead rabbi dipped in the blood of a virginal lamb.

The fact of the matter is that any of these methods will effectively end a revenant. It doesn’t matter what the stake is made of, or what it’s been dipped in.

Everything dies when you stake it through the heart.

But it has to be the heart. Stop the heart and you stop their regenerative abilities.

You’d think that’d make them easy to kill, but bullets won’t work—there’s a ten second rule—and the demons are goddamn resourceful.

Which is why I can’t keep Barbie in this noose for much longer.

All I need is something long and skinny...

A stick? The parking lot planters are too far away.

I could break a mirror off my bike…

Then my gaze falls on Barbie’s pink stilettos, and I almost laugh at the irony of staking the blow-up doll with her own pump.

Oh yes, this is happening.

Barbie twists around in her collar to grab my ankle, but a solid kick to her face with my other foot discourages her advances and grants her a nose job to match Jonah’s.

“You little demon whore!” One hand to her face, she looks up at me, eyes glowing red both with anger and her inner revenant power. “I’m going to shred you and suck the blood from you limb by lim—agk!”

She doesn’t finish her sentence. Likely because the metal base of the mirror sticking out of her back has pierced her heart through her lung. She tries to reach around to pull it out, but Jonah has done a very effective job of staking her between the shoulder blades. Right in that tiny little spot you can never quite reach to scratch when it itches.

Well, this was one itch I would not be helping scratch.

“Jonah.”

“Hm?”

“Did you get that mirror off my bike?”

“Uh huh.”

“… I see.”

Barbie’s ten ticks down to zero and we watch as she stills and decomposes into a pile of ashes, thick with blood.

A gentle breeze, cool with night air, sweeps through the parking lot, lifting my hair from my shoulders and pulling some of Barbie’s remains to dance among the rainbow of tissue paper from the shopping bags.

I can hear the sounds of cars driving past on the main street and part of me is shocked that we just killed her out in the open like this.

What if someone saw?

What about the security cameras!?

Ugh, but cameras are the least of my problems right now. First things first.

“Jonah.”

“Hm?”

“What happened to Ken?”

I look at him then, really look at him for the first time since our little foray began.

He looks awful.

His shirt has nearly been torn from his body, and violet bruises have already begun to blossom where his skin met Ken’s fists. His nose has swollen something awful, and the blood from the break has started to dry down his face and the front of his shirt. Cuts and scrapes crisscross up and down his arms and the trail of blood that streaks down the back of his neck from behind his right ear tells of a gash yet to be discovered.

“Oh, Jonah.”

His knees give out and he collapses, just barely missing Barbie’s mess.

I drop my leash, which I had still been clutching, and move to his side to take his head in my lap. When I tip his face up, I’m surprised to see his eyes have dimmed to a glistening sparkle as they look up into mine.

“Don’t look so worried.” He smiles weakly, then grimaces as the effort pulls at some of his cuts. “It’s not so bad. You should see the other guy.”

“Yeah, speaking of which, should I be concerned that I don’t?”

“Ah.” He coughs, “No, he ran off when you got the upper hand on the girl. I tried to chase him down but I was—nngh—having trouble keeping up.”

His hand moves to cover his side where, I assume, he took a hard hit. Could be he has a broken rib or two.

Poor kid, he’s really being a champ about it.

“Jonah.”

“Hm?”

“Are you dying?”

He tries to laugh but it turns into more of a wheeze so I smile weakly for the both of us.

“No, I’ll be fine. I just…”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised he passes out.

I mean, I shouldn’t be, but I am anyway. What the hell am I supposed to do now? Call a cab?

I can already see myself trying to explain this all away: That oozing pile? Oh, it’s nothing. Just the slushie I dropped while trying to carry all my bags. Would you mind helping me get my boyfriend in the car? Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he doesn’t bleed on the upholstery. No, no need to call the cops. It was just a bar fight. He’ll be fine. Really.

Yeah, sure, like anyone would buy that.