In all the old stories, they used holy water to ward off vampires. She couldn’t get behind that though. She wasn’t a believer, so she didn’t think trying to invoke the Christian God would work for her. She had the next best thing though, a hip flask full of wine. Most of the holy moments in her life had featured wine – weddings, funerals, and moments of friendship where you met souls instead of people – so she figured that was a close to a blessed fluid as she was likely to come across. She wasn’t sure if it would work but she had to put her faith somewhere.

Sometimes, they could go ages between attacks but this past month the creatures had been coming week after week. It was just wave after wave of them, and her team had been out in full force. Sean had fallen prey to them last week. Maddie and Jason were both injured after a battle with a particularly strong vamp, so she was the only one to stand between this wave of vampires and the people sleeping in the village just beyond.

So far, the wine was just back-up. Her stakes had been working just fine, but she had a limited supply. It wasn’t like on Buffy when the vampires would disintegrate and leave her holding the sharpened wood to use again. That wasn’t how it worked in the real world. Jillian had to pry the stake loose each time or the vamps wouldn’t go to dust at all. And there wasn’t always time for prying, mostly she had to run on to battle the next one before the adrenaline from the last fight had faded.

She was crouching on the roof of someone’s shed, watching for the steady creep of a bloodsucker. Her attention was so focus on the ground beneath that she didn’t hear the creature slide up behind her. Its hand was tilting her head to expose her neck when she threw her elbow back into its midsection. Vampires didn’t have to breathe anymore but their bodies hadn’t lost the habit of reacting to threats to human anatomy. It took a step back and she turned to face it.

It bared its teeth but the intimidation tactic had no effect on her. On the slope of the roof, she couldn’t risk losing her balance by reaching into her bag for a stake. She was going to have to try attacking with the wine. Even if it didn’t work like the water, it should at least cause enough confusion for her to grab a stake.

The vampire was sniffing the air. She heard that they could smell when you were nervous and they liked the taste in your blood. It licked one of its fangs.

Its commitment to savouring the moment before the kill gave her enough time to reach toward her hip flask and unscrew the top with her thumb. She pulled the flask from the holster, arcing the liquid toward the beast as it sprang. Every splash of wine landed with a hiss as it burned through the vampire’s flesh. She didn’t have enough to take the creature out completely, but as she had hoped, the burning distracted it enough that she could pull a stake from her bag and pierce the vampire’s heart.

This time, she was able to remove the stake and watch the corpse fall into dust. She wiped the mess from the shed roof, threw her stake back into her bag and headed out to find another bottle of wine. Perhaps she’d even get two, she could really use a drink.