Her tenant was sitting on her floor. Next to him was the kid from last night, cross-legged and frowning, and the dog, chewing on one of her grey apples like he hated it.
Marceline floated down to the step. There were three heartbeats in her house, and only one of them paid rent.
She let them notice her. It took a second. The dog noticed first, which was funny, because he was the one who choked on the apple.
"Wow." She drifted in over the threshold and took a long look around. The floor had been swept with something that left little scratch marks, the window had a branch tied into it, and there were pieces of a plate on the shelf next to her mug, lined up like somebody was going to glue them. "You guys really fixed up the place. Thanks. Seriously. It looks great."
Nobody said anything. Her tenant had gone very still on the floor, the way people did when they hoped a bear would get bored.
She looked at him. It was one look, and she made sure it was a long one.
"You. Later."
"Later works," Ray said.
'Later works, he says.' She turned to the kid instead, who was already on his feet with his fists up again. Cute.
"You can't take our home twice!" he yelled.
Marceline swung the bass around, put two fingers on the strings and slid them all the way down the neck.
"Yes, I ca-an."
"No, you can't! That's not a thing!" The kid's face had gone red. He looked at the dog, and at Ray, and then back at her, and she could see him working it out right there, slow and stubborn. "Fine! Okay! Take the dumb cabin! Take the tree too! I don't care! Jake's my home! And Ray!"
"Wait," said Ray. "The cabin's my—"
"Your home, huh?" Marceline floated over to the dog, who was trying very hard to be part of the wall. "Okay. Then I'll take him too."
She picked him up by the scruff. He weighed about as much as a sack of flour and he was shaking all over.
The kid slapped him out of her hand.
It wasn't even a hard slap. The dog went flying into Ray's lap, and the kid stood there with his hand still up and his chin out, and something in Marceline that had been having a pretty good time stopped having one.
"Oh," she said quietly. "Okay."
She started to grow.
...
'Oh, no. Oh, she has a second phase.'
She went up through the roof first, or almost; the boards groaned and she ducked out the door instead, and then she kept going outside, getting bigger and darker and wider, until the thing standing in the clearing was a bat the size of a barn. The wings blotted out half the sky. The face was still hers, sort of, if you took her face and stretched it and filled it up with teeth.
"Out! Everybody out!" He shoved Finn through the door ahead of him and Jake came after them, still the size of a bread loaf. "No, wait! Not out! Out is where she is!"
The bat screamed, a sound he didn't have a word for, and it went right through his teeth.
His right hand went to his hip on its own. The old scabbard was there, the same as always, and there was nothing in it at all. No sword. No knife. Not even a stick.
'Okay. Great. Cool. Fucking great plan, Ray.'
Finn had the only sword. He had it out already, the gold one from his backpack, and he went straight at her with it over his head, yelling like that was a strategy.
"I'm gonna punch your face off!"
A wing came around. Ray saw it coming before Finn did, because he was taller and because he was looking at the wing instead of the face, and he grabbed the kid by the back of the shirt and pulled. Finn came off his feet. The wing went over him and hit Ray instead.
It was like getting hit by a door with a whole house behind it. He went backward through the air and landed on his side in the grass by the stream, and for a while there was nothing in his chest at all, no air, just a loud empty space.
When it came back, he heard Finn.
The kid had gone in again. Of course he had. He got one good swing at a leg, and then the bat flicked him away like a bug off a table, and he hit the apple tree hard and slid down it and didn't get up right away. The sword landed somewhere in the dark.
"Finn!"
Ray got to his knees. His ribs said no. He did it anyway.
Jake got there first. He came across the clearing so fast he was a streak, growing as he went, bigger, bigger, as big as he could get, which was still smaller than her, and he jumped. He had his whole body wrapped around her neck and he was yelling something that was mostly "Leave him alone!" and partly just noise.
She turned her head and bit him.
Ray saw it. He saw the teeth go in. Jake went stiff and then limp, all at once, and slid off her shoulder and hit the grass in a long orange pile and stayed there.
Ray's brain gave him nothing. There was only the pile of orange in the grass that wasn't moving, and the thought that he had brought this to their door. He had said "tree house" with his stupid mouth on a porch, two nights ago, because he was in a good mood.
He didn't see Finn get up. Finn was just there all of a sudden, between the bat and Jake, and his face was wet and his whole body was shaking.
"YOU BIT MY BROTHER!"
The bat leaned down toward him, slow, with its mouth open.
Finn jumped and punched it in the face.
It was one punch, with everything a twelve-year-old had in him, right on the nose. There was a crack. The bat's head snapped back, and the scream that came out of it this time was a whole different scream, high and offended.
Then she was shrinking. It happened fast, the wings folding up and the dark going out of her, until it was just Marceline again, floating a foot off the grass with one hand pressed to her nose.
"Ow. Ow! You actually hurt me, you little..." She took her hand away and checked it for blood. Then she started to laugh. "Okay. Oh, man. Okay. That was really fun."
"Fun?!" Finn's voice cracked all the way up.
She floated over and ruffled his hair, and he was too stunned to stop her.
"You hit hard, kid." She was still grinning, and there was a little blood on her lip. "Nobody's hit me in the face in forever."
Behind them, the pile of orange said, "Is she gone?"
Finn spun around. Ray turned too fast and had to grab his side.
Jake was sitting up. There were two neat holes in the side of his neck, and he was holding up one paw, where his thumb had swollen up to the size of a melon. It was red and tight and sloshing.
"Put all my guts in my thumb," he said. "And my blood. Old trick."
"You're alive!" Finn crashed into him so hard they both fell over.
Ray sat down in the grass. He didn't decide to; his legs just did it. Jake's thumb was slowly going down as everything inside it went back where it belonged, and Ray started to laugh, and it hurt so much he had to stop.
"You absolute bastard," he told Jake. "I thought you were dead. I was gonna... I don't know what I was gonna do."
"That's the trick, man." Jake winced. "Ow. Ow, my thumb."
...
Finn didn't let go of Jake for ages. When he did, the vampire was sitting on the porch roof with her feet hanging over the edge, picking at a red apple and watching them like they were a show.
"Here's the deal," she said. "The tree's yours. You can have it back."
Finn stared up at her. "...Why?"
"I'm bored of it. It smells like pancakes." She shrugged. "Consider it a gift. For the face."
He wanted to say something tough back. He didn't have anything ready, so he just kept his fists up a little, in case.
Then she looked past him at Ray, and her face went different. It went lazy and pointy at the same time.
"And you. Rent."
"Right now?" Ray was holding his side with one hand. "I just got hit by a barn."
"Right now. You've got an audience. Make it good."
Ray sat on the porch step, the way he'd probably sat a bunch of times before, when Finn wasn't here. He started to say something about the song, and she held up one finger.
"Don't tell me."
He closed his mouth and smiled a little. Then he started to sing.
"Almost heaven
West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains
Shenandoah River
Life is old there
Older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growing like a breeze..."
Finn had heard Ray sing before. He'd heard him in the candy hall at the slumber party, when the whole candy hall ended up on its feet singing along, and that had been the coolest thing he had ever seen a person do with just their mouth. This was different. This was quieter, and lower, and it was about a place.
A place with roads and mountains and a river, and a name Finn had never heard of in his life.
"Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads..."
'He's singing about home.' Finn watched Ray's face, and it hit him all at once. 'He's singing about across the sea.'
Ray didn't have a house over there anymore. His boat sank. He swam. And now he was sitting on the step of a house that wasn't even his, singing about the one he couldn't get back to, so he could keep sleeping on a floor.
Finn's throat got tight, and he didn't know what to do with it.
The vampire had slid down off the roof at some point. She was floating next to the step with the bass, and when the song came around again, she came in under it. It was a low, round sound, like the ground was humming along. She didn't look at her hands at all. She looked at Ray.
And she was good. Ray had said scary good, and Ray was right, which Finn didn't like even a little.
"All my memories
Gather 'round her
Miner's lady
Stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty
Painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Teardrop in my eye
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads..."
Then the song slowed down. Ray sang the next part with his eyes shut, and the bass under him went almost quiet, just one low note now and then, like she was leaving him room.
"I hear her voice in the morning hour, she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away
Driving down the road, I get a feeling
That I should have been home yesterday
Yesterday"
When the last part came around, the bass came back with it, louder. Next to Finn, Jake was tapping his foot. He didn't seem to know he was doing it. His thumb was wrapped in a strip of Finn's sleeping bag, and his neck had two little holes in it, and his foot was going tap, tap, tap on the porch boards like it belonged to somebody else.
"Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads
Take me home, country roads."
When it was over, nobody moved. The vampire laid her hand flat on the strings, and the sound stopped.
Finn waited for her to say if it was good enough. She didn't. She kept her eyes on Ray, with the bass hanging off her shoulder, and Finn couldn't tell anything at all from her face. Then she turned to him.
"Your brother's got a decent voice, kid."
"I know," Finn said. It came out a lot more grumpy than he meant.
She smiled at that, like it was the best thing he'd said all night. Then she tapped Ray on the head with one knuckle, going past.
"We're still talking later."
And she was gone, up and over the trees, toward the pond and the tree that wasn't hers anymore.
...
Jake went inside to pack up their stuff, which mostly meant the sleeping bag, BMO and whatever was left of his dignity. Ray stayed on the step. Every time he breathed in, he could feel exactly where the wing had landed.
Finn sat down next to him. He had one scraped hand in his lap, the knuckles all raw from the punch, and there was a lump coming up on the back of his head from the tree. He hadn't said a word since the song. He looked out at the clearing, where the grass was all flattened in a big circle, and then up at the sky, where she had gone.
Ray waited. He figured the kid was getting ready to tell him off again, and he figured he had it coming.
"Ray?"
"Yeah, little bro."
Finn kept looking at the sky.
"So is she a bad guy or not?"