Her family!
The dogs had pulled back, at first frightened by the huge new fighter who had appeared, and then nearly hysterical with excitement as they recognized her. Out of respect for her greater size and power, all of them, including the female and male heads of the family, remained standing where they were, waiting, allowing her to take the lead. Their wounded crawled toward them, bleeding into the dust, whining with the pain of their terrible injuries.
A silence descended on the strange scene.
The Old Vampire didn't move from where he stood near the sleigh, but just quietly asked her in his deep voice, "How did you know?"
He sounded genuinely curious.
He also sounded as if he were humoring her, trying to calm her down so that she wouldn't use her knife.
"Dead reindeer," Ingrid said, wryly, from high on Rudolph's back, "don't show up in Africa all that often, Santa Claus." She pronounced his name with scathing sarcasm. "And reindeer this size don't show up anywhere unless they're supernatural. Besides, I'd always suspected - "
"Don't tell me. Because I work nights and live forever?"
"That, and your red suit." Ingrid pointed to it with her knife, then quickly pointed back at Rudolph. "That was a stroke of genius."
The Old One smiled, a facial change that made the dogs quiver with the desire to lunge and kill. Ingrid looked into the eyes of the dominant male dog and then the dominant female dog to tell them to control their pack.
They understood her.
Young dogs who needed nipping got nipped.
Nobody charged anybody. They stood in a standoff while young werewolf and ancient vampire confronted each other. Slowly, he took a few steps toward her. Careful steps, barely perceptible steps that a human with normal senses and eyesight might not have noticed.
"Yes, I thought it was inspired," Nicholas agreed, with no modesty.
"But why the white beard and white trim?"
He sighed. "I know. So stupid. Easy to hide blood on red, impossible to hide - much less get out! - on white. It was all red to start with. My hair, my beard, the fur trim. All red. Then the damned illustrators got hold of the legend, and turned me into a fat, ermine-trimmed fop."
Ingrid straightened her posture, and looked at him: yellow wolf eyes staring their challenge into old, cold vampire eyes.
"I'm not going to let you kill my family," she said.
"Your family?" He laughed, sounding nothing like the merry old elf of lore. Like her, he was suddenly alert, all banter gone. "So that's it. So that's why you defend them like this. You warm-blooded monsters! You should take a hint from those of us with nothing left to lose."
"Except - "
"My life?" He laughed again. "You think I'd be sorry to lose that?"
"No." She pricked the reindeer's neck, enough to draw blood, and yet no blood ran from him. At the prick, the beast flicked his monstrous head back toward her, displaying a gleam of a tooth like a rapier. Suddenly, at the sight of it, and no sight of blood from the wound, Ingrid understood the importance of this animal. "Not your life."
"No!" Nicholas roared. "Not Rudolph!"
"You fly away," Ingrid threatened him, "or I kill him."
"I've spent a bloody fortune on that reindeer!" And then his eyes turned crafty. Proudly, he thumped his red and white furry chest. "You can't kill him. You don't have any holy water or a wooden stake or a silver bullet."
Ingrid slid down off the opposite side of Rudolph and came up under his massive chest. With her hand that didn't hold her knife, she felt the sleek hide, gauging where a dead reindeer's heart must be. She peered out from underneath, at Nicholas. "Ah, but I have a dagger made out of silver bullets."
"No!" The old vampire's cry seemed truly anguished, but then his eyes turned sly again. "Even that won't do you any good. I can't leave without Rudolph. He guides my sleigh tonight."
"You have plenty of horsepower without him."
She moved the silver dagger closer to the reindeer's chest.
"All right, all right, but I want him back!"
"I'll let him go when I know you're far enough away."
"And how will you know that, little werewolf?"
In a mocking voice, Ingrid sang, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way . . ."
"He left us!" Pasha cried, in astonishment, as they watched the sleigh fly off.
Briefly, the whole sleigh - minus its lead reindeer - was silhouetted against the full moon. And then it disappeared into the Milky Way.
"He left us in Africa!" Serge screamed, and then he started stamping his own feet, just as the remaining reindeer had done before taking off. "What are we supposed to do in Africa?"
"You can be useful," Ingrid told them.
She slid down off Rudolph and gave him a mighty slap on his rump.
The great beast started running down the dirt road, and in only a few yards, he was airborne.
"Useful?" Pasha said it as if it were a bad taste in his mouth.
"Come on, boys," she encouraged them, as she donned her clothing again. "Someday, you'll thank me."
Before she showed them the better way, she got down on her haunches to say both hello and goodbye to her family. There was whimpering on both sides, from her and from them. There were licks and nuzzles, sniffing and pawing, but none of them lingered, not Ingrid, and not the dogs. For her, it was too painful to go through a farewell a second time. For them, there was hunting to do, to compensate for the loss of the splendid feast they had missed.
When she rose to her feet, Ingrid slapped off the dust.
She didn't glance behind her to see the dogs go, but she could hear them, could feel the pounding they made on the earth. If she looked, she thought her heart might break again.
"Follow me." She started to walk but then stopped. "No, on second thought, I'll follow you. Go that way."
When they got back to where her gun was buried, she used her cell phone to call her assistant. "Damian. Yes, I'm fine. No, I didn't locate them. What do you know about the poachers?" She listened for a few moments, then said, "Come get me."
Under the full moon, she pointed the vampire cousins toward the south.
"Keep walking. In about twenty-five miles, you'll come upon a band of soldiers. Paramilitary. They're awful people. They force young boys to join them. They rape women, cut off limbs, kill everything in their path. Last month, they murdered a lowland gorilla. They're all yours, boys."
"Twenty-five myiles?" Pasha whined.