"How long as it been dead?" I asked.
Kolchak shrugged. "A day? Maybe more? If you leave them a few days they eventually start disintegrating. I guess eventually becoming dust like you wondered last night."
"No shit? That's bizarre," I said, not even bothering to notice how out of all the things I had ever experienced in my life, this was hardly even the top ten of bizarre things.
"Based on the hair and remnants of makeup, I think it's her," he said finally.
"So where does that leave us?"
"The Vengeful Rose is one smaller. And Dorian's claim they were being killed off is one step closer to being true."
Neither of us pointed out the obvious. No heart meant it was likely the Family that had killed this one.
"Well, onto the next," he said, but there was a sound to his voice. An anxious confusion, a doubt forced into a theory that he really didn't want to be true. I think he wanted all vamps dead, but this was a perplexing situation.
We got back into the car and headed for the next address on the list. My phone rang. I looked at the number, but it wasn't one I recognized. Since I was newly ostracized, I decided to take a chance and just answer; it might be worth repairing a relationship. Unfortunately, it was no one I wanted to talk to.
"Hello, Mr. Nowak, I'm calling to discuss the money that you owe to your creditors."
"Oh fuck off, you're now calling me late at night?"
"We will call you whenever and however we need to until you pay your bills."
"You know what, fuck off and stop calling me!" I hung up.
There were a few moments of silence in the car. "Lady trouble?" suggested Kolchak.
I laughed. "No... well, yes, I have lady trouble, but no, that wasn't her."
"Ah, to be young and in love," said Kolchak with a laugh.
"No, it's not like that, it's..." I trailed off. The collections call was forgotten as my mind probed the knotted quagmire that was my relationship with Yasmin. I was sure I almost hated her after the intervention, yet I almost regretted feeling that way. I wished that event had never happened. I wished that I could show up at her apartment with a bottle of wine and everything would be okay again. But that wasn't happening. It wasn't me. But could I become that person if I wanted to?
"What's it like?"
I sighed. "So, like, I'm with this girl - Yasmin. She's cute and smart and for some reason actually likes me. But we keep on and off fighting - and maybe that's my fault. But she doesn't seem to like who I am, just who she wants me to be. But despite this and turning all my friends against me, she says she loves me, which I don't get. And it's all confused and I wonder if she's right, that I should be someone else... someone who isn't me." I paused, looking out at the road. "She says she loves me, so maybe she does know better than me what's good for me."
There was a long silence. I had an uncomfortable tenseness in my chest and I didn't want to make eye contact with Kolchak, so I stared out the windshield at the road.
"Do you love her?" finally prompted Kolchak.
"What?" I said, feeling almost a reflexive defensiveness come to my voice.
"Well, I'm just listening to you. Yeah, you say she's great, you say there's lots of problems, but also she says she loves you. Okay, fine. But what I'm not really hearing in all that is your part of it. Do you see what's not there?"
"Huh?" I said, not understanding.
"You come to me with a story of how great she is, how not great things are with her, she loves you, but she causes you trouble... can you hear it? How there's a part of this story that's just missing? An empty part of the equation?"
"What?" I said, missing it.
"What do you feel? Do you love her? Forget about her feelings for right now. What about you?"
Now I got what he meant. I didn't respond at first, thinking things over. "Do I love her?" I felt the question out as I said it, as if it were some new food I was testing the flavor of. "I like her..."
"As the one who has a few more years of mileage, let me point out that like is not the same as love. Not even in the same league."
"Yeah, yeah, I know... I guess it comes down to..." I hesitated, not wanting to give words to the uncomfortable feeling I had been carrying with me for weeks. "I do like her. But I don't love her... I want to love her. I feel like I should love her. But... I don't. And I don't know why. Is there something wrong with her? Is there something wrong with me? Shouldn't I love her? I've been telling myself it's only been two months, that my feeling will change with time."
"But it's been long enough that she knows it?" said Kolchak.
I nodded sadly. "She's known for a while and I had been stopping her from saying it. But she finally said it. Worst possible moment too! Like throwing gasoline on a fire! And then I ran out. She's not talking to me again anyway, not after running out on all that. After she said it."
"If she actually loves you, she'll be willing to talk this out more," said Kolchak. "If it's one thing people tend to do, it's to try to hold onto what they're losing. Even when things become the worst."
"I dunno, I always feel like I'm salting the earth with everything I do, with all my fights. Not just with her, but with everyone. Maybe there is something wrong with me. I'm no good at love... and feelings."
"Do you love anyone else?"
"I don't really have a good track record of exes," I said uncomfortably. "None of them are even on my radar anymore. I don't think of them."
"I don't mean necessarily women. What about family?"
"It's just my brother and I... I care for him a lot. I have his back... well, I did, I'm not sure what he thinks now. But do I call that love? I'm not sure. I fight with him more than I want to. I'm not sure. I'm hoping I'm a good little brother."
"Hmm. Anyone else?"
"Well... my mom is dead," I said. It still hurt to say that, despite the years, despite the closure I had fought for. "I definitely loved her. And before you ask, I don't know my dad, never did. That dude can go fuck himself. But I loved my mom, yeah... and then she was gone."
"Hmm," said Kolchak, slurping his coffee.
"Oh, this is where you go all Freud on me, right? Telling me it's all about my mom and dad. That's why I have this inability to love."
"I haven't said anything at all," he said.
"Well, fuck you then," I said sourly. I crossed my arms and slouched in my seat, sulking for a while. Ace sniffed at the back of my neck affectionately. Kolchak kept driving, not responding. If he had, I would have lashed out at him. But he kept his silence, and I appreciated that. I didn't want to start a fight and fuck this up too.
When we neared the second address a few minutes later, I spoke. "So, uh, sorry about that, uh, fuck you a few minutes ago."
"It's okay," he said.
"No, it's not," I said. "I know I just fight with everyone. So uh... thanks for listening and stuff."
"Of course," he said.
Our next stop, a suburban house in Glenntown, was the continuation of a disturbing trend. We didn't have a chance to stop and investigate, as the house was blocked off and illuminated by the red and blue flashing lights of the police. As we slowly made our way down the street behind other slow moving cars either unfortunate enough to have picked this street or wanting to see what was going on, we saw a body bag being carried off. Someone was dead, probably our target. We didn't know for sure, but it was my opinion that if we had looked in that bag, we would have seen a desiccated corpse missing its heart. We might have lingered for more information, but we got a funny look from an officer - probably seeing two sketchy men in an old car that didn't fit in the area. We took this as our cue to leave, so we passed by and got out of the area quickly.
In a bungalow in the Avalon Hills we found another body missing its heart. This one did look like the vamp from Kolchak's picture, so that was a confirmed death. In a studio apartment in Southend, we found another desiccated corpse in a scattered circle of easels. On one, someone in blood had smeared a symbol. The
letter F, with an M or something like a trident branching from the bottom of the F. As I learned from Kolchak, this was how the Family identified themselves. He said it was on the revenant we killed, and all members of the family had it somewhere on their person.
The address Kolchak had in Chinatown was a dud, the building having burned in the Spring's arson. But in nearby Five Spokes, we found another body typical of the pattern - dead vampire missing its heart. I used to live in Five Spokes only a block from this location, so I was uncomfortable to know a vampire had been right under my nose. At least it was dead now.
"How many more places do we have to go?" I said as we pulled into traffic. There wasn't much traffic to speak of since it was now very late, but some people never sleep in Avalon. We were among them. "Because I'm thinking that Dorian was right. The Vengeful Rose in Avalon is dead."
Kolchak sighed. "I think you may be right. I wish I had some other confirmation, but as you have rightly pointed out, if I had that good intel on them, I would have killed them myself."
"Are we the only ones hunting them? Don't you have anyone to call? I know when we need backup or a consult, we have our friends Paulie and Meat. They do their own work, but if I suddenly thought all the ghouls had died out at once, they would be a real useful source on that."
He shook his head. "I'm the only one anymore. There's no one else to call on."
"Jeez, man. Why do you work alone? All these years, I'd think you would have recruited help. Backup. Emergency support for when the shit hits the fan."
"This life, it drives a wedge between you and everyone else," said Kolchak. He waved his hand at a pedestrian we drove by. "Do you think any of these people have any clue of what we do? Could they even understand it if we told them? We're alone in what we do."
"Yeah, I get that," I said, remembering Yasmin's inability to understand.
"I work alone because when things get bad, you depend on the other person to watch your back. And if they're not there, that's it. You're over. When you depend on someone else, they can let you down. When it's just you, you've never depended on anyone, so you can't be let down. Ace is the only one who I trust." He handed Ace a doggie treat, which was eaten happily.
"Yeah! I know exactly how you feel!" I said enthusiastically, feeling like he understood. "My whole life, my brother's had my back, but now because I'm some goddamn pariah for doing the same things I've always done, he's shunning me. So now no one's got my back at all!" It felt like the same thing, even though on actually saying it, this was a pretty weak argument. My brother had my back my whole life. This shunning was new. So he hadn't had my back for only like two days.
Kolchak shook his head sadly. "Unfortunately, it was me who failed someone else. I wasn't there when I was needed. Sometimes you can't be, even if you want to be. It's this life. Sometimes you need to cut people out to protect them." He turned to me with sad eyes. "Sometimes the people you care the most about need to be kept far away so they're safe. And sometimes they'll never know that."
I thought of how Mikkel and Carly had broken up way back when. Had he been keeping her away the same way as Kolchak? But why was she back? Then I thought of how Meat and Paulie had no known family or relationships. Should I have kept Yasmin away? Then I had a thought - what if the whole farce of an intervention was for Mikkel to keep me away from danger so he could work? It was a dick move of a way to keep me out, but so far it had succeeded in driving me away. I stared out the window at the side street while we were stopped at a light.
Kolchak decided to fill the void. "Szandor, there's something I should tell you. Maybe I should have said it sooner -"
He didn't get to finish that sentence. I saw it a moment before it happened, but there had been nothing I could do about. From the other direction, I saw the lights of a car coming rapidly. At first I thought it was just cross traffic, but they were so fast and they were veering off.
In another second that car crashed into the front of ours. I was wearing a seatbelt but was oddly slouched, so I jerked forward against it painfully, the belt bruising a line across my chest. Our car spun a quarter of a turn, the world suddenly drowning in confusion. My confusion. I didn't hit my head, but I found myself dizzy and disoriented. I sat dazedly, numbly undoing the seat belt to relieve the pain of my chest.
Before I knew anything else, the passenger door opened and I was being yanked out of the car. Strong hands were at my throat, a brutal laughter coming from my attacker. I felt the beginning of a squeeze around my windpipe. It was so quick, I barely had time to understand what was going on and it looked like I might be dead.
"Not so fast," I heard Kolchak say. His voice was hard and threatening. The hands at my neck loosened but did not let me go. I was able to turn my head a little bit in that grip to take in the situation.
While I was held by a strong grip of a man I could barely see, Kolchak had fared far better. They must have attempted the same action, counting on his disorientation and found it reversed. Kolchak was standing at his car door, a wooden stake in the heart of a man that I assumed was a revenant. The man's body was slack due to the stake and Kolchak had his wicked knife right at the underside of the revenant's jaw, ready to jam it up into the brain. There was a third man, probably a revenant, standing near the front of the car, keeping his distance from Kolchak. The unconscious revenant had blonde hair and the right side of his head was shaved. He had a nose ring and tattoos, one of which I recognized as the Family's symbol. The third revenant had a mop of red hair and silver sunglasses, even though it was the middle of the night. Ace was out of the car and growling at this third revenant, keeping him in his place. I knew nothing about my own attacker other than that fact that even if he wasn't a creature of supreme evil, he still had a serious height and weight advantage on me. He smelled like he needed a bath.
"How about you let him go?" growled Kolchak. Ace barked in agreement.
"How about we just kill him and then we kill you?" said the revenant who held me. His hand flexed against my windpipe, eager to finish, but clearly holding himself back.
"Try that, and you're missing a friend," said Kolchak. "And I know how strongly you guys hold the bonds of family."
"Of course we do, asshole, that's why we're here," said the revenant who held me.
"How do you figure?" said Kolchak. "Why are you here?"
"You killed one of our brothers last night," said the revenant who was in front of the car. "You know how it works. You kill one of us, you're at war with all of us."
"That was self defense, he attacked me," said Kolchak.
"That's bullshit, Alan was always on mission!" growled the revenant who held me.
"He did kind of attack us first," I said, but the only response was a tightening of fingers around my neck.
"If he attacked, you did something first," said the revenant in front of the car. "You broke the truce."
"Truce?" I croaked.
"It doesn't matter right now, because you're going to let go of my friend and let us go," said Kolchak. He pushed on the knife, its point digging into the unconscious revenant's skin to show he meant business.
"If he dies, you die," said the revenant in front of Ace.
"And if he dies," said Kolchak, gesturing to me with his head, "your friend dies, like I said. And I know the Family cares about all its members."
Ace's revenant frowned and I could tell there was some tension in the one that held me too.
"So I'm thinking we all walk away from this one," said Kolchak. "You let go of my friend, and you guys walk around the block. Then we drop your friend here, and we ride off. Nobody dies tonight."
"How do we know you're not going to kill him when we leave?" said the one who held me.
"You assholes attacked me," said Kolchak. "I don't want anything to do with you. As far as I see it, you're the aggressors. I have no interest in killing you unless I have to."
There was a pause, then the revenant in front of the car nodded. "I don't like it. But I'll adm
it that's fair, I accept your deal."
"What? Don't trust him!" said the revenant in front of the car.
"What do the teachings say?" said the one who held me, his voice forceful and solid. The other must have backed down under his stare, because he said nothing and changed his glance to Ace. He continued. "But know that this deal is just for tonight. The truce is broken, old man. You better get out of Avalon, because you and yours are no longer off limits. We'll get you, and if we can't get you, we'll get your whole damn family!"
"We'll see about that," said Kolchak.
My throat was released, and I could now see that the revenant who held me was a dark haired ox of a man that probably deserved the designation of Ogre instead of revenant. The two revenants backed up, keeping their eyes on us. They took a final look back, uneasy about the fate of their friend, before they turned and started walking down the street.
Kolchak still held his hostage, edging his feet over so he could confirm that the two revenants were actually going away. "Get in the car."
"A truce?" I said.
"Get in the car if you want to live." His voice was hard like steel.
Grudgingly, I got into the car. The front of it was dented, but otherwise it appeared like it wasn't too badly harmed. Maybe there was something to Kolchak's claim of cars being made better back then. Ace followed me into the car, taking up his position in the backseat.
Kolchak waited a little longer, then he dropped the body of the unconscious revenant, leaping into the car. He started the car and the tires screeched as we took off. We could already hear the faint sounds of sirens, probably coming because of the accident, but that's not why we fled.
A few minutes of high speed travel and a few neighborhoods away, Kolchak finally slowed down and merged into traffic nonchalantly.
"That was bad," said Kolchak, pausing to give Ace a treat and a pet, hoping to calm the dog's nerves.
"You had a truce with them?"
Kolchak paused in his stroking of Ace and breathed heavily. "Yes."
"You have a truce with a frightening organization of the worst monsters ever? You don't kill them?"
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