by Phil Malone
Everything in Napoleon’s kitchen shone, scrubbed clean. Sallow doubted that he used it to cook; in fact, he didn’t smell anything a regular human would find edible. A rich vampire like Napoleon could probably hire a maid to clean the place, though. Hire her, then drink her blood when she finished.
“She did, but she took her time. Like she was considering it. Even though the rest of the vote had already gone against you, so there was no chance it would pass.”
Sallow stopped dead in his tracks as he approached the foyer. There was a third, unexpected person in the house. He heard the rustling sheets of someone turning over in bed.
“I never know what that woman thinks. She is hard to read. She may have been considering it. Or perhaps she was fantasizing about boiling my brains and wearing my skin.”
The scent of sweat and body odor clung to a closed doorway just inside the foyer. Sallow stole closer, held his ear to the door without quite touching it. Barely perceptible, he could hear the subliminal murmur of circulating blood.
“Well, you know her better than I do. I just thought, maybe she’s someone we can work with.”
What was a human doing, sleeping in Napoleon’s house? Did he have a human friend? Family? Was it just a servant?
“I need more than just her. For a change this momentous, the rules only allow for one dissenter. Caligula will never change his mind. The rest go in fear of him. Therefore, I still need to sway not only Gudit, but everyone else.”
Sallow edged away from the sleeping man’s door. As long as he stayed asleep, he wouldn’t be a problem.
Napoleon and his friend kept talking about people Sallow didn’t know. Their conversation baffled him with all its focus on trying to sway people through argument. Sallow never needed to know another person, much less convince them of his point of view.
He kept one ear on them as they nattered on. Otherwise, he explored the rest of the house. He found no evidence of anyone else. Only the two vampires, the caged women upstairs, and the sleeping human by the front door.
The ground floor was more lived in than the rooms upstairs. Most rooms had furniture, at least. He found a room with a long antique table and twelve high backed wooden chairs arranged around it. More chairs lined the walls, which bore twelve huge portraits. He spared a moment to memorize the faces, in case he needed to know them.
From there, he chanced upon a study dominated by a writing desk. An inkwell and pen with a sharp iron nib nestled amongst reams of paper with notes jotted down on them. He perused a few. It looked like they contained lists of government officials, military bases and high-ranking officers, local police authorities. Sallow set the papers aside and moved on.
In the next room he found a glass display case containing an array of pointed wooden stakes. Silently, he opened the case and extracted one of them. The handle was intricately carved with designs, runic symbols, and painted in a pattern of gray, blue, and burgundy. He spotted a name etched into the wood: Fredegund.
Bleda never told Sallow if a stake through the heart would kill him, or if sunlight or holy water would burn him. There was a lot about being a vampire that he didn’t know, he was starting to realize. It seemed a likely way to die, though, if these stakes were any indication.
There were more than twenty of them, each resting on a small individual display stand. They all had different designs, some done in fleurs-de-lis, others with a Native American design, or ones that looked Celtic, Greek, baroque. He found one that was all spears, swords, and daggers. It had Bleda’s name inscribed on it.
Sallow wasted no more than a second thinking about it, before slipping Bleda’s stake from the case and tucking it into the pocket of his jacket.
The last thing he needed to do was get a look at his prey. Two vampires stood only a few rooms away. From listening to them for a while, he was pretty sure which voice belonged to Napoleon. He needed to put a face to it, though.
“I did not join this council to do nothing with its power,” he heard Napoleon say.
“Washington is full of ambitious people with plans and influence. You just have to get enough of the right ones to agree with you. Or give them something they want in exchange.”
“Mutual backscratching?" Sallow heard hollow laughter. “How do you bribe anyone so damnably comfortable?”
He followed the sound of the voices. The best approach was through the dining room. A pair of French doors blocked most of the view, but he could get close enough to peer through the crack between them without being seen in return.
“Everyone wants something. But let’s make that our alternate strategy.”
He inched towards the door, as close as he dared. To be safe, he held his breath. Through the narrow gap, Sallow got his first look at Napoleon and his companion. The one speaking was just a man in a well-tailored suit. Sallow had hoped more for a cape, huge fangs, something more theatrical.
“We’ve only brought the motion forward once. We barely had a chance to make our case for it. Let’s try to convince them on the merits before we try buying them off.”
“Do you think that will work?”
The second man came into view. Napoleon. Right away, Sallow recognized his face from one of the paintings in the other room.
“They’re not so different from regular politicians,” the man in the suit replied, “so no, I doubt it. But there might be another way.”
“I am listening.”
It wasn’t going to happen tonight. There were too many unknowns. At least he had a chance to break into Napoleon’s home, to get the lay of the land. He backed away from the French doors.
“We give them a common enemy. A reason to believe humankind can’t be trusted to leave us alone. No one likes to feel threatened. We can make humanity seem like more of a threat than it is, and give us a reason to take them beneath our wing.”
“How do we do that, Damien?”
Sallow circled wide around the living room, heading back to the entrance hall and the staircase that led to his open window. He was curious about this ally of Napoleon’s. The main target might be lost without him. Helpless, easy pickings.
“You might have to make a small sacrifice. Nothing you’d miss personally, but enough to make an impression on the council.”
“Such as…?”
From upstairs, the man in the suit was barely audible. Still, for a moment more, Sallow listened.
“Nothing much. The lives of a few vampires, maybe.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What now?
It was time for Lucado to check out of his hotel. Another few hours, and he’d have to pay for an entire night. He’d packed up all his clothes and toiletries. The overflowing suitcase sat open on the bed, on top of sheets still rumpled from his restless night’s sleep.
He made his last minute rounds, scouring the small room to double check that he hadn’t forgotten anything. He rummaged through the drawers and in the shallow closet. There wasn’t much room for things to go missing, only a bedroom, bathroom, and a nook where the microwave and mini fridge contested for space. But he’d been living in the room for close to a month. In that amount of time, it was easy to spread out and forget a few belongings.
When he was pretty sure he’d scrounged everything up, he closed the suitcase and zipped it shut. It weighed more than he remembered, enough that he wondered whether dirty clothes were heavier than clean clothes. He hadn’t done laundry all week, just wadded up the outfits he’d already worn and stuffed them in the suitcase as best he could.
His knee twinged horribly as he dragged the suitcase off the bed. Lugging it around would require two hands. Lucado gazed at his cane, still lying across one of the pillows. All he had to do was get the suitcase to the trunk of his car, and then it would be business as usual.
Again, though, Lucado couldn’t remember what business as usual meant anymore. He could go back to Connecticut. His house was there, though he couldn’t really afford the taxes on it anymore. In the meantime, all he could
really do was wait for news of bodies found drained of blood. Follow the trail, lie in wait, kill the vampire responsible or die trying.
He just wished they weren’t so hard to find.
The room phone rang right after he managed to haul his suitcase as far as the door. He left it there, staggered a few steps over to the bedside table, and picked up the receiver. The front desk, no doubt, calling to inform him that it was time to check out.
“Hello?” he said.
“Mario Lucado?”
“I’ll be there in a minute to check out. I just need to get my suitcase out to my car.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “…Mario Lucado, the vampire hunter?”
Lucado frowned. “Who is this?" A few people back home knew about his crusade, along with the police he’d spoken to the day before. He didn’t think any of them would track down his hotel just to prank call him.
“Don’t leave town just yet, Mr. Lucado. There are vampires here. I can give you an address.”
“Who is this?” he asked again.
“That’s not important. I can’t do what you do; it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t risk it. But if you’re really willing to kill some of them, I know where they are. So, are you?”
He sat down on the bed. His free hand reached out and found the cane, gripping it tightly enough to turn his knuckles white. “I will, as long as this isn’t some kind of stupid joke.”
“No joke. Go and see for yourself.”
Lucado supposed he had the cash to splurge on another night in the motel. “What’s the address?”
He stopped at a grocery store on his way to the promised vampire nest. When he first arrived on the scene in Virginia, he bought a few sliced cloves of garlic and kept them sitting on top of the microwave in his motel room. By the time he started packing earlier in the day, he found they’d gone bad, all brown and oily, during his month long stay. He would need a few more, if the mysterious phone call was genuine.
In the years since his wife was murdered, Lucado had found the occasional vampire. During some of those encounters, he barely escaped with his life. Other times, the vampire died writhing. Through a harrowing process of trial and error, Lucado got better at knowing how to hurt them, and how to kill them.
Some things from vampire myth had a basis in reality, he found. Something in the garlic dulled their wits, made them slower, more sluggish. If they were already asleep, it might keep them from waking until it was too late to defend themselves. But it worked better with chopped or crushed garlic than whole, intact bulbs.
On the other hand, they didn’t shrivel up and die in the sunlight, either. Again, they became slower and weaker, more like normal people than vampires. It was no wonder they preferred to go out only after the sun had set.
A wooden stake through the heart would kill a vampire. So would decapitation. Fire would burn them as well as anyone, but it was a slow way to kill them and gave them a chance to douse the flames. Lucado once found out the hard way that bullets barely slowed them down. He wondered sometimes about more destructive methods, like drawing and quartering a vampire, or using acid, a grenade, an atomic bomb. He’d never had the chance to try. Religious iconography didn’t faze them either, but he supposed it gave comfort to vampire hunters in previous centuries.
All he needed, though, was the garlic, a cheap plastic cigarette lighter, and his cane.
It took well over an hour to drive to the address the voice on the phone had given him. The journey led to a house all the way out in Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley. By the time he got there, the sun had already set.
He bought dinner from the cheapest drive-thru he could find before making his way to the right neighborhood. When he found the street, he rolled slowly past the house, giving it a once over. Dilapidated, one story tall, peeling paint and cracked, darkened windows. All the curtains were closed, the lights were off inside, and weeds strangled the lawn. The place looked like a flophouse, and in Lucado’s assessment, it wasn’t in the nicest of neighborhoods. A likely place to find vampires lying low, he decided.
Since night had already fallen, he didn’t bother going in. It would be too dangerous to attempt anything until the following morning. Instead, he found a vacant house not far down the street with a realtor’s sign hammered into the overgrown lawn. One of many Lucado had seen while navigating through the neighborhood. He parked in front of it and ate in his car, keeping an eye on the supposed vampire nest the entire time.
For short stretches of time, Lucado dozed off and on. He snapped awake when a car drove past, or a dog barked, or for no apparent reason at all. Always, he returned to watching the house, but nothing had changed during his naps. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, stretched his bad leg to keep it from getting too stiff. Once, he pissed into the empty paper cup his soft drink had come in, and flung it out his car window.
His keys remained in the car’s ignition. If he needed to make a quick escape, he could. Or so he hoped. But nothing notable transpired during all the hours he was awake to observe.
A glimmer of purple bled across the horizon before something finally happened. He spotted a man walking along the street in his rear view mirror. Whether the man was a vampire or not, Lucado didn’t want anyone to catch him lurking. He hunched low in the driver’s seat, hidden from view.
The man passed by his car at a slow trot. He seemed tired, like someone going for a morning run. That seemed unlikely. The man wore dark slacks, his white shirt untucked and unbuttoned. Beneath that, his pale, hairless chest panted ferociously. As he went by, Lucado held his breath. He glimpsed dark stains on the man’s shirt, spots and splatters, concentrated near the collar.
As anticipated, the man disappeared into the house. Of course he was tired. He barely made it home before sunrise.
Lucado let another couple of hours go by. No one else entered or left the house, though other people on the street started emerging from their own homes and driving to work. None of them took any notice of the old man loitering in his car.
Since the sun was up, it was safe to start working on the garlic while he waited. He stretched towards the passenger seat, reaching for the footwell where he’d left the plastic shopping bag that contained a couple of bulbs and a garlic press. He peeled them, one after the other, discarding the husks on the floor and using the press to mince each separate clove. A stench of garlic filled the inside of his car. Undoubtedly, he would be safe from vampires in there.
By midmorning, he decided to try his luck. At the moment, the street looked deserted. He stepped out of his car, clutching his cane in one hand and in the other, a cheesecloth bag with a drawstring he used to carry the garlic. In his pants pocket, he felt the lump of the cigarette lighter resting hard against his hip. His knee hurt badly; no matter how much he tried to stretch it while he waited, a night in the driver’s seat of his car was bound to make his leg stiffer and more painful than usual.
He limped around to the back of his car, unlocking and opening up the trunk. His suitcase remained behind at the motel, but he had a can of diesel fuel in there. He hefted it out and closed the trunk.
Then he started walking to the end of the block, hobbling along on his cane with the gas can weighing down his free hand. As he reached the vampire nest, he deliberately passed by rather than cross the street towards it. He wanted another brief, closer look.
All the windows in the house remained dark. No twitch of the curtains betrayed the presence of anyone living inside. Lucado watched it from the corner of his eye, and limped onwards, going to the end of the block. Then he crossed to the side of the street where he could reach the house more easily and started back.
The entire neighborhood remained quiet and still. Lucado went up the front walk, his heart in his throat with every leaf that crunched underfoot. This could still be a hoax, he knew. Even so, he kept going.
He reached the front porch, having stirred no signs of life from within the house. As he got closer, he coul
d see that the deadbolt on the front door was broken. The handle hung slightly askew, and the wood around the lock was cracked and splintered. Lucado held his breath, reached out, and gave the door a gentle nudge.
It opened only a few inches, enough for him to slip through without spilling a wide shaft of sunlight into the house. The vampires were probably sleeping, and he wanted no light or noise to alert them to his presence. If they woke, even during daylight hours, he was only an old man with a bad leg. He’d be at their mercy.
He set the gas can down just inside the door, which he eased shut behind him. The house was dark. Very little light filtered in through thick curtains before diffusing amidst clouds of dust motes hanging in the air. It took a few moments for Lucado’s eyes to adjust. While he waited, he listened for the sound of any movement, though he heard nothing but the pounding of his own heart.
When he could see a little better, he ventured further into the house. All the furniture looked like salvage from a trash pile. He poked his head into the kitchen, finding only dust. No dishes, no silverware, no food. The refrigerator wasn’t even plugged in. Even so, the air felt stale and reeked of dirty clothes and body odor.
Not far away, he found them, sprawled out on filthy couches in the living room. Three sleeping vampires, pale skin with dark veins just below the surface. They had blood on their breath. Lucado was a lamb in the lion’s den. If they stayed sleeping, he could kill them. Otherwise, he didn’t think he would make it out alive. He had never faced three vampires at once before.
In the cloth pouch, the crushed garlic sluiced between his fingers. He dug out handfuls and drizzled them over the sleeping vampires. His hands were greasy with it. Once before, he’d been able to smear garlic beneath a sleeping vampire’s nose. The stuff was like chloroform to the creatures.
The first vampire didn’t move as Lucado’s fingers brushed beneath its nose. The thick carpet in the room swallowed up the sound of his footfalls as he made his way to the second. This vampire shifted slightly when Lucado touched him, eyelids fluttering. A low growl rumbled in the back of his throat, like a threatened cat, but tapered off as the pungent smell of garlic filled his nostrils.
