Sallow House

by Phil Malone

She was struggling to stay awake when they reached a well-lit parking garage. Fluorescent lights stabbed at them through the windshield. The woman flinched and squinted her eyes against the glare. Her head drooped for a moment, but then it popped back up long enough for her to make it through the barrier.

  Sallow heard her mumble something, but she was so far gone that, even in his hearing, it sounded like an incoherent hum. She pulled into an open space, fumbled her car into park, then settled her head against the back of her seat.

  Her face turned towards him, but her eyes remained closed. The car engine still idled, the song on the radio kept serenading its unconscious audience.

  Though he wasn’t sure exactly where they were, Sallow got a glimpse of the place through the side window as they pulled into the garage. It stood adjacent to a high rise stacked with condominiums, probably just on the outskirts of Fairfax or Alexandria. There might be cameras in the garage, but that didn’t concern him too much. No one would see him. He was already inside the woman’s car.

  He unfurled himself from the shadows behind her passenger seat. The hunger coursing through his veins tempted him to taste the woman right then and there, but with the GHB in her system, he didn’t dare. Better to take her car, to move her to his home where he could feed off her at his leisure.

  Discovering a dexterity he never imagined himself capable of, he slithered between the two front seats and perched on the center console, just shy of the drugged soda resting in a cup holder by his feet. Reaching down, he unclasped the woman’s seatbelt, gripping her beneath the armpits so that he could transfer her to the passenger seat.

  As soon as he touched her, she stirred. Her eyes opened, struggling to focus. With her head tipped back, her bleary gaze met his. For a moment, she looked terrified.

  Then her whole body relaxed. She melted into Sallow’s embrace, staring into his eyes. A wide, shy grin spread across her face.

  Something unexpected had happened. He could smell the change in pheromones coming off her. With nothing more than his gaze, he’d transformed her from a drugged and unwilling victim to a euphoric volunteer. He’d done it on accident, without even realizing.

  In an instant, he understood that he’d never need the drugs again. It didn’t matter that he was ugly. He only needed to master this newfound instinct of his, and he could choose any meal from the menu. The possibilities were endless.

  “Sallow!”

  He jerked backwards, smashing his head against the roof of the car and looking around as though he expected to find another person in there with them.

  “Have you forgotten the voice of your master already?”

  The words came from inside his head. He didn’t know Bleda could do that. “I’m busy,” he growled.

  “Leave the woman, this is more important. I’m in your house. Get back here this instant.”

  “I’m coming. I just wanted to grab some take out first." He turned back to the woman, again preparing to heft her into the passenger seat—

  --And pain erupted inside his skull. He seized his head in both hands. The woman slumped against the steering wheel, instantly asleep, but Sallow couldn’t even see her. White-hot knives of agony stabbed him through both eyes.

  He slumped on the floor of her car, beating his palms against the seat, the door, his own skull. “Yes,” he managed to croak. “I’m coming now.”

  The sharp knife-edge of the torment ceased, but his head throbbed with the memory of it. He opened the car door and spilled out onto the ground. Kicking the door closed behind him, he crawled on hands and knees towards the nearest concrete pillar, and used it to support his weight as he staggered to his feet.

  Once clear of the parking garage, he oriented the nearest street signs with his mental map of the area. If he ran, he could get back to the fast food place where he left his car in less than ten minutes.

  It would have been quicker to just take the woman’s car with her inside, but Bleda was making a point. He was letting Sallow know who was in charge.

  Seven minutes later, he found himself behind the wheel of his own car. He wanted to rest, to catch his breath. He didn’t dare. Bleda might still be watching, and it was better to answer the summons-- this instant, as Bleda had said-- rather than endure more of the suffering he could inflict.

  That kind of torture was downright murder.

  He found Bleda waiting in the garage, impatient enough to have worked himself into a fury. Dagobert remained trussed to the table, no worse off than the last time Sallow had seen him. He scowled at the ceiling, hating both his captor and the vampire who refused to rescue him.

  Sallow stepped closer, wary, still eyeing various implements around the garage he could use to hack through Bleda’s neck. Tempting as it was, he didn’t think he could do it fast enough.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “You tell me. I’ve been waiting for days. Watching. All you do is mince about in the shadows, trying not to get caught.”

  It took a conscious effort for Sallow to stop grinding his teeth. He wasn’t following orders fast enough, so Bleda was starving him out of spite. “I told you, it takes time,” he said slowly, as though explaining to a child. “I have a process. I have to do reconnaissance…”

  “Napoleon ought to be dead by now! Instead, you’re stealing hard evidence of his crimes and losing it somewhere that has nothing to do with your job!”

  “That…” Sallow feigned a little impatience of his own, sighing, trying to buy time he could use to formulate a good lie. He didn’t lose the stake, he planted it. It was better if Bleda didn’t know his motives.

  “That’s part of the process too,” he finally said. “The guy has allies. He needs to be isolated. I’m just trying to learn more about his immediate circle, anything I can use, any opening.”

  Bleda narrowed his eyes. He gripped Dagobert’s shoulder and shook him like a dog with a squirrel in its mouth. “Is that how he got you, Dagobert? He used his process?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Bleda,” Dagobert grumbled.

  “You hear that? Even Dagobert isn’t impressed with your process and he’s the one who ended up with all the stumps.”

  “Catching him was the trickiest hunt I ever attempted. Napoleon is going to be even harder, and I have to get him alone. The easiest way to get the other vampire out of the picture is to distract him with threats to his family. But if you want to switch, I’ll stay here and you can go kill him.”

  This time, he saw Bleda move. His legs were a blur and the fist seemed to strike him from too far away, but he saw the attack coming. He just wasn’t quick enough to avoid it.

  By the time Sallow landed amidst a cascade of old, disused tools, struggling for breath, Bleda stood beside Dagobert again, as if he’d never moved in the first place.

  “I gave you one simple job,” he said. “Wait for your chance, and then kill Napoleon. Instead you’re sneaking around here, there, and everywhere. Always watching, never acting. I didn’t say anything about the vampire Napoleon just turned. Only Napoleon himself. Why did you even steal that stake from his house anyway?”

  “How do you even know about that? I never showed it to you. How did you know about the woman I was bringing back here?”

  “You really don’t understand how this works, do you? You’re my offspring. You know I can punish you when you disobey, or disappoint. I can watch through your eyes, see everything you do. I know every move you make.”

  “Barely even a life worth living,” Sallow muttered.

  “Well, I can take it away any time I want.”

  Sallow sat up, grabbed hold of a dented tool cabinet, and used it to haul himself to his feet. “I stole the stake because I thought you’d want proof that Napoleon deserved to die. Why else would he have a stake with your name on it, if he wasn’t planning to use it on you?”

  “See,” Bleda waggled a finger at him, “that’s where you’re not thinking. I don’t want to be associated at all with Napoleon’s murder. If they go throug
h his house afterwards and find his collection of stakes, so be it. But I don’t want anyone thinking I killed him.”

  “Fine." Sallow still clung to the tool cabinet. His chest hurt where Bleda had hit him. “I won’t steal anything else from his house.”

  “Good,” Bleda nodded. “Though I did warn you what would happen if you did a bad job." He reached down behind the table, where Sallow’s view was obscured. When he straightened up, he had a long handled fire axe in his grip. The bladed edge of the axe head shone.

  He raised the axe over his head. In the same moment, Sallow realized what he meant to do, and threw himself forward.

  “He’s mine!”

  Too late. The axe swung down, cleaving halfway through Dagobert’s neck. Bleda swung his fist at Sallow, catching him just above one eye. White pain blinded him, and he reeled backwards.

  When Sallow shook his head hard enough to clear him vision, he saw Bleda bringing the axe down for a second stroke. Dagobert’s head rolled sideways off the table. His pooling blood curdled as it cooled, leaking from the skin all over his body. Already, his flesh rotted.

  Sallow’s hands curled into fists. “He was mine. I wasn’t done with him.”

  The axe clattered against the garage’s concrete floor when Bleda threw it to the ground. “You are now. Either get rid of the remains, or let him rot and play with the bones. I don’t care. You still have a job to do.”

  Bleda headed for the door, knocking Sallow aside as if he weighed nothing. At the door, he stopped and turned. “You have one more night to get this done. Do it or die trying. I’ll be watching.”

  One more night, Sallow thought as Bleda slammed the door behind him. One more night to finish this, one way or another.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The vampire council met once every quarter, for ten nights in a row. Emergency sessions could be called, if necessary, though they rarely were. Every now and then, ten nights weren’t enough to conclude all of their business. In those cases, the meetings continued until they were done. If they were lucky, they finished in fewer than ten days, and went home early.

  Each of them maintained a home in the Washington D.C. area that they used specifically to host council meetings. Napoleon’s true residence was in Atlanta.

  “What do I do when you go back?” Sanger asked, as Hugo Head chauffeured them to Adronicus’s home in Maryland for that night’s gathering.

  “Stay here. Be my eyes and ears in the Capitol region. This is Caligula’s territory, and he is the most formidable obstacle of all.”

  They arrived at the house shortly after eleven. Few of the other council members were there, only Adronicus himself and Gudit, who drank warm blood from a chalice and batted her eyelashes at Napoleon from across the room.

  Napoleon accepted a chalice of his own and one for Sanger from a human servant, then turned his back on Gudit. “Do me a favor,” he muttered to Sanger. “See what Gudit wants. Try to figure out if we can win her over.”

  She was a striking woman, Sanger couldn’t help but notice. Sleek, dark hair, ample curves, a flat stomach, long eyelashes, full lips. A classic beauty. Weirdly, he felt a flutter of nerves as he approached.

  Once within reaching distance, he lifted his chalice towards her. She did the same, and the goblets briefly clinked. Sanger took a drink. “How does Adronicus keep the blood warm if it’s not in a human body?”

  Gudit laughed. “Drink it quickly. It cools if you let it linger.”

  “May I ask how long you’ve been on the council?”

  “Mmm,” Gudit thought for a moment. “At least seventy years.”

  “A long time, by my standards. Longer than I’ve been alive.”

  “Are you calling me an old woman, Mr. Sanger?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “I’m still new to this. I don’t know what vampires consider old. Dracula would probably tell you to get off his lawn.”

  Her laughter was musical. “Furthermore, my music would frighten and confuse him.”

  “You call that music?” Sanger laughed. “Aside from the tunes, has much changed in all that time?”

  “Oh, yes. They invented fire, of all things.”

  “Fascinating. How did we respond to the invention of fire?”

  Gudit pursed her lips. “For us, things endure as they always have.”

  “Is that a fact of life, or is that a choice?”

  “It is… harder to maintain with every passing year.”

  Sanger drained the rest of his cup. A sediment of rapidly drying blood remained. “Why does it get harder?”

  “Surely you can puzzle that out. The world the humans have made changes at a pace never before seen. We have adapted to living in the shadows, yet the shadows are shrinking all the time.”

  “Maybe we should change our approach.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sanger, I sympathize with Napoleon’s frustrations. We hide from a world that we might be able to rule. And it grows less and less easy to hide in a world full of smartphones.”

  “It seems to me like it’s a choice between slinking away and living like hermits, or emerging from the shadows altogether. Before they force us out.”

  “We need the humans. We’ll always live near them. They provide our source of food, do they not? If you have ever tried drinking animal blood,” Gudit made a sour face, “then you know what a foul, unpleasant meal it makes.”

  “No hermitage for us, then. Where does that leave us?”

  “Eventually, without question, things will change. But there is a possibility Napoleon failed to foresee.”

  “What’s that?”

  Gudit cupped her hand against Sanger’s cheek, stroking it lightly. “The precise moment we are not merely the monsters from their fiction, the humans might just kill us all.”

  Sanger smiled. “You’d almost think that we need a strategy. That we need to strike first, while they still mostly don’t believe in us.”

  “It is not I whom you need to convince, dear boy." She nodded toward the front door. Sanger turned, and saw Caligula enter with Bleda on his heels. “I am not the man in charge.”

  For the third night in a row, the vampire council gaveled open a session of its annual conclave. Sanger watched from Napoleon’s elbow as Adronicus opened the meeting, welcoming everyone, shuffling notes full of agenda items.

  Clearing his throat, Caligula cut him short. The necrotic old vampire rose ponderously to his feet, commanding the attention of the entire room.

  “Thank you, Adronicus, for hosting us,” he said. “I regret that I must bring an emergency item to the council’s attention. Any other business must wait until we address this. Earlier today, there was a killing of three vampires not far from here. They were slain by the vampire hunter mentioned to us by our sister from New England.”

  “Lucado did this?” Wu Zetian asked.

  “He did. The local authorities apprehended him. For reasons that yet elude me, they moved him to Fairfax County. One of my people is keeping watch on him. He will act to rid us of this man when the moment is right." The old vampire checked a timepiece hanging by a slender chain from his belt. “Indeed, he may be dead already.”

  A tall, thin vampire with a white beard spoke up. “Then what’s the issue?" John Hawkyns, Sanger recalled. His territory was the Great Plains.

  “How did he discover the location of these three vampires, Hawkyns? That is the issue.”

  Another council member, Catherine de Medici, a girl who looked scarcely older than twelve, jabbed her thumb in Wu Zetian’s direction even while she spoke to Caligula. “Could he have tracked these vampires here from Wu’s territory?”

  “No. They kept to themselves, rarely strayed far from their nest. They have never wandered as far afield as New England. I do not know what brought this vampire hunter here, but it was not those three. Nevertheless, he found out about them. That is what concerns me.”

  Sanger noticed Napoleon shift in his seat. So far, he held his peace. But he watched the others intently, le
aning forward, bursting to speak.

  Gudit noticed as well. “Napoleon?” she said. “As our newest member, do you have something to add?”

  “I cannot imagine how these vampires were discovered,” Napoleon answered. “But surely this underscores the arguments I made two nights ago. The humans are dangerous…”

  “The humans are dangerous,” Caligula agreed, cutting Napoleon off, “when they know about us. Thus we must remain hidden!”

  Napoleon kept going, ignoring Caligula. “They will continue to find out about us. It is only through the heroic and diligent efforts of our esteemed council president that our existence is not common knowledge already. But it will not last. There are fewer and fewer places to hide, and the humans share information like never before in history. This is a question of when, not if, and also a question of how prepared we will be when the day of our discovery arrives.”

  “We voted on your motion only two nights ago,” Gudit reminded him, “and it was defeated eleven votes to one. I assume your proposal has not changed in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “No, but the circumstances have. I suggest we take another vote.”

  Caligula’s fist slammed down on the table. A resounding crack whiplashed throughout the room as wood splintered beneath the blow. “I decide what we vote on, Napoleon. I allowed you to bring your motion before us once. I see no need to do so again.”

  “No need? We shall be isolated and overwhelmed when the vampire hunters come for us.”

  “I have a different set of proposals in mind. One that will help mitigate the possibility of humans catching us while we sleep. Even if a few of them find out about us, my new rules will prevent them from discovering our lairs.”

  “We are eager to hear it,” Adronicus said.

  “One: that no vampire shall hunt for prey within a twenty mile radius of their nesting place.”

  A muted buzz of whispers filled the room. Not only did the council members briefly confer with each other, but their aides sitting in the back of the room muttered to one another as well.