by Declan Finn
“Have we met?”
“You shoved me into a tiger trap back in April.”
“Thought you looked familiar.”
Marco finished off the vampire before turning to look over the unremarkable person. His hair and eyes were brown, his skin tanned, his black suit something out of a mortuary supplied by Armani. His body was thin and willowy, his fingers like spider legs. He looked and sounded vaguely Slavic.
Marco held both hands behind him, reaching for a cocktail. “I take it you’re not Dracula?”
He chuckled. “No, not hardly. Vlad was always too much for my taste. Too overbearing, you see. Very snobbish, flashy.”
“I see. So you’re not a vampire?”
He laughed, as though at a good joke from an old friend. “Hells, no. I’m something so much more than those lower-class kneebreakers.”
Marco arched a brow. “You’re not related to a man named Mikhail, by any chance?”
The well-dressed, eloquent monster arched a brow. “The vampire? Technically, I’m a cousin of his. We in the family had been very disappointed by his actions recently, especially how he ended. Even his trainer, she spent so much time and energy on him—she has 800 years of experience, and he wasted it all.”
Marco sighed. “I completely understand. I have a large family myself, I know how hard they can be on the nerves.”
“Yes, aren’t they so?” he cracked his knuckles. “However, he was family. And his death cannot go unanswered.”
Marco nodded. “So, what are you?”
He smiled beneficently. “I am death.”
The human looked him over, completely under-whelmed. “Wow, you just happened to pick one of the few things that I’m not afraid of.”
“Oh, I know. You aren’t scared of me, Marco. You should be, though.” He gave a small shrug. “You may call me Mister Day.”
Marco’s eyes flattened. “Good. I hoped you’d come here.”
With the Molotov cocktail firmly in hand, Marco lit the rag and tossed it at the creature. His chest ignited in flame, but he just stood there, unconcerned. “That’s annoying.”
He dropped, rolled, and sprang to his feet, put out.
Marco raised his brows. “Efficient.”
Day nodded. “Thank you.” He flexed his fingers. “Now, you get to die. Just like your vampire whore.”
Marco’s smile finally faded. His eyes narrowed. “Oh, really? You’re the guy? You leveled a whole building just to get my attention?”
Day’s smile grew a fraction. “Yes. I am ‘the guy.’ You seem to have forgotten that I killed your girlfriend. Does that make you angry?” He blinked. “Oh my, does it ever. You just give off waves of rage.”
Marco said nothing, and simply studied Day, picturing exactly how he was going to break Day apart. There was nothing to say, really. He had expected something to come and get him, and here he was. Mister Day. Something that could track rage. Well, he picked the right method for tracking me. Maybe he should try another hobby, like needlepoint.
“Should I ask who else was behind it?” Marco asked. “Or should I just assume you’re another lone psycho with some nifty powers?”
Day cocked his head to one side. “Oh, there are always some terrorist groups who need encouragement. I needed some help collecting the materials. ISIS or Al-Qaeda, or whatever they are this week will claim responsibility soon. All just to get you. You should feel honored.”
Marco’s smile became sly. “Did you think that it was going to be that easy? Just walk up, have a chat, kill me? Did you think I wouldn’t fight back with every means at my disposal?” You like rage. Well, let’s try something different.
Day grinned. “I expected it. I intend you to. I want you to. I—”
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come—
Day’s face lost its smile, and the glimmer of amusement shifted in a heartbeat. His teeth pulled back in a snarl, and he leapt for Marco.
Marco, however, had been dealing with things infinitely quicker than he was, and had already dropped forward, into a roll, as Day pushed off the ground. Marco was back on his feet and facing Day just as the creature rushed him again.
This time, Day stopped as he came within inches of Marco.
Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Marco’s smile was back as Day looked down at the knife sticking out of his chest. “How do you find rage now, sucker?”
* * * *
Merle came down the stairs to look into his shop. The college students who had been his core group of San Francisco vampire hunters were gathered in his store. Tiffany Whitman had been handling the customers as the others just sort of meandered.
George Berkeley was in the back corner, reading another magazine. His larger build discouraged some of the more obviously stoned from being a pain in the tuchas. Yana and Tara were the ones who were really wandering, though, like lost souls.
Damn it, Marco, I brought you here to be a leader, not the Lone Ranger. You’re supposed to be leading these people, not just leaving them hanging. “How are all of you doing?”
“Fine,” Yana and Tara moaned. George grunted, and Tiffany said, “We made $300.”
Merle sighed. Why do I expect anything different from Tiffany? Why, Lord? Why? “That’s nice. Any word from Marco?”
Yana shook her head. “He left his cell phone in his room.”
“How did you know that if you haven’t talked to him?”
“I broke down his door,” George rumbled as he turned another page. “Don’t worry. I put it back together again.”
“That’s good to know.” Merle frowned. “Is that a lycanthrope thing? The knocking doors down bit?”
George shrugged without even looking up from the magazine. “I knocked a little too hard. It’s not like I bit anyone.”
One corner of Merle’s mouth curled down in a frown. If lycanthropy has more to do with the person, and less with the biter, I can only imagine what these people would turn into if George ever bit one of them. Gah! Though it would be nice to have George as muscle if I ever needed the backup. Hell, he’s already built like a brick wall, the lycanthropy element should be a killer. “Well, just don’t bite Tiffany, no matter how much she asks,” Merle muttered.
George smirked, but said nothing, and it seemed like no one else had heard him.
“Merle,” Yana said, “what will happen to Marco?”
Merle shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t know that you’d become that attached to him.”
Yana pouted. “Well, yeah. Sorta. He’s really nice.”
Nice? Has she been paying attention? Merle thought.
George shrugged as well. “Yeah. He’s cool. He can put a plan together.” He looked at Merle. “He’d be good in a real fight, total war zone. Maybe we should consider combining more traditional tactics with fighting vampires.”
Yana turned to George and said, “No. You can’t possibly be thinking of…of…guns.”
George arched a brow. “We’ve been handling crossbows, napalm, Molotov cocktails, and I’ve been building pipe bombs left and right, and those can kill more people than a whole magazine of bullets from an AK-47. And you somehow think that guns will be a bad thing?”
Tara blanched. “But…guns kill people.”
George looked at her as though she was insane. “Uh huh, and what, exactly, do you think we’ve been doing this entire time? Did you think that vampires were just really big rodents?”
“Oh, no,” Yana insisted, “rodents are part of nature.”
George looked to Merle, as if to say, What can you do?
Merle glanced at his watch. Shouldn’t I be closing up? He looked around the store, looking at the kids, and sighed. “You guys can all stay past closing, I just want the front door locked if you do. Okay?”
Merle sighed. I hope that Marco is doing something productive.
* * * *
As Marco twisted the knife in Mister Day’s body, Day’s visage turned back from rage t
o amusement, as though the psychotic wrath that he had unleashed mere moments ago were a distant memory.
“I approve,” Day told him.
His hand came up to Marco’s shoulder, and gave him a little shove that sent Marco sprawling on the ground. Marco scrambled, and Day pulled out the knife.
“Time to return to sender.”
--and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass—
Day turned, about to stab behind him. A broadsword suddenly ran through Day’s chest and nailing him to a tree.
Rory, the vampire with the bad dye job, turned his glare on Marco, his deep green eyes flashing the yellow of his inner dark side—So the Irish vampire isn’t a perfectly virtuous monster.
“Wha’ do ya think y’ doin’ out here a’ this time o’ night?”
Marco smiled. “Hunting.”
Rory turned to the nailed one, pulled out another sword and swung it like a baseball bat through its neck. The sword bit into the neck and cut through, but Day healed so fast he might as well have been a hologram.
“Leave him,” Marco growled.
Rory grimaced, but he kicked the first sword handle, driving it deeper into Day’s chest.
Day reached out, grabbed Rory by the throat, and lifted him off the ground, the attack not even phasing him. “You should have stayed away, vampire. Now, I pop your head off like a zit.”
Day’s head snapped forward, and Rory’s face was suddenly spattered with blood. The vampire pushed away as Day’s grip faltered. The chatter of automatic fire broke up the night, riddling Day with bullets.
“Rory! Run!” Marco screamed.
“No need to tell me twice, laddie.”
Marco ran through the graveyard, stepped up a headstone to use as a leaping point, and just kept going. He ran past three pajama-clad warriors taking cautious, slow steps backwards in retreat as they fired disciplined bursts with submachineguns. “The vampire with the neon hair is with us!” Marco called.
“Get to the van!” came a Swiss accented voice.
If you were Austrian, you would have had a chopper. Sorry, “choppa.” Marco spotted the dark van, and headed straight for it. “Rory, with me.”
Rory had the back doors of the van open in time for Marco to toss himself in.
Less than a minute later, the other Vatican Ninjas piled in.
“Go!” Bram, the one with the sniper rifle, called as he ran for the van’s bumper. He tossed the rifle into the van, where one of the other ninjas caught it. Bram leapt for it. Rory and one of the other ninjas caught him by the wrists and pulled him in.
Without any warning, Day was there, grabbing the sniper-ninja’s ankle before he could come all the way into the van. “I can get at least one of you!”
Marco stood, right hand held high, and cried, “The power of Christ compels you, motherfucker,” as he threw what was in his hand.
Day grabbed the cord thrown at him, then screamed and leapt back. By the time Bram was pulled in, the van was already turning a corner.
“The last thing I need is to lose one of you people, so make sure you don’t get eaten by the demon!” called the driver – Father Rodgers.
Marco looked around, his perpetual smile had crept back. “Funny meeting you guys here. Just in the neighborhood and decided to stop in?”
“Amanda thought you might be in trouble.”
Marco nodded slowly, as though this was something so predictable, he shouldn’t have even asked the question. Though, inside, his brain was roiling with relief. All of the tension he had been unleashing on the world of vampires just flowed out of him, and he sank against the wall of the van, as though he had just now decided to take a nap.
Amanda was alive. That was all that mattered to him in the whole wide world.
“Well, it’s nice to see that she worries about me,” Marco drawled, “but I assure you, I was doing just fine until Mister Day showed up. Does anyone know who he is?”
“Just a guess,” Bram said, “but I’m going to say demon. Just a guess, mind you.”
“What was your load?” Marco asked. “All of you, not just you, Bram.”
“I was firing fifty-cal hollow-points filled with holy water, sealed with church wax. Forget a vampire, that should have slowed down an elephant. For Day, I don’t care if he was some sort of super vampire, it should have taken his head off. Everyone else was firing our special hollow-points.”
Marco cocked his head. “What’s so special about them?”
Bram drew his Desert Eagle sidearm, ejected the magazine, then wracked the slide in Marco’s direction, effectively tossing him the bullet. Marco caught it one-handed, and held it at eye-level. The bullet was a hollow-point, nothing unusual about it. There were three types that Marco generally knew about—pin, ball, and solid. The pin or ball within the hollow-point was to felicitate expansion of the point, causing greater damage. Without the pin or ball, there was a chance that the point wouldn’t flower out, defeating the purpose of using a hollow-point.
Now, if I was to guess…“Is the ball made of silver?” He narrowed his eyes at it. “Let me guess, you guys read Larry Correia?”
“Who?”
Marco rolled his eyes. “Never mind. Short version is that I read somewhere that silver is basically too hard to rifle. No rifling, there’s no spin on the bullet. No spin on the bullet, the accuracy is basically that of an eighteenth-century musket, good for maybe thirty feet. By keeping the bullet made of lead, copper, whatever, you keep the accuracy, and with the ball, you still deliver the silver.”
Bram cocked a brow at him. Marco smiled, tossed the bullet back, and said, “I read stuff. When my life started to look like something out of a Joss Whedon TV show, I read all the applicable treatises on it. Even if they’re fiction. Trust me, Tom Clancy told me about the applicability of planes as weapons, as well as the troubles in Ukraine, long before reality ever caught up to him.”
Bram chuckled. “I’m sure reality will never catch up with you, Marco.”
“He better not. I run really fast.” He looked around, closed his eyes, and sighed. He let his eyes burn with fatigue. It helped him think better. He placed his head against the back of the van and started. “So, a holy water bullet to the head and dozens of rounds will only slow this guy down. He doesn’t like holy objects, but he doesn’t have vampire-level allergies to holiness; otherwise, Bram’s holy water bullet would have eaten away his brain. It might slow him down a little without destroying him. He also seems to react to rage. He can feel it, track it. ”
Bram looked across the van to another ninja with bright blue eyes that Marco recognized as belonging to Captain Hendershot. “Does that sound like a Prince of Hell to you?”
Hendershot nodded. “It does. Aamon.”
Marco winced. From what he could recall, they were basically talking about fallen angels. Even worse, one of the more powerful of the fallen. “So you figure that this guy is possessed?”
“It’s the only way we know of that demons enter this world,” Rodgers said. “Aamon fits the bill.”
Marco sighed. “Well, that’s just great. Wonderful. Perfect. Though I’ve got a better suggestion for Mister Day. If we’re not too strict and literal, how about a demon whose name was originally demon of wrath.”
“Oh no, Marco,” Father Rodgers said from the front. “You’re not serious.”
“Who else would Mister Day be, but Asmodeus,” he said, pronouncing it As-mo-day-oose.
At which point, even Rory groaned. “Aw crap.”
Chapter 18: Start of a brand new Day
Merle had fallen asleep in his chair, though it wasn’t a big surprise, considering the month he had had. Technically, it was even worse considering how the last year had been going.
The pounding on the storefront had woken him up, and he could hear someone speaking softly, in hushed, calming tones.
Merle got out of the chair, and he felt his body creak along the way. I’m too damn young to be falling apart like this.
By the time he had gotten out of the office and to the front, the entire task force he had assembled to fight the vampires of San Francisco were inside and waiting. There was George, the human mountain, standing behind the blonde, Barbie-like Tiffany Whitman, and on the other side were Yana and Rory.
In the middle was Marco Catalano, and he looked annoyed. “We have a problem. What do you know about a creature that can heal so fast it almost looks like he was never touched?”
Merle blinked, trying to wake up. He glanced outside the front window, and wondered if it was still dark, or if the fog had just concealed the sun. He shook his head, sighed, and sat down behind the counter. “You’re not kidding, are you?” He rolled his deep blue eyes. “And I suppose you also want me to bring in my brother Dalf as well?”
Yana’s eyes flared. “You’re one of those Kraft brothers?”
Marco clamped down on the redhead’s shoulder. “Down, girl, this is a good Kraft brother; he doesn’t actually bite.”
Merle cocked his head. “There’s actually only one bad Kraft brother… though he seems to get all the press.” He stopped and pondered Dalf a moment. “Then again, I’m not even sure that he does bite… sigh… I don’t know a darn thing about this, so I’m not exactly the go-to person this time.”
Marco’s little smile increased a little. “I may know a guy.”
Marco walked to the door, opened it, poked his head out, and said, “Come on in, Father.”
Merle started at the sight of the newcomer. He was black, older, a little pudgy, with close-cropped hair and thick, coke-bottom classes. “Where’d you get the priest?”
“Everyone, meet my local priest, Monsignor William Rodgers,” Marco said. With a look at Merle, he continued, “He deals with these things on a regular basis, much like you, Mister Kraft.”
Merle merely arched a brow. “Right. So. What do we know about your bad guy?”
The priest and Marco exchanged a glance. The priest yielded the floor to Marco with a nod. The New Yorker shrugged, moved to the counter, then sat on top of it, making sure everyone could see him. “What we know thus far is that his name is simply Mister Day. That’s what he calls himself. As for what he is, well, there are various and sundry theories on what he really is. He heals really, really fast. Holy objects seem to slow him down, but we weren’t going to hang around for an extended period of time and test the theory. We almost lost someone just running away from him.”
