Roderick and I went back to Cacciatore after that, to keep an eye on it, but nobody ever showed. Eventually we got a text from Jennifer that the technopagans were back from the errand of dealing with Xi’s corpse and would be ready to debrief the next night. Roderick and I drove back to the motel an hour before sunrise, with Smiles and Dog piled in the back behind us, T-tops open, the early morning wind in our immortal hair.
4
“Wait, OK, record scratch,” Jennifer said to us. It was a couple of hours after sunset the next night. We were standing in the parking lot of a tiny coffee house that looked like it was closed for the season. “Café du Mar” was nestled in the shadow of the giant bridge connecting Sunset Beach to the rest of the world, on the mainland side, and we were standing between our cars talking in the dark. “You saw a ghost?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why?”
Jennifer gave me the sort of look smart people give the very stupid. “You’re not even a little curious to investigate it?”
I shrugged at her. “I mean… it’s a ghost. What do you want? To ask it if it’s seen any vampires?”
Jennifer knit her eyebrows together. “Yes. Exactly that.”
I waved the idea off entirely. “Ghosts are hard to pin down. Late night television is full of people failing to get ghosts to cooperate with them. I’m here to find the distinctly corporeal dead, not to get jerked around by lost spirits wandering the same staircase for eternity.”
Jennifer’s look didn’t change. “You’ve got a crew of magic users who are also a paranormal investigations team. We can make a ghost talk to us, and ghosts see everything.”
I started to say something – so far all you’ve done is make a ghost out of Xi and kill the vampire I wanted to “interview” – but I bit it back. That wasn’t the place to take this. Not right now. “Then feel free to pursue it,” I said. “But the vampiric concern here is vampires.” After a second I said, “Wait, y’all are a paranormal investigations team? Like the ones on TV?”
Jennifer tried not to smile. “Well, you know, a coven’s got to make a living somehow. I used to be in one a lot more like the ones on TV. It turns out they weren’t very good at finding the supernatural. These guys are way better.”
“Huh,” I said. “And you, what, sell your services? Lone Pine Bed & Breakfast calls and says their guests are getting scared out of room 13 every Friday and they want you to find out why?”
Jennifer did not favor me with an answer. Instead, she looked at Roderick for a moment, then back at me. “Right. Vampires. And what’s your plan for dealing with that?”
I let the paranormal investigations thing go. I realized I’d been a dick, but it’s hard not to be sometimes. I’m not always the most socially skilled guy in the fight club. “That’s… Roderick’s department.” I scratched my goatee and looked at him.
Roderick flirted with the idea of merely smiling but instead caved and gave her a great big shit-eating grin. “We do not have a complete plan. That is a part of the plan. We are going to initiate a few moves, see what they do, and react on the fly. That is our great strength. The elders are all consumed with convoluted plans within plans. We do not have that kind of time or perspective. We are young, though, and we have adaptability. They have demonstrated amply they do not. So, let us sow chaos among them. Let us behave unpredictably and cause them to reveal themselves through reaction. I would say we are already off to a decent start, but we could do more.”
Jennifer blinked at him. “Your plan is…” I thought Jennifer was going to say something demeaning but she smiled instead. “Agile programming?”
Roderick’s smile didn’t move but the light went out in his eyes. “Sure,” he finally said.
“Ha!” I smirked. “Mister Modern Era doesn’t know what agile programming is, does he?”
Roderick swiveled his eyes like the sails of a ship: great and wide and slowly as though worked by many hands. “And you do, Cousin?”
“Shit no,” I said, still smirking, “But nobody would expect me to. You’re the one who’s all Mister Here & Now.” I clapped my hands together. “It’s just satisfying not to hear you explain something for once.”
Roderick gave me a cool smile under heavy-lidded eyes that said I would pay for this later in some unexpected way. The ties that bind, indeed.
Jennifer considered. “Tell me what my team’s goal would be.”
“Is that how this…” Roderick’s lips squirmed for a moment. “Agile programming, you called it? Is that how this agile programming works?”
Jennifer shrugged. “More or less. Set a goal, a team gets to coding, problems and opportunities present themselves, collaborations arise as needed and the whole team moves the product forward in an organic fashion.”
“Organic,” Roderick said. He smacked his lips a little. “’Derived from life.’ Yes. Organic.” Something in that amused him terribly. “Your team’s goal is to create some containable but unmistakable chaos. The violence we have thus far dispensed did not elicit an official response. I suggest we undertake an operation that cannot help but draw official notice. I wish to measure the degree to which mortal authorities do or do not extend special consideration to the ancient vampires hiding here.”
Jennifer looked thoughtful for a moment and crossed her arms, leaning back against the small SUV Dan had been driving earlier, the one into which they loaded Xi’s corpse. I didn’t know where the rest of the technopagans were at the moment. It was just the three of us out there. “So you think they’re running the town?”
Roderick shook his head. “No, I do not know whether they are running the town. There are a limited number of ways available to find out. This is one. It will be important for us to know. Their degree of control or lack thereof is one of the boundaries on the game board. We must know the limits of force we may deploy.”
“But,” I said, holding up a finger, “We don’t want it to be obvious we’re the ones behind it. That’s part of the confusion factor. They know I’m here, I’m sure. They know we’re looking for them. I want them to have some reason to doubt we are the ones doing what you’re doing, though. I want to leave some room in their wicked imaginations for whatever crazy-ass theories they might come up with about it not being vampires this time. Let their paranoia do some of our work for us.”
“Some sort of hit, but not obviously vampires.” Jennifer nodded. “OK. I’m open to suggestion. No unconditional pledge to participate, though.”
I smiled at her. “That’s just what I told him you’d say. Hell, that’s what I said myself.”
“That is why it is your team’s task,” Roderick said. “I leave it to you to determine your own willingness to act, and the degree to which you are willing. I am proposing an alliance, not issuing you orders. You are free to be as creative as you are comfortable being – within the bounds we have asked of you.”
Jennifer thought about it and nodded. “OK. I can live with that. What’s off-limits other than making it seem like vampires are doing it?”
“I may be in a fight with these assholes,” I said, “But I’m not ready for everyone to know there’s a vampire turf war happening in Happy-Time Vacation Village. So, don’t do anything that directly engages their… vampireness. No running around with wreathes of garlic around your necks and a tee shirt that reads, I dunno, hashtag-team-living. You know. Discretion.” I touched my index finger to the side of my nose and nodded.
Roderick raised his eyebrows a little.
Jennifer looked between us. “I think we can somehow avoid declaring ourselves to be vampire hunters, sure. Now what’s the long-term goal?”
“My plan takes a three-pronged approach: we will make the enemy nervous by testing their holdings; we will cause them to break cover so we may directly engage them; and we will force them to deploy the Rhinemaiden before it can be used to produce maximum harm.” That was exactly the phrase he used when he described it to me the first time as we sat in my car: maximum harm. Roderick’s face was
deadly serious and still when he said it and – even knowing him as well as I did, for all that was worth, and as suspicious as I was of his predilections – I had to pause a moment and wonder if his participation in the fight against the elder vampires was purely self-serving. It sounded to me like there was a grain of compassion – or even guilt – inside him somewhere: a sense of responsibility for the mortal masses who would surely suffer in any scenario in which ancient vampires released their supernatural nuke on the world just to get at him and me.
Jennifer let the gears spin for a second. “I’m in,” she said. “It’ll be a good chance to test out Xi 2.0 anyway.”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “Let me call in the others.”
Five minutes later, they pulled up in a mini-van being driven by the woman named Sheila.
Jennifer and the technopagans gathered in a circle in the empty lot. They ringed up around one of those toy helicopter things, a remote-controlled drone like you see on the Internet, made of lots of little rotors and with a bunch of stuff taped to it with glossy black electrical tape. Roderick called it a “quadcopter” which seemed to me like too stupid to be a real name.
Jennifer and the others turned their backs to Roderick and me, clasped hands around the drone, and hummed in unison, then harmony, and then unison again.
“Navigator!” Jennifer’s voice was clear as a bell in the thick seaboard air. “Are the winds favorable?”
“They are,” answered Ramon.
“Power management,” Jennifer said to Sheila, “Release our brother that he may move again in the world of the living.”
Sheila reached down and unplugged what looked like an electrical power supply from the side of the drone, flipping switches. The drone lit up, powering on, and a couple of glinting LEDs blinked into being. No one seemed to be controlling it but the drone whirred, its blades spinning in the abstract butterfly described by their plastic outer rings, and the thing lifted off to hover about four feet off the ground. It was bigger than some of the little ones, and seemed to have more heft to it, more power: it was able to stay still even in the constant wind of the coast.
Jennifer regarded it for a few seconds and then said, gently, “Xi? Do you hear us?”
A single red LED blinked on, then off again, then repeated a few times. Something itched at the back of my brain and then I realized – the memory rushing at me from a boyhood ended many decades ago – it was Morse Code. I had no idea what the drone said, but my guess was it was good: Jennifer let out a long breath.
“Can you see?”
The light blinked what looked – to me, anyway – to be the same pattern.
“How many of us are there? Switch to simple mode.” Jennifer waved her hand, apparently tired of having to read Morse Code on the fly.
The light blinked six times – Sheila, Ramon, Dan, Jennifer, Roderick and me.
Dan whooped with excitement. Sheila and Ramon gave each other a high-five. I looked over at Roderick and said, “No way.”
Roderick looked just as stunned as I felt but plunged ahead in an apparent inability to respond to what we appeared to have witnessed. “In the meantime,” he said, “Cousin Withrow and I will be engaging with the locals.” He smiled at all of us, stared at Xi 2.0 for a moment, and looked back at me. “I have a meeting with a client.”
“A… client?” I hesitated even to ask. As far as I knew, Roderick was like a lot of us: wealthy enough to make it on residual income. It can be tough to find enough work to get by the first few decades after you get turned. Back in Asheville, for instance, I knew a vampire named Marty Macintosh who was scraping by in a small apartment doing medical transcription all night long. That was part of why we usually targeted people with enough wealth to make it without a day job.
“A client.” Roderick nodded.
I looked at the remote control copter, still hovering in the air, and back at Roderick. “No way.”
“Okay,” I said to Roderick an hour later as we stood on the front steps of a beach house, waiting for a real estate agent to arrive. It was a jaunty yellow on the outside and had a sign with a cartoon mouse on it. Underneath it read THE HOUSEKETEERS. Smiles was by my side. Dog was sniffing around the bottom of the steps and the trash bin. “First of all, what the shit is up with that quadcopter. Second, tell me what my part in all this is. I can’t imagine you’ve not thought of something special for me to do.”
“I have no idea about the quadcopter,” Roderick said. “It appears they have digitized Xi’s personality and a decision-making matrix and loaded them into it after adding supplemental sensing software, such as an audio microphone.” He paused, looked away for a moment, and looked back at me. “Ghosts. Ghosts made flesh. No, not flesh. Ghosts made into tools.”
I waited. Roderick can be like that sometimes.
After a few seconds he blinked and looked back at me. “We must ask Sarah and her Greensboro cohort of vampires to maintain the appearance of vampiric activity in Raleigh,” Roderick said to me. He looked me right in the face so I would know he was not kidding. “It is integral to phase one of the plan.”
“No,” I said. I was the boss of all the vampires in the state but Sarah was the boss of one town in it. OK, maybe two or three towns, but they were clustered together and I didn’t much care about them anyway. She helped me get rid of the last boss, Bob the Third, and that had been our deal: she could have some turf of her own and I’d do my best to stay out of it. We weren’t unfriendly, but not a lot of vampires are exactly friends, either. We kept in touch. Occasionally I went to see her and her crew. They were nice enough folks, but. “I’m not going to let another vampire move into my most…” I struggled. “Into my most personal territory and maintain it for me as a favor.” Roderick – having done just that in Asheville at my request a couple or three years before – started to open his mouth but I put up a hand to silence him. “Your situation is different. You’re there on my behalf and that isn’t so much ‘home’ anymore. You’re an extension of my…” I hesitated to say it. I hate having to talk out loud about being in charge. I hate the way it reminds me of The Bobs and what self-important pricks they were. Every last one of the Bobs was like that: everybody’s pal when they needed something and then wondering what the fuck you were doing scuffing their carpet the second they had whatever it was. I didn’t want to get into the habit of asking favors of Sarah and I knew my personal predilection would be to dismiss her when it was done – just plain get her the fuck out of my sight – before she could call one in of her own.
“Your authority,” Roderick said. He smiled a little. “You can say it, you know.”
I chewed my own distaste for a moment and shrugged. “Happily I didn’t have to.”
“So,” Roderick waved it away. “You do not want to ask Sarah to mind the shop on your behalf because she might get too comfortable or be too eager to assert a favor owed or to expect to be treated as a peer rather than a vassal.”
I worked my jaw again. The word “vassal” was particularly unpleasant to me. “I wouldn’t say it exactly like that.”
Roderick smiled more broadly this time. “I have already assumed you would say as much. Instead, we will engage two of her underlings on our behalf without her knowledge or permission. If it is discovered, you will appear to have subverted her rather than to have relied upon her. Being seen to make a move into her territory will, I assume, be an easier pill to swallow than to be seen as inviting her into your own. Two of her minions are interested. We have met socially.”
I blinked. “You’ve already negotiated this with her crew? And they’re willing to betray her?”
Roderick shrugged a little. “It is not a betrayal. It is side work. Negotiating from a cold start would be woefully inefficient. You needed agents in place. I did not know how you would need to use them but I had a strong intuition it would come to pass.” Yeah right, I thought to myself as he spoke. “One does not open the box anew and complete
the puzzle within the same moment. In the worst-case scenario we would never use them and I would quietly pay them a reduced rate to compensate them for their time and attention. Were we to find extra hands useful to us, they would already be available. I could find few reasons not to make the deal.”
I arched an eyebrow, unclasped my hands and held them apart for a moment. “OK.” I sighed. “And what is everyone else going to be doing?” Here I meant the other vampires of Raleigh. North Carolina is a few urban areas amidst vast swaths of rural land and small towns. There weren’t many good places for a vampire to live. It was easy to know everyone by name.
“All other vampires in Raleigh – save one – will be relocated here for a period of anywhere from a few nights to a few weeks. Marty Macintosh will also be relocated to Sunset Beach for a small period of time.”
I must have widened my eyes or something else to show my surprise because Roderick smiled just a little and nodded.
“I know,” he said, “It will be a challenge for him, but it will also be beneficial. He must overcome his agoraphobia if he is to survive the coming changes in society.”
I put up one finger. “Okay,” I said, “We’re bookmarking that one, too – ‘the coming changes in society’ – because I want to come back to that topic and hear just what the fuck that is supposed to mean. Just not right this second.”
Roderick’s eyes twitched for a moment, looking elsewhere, as though he were recording that on the wax tablet of his memory using his eyes as the stylus. It occurred to me that was probably precisely what he was doing. “Yes,” he said. “I will not forget your desire to discuss that further.”
“Just to check,” I said, not yet letting him pick back up just yet, “Are we talking vampire society or human society? With the, uh, ‘coming changes,’ I mean.”
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 6
