“Well, lucky us, we’re already dead,” I replied. “You don’t need to breathe so you don’t need to swim. You just need to know how to walk.” With that I stepped forward and down a few inches. Cold, brackish water flooded my boots and made a horrible sucking sound. “Last one across is a rotten egg.”
Roderick stretched from toes to fingertips, head back, naked as fart, and laughed. “Oh, Cousin,” he said, “Do not issue such challenges. You know I love to win.” He winked, stepped backward twice, then ran forward and dove directly into the water with an impossibly far leap, the strength of a vampire letting him get well out over the water before he dropped lithely beneath the surface and vanished. Dog, without a care in the rest of the world, nor a second thought, stepped into the frigid water and began his slow, purposeful paddle across the Waterway with the strength of a hellhound. The plastic bag of clothes bobbed along beside him.
That gave me a thought, and I laughed to myself. Old Shoe – it felt so weird calling this cute but ultimately eminently forgettable college kid by that name, but I had no idea what his real name might be – looked at me oddly.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I said. “And everything. Watch this.” Smiles was sitting next to me and I squatted beside him. With a click of my cheeks, he dutifully climbed into my back and let me grab him by his legs. Hellhounds are sturdy animals. You don’t have to be as easy with them as you might a real dog. I turned away from the water, sprinted a few yards onto the golf green with Smiles on my back, and began to run in circles. Just like the time I’d taken Mary-Lou Reinholdt’s stupid-ass handgun away from her before she knew it, and the time I’d fought the Transylvanian in high speed, and the time I’d fought Dmitri to the finish before his revenant minions could leap into the room, I spun up the super-speed and really put some pepper on it. Faster and faster, my boots tore through the turf in a widening circle. The hedge fund managers were going to wonder who did donuts on their precious putting green.
“Jesus,” I heard Old Shoe say in ultra slow motion as I rocketed past him.
My feet just kissed the top of the water.
I laughed as I ran. That’s kind of exactly the idea, I thought to myself. In what might have been two blinks of a mortal’s eye, I crossed the river moving too fast to sink, running on the surface of the water itself. I glanced behind me as I went: I moved so fast I left boot prints.
I could see ripples in the depths from Roderick swimming along just below the surface. He had turned on the super-speed, too, so he flashed like a fish and the water frothed around him as though churned up in a motorboat’s wake. The idea suddenly occurred to me these were shark-infested waters – just like the sign warned us – the moment we stepped in. That made me laugh again. Some nights I really love being what I am.
I hit the opposite shore going hell for leather. Smiles leapt from my shoulders as soon as I let go of him and nimbly touched down on all fours. My own momentum drove me straight up the beach, plowing aside wet sand like a ship run aground. I smashed into a dune and it exploded apart, sand and shells and clumps of wispy little grasses flying in all directions like a grenade had gone off. I slid face-first a good twenty yards into the nature preserve, rolling head over heels and grunting and groaning with each bump and fumble. When I finally came to a rest I staggered to my feet, dizzy and spitting grit all around me. Smiles calmly sniffed the air from thirty feet away.
The world slammed back into regular time with something like a thunderclap and I trudged back down my own trail of destruction to the shore of the waterway. Roderick was standing there, having finished his high-speed swim with grace rather than my tomfoolery. He laughed when he saw me, his eyes twinkling. Dog appeared a couple of minutes later, plastic bag in his teeth, and Roderick began to dress.
“You skinny son of a bitch,” I said to him. “You ought to try out for the Olympics, swimming like that.”
“I have to say,” he replied with a smirk, “It was very enjoyable watching you impact the shore. It was like a meteorite strike – no, like a cannonball exploding in a pirate film.”
“I guess I didn’t think that entirely through,” I said. “I was just so intent on getting across, I didn’t think about the landing.”
Roderick’s hair was slick-wet and so was he, but with a rapid-motion blur he shook himself. He shimmied just like one of the hellhounds, but with the super-speed of a vampire, and in a blink he was dry.
“Now that…” I said. “That’s clever.” I held out my arms and did the same. Sand flew off in all directions.
Roderick wiped some from his face. “Well,” he said. “Thank you for the warning.”
I chuckled and chucked a thumb towards the water. “I wonder how Old Shoe is doing?”
We both turned to look for his progress, but he was underwater, doing it the hard way, and we couldn’t see him. To be honest, that was also the smart way from the perspective of not being seen by anyone else, but my desire to show off simply got the better of me.
I could see a silhouette out on the water, too: one that was not the giant, arcing bridge over the waterway between Sunset Beach and the mainland, nor was it the dunes and grasses of the nature reserve where we were coming ashore. It was a fishing boat, just some old guy in a little dinghy with a thermos of coffee, maybe a pint of bourbon, and a rod and reel. He probably wasn’t even trying to catch anything. I saw him leaned back with a longneck bottle held to his mouth and could hear what sounded like a transistor radio playing some old tunes.
This wasn’t the hedge fund manager with his golf foursome and a cocktail; this was some gone-native neo-local living the old-fashioned old man dream. A retiree in a retirement town listening to golden oldies on the waterway was about as classic Bullshit Americana as it got. I was a little worried he saw me run across the river or noticed Roderick’s meteoric swim, but then I heard him belch with satisfaction at the end of that beer, and he turned up the music: mission accomplished. He was probably a little toasted and didn’t notice a thing. Vampires make our bread and butter on mortals being lousy at seeing what’s right in front of them.
The oldster got a bite right about then and all of a sudden his attention was on trying to reel in whatever was on the hook. Whatever it was, it was big and strong and had plenty of fight.
For a moment it looked like he was winning as the reel suddenly started turning and he leaned backwards as he brought up his catch. At the last second, just as the fisherman was making some cackle of victory, I caught a flash of white emerge from the water. It wasn’t a fish: it was a hand with a coral bracelet around the wrist. It grabbed the guy by the wrist, yanked with the unnatural strength of a vampire, and pulled the guy into the water so fast he only got out the very first spear tip syllable of what he meant to be an ear-splitting scream.
The water foamed and thrashed for a few seconds while Old Shoe got his teeth in the guy, both of them under the surface, but then it went still.
Old Shoe beat the fisherman at his own game, I guessed.
Eventually I heard a sloshing noise and the guy’s corpse floated on the surface. Old Shoe knew to lick the wound clean so it wouldn’t show. Now there wouldn’t be an inconvenient mystery: there would just be a guy who got drunk, fell overboard and drowned. Hell, if there really were sharks around, the blood would probably lead them right to the body and disguise any sign of the unusual. It was a tidy, open and shut case, just the way we like to leave them.
It was also one of Marty’s various tangential categories of data: shark attacks in places or at times other than expected. I wondered if anyone would notice it.
Looking up at the massive arch of the bridge spanning the Intercoastal Waterway, only the blinking red lights along its edge winked back. If anyone noticed, they weren’t standing out here right now.
Jennifer and her gang – that’s what I think of the technopagans as being, a kind of gang with a very special set of circumstances surrounding them, because they do it partly for prestige a
nd partly for profit and some of it sounds pretty illegal, and sometimes they have scuffles over turf – were sitting in the van in the parking lot of that coffee shop that was closed down for the off-season.
Ramon was in the passenger seat. In his lap was a tablet he used to track the movements of Xi 2.0. The drone was navigating over the island from north to south and east to west in a complex grid pattern. On the tablet, Ramon could view the camera feed, monitoring the ground and the many rooftop decks and backyard boat docks of the houses on the tiny island.
On Sheila’s computer, the drone’s movements were drawing a pattern on a map overlay of the island. She could see the drone’s path unfold superimposed over the island, not the drone or its feed itself. Like a long stroke being drawn in the absence of a pen, Sheila’s map began to reveal a complex geometric pattern I would later hear described as “a kind of cross between a fractal and a sigil.”
“You guys are doing magic,” Marty asked it of Sheila after a very long time of considering whether or not to speak. He and Beth were seated in the back, watching the others work in silence. “Right? What’s the point of that design?”
Jennifer was the one who answered. “She can’t answer because she’s meditating to maintain the focus of the spell.” Her eyes met Marty’s in the rear view mirror. He shrank a little but she kept talking. “The spell expands our ability to surveil small pieces of the island into a persistent magical presence over its entirety. When we look at the pattern as a whole, we know also – due to the nature of a fractal – that we can then look on any part of it and find it as valid as the whole. That’s how fractals work: any suitably chosen part is similar to a larger or smaller component of the overall shape when enlarged or reduced in size.”
“It’s a magical microscope,” Marty said. “You can zoom in or out wherever you want.”
“Exactly,” Jennifer said. “In this case we’re specifically tracking supernatural presences on the island.” After a pause, she went on. “So you’re good with numbers?”
“’Surveil’ is a mutant word,” Beth said, staring out the window at the darkness and the water. “It was created in reverse by dropping the end from the pre-existing word ‘surveillance.’ It’s debatable whether or not it’s a real word in English.” Her tone was flat and steady.
Marty nodded, still looking Jennifer in the eye in the rear view mirror. “It’s like a fractal word-origin. ‘Surveillance’ was a valid word, so a smaller portion of that word is also valid.”
Jennifer was quiet for a moment. “Okay. I see where you’re going there.” She ignored when Ramon mouthed the words so crazy to himself. “So, what sort of data do you work with?”
“I like to think of myself as more of a computer geek than a numbers geek. It just turns out computers are really good at math. What’s the third computer doing?” He pointed at Dan. “What is his part of the ritual?”
“I’m mapping the course of the car and the hydraulic lift and anything else we’ve done to drive around the island for the last, say, 72 hours,” Dan said. Marty leaned forward and peeked over his shoulder while Dan spoke. “If we lace together the patterns derived from Xi and from our own movement on the grounds, we create a magical synergy: two images generated with the same intent but using different means. Our ground-level view and the flying perspective of Xi complement one another. They reinforce our ability to study the island from either perspective by intertwining the output of each.”
“As above, so below,” Marty said. He blinked at Jennifer’s reflection.
“Yes,” Jennifer said. She smiled a little. “At least, that’s what they tell me.”
“Aren’t you a ritual magician?” Marty sounded confused for a moment.
“Only sort of,” Jennifer said with a little shrug. “Originally I was just a computer geek like you. It turns out computers are really good at magic, too, because maybe magic is just fancy math, and I needed magic to keep up with everything going on. It’s not that simple, though. Magic seems to work when you really need it, and it’s like it knows. It’s like there’s something behind it: a force, maybe an intelligence, and it’s listening to see whether it thinks you really believe. It turns out I’m also pretty good at that part. I’m good at spontaneous stuff. I just don’t have a ton of training.” She looked as though she might keep going, but she and the other technopagans all drew in their breath.
“Did you feel that?” Ramon asked.
“Yeah,” Dan said.
“Jennifer,” Beth asked. “Do you believe in devils?”
“We’re not Satanists,” Jennifer said with something of a sigh.
“How are you in charge if you aren’t trained as a witch?” Marty looked slightly worried about that, as though it weren’t natural.
“I didn’t ask if you are Satanists,” Beth said.
“I’ve been initiated, but I’m more techno than pagan,” Jennifer replied, stepping on Beth’s statement.
“They know we’re here,” Sheila announced. She didn’t open her eyes, but her voice carried the urgency of someone who’s just heard the boss’ footsteps in the hall. “They know Xi is there.”
“They have magic, too,” Beth murmured. “They have magic from a devil they created. That’s what Seth told me. Seth told me all about them. All about the thing they created so they could worship it.” Her eyes slid off the endless burble and flow of the Waterway, just barely visible from the coffee shop’s lot. Her gaze fell on the back of the seat behind her, or a speck of dust in front of it. “They have magic they sacrificed their own kind to get. The thing they worship is like a demon but it isn’t from Hell. Seth told me they made it themselves so they would have someone on whom to blame their failures. He said they always knew they would lose. Seth thinks most of them are just hoping to stick around long enough to watch the others die first. They’re like castaways on a desert island who find the last coconut and look at one another with hunger in their eyes. At best, the victor will live longer than the loser by a meal or two.”
Everyone was quiet for a very long time. “Tell me about this magic they’ve got,” Jennifer said.
“I don’t believe in magic,” Beth said. “I think Seth was just being funny.” She smiled and leaned forward in her seat to speak to the back of the others’ heads. “I think he just said it to make me laugh.”
Jennifer chewed her lip but didn’t say anything to her. Instead, to Ramon: “What’s their status? Is Xi seeing movement?”
Ramon leaned close to the tablet, hunched over it like a jeweler at his task. “There are… yeah, there are targets in the street. They’re looking up at Xi. So, like Sheila said, they’ve seen him. And…” He made a noise in the back of his throat. “There are a lot of them, and they’re waving at us.”
A couple of minutes later, Old Shoe trudged up onto the sand. Brackish water streamed from every corner and hem he had. His phone and wallet were in a sandwich bag but the kid’s clothes were drenched. He looked at us and said, “Where did you learn to do that?” He sounded offended, almost, like it was yet another unfairness heaped upon him. To be fair, if I woke up looking like he did every night, I’d probably resent some shit, too.
Roderick smirked at him.
I just shrugged. “What, haven’t you learned to move fast? That was one of the first things I realized about myself,” I said. I chucked a thumb behind me, in the direction of the ocean, across the width of the island. “I see lights in the distance. We need to get moving.”
“What are we here to see, anyway?” Old Shoe still sounded sulky.
“I think the vampires in this place and a few humans from a local historical society are all looking for the same thing. Or maybe the vampires are trying to protect it and the humans are trying to find it. I want to see what they’re looking for, because I think it’s the Rhinemaiden.”
Old Shoe opened both eyes wide. “Wait, you think some folks from the local tourism board are out here going toe to toe with the ancient vampires you think are trying to
wipe us all out? That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t the old guys just bump ‘em all off in a night?” There was a panicky edge to Old Shoe’s voice that surprised me. Maybe the kid hadn’t seen much action, sure, but we’re all vampires. Not a one of us is a stranger to violence.
I shrugged. “Because people would notice. Because one of the people in the historical society – at least one, maybe more – used to be a thrall and now he hunts our kind. I think he escaped from one of the ancients and wants to find the Rhinemaiden so he can use her instead: to put a hurt on his old masters.”
Roderick was just finishing tugging on his shoes. “Cousin,” he said, in a much more measured tone than Old Shoe, “This would explain some things about our interactions with the deputy. I do not understand how you have arrived at some of these conclusions, however.” He smiled a little, looking back at me.
I grinned a little. I couldn’t help savoring knowing something Roderick didn’t. “I have my methods,” I replied, hands spread. “But also because I went and knocked on Deputy Crew Cut’s hotel room door. The guy is larded up in magic like you wouldn’t fucking believe. It reminded me of the shit we saw in that garage, except this time all the blood was still running around in the veins of a bunch of living animals. He’s got one of the same maps of the island, too. I think they’ve both…” I struggled with the terminology. I’m a supernatural creature, sure, but I’m no mystic. “I think they divined the location of something, and we all only know one thing they’d be out here trying to hide or find. So, two plus two…”
Old Shoe didn’t like it one bit. “And we’re just going to walk up to them and ask what they’re doing? How do we even know the people out there where those lights are…” He looked over my shoulder suddenly and shivered. Funny, since vampires don’t really get cold. “How do we know they’re these blood bags? How do we know they aren’t, like, a few elders standing guard?”
“What, you worried they’ll catch you?” Sometimes I have little patience for a vampire who won’t get his hands dirty. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t run.”
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 13
