In practice, none of that means a lick to a vampire. I could go skinny dip in the baptismal pool at the back of the craziest, most fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone-preaching-est, full-immersion Southern Baptist church in the scariest little inbred corner of Creation you can conjure up. All I’ll get is a stern look from whoever sees me.
Unless the person who blessed it happens to be a little magical in her own right.
Jennifer told me one time they’re called extempore witches. Nobody knows why they happen but they’re basically witches who’ve never been trained and may not even know they’re working magic. I’m not convinced it’s magic, actually. I suspect these people are just lucky or something. Maybe they’re psychic or some shit and they use it to shape reality to their expectations. Of course, Jennifer told me that is a witch: someone who reshapes reality to align with their vision of it. Hell if I know. Apparently, if you can find an extempore who is also a recognized religious leader – a priest, a cleric, an imam, a monk, a rabbi, whatever – and get them to bless some water, voila, you’ve got something that will turn a vampire into slag with a splash.
Jennifer and Dan each had a liter of the stuff in giant water guns and, next to them, power windows. They opened fire the second their windows were down. The vampires about to yank open their doors didn’t stand a chance. Water splashed them in the face and their heads simply weren’t there anymore. Their bodies didn’t thump against the pavement because they exploded into wet dust before gravity could catch up to them.
Beth grabbed Marty by the shoulders, dragging him into the floor of the mini-van next to her, between the bench seats, as Jennifer and Dan each shouted a war cry and rolled out of the van in opposite directions. Sheila snapped out of her trance and slid into the driver’s seat. Ramon grabbed a third water gun from the floor by his feet, leaned over the back two rows and jabbed his finger into the hatch release so it popped open on hydraulic arms. Flying open, the hatch clocked the vampire holding up the back end of the van.
Stunned, she dropped the back bumper, the wheels hit the ground spinning, the tires shrieked and Sheila, foot on the gas, yelled, “Eat Detroit polypropylene, broccolis!”
Roderick sprang forward, his eyes suddenly sharpening and his focus seeming absolute. I spun up to super-speed and ran around behind Ross to grab his shoulders and hold him still so Roderick could do whatever it was he could do with a silver coin. I had no idea what Roderick was thinking, but I was one hundred percent on board.
There was a time when I felt a powerful attraction to Ross. That was before I knew the things elders did at his behest: the rituals knee-deep in blood, the deception, the betrayals, the way he took what people wanted and used it against them. There are plenty of ways that parallels what a vampire does to mortals and I’ll be the first one to cop to that, but the truth of the matter is that there is something, to me, honest in a vampire’s dealings with a human. We need food and we need it in a specific way and – importantly – we can get it without killing them and without leaving them traumatized if we choose to operate with something just a little bit like mercy when we hunt. That isn’t just different from what a demon does. That’s different from what McDonald’s does. Not a lot of hamburgers get made where the cow sleeps it off later.
Not all vampires try to operate with mercy, either, but one of the reasons we keep each other in arm’s reach – and one of the tasks I set myself as the boss of North Carolina – is to step in and act when a vampire has done evil too much or too often just for the sake of having fun.
Something about this demon, about the way demons act in general, about Roderick’s pet notion Ross might not even be a real thing but instead was something the elders dreamt up out of whole cloth: it all added up now to make me feel an overwhelming revulsion and hatred where I once felt a long-dead sense of longing. Maybe that was a part of why I hated him so much, if I’m really honest with myself. Maybe I was just furious at the way his original flirtatious attempts to distract me reminded me of how alone I was for decade after endless-and-unnoticed decade.
Maybe all I really wanted was to help murder the one and only guy who said he was into me since the night I gave up on ever having anyone be interested again.
I grabbed Ross’ upper arms with all the strength the blood would give me and Roderick brought his hand around in an open-faced slap at hyper-speed. The silver coin was in his palm and burned an ugly purple scrape across Ross’ silver-blue scaly skin. Roderick’s other hand came up and around to mirror it and moving as fast as I was – even faster than Roderick – I had time to read the date on the silver dollar: 1934. The second slap burned Ross’ skin just as badly as the first, the other way across his face. Roderick spun with the momentum, brought up both hands in front of him like some kind of kung fu master, and slapped his hands forward. The shirt Ross was wearing must have been a part of him, because the coins touched what looked like fabric in the middle of Ross’ chest and gouts of black smoke bubbled out from between Roderick’s hands.
Roderick’s eyes were open, his pupils tiny, his gaze as sharp as a scalpel. His fangs were bared and he was growling like a wild animal.
We were moving so fast Old Shoe didn’t even have time to turn around. He was able to see what was happening, but his eyes were wide with horror and he looked to be taking a breath to say something. I wished him luck: I wouldn’t understand a thing at these speeds.
Dog was still obeying Roderick’s order to remain still, but Smiles was – very slowly – leaping forward with his mouth open.
Roderick pulled his hands back and flipped the old coins between his fingers like an illusionist doing a close-up magic show: now you see them, now you don’t. They reappeared between Roderick’s fingers, jutting out edgewise between his digits like a couple of claws. He reared back to strike, ready to plunge them into Ross’ flesh, when the demon bellowed deep and long and low, a roar distended by our own time distortion and by the rage and pain he must have been experiencing. It sounded delicious to me, one of the best things I ever heard, as satisfying as the hot wet smack of blood against the back of my throat. A kind of satisfaction washed over me in guiltless, unrestricted, unmitigated waves. Trying to kill a demon – and especially with my cousin helping me – just felt right to me in a way I did not expect and also did not question.
The moment before Roderick could drive the coins into him, Ross disappeared in a puff of angry yellow smoke and a bright flash of cobalt blue light. I could feel the magic he used – or whatever – tear him apart and whisk him away, right out of my hands, like sand through a sieve.
Roderick and I, unable to stop our momentum, slammed into each other and tumbled to the ground like two of stooges. Under us, where Ross had stood, the sand was covered in sticky black tar – or something like it. It seemed to be the residue of whatever he did to get away.
I dropped back into normal speed as I landed sprawled in the sand and Old Shoe – with his generic, forgettable face and his youthful expression of something like naiveté despite being my town’s resident blackmailer – was shouting out. “What the hell are you doing,” he cried. “What the fuck is going on?”
Jennifer and Dan each tumbled in a barrel roll to come up standing. Dan was screaming something non-verbal, just a plain screech, but Jennifer gritted her teeth and came to her feet in silent and utterly grim determination. She and Dan were both pumping water out of their UltraSoak 5001 With Bonus Tank & Lighted Barrel water guns. Elder vampires – or their minions, or their spawn, or whoever – were pouring out of the darkness now. They looked some combination of amused and confused until a stream of water thirty feet long shot from Jennifer’s gun to one of the vampires. He looked like he was about 25 but he stood with a straight-backed, haughty regality modern sensibilities classify as being a one-percenter. Older eyes recognize it as nobility. He probably once had a title and land somewhere, and then he came to America to feast on its all-you-can-drink buffet of native and enslaved blood, and then history happened. Now he w
as just some asshole in a little beach town, polishing the knob on his plan to rule the world.
The next second, he was dust on the wind.
The vampires all blurred at once and instantly two of them were on Jennifer: one in front and one at the side.
She felt vampires’ bodies press to her and she let herself cry out once as something sharp grazed her skin. She always wondered if this – all this, the business of chasing vampires, of trying to understand how they worked, how the world worked, the secret mechanisms behind the world most people saw – was what would be the end of her. Now she was going to find out.
The first set of teeth sank into her flesh like burning, jagged knives. A vampire’s bite does not have to hurt but many of us take pleasure in causing pain and the elders who survived the rebellion of the 19th century were ones who especially savored the suffering of others. This one was not being kind. He was being especially cruel.
Blood shot out of Jennifer like it was under extreme pressure. Her heart was pounding, adrenaline flooding her system, and she saw red spurt once, twice, three times as the vampire tried to tear with her bite rather than necessarily drink. She was a middle-aged woman, or looked like one, and she was using her fangs as a weapon.
The one at her other side tried to bite into the skin at the base of Jennifer’s neck, through the high-collared workout fleece she was wearing, but under that fabric Jennifer had secreted what’s called a “twisting” balloon: the long, skinny kind used to make animals at the county fair. Jennifer filled this one with more of their special holy water, but not so full it kept its shape, and draped it around her neck under the fleece. The vampire’s teeth burst the balloon and that vampire – she never even saw what he looked like – exploded in a cloud of greasy ash.
Dan was being mobbed, too, but he was packing water balloons under his armpits. When they tried to hold him down to bite, those balloons burst, obliterating both of his attackers.
The one who’d managed to get her teeth into Jennifer finally clamped down, sucking at the wound like a giant, sloppy leech, confident she was in control of her prey and ready to savor the kill, but Jennifer got her water gun up against that vampire’s neck and squeezed the trigger.
An instant later, Jennifer was staggering, free, bleeding profusely but alive and unrestrained.
The van was screeching forward and one of the enemy vampires cried out as the front end plowed into him, knocking him airborne and, even as the vampire – apparently a kid of no greater than thirteen or fourteen, but Jennifer knew that meant nothing – flipped backwards through the air to land on his feet, the van surged as Sheila put the pedal down. The vampire-child landed in a crouch just in time for the van to hit him again, knocking him backwards and down, dragging him forward, pinned under the front axle. Sheila plowed it into a low wooden fence at one edge of the parking lot.
Wooden pickets drove through the vampire’s back and erupted from his chest, thick black blood welling out of gaping wounds. Ramon shot out the side door of the van to pump water into the vampire’s face.
More vampires were coming out of the woods, blurs of shadow leaping from the darkness. Jennifer wondered at first if this was a kidnapping but no, she realized, this was a hit squad. Running for the van, she yelled into her smart watch, “Fast forward!”
Reality rippled around her as the keyword set off a spell she kept in reserve. Time slowed for her as she spun up to super-speed.
The vampires were still faster.
“Politics,” Roderick said to Old Shoe. His eyes had unfocused a little again and I could feel him slipping free of the grasp of the here and now in the way one does when they sit by a patient in a hospice or a psych ward. Roderick’s presence in the moment wavered but he seemed more or less to home back in on our current coordinates in space and time. “Politics are what is happening.”
“How did you know silver would hurt him?” I was knocking sand out of my hair, my coat, off the knees of my pants.
“Because it hurts them in the most popular and widely read demon fiction in America,” Roderick said.
I made a little ‘o’ with my mouth. “Which… is…?”
“Dungeons and Dragons,” Roderick replied. He shrugged. “Ross is a product of the belief in him, and the rules by which he operates are the rules those beliefs set around him.”
I rolled my eyes and looked at Old Shoe. “Anyway: no, this is not politics.” I said. I shook my head at the ground where Ross had been before he disappeared, the place where we’d finally, for just a moment, held him down and made him suffer for the things he did to us: not for the things he did in general, not for being the thing he was, not for being bad as though we were some definition of good, but for the things he did to us in specific. “Revenge is what’s going on.” I looked at Old Shoe and nodded in Roderick’s direction. “There’s some politics, too, but I’m going to tell it to you straight, Old Shoe, and I always will: this is mostly about revenge. That thing lies. Always. Do not forget that. It tells people what they want to hear. It’s a demon with all the crazy shit that suggests. But to be honest, I just want to get revenge, plain and simple, for what it did to me, and for the lies it told some people who didn’t deserve to die.”
“A tulpa,” Roderick corrected, voice quiet and still a little dreamy. “I am still fairly sure demons do not exist as an independent type of entity.”
I waved that off. “Whatever it is, wherever you want to put its picture in the encyclopedia of the strange, some good people got hurt or got killed because of that son of a bitch. Ancient vampires have been using it for over a century to try to survive a rebellion against them.”
“Withrow…” Old Shoe sounded a mixture of uncertain, amused and frightened. “We’re vampires.” He bobbled his head as if to say duh. “We deceive. We use humans. Sometimes we kill them. We don’t care about people. We feed on them.”
“The hell we don’t care!” My voice rose all of a sudden and my teeth dropped down and I pointed a finger right in Old Shoe’s face. I caught myself suddenly. I saw in Old Shoe’s eyes just how sudden my rebuke had been, how out of character. I was the boss of all the vampires of North Carolina, with some fine print at the bottom of that assertion, sure, but I styled myself as the easy going kind. “Okay, so I’m the most hands-off boss this state has ever had. But I’m also the first one to give an actual fuck about the rest of us. Oh, sure, at first I was just the nice fat guy with a joke for every occasion, who didn’t really care what you did, but these last few years – since I got dragged into saving people who never knew the irony of having a vampire save the day – well, I don’t know, it’s all fiddled with the gears in my head in some way. Old Shoe – no, Brodie – don’t let yourself forget the importance of there being other people in the world. Don’t fall down the well of thinking you’re the only thing that matters in your whole damn world. That’s what makes them – the elders – go fucking crazy. That’s what makes them monsters. Working with other people reminded me it was possible to respect some of them. Eventually I realized I even liked them.”
Shit, I thought, I’m getting too soft.
I dove ahead while Old Shoe stared at me. “Once I liked them, some of them were taken away. That hurts. I didn’t know I could hurt like that, but it hurt me in my heart.” My eyes softened a little, just for a moment. “It hurt me in the place where I used to have a soul. Now I am just so ready to punish the people who did that. I want revenge for the twins who got turned into an all-you-can-drink buffet. I want revenge for children who got turned into a squad of murderbots. I want revenge for Ross manipulating my feelings in ways I didn’t even know could be done anymore.” My voice fell, and I said aloud what I’d been ashamed even to think before. “The way he made me feel excitement and lust, the simple flattery of feeling desired… that hurt, too. Part of why I said yes to Agatha was to escape a world that wouldn’t let me live as who I am, a gay guy in an era that only used “gay” to mean “merry.” I thought all those parts of me were
dead, but Ross brought it all right back like he flipped a switch in my brain – and then he used them against me.”
Old Shoe’s shoulders sagged and he blinked. “Dude.”
“More than anything,” I said, ignoring whatever he was about to say, “I want revenge for The Bull’s Eye. She was a hero – an honest to God super hero – and she went toe to toe with a real mad-cackles-and-stolen-costume super villain. She was willing to die for the people of her city. Sometimes, when you’re around genuinely good people, you can’t help but let a little bit of goodness rub off on you. I never told this to a single soul, Old Shoe, but being around the Bull’s Eye made me want, just a little bit, to be a hero.” I drew a long breath and it shook a little. “Killing zombies to save my neighbors just made me want to be forgotten. Avenging an old friend back home made me want to be powerful. Fighting beside the Bull’s Eye made me want to be admired. I want something new, now. The enemy knows I’m here and thinks it’s OK to use my heart against me, so now I want to end them, once and for all.”
Old Shoe stared at me with wide eyes and an almost blank expression. The only thing I could pick up from it was that he was horrified. I didn’t know by what: by me, by Ross, by this whole situation in which he found himself. He was mostly still just a kid like any other trying to find a way to fit in. Everything about him said he wanted to blend in or otherwise go unnoticed: when he healed his eternal injuries he looked indistinguishable from any other kid in an ad for a cheap beer and when he wore those injuries he had to live in the shadows.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 15
