And here we were, dragging him headlong into a fight where the whole point was to be seen, to make an impression, to be remembered.
Roderick turned to me and said, his eyes still a little unfocused, “What is that thing you want right now? What do you want in this moment? Not in terms of goals, cousin, but in terms of feeling?”
Without hesitating I said, “I want to be feared.” I blinked at him, pausing a moment. “I want to destroy their secret weapon and destroy Ross and put them right back where they were a century ago: hunted, outnumbered, with nothing to do but turn on one another. I want them to know I took away their pretense of having a fighting chance. I want to be the shadow on their doorstep. I want to take away their hope.”
“Then we must find the Rhinemaiden,” Roderick said, “And destroy her before she is used against us.” The wind kicked up then, and whistled across the dunes like the sound of a knife across flesh.
“So let’s go look and see if she’s over there,” I said. I chucked a thumb in the direction we originally were to go. “The sooner we look, the sooner we know.”
Roderick straightened his shirt. “And Jennifer and the others?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think they’re actually in danger,” I said. “I think anything Ross says, we should assume the opposite.”
The van backed away from the spot where Sheila drove the ex-vampire into the fence. Its tires spun on wet, sandy gravel, and as the wheels turned sharply to the right, Sheila let off the gas, whipping it around. Jennifer heard the car’s transmission howl as it popped from R to N. The engine roared as Sheila put the pedal down with the car still in neutral, then yanked the shifter into D. Gravel pelted everything in a thirty foot arc, Jennifer included, as Sheila hit the high beams at the end of her perfectly-executed J-turn.
The high beams were sun lamps.
Where the holy water made vampires explode in wet dust, sunlight merely made them explode. Three were running for the front of the car when light siphoned directly from the literal other side of the world struck them full on. No one even saw what happened to them: they simply went off like bombs.
The front of the minivan flew off the ground from the force of the explosions, like Jennifer imagined happens to Humvees driving over IEDs in the various horrible places the United States likes to invade. There were screams from inside the van and screams from the shadows. Apparently vampires didn’t like watching sunlight happen to other vampires.
Jennifer was up and moving before the van came back down. Moving faster than any vampire would expect of any mortal, she plunged ahead into the shadows sharply contrasted by the beams of sunlight. “Cat’s eye,” she said aloud, and with a blink she could see in the dark. It hurt, though: magic always has a cost, and the on-the-fly stuff like this usually took its fee in pain. Best-case scenario, Jennifer would have a hell of a hangover the next day. Worst-case, she would be blind for a week.
There were five more vampires standing there, dropping out of super-speed to gape at what just happened. Jennifer hit one with the water gun, then a second.
Dan, slow as molasses, came running, screaming, around the front of the van, right into the chaos. With a ridiculously slow barrel roll Dan cut across the lines of attack between the remaining vampires and the van and came up standing in the light. Yes, Jennifer thought, Always thinking! With a shrill war cry, slowed hilariously by their different paces, Dan reached under his shirt and pulled out a giant silver medallion. It was the reward he’d gotten for running a race somewhere, and the light from the sunlamps played across it and out over the parking lot in wide, shimmering, disco-ball rays. They shot through the dust and smoke of the impromptu battle. Jennifer tried to shout – the explosions would surely kill him – but Dan would never understand her.
The three vampires screamed, but none of them exploded where the light touched them.
Jennifer seized the moment and shot one with holy water. The other two snarled and roared, but they were on the other side of the high beams and couldn’t step through. With a blur, they were gone. Jennifer realized she was moving just fast enough to see them: they were simply running around the back of the van. One came at her and took a hit of holy water in the face. The other stopped at the back of the minivan and ripped the hatch right off of it, then came running at her holding it up like a shield – or a weapon.
Jennifer squeezed the trigger on her water gun, but it was empty. There wasn’t much to begin with and she used it all up. Jennifer could feel her super-speed starting to slip, too, and the minivan was pointed the wrong way – possibly entirely out of commission – for the high beams to hit the vampire.
Dan was just now starting to realize the vampires did not explode. Looking around, he saw the remaining one running towards Jennifer with the giant sheet of metal from the back of the car. Dan lunged forward, and Jennifer realized if they were going to make it through this they were just going to have to fight the vampire the old fashioned way.
Roderick’s eyes went unfocused and he turned away from me to look back, towards the mainland, and he shook his head. “I believe Jennifer is in danger,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“Dan and I…” he said. He blinked again, slowly, still looking that direction. “We are linked.”
I rolled my eyes. “I thought you said you wouldn’t describe what you did as ‘dating.’”
“I asked him to alert me were he ever in serious danger,” Roderick said. His voice had gone dreamy again. “It… seemed the romantic thing to do at the time.”
“Great,” I grumbled. “Just fucking great.” I pointed at the lights on the horizon, on the other shore of the island. “Listen, Ross is making shit up. It’s what he does.”
Roderick waved a hand. “Cousin, it is important. Go. See if the Rhinemaiden is there.” He still looked the other direction, though. “But I…” He hesitated. Roderick, my cousin who isn’t always exactly here, I admit, but who is at least always sure of what he’s going to do, and of himself, seemed uncertain. He took one step back towards the Waterway, and towards the mainland beyond, where we knew the technopagans were conducting whatever reconnaissance mission they cooked up. With agonizing slowness he took another. Then another, but his steps were slow and trudging. I wasn’t sure whether Roderick was fighting the urge to go or the urge to stay.
“And you go…” I sighed long and loud. “Check on your boyfriend.” I put a little hoodoo behind it. It was freaking me out to see Roderick not sure what to do. Roderick moved more freely and, fresh clothes and all, dived into the water to swim away. Dog dove in right behind him.
“Shit like this,” I said to Old Shoe, “Is why I don’t date.”
The vampire was slowing down, too. In fact, he stopped running and slowed to a stroll, minivan hatch held aloft in one hand. “Mortals,” he said, the way you might say “maggots,” or “Uncle Bob.” The loathing in his voice was a living thing, with a history and a heft to it. It was its own undertone, a distinct harmonic. He wanted to make sure Jennifer and Dan could understand him.
Jennifer noted the driver’s door of the van popping open as Sheila got out. Ramon, slow the whole time, came jogging around the end of the minivan.
“Magic users!” The vampire was dressed like a suburban dad: khakis, a golf shirt, but both were dated. He looked like the men’s casual wear section of a JC Penney catalog from 1964. “Do you think your petty mumblings can really stand up to the full might of the vampires of old?”
“You’re dressed pretty ‘now’ for somebody talking a lot of shit,” Jennifer said. She ducked into the other of the high beams, putting Dan and her out of the vampire’s reach. He had that door, though, and he could use it from a distance. All he needed was decent aim.
“Why didn’t the reflected high beams work?” Dan sounded a little panicked.
The vampire snickered at him. “So clever, and so stupid. Typical.” He pointed up: the moon was overhead. “Reflected sunlight means nothing, boy, or the moon
would be as deadly as the sun.” With a flick of the wrist he threw the door, but Dan dodged it – and fell out of the beam of light.
The vampire’s fangs shot out and he started to crouch to make a leap over the beam to get to Dan.
“ROUNDABOUT,” Sheila shouted, and Ramon and Dan both shouted guttural screams. Jennifer joined in, and so did Sheila. Jennifer could feel the magic pulling at her, pulling something out of her. Sheila wasn’t just focusing her will to execute a spell. She was pulling power from all of them there, pulling energy, and it hurt. As they screamed the light from the headlights bent. Impossibly, defying all the laws of nature – but then, that’s what a witch does – the beam of light arced around in a circle like a bendy-straw in a milkshake. The light struck the vampire and he, like the others, erupted in light and fire, a bundle of ancient death exploding in the light of the life-giving sun.
Thirty seconds later, Jennifer came back to consciousness. She was lying fifteen feet away, on her back. Her face was wet, and she could smell blood. The van was a wreck. The lights had been turned off, or had burned out – sunlamps didn’t last very long. Sheila was staggering to her feet. Marty Macintosh seemed to be helping Dan to stand.
Before Jennifer opened her eyes she realized someone was very close: perhaps right over her. She fluttered her eyes open and found Beth crouched there, sniffing. With a motion like a snake, or like a frog catching a fly, Beth’s tongue shot out and ran up the side of Jennifer’s face. Glistening with blood, it shot back into the vampire’s mouth. Jennifer gasped, then held her breath.
Beth did it again.
Jennifer made a small sound, something between a squeal and a whimper.
“Oh,” Beth said, looking her in the eye at last, “Are you awake?” Her mouth opened, but Jennifer scrabbled back across the gravel.
“Don’t,” Jennifer said. Then she grabbed her forehead and cried out in pain. The magic – there had been so much magic. The others warned her against this when they started to teach her, when she became the executive they so desperately needed, but she always chalked that up to the timidity she was constantly trying to work out of them. Her head hurt just thinking about all that energy they used. This wasn’t the next-day hangover she figured she would get. This was her body and her mind reacting to all the magic she used like a liver reacts to alcohol poisoning. She was going to be down for the count for a nice long while. Magic always has a price.
Beth blinked at her, all innocence. “Was that impolite?”
“Did you call them ‘broccolis’?” Dan said aloud to Sheila, though he was still panting and still staring wide-eyed at the places where vampires had been.
“Well,” Sheila said, much more matter-of-fact and in the moment, “Ending a statement with ‘bitches’ for emphasis always struck me as misogynistic.” She paused, drew a breath, winced, put a hand to her side. “And I’ve never liked broccoli.”
On the other side of the van, Ramon threw up.
9
I turned from Old Shoe and said, “Catch up when you can,” over my shoulder. Then I took off across the sand at top speed, with Smiles right beside me. The Bird Island Nature Preserve is a long field of dunes covered in scrub grasses: steep angles and sharp curves, and easy as hell to get lost in. At times I ran so fast I just went right up the side of a dune, but other times I had to go around, double back, or tack right or left. I needed to jump as I ran, bounding high into the air, to get oriented. Smiles seemed to know exactly where he was going, or at least where I was going, and I could tell he loved running like this: wide open, no subtlety, pedal to the metal.
Ahead of me, maybe half a mile or three quarters, were lights in the night. I didn’t know exactly what was there, but I knew it was important. I knew if it wasn’t the Rhinemaiden then it was something that would lead us to her. I knew this. I don’t know how to explain that other than to say this was not information that came to me: this was information I felt like I already possessed. It was certainty, not supposition.
A hundred yards out, I slowed again and started creeping along, hunched down, like a bad movie ninja. The lights ahead were bright, but they were also shielded so the light was directed rather than producing the maximum possible ambient glow. That was interesting to me: whoever was doing this needed light but they didn’t want to be seen from a mile away. I could see them, but I’m a vampire. Humans probably could not see them at all. It suggested these were mortals, and it suggested they were breaking the law.
At fifty yards, I could hear their voices over the otherwise deafening background roar of the ocean. It was low tide, and in Sunset Beach low tide is low. The water was easily thirty or forty yards farther out than what I imagine it would be during the day, with people on the beach. Still, that surf is a hell of a white noise generator. I continued creeping along, confident in my ability to hide in the dark, and listened. Smiles was as silent as the sky as he slunk from one shadow to another.
I could only catch snatches of what the people were saying to each other, but it was plenty intriguing:
“…But this is where the map…”
“…Divination is unreliable!”
“…Sources tell me it’s got to be here.”
“Bastards from South Carolina probably got here first.”
“We would know. Trust me.”
That last one was the voice of the old guy who’d been such a dick to me when Roderick and I barged into their little historical society sales pitch chasing Crew Cut. I clambered to the top of a big dune overlooking the beach itself. Beside me – at least a mile from the nearest house – was a wooden post and, atop that, a mailbox: a plain black residential mailbox with APPROVED BY THE USPS stamped on the back. It was one of the big ones, the kind you can put a couple of packages in, like maybe you’d see out in front of a business instead of a house. The mailbox gaped open, and inside I could see a bunch of spiral bound notebooks with pens and pencils tied to the wire binding them together.
You can read about this mailbox on the Internet. Tourists come and write notes and poems and letters to no one in the notebooks inside. They’re like a guestbook but they’re for the whole town and you have to walk a mile to try to find them.
I hunkered down beside the mailbox, gritted my teeth, and peeked over the edge.
On the beach, well into the area that would be underwater at a higher tide, were all the people who were in that metal detector sales meeting a few nights before. They were still dressed in the dumpy, frumpy clothes of a weekend gardener who knows she’s going to get dirty, just like before, but they were also wearing long black opera capes a la Count Dracula himself. Standing in a circle around a hole – maybe ten feet across and deep enough I couldn’t immediately see the bottom – they looked to be taking a break from digging: work gloves off, arms folded, breathing hard. It sounded like an argument was going on and maybe they were ready to start laying out the blame for something. The same interpersonal politics bullshit can take down any team, whether they’re playing football or doing the devil’s work.
The clown who sassed me wore a comically high collar on his cape. It marked him as being in charge. So did the ten pounds of costume jewels all over it. He bedazzled his ritual cloak. Take a second to picture that. I shook my head and stifled a laugh.
“It. Is. Here.” He spoke with the firm, pausing words of someone trying like hell to ride the bucking bronco of his flock’s sudden disbelief. “All the signs point to it being in this place.”
“We should have bought the big metal detector.” One of the women in the group shook her head as she said it. “It would be a good investment.”
“No,” another said, “We would have every cop in Sunset Beach all over us in an hour if we tried to drive that thing out here.”
“This is the best plan. We’ve all agreed to that. Now pick up your shovels and dig again.”
The thing is, when he said that, even I almost looked around for a shovel. He was using the hoodoo, and it worked.
On t
he wind, just faintly detectable under all that sand and sea, I could smell the same scent of a vampire I’d picked up when I talked to them before. I thought it was Crew Cut sweating out the blood of whoever had made him a thrall, but doubt crept on cold toes across the back of my neck. Now I was forced to wonder, what if that asshole in the fancy robe was a vampire and I somehow didn’t recognize him as one?
The others grabbed their shovels and started digging with enforced enthusiasm. I slipped back behind the dune and pulled out my phone.
Are there vampires who can turn into people again as their Last Gasp?, I texted Roderick. There were undoubtedly better ways of phrasing what was running around in my head.
The phone thought about it for a second then sent the message. I put it back inside my coat, put my back to the dune, and listened.
Roderick pounded down the pavement of the empty streets of Sunset Beach in winter. Dog – old as dirt – padded behind him on giant paws. Roderick didn’t try to hide his approach in any way. His boots slapped asphalt like clapping hands and, at the speed he was running, anyone perceiving events in “normal” time would probably have heard them like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel rather than footsteps.
Rounding a corner he saw the minivan sitting in a heap in the parking lot. Finding them was easy: there was smoke billowing from the wreck. Jennifer was bleeding but standing upright. The others all seemed to be alive, too. They were gathered at the edge of the parking lot for a quick conference but turned, guns pointed up, as Roderick blurred into view.
“It is I,” Roderick said with a smile. He held up his hands, but then brought them together in a single excited clap. “They engaged you! Tell me you used the holy water!” In the empty lot, even with the gentler breeze of the waterway instead of the powerful wind of the Atlantic itself, he could be heard as clear as anything.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 16
