“You scared us,” Jennifer said with a sigh, her hand against her head. “Call out or something before you come tearing up the street like that.”
“You would not be able to understand me if I did,” Roderick said. “It would sound like a shrill scream. I do not think you would react better to that.” He smiled.
Jennifer glanced around. “No, I guess we wouldn’t.”
Roderick then nodded towards the island. “I observed Xi’s return over the water. He appeared damaged. Did he have to abort his mission?” He looked around at the crushed fence and the greasy, ashy clothes scattered across the ground. “There were many of them. An ambush.”
Jennifer sighed and nodded. “Xi had to abort. He went back to base on an auto-return sequence after being too damaged to continue. They spotted him and threw a rock.” She sounded disgusted with herself. “A fucking rock.”
“Ranged weapons are for cowards,” Roderick murmured. “I have much greater respect for someone willing to kill with her hands and teeth. Murder is the sort of thing one ought to do by one’s own power.”
The others – with their super soakers and their sunlamp headlights – looked at him for a long moment.
“Present company exempted, of course. You need tools to do your work. Using a hammer to drive a nail makes perfect sense.”
The historical society cult – Jesus Henderson Christ, I thought to myself, the world is a fucking weird place – kept digging in silence for a while. I could hear someone stomping around in the sand, and I guessed it was the Big Cheese since everyone else was digging at his command. He sounded pissed off. The more I listened, though, the less he sounded pissed off and maybe instead a little bit infirm. His heavy steps were just slightly uneven. He was landing harder on one foot than the other.
Vampires are exceptionally good at picking out the weak member of the herd.
I decided I needed to risk it, so I peeked back over the dune between tall stalks of the hardy grasses growing in the preserve.
Big Cheese was indeed favoring his left foot. It was very faint, but I could see it in his walk. The humans around him probably didn’t even notice. I don’t know why that struck me as odd, but it stuck. Details are funny like that.
Sand was piling up around them. They weren’t literally tossing it over their shoulders, but they were filling a central bucket and lifting it out, over and over. As it filled, they got deeper in the hole. The hoodoo made them really go at it, so they started getting lower a lot faster than I think they would have done on their own.
Crew Cut was in there digging, too, the hoodoo working on him even better than it would another. Being turned into a thrall makes someone especially susceptible to suggestion. That raised its own question, though: what was he doing here trying to hunt the elders and taking part in a little cult being led by one? I mean, if the boss actually was an elder who could, I don’t know, disguise himself as a human somehow? Thoughts of the Last Gasp ran around in my head. No one knows the full range of possibilities for the power a vampire will manifest at their second death – the moment there isn’t a living soul left who knew them when they were alive, so they pass entirely from living memory. There’s a taboo against vampires discussing the Last Gasp, too. It’s seen as intensely personal. I’ve always assumed that’s just a polite cover for no one wanting to give away what card we’ve each got tucked up our supernatural sleeve. The end result is none of us knows a ton about what it might be or do for anyone but ourselves – and we have to kill experimentally just to figure out our own.
Crew Cut seemed to be surrounding himself with the magic of life, back in his motel room, and I guessed it was to shield himself from the death magic the elders practiced. Was it possible he was trying to shield himself from the vampire right in front of him?
Was it possible that vampire’s powers of disguise were sufficient for Crew Cut not to have realized the guy was a vampire?
“Herman,” someone in the hole called out, putting her shovel to one side. “Herman! We’ve got company!” I froze, stock still, cursing myself for being so foolish as to peek over the top of the dune, but she wasn’t looking at me. She nodded her chin to point down the beach away from town, towards the southwestern tip of the island, past the South Carolina state line. She was looking at the end of the island where ships came and went from the waterway. Beyond that, the lights of Myrtle Beach – the South’s trashy cousin of Las Vegas – glowed just beyond the horizon.
All their eyes turned, and I saw the Big Cheese – Herman – put a hand up to shield his eyes as he blinked them rapidly. He looked uncomfortable, like maybe his eyes didn’t work too well, but he didn’t have any problems with them the other night. I noticed at the time how sharp his eyes were. He shifted back and forth from tiny print on one end of the room to me, right next to him, without batting a lash.
Huhn.
After a second, I looked where they were pointing, because they all stopped what they were doing. Off in the distance, maybe two hundred yards away, there was a figure in the darkness. My vampire eyes zoomed right in on the vague shape and if I froze any harder I’d’ve turned into a block of ice.
Hand to the gods, there was a ghost walking up the beach towards them, looking right at them.
She was regal. I think – no, wait, let me expand on that. I don’t know why, but every time I think of her, “regal” is the word that comes to mind. I don’t mean she looked like a cover model or a movie star. I mean she had that same air of command about her old queens like me see in our favorite stars of yesteryear. From two football fields away I was struck by the same quiet command possessed by someone like Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall, or these nights maybe by Cher or Beyoncé: eyes that say do not fuck with me set in a face wearing a measured passivity. She had the look of someone who was a victim at some point and will never, ever be a victim again.
I liked her right away. I just immediately felt like she was someone whose hand I’d want to shake if she weren’t also about half-transparent and obviously insubstantial. Behind her – through her – I could see the sand and the water and those Myrtle Beach lights just as plain as my own hand. The woman walking toward us was also gray. I don’t mean just her skin tone, or her hair, or her clothes. I mean she had the features of a young woman but she was monochromatic from head to toe: one largely undifferentiated shade of gray, her features distinguished only by the lines of her face and the deep black wells of her pupils.
I knew instantly I had seen her before: she ran in front of my car the other night when Roderick and I were driving around chasing Crew Cut. So much for my plan of just pretending I never saw a ghost.
Herman – the Big Cheese – barked at his crew. “Dig, goddamn it. Dig.” The hoodoo worked, and they went at it double-time, glancing up at the figure as it strode towards them slowly, but digging nonetheless. Something had been odd in his voice, though: the words were accented this time. Something thick and guttural was there that wasn’t before.
Herman began walking toward her, slowly at first, then stumbling into a trot. He looked like he wanted to run, but his aging body wouldn’t let him. More possibilities about what was going on with him – possession, shape-shifting, body-jumping – all sprang to mind but I pushed them aside. Herman was about to have a moment with this ghost, and I wanted to see it.
The ghost was maybe 180 yards away now, walking slowly but certainly. In a blink between seconds, it moved closer by a third of that. Another blink and it jumped forward just as far. Now Herman really did try to run but stumbled and almost fell.
“MISTRESS!” His voice rang out across the dunes, subtlety be damned, and he threw his hands out towards her as he screamed. His voice didn’t sound at all like the old redneck he’d been at that metal detector sales pitch. He sounded younger, and he sounded… European? “My mistress,” he shouted. “Please come back to us! Mistress, we will make you whole again!” He stepped wrong, on that leg he was favoring, and finally went down on his knees, his face in the
sand, his arms out in front of him. Whether he meant it or it was an accident, he landed posed for supplication and he didn’t stop shouting for her favor even as he buried his face in the surf.
The ghost – goddamn nothing ever being fucking easy – blinked forward again and this time went right past him. I looked around for her: she stood by the edge of the hole where the historical society was digging. The hoodoo Herman used on them was still working – they were digging hell for leather down there – but they were staring at this apparition in front of them and gaping in terror at the same time. Sand was flying around, shovels were banging into each other, but none of them could turn away. None of them could stop what their bodies were doing and none of them could stop staring at what their minds refused to comprehend.
The ghost woman opened her mouth in a big, toothy grin, complete with vampire fangs. I shuddered involuntarily, because her jaws opened like those of a great snake and kept opening. Her whole face folded backwards with horrifying slowness, like a convertible car opening its roof to expose a Sarlacc pit inside, and in a moment she was just a giant ring of ghostly teeth sucking air, her face dangling backwards from the stump of her own neck.
The people in the hole started screaming – all but Crew Cut, whose jaw was open but who did not shout – as the ghost lifted her arms out to the sides. She looked like a diver about to jump from way up there, one of those tall diving stands they use in the Olympics. For a moment all was still except the screams of the humans and the crash of the waves. The water itself ran back, perhaps building for a real chest-slapper of a wave, perhaps running away from this horrible tooth-woman-monster-ghost standing half-visible in the bright artificial lights. Smiles couldn’t even see what was happening but the screams agitated him. He started to growl, deep down, until I pointed at him with one finger: universal owner-speak for no.
Herman got to his feet, his gray hair matted, his beer gut soaked, his dime store ritual cloak drenched and clinging, the bedazzled collar crumpled. He staggered back toward the hole, screaming again, and I could just make out the words over the surf and the humans shrieking: We can make it right, mistress, we just need another chance.
The ghost looked for a moment like it might dissipate, going briefly fuzzy, an image out of focus, but instead it turned to something like smoke – no, like a swarm of bees – and shot forward at the woman seated next to Herman at the sales pitch: the frumpy woman with the white hair and the very sincere sweater vest. The woman’s hands dropped the shovel she was waving around. The swarm of smoke-bees surrounded her and invaded her. The scream in her throat turned to gravel and then to choking gasps, then stopped altogether. Her hands scrabbled at her own neck. Her eyes rolled back. The hoodoo finally broke and the others started dropping their shovels and diving in different directions – none to help her, all to get away – as the woman clawed at her own flesh.
I saw blood fly out from between her fingers.
Glistening red fired out of her neck and ran down her sweater-vest. She stopped screaming and stood stock still, mouth open, then slowly began to cave in on herself.
Like an old stop-motion effect, the woman shriveled and shrank, light spilling from within herself as she turned to something like thin paper around a skeletal frame, then crumbled entirely to dust, her cape and that sweater vest falling down and fluttering away on the whipping wind of the Atlantic Ocean.
There was a sound like a thunderclap and a gust of wind going the wrong direction threw sand everywhere. I raised my hand to shield my face, turned the other way. Smiles squeezed his eyes shut and showed his teeth but didn’t quite growl.
A half mile or so back, from about where I stood with Roderick and Old Shoe to slap Ross around a little before he disappeared, I saw a flash of cobalt blue light. It occurred to me to wonder why Old Shoe hadn’t caught up by now.
Shit.
Digging into the sand, I started to run back that way at top speed. With everything they just saw, there was no way Herman or Crew Cut or the rest of these shoveling mortals would notice one more idiot running away into the night. I pounded across the sand, stumbling and staggering on the loose dunes, the wind buffeting me every time I reached a peak and screaming past me overhead as I dipped into the valleys. I was as loud and as fast as I could be. Subtlety was the last thing on my mind. Fuck this shit, I thought to myself. Fuck everything about this shit.
Around me, every bird of every type rose into the air and took to the sky en masse, like they were giving up on the island if it could hold monsters like that ghost thing back there. They shrieked and circled, nearly banging into each other as they flew, and with a few whirling turns they all eventually pointed themselves in the same direction: towards the mainland. They took off together on the thunderous applause of what must have been a thousand wings.
“So you were doing a surveillance ritual?” Roderick looked more than interested. He looked intrigued.
“We were,” Ramon said, “But without Xi we can’t finish.”
Sheila nodded. “We have to inscribe two opposed designs onto the area. Xi was carrying a GPS transmitter for them. He was going to fly one pattern, then turn around and fly the other. Our position would provide the third point of reference to obtain a magical triangula…” She trailed off. “Well, anyway, we need him to finish it. Unless you can fly.”
Marty perked up a little and seemed to snap out of his shock at the mention of maps. “Can you…” His voice faltered for a second. “Can you show me the route he was going to fly?”
Marty, Sheila and Ramon conferred for a moment. “If we had someone who could move very fast or jump great distances with a lot of…” Marty hesitated again. “With a lot of agility? If we had one of those people, and they carried Xi’s GPS transmitter in their hands, I could describe the route they needed to run.” He blinked, eyes wide, then narrow again, as his mind leapt hither and yon. “You know, on the rooftops?”
Beth held out her hand to Sheila. “I can map it.” She said it with her usual dreamy quality, as though trying to join a conversation while just waking up. “Marty can tell me where it needs to go.”
“But…” Marty licked his dry lips. “You would need to be able to jump the gaps between houses and, looking from here, I would guess that averages to be approximately fourteen feet, four inches.”
“We’re…” Jennifer blinked at him. “We’re standing at least half a mile from the nearest house on the island itself. We’re at one of the widest points of the Intercoastal Waterway.”
Marty nodded. “I could be more precise if we were closer. I’m sorry.” He shrugged. “The average person can jump a gap of at most ten feet and only with a running start of at least forty feet across level ground but none of the roofs are level and – “
Roderick’s abrupt laughter at Marty’s naiveté made Marty stop. “You…” Roderick paused. “I apologize. I should not laugh. You have not spent much time fighting other vampires, or running away from the scenes of your meals?”
Marty shook his head.
Roderick nodded. “Another vampire unaware of his capabilities! Martin, a fourteen foot gap is trivial for a vampire.” He clucked his tongue. “I have been too lax in your education. We will work on this when we return to Asheville.”
Beth looked at Marty again. “Give me the route,” she repeated.
He and Sheila produced a tablet computer with the route Xi was meant to take. Beth stared at it a moment and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Wait here.” She stepped away, just a few yards, and in perfect silence on bare feet walked up to the edge of the parking lot. One of the countless little sea birds that populate the coast – driven away when the fight broke out – had returned and started pecking at the asphalt again in search of food that wasn’t there. With the speed of a vampire, her hand shot out and her fingers gripped it around the body. It produced a chattering cry of protest but Beth was gentle with it. She lifted it up to hold it in front of her face, looking into its mad, black eyes.
&nbs
p; Beth studied it for a second, held that way, then plunged her fangs into its tiny body and in an instant drained it dry. The humans gasped, even Jennifer, who saw a vampire feed the very first time she met one. Roderick opened his thin lips for a moment and his eyes flashed with something like shock. We can feed from animals, and there are always rumors of vampires who do, but I’ve never actually met a vampire who truly only ever ate from animals. It isn’t like with human vegetarians who are perfectly capable of getting what they need without eating animal proteins. A vampire can in theory subsist on animal blood alone but that blood tastes… incomplete. There’s something missing when we drink an animal’s blood: some quality to it we can’t get otherwise. I don’t know what that is, and I don’t care. A vampire feeding from an animal is, to another vampire, sort of like seeing someone pick their nose. We’ve all done it but that doesn’t mean it isn’t gross. Animals don’t deserve the cruelty of being drained, anyway. It’s never hard to find a human who has it coming.
Beth dropped the corpse of the bird and leaned her head back with her eyes closed and her hands outstretched, her arms up at an angle. Roderick felt that sixth-sense ripple in the air of another vampire using their Last Gasp. In the distance, even over the constant wind on the water, they could all hear a massive number of birds taking flight.
Appearing as a dark mass in the sky, dozens upon dozens of birds of all sorts rose from between houses, from the water, from the side of the island facing the Inter Coastal Waterway, from the nature preserve, and from anywhere else they might roosted at night. Gathering together overhead, they descended all at once, some landing on Beth, up and down her arms, across her shoulders like a shawl, and arrayed around her on the ground.
Perfectly silent, without a sound other than the thin, slicing whispers of their bodies in the air, they stood and stared at her with the alien eyes of the ancient dinosaurs whence they were descended. Beth did not look back at them: her eyes were closed and she turned her face to rub her own cheek against the body of the bird closest to it on her right shoulder. She looked like she was greeting a favorite pet after a long vacation.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 17
