Strangers in the Night

by E M. Jeanmougin

  Crimson shook his head. “You don’t ever gotta apologize to me for a few tears, Jazz. Whatever the cause.”

  Jasper swallowed hard, the click in the back of his scratchy throat audible. “I’ll take that glass of water now, if you’re still offering.”

  “Sure thing,” said Crimson, then bellowed up the stairs, “Hey! Alcander!”

  Jasper sighed. Well, it was nice while it lasted. “Don’t do that.” He rubbed hurriedly at his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ll get it myself. It’s not like my legs are broken.”

  “Can’t,” said Crimson. “Iron beams, remember? I gave Al the last of the reeds, and he’s so meek, he probably already shows up as a mortal.”

  “Crimson, I am standing right here.” Alcander was halfway down the steps, a lime green ceramic mug in his hands.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Crimson, and Jasper elbowed him sharply in the side.

  Alcander scowled, but descended the rest of the way, flipping the light switch as he passed. He offered the mug to Jasper, who accepted with a sincere (if raspy), “Thank you, Al.” He took a small sip, then a much deeper one. The water soothed the ache in his throat and seemed to temper the fever in his skin.

  Alcander crouched in front of him, his pale pink eyes scanning Jasper’s face. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay,” said Jasper. “Really. I’ve been through worse.” Though he didn’t know that he had. “Where’s Max?” He wanted to thank him for letting them stay at his place right out of the blue. And make certain he was actually okay with the danger that was implicit in such a choice, and not just wandering around upstairs in some half-hypnotized daze à la Crimson.

  “He is making dinner,” replied Alcander.

  Jasper looked suspiciously at Crimson, and he raised both hands. “Hey, don’t look at me. He volunteered.”

  “He is very friendly.”

  Crimson snorted. “Well, he ought to be after we nearly died saving his skin.”

  Jasper hadn’t helped Max because he wanted him to owe them, it was just something he had to do. The thought of trying to explain that to Crimson, even after he’d been so nice to him, sounded exhausting. He finished the water and set the empty mug on the coffee table. With the light on, he could more clearly see the basement, noting the pink plastic-covered insulation between the wooden frames of the walls, the closed door at the bottom of the stairs that he hoped was a bathroom, and the large metal sink by the washer and dryer, with a faucet that dripped steadily, the source of the constant tapping sound. A big ugly red leather armchair was pushed under the stairs next to a few neatly stacked boxes, but other than that and the futon, there wasn’t any other furniture. There was also no clock on any of the walls, or the lack thereof, so Jasper wasn’t sure what time it was. The small window showed nothing but darkness, seeming darker now with the light inside.

  There were much worse places to be, but Jasper was anxious to find out when they were leaving.

  #

  Max had spent his first week back wandering quizzically through the rooms of his house, numbly searching for the sense of connection he’d once felt to the place. For the most part, he was hollow, empty, only circulating around the house habitually, as if somehow, someday, he would remember why he used to bother doing so. This bleak feeling was interrupted only by sudden bursts of choking panic. They came from nowhere, lasted however long they lasted, and went as they pleased, often with neither warning nor trigger.

  Then he lived in perpetual terror of their approach. One seemed to lurk through every door.

  Barring college and a rental apartment in his early twenties, he had lived in the old one-story house for his entire life. It was his father’s house. His parents had been married on the front porch. Their wedding picture was still on the mantel over the fireplace, sitting in the same place it had sat for nearly fifty years. The living room still had its original moldings, though the hideous wallpaper had been stripped and replaced with flat blue paint. He’d painted it himself.

  It was, and had always been, his home.

  It now felt suspiciously like a tomb.

  During the second week, he’d relocated himself to the basement. The futon down there wreaked hell with his back and hip, and on the nights when he did manage to sleep, he woke feeling largely like someone had spent the better half of their night kicking the shit out of him, but it was better than the living room, where he could still see the trails his fingernails had left on the hardwood floor. And a far cry better than the bedroom, whose door he had not opened since the day Jasper and Crimson dropped him off.

  It came down to two facts.

  One, the house no longer felt safe.

  Two, there was literally nowhere else for him to go.

  He couldn’t even go to work anymore. Hadn’t even tried.

  During the third week, the police showed up, seeming shocked, baffled, and then, finally, angry to find him just hanging out there, like he had never left. He wondered who might have reported him missing, but no one came to mind. Someone at work, perhaps. Or maybe one of the neighbors. It was really too depressing a question to ask outright, and he didn’t feel like having a complete mental breakdown in front of the Miami beat cop who came to check on him. He gave the officer some half-assed explanation about how he’d simply decided he needed to get away from it all for a while, and how there was really no need for any alarm.

  The cop went away, and Max slunk back into his house.

  During the fourth week, he’d taken it into his mind that he was going to put the house up for sale and move. Definitely out of Miami, maybe even out of Florida as well.

  That was when the demons showed up.

  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it had started to feel to Max like the entire thing was a hallucination. Their presence—there and real and tangible—was a relief.

  The news they brought with them was less so. They were being hunted, and it looked a great deal like they would need to run. Crimson, his arms and hands crusted in drying blood, was carrying Jasper and hadn’t so much as asked if they could come in, as he elbowed his way past and told him they were staying. But that was okay. Max would not have argued even if they had given him the opportunity.

  They were downstairs now, the murmur of their voices carrying up through the cracked basement door, into the kitchen, where Max was slicing carrots into even, chunky pieces. He swept them into the pot with the flat of the blade, then started on the onions. By the time he had the pot simmering, the tone of the voices downstairs was no longer low and serious but playful and joking.

  He set the timer on the stove, then sat down on the couch. The quiet bubbling of the stew combined with the dreamlike murmur of voices below lulled him, and the terror that lived like a scrambling rat at the back of his brain seemed at last to take a break from its gnawing.

  He was asleep in minutes.

  He awoke to the sound of the timer, panicked about nothing in particular but panicked nonetheless.

  The annoying beeping noise stopped almost as quickly as it began, before Max could make it off the couch.

  The vampire, Alcander, was already at the stove, giving the pot a few perfunctory stirs before neatly ladling the thick stew into two identical bowls. He was wearing a gray turtleneck, a loaner from Max that was a full size too large. His shaggy hair, still damp, was tied loosely back at the nape of his neck, fangs hidden in a gently encouraging smile. “I have been keeping an eye on it for you. I hope you do not mind.”

  “Not at all,” said Max. “I should be apologizing to you for falling asleep.”

  “You looked like you needed it. How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. Apart from the nightmares. And the panic attacks. And the pain. But that’s mostly from the futon, I think. Except for my fingers. Or, uh… the lack thereof.” He hadn’t yet made it a full day without forgetting they weren’t there, and must have burned himself half a dozen times in the last month, reaching for the handle of a skillet or
frying pan, only to have it slip through his phantom fingers and go toppling from the stove. He was lucky the wok hadn’t broken his foot. “But… other than that…”

  “You need rest,” repeated Alcander. “But food first, I think. Why don’t you come eat with Jasper? I am sure he could do with a human’s company right now, and he has been asking about you.”

  “I’d be happy to,” said Max. He could do with any sort of company right now, human or otherwise. He placed the bowls on a small carrying tray, added a half loaf of fresh-baked bread and a sleeve of store-bought cookies on the side, then followed Alcander downstairs.

  #

  The door at the top of the stairs opened again, and Max appeared there, though it was difficult to see him from their position on the futon. The smell of whatever he had cooked reached Jasper first, and despite his anxiety and troubled mind, he felt hungry.

  Max looked better than he had a month earlier, when Crimson and Jasper found him wandering in the woods. His long-sleeved flannel covered a majority of the scarring, excusing a few jagged runes etched into the side of his throat. The scabbing had peeled away, leaving white ghosts of slightly puckered scar tissue. Some of the color had returned to his still-thin face, and his blue eyes were stained with dark, sleepless circles underneath.

  He brought Jasper a tray with a bowl of thick, hearty stew and a thermos of coffee, with fresh chunks of bread, still warm from the oven, on the side. Jasper hadn’t had home-cooked food in longer than he could remember, and he scarfed it down hungrily while they bounced ideas back and forth. Crimson believed they should return to New York, where the Hunters would be least likely to expect them. Jasper wasn’t sure that was such a hot idea, but primarily because the idea of possibly running into Charlie out there quickly had his stomach twisting into knots.

  “Maybe we could go somewhere else,” suggested Jasper. “Someplace where there aren’t so many Hunters.”

  “No such place,” said Crimson. “Not in the States anyhow. You know how much money these people spend on their military. Anyway, I have connections in New York.”

  “Crimson, you don’t understand,” reasoned Jasper. “They know where you live.” It hurt him to tell him this, almost as much as it had hurt him to admit he was a Hunter. More, in fact, because the place was obviously important to him. “They’re going to be pissed that we killed those Hunters. They’ll come after us.”

  “The house’ll keep ’em out.”

  Jasper thought of the swinging blades in the old library, of Crimson’s vague warnings. “A few booby traps won’t be enough to stop a group of trained Hunters.”

  “There’s a lot more than a few. You ever see one of those old movies where a bunch of explorers discover a pharaoh’s tomb, so they all go down there, sniffin’ around for artifacts, and then even though there’s like twenty people to start with, only the hero and the dame make it out alive? It’s kinda like that. ’Cept no one makes it out alive.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. If I only managed to activate one—”

  “You only managed to activate the one that was set,” interrupted Crimson. “I don’t keep them all active all the time.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I get tired of cleaning up dead teenagers, mostly. You should see the mess the chandelier makes. Guts and brains all over the walls. And don’t get me started on the trapdoors. Sometimes it’s days before the smell works its way up.”

  Jasper flinched. How could the demon be so gentle one moment and then so cold the next? Sometimes he felt like there were two of him. “That’s disgusting.”

  Crimson grinned. “Wait until I tell you what the sconces do.”

  As this went on, Alcander was typing on his laptop in the chair by the stairs. He cleared his throat. “I don’t believe the Hunters are going to be a problem.”

  Al was supposed to be the smart one. The day the Hunters gave up on a hunt was the day hell froze over. “What are you talking about?”

  He turned the screen to face Jasper, though he could see very little from the other side of the room. “I do not know whether you would consider this good news or bad news, but if St. James is to be believed, you died in the same car accident that killed your parents.” Before Jasper could properly form a response, Al continued, “The good news is that there are not any files on any of your… shall we say, more recent activities either. I don’t see anything about the operation you and Charlie cobbled together. The file from Joan of Arc is still being drafted, but I see that it has been changed to exclude you entirely. They do not even mention that Crimson and I are from New York. It leaves gaps in the archive somewhat, but none anyone would notice unless they were looking for them. Seems to me like someone on the inside is looking out for you.”

  Jasper made a small noise of noncommitment. He supposed it was a good thing that the Hunters didn’t know he existed. In fact, it was probably the best thing for their survival. The idea of his father systematically deleting every mention of his existence didn’t make him feel so hot, though. He was too worn out to express this feeling, which was probably a good thing because he did not want to cry in front of Crimson again, no matter how kind the werespider had been.

  “If you three need a ride back to New York, I’d be happy to take you.” Max spoke up for the first time in the conversation. His voice was soft and slow, not quite a drawl but something akin to one. As Jasper understood, he had not gone back to work and had been living day by day on whatever nest egg he’d built while working as an accountant. “That is, if you want to go back.”

  “We couldn’t ask you to do that, Max. You’ve really already done more than enough.”

  “Oh, it’s no bother.” He rubbed the stumps of the missing fingers on his right hand, his eyes not quite meeting Jasper’s. “I don’t have much to do around here except sit around and feel like I’m going crazy. I, uh… can’t really sleep here anyway. Might be nice to get away for a few days. And I’ve never been to New York.”

  “If you wanna come with us cuz you’re scared the boogeyman’s gonna crawl outta your floorboards in the middle of the night, you can just say that,” said Crimson.

  Jasper threw another, much harder, much more pointed elbow in his side, punctuating the unspoken sentence with a glare.

  “What? That’s what it is, isn’t it?” He looked towards Max, who only shrank a little in the armchair.

  Jasper had known about demons his entire life. While other children were out playing tag and kickball, he’d learned fencing and marksmanship. After Saturday morning cartoons, he read hunting manuals from his father’s study. He slayed his first live vampire when he was thirteen. Granted, it was under controlled circumstances, but the werewolf that came a year and a half later wasn’t.

  He couldn’t imagine what it was like to one day simply wake up to reality and then have to live there while everyone he knew was still asleep. “We’d love it if you gave us a ride,” said Jasper. “Crimson drives like a fuckin’ asshole anyway.”

  #

  The drive back to New York was not bad, insofar as such things went. The hatchback was slightly smaller than Jasper would have preferred, and slightly too slow to hold Crimson’s bitching at bay, but with three drivers they made good time.

  They were going to stay with Alcander for a couple of weeks until they could be certain the heat had died down and they weren’t being pursued. The factory was an old ironworks, which had seen its last great boom during the Second World War and had fallen to ruin in the years since. Alcander said his older brother had worked there during the Great Depression. He wondered if any of the vampire’s human family was still alive, then decided it might be rude to ask.

  “The iron is good for shielding against tracking spells, and psychics don’t See through it clearly,” said Alcander as they wove their way through the dark in a single-file line. Like all vampires, Al could see in the dark almost as well as he could in the light, but he was carrying a small flashlight, a beacon for the others in
case they should become lost. “The condemned signs and caution tape keep the humans away. Most of them, anyway.” He turned sideways to squeeze through a gap between two large furnaces, careful not to brush the grimy machines. His small stature gave him that luxury, but it wasn’t allotted to the other three. Chunks of jutting metal snagged at Jasper’s clothing, and he had to stoop to keep from banging his head on the rusty supports.

  On the other side, the space widened out just enough for the four of them to stand in a very close, nearly claustrophobic huddle. The only thing there was a blank space of wall. Using the handle of the flashlight to avoid using his own fingers, Alcander pushed open a small compartment hidden in the molding on the baseboards. This revealed a keypad. Judging by the dirt and grime around the fixture, it had not been used consistently in many years. Alcander made a face. “Max, do you think you could…?”

  “Yeah, I got it. What’s the number?”

  “11131952,” said Alcander.

  Max entered the number, and the keypad beeped and flashed. There was a metallic thunk somewhere inside the wall.

  “Okay, quick, before it times out, 0104051216081519.”

  The keypad beeped twice more, then flashed green. A second loud thunk, and a rectangular seam appeared in the wall. With a hiss of air, it pushed itself outward, then rumbled softly aside, revealing a steel door. A glass lens mounted at the top of the frame shined a green light down as Alcander stepped beneath it. Gears knocked and clanked. Something that sounded like a chain on a spool rattled, and the door slowly opened inward to reveal a stone set of stairs that spiraled down into darkness.

  “Lotta pomp and circumstance for a hole in the ground,” muttered Crimson. “How’d Sid and Ivory get in anyhow?”