Thankfully, there were three incapacitated bodyguards just outside. Ramon and I made similar work of them. Not quite as flavorful as their boss—quite odd, in fact, how men of unsavory morals have quite a savory flavor. I chuckled to myself as I considered the irony of that fact.
Now I knew why Ramon was so disposed to his particular predilections. It was more than the taste—it was the thrill, the control, the power of destroying a body so thoroughly. It resonated with something deep inside my vampiric nature, something that had been locked away ever since I’d been turned.
The difference was that Ramon had engaged in this sort of behavior on a whim. He never planned it out sufficiently because he was told not to do it. Instead, it always happened on impulse, in the heat of a moment. If only Ramon has been given the freedom to indulge himself properly, to plan out these feastings, he could have done so with the same kind of discretion and calculation we were doing now. And more than that, the fact that I could compel people to silence meant this was a relatively low-risk, high-reward approach.
We acquired more targets from the senator, and over the next several weeks we eliminated his threats one by one. The senator was so satisfied, in fact, that eventually I didn’t even need to compel him. He started contacting us through a burner phone we’d left him, giving us names and locations. Ramon and I were an unstoppable force. We were the terror of New Orleans—but no one knew it. People were going missing, but they were all undesirables, individuals the powers-that-be deemed expendable.
When the leads started to dry up, when the senator stopped sending us names, I knew it was time to start looking for another well to tap. But Ramon had another idea… “Isn’t it time the senator had his comeuppance?” Ramon asked.
I knew it was risky—but Ramon had a point. He was the real scoundrel. He was the one who not only managed the most insidious drug ring in the city, but he had committed murders, albeit most of them through us. With every act, every sin, his blood surely grew more flavorful.
20
THE BEST WAY to make yourself unattractive to a vampire is to be an average person. Not too pious or innocent. Not too vile or sinister. The former are delectably sweet, while the latter are savory and spicy. Everyone in the middle? They taste a bit like oatmeal. It will fill the hole if there’s nothing else available, but no one ever really craves it.
For good reason, not out of preference for flavor, we tended toward the savory and spice. A scoundrel goes missing, people don’t ask too many questions. Someone innocent or especially virtuous disappears, and the powers-that-be will turn the whole world upside down looking for answers.
So long as we were eliminating the most vile element of society, one might say we were actually performing a civil service. Not that such was our goal or purpose—but it worked out conveniently. The problem comes when the rest of the world doesn’t know that the scoundrel you’re eviscerating is, in fact, a scoundrel.
Such was the challenge with politicians. Most of them were spicy, but they all wore a facade of virtue—they were insufferable, holier-than-thou virtue signalers. They were like chocolate-dipped turds. They looked good on the outside, but on the inside they were repulsive. Unless of course you’re a fly or a dog, something that likes turds. We rather enjoyed the savory flavor of the politician’s insides… but there was no denying that what they were on the inside was not what they appeared to be.
Now, imagine yourself at a party and one person loads all the chocolate-covered turds on his plate, leaves none for anyone else. Thinking they were chocolate-covered bananas, people take great offense at his action.
Save some for everyone else! Those are meant to be enjoyed by the whole party!
Little do they know that the turd-hoarder is, in fact, performing a public service. But since no one else sampled them, everyone imagines the one who actually spared them a mouthful of shit was a greedy son of a bitch and they seek to kick him out of the party.
That’s sort of like what we were doing by taking down a corrupt senator like Johnson. People would take great offense at his loss, they’d mourn him and want to punish his killers. Little would they realize, though, that we were sparing them from the tyranny of a corrupt leader, a drug-peddler, and a victimizer. I grant, my chocolate-covered turd metaphor needs some work. But you get the idea.
And the senator was quite tasty. We expected his mutilation would garnish more attention than, for instance, the elimination of One-Eyed Clyde did. What we didn’t count on was how close they’d get to the truth… even though they’d never admit it.
We didn’t attack him in his office—we broke into his home. We were careful to avoid his security cameras, speeding past them like a blur and hiding in his shower. I compelled him to silence and we did our thing, leaving his blood-drained corpse in several pieces in the shower, his head in the toilet.
Initial suspicion turned to his wife—no one else, to her knowledge, had been in the home. But there was no evidence on her person, no blood at all, and the medical examiner couldn’t figure out what sort of weapon was used. Unable to account for his blood, an inquisitive reporter posed the question—what happened to it? In something of a jest, the reporter asked, “Vampires, perhaps?” I knew most people wouldn’t take her seriously, but it wasn’t most people I was worried about…
“We’re done,” I told Ramon. “This is too risky.”
Ramon extended his lower lip as if in a pout. “Mais non, ma petite chou chou!”
“Don’t call me that. You know I don’t like it when you call me that. You heard what the reporter said. If she suspects a vampire, even if she’s just joking, there are people out there who will follow her line of thought.”
“But you are invulnerable, ma chérie! Let them come!”
“I’m not invulnerable. I just can’t be staked. You know as well as I do that there are other ways to do a vampire in. Say they find out we’re here and burn the house down during the day, with us inside.”
“Then we hide in the cellar.”
“Then we’d be sitting ducks, hiding there until night fell. They’d garlic our asses and drag us out into the sun. And if we get eliminated, who will wake Nico up when the time comes?”
I could go a few weeks at this point without feeding. Ramon should be able to, too. And we needed to take our time… I could just sense it. I hadn’t felt this much anxiety since shortly after I’d been turned, when Nico and I suspected that the Order of the Morning Dawn was on our trail. All those days hiding in Moll’s basement, waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop… and it dropped like a bomb.
When the reporter said, “Vampires, perhaps?” it felt like she was staring straight at me through my television set. Ramon thought I was just being paranoid. Let it blow over. They’ll eventually call the senator’s death a cold case and move on. The cameras hadn’t caught us… so we thought. We didn’t think about all the times we’d been to the senator’s office. We didn’t think about the fact that we would, in fact, be on camera there.
A slightly blurred image of Ramon and me showed up on national news—persons of “interest” in the Senator Johnson case. A number was given—if anyone could identify these persons, they were supposed to call.
Yes, Johnson was just a state senator, but the mystery of the case had turned it into a national story.
Would anyone recognize us? I wasn’t sure. We only went out at night, we never dressed the same way twice. I always wore makeup to give myself color, and typically wore contacts to make my red irises appear brown.
We tried not to visit the same night-life establishments regularly—usually trying to leave a month or two between visits to any spot lest we become recognizable. We had to double-down on these efforts. One thing we couldn’t do was appear like ourselves, not like the “persons of interest” on the senator’s security feed.
I couldn’t dye my hair. As vampires, our skin, nails, and even our hair is resilient. Bleaches and dyes don’t have any impact on my hair. But I did have a collecti
on of wigs specifically for times like these. Nico had always said we needed to be prepared in case suspicion ever turned our way. We had to become masters of disguise. Had Nico not been buried here, we could have moved.
Had we not been persons of interest, had I not worried that people might be tracking us down—if they hadn’t already—we could have moved Nico with us. But now… what if someone, already suspecting us, caught us moving a body? And more, what if it was someone in the know, a hunter perhaps, who might recognize the staked body of the infamous Niccolo the Damned?
So far as the hunters knew, Nico was still at large—and he was the ultimate prize. But he also had a perfect record against the hunters. It was to our advantage that the hunters feared him, that they believed he was still a threat.
There are two options a vampire has when threatened: flight or fright.
For now, we were employing basic subterfuge… but if they got any closer, we’d have to make a choice. But there wasn’t really a choice. Flight was not an option.
21
DAYS PASSED. NO new developments on the senator’s case. No signs that anyone had identified Ramon and me as the “persons of interest.” Then weeks… months… still nothing. But I still wasn’t comfortable. We’d had to use our best subterfuge, disguises, my compulsions, and alcohol—just for extra measure—to find ourselves meals.
I lamented the loss of the good old days, when I’d first arrived in New Orleans and there were establishments, brothels just for vampires. But it had been decades since we’d had that degree of freedom. Part of it was due to the rise of technology—even “dark” corners alleys were not necessarily as dark as they seemed. Infrared cameras, the advent of the smart phone, and the speed by which questionable images could be exchanged on the internet all posed a threat.
This was what Nico had told us would come to pass. It was why he’d engaged such a vigorous campaign going back nearly a century to take control of the public perception of the vampire. So long as people didn’t believe we existed, we could use that to our advantage.
But if we were discovered—a reality that, Nico believed, was an eventual inevitability—we needed to be objects of public empathy, creatures forced into the dark by the hegemonic powers-that-be, a marginalized community ready to demand their rights.
We needed to appear just as human as anyone else—creatures capable of loving and being loved. Hence the rise of the “vampire romance” genre—all of that a part of Nico’s plan. Was it deceptive? Absolutely. But Nico believed it was also necessary.
I thought it was mostly bullshit. We drink human blood—from a human perspective, how could we ever be viewed as victims of the “system?” I never doubted that humans might think they could love us—our allure accomplished that.
Sure, it might not be a genuine love, but humans are notoriously bad at deciphering the difference between love and lust. And there was something to the fact that we were victims of an unjust system. We were an oppressed species, forced to hide our nature, required to lurk in the shadows, always careful not to reveal our true nature to others.
As Ramon was quick to point out, we ought to be viewed as gods amongst men. We were more powerful than humans. We were immortals. They were our primary food source. Why we were pandering to human perceptions? We were playing the game on humanity’s home field.
But what if we could take control of the field? What if we could force them to pander to us… What if we were the ones in control and they were the ones who lived in fear? Naturally superior to humankind—that would be justice. It’s called the survival of the fittest.
It was patently absurd, I realized as we worked for months on end to hide ourselves from humans, that we were the ones full of fear while humans went about living their lives in blissful ignorance of our existence.
Don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t going to undermine Nico’s plans. We had to bring him back. Besides, if we made too many revolutionary changes, all it would take was one staked vampire in hell to let Nico know… And since he had access to Edwin, I feared if we pissed him off and he began to think we weren’t going to raise him, he’d help Edwin find a way out of hell.
So we played the coward—we hid, we disguised ourselves, we did whatever we could to feed without being seen. It pissed me off that we had to act this way. But it was what it was.
There hadn’t been any new developments in the Senator Johnson case in a while; I was checking the internet regularly. Conspiracy theories abounded in cyberspace—including the accurate notion that vampires were responsible—but so long as conspiracies remained conspiracies, I figured we were in the clear.
All of them asked same question: Why had the senator been drained of his blood? The case disappeared from mainstream media as Ramon predicted it would. Still, there was a constant stream of underground curiosity in the remote parts of the web about the matter. I kept tabs on it as best I could. But so long as anyone was talking about it, I wasn’t going to allow Ramon to convince me to go on another round of dismemberment and feasting. Our hunts had to be calculated, well planned, and carried out precisely.
Nico had been gone for almost a decade now. In one sense it felt just like yesterday when I plunged the stake into his heart. On the other hand, it felt like we’d been living in the wake of the situation with the senator for a century.
Ramon and I were preparing for another hunt. We’d put off feeding for almost a month, and if we waited any longer the cravings would take over. It required a balance—don’t feed too regularly and risk getting discovered, but feed regularly enough that the cravings wouldn’t make us too reckless.
A month or so was the “sweet spot.” We were hungry, but not so hungry we couldn’t think straight while on the prowl.
The older I got, in fact, the easier it became to resist… I’d still hear my victims’ heartbeats. I could smell an open wound, even something as small as a paper cut, from a hundred yards away. When I was younger I’d be on the victim in a split-second; it would take all the effort I could muster to maintain my secrecy.
Now I could pull myself together, stick to my plan, prevent myself from acting too foolishly. Ramon was older than me, but considering the fact that he’d spent so much of his existence in hell—especially the early part of his existence before I developed my compulsion abilities—he still had a harder time resisting than I did. If it wasn’t for my commands, I was reasonably certain he’d have given us up a long time ago. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d be left alone—with quite a bit of time left before Nico could be raised—it would have been easier to just put Ramon back in the ground.
We’d been stalking our latest victim for more than a week. We’d gotten a whiff of her when, on her daily stroll, she tripped and skinned her elbow. She smelled sweet… sweeter than honey, sweeter than a child. I’d fed on priests and nuns before, but not even they were this pure, this innocent, this delectable.
Every evening she followed the same routine. She’d attend compline prayer services at the St. Louis Cathedral, in Jackson Square. She’d cut through Pere Antoine Alley toward Royal Street. From there she’d hang a right and walk a few more blocks to her apartment where, it seemed, she lived with another woman we’d never managed to catch a glimpse of.
I’d tried to listen in to their conversations, utilizing my keen vampiric sense of hearing, but the roommate was a timid woman, always speaking in hushed tones. Two meek women, I supposed, which made our target an ideal one. And since she spent nearly every evening in prayer, I was hoping she’d satisfy my sweet tooth.
Why not attack at the apartment? Most homes we can’t enter. It’s like the familial bond between persons casts a sort of magic that most humans are unaware they even possess. It prevents us entry absent an invitation. The alley was the best bet.
The plan was simple: I’d encounter her head on. Ramon would come from behind. The alley by the cathedral was regularly traveled, so we’d have to be quick. But I didn’t see any cameras there, so I figured if we ma
de it quick we could both feed just enough to satiate us for another month or so, compel her to forget, and be on our way.
So far everything was proceeding according to plan. The woman left the cathedral and turned down Pere Antoine Alley. I proceeded in the opposite direction, intending to meet her head on. As we met, I looked at the woman—my eyes met hers.
“Stop,” I said.
The woman stopped.
“Don’t say a word.”
Ramon came up from behind her. He prepared to bite her neck…
I felt a burning sensation in my back. It was almost unbearable. I didn’t remember the last time I’d felt pain, and probably never anything quite like this.
I quickly turned, and there stood another woman shrouded in a black robe, holding a crucifix… a gold crucifix channeling a fierce beam of sunlight into my body.
I’d seen this before. It was the same crucifix, I was sure, that my father had used to assault us so many years ago back in Rhode Island, the night Moll was murdered by the Order of the Morning Dawn.
As my skin on my back boiled beneath the beam of light, I was struck by the fact that I only heard one heartbeat… only the woman we’d targeted. It was as though the person attacking us wasn’t human… Could she be a vampire? Vampire hearts don’t beat but once every few minutes. Since we don’t technically require oxygen to survive, that’s all it takes to keep most vampires going. Vampires who have hearts, that is.
Seeing what happened, Ramon quickly grabbed me as I fell to my knees and ran as hard as he could, me in his arms, out the alley from the direction he’d come. Beams of sunlight chased us all the way.
I needed blood… the wound on my back wasn’t healing. The only way it would was if I fed. I shook myself from Ramon’s grip, grabbed a random passerby, and sank my teeth into the man’s neck.
People all around screamed in horror. I didn’t have much choice. I saw the shrouded figure exit the alley. I wasn’t going to risk another zap from the crucifix. I release the man, his blood dripping from my lips, and Ramon and I quickly fled back to Casa do Diabo.
Gates of Eden: Starter Library Page 83
