by J. F. Lewis
My chandelier was now self-cleaning, as was the mirrored entryway. The concession stand had been reworked too, only now there was a wine rack with a selection of blood wine from Lord Phillip’s own stock. Vintages with which he had grown tired were no longer poured out or flung into the fireplace, but were instead used to restock my supply. I’m sure that was some sort of insult, but Phillip knew I wouldn’t take it as one, and for that matter, he knew I just didn’t care. I grabbed a bottle without looking at the label and headed through the theater doors, down the center aisle, right up to the stage.
Talbot was sitting dead center in the mezzanine, his heartbeat a steady thrum of calm composure, breathing in slow deep draws as if he were napping. We didn’t speak. There was no need. I knew what had his attention.
I looked past the rows of new, more comfortable seats, let my gaze linger on the clever way that Winter had reworked the decorative hangings over the curtains concealing the organ pipes stage left and stage right to resemble the figures I’d seen squaring off against one another in stained glass at the Highland Towers. On the right, a female uber vamp with fierce red eyes, dark black skin, and engorged breasts glared at a vampiric knight in holy armor on the left. My gaze drifted further up to the apex of the dome’s ceiling, where a magical painting of a night sky had replaced the old representations of Castor and Pollux that had been destroyed by the fire. The new painting showed the sky directly above the Pollux, but as it might have appeared if there were no light pollution—a clear perfect night sky that changed with the seasons. Winter has style, I’ll give him that, but when I looked down at the stage to the same object that fascinated Talbot, that’s when I felt a little shiver of excitement.
“The Mighty Wurlitzer,” my theater organ, was well worth our attention. If you look it up on Wikipedia, they have a list of sixteen or so Wurlitzer theater organs that are still in their original locations. That number is one off.
My Wurlitzer really was original to the building, though it had been sold to a collector when I got blown up and had my assets seized while I was trying to re-form. Now, thanks to Winter, it had been returned to its place, stage left and in the upright position. I have a love-hate relationship with the damn thing. An organ like this should be treasured, should be played and maintained. An organ like this brings back memories . . . and memories and I don’t get along.
I read somewhere that music and musical ability are stored in a different part of the brain than most data. The words might escape me, but I’ve always been able to sit down at something with the right number of keys and re-create a tune. When I died, I could still play, so apparently my muscles will never forget what to do.
At the start of every movie at the Pollux, back when it was open to the public, in addition to the cartoons, newsreels, and sometimes even local folks demonstrating their talents, there was always a sing-along and some organ music when the show was about to start and again after it was over. Ode to bygone days. Blah blah blah.
“Are you going to play it?” Talbot’s voice was a study in restrained eagerness, his eyes focused on the organ.
“Why,” I asked. “Want to hear ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’?” I ran my hand along the top of the stage. Before the renovations, the floor had been too uneven for modern productions, but it was smooth now, up to code. I wouldn’t have changed that.
“Is that what you feel like playing?”
“Sure.” No. I looked up at him over my shoulder, momentarily surprised to see him wearing something other than a suit and tie. He wore a loose-fitting T-shirt, the sleeves torn or cut away to reveal his well-muscled arms to the best effect. A musky scent, sweat for his kind, clung to him. He’d been working out. Why?
“Then play it. Or not.” His tennis shoes slid across the new carpet as he stood to leave. Just to make him show his real desire, I leapt onto the stage, crossed to the Wurlitzer, and turned the blower on. The subtle hiss of air whispered through the pipes. Talbot froze. In the good old days that sound had had much the same effect as the sound of a DTS test in front of the feature presentation in a modern theater. Talbot found his seat, waiting.
“Pick a song,” I said.
“Any song?”
“Yeah, but I want a favor in exchange.”
We both knew what he wanted. He wanted to see if it still worked, if when I played, he’d see the same sight that had made him my boon companion for the last twenty years. He wanted a song that could vanquish demons and save the world. He wanted me to be a hero, a golden soul . . . like in El Segundo. I swear to God, you save the world one fucking time and some people never let you live it down.
But then, I guess everybody has their little eccentricities. Talbot’s is that he thinks I’m a hero. Whoever bought him DVD copies of Angel ought to be shot.
“Stardust,” he said quickly.
Fucking “Star Dust.” It had been our song, me and . . . old what’s-her-face, the woman whose name I’m pretending to forget: Marilyn.
“Don’t you want to know my favor first?”
Talbot laughed. “You want me to find out what’s wrong with Tabitha.”
“How’d you know?”
“You walk in here the day after your wedding without taking a shower and think I don’t know something’s up? I smell Tabitha, Rachel, and some Asian woman, Eric.” He gripped the rail of the mezzanine, leaning precariously over the edge. “You aren’t the only one with a discerning olfactory sense. Mine tells me more about what you did last night than I want to know, but what I know about Tabitha tells me . . . I should look into it.”
I looked down at the keys.
“It could be that someone magically ‘spiked’ the hotel room as a perverse wedding present. Just find out what happened for me.”
Shoes hit the carpet on the mezzanine floor. Bare feet moved on metal. A glance showed me Talbot, perched on the rail at as close to the optimum acoustic center of the theater as he could reach without a rope.
“You comfortable?” I asked.
“Yes.” I looked away before he grinned.
“I suppose you want me to sing it too?” I didn’t look at him. I was fuming, but this was my fault. I’d offered.
“Please,” Talbot answered.
So I did . . . and no offense, but not the Nat King Cole version. I like that one, too, but the first time I heard a song called “Stardust,” it was sung by Hoagy Carmichael, just him and a piano, and it was spelled “Star Dust.” The tune was slow, mournful even. That’s how I heard it, how I think it should be played, and how I played it then.
It didn’t sound quite right on the Wurlitzer, but partway through the song, I could feel that didn’t matter. Playing the song hurt, singing it was worse. Drops of red stung my eyes before splashing down on the ivory keys. Something seized in my chest, but I ignored it, tried to shrug it off, make light of it.
“Well?” I asked as the last note reverberated through the theater. “Am I going to Hollywood?”
But Talbot couldn’t answer. He was sobbing gently. During the song he’d transformed and I hadn’t noticed. It was pitiful to watch, really, a massive furry demon eater, no longer perched like a predator but slumped over the rail, his silver mane glowing dimly in the dark. Luminescent tears illuminated the subtle texture of his smooth black fur as he gripped the rail with metallic silver claws. He stared at me through star emerald eyes, then a white glow flowed over him as he changed back to the human form with which I was more familiar.
“Even with her gone—” he said. His voice broke and he started over. “Even without her here, on this plane, your soul still shines like a star when you sing that song, Eric. I was right when I picked you.”
“Stop looking at my soul, Talbot,” I muttered as I shuffled off the stage, shaking. “Just go find out what’s wrong with Marilyn . . . I mean Tabitha. Make sure it isn’t anything permanent.” The trembling started when I said her name, like an earthquake under my skin. I ached for Marilyn. Playing the song brought it all back: the smell
of her, the feel of her breasts, her tongue against mine, her voice in my ears. “Star Dust” was playing on Fang’s radio out on the parking deck and I could hear it through the walls.
The world vibrated and my vision blurred from the tears, not water, but blood welling up within my eyes . . . and I howled in sudden pain. The Stone of Aeternum flared in my chest, bright enough to make shadows, shapes of my spine and rib cage visible through my skin. Fire lanced through the ring finger on my left hand and the band of gold, the wedding band Tabitha had given me, smoldered and hissed as it melted off my finger. I caught the drips of molten gold in my right hand, grinding my teeth as the hot metal seared my skin.
“What the fuck?” I blinked blood out of my eyes.
“True love . . .” Talbot whispered to himself. “Shit. He almost cured himself.”
“How. Fucking. Romantic.” I spat through the pain.
It didn’t stop. The burning did. The gold cooled, and the light from the gem faded, but the memories of Marilyn kept coming. My fingers through her hair. Lower memories of sex came too, but mostly it was the sound of her voice young and old, the perfume she wore, the way she smelled fresh out of the shower, the echo of her heartbeat . . . even the ashtray taste of kissing her right after a cigarette.
“Too bad,” I tried to say. “She’s a corpse already. She’s burning in hell where she belongs.” The words wouldn’t come. Instead I yowled, a low pitiful sound that turned into a scream. I’ve always said that I’d go crazy when I lost Marilyn and it occurred to me that was exactly what was happening—a full-on vampire meltdown. The wedding. The marriage night. The song. All together they’d been too much. I’d said good-bye, but I couldn’t let go.
I felt the change coming and something else came with it. After I was blown up, when I reformed, I’d almost come back alive, but the Courtney family curse reached in and revamped me. It hurt like a bitch. This felt the same, like having swung close to being cured by or in association with the Stone of Aeternum, the curse was trying to swing the pendulum of me in the opposite direction.
When it rains it fucking pours.
The uber vamp roared, and it had a hunger that could not be sated by blood, could never be sated because it . . . I . . . wanted Marilyn and could never have her again, not even the hope of her, and I had dared to try and move on, dared to try to replace her.
My eyes closed and my mind touched the minds of every waking vampire in the city. They recoiled. Some of the sleeping vamps woke, their screams joining mine as if waking from a dreamless sleep that had somehow been invaded by a nightmare. My thralls. I sensed them, all but one, running toward me. Gladys’s voice echoed dimly in my head. I’m coming, baby. Hold it together. But there was no holding things together. Fang’s horn honked over and over again in the distance, engine revving, tires squealing.
Cool! Rachel’s thought hit me as the theater shrank around me or I grew. I flexed my wings, preparing to fly out into the day and feed, feed until somebody stopped me, until someone found a way to put me down, but knowing that they wouldn’t be able to, wouldn’t stand a chance, not until the pain went away, and it never would.
Then there was blood in my mouth. It scalded my throat, but I drank it blindly. I’d had the blood only once before, in El Segundo, and it was one of the many reasons (all involving me) for which Talbot had been cast out, exiled by his people, willingly giving his “holy blood” to a vampire. And just as it had done then, it brought me back under control, damped down the rage and the loss. But this time I wasn’t grateful.
When I change into a bat, it feels like I’m being forced into too small a space, the full-body equivalent of my balls retracting to protect themselves from the cold, but for the first time changing back into my normal human shape felt the same way. Talbot grabbed my face, forcing one of my eyes open, and I hissed at him.
“Hold still, damn it,” he shouted, letting the claws of his left hand sink into my face to give him a better grip.
I hissed again and he swore. Smoke billowed from my cheek, but his claws weren’t burning me, my blood was burning them. I don’t know what he said, because it was in Cat, but it was definitely a swear word.
“Is he okay?” The voice was John Paul Courtney’s.
“PMS,” Talbot said, his eyes never looking away from mine. “Postmortem stress. Most vampires go through it within a few days of being turned, but Eric never has. It’s why his eyes were still blue.”
Were?
“Were?” asked the ghost. He reappeared closer, then shrank from what he saw. “They’re going clear, washed out, dead pigment clear, like a normal vampire. That ain’t supposed to happen. He’s the last of the Courtney line subject to the curse, the one who c’n—” He caught himself as if he’d said too much. “It just ain’t.”
“Let. Me. Go!” Purple light covered my skin and I changed into the uber vamp again, hurling Talbot into the concrete base of the mezzanine. I could feel them, the bats, the rats, all the little creatures that would answer my call. They were mine to command. Others too: the vampires—the Drones, the Soldiers, the Masters, all the undead who weren’t Vlads. I touched their minds and they quaked in their graves, in their beds, wherever they were.
Talbot rolled to his feet, claws reaching up toward the ceiling, and cut loose with more Cat-speak. It seemed important, incredibly earnest. He charged me again. At his touch, I was changed involuntarily back to my human form. I tried to push him away from me, but I was weak, too weak even to support myself. Warmth washed over my skin. My heart didn’t beat, but the warmth spread, seeping into my muscles, my organs, and even my bones. I was core warm.
Talbot looked back into my eyes, his face beaded with sweat, and he smiled. John Paul Courtney stood next to him, hat in hand, worried.
“They’re turning blue again,” John Paul said with glee. “I don’t know what you done, but you done good, cat.”
“Thank you, Mother,” Talbot said, ignoring JPC. “Sekhmet is kind to all her children.”
“That some kind of cat religion?” John Paul asked. “You guys pray to some cat god?”
“Cats don’t worship anyone,” Talbot said as he lowered me gently into a seat. “I just needed a little help from my mother.”
“You still think your mom’s an Egyptian goddess,” I said with half a smile.
“You still think she isn’t,” Talbot told me, “which is why I’ve never even started to tell you about my father.”
“You’re in deep shit now,” I said, suddenly grateful after all. “You gave me your blood again. You worked your cat magic for me again. What does that buy you, like a hundred more years of exile?”
Talbot didn’t answer.
Gladys burst in through the double doors, and Talbot stepped away. Gladys is the oldest of my thralls, older than me, but she doesn’t look a day over twenty-five now. Her hair, recently dyed purple (thanks to an errant comment from me), brushed against my face as she sat in my lap, pushing my mouth against her neck in case I wanted to feed, then cradling me against her breasts when it was clear that I didn’t.
Her breath tickled my scalp in calming bursts with each cooing shush that moved past her lips. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”
Erin and Magbidion came next, followed at a restrained pace by Cheryl. Erin slid wordlessly into the seat next to me, her hand on my arm—her way of letting me know she was there if I needed her. She’d come out of her shell a lot since I took her and the other two away from Sweet Heart Row and made them thralls instead of blood whores, but she’d never be much of a talker. Blond bangs fell down over her face, mostly covering it. She squeezed my arm. Magbidion stood next to Talbot, shuffling his feet and looking for a place to stand where he’d be helpful and frustrated to find that the girls had it covered.
“You okay, boss?” That was Cheryl. She stood in the door, staring down at the other thralls with vague disapproval at the way they fawned over me. She likes me, she really does, but she doesn’t like that
she likes me, which is why she’s kept her brown hair cut short when she knows I’d prefer it long.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You need anything before I go back across to the Demon Heart?”
“No. I’m good.”
“Send one of them back when you can,” she said. “I can’t do everything by myself.” She can, though, and we all know it, but that’s just Cheryl being Cheryl.
“Mags,” I said to the dark-haired man standing next to Talbot, “go help Cheryl. Gladys and Erin are going to tuck me in upstairs.”
“You got it, boss.” Damn, but he sounded chipper. I swear, you save someone’s soul from a demonic loan shark and they go all puppy dog on you.
“And Talbot . . .”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’ll go start work on that other thing as soon as I get cleaned up.”
“Thanks.”
He left, and Erin and Gladys helped me up the stairs to my bedroom. Winter had remodeled it, too, turning the space into a proper bedroom instead of a room with a bed against one wall and a sink against the other. He’d replaced the double with a king-size, put in a proper shower, even a fifty-two-inch projection screen on the wall. He’d extended the space into the storage area on the other side to make room for a walk-in closet. There was even a little fridge so I could store my magic ice sword without the condensation leaving wet rings on the floor. It was nice.
The girls took off my clothes, tucked me into bed, and lay next to me so that their body heat would keep me warm. Just before I fell asleep, Beatrice showed up and took Erin’s place. She’d been over at the Highland Towers and it had taken her longer to make the commute. We didn’t do anything because, despite my many indiscretions with Rachel, I was really trying to stay faithful to Tabitha.
It may sound funny, but to a man from my generation, especially from my family, wedding vows are important. You don’t break them casually even if you cheated all through the courtship. Once you tie the knot, you stay faithful until the knot is cut. Even thinking about marriage made my ring finger ache. What the hell was up with that? I tried to put it out of my head and I actually slept again, which is a bit unusual for me. Weirder still, I dreamt.
