by J. F. Lewis
8
ERIC:
A MIDSUMMER’S DAYDREAM
I hate dream sequences. I’m not fond of travel sequences either. The last one I had any respect for was in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, when they get on the boat and Gene Wilder sings, proving that Wonka is a complete nut job, but in a fun way. In my dream, though, I was having sex with a beautiful woman, a vampire I’d never met before, and she wasn’t my usual type.
She was a classic beauty, rounded cheeks, well fed but not fat. She came from a time when women didn’t exercise to excess, crafting their bodies into works of sculpted deprivation. Pale cold breasts overfilled my hands, unusually short thick nipples poking out from between my fingers. We were in Fang’s backseat, top down, parked in the driveway of an abandoned house looking down on Void City. Nearby, in the remains of the two-story wreck, mice scampered, their tiny claws scrambling across the damp floorboards. Wet grass from a brief evening shower sent up a heady smell of life in contrast to my lack thereof.
“Dites-moi,” she whispered, her voice urgent as she reached down and guided me inside her. “Tell me you trust me.”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to lose the moment.
Moonlight caught on a necklace that was either gold or platinum. Eight strands of metal all hooked into a central jewel—a large emerald. An irrational urge to grab the necklace and tear it off, to run over it with Fang, rose in my chest.
“If you trust me, then tell me.” She nuzzled my neck and I pushed her face away with my left hand. Her fangs flashed in the night; a frustrated hiss left her throat.
“I don’t like to be bitten,” I told her firmly. “If you aren’t okay with that then we should stop right now.”
“How can you say no to this body?” Her arms came up behind her head. Her tempo increased, the wet slap of our bodies drowning out the sounds around us. She was cute, but the pit hair was too much.
“Aw, come on! What the hell? Don’t they sell Nair in my sex dreams?”
“Tell me where it is!” She dug into me with her nails, suddenly extending them into claws that tore through my shoulder muscles. I shouted an obscenity or seven. With the muscles severed, my arms wouldn’t move properly and I growled.
“Get off me, bitch!”
“Tell me what it is, your memento mori! Tell me and this pain can end.”
Sure, I could have told her that I didn’t have clue one what she was talking about, and at the moment that was actually true, even though we were in my memento mori’s backseat. I was too confused, too jumbled up by what had happened with the Wurlitzer in the real world to recall the ins and outs of vampiric metaphysics, but I wasn’t about to start explaining myself to an errant bit of S&M kink hanging about in my head, particularly one that hadn’t even bothered to shave her pits.
So I popped my fangs; the vague pain as they forced my other teeth to move aside paled in comparison to the constant tearing of my shoulders as her claws flexed inside, flaying the meat. A vampire’s pain receptors don’t work like the living’s. New pain hurts, but it’s fleeting. Once the damage is done, the pain fades, unless the wound keeps tearing, then the nerves wake up again. The chick on my tip (oh, good grief, now I sound like a rapper) . . . the vampire on top of me knew how to keep her claws moving, stoking the agony to new life over and over.
Unable to get at her throat, I sank my fangs into the tenderest flesh available and jerked my head back like a zombie tearing into a fresh corpse.
That’s not the worst bit.
Her breast came away, revealing rotted meat beneath. Decomposing flesh, the smell of it, filled my nostrils. Black blood seeped from the wound and I gagged . . . and came. That was the worst bit.
“Non! Vous êtes mauvais! Très très mauvais!” Above me, she began to grow. A black tinge crept across her skin, the same color as my uber vamp’s.
“Oh,” I spit the hunk of rotten meat out of my mouth, “that’s not right. Who’re you supposed to be? My sire? What? Do I get to have an Oedipus complex now?”
Wings, long and leathery, sprang from her shoulders. I’d seen her before, or a representation of her. A stained-glass likeness of her fighting one of my ancestors could be found hanging in a hallway at the Highland Towers. My ancestor had been a knight. He’d been turned into a vampire. And he’d asked for forgiveness. It had been granted and he’d run away, had fled all the way to America, where I had no doubt that his ghost was embarrassed by the lot of us, right down to his great-great-whatever John Paul Courtney, and me in particular.
“You’ll pay for that, whelp!”
As the uber vamp, she still had hairy pits. I shook my head. “That just gets me. I know it’s probably chauvinistic or something, but . . . doesn’t that bother you?”
She was confused. So was I. This didn’t feel like a dream. Everything was too real.
“The pit hair,” I snarled. “Doesn’t”—my skin turned black and I started to grow—”it”—the wounds in my shoulder closed around her claws—”bother you”—my wings sprouted, pushing me away from the car seat, shifting us forward—close to standing—”to be”—purple light from my uber vamp eyes washed across her body—”so fucking hairy?”
I gain an extra three or so feet in stature, but my legs and torso aren’t the only parts of my body that get bigger. She grunted in acknowledgment. And, not to be icky, but so did I. We sagged against each other, momentarily overcome by the new sensation.
“It is true that I am your sire,” she said in my ear. “I do not understand how you managed such a thing, and for that reason alone you must be destroyed.”
I thrust in hard, bottomed out, and kept pushing. “How are you in my dreams?”
“Maybe you’re in mine,” she said, grinding against me.
“Shit.”
She licked my neck with a long gray tongue.
“Are we fucking or fighting?” I asked.
“Must there be a difference?” Her fangs pierced my skin, and it felt like ten-penny nails ripping through my neck. I struggled, but it was hard for me to get any leverage. I flapped my wings, pulling us skyward, but she was already letting go, smoke billowing from her mouth as she fell away from me.
“What,” she coughed, “have you been feeding on?”
“Mouser,” I said.
We hung in the air, held aloft by our wings, glaring at each other in the night. She tried to lock gazes with me, but I kept my focus low, staring at her breasts. The one I’d bitten had already regenerated. As I watched, her flesh began to gray, her wings receding. Plummeting toward Fang, she screamed, more in frustration than fear. She landed on the hood, feetfirst, with a metallic thunk and a distinctly less metallic snap. Her legs gave and she fell to one side of my car.
“How is this possible?” She rolled away from the car, already trying to stand. “No vampire that has passed through the threshold of death and embraced undeath can—”
“Drink the blood of a Mouser?” I completed her sentence as I landed in front of her. “Yeah, I’ve never been much of a joiner.”
Fang roared to life behind me.
“How?”
“If we’re really in a dream, then anything is possible,” I lied, hoping she’d believe that rather than figuring out Fang was my memento mori.
“Could the car—” she whispered, then interrupted one thought with another. “Bien sûr que non. I sensed magic from within his chest.
“Is that what you did, clever boy?” She slowly stood, her legs mending as we spoke. “Did you hide your memento mori in your own body?”
“Maybe.” She sensed magic inside me? The Stone of Aeternum, I thought.
Last year I’d gotten into it with a demon and wound up with a magic rock that is supposed to make a vampire who finds a cure for vampirism immortal if he manages to find a cure while the stone is in his heart. I don’t go for all that magic mumbo jumbo, but I’d held on to it, just in case it actually worked. The rock technically belonged to Lord Phillip, who wanted to use it f
or a magic ritual to make himself more powerful, but in the meantime, he’d been willing to let me hang on to it as long as I promised to hand it over on demand. I think he was more interested than I was in whether it would work or not. If the stone was powerful enough to throw Mommy Dearest off the scent of my real memento mori, off Fang, then I was even more pleased that I’d held on to it.
She smiled at me, and our surroundings faded. She had the information she thought she wanted, and I had an edge, a tiny one, but she’d been an Emperor (Empress?) for more years than I’d been on the planet . . . and I had the sneaking suspicion I was going to need every little break I could get to take her down.
9
RACHEL:
THE WRONG SORT OF PEOPLE
An hour before sundown, a gray Void City Department of Public Works van pulled up outside the Iversonian. A brown-haired man in a blue work suit stepped out of the passenger’s side and peered out from behind the tinted lenses of his Bono-style sunglasses directly at my hiding spot in the open parking lot across the way. He was slightly tubby, but cute in a fun-to-hang-out-with-but-I-wouldn’t-do-him sort of way, and seeing him brought out a sigh. I didn’t need to see the little name tags sewed onto his work suit to know that his name was Melvin or that he worked for the Mage Guild.
He waved at me before yelling across the street.
“I’m just doing a standard sweep. Will I find anything?”
“Nothing of mine, but there’s an assload of weird crap I don’t recognize. Soul magic or some such.”
“That’ll be the Iversonian’s work.” Melvin worked his way across the road in grids. I watched him, admiring his attention to detail, his craft. Kind of a turn-on really, seeing him in action. Fifteen minutes later, he stopped on my side of the road, breathing a little hard, a thin layer of sweat beading on his forehead. “True immortals’ powers range nearly as far afield as vampires’. The Iversonian is good with the trickier stuff, but none of this is leveled at Winter, only at folks who want to mess with Iver’s place or who become violent.”
“So Winter picked this place so he could take advantage of the Iversonian’s well-laid protective countermeasures?”
“It’s cheaper than paying the Guild for the same level of shielding.” Melvin rubbed his nose with a well-worn square of faded cloth, then swabbed his brow with it. “I’m going to set a class nine detection web on the area, piggyback it on what’s here in case someone decides to use any magic.”
Damn it. “Go ahead,” I huffed as if the precaution wasn’t necessary, and looked up at the tiered signs of the Iversonian’s self-titled club. “IVER,” “SON,” and “IAN” were staggered up the side of the massive white building. It looked better at night. “I wasn’t planning anything, just showed up early to be certain Winter didn’t have any strange ideas about a peaceful meeting.”
“Fair enough.” Melvin blew his nose on the cloth and squirreled it away in his jumpsuit pocket, putting himself right back into the “never in a million years” category. Not that I didn’t watch him cast the spell. He worked magic like he’d been doing it all his life, and I realized that he had.
“How young?” I asked as he walked toward the van.
“My earliest memory is sitting in front of the High Magus and listening as he decided what to do with me. I think I was two or three.”
Shit!
“It should be safe to cast in this area in two or three hours, but before then”—he winked at me and climbed into the driver’s seat—“I wouldn’t.”
Clouds of exhaust spat free of the public works van as he drove off. A guy like that could write his own check, be a member of the High Council. What the hell was he doing working jobs like this—routine service calls for a fricking vampire? I’d used him before when I’d tried to have Eric’s soul captured, but I’d never realized how much he’d been worth the money.
My cell chirped. Another text. This one from Talbot.
Shenanigans, where you at?
Talbot was just as bad as the damn thralls, spelling everything out like textspeak was below him. And don’t get me started on the stupid nickname.
FU cat.
Play it your way, Shenanigans. His message flashed up, vibrating even as I sent my reply. I hate it when he does that. Eric wants me to find out what the hell was going on with the gang bang honeymoon. You have anything you want to tell me?
“Fuck! Of all the times Eric picks to be curious!” I stabbed the number for the Irons Club into my cell. It wasn’t really where I’d learned how to be a thrall, but I’d been there with J’iliol’lth and with Roger. People knew me there, and though they might not like the way I’d gotten free of my contracts, my current master was more important than any of theirs, so they’d have to talk.
“Irons Club. This is Gregory speaking. How may I assist you?”
“This is Rachel Sims, thrall to the Emperor Eric.” I heard an intake of breath, close to a gasp at the sound of Eric’s name. Greg’s a stuck-up ass with a limp, but he knows his place. “I need a gallon of werewolf blood and I need it in less than an hour.”
He scoffed. “That is quite the—”
“Can you get it here or not?” I looked at the skyline. Dark was coming too quickly, sunset in progress. I needed to be done with the call before Winter showed. Why couldn’t Talbot have texted me earlier?
“He’s never asked for anything like this before, and I’m not sure where else to get it,” I dissembled. “The Irons Club keeps a stock of exotic blood for when the rich and powerful with thralls to match want something out of season, right? Money is not—”
“We can provide it, of course, but the Irons Club is not a vending machine or a mercantile, Ms. Sims. We are a group of like-minded individuals united to assist each other in serving our masters to the utmost. You can have the werewolf blood to make your master happy, but . . .” He paused for a second, enjoying having me in a tight spot. “You will not receive our assistance in exchange for any level of monetary compensation. You will owe us a favor and you will respect the rules and regulations of the Irons Club.”
I held the phone to my ear and considered that. Did I have other choices? Where else could I get werewolf blood? Back before I had double-crossed J’iliol’lth, I’d have tried contacting one of the local demons who dealt in that sort of thing: blood, body parts, etc. But now, most demons wouldn’t work with me anymore, or rather, they weren’t worth the trouble. In a way, getting out of a demonic contract the way I had bought me the respect of the demonic community, but realistically all that meant was they’d screw me to the wall at the first opportunity so they could be the one who got one over on the mortal who’d gotten the best of J’iliol’lth, used him up, played him, and gotten him eaten by a Mouser. I was out of choices.
“Fine. Leave it for me at the front desk of the Void City Hilton, and I’ll play nice with the Irons Club.”
“When we need you, if it doesn’t directly interfere with your master’s plans, you’ll provide your assistance?” His voice rose at the end of the sentence like it was a question, but I didn’t think it was supposed to be one.
“Yes.” A powder blue Porsche Cayman S (I thought Talbot’s car magazines said they only came in black) turned onto the street. Only one vampire would be caught dead driving a car like that. Only one vampire could pull it off. Winter.
“You’re familiar with the rules?”
“Not as such, but I agree anyway.”
“Your werewolf blood will be at the designated location within the hour. It will be under the name Marie.”
“Good.” I hung up as Winter stepped out of the Porsche.
My phone buzzed again. Shenanigans?
sum vmp s hsling me. brb. I tapped the message and sent it. When I looked up again, Winter was standing in front of me. Before I could saying anything, my phone was in his hands and he was scrolling through the messages.
“The cat calls you Shenanigans?” He laughed, handing back the phone, and despite my outrage, I felt a t
ingle down below. Winter was dressed for clubbing, in clothes so stylish I didn’t even know what to call them yet. They were all Winter originals, and he always saved the best for himself. “Well?” Winter walked around me once, eyes raking up and down my body, not luridly, but evaluating me, as a designer might eye a potential new model. “Does the Mouser have your tongue as well as your dignity?”
“Talbot thinks I’m always up to something,” I spat, “therefore . . . Shenanigans.”
“I like it.” Winter wrinkled his nose at me, those blue eyes of his sparkling. That he wore contacts was obvious only because I already knew him to be a vampire. “So. You’re in a great deal of trouble and you’d like to get out of it.”
“I’ve got a plan.”
“Yes, I heard.”
I doubted that, and my expression must have given me away.
“Vampire hearing, dear. Vampire hearing. You didn’t expect Eric to notice that you’d hijacked your sister’s volition? Or you thought he’d play it off?”
I nodded.
“He’s married now, darling, and men like Eric, from Eric’s time, the greatest generation, particularly the Courtney family . . . they take vows very seriously.” Winter caressed my shoulder and the cool dampness surprised me. He’d been in mist form this whole time! Being able to turn to mist is a rare ability. As far as I know, the only two vampires in Void City who can do it are Winter and Lord Phillip. I was impressed.
“And you can convince him otherwise.”
“No, but you can, and I’ll tell you how. In exchange, I want your help.”
“I won’t hurt Eric.”
“Of course not.”
“Then what?” I stepped away from him, up onto the sidewalk.
“As you may already know, I’ve bet against Eric in Paris, but that doesn’t mean I’m betting against him in Void City.” A limo pulled up, and some of Winter’s entourage began piling out of the car. I inhaled sharply, ready to use my magic, then I remembered Melvin’s damn spell.
