by J. F. Lewis
“All I want you to do is keep him in Paris for at least a week. Is that so hard? I’ll even set you up with a little assistance.” Winter followed my gaze toward his groupies. “Don’t mind them. I’ve rented out the Iversonian for the evening. I can’t exactly throw myself an anniversary of immortality party in my own club.”
“All I have to do is keep him in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll get me out of this?”
“Mmmm-hmmm. You won’t believe that it will work, of course. So you’ll only owe me if you do what I tell you to do and it works. I’ll even be kind enough to renegotiate your debt to the Irons Club. You’ll still be bound by the rules, but I’ll let it be known that calling on you needlessly will make me needlessly pissy.”
His entourage gasped in unison. The idea of a pissy Winter seemed like a bad plan to me too.
“What about Eric? He won’t be hurt, will he?”
“Hurt? Yes. Destroyed or permanently altered? No.”
“Fine. I agree. Tell me how to get out of it.”
He whispered the answer in my ear, and I shook my head.
“Bullshit.”
Winter stepped through me, his mist sending a shiver down my spine. “Think what you will, Shenanigans. But if you use my solution, you owe me. Paris. One week. Don’t forget.”
As soon as Winter headed into the club, I texted Talbot. Dn’t no n.e.thng abt htl rm. We all hd fun. Whre r u?
Headed back to the Pollux to get Magbidion. Why?
No rsn.
Tabitha didn’t rise until an hour after sunset. I still had time . . . if I hurried and if I didn’t take any chances. I dialed information and asked for the number for Triple-T Waste Disposal. Sorry, sis, I thought to myself, but it’s you or me, and if Eric finds out that I put the whammy on you, I’m dead meat.
10
ERIC:
“. . . BUT I AIN’T STUPID”
I handed the cell back to Talbot. He took it calmly, slipping his precious iCall or uDial—whatever it was—back into the pocket of his suit coat. Magbidion stood on the other side of the hotel room, retching at the smell and made doubly uncomfortable by the purple glow of my eyes. Revenant’s eyes. I hadn’t transformed into uber vamp mode, but my anger was showing.
I hoped I was wrong. I hoped Rachel would be smart enough not to kill her sister in an attempt to cover up her little mind-control joyride, but when I know about something, I have to act. I’d rather not know. If my friends really hate me and are nice to me just because they get something out of it? Great! But I expect them to keep it to themselves.
Hell, I’d have forgiven Whatshisname for all the stupid crap he pulled: arranging my son’s death, trying to steal my soul, wrecking my car, setting me up to fight William and his pack, murdering me . . . all of it, if he’d just said he was sorry and either stopped being an asshole or got better at concealing it. It’s weird, but it’s the way I work. Anybody can get a free pass, but they don’t get many, and when they run out . . . they die.
The scents of rotten meat and sewage mingled in our nostrils, the final remnants of Tabitha’s corpse sweat episode. Talbot and I acted as if it was no big thing, but even after I’d showered Tabitha off and sent her clothes, the bedding, sheets—everything that could reasonably be incinerated—out to be incinerated, the smell still threatened to bring tears (or blood in my case) to our eyes.
I looked at the bedside phone and shook my head. It was a test I wanted Rachel to pass. The chain of evidence goes like this: Talbot had suspected Rachel of doing something to Tabitha, Magbidion had been able to confirm the extent to which Rachel was doing something to Tabitha, and my text conversation with Rachel and my knowledge of just how scheming and low-down she can be filled in the rest.
I didn’t know how Rachel was intending to do it, but if she was, there is one surefire body disposal method in Void City, Triple-T Waste Disposal, three oni brothers who won’t report anything to the police for any price and who dispose of the evidence. I used them myself before Fang turned out to be almost as good. He leaves the bones behind and they don’t, but . . .
“Shenanigans, huh?” From my seat at the edge of the bed, I put my cold dead hand on Tabitha’s equally chilled one as she slept. She was safe, but if I hadn’t woken up from the Lisette dream feeling paranoid, Tabitha might have been destined for oni cuisine. I may not be the world’s best husband, but if anyone’s going to kill my wife, it damn well better be me.
“I thought it was a good fit.” Talbot paced the room. “You wanted to know, right? I know that you don’t want to know a lot of things, but this?”
I took a deep breath and didn’t let it out for a few seconds. It’s a human thing. I still do a lot of human things for all that I’m dead.
“Yeah.” The phone on the nightstand wasn’t ringing yet. I wanted it to keep right on not ringing. “I needed to know. You did the right thi—”
Ring. I eyed the phone like it had betrayed a confidence, but that didn’t stop it from ringing again. Ring. Ring.
“Damn.” As the phone rang, I remembered the punch line to an old Cajun joke about a man who wins the lottery and tells his wife she can build any house she wants as long as he can have a “Hello Statue.”
No. I want wanna dem tings what goes bring bring and have dat little ting what dat you pick up and say, “Hello? S’datch you?”
I picked up the “Hello Statue” with a laugh trapped in my throat, choking out a word. “Yeah?”
“She just called.” The voice on the phone had a slight accent. It was Tiko, Timbo, or Tombo . . . one of the three. The oni didn’t waste much time, straight to business. “We’re supposed to meet her over at the Void City Hilton PDQ. She said we should head on up to the Honeymoon Suite and wait outside. Do we go?”
“Uh-huh. I’ll hand you your check when you get to the room. I might even have a body for you to dispose of. Just don’t let on that anything’s up.”
“Sixty grand, right?” You could hear the greed in his voice, like Scrooge McDuck thinking about his money bin.
“That’s right.” I hung up the phone. Hard. Plastic shrapnel scattered in all directions as my knuckles scraped the phone’s inner mechanism. Pain flared, then faded too quickly, curlicues of torn skin weaving themselves back together fast enough to see. I killed the nightstand next, putting my fist through the alarm clock, an electrical jolt buzzing through my arm before the cord melted. I couldn’t smell it over the lingering odor of corpse sweat, but I saw the sizzle and the smoke.
I put my fist through the television, too, and then stopped in my tracks, not from the pain, but from the searing memory of a house near the beach and a blond little girl whose foster father was not even worth biting . . .
“I’m not even going to bite you,” I said under my breath.
“What, boss? You hungry?” Magbidion held out his arm.
“No.” In my mind’s eye, I saw my work boot on the back of the man’s head, forcing his skull into the floor. “No. I’m fine. When’s our flight?”
“You’re supposed to leave at midnight.” Talbot looked at his watch. “You’ve got plenty of time, even with airport security the way it is. After all, it’s not like you’re going commercial. Do I need to try and reschedule?”
“No.” I squeezed my fist as tight as I could, watching as bits of glass, wood, and plastic rose to the surface, pushed out by my regenerative process. Two years ago, I would have thanked Lord Phillip for the use of his plane without a second thought, but nowadays, the idea that I didn’t know exactly what was in it for Phil made me nauseous. But I’d promised Tabitha a honeymoon in Paris, and that’s what she got. “Go back to the Pollux and make sure Beatrice doesn’t need any help getting her stuff together.”
“I thought Rachel was—”
I glared at him.
“Right. You sure you don’t want me to stay?”
I shook my head.
Talbot left.
Ten minutes later, I heard
heavy footfalls in the hall. Okay, to be fair, I heard the three oni talking to each other in the elevator on the way up too. Yeah. My hearing isn’t quite at Superman’s level, but it’s good.
A check for sixty thousand dollars was sitting on top of the television. I got it, opened the door, and smiled at the three oni. For triplets, they sure looked different. Not one of them had the same number of horns or eyes, or the same skin color.
“What now?” one of them asked.
“Now we see if she’s going to go through with it or not.”
Three Japanese ogres waited in the hallway. A magician whose soul I’d saved waited in the bathroom. My wife waited, even though she didn’t know she was waiting. We all waited.
Two minutes later, I heard Rachel’s heartbeat outside on the sidewalk several stories down. It’s not the sort of thing I usually notice, but I was specifically listening for her. Her heart was pounding; she was out of breath. Concentrating, I heard her exchange words with someone briefly. Was she checking for messages? Saying hello?
As the sun set outside, Rachel came up in the elevator.
“It’s okay,” I heard Rachel whisper to herself. “I’ve got time.”
With a clunk and a swish, the elevator doors opened and I could smell the werewolf blood. See? Now that’s just clever. Werewolves were out to get me again, so why not vanish her sister and make it look like the werewolves did it and Tab got a few good shots in before they took her down? Rachel could even guilt-trip me over the whole thing for not forcing Tabitha awake and taking her with me for the day.
“Okay, guys. We’ve got to do this fast. Like five-minute-meal fast.”
She slid the key through the card reader, sending whatever magic codes were needed to signal the hotel’s security system to unlock the door. Shouldering it open, she stepped into the room, looking over her shoulder at the oni and unscrewing the top of the blood-filled jug she was carrying.
“I can see why Talbot calls you Shenanigans,” I announced, stepping forward into the patch of light that spilled through the open doorway.
Werewolf blood ran out of the plastic jug when it hit the carpet, creating a slick, growing puddle. Strong and bitter, the scent cut right through the other smells in the room.
“Lucy,” said one of the oni in his best Ricky Ricardo imitation, “you got some ’splaining to do.” The others laughed and Rachel tried to run.
“Stop.” Though spoken softly, I made it a command, and Rachel froze with such violence that she looked like a dog that’d just run full speed to the end of its leash and had been surprised by the sudden stop at the end. Rachel fell backward into the blood puddle, the rich liquid soaking into her hair.
“No magic.” Another command. “Don’t move.”
“I can explain. Eric. Master, I can explain.”
Fang, I called for him with my mind and felt his engine start in response. Get your undercarriage up here.
“I’d like to hear all about it.” My hand closed around her throat and I picked her up, carrying her across the room at arm’s length. Ripping the window treatment down with my left hand, I broke the window with Rachel. Glass rained down onto the street and sidewalk below, some of it shattering into even smaller pieces as it struck Fang’s windshield. Rachel’s eyes widened at the sight of my Mustang rolling up the hotel’s exterior wall in a tire-gripping defiance of gravity.
“No,” she choked. “Please. Let me explain.”
Bright light flared from the butterfly tattoo on her cheek, and I sensed her trying to pull free of my control. It’s been decades since my sinuses hurt. Pressure built, but I fought back, reaching out for her along my link and holding tight. Her tattoo sizzled, the skin darkening like a brand. She winced against the pain and I stopped pushing.
“I turn a blind eye to a lot of shit, Rachel.” Fang came to a stop over the window, and I wondered just what the Veil of Scrythax would make people think they saw. Would they simply believe they were seeing a movie stunt? A line of smiley-face stickers stared at me from Fang’s undercarriage and someone (obviously Greta) had written “OK I LUV YOU BYE-BYE!” in blue sparkly paint pen underneath them. “I really do, but this? You think you can explain this? Tell me if I have it all wrong somehow, but you mind-raped my wife and forced her to engage in a . . . honeymoon gang bang and then, when you got caught out, you decided to feed her, your sister, to oni and blame it on the werewolves. Did I miss anything?”
“He was right,” Rachel whispered.
“Who was right?”
“You.” She stopped struggling even as I pushed her back against Fang, the line of smiley faces peeking out at me behind her shoulders. “You’re right about everything. And I’m sorry.”
“What?” I let her go at the word sorry, but she didn’t drop. Her body clung to the metal, and I kind of wished Fang would go ahead and eat her, but he knows me too well. Apologies are one of my weaknesses. And like I said, I’ll give anyone a free pass. Up till now Rachel hadn’t used hers. I didn’t even think she knew how to call it in, but—
“At the wedding, I tried to talk Tabitha into giving you a three-way, just once for your honeymoon as an extra special kinky surprise and she hit me with her vampire strength. It spun me around into the sink and when she walked over to me, I . . . I just reacted.” Tears flowed down Rachel’s cheeks. Crocodile or not, they were convincing. “I struck out and took her over with the dark tantra. I meant to let her go, right after, but you seemed to have such a good time that I thought I’d hold on to her until after the honeymoon. She’s not hurt, just incredibly uninhibited and suggestible.”
I turned my back on her.
“When I thought Talbot was going to find out, I freaked and decided to cover it all up. Magbidion’s good enough that even if I let her go, I was afraid he’d figure out what happened. I wasn’t plotting against you, Eric. I wasn’t in league with anybody. I promise. I fucked up. I fucked up bad, but I’m sorry and it won’t happen again. I swear. I swear to whoever you want me to swear to.”
At the door, Tiko and the boys waited eagerly. “You’re not going to let the car eat her, are you?” one of them asked.
“You can go, boys. Thanks for coming.”
I shut the door and listened to the sounds of their grumbling departure, subconsciously amazed that the elevator was strong enough to hold their combined weight. Oni are heavy. Behind me, my sister-in-law sobbed and I did not smell cinnamon. With the window broken, the odor of Tabitha’s corpse sweat was fading and I could detect the acrid scent of burnt electronics. In the bathroom, Magbidion was taking a piss.
I was going to let Rachel go. I had her dead to rights, caught red-handed attempting the unforgivable, but I was going to let her go because she said she was sorry. If you look up “gullible fucktard” in the dictionary, I’ll be right there waving at you.
“You ever watch Lost in Space?”
“What?” Eyes red and puffy, Rachel blinked at me between sobs.
“I watched a lot of TV the first few years after I got turned. Lost in Space was on that first year. They had a robot and spaceships. It blew my mind, plus it had this gal, Marta Kristen, playing Judy Robinson. I lusted after that woman.”
Rachel did that whole body shake and snuffle that happens to little kids when they’ve been all-out sobbing and have barely managed to stop and might start up again at any moment.
“But the character you remind me of is Doctor Smith. He was a constant pain in their ass, always getting them into trouble, trying to sell them out to aliens, the whole spiel, but Doctor Robinson would never kill him and he never let Major West kill him either, no matter what kind of shenanigans he got up to.”
I pulled her off the car with a sound like tearing sheets of Reynolds Wrap apart.
“You have three choices.” I held up a finger. “One. You can stop being my thrall and go do your own thing. If you do that, you need to leave Void City and stay the hell out of my business.” She shook her head and I held up a second finger. “Two. Yo
u can stay my thrall, but no more of this crap, no hitting on me, no using the dark tantra thing on me or Greta or Talbot or Tabitha . . . or the girls . . . not even on Fang. No ‘accidentally’ letting me see you naked. None of it. And if I catch you out, just once, one sniff of cinnamon when there isn’t any real cinnamon around, one slipup, and option three”—I pointed at Fang, still parked over the window—”is the last thing you’ll ever see.”
“Two,” she coughed.
Yeah, I thought, no shit option two.
“What about Tabitha?” Rachel asked after a second. “What do we tell her?”
“Mags,” I yelled at the bathroom. “Can you alter a vampire’s memory?”
“I’d need help. Vlads are a little too strong for me alone.” He looked at Rachel. “With her help, I could fix it.”
I knew I was making a mistake, but I didn’t want to have to tell Tabitha that I almost fed her sister to my car, and I didn’t want to tell her about the first night of our honeymoon either. This way, I could pretend like it never happened. It was easy. Stupid, but easy . . . and I’m good at both.
“Help him, but no foolishness. I want her ready to fly to Paris with me and Beatrice.”
Rachel bristled at that, but she was wise enough not to question it. “Eric?”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t you just order me to do all those things, like make it a master-thrall command?”
“Because then you’d be my slave and I don’t do slaves. You have free will. Use it. Now get it done.”
I walked out of the hotel room, out of the hotel itself, and met Fang down on the sidewalk. John Paul Courtney was sitting in the passenger’s seat. “I’m prou—”
“Shut up!” I snapped.
Fang played “Born to Lose” by Ray Charles and I told him to shut up, too.
11
ERIC:
DA PLANE! DA PLANE!
Get on a plane and fly to Paris. Simple, right? It should have been. Everything was arranged. A midnight departure meant that with the twelve-hour flight and the seven-hour time zone change we ought to show up in Paris while it was dark outside. My not-so-blushing bride was all packed. I was all packed. Even Beatrice was all packed. Our passports had been taken care of (courtesy of Lord Phillip) and for the first time in four-plus decades, my identification even had the right last name on it. Rachel didn’t show up to see us off, which got on Tabitha’s nerves, but I thought it was a good call. Whatever it takes to keep you out of trouble, yeah?
