by J. F. Lewis
Waiting in line at the ticket booth, I’d heard how much money the tickets cost and my mom had begun to complain that we couldn’t afford it, but Dad had bought us all five-day Park Hopper passes, the kind that never expire.
I remember having seen a topiary shaped like Mickey Mouse as we headed to the Ferry Boat. I’d been sure something bad was going to happen. The boat would sink and we’d all die in the Seven Seas Lagoon. But we hadn’t. Rachel had leaned over the side, smiling down at the water, and I’d walked up to the top level, admiring the palm trees and eyeing the resorts in awe.
When Eric asked me to marry him, and when I said yes, when I asked him where we were going for our honeymoon, I think I was hoping he’d say Disney World and that we’d stay at the Polynesian or the Contemporary Resort. Little did I realize when he said Paris that, in a way, it was the same thing.
As we’d passed through the turnstiles and walked under the train station, I had broken into a run. I’d ignored Main Street USA completely, running by the re-creation of old-time Americana, and had stumbled. I’d caught myself on a bench and run into the street, darting past a horse-drawn trolley. Mom had called my name, anger clear in her voice, but Dad’s laughter had spurred me on. I’d passed the ice cream parlor, heading into the square, and I hadn’t stopped until I was standing in the little park area where Main Street makes a circle, and I’d been able to see the whole thing.
“Well, what do you think?” Dad’s hand had touched my shoulder.
Behind him, farther back, I’d heard Rachel complaining. “We’re just going to have to walk back to get our picture taken.”
“It’s okay.” I’d been so full of teenage cool. Embarrassment had colored my cheeks at the thought of how I’d raced across the park. Going ga-ga for fantasy castles didn’t go with the black polish on my nails.
“Okay, huh?” Dad said.
He’d hugged me and, despite a plaintive cry of “Da-aad,” I’d hugged him back.
James, Eric’s war buddy, touched my shoulder as I eyed the real thing. The so-called dungeon looked more like a sand castle than a Disney castle. The outer wall was made from sections of small stone divided by narrow sections of larger stone in a pattern that looked a little like columns. I would have done that bit with seashells. The wall was topped with a roofed walkway, which stuck out a bit, and had a round tower with a cone-shaped roof at each corner, even though the base of the thing was square. On the side closest to me, four towers framed the drawbridge, with two short guard towers in front, and two taller towers set into the main wall behind. I couldn’t really see the moat yet, but from the gap between the guard towers and the entrance towers, I guessed it was wide. Inside the wall, an impressively large keep rose at least fifty feet into the air. As a sand castle, it could have been built tall and rectangular, and then had a big round tower placed around each corner. It seemed to me that King Arthur might have designed Camelot to look something like this. . . . It wasn’t ornate and lacy like the chapel, but it was pretty in a functional way.
I crossed the courtyard, walked the edge of the moat, and looked down into the murky water, not yet ready to cross the bridge into the stronghold proper. “What do you think?” James asked.
I watched Eric disappear over the edge of the donjon, surprised to see his reflection in the water. Magic water. Magic castle. Why shouldn’t it show a vampire’s reflection if it wanted?
“It’s beautiful, the second most wonderful castle I’ve ever seen.”
“Where was the first?”
My lips drew into a smile. “Disney World.”
We crossed the bridge and I saw a man sitting atop the wall. He wore a long leather duster and had a polearm of some kind slung over his shoulder and a pistol on his hip in a holster strapped on over his jeans. Long black hair hung in a braid that draped over his right shoulder down to his waist. His face was one of those movie-star faces, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses with silver frames. Casually smoking a cigarette, the man let his feet dangle over the edge at the top of the covered walkway that comprised the top section of an exterior wall protecting the donjon proper. Next to him, a trumpet gleamed in the moonlight.
“Who is that?”
“Christian,” Aarika answered. “He’s Lord Isaac’s paladin. He’s maintaining the wards this year.”
“What do you mean? He’s powering them?”
“Maintaining.” Luc broke in when it was clear Aarika wasn’t going to answer my question. “The wards themselves are powered by Scrythax. A maintenance person guides them . . . acts as a controller.”
“What would have happened if he hadn’t let Eric through?”
“I don’t think he did let the vampire through.” Aarika nudged James in the arm. “When was the last time you saw Christian smoking?”
“Maybe one of the Elders overruled him.” James studied Christian for a moment. “He doesn’t look happy.”
“Ho, Christian,” Luc called up at the immortal. Christian responded with a simple nod and a gesture to “come ahead.”
Moving through the wards felt like walking through a fine mist. Gooseflesh rose on my skin, subsiding as we passed through the doors into the courtyard. The stone bridge continued beyond the wall, and my view opened up on the interior courtyard. Steep stairs led down from the walls to the lower courtyard, but the bridge led only one way, straight into the donjon, and we soon entered the meeting room.
Then I saw the head.
Three catlike faces were all attached to the same oversized head. The angle of feline faces allowed the head to be held level by the jaws of each open mouth. Its eyes were closed, the lids sunken in as if there were nothing left behind them. The tan fur was matted and tangled, even missing in spots, laying bare the shriveled muscle underneath. Dried blood was at its base where the head had been severed from the trunk. The gruesome thing was displayed on a stone pedestal in the center of a U-shaped table upon which laptops were scattered in various stages of active, screen-savered, or hibernating.
Several normal-looking guys and gals were standing about, broken up into little cliques—not a very united front. They stopped talking as we entered and turned to face us.
“Wait a minute.” I stopped, forcing Beatrice to halt as well or ram into me from behind. I walked up to the edge of the table, not wanting to walk into the open space and stand too close to the decapitated head. I pointed. “You want me to touch that?”
“Upon the conclusion of a three-day assessment, assuming you are found acceptable by the Council.” One of them, a fat man who looked like he belonged at a nerd convention, stepped away from the slight, swarthy brunette with whom he’d been conversing.
“Acceptable?”
“Do you agree to undergo a thirty-six-hour assessment, at the end of which you will, if found acceptable, be allowed to swear the Oath and join the Treaty of Secrets?”
I thought about it. If I said no . . . no honeymoon in Paris. Back to Void City. “What happens if I fail?”
“Luc, if you wouldn’t mind escorting our errant Emperor down to join the rest of us?” An Asian boy, who looked like puberty might hit any day, gestured up at the ceiling. He wore a white T-shirt with some kind of robot dragons on the front, camo pants held up by a studded leather belt, a black hoodie, and a pair of those Tatsu Ne sneakers from Onmyoda that I only recognized because Greta had asked for some and had been mad that this exact shoe didn’t come in pink.
“Of course, Se Fue.” Luc bowed and took off at a fast walk.
“Se Fue?” I whispered over my shoulder to Beatrice. “What is that, Japanese for ‘little brother’?”
“It’s Chinese for ‘teacher.’” The young boy stepped toward me and smiled. “Not all of us become immortal at the same age, and few of us find it uncomfortable to dress according to the age of our bodies.”
“Do I have to call you Se Fue?”
A smile broke across his face. “Only if you want me to teach you how to fight. In twenty-five years, you’d have mastered th
e basics.”
“No thanks. I’m on my honeymoon.”
“Then you may call me Ji.”
Beatrice slipped past me to get a better look at the head. “Why does it look so human?”
“What?”
“The head.” Beatrice gestured at it. “It’s just a decapitated human head. Why is it so powerful?”
“The Head of Scrythax is actually quite alien-looking.” Aarika crossed the room as she spoke, moving closer to a blond man wearing a tailored business suit. “It takes remarkable concentration for even a supernatural being to see it as it actually is. It took me years.”
“Or a being who is truly noble at heart,” Master Ji corrected her. “Such beings cannot be fooled by Scrythax’s huan xiang, his illusions. One of the tests we administer early on is to see what appearance Scrythax takes for you. It—”
All of the immortals looked up at once, stepping back to their places.
Eric came into the room, Luc trailing behind him. “His brain glows?” Eric squinted and kept walking, sparing the assembled immortals little more than a glance.
I looked at the head more closely. His brain?
“Guy looks like he was designed by H. R. Giger . . .”
Who?
And then it moved.
The noses sneezed in unison, sending puffs of dust out from under the head and out of its nostrils and mouths. The eyelids of each face opened with the sound of squeaky shoes on tile to reveal empty sockets. People moved around me, but Beatrice and I stared openmouthed at the head as the cat lips closed and opened in unison. The withered pink tongues became moist and supple again.
“Does my nose deceive me”—each word seemed to come from all three mouths—”or do I smell a Courtney?”
33
ERIC:
SMELLS LIKE COURTNEY SPIRIT
Great,” I said as I tried to pop my claws and went uber vamp instead, “the fucking decap-a-Muppet is talking to me.” Once again the transformation from human-sized to extra-large felt good, natural, like slipping on a favorite jacket. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. My body should have felt like it was expanding, like an overfilled balloon, and that fundamental wrongness worried me as much as the talking head.
My wings knocked Luc down, taking him in the chest and hurling him back into the wall. He’d been standing too close. Immortals shifted left, right, and sideways, donning their combat armor. Weapons appeared, flowing out of the coalesced energy I’d seen surrounding them all. The Asian kid stood out the most, going from punked-out anime clothes to a Hello Kitty gi and a yellow headband. I can’t say which got me more, the gi or the fact that his hair was dyed a vibrant shade of blue.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” I was talking about the kid, but it was the demon who commented.
“Quite unlikely, as I’m currently unaware of the location of my anus.” The inner row of teeth moved independently of the outer row; it made my flesh crawl to see it. The immortals were frozen in place. Of course they were. They swore oaths on a demon head. “Now . . . I’ve taken the liberty of halting our—”
“I’m not talking to you,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
Tabitha backed away from the table, claws out. She took a position in front of Beatrice, instinctively protective of her. “Eric, what’s going on?”
I wondered if she guarded Beatrice because she was my thrall, because she was human, or because she was a possible food source.
“Eric?”
How do you explain to your twentysomething wife (vampire or otherwise) that you’re sober for the first time since you met her and nothing makes sense the way it used to? That you’re still you, but you’re also something that went to sleep a long time ago, something that woke up when the magic went away. That you’re a vampire, but you’re also a boy who went to war, a man who went back for more, and a guy who just married the wrong woman, because the right one died? That you have a piece of a demon in your chest? That the magic castles and the immortals don’t feel like magic—they just make you tired? Is there any good way? I looked for the words and the only thing that came was this: I could have told Marilyn.
Oh, boo-frickin’-hoo, I told myself. Why don’t you go cry all over Scrythax?
“Eric, are you okay?”
“Yes, Mr. Courtney”—double jaws clicked and clacked, flashing as the demon spoke—”are you feeling well?”
My heart beat twice.
“You felt that quite well, I would imagine.”
So my theory about the thing in my chest being the Eye of Scrythax seemed pretty likely if he could use the damn thing to make my heart beat.
“Stop it.” A leap and a series of wingbeats brought me to the center of the room. Despite the pedestal, my uber vamp form towered over Scrythax. “You want your eye back? If you tricked me into bringing it to you, then fine. Tell me how to get it out and you can have it.”
“Tricked?” The demon’s eyelids narrowed, a glimmer of light visible between the slits. “No. I have tricked no one. Nor do I desire the return of either eye at this time.”
“You have one of this thing’s eyes?” Tabitha continued backing away from the head, making sure I was between it and her.
“Then what do you want?”
“I want many things, but mostly I desire a conversation with one of my champions.”
“Who the hell are your champions?”
“Why, you are, Eric; you and one other from Void City.” Its horns skritched on the stone pedestal, skittering like the legs of a centipede, moving it back as if it wanted a better look at me.
“I’m not your champion, Scrythax.”
“Of course you are. You’re a Courtney. You are all my champions. Did you not stop the plot in El Segundo and save the world?”
“I barely remember that.”
“You could always turn into a revenant. Your noncorporeal form is not possessed of the same ailment your physical body possesses.”
“What ailment? I’ve got a bad memory. I was embalmed and—”
“Embalming had nothing to do with it, Eric. True, Lord Phillip’s counter-enchantment, the one that hid you from Lisette, also played merry hell with your powers, but surely we both know full well your problem is altogether different—or do you truly not recall that even in your last few years of life, you’d begun to have difficulty recalling your personal history, keeping facts straight, remembering little details?”
No, I didn’t remember that either—which didn’t exactly prove anything. “So what’s your diagnosis, if you know so damned much?”
“You have what humans refer to as early-onset Alzheimer’s, Mr. Courtney, or something very much resembling it.” I must have looked stricken, because the demon frowned as much as its features would allow. “I apologize if it comes as something of a shock, but I thought you knew.”
“That’s bullshit. I was embalmed. I—”
“Embalming stops the resurrection process. Having survived it, a vampire of your stature shouldn’t have had any further side effects.”
“I don’t have Alzheimer’s.” I shrank to human size; the transformation hurt, like cramming your feet into a pair of shoes that don’t fit. “Tabitha”—I looked back at her—“you don’t think I have Alzheimer’s, do you?”
Her face told me everything I needed to know. It was the oh-poor-baby look. “What’s my maiden name, Eric?”
“Smith.”
“Sims,” she corrected.
“That doesn’t prove—”
“What was Marilyn’s last name?”
“Robinson.”
“Perfect.” She winced. “Hers you remember. What about this one? How did Kyle die?”
“Who the fuck is Kyle?”
Tabitha touched my cheek. “Your son? You made him at the same time you made Greta.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t make any—” A sound on a telephone, a rush of air, like a vampire being dusted. I remembered that sound and attached it to a name. �
��Kyle. Damn. Was he the one who died out front of the Pollux, the one who set me up?”
“No, that was Roger.”
“No, Roger was my best friend . . .” Roger yelling at me outside of the Pollux, so bitter and angry that it was easy to let it wash away once he was gone.
My face must have said it all, or maybe Scrythax was using his eye to read my mind. “Now you remember.”
I dug around in my pocket for my cell phone. “Beatrice, how do I call the States?”
“Talbot programmed it into your phone.” She stepped out from behind Tabitha. Her heat hit me like the opening of an oven that’s kicked up to baking temperature. “Why?”
“I need him to fly out here and eat this asshole.”
The demon’s laugh was clear and brilliant. “And the other Infernatti wonder why I find live humans to be so wonderful.”
“I ain’t alive.”
“Yes, you are.” Scrythax’s eyelid closed, the eyebrow ridges rising on the left side and flattening on the right like overexpressive eyebrows expressing sly thoughts. “A tiny little light of life, to be sure, but it’s there. It had to be there for you to be an Emperor, and it will remain until you undergo postmortem stress and surrender to undeath completely. You are two kinds of undead at once, which can only happen when the soul is in flux at the point of death but not wholly beyond. This is why you’ve continued to age, albeit slowly, and why . . . What does he answer to now? Talbot did you say?”
He clucked that putrid tongue of his and sighed a happy sigh, sending more dust pouring off the pedestal. “This is why Talbot has gone to such lengths to ensure that you do not undergo true postmortem stress. He’s afraid it would ruin you. I know better, of course, but it’s very sweet.”
“What do you want?” I brushed an errant dust bunny off my shirt.
“From you?”
“No, from the fucking Easter Bunny.” I uber vamped again without meaning to, and it felt so nice I almost hit a knee. “Yes, from me.”
