by Declan Finn
The muscles holding Marco's smile up tightened visibly. “You mean it's always useful to have someone like me? Yes, I'm sure it is.”
Before Lily could face a full verbal onslaught, Marco's cell phone rang. He pulled it from his inside jacket pocket and flipped it open quickly. “Speak.”
“Yeah, it's Vega. I got two of my guys in the area already, one visiting his abuela. You know Roman?”
“I believe so. Big guy, army family? Marines tossed him out after he spent six tours in whatever sandbox they'd let him play in?”
“That's him.”
“Good. If the cops swing by, tell them that the attackers were scared off.” Marco thought a moment, switching from rage to his plan. There were a bunch of annoying drug pushers who ended up in the East River after graduation, and they hadn't surfaced yet–Marco had wrapped them thoroughly. “Give them the description of those guys from early last summer.”
“I can do that. Anything else?”
“No.” Marco looked straight at Lily as he spoke into the phone. “I'm leaving.”
Marco closed the phone with a snap as he turned and started down the stairs. He met Amanda's eye and nodded towards the direction of the subway.
He was halfway down the stairs when Lily called out, “I never meant to hurt you!”
Marco stopped dead on the last step, and looked over his shoulder at her. “Leaving me without a word was your choice. You can associate with whomever you like. Telling everyone at Xavier I was a freak, though; that proves I can't trust you. Ever. And that I shouldn't have trusted you to start with.”
Marco and Amanda started walking again.
When they were two blocks away, Amanda said, “She really wants you back.”
“So?”
“She might repent.”
“So?”
“She is cute.”
“So?”
“You have anything else to say?”
“Nope.” Marco walked in silence for a few moments. “She stabbed me in the back so hard, the sword tip came out my chest. I'll never trust her again after such an egregious violation. But just because I don't like her doesn't mean I want to see her dead.”
* * * *
“So, why are they putting this much energy into you?” Amanda asked once they were back on the train.
Marco frowned, and leaned back in the seat. “I'm not sure. Okay, fine, Nissin may have hated my guts, but that's no reason for anyone in a vampire hierarchy to believe the newest person in the gang when he started ranting. It's probably because they sent a guy after my father, and he didn't come back. Add Nissin saying that I did it, they probably figured out that something was wrong, and then, tag, I'm it.”
“Which leads to another troubling 'something.' ”
“Which is?”
“That there is a hierarchy,” she said, making it sound like higher-arr-key.
“Wasn't that implied by the way they've been organized?”
She raised a brow, a small amused smile on the edge of her lips. “With networked intelligence? Nyet, this is more organized.”
Marco considered it a moment. “You have a point. Which means we're probably in even more trouble, and we need to step up training on the gangs, and…”
Amanda frowned. “And…?”
“This is too much without someone noticing.” Marco stared at the subway map in front of him, his eyes losing focus as he concentrated on the matter at hand. “It's not like we're the only ones on the planet with a brain cell between us, right? This is too organized without prior experience. This has happened before, and I'd bet a lot of times before. That's not possible without someone seeing something.”
She nodded, but said nothing. She bit her lip, gazing at the same map as Marco.
After a long moment of silence, he finally turned to her.
“What?” she asked.
“Under the heading of someone who could have noticed something like this happening before, there happens to be someone right next to me who's been around a while.”
“I’m not from New York, remember.”
“But what do you know about this kind of thing happening anywhere?”
“Hmm…I have heard of this before,” she said slowly. “On occasion. It happens. But not enough for someone to be this proficient. There are usually villagers with pitchforks involved.”
Marco chuckled a little, but then his smile faded, disappearing with fatigue. “Oh, please, this is New York at the dawn of the twenty-first century. No one believes in vampires, the supernatural, God. We’re living in one great, big, atheistic culture. Go to San Francisco and they'll believe in practically anything. But this is New York. You might as well have a muezzin with a call to prayer of Dawkins-hu Akbar, so you can get all of the atheists to come and talk about how they hate everybody.”
“You do not like atheists?”
“Oh, I don't care about atheists, one way or another. I'm a Libertarian Catholic. My God is quite forgiving; if you're going to go to Hell, you more or less have to put some effort into it. As for me, you leave me alone, I leave you alone. I mind people who inflict their beliefs on me when I'm leaving them the hell alone. This includes everybody who tells me my religion is harming them even though I've never met them before. They can go screw themselves.”
“Okay, point taken. And this relates to our vampire issue, how?”
“My point is that whoever did this knows that no one in New York is going to think 'vampire' except as a last resort. Even then, there are a whole slew of people who would shrug it off and ignore the whole thing. Most of Manhattan, I suspect. Still, someone has to have noticed this sort of thing before, somewhere, somewhen. You know of anyone in particular?”
“There is Mikhail, but anything I know about him is rumor.”
He nodded, his eyes closed. Fatigue was starting to set in already…had he burned through that much of the vampire virus in his system, or was it just the adrenaline letdown? Also, it was a metaphysical virus, so maybe his emotional drama was a physical drain.
Any other day he would have pressed for details on this Mikhail, but not today. Not now.
“So, not a close personal friend. Understood.” He rolled over onto his side. “I think I want to go home right now, stay in bed, and not get up for a day.”
Amanda smiled. “I am not going to object.”
“Didn't think you would. I'm also a semester ahead on all of my reading, so I should be good as far as classes go.”
“Ah.”
Marco sighed, and closed his eyes. “Would you like to stay with me?”
Amanda blinked, a little shocked. “What?”
“I have blackout curtains in the house somewhere. I wouldn't mind…you know, if you just stayed over. Slept a little.” He opened one eye to look at her, and smiled weakly. “Only sleeping, obviously.”
She finally took a breath. “I would like to, but I do not have my earth with me.”
There was a moment of silence. One traditional “rule” that most vampire fiction ignored was the requirement that vampires sleep in the dirt of their native land. In the case of Amanda, she was old enough that she didn't need to sleep with buckets of Earth in, on, and around her. She used Ziploc bags for the last twenty years. Though she had plenty of Russian soil over in a warehouse on Long Island.
Marco frowned. “That was one rule I never understood. Why the dirt?”
“At a guess…I have nyet idea.”
“Oh well.” Marco closed his eyes. “I'm just wondering why there isn't someone else who's caught on. I mean, hell, who would have caught on after a while? Granted, that needs an organization that's been around for years, who file reports, keep them over time, have people who analyze stuff that is so out of date it's virtually obsolete…”
Marco's eyes snapped open, and he sat up straight. “We need a church.”
Amanda cocked her head to one side. “Anyone in particular?”
“Catholic, of course. They're the only ones I know with a
long-term headquarters…and I'm not walking into a synagogue with a rosary wrapped around my neck.”
Amanda nodded as the train came to a stop. “I presume that you wish to wait for morning?”
Marco glanced at his watch. “Yeah, I can't imagine a rectory that's going to like me knocking on their door at this hour.” He stood as the door opened. “At least come with me? I'm sure my father would like to say hello, assuming he's home.”
“Sure. Why not?”
They exited to the fresh night air of the Brooklyn street. Marco wondered what it smelled like to a vampire. With a burst of speed, the two of them made it to Marco's door in moments, mostly because they could.
He skidded to a stop just before the first step, and Amanda left some shoe rubber on the sidewalk.
Officer Donald “Duck” Tolbert was passed out next to the stoop, his blue uniform covered in blood.
Chapter Thirteen: Elementary, My Dear Dracula
Amanda remembered Officer Donald “Duck” Tolbert from the Christmas dinner with Marco and the Catalano family. The large black officer had the air of a minister, and smelled good enough to eat. A blood-type A-positive, and a good vintage, too.
Now, he looked quite different. His blue uniform shirt was covered in blood, his face slashed, his call radio crushed. His gun lay next to him, the slide locked open and empty.
Marco knelt next to him, felt for a pulse, surprised when he found one. “It's actually quite good. What do you think?”
Amanda took a deep breath, then listened a moment. “By the coagulation, he has been here for two hours, maybe more. It looks worse than it is.”
“He should have been home three hours ago. His, not mine.”
“How often does he drop by?”
“Often enough that he could have been off-duty when he arrived here.” He moved and grabbed one arm, Amanda grabbed the other, and they both hauled Tolbert to his feet.
He looked across Tolbert at Amanda. “All this blood isn't affecting you?”
“Only the way you would look at food after spending all day at a buffet.”
Marco winced. “Try not to vomit on him, then.”
Maneuvering Tolbert up the stairs was easy. Marco quickly unlocked the door, and relocked it while Amanda carried the cop into the sitting room. “Look after him,” he whispered. “I'm going to go see if anyone is awake. If not, I'll patch Donald up myself.”
After a quick walk through, Marco couldn't find the lights on in any part of the house aside from the main hall. He muttered a silent curse, and went directly for the first aid kit.
He returned to the sitting room, and found that Amanda was already washing the blood away. It seemed the source of most of the blood was the massive gash alongside Tolbert's head.
Amanda tossed some damp, blackish-red paper towels into the garbage. “No pun intended,” she began, saying it like in ten did, “but it will suck to be him in the morning.”
Marco nodded, and moved closer. Suddenly Officer Tolbert sat up with a start and a shout, making even Amanda flinch.
Tolbert's eyes looked around, taking in the scenery.
“I don't remember getting inside the house.”
“You didn't,” Marco told him. “You got to the stairs. You'll be fine, though. What hit you?”
“Something weird.”
Marco's mouth bunched up. “Yes, that's helpful. Because nothing 'weird' ever happens in New York.”
Tolbert gave Marco a look that told the student that the cop would be quite all right. Maybe even better after kicking Marco's ass. “I shot a creep. Two of them. They were attacking a guy in the street. I drew down. I told them to freeze. Then they tossed something at me, threw my aim off. I got one of them in the throat, should’ve taken his head clean off. Then he…sort of just…was gone. Just…gone. I think I emptied most of the rest of my magazine into the second guy. Bam, same thing. Though I think he took three rounds in the head. It was like a freaking monster movie.”
Marco and Amanda exchanged a glance. “Amanda, can I speak with you a moment, please?”
The two moved to the doorframe, standing on the threshold. “Should we tell him?” he asked. “Or should we pass it off as him taking a hit to the head?”
Tolbert groaned. “Guys, I'm brain-damaged, not deaf. Are you guys trying to avoid telling me there are vampires? Because, right now, I would accept that as an explanation.”
The two of them turned to look at him at the same time.
“Sorry?” Marco asked.
Tolbert slowly swung his feet off the couch onto the floor. “There are a whole bunch of people being attacked, at night, with the only wounds being bite marks along the major veins. There are attackers who become dusty when you blow their head off. How stupid do you people think I am?” He slowly raised a palm and pressed it into his eye, rubbing as though trying to keep it from popping out of his head. “My problem is that I couldn't prove this around the station house. I tell anyone, they're going to put me into a rubber room for eval.”
The two of them exchanged another look.
Tolbert looked at them, then rolled his eyes and sighed. “You to want to tell me something else now, or are you going to have a conversation without letting me in on it?”
“The DVD?” she asked.
Marco nodded.
Tolbert stood up. “The what now?”
“We have a DVD of a disintegrating vampire,” he told the cop. “The problem is that you can do anything on a laptop nowadays.”
Amanda nodded. “Exactly. You would have to have it verified as true in forensics, but then, how do you control the flow of information?”
“It gets out, people start being set on fire,” Marco noted.
“Goths being shot with arrows in the street,” Amanda added.
“Environmentalist lawyers trying to make vampires an endangered species.”
Both the vampire and the police officer looked at Marco. “Really?” Tolbert asked. “Of all the bad things you think could happen, lawyers are in your top five?”
He shrugged. “My father's a doctor, so of course I hate lawyers. Lawyers are like the top ten evils of the universe, with evils number one through ten being different varieties of lawyers. But, unfortunately, I think they'd actually try that.”
Tolbert frowned. “Okay, I see your point. I've seen enough lawyers get career gang bangers off for fun and profit that I don't doubt a future where vampires are protected predators. But, yeah, we're going to have trouble selling this to anyone, no matter how much evidence we have. And if it was proven? Oy.”
“Just imagine if it got out to the general public.” Marco winced. “Keeping regular people still long enough to explain it to them, calmly, and reasonably, would require nailing them to the floor, locking their faces in place with a collar, and put them on Ritalin to control the ADD of the average New Yorker.”
Tolbert smiled. “Makes you wonder why they had to come here.”
Amanda laughed. “Really? Why not? Groups of people who walk around in the middle of the night, who are pale, and bloodless, and occasionally having red eyes?”
Marco nodded. “Sounds like a night in the Village, don't it? Not to mention you're talking about a heavily-populated area, with enough transients, illegal aliens, hookers, and organized criminals of various flavors that we might as well have a buffet line of people who won't be missed. Try having one strange murder in the middle of, oh, hell, Iowa.”
Amanda agreed. Goodness knows that’s why I’m here and not Iowa. I can’t draw attention to myself either. “In rural areas, people notice strange things. Would not be as easy to make people disappear as any neighborhood in five boroughs.”
“Yeah,” Tolbert said, “and rural areas generally don't have violent sociopaths like we do in Crown Heights and Brighton Beach. Oh, yeah, and some of our citizens carry machetes, and others routinely dismember victims. For fun. Not to mention various hazards of city life.”
Marco frowned. “True.” He glanced to Am
anda. “I don't think it's easy to fall on the third rail and burst into flames in the middle of Utah. Though if they ate a few Mormons, I wouldn't mind too much.”
The cop and the vampire gave Marco another look. He shrugged. “Have you ever met a door-to-door Mormon? Those guys are creepy. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and always perky and cheerful. I feel like they've always stepped out of an Ira Levine novel.”
“Stepford Wives,” she supplied. “Not with Nicole Kidman.”
Marco sighed, and shook his head. “Okay, I can prove to you Mormons are creepy in two words: sparkly vampires.”
Amanda hissed. “Do not even discuss those books.”
Tolbert rolled his eyes, and groaned in pain. “Ow…hey, guys, I should ask. How much work have you two been putting into this?”
“Enough to start putting together an anti-vampire army, and killing people in the middle of my clinic,” said Doctor Robert Catalano from the staircase, blue bathrobe wrapped tightly around him. He stopped on the bottom landing, and looked at the three of them in the sitting room.
“The next time you turn someone into a great big pile of dust in the middle of my micro lab, Marco,” his father said, “dispose of the clothing, and delete the digital backup on the security cameras.”
“Good to know, Dad,” Marco said, fidgeting nervously. “I'll take notes.”
Robert looked at Tolbert and nodded towards the living room. “Donald, I'm going to have the kids here move into the living room so they can have a chat, and we're going to start putting your head back together.”
He walked down the rest of the way, hands still in robe, and stopped between the two of them, and leaned over close.
At a very soft whisper, he said, “Shouldn't your girlfriend get home before sunrise? We'd hate for her to burst into flames in the middle of the sitting room. Insurance wouldn't cover it.”
* * * *
Amanda left for her evening classes. After Officer Tolbert was patched up and sent to bed in the guest room. Marco stayed up with his father in the kitchen.
Doctor Robert Catalano only started getting his hands under the water before Marco asked, “How?”
“To which part?” his father asked, not looking away from the soap.
