I passed by that section as quickly as I could, trying really hard to make 'la la la I can't hear you' noises as I did. Sally had, of course, set herself up in a comfy corner office from which to supposedly oversee the coven's paperwork. Yeah, OK, whatever she liked to call it; however, even a blind man could see she enjoyed playing queen bee. I normally wouldn't have cared, but despite my status as coven master, I didn't seem to have an executive suite here with my nameplate on it; however, considering the business going on just a few yards away, maybe that wasn't a bad thing. I lost enough sleep over it as it was.
I approached Sally's office and saw a familiar face seated outside of it. “Hey, Starlight! What's up?” I said as I approached. “How the hell did Sally sucker you into playing secretary for her?”
She looked up, flashed me a nervous smile, then quickly averted her eyes. “It's no problem, Bill. I don't mind helping,” she answered with a little quiver to her voice.
Starlight's real name was Alice. She had been given the name Starlight by Jeff as part of the ridiculous pseudonym campaign that he enforced for all vampires in the coven. That rule was the first thing I had tossed out the window, but a lot of the coven had preferred to keep their 'code names' regardless. Starlight was one of them.
She was a stacked...well, Nubian goddess is probably the best term for it. She had been working on a career as a model before being turned. Despite the fact that she appeared younger than my twenty-five years, I knew she was almost twice my age. She also wasn't the sharpest tool in our shed; however, despite an outer veneer of vampire attitude, she seemed to be one of the few amongst us who genuinely cared about her coven-mates. As a result, she was also one of the few that I genuinely liked. Unfortunately, due to the outer guise I had to keep up, she was also completely scared shitless of me. I kind of felt bad about it, but not nearly bad enough to let it slip that a lot of my bravado was bullshit. The rest of the coven could smell weakness like a school of sharks. I had little doubt they’d turn on me if they suspected that I wasn’t nearly the badass I tried to pretend to be.
I also had little doubt that Sally had used Starlight's fear of me to manipulate her into her current situation; however, there wasn't much I could do to fix that right now. Or maybe there was...
“I have business with Sally,” I said with a sneer. “Go take a coffee break...a long one.” I gave her a glare with my fangs bared, and that was all she needed to vacate the premises. As I watched Starlight run off, I heard Sally's door creak open behind me, followed by her annoyed exhale. Thanks to her vampire hearing, she no doubt knew what had happened. Heh!
“You know, I should report you for harassing my employees,” she said in a dry voice from behind me.
“Take it up with the labor board,” I shot back as I turned towards her. “You can always hire a temp.”
“True enough,” she answered, showing me a smile full of fangs. “Besides, if they don't work out...well, the severance plan is a killer.”
* * *
We spent the next hour or so going over various coven related business. She had the final tally of casualties from the fight with the HBC. Eight of our vampires were dusted. All of them were assholes, so I'd be shedding minimal tears on their behalf. Sally wanted to start recruiting new members immediately, but I put the kibosh on that until I got back. Since there were rituals involved with indoctrinating new members that I, as coven head, had to oversee (stupid college-like rituals...but rituals the same), this was one area I was confident that she wouldn't immediately set about doing the opposite of what I said.
We were finally starting to wrap up (Ye gods, even the dead can't escape from bureaucratic red tape!). When we were just about finished, I asked Sally, “So what should we tell the others?”
“About what?”
“About me,” I clarified.
“That you're a dumpy, four-eyed, piss-poor excuse for a vampire,” she said with that sickeningly sweet smile of hers.
“About my vacation!”
“Oh, that? I don't think there’ll be much problem there. Word of your victory over Samuel is already starting to spread throughout the membership.”
“Let me guess: you're helping that along, right?”
She smiled in response. “Well, I was the only witness, after all. Needless to say, I doubt too many of the coven are going to be bugging you about your personal business; however, just in case they do, we can fall back onto some of the typical Freewill bullshit we've used before. I was thinking, if it comes down to it maybe your animalistic urges got the better of you. I could always say I was busy trying to track your feral ass down for a couple of weeks.”
I thought about it for a second. “That'll work.”
“Just be sure to muddy yourself up a bit before you come back.”
“No prob,” I replied. “We done here?”
“Almost,” Sally cooed. Uh oh. “I was going to give you an update on the hotline.”
I stood up, almost knocking the chair over. “I told you! I don't want to know about the hotline.”
“You need to know about the hotline. Without the hotline, we'd be back to where we were. You were the one who forbade us from trolling the raves or luring in the uglies.”
I had (tried to) put an end to both practices in the coven. Both groups were easy prey. The first were mostly underage, which definitely didn't sit well with me. As for the second group, that was a particular pet peeve of mine as that was how I had wound up a vampire in the first place. In years past, every few weeks the males and females of the coven would take turns on a particularly reprehensible practice. The coven members mostly consisted of people who looked like they just stepped out of an Old Navy commercial. They would use their sexuality to easily sway the less...err...physically confident into following them back to the coven lair, where they would be turned into late night snacks.
As I knew she would, Sally next reminded me of the consequences of my attempts at de-psychoing our merry little band. “Even with the assholes the HBC took care of, there's still a lot of pent up bloodlust in the coven. It's either the hotline, or you're going to have a major body count on your hands.” It was a common argument from her, and one that she knew I couldn't refute.
The hotline had been all Sally's idea, but as coven head I had to pretend I had given it my blessing. The funny thing was, since the whole idea was so insanely evil at its core, it had actually enhanced my reputation in the coven. It's a good thing I didn't need nearly as much sleep as I used to because I sure as hell wound up losing a lot of it over this.
Sally had used coven funds to purchase several 1-800 and 900 numbers. Between sundown and sunrise, coven volunteers manned the phones of what was becoming a fairly well-trafficked suicide prevention hotline. The ground rules were disturbingly simple. It was pretty much Vegas casino odds, basically a 70/30 payout. Most of the people who called would actually be given help either through actually talking them through their troubles or outright giving them a minor compulsion over the phone (vampires can compel humans...just not as easily as they can other vampires). The rest...well, as Sally put it, they were the sad statistics of the world.
I had enough sway to insist that kids were off limits. Fortunately, there were no real arguments there from anyone. Adult bodies held more blood anyway. As for the rest...generally speaking, the coven went after two types via the hotline: The first were those who were genuinely going to do it anyway, regardless of intervention. The others were your basic attention whores, the latter being those types you read about standing on the edge of a bridge, snarling up traffic for three hours with constant cries of “I'm gonna do it!” until such time as they didn't. Truth be told, this latter group didn't bother me quite as much. There were enough assholes in the city as it were. Still, this was creepy ass business, and some days I would wrack my brain trying to come up with something better. I mean, think about it: there you are depressed and thinking dark thoughts. You call up a place to discuss your problems, only for it to turn o
ut that the voice at the other end was just sizing you up as an hors d'oeuvre. Not cool.
Sure, there was always bottled blood as a substitute. That worked for some of us. Unfortunately, a good chunk of the coven considered themselves to be active predators. They were actually blood snobs and didn't like anything that wasn't still warm and fresh. Psycho assholes! I either had to appease that need or try to stake each and every one of them. I didn't particularly favor my odds of doing the latter, thus I had to accept that part of being a vampire meant that there was a lot of shit I was going to have to toughen myself up about.
I shook my head to clear it. I might as well deal with this because Sally wasn't going to let me go until I did. “Fine. How’s the hotline doing?” I asked her through clenched teeth.
“It's doing great!” she replied with a chipper little voice. I could tell part of it was genuine enthusiasm. Sally had benefited greatly from Jeff's demise. Upon his death, she had been pretty much instantly promoted from his sex toy and part-time secretary to second in command of the coven. Behind the scenes, her position was even more powerful. I could tell she absolutely loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, I knew the other part of her cheerfulness came from knowing how uncomfortable the hotline made me. Sally derived way too much amusement from doing little things that she knew annoyed the ever not-living shit out of me.
“We got a mention in an editorial in the Post,” she continued. “And guess what else?”
“What?”
“We got approved as a nonprofit. That means government grants and a huge fucking tax break at the end of the year!”
“How do you sleep at night?” I sighed disgustedly.
She just kept right on beaming as she replied, “On a comfy bed, and usually next to guys much better looking than you.”
* * *
On the way back home, I had at least one bright spot about the hotline to think about: my roommate, Tom. I had kept both of my roommates up to date on the goings on in the vampire world, despite the fact that I wasn’t supposed to. They were two of my best friends, and I could use them as sounding boards when I needed to bitch about things. Besides which, they really loved the fact that there was an actual supernatural underworld that they were amongst the few humans to know about. With regards to the hotline, Ed had been as disgusted as I. Tom's response was more practical. He made it a point to crank call them every opportunity he got. It was mostly stupid shit, but he had made one or two that would have been Jerky Boys worthy. I knew it pissed off Sally, even if she didn't mention it; however, there was absolutely nothing she could do. I had made it a point amongst the coven to let them know that my friends and family were on the do not eat list. Considering that all the vampires in a twenty-mile radius thought I now had two master vampire dustings under my belt, I was fairly confident of not being crossed on this one. Tom could fuck with them to his heart's content, and he had my absolute approval.
However, my blessings to crank away had to wait. I got back to my apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and found only my other roomie, Ed, at home.
“How'd it go?” he asked as he greeted me, momentarily diverting his attention from the TV.
“About like you'd expect,” I answered. “Doesn't matter, though. I’m officially off the clock for a few weeks.”
“Cool. So what are you gonna do now that you're not Dr. Death?” he replied, bringing up my old coven pseudonym. Despite my having abolished the 'superhero name rule', as I liked to think of it, my roommates still used it to refer to the persona I had to keep up around the others. The funny thing was that I did, too. In my mind, Dr. Death was the dark beast inside of me who took care of the nasty business and wasn't one to fuck with. It was all crap, of course, but sometimes it helped me think through things.
“For starters, I think I'll be happy to sit back and not worry about monsters trying to kill me or me having to kill them.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said dismissively, turning back to his show.
“Tom out?” I asked, sitting down on the opposite side of the couch. Iron Chef was on. I could dig that.
“Yep. He actually has himself a date.”
“Really?” I asked with some surprise in my voice. “They decide to let farm animals back into the city?”
That elicited a chuckle from Ed. He wasn't the most emotional person on the planet, but he could always appreciate a good dig.
“No, with an actual girl,” he replied. “Yeah, I know, surprised the hell out of me, too. Some chick he met at work.”
That could be interesting. Tom was a low level gopher on Wall Street with aspirations of brown-nosing his way up the corporate ladder. According to him, most of the people who worked there fell into two categories: the work hard, play hard types that mostly had a nervous breakdown by the age of forty, and the boring-as-all-fuck crowd, AKA the types who got into finance for the sheer thrill of managing budgets. So if Tom was dating a girl from work, that meant he was either tied up in some S&M dungeon getting his brains fucked right out of his head or they were sitting down somewhere discussing the finer points of well constructed spreadsheets. Knowing Tom's luck with women, which was only marginally better than my own, I hoped his Excel skills were up to the task.
“Oh, yeah, your dad left a message for you,” Ed said, changing the subject.
“What’d he say?”
“Do I look like your hot ass little secretary?”
“Sally’s not my secretary. You know that.”
“Yeah, from the sound of things, it’s more like you’re her secretary.”
“Sometimes, I’m not so sure I’d disagree.” I got up to listen to whatever it was my parents had to say.
“She does have a hot ass, though.”
“Not arguing that point in the least,” I answered, hitting play and then going to the fridge to grab myself a liter of blood.
Truth be told, I should have probably been a little more interested when my parents called me. Several months ago, I had been given the scare of a lifetime when Jeff claimed to have kidnapped my mother. It had all been a misunderstanding...mostly because Jeff was little more than a complete idiot, but it had still scared the crap out of me at the time. For a while there, I had tried to be a lot closer to my mom and dad. Jeff’s scheme had given me a new appreciation for them; however, time tends to make us forget these things. By now, we were more or less back to our typical relationship, consisting of the occasional call and me more or less yessing them to death when they asked me questions about my life. I listened to the message and deleted it. I’d text Dad tomorrow to let him know it was cool.
“What’s up with your folks?” Ed asked as I returned to my seat.
“They’re heading to A.C. for the weekend to piss away my inheritance,” was my reply as I started sipping on my blood. “Their neighbors are away, so they have nobody to watch the cats.”
Ed gave an amused sniff in return. “Cat sitting, huh? You vampires get all the cool gigs.”
“Tell me about it. Hey, you wanna head down with me? Dad bought a sixty-inch plasma TV a while back, full HD. Got a pretty sweet sound system to go with it.”
“He really is pissing away your inheritance.”
“Yep, so I might as well get some use out of it. I figure we can throw on a few movies, maybe smoke a few blunts...”
“A few?” Ed asked skeptically.
He had a point there. Due to my vampire physiology, things like that tended to have less of an effect on me than they did on normal humans. One of my roommates’ more pleasant experiments had involved such. Based on our extensive testing, we estimated it took roughly three to four times the amount of alcohol (or other substance) to get me as shitfaced as it normally would. If I ever sat down to have a drinking contest with Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark, I'd win...probably. The effects also tended not to last as long either. In short, when it came to better living through chemistry, I was no lightweight. The downside, though, was that it wasn't exactly friendly on the old w
allet, unless I consigned myself to a night of drinking caseloads of shit beer. All things considered, I'd probably rather be staked.
“Tempting, but I might have some shit to do on Saturday,” he continued. “Maybe I'll pop by on Sunday if there's anything left of you.”
“Your loss.”
“So what about the rest of the week?”
“Oh yeah,” I answered as realization dawned. “Maybe I should have put in for a vacation from work.”
Ed just sighed and shook his head. “Dude, we work from home and pretty much set our own hours. Every day is a vacation.”
“There is some logic to your words. Still, it’s probably too late to put in for some time off anyway. I think Jim's off this week.”
Jim was our boss over at Hopscotchgames.com. I was one of their lead game programmers, responsible for my fair share of hits, if I do say so myself. Ed worked as a graphic designer there, creating both in-game art as well as promotional materials. While it wasn't making either of us overly rich, it was a good place to work. Normally, the game industry is a kill-or-be-killed field, full of nonstop death marches topped off by layoffs so that the bigwigs don't have to pay out end-of-project bonuses; however, our company was pretty cool. As long as projects were finished and the money kept flowing in from users, they had a pretty laid back attitude. Give it a few years, and I'm sure they'd get big enough to adopt a corporate asshole atmosphere, but for now I enjoyed it.
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