by Mary Hughes
“Actually, I do know.” Nikos shot Klaus a glance. Klaus gave an imperceptible nod, started edging toward the man while Nikos continued. “I know they sent us home in airplanes, so we couldn’t process what we saw, what we did. No time to talk about it before we were dumped back into ‘normal’ society.”
The man squinted at Nikos. Took an unwilling step forward. “You’re too young…unless-”
Nikos nodded. “Yes, Mr. Jones. I’m a vampire. And yes, I was there.” His voice softened, became beguiling. It was a tone I hadn’t heard before, a poet’s croon. “They sent us back from the lush jungles that smelled of rampant growth and death and dropped us into concrete warrens with people who hadn’t been there, couldn’t understand.”
“I had it worse.” Jones took another step forward. “I was a spy. Secret even from my own unit. Suicide-pill secret. I barely made it out alive.”
“And I was a POW. It warped us, all of us, made us angry and afraid. And we had to deal with it, not them. But this isn’t the way.”
The man jerked straight. Blinked. Shouted, “Your vampire tricks don’t work on me.” He pulled the trigger.
Klaus leaped. I thought maybe he’d get there before-but he was too far away.
The man shot, bang-bang, bang-bang.
Klaus’s chest and forehead bloomed red. Nikos was in front of me so I couldn’t see what happened to him. But he was a huge target.
Nikos jerked, went down on one knee.
I screamed. Klaus was out, Nikos was down. Jones stalked closer, gun pointed at Nikos-to finish him. I couldn’t let that happen.
I skirted around Nikos’s big fallen body and ran at that madman like a banshee, Burgundy Blast nails clawing.
Jones’s eyes widened, seeing me rush him like a lunatic. And maybe I was, to charge an armed man. And maybe I wasn’t, because his gun shook.
I barreled toward him, death in my eyes.
Nikos caught me from behind. “Twyla. Let me.”
“What the-? Lie down, you! You’re injured. I’ll kill the bastard and then we’ll get you to a hospital and-”
I was flat on the rooftop without knowing how I got there. A sharp report split the air right above my head. Nikos lay atop me, body shielding mine. Damned fucking hero.
I pushed him off. “That nutjob shot at me.”
“I know. Just a minute.” Nikos exploded into smoke, whipped around the gray-haired man, reformed behind him.
Jones spun, too late. Nikos slammed a fist into the man’s jaw, seized Jones’s gun from his loosened grasp. Lights from the Ball played over them both, colors flashing like a strobe. Jones grabbed at his belt for another gun. Nikos threw the first clattering onto the grating, snared Jones’s wrists in one big hand and yanked him tight into his body.
Then Nikos grabbed the man by the throat and bit him.
Jones squirmed and moaned as Nikos tasted him. When Nikos lifted his head, his eyes glowed bright red. “All right, Jones. You will tell us what you did.”
The gray-haired man struggled. Nikos held him firmly until he quieted. Jones spat. “I’ll tell you. But not because of vampire mind tricks. Because you can’t stop it. In fifteen minutes the Ball’s lights are going to unleash the monster in every vampire in Times Square. And unless my demands are met, I’ll do the same in Chicago. Los Angeles. More.”
The lights of the New Year’s Ball. Not the sound system at all. A laugh-or sob-rose in my throat. Bujný, not zvuk. Not Nixie’s bailiwick but mine. Nikos was right again.
“What are your demands?” Nikos’s face was carved granite.
“One hundred billion dollars. Release of five hundred political prisoners. Air Force One, fueled and ready to take me to Asia.”
“Impossible.”
“Then I guess we’re gonna have some blood.” Jones laughed.
“No. Tell me exactly what you have done.”
“I…changed…the program-” The man’s eyes went wild. “No! I won’t tell. You can’t make me!” His jaw clenched, and there was a crunch.
Nikos grabbed Jones’s shoulders, started shaking him like he was a rag doll.
No. It wasn’t Nikos shaking him. It was Jones himself, shaking uncontrollably, as if every muscle in his body was contracting simultaneously.
Jones grabbed his chest and started panting, like he was having trouble breathing. Nikos eased him onto the grating just before Jones threw up.
“My God.” I ran over. “Is he having a heart attack?” I tried to remember my last CPR refresher.
Nikos peeled back Jones’s eyelids, difficult because the man was jerking hard with convulsions. “His pupils are pinpricks. Drug or poison of some sort. Call 911-damn it.”
Jones stiffened like a board, his eyes suddenly glazed and fixed.
I clapped hands over my mouth. “Oh my… Is he…?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, God. So fast. How?”
Nikos opened the man’s mouth and felt inside. Whatever he felt made him withdraw his hand with a grimace. He rubbed his index finger against his thumb, staring at his fingers in distaste. “Thick and oily. Like motor oil. Maybe VX, although I don’t remember it working this fast.”
“VX?”
“Nerve agent. Extremely toxic, highly illegal. Maybe Novichok.”
The crunch, just before Jones started shaking. “A suicide pill?” Another thought struck me. “You’ve been exposed!” I tore out my phone only to stop when Nikos dissolved, reforming holding me tight.
“It’s fine. Even if I weren’t indestructible, the mist will have taken care of it. Twyla. We need to concentrate on more important things.”
“But you…and Jones…and Klaus…” My eyes shifted to another crumpled form, blond hair flashing red and blue in the Ball’s light.
Nikos barely spared him a glance. “Klaus’ll be fine. Twyla, love, I know this is horrific but you can fall apart later.”
I blinked at him, wondering how I could possibly process everything that had happened in the last minute. My sister the neurosurgeon would have known how. Or my brother. Colin had been in situations like this, and worse, in Iraq. And yet he’d gone on.
But I wasn’t Colin, and didn’t know how to handle myself in an emergency-wait.
I had never faced sudden death before, but I did know how to handle myself in a crisis. In fact, I was the epitome of calm in the madhouse that was City Hall. I could fall apart later. Nikos was right. I didn’t need to process everything now. In fact, it was too big-I couldn’t process it now. I’d simply pack it away until I could.
Right now I had a job to do. I sucked up my competence and applied myself to the problem at hand. Jones had sabotaged the Ball. Discovering how needed to be our first priority. “What about the man Jones was holding hostage? Maybe he can tell us something.”
“That’s my soldier.” Nikos’s eyes waxed even more eloquent in his relief, pride and…love?
Well. Deal with that emergency later too.
The man in the Giants hat lay a few feet from us, his hands bound behind him with a zip tie. As Nikos sliced it off with one razor claw I checked the time. Eleven fifty. The whole drama had taken less than five minutes. It still didn’t leave us a lot of time.
Released, the man chafed his wrists. “I can’t believe I’m free.”
I took the man’s hands in mine. They were freezing from exposure and lack of circulation. “What happened?”
“That guy…he had clearance. He was one of us.” The man shook his head. His cap was askew. “No, I knew something was wrong about him…yeah, I knew all along. Well, about eleven he pulls a gun. Makes us all tie each other’s wrists. Carted us down one floor then picked me as a hostage and brought me back up-shit, nearly forgot. There’s another guy down there, crusted blood on his pants.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Nikos said. “But first, is something wrong with the Ball?”
“The Ball? Not that I know. But I’m only doing the fireworks. Security, fireworks…the guy was doing the Ba
ll, I think. Maybe that was a cover, though. This guy was bad, you know? He took us all out-even the security.”
I patted the man’s hands soothingly. There was some warmth coming back, and some color to his face. I shifted my eyes to Nikos, telling him that I thought we could leave the man safely on his own for a while. Nikos nodded, stood.
Then I realized what I had done. Was I getting as taciturn as my Spartan? Channeling Queen Gorgo? Were we becoming alike, like two old married people?
It was cute, it was scary, and it would have to get stuffed away in the burgeoning pack of later. I rose next to Nikos. “I know some kinds of flickering light can cause seizures in people. And the color red makes them hungry. But could light or color hypnotize vampires, like Jones said?”
“Our senses are heightened. We may actually be more vulnerable than humans.”
I frowned. “Speaking of Jones, how did you know his name? Or were you guessing?”
Nikos’s nose wrinkled. “He smelled of cigarettes, like the door across from your cousin’s in the brownstone. And I smelled faint traces in Aylmer ’s apartment, recent. When I rang doorbells to get in I noticed 7A was labeled Jones. A guess, but logical.”
“Jones was Aylmer ’s neighbor? He could have found out about vampires the same way Aylmer did.”
“Yes. That might have also triggered their association.”
“Speaking of vampires-” I nodded toward the fireworks man. He was watching us with wide eyes, and his color had drained again.
“I will deal with his memories later. Now we must discover what Jones has done and stop it. We have only…damn.” Nikos had pulled out his cell phone and was staring at the readout. “It’s eleven fifty-one.”
Nine minutes. Only nine minutes to figure out what Jones had done to the Ball. “Okay. We know Jones was the Jones I got in as the American rep for Bujný a Zvuk Magie. Specifically, he worked with Steale Programové. He could have directed the Ball’s programming, saying certain things would appeal to American audiences. Maybe he even did some final adjustments here, if he was a coder.”
“We also we know he would target the sixty seconds while the Ball is descending.”
“And everybody’s riveted on it, yes. But I have no idea what kind of visual might rile vampires. Do you?”
“No.” Nikos did not look happy. “This is beyond the reach of my sword, Twyla.”
“I don’t know enough either. We need a lifeline.”
“A what?”
I smiled. Spartan generals must not watch too many game shows. “You’d say time to gather information and allies.” I pulled out my cell phone, hit my own Emerson speed dial. “Nixie, I need to know what kind of colors or lights might make vampires go on the rampage.”
A flash of numbers caught my attention-the time, thrown up on the side of the huge building next to us. Eleven fifty-two and five seconds. Six. Seven. “And please hurry. The clock is ticking.”
“On it.”
While I waited for Nixie, I watched the seconds change. Nikos’s sable eyes followed my gaze. He frowned.
“Twyla. Will everyone be riveted on the Ball? Or is there a countdown?”
“Damn, you’re right. There’s a billboard too, with numbers flashing, and-” I swung around, seeing again the glaring color and light that was Times Square at night. “Everything’s lit up for miles around. It’s not just the Ball. It’s the whole damn canyon.”
Except Jones couldn’t have screwed with every building in Times Square. He’d only had access to the Ball, and maybe some connected mechanisms. Still, I waited impatiently for Nixie to get back on the line. My internal clock clicked off each second like a notch on my gut. Sixty seconds passed, and then another.
We’d never fix it in time. Another thirty seconds carved into me as I gazed at the crowds below, seeing a Google-Earth-sized Where’s Waldo. Only in this case the vampires would be only too easy to find.
“Twyla. Power-tie colors. Red and yellow.”
I blinked. Focused on the clock, which read eleven fifty-five. Five minutes left. “Red and yellow?” I pictured the old Windows color scheme called Hot Dog. Thought of Monty Python and the Holy Grail-the introductory credits with the llamas. Winced. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”
“Huh, Julian? Twyla, there’s a problem. Julian says the Ball isn’t set up to do all red and yellow.”
“What? You know that how?”
“He’s on the line with a computer guru in Iowa. Mr. Goo Roo hacked into the Ball through some sort of SyFy interwebz.”
“You mean the Ball is doing a normal show?”
There was a long pause. “Goo says it’s not normal either. But it ain’t pus and blood. He’s not sure what it is. Huh, Julian? Oh yeah. One more prob. Even if the Ball were screaming chartreuse, it’s not big enough to send v-guys into spasming conniptions.”
“Chartreuse is green.”
“Yeah, okay. Thing is, the Ball is too small and too far away to do more than make a vamp a little sickly carmine.”
“Carmine is red.”
“Fine. Puke-y green. Up-gechucken green. Vomity-”
“I get it.” The clock flashed across from me, eleven fifty-six a full story high. “What about the countdown clock? It’s on a screen, and flashes with the Ball. Maybe they’re coordinated.”
“Hey Julian. Ask Mr. Goo if the Ball of Damocles is tied to the ticking crock.”
Sometimes Nixie’s cultural polyglot is confusing, but this time I got it. I laughed. “Ticking Crock. Like the crocodile that swallowed the clock in Peter Pan.”
“What? No, that’s Team America.”
“Huh?”
“For shit’s sake, Twyla, what eon were you born in? What, Julian? Oh. Yeah, the Ball and clock board are tied. But that still won’t be enough firepower to fry a vamp’s circuits. And it’s still the wrong colors.”
I pushed knuckles into my skull. “I should know this. I’m the light and color expert.” Nixie’s handle on chartreuse and carmine hammered that home.
Nikos, maybe feeling my frustration, started pacing. His eyes were red and his fingers were awfully long and pointy.
Something niggled at me but it wouldn’t quite settle. Kind of like my big Spartan lover. “I should know this,” I repeated.
I panned through years of art school memories, but there was so much. Photographic theory. Mixing oils, different than mixing watercolors. Arc welding. Even some CAD. Centuries of knowledge, condensed into an impossible four years. Now I tried to pack that into four minutes.
No, three. The clock turned eleven fifty-seven while I was thinking.
Nikos stopped pacing abruptly. “I’m going down.”
“Into the streets? You hate crowds.”
“It’ll be a bloodbath. Somebody has to help. They’re mostly fledglings down there, and I’m old. I can take them out.”
“And what happens if you’re as overcome by Jones’s light show as the rest? How much more damage could a millennia-old vampire do?”
Without a word, he kicked into pacing again, although his pacing screamed curses.
Eleven fifty-seven and twenty seconds. “Nixie. Is there a way to see what your computer guru is seeing?”
“Hey. He’s not a guru for nothing. Julian?” She spoke with her hubby for a moment, then came back on the line. “Okay, take a look at your display.”
I pulled the phone from my ear. Nikos came to watch over my shoulder.
Sure enough, the normal display had been replaced by a picture of the Ball, all flashing colors, descending on its pole. Colors played, indigo to orange to white. Red and yellow weren’t even predominant. I cudgeled my brain, trying to figure out what that meant. Or even trying to guess a way to structure my thoughts to figure out what it meant. I clapped the phone to my ear again. “Can I see that with the countdown added in? Cut it down to the last fifteen seconds.”
“You can see the whole damned building, and hear it, too. Julian!”
Moments later we saw the same play
of lights, view expanded now. Whatever Jones and Steale Programové had done, it coordinated the entire building. Color swirled, intensifying with the percussion that hit the final ten seconds.
“What’s wrong?” Nikos’s breath was warm on my ear.
“The colors intensify on the beat. But they don’t change. Don’t flash. On television the Ball flashes the last seconds of the countdown in bright, white light. But this one swirls a cacophony of colors.”
“Isn’t it just artistic design? Maybe there is no purpose.”
“All art has purpose. Sometimes only to shock or please the viewer, but the artist made it for a reason. And in this case, we even know the purpose-stimulate vampire vision. But how, without the red or yellow? Damn it, Nikos, I’m missing something.” I gasped. “It’s missing-”
The music stopped. Loudspeakers blared. “Two minutes.” A roar erupted from the city’s miles-long carpet of people.
“Damn it, I had it! Before that stupid announcer broke my concentration-”
“Calm down, Twyla.” Nikos stroked my hair. “You had it, you’ll get it again. Something missing.”
“Missing, yes. Missing.” I snapped my fingers. “Color. The way it combines. Red and blue, red and green-no wonder I didn’t see it before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What if the Ball isn’t the focus? What if Jones programmed the colors, not to trigger the vampires, but to trigger the other buildings?”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“Colors combine. Imagine the Ball-and the whole damned glowstick of the One Times Square building-throwing its light on these skyscraper-sized neon billboards around us. Beaming colors in just the right order so that everything that’s not red or yellow is changed to red or yellow. Now the whole ocean that’s Times Square is pulsing pus and blood. Combined with the noise, the blood scent of the crowd, the excitement-”
Nikos nodded impatiently. “Vampires would go wild, especially the youngsters. But how? Yellow and blue combine to make green. Yellow and red make orange. Nothing combines to make red or yellow. They are primary colors.”
