“Deputies,” said the alien on the right.
“Marshals,” said the deputy on the left.
Alien leader flexed his jaw in irritation.
“You’re cops?” I asked.
Alien leader nodded. “Cops. From the Galactic Union.”
“You got any ID?”
“Yeah, sure.” Alien on the right reached into his back pocket.
More embarrassment flared through the leader’s aura. He elbowed the other alien. Leader raised his blaster. “Here’s all the ID I need. Now give us Fugitive 187.”
“Fugitive?” I gave the leash a tug. “I knew Clayborn here wasn’t on the up-and-up. You got a warrant?”
Leader steadied the blaster. “Don’t push it.”
Jolie took careful steps toward Clayborn and me. “What’s he wanted for?”
“Class 2 crimes against the Union Code of Order. Violation of the quarantine. Interplanetary racketeering. Smuggling exotic contraband. Social contamination of a primitive species.”
“What primitive species?” I asked.
“You.”
Jolie stood behind Clayborn. “Anything else?”
“Class 1 crimes. Murder. Conspiracy to commit murder. He’s been sentenced to death in absentia. We’re to bring him back, dead or alive.”
I patted Clayborn’s head. “Is there a reward?”
“Yes. We leave you two alone.” Alien leader swung his pistol from me to Jolie.
“How did you find him?” I asked.
“We were patrolling near your planet Neptune when we picked up the power surge of a transporter dematerializer orbiting Earth. By the time we got here…”
By the time they got here? How many millions of miles away was Neptune? The teleportation happened yesterday, so they must have hauled serious space ass to get here.
Leader continued, “…the ship with the transporter was gone. But we got a fix on Fugitive 187. I didn’t know how we’d get him from the compound on Hilton Head but when you escaped with 187 in the helicopter, it was easy as cake.”
“You mean pie,” Jolie corrected.
“Pie, cake, doughnut, whatever.”
“My friend was teleported,” Jolie said. “Where to? Is she okay? I need to get her.”
Alien leader raised an eyebrow. He fixed his attention on Clayborn. “So it’s abetting the illegal transport of a native species? That’s a Class 4 offense.”
“If we turn Clayborn over,” Jolie asked, “can you get him to tell us where my friend has gone?”
“There is no if.” The alien on the left motioned with his blaster at me. “Fugitive 187 must answer for the Class 1 crimes.”
Jolie circled her hands around Clayborn’s neck. Spots of intrigue formed and floated in her aura. “Then give us a day, a few hours, to get him to talk.”
The leader snorted. “Don’t bother. Show her, 187.”
Clayborn slowly raised a hand and splayed his tentacle fingers across his right eye. The tips of his fingers squeezed around the eyeball and entered the socket. He winced and the eyeball popped out with a wet slurp. A wire bundle, like an optic nerve, extended from the eyeball into the socket.
As a vampire, I’ve seen all kinds of creepy shit. This ranked near the top.
He offered the eye to Jolie. She shook her head.
“It’s a prosthetic,” the leader said. “Your Mr. Clayborn embezzled from his fellow gangsters. They kidnapped and tortured him to find out what he’d done with the money. Besides taking his eye, they roasted his wives and children in front of him. And still he wouldn’t talk.”
Clayborn licked the eyeball to moisten it and screwed it back into the socket. “I remain true to my principles.”
Alien on the right nodded. “So you see, it would be pointless to question him.”
Jolie massaged Clayborn’s neck. “Then you’ll help us find Carmen. I can’t abandon my friend.” Her aura brightened with anger.
“Our friend,” I added.
The leader answered, “Like I mentioned, that was a Class 4 violation. We have the Class 1s and 2s to investigate first.”
“Too bad for your friend,” said alien on the left. “We have our orders.”
“Meaning Clayborn keeps his secrets.”
“Probably.” The leader beckoned that I turn Clayborn over to him. “We need to take him.”
Jolie’s aura raged with defiance. “You said dead or alive?” Her talons extended quick as hornets’ stingers. With a move that would’ve been invisible to mortal eyes, Jolie’s talons scissored Clayborn’s neck. One second she was standing behind him, clasping his neck. An instant later she backed away, her hands held up. “Then take him.”
Clayborn wobbled in place. His knees buckled, his body sagged, and his head tipped forward. Purple blood gushed from the neck toward the alien cop trio.
They recoiled in horror. By the time they gathered themselves, Clayborn had plopped dead between them. His head plunked facedown into the sand. I held the empty hoop of wire.
The leader paced forward and examined the corpse. He sighed with disappointment.
I extended my talons and readied myself for the attack. “Don’t try to take us.”
The leader shook his head. “Earthlings are outside my jurisdiction. I’m pissed because you just cost me a bonus.” He shoved the pistol into a holster. He waved to his comrades. “Grab his arms and legs.” The leader picked up Clayborn’s head and jammed his fingers into the nostrils and mouth. He held the head like a bowling ball and at an angle, to keep the still dripping stump from soiling him with purple blood.
“What about Carmen?” Jolie asked.
“Can’t help you.”
“How can we find her?”
“Know any detectives?”
Jolie pointed at me.
The leader stopped and gave me the once-over. “Good luck, lady.”
He followed the others up the ramp but slipped and caught himself before falling again. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he muttered. “This isn’t worth the overtime.”
The ramp retracted into the hatch, which then closed. The hum started once more. The saucer lifted and the three landing struts folded flush with the belly. The saucer rose into the sky, going faster and faster, and became a black circle that shrank into the void of night.
I stared into the spot where I’d last seen the saucer disappear. Jolie sat on the bottom lip of the helicopter cargo door. Her aura tightened and waves of despair pulsed through it. Her shoulders quaked and she rubbed her eyes. “Damn it, I wish I could cry.”
She turned her vampire eyes to me. This was the first time I’d ever seen tapetum lucidum clouded with grief. “Where is Carmen? How can we get her back?”
She might as well have asked me to shit rocket fuel.
I looked back to the stars. Carmen was among them, not in a spiritual sense but for real. In a UFO, like she’d always wished for, but not under these circumstances. All my life I’d looked up at the night sky and wondered when and if it were possible to cruise among them. Now I knew it was not only possible but that I had to. How? And when?
“Call me a coward?” Antoine’s voice carried across the marsh. He marched toward us, splashing through the muck, his orange aura signaling a fight.
“You’re late for the festivities,” I told him.
“Late hell.” He pointed to the sky. “They left early.” Antoine hefted a two-by-four with a big nail sticking out one end. “I needed something to even the odds. Took me forever to find this.”
“Antoine, I can’t even give you credit for trying. They had blasters and God knows what else. A board with a nail in it wouldn’t have done much.”
Antoine swung the two-by-four like a ball bat. “Let me hit you and then you tell me.” He turned to Jolie. “What’s up, babe?”
She started to explain. Antoine walked up to her and they hugged. A moment later, Antoine tore himself from her and flung the two-by-four into the sky. “Useless bastards.” The board whirled and splashed into the mars
h a hundred meters away.
Jolie checked her phone. “It’s still dead.”
Antoine leaned into the pilot’s side of the cockpit and flicked switches. “Same here.”
I said, “We better get moving before the government comes looking for their helicopter. Antoine, you lead the way.”
He tugged at Jolie’s hand. She pulled free, straightened up, and marched alongside him up the sandy road. I followed right behind.
Antoine began to trot. Jolie and I took up the pace.
“What about you, Felix?” He quickened the trot into a run. “How do you plan on bringing Carmen back?”
What was my answer? I glanced back to the sky and the stars. Carmen was a long distance away, even for a vampire.
Chapter
54
I headed back to Colorado on I-10. I drove straight through, stopping only to gas my Cadillac and to hide in the restroom of a Houston diner while I waited for the sunrise to pass. Some big, bad vampire I was, loitering in the stall of a men’s room. Times like these made me wish for another spider bite…almost.
Afterward I sat at the counter and ordered a large coffee and a breakfast burrito to go. Outside, I dumped half of the coffee from the Styrofoam cup. Back in my car I set the coffee in a console cup holder and unwrapped the burrito, which I lay on my lap. From the console I pulled out a plastic squirt bottle of type A-negative. I filled the cup so the mixture was fifty-fifty blood and coffee. I took a sip and added a little more blood. I pumped a couple of squirts of blood into the burrito. Mmmm, egg, jalapeño, and type A.
I didn’t want to think about what had happened in the last two weeks, I only wanted to get home. The enormity of the loss of Carmen overwhelmed me. This was worse than her being dead for good. In this case, the great sea of space and getting Carmen back seemed as impossible as me plucking a star from the heavens.
I couldn’t do anything about it, and worrying didn’t do anything except leave me frazzled and feeling helpless.
Something rapped against my car. I looked up. A crow peeked over the upper left corner of the windshield.
A crow? This meant the Araneum wanted something.
The bird’s claws scratched across the roof of the Cadillac. The little black head appeared over my side window and tapped again, this time impatiently.
I felt a queasy hollowness and I knew I was in trouble. I had failed in my mission. I found out about the alien threat but the cost had been losing Carmen.
My appetite vanished and I put the burrito and coffee away. I scrolled the window down. The crow perched on the windowsill, facing me. A filigreed capsule the size of my little finger was clipped to the crow’s right leg.
I caressed the crow’s warm, soft head. The beady eyes expressed no emotion. With my other hand, I slipped the capsule from its leg.
I spread my knees and held the capsule low between my legs to keep it in shadow. I unscrewed the jeweled ruby cap from the platinum-and-gold capsule. The familiar and rancid smell of flayed vampire skin wafted upward. I used my little finger to pull out a roll of parchment.
I unrolled the tissue-thin paper and read this note.
We’ve been texting you. Check your cell phone.
Araneum
So the Araneum had gone snippy on me. I had a new cell phone but no car charger, so I had left the phone off to conserve the battery. I turned the phone on and got an alert that I had several voice mails and a text message waiting.
I checked the text message first.
FELIX
BE AT THE MOTHER CABRINI SHRINE THIS WEDNESDAY AT 3 P.M.
ARANEUM
Sounded like a trip to the woodshed. Not good. I erased the message.
The Cabrini Shrine stood west of Denver on I-70. An unlikely place for a meeting.
I balled the parchment and tossed it out my window. When the parchment flew out of the shadow of my car and into the sunlight, the note immediately flared into a burst of fire that darkened into a puff of black smoke.
The crow stared at the vanishing smoke and blinked its eyes. Then it turned around on the windowsill and tapped against the capsule in my hand. I screwed the cap back on and fit the capsule on the bird’s leg.
I tried to shoo the bird, resentful of the news it had brought. When it didn’t move, I scrolled the window up. The crow jumped away, startled by the glass pane rising against its tail feathers. It flew to the hood of my Cadillac.
I honked the horn to shoo it again. The crow wouldn’t scram.
I checked my voice mail. Jolie left a message wishing me a safe journey and telling me that she missed Carmen.
She signed off: “Call me.”
There was a lot of sadness in her voice. I could wait for that conversation.
The other calls were from human clients asking when I’d return to my office. When I got there.
I started the car. The crow hadn’t moved. When I got to the highway, the crow centered itself on the front of my car and faced ahead like a hood ornament. I accelerated to ninety miles an hour. The crow hunkered down and squinted into the slipstream.
Was this bird going to freeload a ride all the way to Denver? Fat chance.
I slammed on the brakes. The crow shot from my car like it’d been catapulted from an aircraft carrier.
Hasta la vista, you little feathered bastard.
The crow sailed over the concrete lane for a hundred feet. It spread its wings and wheeled upward to arc over my car.
Bird poop splattered on my windshield.
The crow gave a laughing caw. Hasta la vista, back at you.
Chapter
55
I waited at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, better known locally as the Mother Cabrini Shrine. The Catholic Church built the shrine to commemorate the first American saint, Maria Francesca Cabrini, Patroness of Immigrants. Her twenty-two-foot-tall statue stood on a commanding hill overlooking the Colorado plains to the north and the town of Golden straight east. Close by, I-70 snaked westward through the foothills into the Rocky Mountains and over the Continental Divide.
If anyone believed the myth that the Christian cross was as feared as garlic by us vampires, then a stroll to this shrine would destroy that fiction.
The Stations of the Cross bordered the concrete steps leading to the shrine. The dozens of crucifixes here—imbued with Resurrection juju, no less, should’ve been enough to incinerate any undead bloodsucker. But the only way to hurt a vampire with a cross would be to either bonk him on the head or sharpen one end and stab him through the chest.
Here I stood, at the top of the shrine, waiting for the Araneum. I didn’t know their agenda. I was only told to show up. I’m sure they were pissed over what happened to Carmen. So was I. I’d be surprised if I didn’t get a major ass-chewing…or worse. The worse part unsettled me. I didn’t want my skin used for undead Post-it notes.
The sun warmed me and I touched up my sunblock with a tube I pulled from my pocket.
Mother Nature had given the Front Range one final arctic blast as a going-away present. Smudges of snow lingered in the shadows. Cirrus clouds traced across the distant sky like scrawls of chalk against cerulean blue. A brown haze ringed the horizon.
Two women in their mid-thirties, both wearing fleece vests over black jogging tights, leaned forward against the base of the shrine and stretched their legs. They chatted about tax law and money, so I guessed they were lawyers or accountants playing hooky from the office.
I peeked over my sunglasses to study their auras. Neither seemed interested in me. Good. I didn’t want to be so far down on the vampire pecking order that the Araneum sent humans to interview me.
The two women turned from the shrine and bounded down the steps.
Coming in the opposite direction, another woman jogged up the stairs. Her skin was the color of a roasted coffee bean and she had short, black, nappy hair under a red head-warmer band. She held the leash of a large dog, some mutt with a blue-gray coat with yellow tufts around its neck and down its
long, skinny legs.
I read her aura.
Orange.
Vampire.
The time was three on the dot.
An uneasy feeling ran through me. My kundalini noir shifted like it wanted to relieve a sudden kink.
Her aura had the even glow of a bulb filament, not betraying any hint of emotional turbulence. The Araneum had sent a real composed one to interrogate me.
The vampire crested the top of the stairs and halted. She stood a bit over five feet and wore sunglasses with rhinestones and a green jacket over a navy blue jogging suit. She carried a messenger bag over one shoulder. In human years, she looked in her early forties.
The dog had a red aura, so I knew it wasn’t a supernatural in disguise. With its tail wagging and ears perked, the dog lunged playfully for me. It was a cross between a blue heeler and a golden retriever, hence the unusual coat. The vampire pulled the dog back, patted its head, and unclipped the leash. The dog bolted for me, sniffed my crotch, and turned away to explore the garden around the shrine.
The vampire wound the leash around one wrist. “Felix, good to meet you.” She kept her distance, about six feet away, and didn’t bother to extend her free hand to thaw her frosty greeting. “Phyllis.” All business, she was. No point in asking her favorite color or taste in music.
I didn’t recognize her face or name. “I know most of the vampires in the Denver nidus but not you. Where are you from?”
“You have a way of contacting Carmen Arellano?” Phyllis didn’t waste time with prolonged introductions.
I didn’t want to discuss Carmen but I knew we would. Thinking about her only uncovered the loss and deepened the scar.
I started with my story, beginning with my acquaintance of the alien impostor Gilbert Odin.
Phyllis raised a hand to stop me. “I’ve read Jolie’s report.”
How should I handle confessing my failure to protect Carmen? What fate awaited me? Was the Araneum going to tear off my skin? The Araneum should have shared more information, preparing me to better deal with Goodman and Clayborn. Still, the fault was mine. Anything I had to say in my defense remained clotted in my throat.
The Undead Kama Sutra Page 25
