by Karen Ranney
“To keep the balance,” I said. “Between life and death.”
She nodded again.
“They aren’t the undead, are they? They’re the Un-alive.”
If a dog could smile, Charlie managed it.
“I injected Maddock with something,” I said. I couldn’t remember if she’d been there when I’d used the hypodermic or just after.
Her big brown retriever eyes watched me with interest. She didn’t ask and, for a moment, I thought about not telling her. Only for a moment, though. She was the closest thing I had to a friend, either in the guise of a ghost or a dog.
“Rabies,” I said.
She didn’t even blink. She just stared at me as if I were a rabbit and she was spotting me for her pal, the hunter.
“Rabies?” she finally said.
I nodded. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. The incubation period is long enough that the Council wouldn’t connect me to his illness. He’d go mad before he figured out what was happening, so it would be too late to survive.”
She nodded. Opie had been a vet before she’d become a ghost, so she knew a lot more about rabies than I did. But I sure as hell didn’t expect what she said next.
“You realize, of course, that he’ll infect everyone he feeds from.”
It was my turn to stare. “What?”
She sighed, more human than dog. “Remember, a vampire’s cells are in stasis. So is every organ in his body. He doesn’t acquire disease as much as he’s simply a vessel for it. Think of a Coptic jar, one of those Egyptian funereal jars that hold a mummy’s organs. That’s what a vampire is.”
“Typhoid Mary,” I said.
“In this case, Rabid Randy.”
“Holy crap, what have I done?” I said.
If Maddock thought he was sick, he’d feed more often. The more often he fed, the more people he’d infect. I’d created a plague.
Not to mention what he’d done to Mike.
Dear God, I’d killed Mike.
Chapter Four
They're Not All Kitchen Staff
Charlie blinked at me and for a moment, all I saw was dog. He jumped off the chaise, and began to walk in a circle, nose to the carpet.
“Oh, oh.”
The conversation about vampires was about to be pushed aside for bodily needs.
I rushed Charlie down the main stairs and out the front door. He ran ahead, barking once to announce his joy before looking back at me, tongue lolling. Then he promptly squatted near one of the topiary bushes and, with a quick, apologetic look in my direction, defecated an amount that would have made a Clydesdale proud.
I wish I could have Charlie’s single-minded pursuit of what he wanted.
If he wanted to go sniff butt, nothing in the world was going to stop him. If the object of his nose ardor sat down, Charlie simply waited him out. When the reluctant dog finally stood, Charlie dived beneath the tail and took a big whiff.
If he wanted to investigate something interesting on the ground, he did so. He didn't look around and ask for permission. It could be a snail or a frog or a dead bird. Charlie pounced on it with no apology, embarrassment, and complete curiosity.
If something itched, Charlie scratched. If it smelled good and it belonged to him, he checked it out. Sometimes he licked it, just because he could.
He never looked around to see if the world was watching. Never once did he ask approval.
I wanted to be more like my ghost ridden dog.
“You know I don’t have anything to clean that up,” I said, searching my pockets.
I didn’t want to leave Charlie out here by himself while I went back inside the castle to get something to pick up his present. Frankly, I didn’t want to be out here by myself at dusk, either. The threat of Maddock hung around every corner once the sun set. I didn’t feel right leaving Charlie’s present on the front yard, either, especially when I turned to find Dan standing there.
Not exactly what I would call an auspicious meeting.
He was wearing a yellow shirt again. He looked good in yellow and blue and green or any damn color he wore. He had three styles of dress: jeans, tailored slacks, and suits. Jeans meant he was staying in the castle. Tailored slacks: appointments outside the castle. Suits: important meetings such as attending the board meetings of Cluckey’s, the company his grandfather had founded. But, then, Arthur Peterson had also founded the OTHER.
Mike's condition had made an impact. There were dark circles beneath Dan’s eyes. He hadn't shaved, either, yet the shadow of beard somehow added to his attractiveness. Maybe I go for the bad boy look. His hair wasn't combed, but the biggest difference in the Dan I knew before and the one who stood there now was in his eyes.
“Do you have one of those baggie dispensers around here?” I asked. “You know, for doggie stuff.”
His face was stone, his eyes as expressionless as a corpse. “I’ll call someone from the kennel to take care of it. You and I need to talk.”
I shook my head. “Charlie’s my responsibility,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
He pulled out his phone, pushed a number and said something I couldn’t hear. In less time than it took me to tease my hair (I sometimes liked the Texas big hair look), a fresh faced young man in a blue shirt and black pants appeared at the front door with a roll of plastic bags.
“Yes sir?”
Dan pointed to me and the young man proffered the roll of bags as if it were a crown. While they both watched, I took the bags, thrust my hand into one to reverse it, and grabbed the Clydesdale mound. I tied a knot in the bag and stood there feeling as stupid as I’ve felt in a long time.
“Would you like me to take that, ma’am?” the young man asked.
The stone god still hadn’t moved.
“Yes, please,” I said, handing the warm bag to him.
“And Charlie?”
The moment of reckoning had come. Having Opie listen might be helpful, but I nodded.
“I promised him liver,” I said. “Chicken liver. Pate, if you have it. You know, with celery and spices and those little crackers.”
The young man didn’t say anything, but he did glance at Dan who deigned to nod, just once.
The stone god moves.
A moment later Dan and I were alone at the front door of the castle. I turned and entered, brushing past him and walking to the bathroom down the hall. After I washed my hands, he was still standing there.
His face hadn’t changed.
“How is Mike?”
“I’m not going to talk about Mike right now.”
Okay, then.
Was I going to be marched off to the dungeon? And don’t tell me Arthur’s Folly lacked a dungeon. I didn’t believe it. Arthur Peterson was a crazy old coot who built weird shit and not all of it was contained in this castle.
I was not, frankly, in the mood to be chastised or lectured. I was feeling too emotional for my peace of mind. I didn’t like getting teary eyed, especially when I couldn’t help it. Maybe I had just a teensy weensy bit of a chip on my shoulder. I sent a look in Dan’s direction just to warn him about my mood.
“Can we take a walk? I’ve never seen the inner courtyard.”
He gave me a quick once over, then nodded, leading the way to one of the elevators.
I haven’t seen a lot of Arthur’s Folly, the name the locals called the castle where I was a semi-guest. I insisted on paying rent, but that was laughable. I was probably paying a tenth of what my suite and all the amenities were worth.
“Are you cold? A front’s supposed to come in tonight.”
As a topic of conversation, the weather wasn’t a bad place to start. The castle was located outside of San Antonio, in the foothills of the Texas Hill Country. We got the worst of the weather that never made it to the city, like freezing temperatures and occasional snow. Still, it was only November, which meant that summer hadn’t quite departed the area.
I used to try to tell my friends who weren’t from here that summer l
asted ten months. Fall - about a week, winter - three weeks, tops, and spring the rest of the time. The Hill Country had more of a winter and sometimes it got downright cold, so if a front was coming through, it was time to get out my coat, mittens, and ankle warmers. People from Chicago laughed like hell at South Texans the first winter they lived here. After their blood thinned, though, they froze along with the rest of us.
“How’s Charlie doing?” he asked.
We’d segued from the weather to my dog. Dan was really good at this stone god turned cocktail party maven persona. Me? I pretty much sucked at small talk.
I had to address what might have happened to Mike and I didn't know how to push past Dan’s wall.
Instead, I answered his question. “Fine. I’ve been putting that ointment on his neck and it seems to be healing well.”
Charlie’s dick of an owner had chained him with a barbed choke collar and he’d escaped, which was the reason I was determined that the idiot would never see Charlie again. People who abused the helpless, whether they were human or animal, earned my endless disgust.
“The vet would probably like to see him again.”
That wasn’t a hardship since the vet was located on the second floor of the castle.
“I was planning on taking him,” I said.
He nodded. I nodded. So far, so good.
We entered the elevator, but instead of pushing one of the visible buttons, Dan slid a panel aside. S-1, S-2, and S-3 appeared.
“You have sub-levels?”
He nodded. “S-1 is where you go to access the courtyard.”
“And the others?”
I wondered if he was going to answer me and he surprised me when he did so. “The armory and other areas. S-3 is a food storage facility and the entrance to the cistern.”
Dan was prepared for a siege.
When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, I was surprised again.
I’ve never been around the uber rich. One of my friends in college was a member of the Dalton Ranch family. Their wealth was in land, thousands of acres in the Rio Grande valley. They drove nice cars and had nice houses, but most of all they didn’t sweat the small stuff. If something happened to one of their cars or houses, they simply got it fixed or bought a new one. Their kids went to Ivy League colleges without their parents going into debt. They all had pools. They didn’t have to juggle money and I remember thinking that their lifestyle must be nice.
But the uber rich were different. They didn’t worry about money, either, but they also made money do fantastic things. Like developing a spaceship to take tourists to outer space. Or constructing the world’s tallest building. Or creating a castle in the middle of the Texas Hill Country that was part medieval world and part Disneyland.
I walked side by side with Dan through the arched door. I stopped in the middle of the path and looked up at the wall of brick in front of me, then turned to look at the back wall. The castle was much bigger than I’d thought. The square the four wings created made for a huge courtyard, one with mature Texas red oak trees, a creek with several arched bridges, and rolling topography created to look like you were on a meadow covered with Texas wildflowers on one side, and a metropolitan street on the other.
Above us, the Texas night sky was brilliant with stars. I saw the drones circling the perimeter of the courtyard, their blinking lights the only sign they were patrolling for vampires and other nocturnal creatures.
We began to walk, taking one of the graveled paths. We passed two gazebos, each one filled with laughing people, several of whom waved to us. Dan smiled and waved back.
I didn’t know who all the people were and couldn’t think of a way to ask without sounding rude. I sometimes think I was raised with too many manners. Mannerly Marcie, that’s me. I find it difficult to hang up on recorded messages. I also had an Amazon Echo and found myself telling Alexa, “Thank you.” She answered with “No problem,” which was, to me, borderline rude. If you were going to have a robotic device in your home, it damn well better be polite. Right now she was in storage. I wondered if I was going to get lectured when I finally plugged her back in.
“We have three shifts,” Dan said.
“So, they’re all employees?”
He nodded.
“Round the clock service?” I asked. “If I want Rum Raisin ice cream in the middle of the night, somebody’s waiting for my order?”
“They’re not all kitchen staff. We have a large IT department, plus personnel monitoring the cistern, the food supply, and other aspects of the castle.”
He led me to a bench placed along the path and we sat.
“What is it that you do here?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you run Cluckey’s from here? Or the OTHER?”
“I don’t have anything to do with the day to day operations of the company. And I only make appearances at board meetings of the OTHER to defray suspicion.”
His answer didn’t satisfy me, but hopefully I kept my expression bland.
Here’s the deal: I know a lot about business. It’s been my concentration ever since leaving college. I’m not all that up to speed on major corporations like Coca-Cola or Pepsico, but I do know about small and medium sized businesses. I know about payrolls. I know about net worth and projections.
Dan was running the equivalent of a medium sized business here at the castle. In order to be able to afford all those employees, either the chicken empire was really profitable or he was involved in some other operation. My bet was on the latter. He’d mentioned that he had people looking for his sister. Were they involved in some sort of group, say an anti-vampire organization?
“How many people do you employ here?” I asked.
He only smiled, which was a clue.
I once had to take a seminar on Emotional Intelligence. The higher up the food chain I got at my insurance company, the more meetings and seminars I attended. The more meetings and seminars I attended, the less I got done during the day. The less I got done during the day, the more work I had to do at home.
Managers are grumpy because they have no personal time, their marriages are on the rocks, and they’re exhausted. No, that’s not what I learned at the seminar on Emotional Intelligence.
What I learned at the EI seminar is that there are some people who just don’t have a clue. Trust me, I could have taught the course.
People who have emotional intelligence have that certain something we’re never taught, I guess because we think everybody has it. It’s going to a party and knowing when your host would really like you to get the hell out now. Or sitting in your boss’s office and getting an invisible signal that the meeting’s up. Or knowing how to read people, realizing when their tolerance has been reached.
Surprisingly, EI seems to be a dying trait, at least in the people I interviewed for open positions.
Some people didn’t have the sense God gave a gnat. They were the last ones to pick up on signals. Or they didn’t understand that what they said was callous or cruel. Sometimes, they were the first to be offended. Every slight had to be responded to, every slightly jarring remark was a slur or an offense.
Most of my managerial time was spent adjudicating arguments between co-workers. Or Kindergarten Central as I sometimes called it.
I was really good at picking up clues, just like the one Dan was giving me. He was smiling. He looked calm and relaxed, but he was focusing on the bushes in front of us and not looking at me.
He wasn’t about to tell me the secrets of Arthur’s Folly, but he would be very, very polite about his silence.
Chapter Five
Eager Beaver Marcie
"The witches were there to see you, Marcie. To talk to you. To make a decision about you."
"I know." I looked over to see him frowning at me. "I really do know, Dan. I had to leave because of circumstances beyond my control."
Boy, that wasn't an understatement, either.
"What circumstances?
”
"When I can tell you, you'll be among the first to know. I promise. But I can't talk about it right now."
"Marcie, how can I help you if I don't know what's going on?"
That was a fair question and one I didn't know how to answer.
If I was one of the heroines in the books I love to read, I would only incidentally be a vampire. I would have another job, saving the world or catching a monster or battling magic. Only once in a while when I be bothered with my true persona. Unfortunately, I was living in the real world and I didn't have another job other than being me.
I had to find a job. I had to save the world or catch a monster. I wasn't so interested in catching Maddock as I was stopping him. Saving the world would take a little more time to think about.
"Tell me what happened at the meeting, especially when I left. Do we need to call another powwow? Do I need to send out email notes of apology?"
He studied me for another long moment and I smiled over at him. Okay, maybe it wasn't a come hither smile and maybe I wasn't looking my best, but it seemed to do the trick.
“The witches think we’re heading toward war,” Dan said, startling me.
“War?”
He nodded.
“A full blown internecine war. There’ve been skirmishes from time to time in the past, but nothing involving humans.”
“The OTHER,” I said. “The OTHER will make sure that humans are involved, won’t they?” I was getting goose bumps, and it wasn't from the cool breeze.
He nodded again.
Lights were cunningly placed beneath the bushes at regular intervals. They softly illuminated the path but they weren't glaring.
I knew we were safe here in the darkness because of the drones. They were soundless, but I could see their lights high above us, along the roof line. I wondered if they had special detectors for vampires. If so, what would that entail? It certainly wouldn't be heat sensors because vampires were, by their very nature, cold-blooded. Motion detectors? Il Duce was one of the fastest creatures I had ever seen. Did vampires give off a scent?
