The Artist of Ruin

by Matthew S. Cox

  10

  Crash Pad

  Glim doesn’t say anything, but I get the feeling I’m putt-putting along.

  He’s constantly ahead of me as we fly, and something about the way he keeps looking back makes me think he can go way faster.

  “Yes,” says Glim.

  “Huh?”

  “I can fly a bit faster than we are going.”

  “Oh. I think Dalton can, too. He grabbed my hand the first night I woke up and dragged me around like a helium balloon. The whole thing’s mostly a blur, but it felt faster than I can fly. I guess I’m weak all around, huh?”

  “Not completely. The Beasts are perhaps the worst at flying. Some can’t even do it at all. Furies occasionally even lose the ability if they give in too much to their anger.”

  I laugh. “So, how fast can you go?”

  “A hair over 200 miles an hour if I fly normally,” says Glim. “Maybe a little faster if I have a good reason to hurry, like racing sunrise.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good reason.” I bite my lip, thinking about how he’s stuck asleep until sunset. I guess that spares him a little boredom though. Being trapped in my room on sunny days while awake is kinda annoying. “What do you mean fly normally?”

  “Tricks of the darkness.” He lets me catch up, takes my hand, and proceeds to do the ‘towing a balloon’ thing. Wow, I’m glad I skipped the Uggs. Wind moving past me at this speed would totally have ripped them off. This would probably tear off most of my dresses as well. Note to self: high-speed flight requires jeans and a decent shirt.

  It doesn’t take us long to reach Seattle, and he homes in on a spot in Beacon Hill, due west from the little peninsula holding Seward Park. Okay, it’s not that little, but it looks small from the air. We land in a quiet, residential neighborhood dense with houses. The one in front of us is kind of an olive-drab and brown mess. It’s pretty clear the owner doesn’t care a lot about maintenance. The front door’s ajar, and the scratchy, almost-in-tune notes of someone fooling around on a guitar blare from inside.

  Two little cars have jumped the curb, cramming onto the sidewalk by a driveway with three other compact cars.

  “Big family,” I mutter.

  “Probably roommates.” Glim approaches the porch, but doesn’t touch the steps. “I didn’t bother figuring out if they split rent or if one of them inherited the house from their parents. Everyone inside is relatively young, and they all appear to be addicts. Some more than others.”

  “Oh. Is this a crack house?” I ask.

  Glim chuckles. “I suppose for this area, it’s about as much a crack house as anything would be.”

  “Okay. So, I just pretty much walk in?”

  “The door is open, and you are a vampire.” Glim smiles.

  “No one’s invited me in.”

  He raises an eyebrow at me.

  “Heh. Just kidding.”

  I walk up onto the porch. When I reach the door, I go to peer back at Glim, but he’s right behind me. This time, I don’t yelp, but I do bend the knob from squeezing it so hard.

  “You are way too good at moving without making any sound,” I whisper.

  He tilts his head a bit to the right and smiles, moonlight making his sabretooth fangs all but glow. I had a reasonable amount of confidence in myself, given that I’m a vampire and all. But having him with me makes me feel immortal.

  Well. Duh. I am immortal. But, whatever.

  My shove at the door is somewhere between DEA raid and angry ex-girlfriend come to take her shit back. As soon as I step inside, a sledgehammer of sweaty socks and stale cheese mashes me square in the face. Whether that cheese is ‘foot,’ ‘navel,’ or ‘don’t ask,’ I’m not entirely sure, and it’s a debate I’m not wasting brain power on.

  The place looks like the set of Animal House two years after they filmed the movie. Weird unexplainable blotches stain the walls and ‘snowdrifts’ of old beer cans and fast food cartons gather in piles. Patches of plaster are missing, exposing wood slats underneath. A ruined mess of a ceiling light that may have once been a fan hangs off a wire, with four light bulbs glowing at different elevations. I’m astounded I don’t see the ghost of a sweet elderly couple who used to live here crying over their once-nice home.

  Six people, four guys and two women, lay around in various states of chemically-induced transcendence. Mercifully, all except one are dressed, and the nude guy—well, he’s not technically nude. He is wearing underpants, even if they are on his head—is face down on the rug by the bay window.

  They’re all too skinny except for a round-faced guy with a black mustache and goatee in the middle of the couch. In addition to his tank top and cargo pants, he’s sporting a black wool cap despite being inside. He’s the only one coherent enough to notice me, and gives me this challenging stare like he’s trying to figure out if I’m real or a figment of his mind. Spanish words fly by in his thoughts too fast for me to follow. The coffee table in front of him holds several small bottles, needles, spoons, baggies of white powder, and two handguns.

  Eep!

  I keep a calm face despite being irrationally frightened in the presence of guns. Intellectually, I know I don’t have much to worry about. Except being shot in the head, which would essentially knock me out for a while. Kinda like the way I bashed Scott’s face into that steering wheel until brain stuff came out. It won’t kill me, but I’d rather not wind up unconscious around guys like this. It would be my luck I’d stay out cold until the sun came up.

  A wide archway separates the living room from the dining room, deeper into the house. At the far corner, a skinny guy with long, sandy brown hair sits on a thin mattress, back against the wall, strumming at a guitar. He’s got a thin face, big nose, and prominent Adam’s apple, but he’s not that bad looking, well, except for the effects of a heroin high. He’s doing that one eye wide open one eye mostly closed thing. Like a human version of Bill the Cat.

  And yes, I know that comic. My Dad’s a major fan.

  In fact, I have an Opus plush.

  Anyway… That guy kinda looks like a much younger version of Daniel Parrish after he spent two years in a prisoner of war camp and then had to suffer through a Jerry Springer taping. Glim’s still right beside me, but no one is reacting to him. They’re all staring at me. Bet Glim’s doing that invisible thing again. I ignore the lot of them and head inside to the guitarist.

  “Alex?” I ask.

  He looks up at me, squinting. It takes a moment for his eyelids to equalize, at which point, he stops strumming. “Oh, hi. Do I know you?”

  “No, you don’t,” I say. “But I’m here to help you.”

  “Huh?”

  I take his hand. “C’mon. Pack your stuff up. You need to go home.”

  “Pff,” says Alex. “I am home. This is my crash pad.”

  “Hey, who the hell is this bitch?” asks a voice behind us in the living room.

  I squat, eye level with him. “Alex. Pack your stuff.”

  My compulsion burrows past the fog of drugs in his brain. After a moment of staring glassily at me, he sets the guitar down and starts gathering clothing laying loose around the floor. My ears pick up the scrunch of carpet compressing. Three of the guys from the outer room, including the one thinking in Spanish, walk up behind me, forming a wall of person they think traps me in the corner.

  The guy on the left, the oldest-looking at almost thirty, rubs his nose and sniffs. “Probably a cop. She ain’t one of the usuals.”

  I smirk at him. “Dude. You’ve taken so many drugs, your brain’s Jell-O. Do I seriously look like a cop to you? And eat something. Your ribs are sticking out like a xylophone.”

  Alex chuckles.

  “What the hell did you call me?” asks the guy who thinks I’m a cop.

  “An alien. Xenomorph,” says the dude on the left.

  Ugh. I shake my head in disbelief. “If you think I’m a cop, you’re an idiot.”

  “Yo,” says black-wool-hat guy. “Probably Parris
h’s kid sister or some shit. This chick ain’t no cop. Too young.”

  “Yeah.” The third guy reaches for my chest. “She’s kinda cute for a kid.”

  I grab his hand before it makes contact and fling his arm away with enough force to make him stumble back. “Sorry. I’ve already got a boyfriend.”

  “That don’t matter.” Xylophone lunges at me with a grab.

  He winds up with his arms wrapped around me for a second or two before I plant a hand in the middle of his chest and shove him airborne. He sails across the dining room, smashing a dent in the drywall before hitting the floor on his ass with a heavy thud.

  “We got an issue,” yells black-wool-hat guy.

  The instant his hand goes for the gun in the front of his pants, my reflexes kick in, stalling time to a near standstill. I kick him in the nuts and follow up with a right cross to the face. Since I’m not trying to kill him, the hit merely dislocates his jaw.

  Boob-grabber takes a step back, hands up.

  Shaking my head, I turn and start pulling Alex to his feet. Grabby flings himself on my back, trying to get me in a bear hug, but he winds up with both hands on my breasts. I can’t tell if he’s attempting to fight me or cop a feel. Either way, I’m beyond done with this idiot. I ram my elbow back into his chest, launching him. He hits the ground and goes sliding, tearing up the old rug. Rumbling like an army coming down stairs shakes the whole house.

  Xylophone snarls as he picks himself up from the floor. He staggers toward me while pulling a knife from his belt. “Time to bleed, bitch.”

  He charges, leading with the blade. I sidestep with ease, grab him by the scruff, and toss him into the other wall. He bounces away and falls to the ground under a rain of plaster bits. “Nah. I don’t do that anymore. You wouldn’t believe how much I save on feminine products.”

  Glim chuckles.

  Four more guys, all strung-out twentysomethings, rush in from the direction of the living room. They look at me, the three more-or-less unconscious guys, and Alex, who’s still picking crap up and stuffing it in a trash bag.

  “What the hell man?” yells the guy with the aluminum baseball bat.

  Yeah, okay. No one suspects little ol’ me as the cause of this ass kicking. Of course, that presents an immediate other problem—they’re about to exact revenge on the guy I’m here to save. I wonder if this is why Daniel thought his grandson would wind up dead within a few weeks? I’ve basically set up a situation to cause that. Which makes me wonder, if Daniel never asked me to help, would Alex still be in danger?

  Seeing the future makes my head hurt. Or, talking about someone else seeing the future. Or… Argh! Forget it.

  The four druggies storm over, intent on beating Alex senseless. Since the one guy is raising the bat, I’m going to guess they’re not too concerned if he lives through it. I pounce at ‘bat man’ and shove him off his feet before grabbing the next nearest guy (who is much skinnier) and swinging him like a human club at the other two.

  Glim paces around as I jump from guy to guy, trying to punch them unconscious. He leans effortlessly out of the way of flying bodies, so fluid and graceful he could pass for an insubstantial wraith. Another guy goes for a knife; I kick him in the chest, launching him into a triple backflip that ends with him stuck headfirst in the wall like a dart.

  A flicker of white draws my attention to Glim. He’s holding up a card with ‘9.8’ written on it. I blink. The ‘card’ dissipates into a pale mist, an illusion.

  “Hah. Nice.” I grin at him.

  “Deducted zero-point-two for only embedding him shoulder deep,” says Glim.

  Not that it took much effort for me to beat up a bunch of mortals, all of whom are at least partially out of their heads on drugs, but I do kinda wonder why he didn’t help. Maybe because he’s a former soldier and he didn’t trust himself to not kill them, or maybe he’s got PTSD, or maybe he’s required to be a nonpresence here by some political stuff I’m unaware of.

  Meh. I’m sure he would’ve stepped in if I wound up in actual danger. They’re only humans after all.

  Moaning surrounds me. Between the half-hearted groans, the soft creak of floorboards in the living room approaches. Someone’s shifting their weight from leg to leg, trying to be quiet.

  I glance toward the arch. A scrawny woman freezes in her tracks, not quite pointing the other handgun from the coffee table at me. Oh, hell no.

  The room blurs as I hurl myself at her as fast as I can make myself run. Her hand nudges upward; a spinning lead nugget flies out from a bright orange flare. I twist to the left, leaning under the bullet—which misses my shoulder by an inch or two—and keep spinning into a tackle. I tackle her hard enough that we crash to the floor and I slide on top of her like riding a bobsled straight into the wall. Her head cracks against the baseboard, but nothing goes crunch, so she’s still alive at least.

  “That sounded painful,” says Glim.

  “The bitch shot at me.”

  “Yes, well, you should probably consider leaving.” He approaches the bay window in the living room and peers out. “Someone will have heard the gunshot.”

  I stand, dusting myself off, and walk over to Glim, who’s standing under the arch. “We didn’t exactly drive here. How am I supposed—wait. Alex might have a car.”

  “Yeah,” says Alex. “Hey, why is my shit all packed up? Whoa. Why’s everyone sleeping already? It’s too early.”

  “Alex…” I walk up to him. “Look at me.”

  He does.

  I dive into his head. While implanting a compulsion to go home and forget being a heroin user, I stumble over a mental bump. Hmm. That’s new. “Hey Glim?”

  “Yes?” he asks, right beside me.

  “Ack.” I twitch.

  “Does it bother you when I do that?”

  “A little. I don’t mind if it makes you laugh. Just don’t startle me into doing anything embarrassing.” I point at Alex, who’s standing mesmerized under my half-completed command. “Wil you please take a peek in that head and let me know what that weird little, umm, blob in his thoughts is?”

  Glim leans close, almost touching noses with him. The light radiating from his eyes paints Alex’s face a sickly shade of yellow. “Another vampire has played with his mind. Look.”

  I focus on Alex’s vacant hazel eyes, forcing my awareness deep like a mole burrowing into the ground. A group of thoughts has a spongy quality that I’m unfamiliar with. Like, if normal memories feel like I’m playing with marbles, these are gummi bears. Picking through them unravels the image of a too-pretty woman with black hair and porcelain-pale skin. Image after image flashes by, and I get the feeling this woman had Alex so wrapped around her little finger he’d become a veritable slave. It’s clear she’s one of us, since normal people aren’t that pretty. Though, she’s no Aurélie. If beauty was a weapon, this girl’s got a rocket launcher, but Aurélie’s a nuke.

  The endpoint of the fake memory consists of her dumping him. The rejection fills him with a sense of such worthlessness he fell into a bottomless pit of drugs and not caring. There’s so much depression in there at losing her that I no longer think Daniel saw the fight I started being the cause of his death. No, this poor guy was definitely going to kill himself.

  “This is a strong fake memory,” I mutter.

  “It’s not a false memory. The unnatural feeling to it is due to his experience being a thrall.”

  “That’s like a slave, right?” I ask.

  “Think of the way your friend Ashley reacted to Aurélie feeding from her. It is similar to that, only, your patron is so powerful in that technique, she does it without even meaning to. Mortals fall under her sway with little effort. This one did it on purpose.”

  “So these memories are real?” I gawk. “This guy spent months lounging around at this woman’s place basically being a toy for her?”

  He nods.

  “Oh wow. And he couldn’t handle it when she got bored.”

  “Alas,” says
Glim.

  I concentrate on Alex’s mind, trying to make him forget this woman… but I feel like I’m banging my head into a padded wall. “Argh. Wow, this is strong. Can you help?”

  Glim stares at the guy intently for about ten seconds. “I think I’ve managed it, but the radiance is quite potent. Whoever did this is older than I. There is a chance it will come back to haunt him.”

  “Damn. I suppose I could ask Aurélie to look at him.”

  “She will likely want a favor in return.”

  I shrug. “No problem. She’s a little creepy, but I like her, and I think she likes me.”

  “She does. But once we reach that age, we become far different from human. While I have no reason to suspect she will become a threat to you, it would be wise when dealing with any elder not to expect them to react in human ways to anything.”

  I nod. “Yeah, a couple hundred years will crack the noodle.”

  “Come on, Alex. Let’s get in your car and go meet a friend of mine.”

  He reacts to my command with a nod, and a mechanical walk out the front door. I follow, but pause in the living room at the notice of a cell phone on the floor. Heh. Time to be a spiteful bitch. Careful not to leave fingerprints, I use my claws to pick up both handguns and put them on the coffee table by all the drug stuff where they are nice and obvious to anyone coming in the front door. That done, I dial 911 on the cell phone. It’s so nice of cell phone providers not to require an unlock code to call emergency services.

  Before they pick up, I hurry out the door. Shoot at me? Hah! Take that.

  Alex stares at me from behind the wheel of an ancient Toyota Celica. I command him over to the passenger seat. Bad enough he’s high, he’s still stuck in a mind-control fog. No way am I riding in that car. I settle in behind the wheel… and, shit.

  I can’t drive stick.

  Alex mutters a non-word, trying to grab a steering wheel in front of him that doesn’t exist.