♦ ♦ ♦
Friday night finally arrived after what had turned out to be an exceptionally long week. During the days, Ed and I were slaving away at work, and then the nights were spent with my roommates coming up with new and inventive ways to torture me.
Speaking of work, I had managed to do my job from home all week, which was good considering the crispy fried alternative of going to the office during the day. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to last forever. At some point, they'd expect me in for a face-to-face meeting or status update. I'd have to work on a contingency plan for that. Fortunately for me, though, I had at least a few days before that would be an issue.
It was supposed to be a night off for all of us. With the weekend coming, the crowds would be out in force and there would be little chance of us getting anything done without attracting undo attention. So the plan was ... well okay, the plan was pretty damn close to almost every Friday night prior to me becoming one of the undead: pizza, some beer, lots of bullshitting, and maybe a movie or two. That was just fine with me. Saturday was supposed to be my day to check back in at Vampire Central. To say I wasn't looking forward to it would be an understatement of epic proportions.
Well, all right, I was looking forward to some of it, but not a lot. As it turned out, though, the “some of it” part of the equation came looking for me instead.
Around seven o'clock in the evening, there was a knock on our door. This was a little odd since we hadn't buzzed anyone up. But then again, the downstairs tenants would occasionally leave the front door open, so it wasn't unheard of either.
Ed got up to answer it, leaving Tom and me arguing over the finer points of whether Stargate Universe was superior to Stargate Atlantis. He opened the door and I heard a familiar voice say, “I'm here to see Bill.”
“Sally?” I asked loud enough for everyone to hear.
“This is that vampire chick?” Ed blurted out, inadvertently swinging the door open a little wider.
“Good job keeping the family secret, Bill,” she quipped, taking a step in.
“Hold on there.” He stepped in front of her. “I haven't invited you to cross the threshold.”
She sighed dismissively then walked around him. “Out of the way, dork.”
Sally was wearing a tight black cocktail dress, four-inch heels and was by far the best-looking thing that our apartment had seen in a long time. As she stepped toward me, Tom lowered his voice and whispered, “You left that to come back home to us? You, sir, are seriously gay.”
Ignoring him, I stood up and faced her. “What are you doing here? I thought we had a deal.”
“Deals, much like underwear, are changed often.” She glanced for a moment at my roommates. “At least for some of us.” There was a momentary silence during which both my friends gawked at her like a pair of retards. “Going to introduce me? Just because I got you killed is no reason to be rude.”
“Tom, Ed, this is Sally.” I grinned evilly at her and added, “Sally Sunset.”
That elicited a glare from her and the beginnings of a chuckle from Tom. However, before it could evolve into more than that she said, without taking her eyes off me, “Before anyone laughs, let me point out that I'm capable of twisting your heads off like a beer cap.” That pretty much killed my joke dead right there.
“Pleasure to meet you, Sally,” Ed said, completely deadpan. Tom immediately followed suit.
She nodded slightly, then pretty much dismissed them. “As much as I’d love to stay and play with your pets, we have places to be. Grab your backpack and some things. Oh, and put on something decent too. We do have an image we’re trying to maintain.”
“Not until you tell me what the rush is. For all you know, I had plans for tonight.” She gave me a skeptical look at that one. “What? I occasionally do stuff with actual people ... sometimes even women.”
She answered my protest with a roll of her eyes. ARGH! Getting me killed I could tolerate, but if she didn’t stop doing that at me, this bitch was gonna get decked.
“If you say so, champ. Oh, and since you’re wondering what the rush is, James called. He’s driving down to see how his favorite Freewill is doing.”
“Freewill?” Ed asked.
“Later,” I assured him, and then turned toward Sally. “Why is he coming back so soon?” Despite my surprise at hearing such, I was also damned glad for it. Jeff would probably keep his distance with James around. Of course, this was assuming he wasn't returning with marching orders for my dissection. That would be a little less than awesome.
“Go figure. Personally, I thought he’d either give it a few weeks or forget about you completely, but apparently not. Who knows? Maybe you really touched something deep down inside of him and he’s driving in to profess his undying love,” she said then giggled. My roommates, sensing this was a joke that was unlikely to get them killed, joined in.
“Perhaps,” I mused. No way was I going to let her win this one. “When I see him, I’ll ask. Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to give you full credit for coming up with that theory.”
As expected, that shut her up. Most of the vampires in the city might be able to kick my ass in a fight, but when it came to verbal sparring, I was Muhammad Ali. Satisfied that I’d gotten the last word (for now), I turned to go gather my things. Hopefully everyone would still be alive when I got back.
♦ ♦ ♦
I needn't have worried. I returned to find my roommates no worse for the experience, with maybe the exception of having Sally's cleavage burned into their retinas. I went to grab my jacket and quietly slipped a note under Tom's door, listing some quick instructions on what to do if I wasn't back by Sunday night. That finished, I set off into the night, accompanied by the woman who was responsible for my murder.
A short while later found us on a train speeding back toward Manhattan. I could sense the many male eyeballs in the subway car checking us out. I had no doubt they were all thinking that I was either rich or had a huge dick. Damn, envy felt good on the receiving end.
“Nice friends you have,” she said, apparently looking to kill some time with small talk.
“Yeah. They have their quirks, but they're good guys.”
“They freak out when you told them?”
“They barely flinched.”
“Really?” she sounded a little surprised. “Most people freak and then we usually have to kill them before they try something stupid.”
“We tend to watch a lot of movies. You'd be surprised how desensitized that makes one. Ed could probably come home, have an alien burst from his chest, and the rest of us would be most concerned with how to clean the carpet afterward.”
“You guys are certainly an interesting bunch. Way different from the crowd I used to hang with.”
“What happened to them?”
“They freaked.”
“Oh,” I said, not wanting to know more. Instead, a memory from the week prior came back to me. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“If this has anything to do with third input, you're going right through the side of this train,” she warned.
“Third in ... oh, that. No, it doesn't. Although we can save that discussion for another time if you want.” She glared hard at me, so I quickly continued. “What I meant to ask is ... well ... did you always look like this?”
Not comprehending, she answered, “No. I'm a little dressier on the weekends, and I tend to change my hair color once a year or so.”
“Not what I meant. Forget about clothes or hair. Did you always look like you do now?”
“Well, I used to look like a baby, then a little girl, but eventually I grew these and well, golly, now I'm all grown up.”
“No, no, no. You're not getting it.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It's just that every vampire I've seen so far looks like they could moonlight as an underwear model.”
“Except for you?”
“Yes, except for me,” I snapped.
�
�And you're wondering if maybe we all started out average looking, then we got bitten and, poof, the vampire whammy transformed us into the seductive creatures of the night you see before you, right?”
“Well, yeah, actually.”
She started giggling again. “They say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but damn, they're wrong.”
“Shall I assume the answer is ‘no?’” I asked icily.
“Sorry, but it's all by design. If the coven looks like a scene out of Baywatch, it's because Jeff wants it to. A lot of coven leaders do the same thing. They figure if they're going to stare at the same faces forever, they might as well be pleasant faces.”
“So, I'm shit out of luck and get to spend eternity sticking out like a sore thumb.”
“Yeah, but that might not be a bad thing.”
“This phrase you say, I do not think it means what you think it does.”
“Look at it this way, Bill. No matter what we may look like to you, after a while, it all starts to blur together for us. It’s like living in a house full of clones. What you think of as 'hot' ends up being dull and normal for us. You, on the other hand, are different from the average vampire.”
“Below average, you mean.”
“No, I mean different. Different isn't always a bad thing. Different can get you noticed in a crowd.”
“Different can get my ass killed by Jeff in a little less than three months.”
“I never claimed different was always a good thing, either,” she pointed out.
After another moment, I asked, “So, if you had a choice, would you pick to be different like me?”
She thought about it for a second. “I probably wouldn't go that far.”
Bitch!
History Lesson
Rather than go immediately to the loft, Sally took me to a little café in a corner of Little Italy. There we found James, thankfully alone, waiting for us.
“Well, if it isn't the esteemed Dr. Death.” He stood to greet us.
“Considering the alternatives, it's nice to see you again, James.”
He frowned mildly. “It's Ozymandias here, I'm afraid. If I'm expected to respect Night Razor's silly rules when I'm in town, then you most definitely have to as well. He is your sire, after all.”
I winced visibly at that. This caused James ... sorry, Ozymandias ... to grin, and then he spread his arms toward the table.
“Enough of the formalities for the moment. Please sit and order yourselves something. The espresso here is marvelous. Much better than anything up in Massachusetts.” He held up his cup. “I dare say, if we ever run out of blood to drink, I'd be more than happy to subsist on this alone.”
As I had sucked down a liter earlier in the evening, I wasn't particularly hungry. I just went with an appetizer of mozzarella sticks so as not to seem rude. We were in Little Italy, after all.
“You're causing quite the stir, you know,” Ozymandias said after we had placed our order. “It turns out there have been no confirmed Freewills mentioned in the archives since before even my time.”
“And when exactly is before your time?”
“Never ask a vampire his age, my boy. Besides which, the older we get, the more we tend to lie about it. There are plenty of our kind, most of them far less than a millennium old, who love to go around bragging about how they were present at the Crucifixion. If you believed every one of them, the whole gathering would have been the size of the Super Bowl.”
“Okay, then let me rephrase the question. How long has it been since there have been people like me?” I saw Sally smirk out of the corner of my eye. “Freewills, I mean, running around?”
“Over six hundred years, at least.”
Whoa! Here I was, sitting with someone who might have personally known Christopher Columbus. It kind of put things into perspective for me.
He turned to Sally. “Did you tell him what's been happening?”
“No,” she replied. “I didn't want his head to swell or anything.”
“Tell me what?”
At Ozymandias's nod, she started explaining. “The rest of the coven. You’re all anyone's talked about this whole week. It's driving Jeff bugshit ... sorry ... Night Razor. There are some wild rumors flying about. Freewills can walk in the sunlight. Freewills can fly. Freewills can feed off of other vampires. Y’know, that kind of stuff.”
“All bullshit as far as I'm aware,” I confessed.
“No, really?” She gave me another fucking eye-roll. Gah! It was all I could do to keep from stabbing her with my fork. “The point is, you've become a mystery to them. The fact that you disappeared for the past week has only fed the rumor mill.”
“Disappeared?”
“Escaped might be a better word,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye.
“That's a good thing,” Ozymandias cut in before I could further question her. “It means that, in their minds, you've become greater than the sum of your parts. You're most likely going to garner respect from them that's far outside of your age or deeds. More importantly, it means that there will be just enough doubt in them to probably keep them off your back.”
“But I thought I was under your protection.”
“That only lasts so long,” he said almost dismissively. “Besides which, it's not a sure thing. Accidents happen. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't put it past Night Razor to sacrifice a few of his children to take you out. As coven head, if he claims they acted on their own, then we'd have no choice but to believe him.”
“But now...”
“But now, that's less likely to happen. If they believe just enough, and Sally here seems to think they do, then that coupled with my protection might be enough to make it difficult for Night Razor to even compel them to act against you for the time being. Maybe even afterward.”
“And Night Razor?”
“He doesn't believe a word of it,” Sally interjected. “No matter what, you'll still have him to contend with.”
I thought for a second and then said, “Okay, but that doesn't explain why you're both telling me this.”
“My motivations will have to remain my own, I'm afraid,” Ozymandias replied. “However, suffice to say at the moment I'd prefer to keep you alive, even if only for amusement purposes. It gets better, though. Our ruling council has expressed an interest in seeing you continue to draw breath ... in a manner of speaking, of course. Unfortunately, though, they refuse to take a more active stance, for now at least. And as for my dear Sally, here...”
“Where do you think most of this gossip started?” she added, a saucy little grin on her face.
Okay, that one surprised me a bit. Still, I wasn't exactly convinced of anything. I turned toward her and said matter-of-factly, “I thought you were Night Razor's little plaything.”
She let my barb roll right off her. “Perhaps. But if, say, a senior, more powerful vampire were to give me a compulsion to play along and keep my mouth shut, well, even Night Razor couldn't undo that.” She nodded in Ozymandias's direction. “If you catch my drift.”
Goddamn it! That didn't really make me feel any better. If I knew she really had an interest in keeping me alive, that would be one thing. But this compulsion bullshit left me uneasy. If that was all that was behind this, then I wasn't sure I trusted it to be enough. Then again, I really had no idea how powerful a compulsion truly could be outside of its loudness anyway.
Bill The Vampire (The Tome of Bill Book 1) Page 11
