by Garon Whited
My arm continued to recover quickly; all the materials were still there, which made fixing it much faster than regrowing it. Everyone in the room was dead. That agonized tendril-lashing I gave the area was probably lethal to anything without a spell to shield it. That was a shame; I hadn’t intended to kill everyone. Still, now that it was done, I ripped open throats so the blood could crawl out while I salvaged clothes, cash, and a few magical doodads. I was pleased to see Esteban and Jason had salvaged my rings and amulet. I was wondering where those had got to when I was captured.
Once dressed, I headed out of the room and down the hall. The door on the left was a heavy thing, more like an external fire door than an interior door, but it wasn’t locked from the outside. I opened it.
The room had some heavy equipment in it for some unidentifiable purpose. There was also what was left of Mary’s steamer trunk; they broke it open. I also found two more corpses—oops—and Mary. The corpses were in tactical gear and armed. Mary was naked and embedded in something resembling plastic. Only her face protruded from one side of the solid block. The block was about the same size as the box-like portion of the equipment—a mold for embedding things, maybe? Probably.
They removed her eyes and her fangs as part of the process. Practical and smart, that idea. Also unkind, but, to be perfectly honest, who am I to talk? I recall a living elf-sausage and some other elves embedded in a wall.
I didn’t see a handy cutting tool for the block; presumably, they never intended to remove her. Since the plastic stuff was also completely clear, disposal might be as simple as taking her out into the sunlight and waiting for the fires to die down. I wondered if it was a flammable plastic or one that melted. I would have gone with a flammable one, myself. Better potential for a complete burn and all that.
I tried ripping it apart. It wasn’t a brittle plastic; it had some give to it, kind of like some of the softer acrylics used as glass substitutes. It didn’t crack or shatter, but I could tear out handfuls of it. I started digging her out, excavating her one clawed handful at a time.
She woke up as I peeled the stuff off her right arm. She screamed.
“Hush,” I told her. “We’ve been captured by magic-working morons and we’re escaping. Let me get you out of the plastic block and we’ll get out of here.”
“Vlad?”
“That’s me. This stuff is going to hurt when I get it off your head; it’s all in your hair. I’m going to have to tear it out.”
“What happened to me? Why do my eyes hurt? Why I can’t see?”
“They cut out your eyes and pulled your fangs.” There was no point in breaking it gently. Besides, vampires regenerate. It’s not like she was permanently blinded, merely inconvenienced. Okay, drastically inconvenienced and hideously violated. Dealing with it would come later. “Not to fret; I’ve got two bodies full of blood waiting just for you.”
“Okay.” She settled down while I finished peeling her loose. I didn’t peel her scalp off; I used a knife from one of her guards to cut her hair. She didn’t like that, but gritted her teeth through it. I guided her to the bodies and poked holes in them for her to feed on. I stood behind her so the blood would crawl in her direction and hurry the process along.
“Feeling better?” I asked, once the bodies were pale and shrunken.
“Much. Nothing hurts now, so that’s something. How are my eyes?”
“Starting to grow,” I assured her, and helped her dress in stolen clothes. “Sorry for the fit; they’re salvage.”
“Not the first time I’ve worn a corpse’s clothes,” she observed, bitterly. “Are we burning the place behind us? Please tell me we’re burning the place behind us.”
“I’d rather not. This is all a conflict between the magi and vampires. These people feel responsible for creating vampires and want to clean us off the world.”
“Sounds like a good reason to kill them all,” she snarled. “At least, it does to me. My viewpoint may be a little dark at the moment.”
“No doubt Firebrand would agree,” I observed, working a shirt over her head. “Thing is, they’re cheesed at their own people for seeking immortality. Those guys are long-gone; the rest of us don’t deserve to be hunted for it.”
“You think you can get them to agree?” she asked. I put a guard’s helmet on her.
“There. You’ll pass until we can get you real clothes. And I have to try. This all seems like a terrible misunderstanding. Or an injustice.”
“Injustice?”
“Okay, the inequities of this situation annoy me. I’d rather settle it than set it on fire.”
“I look forward to seeing it,” she replied.
“You’re funny.”
“I was shooting for bitter irony.”
“It was closer to sarcasm.”
“Since I’ve had my fangs yanked and my eyes cut out of my head, I’ll settle for that.”
I took her hand to lead her. Mary extended her feathery psychic tendril to feel her way. She stopped walking and I turned back to look at her.
“There’s something…” she said, trailing off. “Are you looking at me?”
“Yes.”
“I can… it’s like…” She paused, uncertainly. “Will you touch my spirit-hand with one of yours?”
I took that feathery extension of her psyche in one of my steely ones, carefully. Her eyesockets widened.
“I can see!” she gasped, and I heard her with my ears and my mind.
Good, I replied, mentally. Can you hear me?
“Are you—did you ask me if I could hear you?”
“Yes.” Yes.
The feeling of a reply, an affirmative, came back to me. It wasn’t in words; the communication wasn’t that sophisticated. All I felt was the feeling, the impulse. Along with it, I had the strangest sensation of being in two places at once. I knew I was standing there, holding her hand. Faintly, like an image made of morning mist, I could sense her, too—how she stood, how her eyes had an empty sort of ache, her readiness to walk or run or drop, the writhing anger in her, viciously suppressed, and the fear.
“We’ll explore this more later,” I decided. “Right now, stick close and we’ll go home.”
“I’m on you like red on blood.”
I found the stairs and we went up. It wasn’t Esteban’s house, but it was on the grounds. What I had taken for a large storage building was the aboveground portion of his vampire containment bunker. The people on the ground floor were obviously there to keep us from escaping.
Now, I admit I’m not the most reasonable and patient person in the multiverse. I have things that set me off. Everyone does. I can be as provincial, prejudiced, and narrow-minded as anybody, I suppose. On the other hand, I like to think I take a pretty good try at being calm and understanding. I fail, and I know I fail, but I recognize my failures and I try to do better. Honest.
The incident belowground did not end well. I know that. I was hoping—irrationally—that I might be able to explain matters to the Fries and Mendoza families, work out some sort of apology, maybe negotiate a cease-fire or even a treaty of sorts. After accidentally killing Jason and Esteban, though, I should have written any such possibility off instantly. I obviously wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe it was the recent pain scrambling my thinking and the multiple magi souls influencing the direction of my thoughts. I don’t know.
I waved as I came up the stairs.
“Excuse me,” I began. “We really need to talk to—” was as far as I got. Then the two guards by the door opened up with submachine guns.
Mary was still below and behind me; she flattened immediately as she sensed the impending attack through me. I threw my arms up in front of my face to protect my head. As a result, I took a bunch of bullets in the arms, body, and legs—pretty much everywhere. I also discovered that magi know a spell to make silver bullets more effective against the undead. The things felt as though they were on fire. The wounds didn’t close up immediately, either; they stayed open and painful.
We reestablished our tendril-touch. We lost it when I lost my temper, or Mary snatched herself away, I’m not sure. If she didn’t want to feel what happened, letting go was a good idea. Now, though, I led Mary out of the building and steered us toward the garage. I figured stealing a car was acceptable at this point; no one was going to care about that. We made it to the back door of the garage without opposition, but someone had made it to the pool. I heard the chanting and whirled to see what the new problem was.
A middle-aged, black-haired lady stood next to the pool, palms pressed together, arms straight up over her head. Her whole body glowed in my magical vision. Her spell sucked up the contents of my Ascension Sphere, killing it, and she lowered her arms, pointing her hands at me.
It was a nice spell. It caused a ripple in space. This ripple acted like an immense, directed force. I’d say it was about the equivalent of a pickup truck doing a bit over the highway speed limit. It hit me, but it didn’t hurt at all. I didn’t even feel it. On the other hand, it gave all that energy to me in the form of motion. It wasn’t an impact so much as it was a launch.
If I can figure out a way to duplicate it, the space program will save a fortune.
I flew backward at an unreasonable speed. I crashed through the garage’s rear wall, plowed right through the back end of one of the electric cars, smashed through the seats, and finally came to rest embedded in the dashboard. The car rolled forward with my impact and crashed through one of the garage doors. We coasted along the driveway with me buried in the dash and my head lolling about like a bobble-headed vampire doll.
The car shorted out. The thing shocked the hell out of me for several seconds and set the car on fire. As it rolled to a stop on the front lawn, the battery finished shorting out and the current died, leaving me crushed, contused, concussed, convulsed, and combusting.
That’s when I really lost my temper.
For the record, the dark, semi-demonic thing that possessed me for several years isn’t your run-of-the-mill evil entity. It’s a copy—an enhanced, empowered copy—of things that really do live in places dark and deep within my psyche. The fundamental difference between us, however, is it doesn’t have my sunny disposition. If I have other redeeming qualities, it doesn’t have those, either.
I do have all of its qualities. I possess the capacity for cruelty, savagery, callousness, sadism, inhumanity, and brutality… although, I hope, not in as great a degree. I generally choose not to indulge these impulses—or, at least, make an effort not to express them in unacceptable or unjust ways. Doing horrible things to a child murderer is one thing; doing horrible things to someone who is not responsible for my having a bad day is quite another.
I suppose it’s possible my own darker impulses have gained some ground, become a bit stronger, during the tenure of my evil twin. I won’t use that as an excuse, though. I knew what I was doing. I didn’t give a damn.
I’m glad Mary didn’t have to see it.
Flames billowed out of every window, licking hungrily up the sides of the house.
I retained enough presence of mind to avoid damaging the rest of the garage too much. I stole the least-damaged car and we made our getaway.
As we pulled out of the driveway and onto the road, the roof of the house fell in. It crashed down inside with a great rending, groaning roar. Flames shot hundreds of feet into the air, lashing the sky with fire-shot smoke. It reminded me a little bit of the time someone killed my daughter, only smaller and dirtier.
We went back to the hotel. I led Mary in through a side door and up in the elevator. We replaced the helmet with some sunglasses we found in the car.
Lacking our keys, Mary spoofed the lock on our door. We cleaned up and dressed again.
I examined her eyes. They were coming along fairly well; they were white orbs with cloudy discolorations where iris and pupil would form. In another hour or two she might be able to see. As it was, she could make her way along pretty well with her psychic feeler or by using me as a seeing-eye vampire.
I drove us away, parked the car outside town and left it to burn. We hitchhiked to a bus stop, rode around for a bit, and eventually walked to the hotel. I could have left Mary to wait while I did all the running around, but I didn’t trust the locals not to be unpleasant. Once we returned to the hotel, I checked us out, called a cab, and made a run for the border. If there were any records to be analyzed, I wanted them to show we checked out and called a cab like any law-abiding citizens.
The irony of fleeing pursuit across the Mexico border, headed northward, was not lost on me.
Friday, November 13th
Mary can see again. Her eyes were fine before the night was over; I think it was quicker than usual due to all the extra blood after I carved her from the plastic. Her fangs grew back in by the time we crossed the border.
The trip home was uneventful and about as boring as the trip down. We watched some streaming video during the ride and kept quiet. We weren’t going to have a serious conversation in a public cab. During the day, I had to improvise a bit for Mary’s sake; a cab can’t make the windows completely opaque. Still, a few trash bags do wonders for light-proofing a corpse. The rest of the day I spent in my mental study, rummaging through the trash and sorting out the pages of my memory. The place was in much better order by the time night fell, and I had a pretty good line of attack on my modular gate problem.
No one was waiting for us when we got home. Bronze was in the barn and hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Francine and Firebrand agreed. That was good enough for me.
Once we established no one had prepared an ambush, Mary started looking over my house while I called Sebastian. It rang several times before he answered.
“Yes?”
“Good evening, Sebastian. Have I caught you at a bad time?”
Long pause.
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
“I need to talk to you about that client in Mexico.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think he’s really as interested in a power circle as you seem to think. Did he already pay?”
“Yes.”
“Cash?”
“Money transfer.”
“That’ll do,” I decided. “I may have to get out of the business, though.”
“I understand.”
“Oh?” It occurred to me I hadn’t explained anything to him. That told me a lot. “Well, that tells me a lot.”
Long pause.
“What I mean to say,” he said, carefully, “is I heard about what happened in Mexico.”
“I look forward to hearing your version of it,” I told him.
“Well, as I understand it—”
“In person,” I added.
Long pause. I continued.
“Sebastian, I’d like you to come by some afternoon. We can sit down, have lunch together, and discuss future business arrangements. I’m not all that upset, not anymore. I’ve had some time to cool off and think. I’d like to understand what the problem is, who has the problem, why there is a problem, and how to deal with the problem. Do you think we can have a civilized conversation about it?”
“I think so. I’m not sure when I can get away,” he added. “Things are busy right now. You understand.”
“I’m sure your clients would appreciate you getting more information on this matter.”
“Yes… I suppose they would,” he agreed, thoughtfully. No doubt he was considering how valuable such information might be compared to the risks he might be taking.
“I’ll expect you on Sunday, about one o’clock. How’s that?”
�
��I guess it will have to do.”
“I look forward to it.”
“I’m sure I do, too,” he said, and hung up. I didn’t believe him.
Mary came in a little later and slumped into a chair. Francine raised her head, yawned, and went back to sleep. I raised an eyebrow.
“This place is a deathtrap,” she began. “You’ve got all sorts of ways to tell who killed you, but nothing to keep someone from doing it.”
“Go on,” I encouraged.
“It’s a frame building with lots of windows. That porch runs around the house. It makes it easy to get to the windows. I could get into this place naked and blind—and I know how it feels, so I’m sure. You have alarms and cameras, but that’s… hmm.” She paused pressed her fingers to her forehead, thinking.
“All right,” she continued. “There are two categories of security, each with two levels, for four possible layers.
“The first level is deterrence, in the passive category. Post signs, install cameras, and otherwise make it clear people are unwelcome. It tells people they shouldn’t go there. It doesn’t do anything to stop them. All it does is warn them not to try it.
“The second level is restriction, also in the passive category. Lock the doors. Put bars on windows. Put a wall around the property. Make it impossible to enter without deliberate effort and forethought. Whether they’re warned off or not, this type of thing makes any intruder work for it; nobody can wander in accidentally. Someone could claim they didn’t see the sign, or didn’t understand it. They can’t say that about the door they had to kick in.
“The third level is guardian, the first of the active security. Have people or animals to actively oppose efforts to enter. Rather than simply sitting there and being an obstacle—like a wall, or barred windows—the guardians are opponents. They tell you to stop and they’ll make you leave. Anyone trying to get in has to overcome them in some way or find a way to avoid triggering them.
“The fourth level is interdiction, the last level of active security. This consists of booby-traps and active defenses. Radar-controlled guns, landmines, poison gas—all things designed to kill an intruder instead of deter or remove him. If the intruder gets to that layer of defense, it’s designed to make him stay in a permanent fashion.”
