Nightlord: Orb

by Garon Whited

  Okay, yes, we also siphoned off little bits of spiritual essence from people around us. Trifling amounts of vitality from each person adds up over time. Our main reason for being in Vegas was to enjoy it, not hunt it. And, to be fair, Vegas was nice to us. Nobody asked us to hand over our money; nobody even asked us for a handout. Maybe it’s only on the boulevard, but Vegas did a terrific job of making itself hospitable and welcoming.

  If there’s one thing I disliked about the place, it’s strictly a personal preference. I brought my sunglasses. I needed them. They don’t need streetlights; Las Vegas is the land of neon sunshine. The signs illuminate the world. My eyes and ears—heck, all my senses—are supernaturally sharp at night. I prefer quiet, not-very-well-lit places. Las Vegas is neither of those things. But, as I say, that’s my personal preference. No one else seemed to mind.

  Thursday, December 3rd

  They say New York is the city that never sleeps. Maybe so; I haven’t really tried to find out. Las Vegas, on the other hand, is the three-ring circus that never sleeps. It’s a wonderful town for a nightlord. During the day, there are a thousand things to do. At night, there’s a different thousand things to do. And all the things you expect to close at night? Somewhere, one of them is open. Need to talk to a loan officer at four in the morning? No problem. Looking for a breakfast bar when you woke up at four in the afternoon? Right this way. It’s possible there are goods or services you can’t find twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I don’t know what they are. Las Vegas tries to be everything to everyone.

  On the downside, the place is crawling with undead.

  Last night, Mary and I saw several vampires. We didn’t make ourselves known to them—none of them were Thessaloniki, or if they were, they didn’t brush against us with spirit-tendrils. We simply took note of them and pretended not to. Shortly after, we noticed a few more, here and there, usually alone but occasionally in pairs. I started to wonder a little and counted people vs. vampires as we walked along, taking a random sample.

  A little napkin math seems to indicate the vampire population of Las Vegas would therefore be around a hundred thousand undead.

  Which is ridiculous.

  That’s about one vampire for every twenty-five people. Don’t get me wrong; it could be done. Twenty-five people could support one vampire. I have a sneaking suspicion that vampire saliva causes an increase in blood production. One vampire might, theoretically, survive indefinitely on a group as small as ten adult humans. To do so would require the active cooperation of the humans, though, and that’s not going to happen.

  My best guess for the ridiculous numbers is that the undead tend to cluster around the Strip, which gives an abnormally high chance of encountering one. But even if that changes the odds by a factor of a hundred—meaning one vampire for every 2,500 people—that’s still about a thousand vampires in one city.

  That’s not ridiculous. Preposterous, perhaps. Surely, I’m missing something in my assumptions. There must be some other factors involved I don’t know about.

  On the other hand, Mary and I did some research on the local meat packing industry. If no one is going to volunteer to be a blood donor and get their gallon pin all in one go, we have to look into other options. We found a number of places that butchered livestock and packaged the meat. And, strangely enough, were open twenty-four hours a day.

  Even for Las Vegas, that seems odd to me.

  What was even more odd was the price list at each place. In addition to the regular cuts of meat and various organs—sheep’s kidneys, calf liver, ground beef, whatever—they also had prices for various types of animal blood. By the pint, quart, and gallon. It’s fairly expensive to fill a bathtub with blood, but you can do it here. All you have to do is lay down enough cash. It takes about forty gallons. They’ll even deliver it in sealed five-gallon bottles, like the bottles for a water cooler.

  Maybe I’m wrong about being wrong. Maybe there are a thousand or more vampires in town. That’s the only thing I can think of to cause such a drastic demand.

  We’re surrounded by vampires. They don’t seem to have noticed us, though. Hopefully, we can blend in. With so many in town, what’s two more?

  The magician was as much a mystery the second time around. The only possibilities that spring to mind are he’s a supernatural entity, a mutant with psychic powers, or an absolute master of misdirection. While I’m confident in my ability to duplicate all of his tricks, it would take a week of work to gather sufficient power and set up the spells. The cup and balls I get. The bullet-catching illusion, I get. The rest of it… I don’t see how he does it.

  This frustrates me. It’s entertaining, but also frustrating. He’s good.

  We also saw more vampires while we watched the shows. I took another count and came up with roughly the same numbers. Mary noticed me doing the math during the lounge singer’s performance of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” I’ve heard Vic Fontaine sing that one; everyone else is just another singer.

  “Shall we see if we can buy a liquid dinner?” she asked. “You can see how many of the customers are interested in blood.”

  “We could,” I admitted. “It’s tempting. You know it’ll be cold, refrigerated stuff, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” she told me. “I looked them up. Two of these companies run their own slaughterhouse. It might be fresh out of the animal.”

  “And that tells us something, too, doesn’t it? Don’t Phrygians have to drink human?”

  “I don’t know if they have to,” Mary considered, thoughtfully. “That’s what I understand, but they may actually be picky eaters. Their powers certainly make it easier to be choosy.”

  “But it would imply the locals are mostly Thessaloniki and Constantines.”

  “It would. Why?”

  “Just wondering. I’d think they’d need Phrygians by the gross to keep their secret with a population so large.”

  “I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “I’ve never had to supervise a city. No one ever put me in charge of an area; I’m too young and not at all interested. At least, not in doing it. The details are becoming more interesting.”

  “Let’s go get dinner,” I suggested. “Your idea has me curious.”

  We took a cab. Arthur Marten’s Meats was definitely open, with lights ablaze and doors swinging. They were doing a surprising amount of business for near midnight on a weeknight. Either tomorrow was a meat-industry holiday, or…

  Yep. Vampires, or people who worked for vampires. While most of the customers left with a wrapped package of meat, all of them left with a container. Most were pint-sized. A few were quarts. One carried a gallon. I presume the larger volumes were delivered; no one wants to be seen carrying a five-gallon bottle of blood out of the store.

  “I don’t think I need to go in,” I told Mary. “I’ve seen enough.”

  “But I’m hungry,” she complained. I shrugged and offered her my arm. She hung on to it and we went in. There was a line; we queued up.

  The man behind the counter was human; you don’t get his sort of florid face and sweaty forehead without a pulse.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Five gallons of beef,” I ordered, reading it off the menu on the wall, “and another five of mutton, please.”

  “Ten gallons?” he asked, looking doubtful.

  “Yes, please.”

  “You sure?”

  “I have help to carry it.”

  “Okay.” He thumped computer keys with thick fingers and nodded. “Yeah. It’ll be a minute. Takes a while to fill.”

  “No rush.” We stepped aside to wait while he took other orders. It wasn’t that long a wait before two large, plastic bottles appeared. I noticed the bottles were warm to the touch. I also noticed everyone in the room was looking at us with what I can only describe as hungry expressions.

  I punched for a cab and we went outside, each of us carrying a bottle.

  “Mutton?” Mary asked.

  “Ever had it?”<
br />
  “Not that I know of.”

  “It’s good.”

  We got into the cab and Mary reached for the plastic-wrapped mouth of the bottle. I stopped her.

  “Remember, if you open it near me, it’s going to crawl out.”

  “Ah. Good point. I can wait. Hey!”

  “Hey, what?”

  “Why don’t the bottles slide over to you?”

  “What, you mean like magnets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s more of an animation thing than an attraction thing.”

  “You mean, the life in the blood actively tries to crawl toward you?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t looked into it. But that would explain it.”

  “Could be. At least now I won’t have to wonder.”

  We returned to the hotel and the cab deposited us in the parking garage. We climbed aboard our RV and locked the door. Mary cracked the seal on one of the bottles. It was a little awkward to horse it around and find the right angle, but spills weren’t our first concern. Anything we spilled would crawl over to me anyway.

  Mary got the majority of it. She was surprised she could drink so much. You wouldn’t think ten gallons would go into a human body, and it won’t. She was under the impression a vampire could only drink about a gallon at a time. But ten gallons of blood into a nightlord? I’ve absorbed more than that by accident, just walking through a room. I still don’t know where it goes, or how I metabolize it, or any of that. Frankly, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand it. Mary didn’t seem bothered by it beyond a mild curiosity; she was simply pleased to no longer be hungry.

  I actually got to drink some, sort of. It’s hard to actually drink free blood; it wants to crawl all over me more quickly than it can go down my throat. On the other hand, my tongue will almost reach the bottom of the bottle, and it soaks up blood at a phenomenal rate—it’s strange to be able to actually see it in action. Mary drank most of each bottle, then handed the rest to me. I got a quart or two from each one. I think I like the sheep’s blood better than the beef.

  Mary dabbed at the blood on her chin. I lashed my tongue across her bloodstains and they disappeared. She grinned at me, waited until I retracted the thing, and kissed me.

  “I want one.”

  “One what?”

  “A tongue like that.”

  “I don’t know how I got it,” I admitted. “I just woke up with it one day. It’s kind of troublesome, especially with the knife-edged teeth.”

  “I like it.”

  “You like mine,” I retorted. “It’s not as much fun to have one.”

  “Oh, but I’d love to try!”

  “Woman, you have a one-track mind!”

  “I do not! I also think about… um. All right, maybe you have a point.” She changed the subject. “Did you find out what you wanted at the blood bank?”

  “Yes and no. I found out, but it wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “From what I saw, every midnight customer was buying blood. Some of them I could recognize as vampires. Teeth, eyes—little telltales mortal eyes probably can’t see, or don’t see without actually looking for them. Kind of like how you can see I’m not human even when I’ve got my contacts in, makeup on, and hair combed. But everybody in the place, without exception, was buying blood. Which means they’re either going home and making sure Passover is observed in the original way—and it’s the wrong time of year for that—or they have some other use for it. There may, in fact, be over a thousand vampires in one city.”

  Mary gave it serious consideration.

  “How many vampires were at your house? Eight Constantines, six Thessaloniki, and three Phrygians?”

  “Sounds right. Wait—seven Thessaloniki. I killed one as I came out of the house. I presume he was a Thessaloniki; he had a shotgun.”

  “A total of eighteen,” she mused. “Think we can take a thousand?”

  “Oddly enough, no.”

  “Did you leave anything in the room?”

  “Socks? Toothbrush? Other chattels of inconsequence.”

  She started the RV, swung around the parking area, and I hitched up the trailer. We pulled up to the exit of the parking garage and Mary ran a digital stick through the machine, touching various options—paying the hotel bill and parking fees right there at the terminal. Then we hit the road and left Vegas behind us like a premature sunrise.

  Paranoia? Possibly. I prefer to think of it as caution.

  Still… a thousand vampires in one city? Can that possibly be right?

  We really didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  Saturday, December 5th

  The one thing about living in Las Vegas I never could stomach; all the damn vampires. I think they picked up our trail there.

  Cruising southwest down the I-15 highway has been pretty much the same as always. It’s a wonderful road trip. We drive for a while, stop wherever we feel like it, have two breakfasts, two lunches, and multiple dinners. We’ve both gone riding in the Mojave National Preserve—separately; someone is always with the RV. Bronze is delighted about the open spaces. She’s also careful about brushfires. My horse is responsible like that.

  We’re driving nowhere in particular and the magic charge is building up amazingly quickly—the faster we go, the more we take in. I think it’s the first of the electromagical conversion spells on the RV’s power uptake. I need to put a lot more layers of spell in there, but it does seem to be working.

  The front scoop doesn’t seem to help, really; the Ascension Sphere soaks up anything we encounter anyway. Maybe if I expanded the radius of action on the scoop—made the magical “funnel” larger—we’d get a better yield. I’ll have to look into that. The problem is it takes power to create a scoop, and the larger the scoop, the more power it takes. In this low-power environment, the most efficient size may be awfully small.

  The one on the trailer seems to work better, but I think that’s because it’s set higher, drawing in power that would normally flow right over us.

  Between teaching magic to Mary and studying the workings of a gate spell, I’m never bored. Mary’s getting better at her spell work, too; we’ve spent hours (which feel like weeks) inside my headspace and, more recently, in hers.

  Her headspace is nicer than mine. The décor is pretty. No windows, but that’s typical. There are still window curtain things to make it look as though there are. The walls are decorated with murals, mostly of building layouts, possibly from some of her more carefully-planned thefts.

  I find it vaguely disturbing that the “housebreaker” has an intimate knowledge of the Louvre, the Tower of London, and the United States Bureau of Engraving in Fort Worth. I’ve resisted the urge to ask. I’m sure she just has fantasies of stealing the Mona Lisa, the Crown Jewels, and the printing plates for cash. That’s all it is.

  Her bookshelves are a mess, of course, but she’s been sorting out her own memories. We’ve managed a few experimental spells in her mental study to show how it can be done. She’s getting the hang of using a search spell in her bookshelves to find memories. That helps, but organizing it all is going to take a long time.

  Her spell repertoire is limited. She can create a small light, start a fire without a lighter, and damp down vibrations in the air—she can make herself almost entirely silent. That last one was a spell she insisted on learning. She tried to insist I use it when we go sneaking. She changed her mind once I had her use it on herself. Casting it wasn’t the problem; keeping it going for any length of time was the problem. She agreed it might be impractical for routine use.

  But I digress.

  The vampires of Vegas are following us. Not in person, obviously; they have a sunlight allergy. Their servants, hangers-on, agents, employees, thugs, muscle, spies, and flunkies don’t have that problem. Their technique, at least to this point, was to simply get a cab, set it to cruise mode, and have it get radar lock on the trailer.
Then it’s only a matter of sitting back and killing time.

  We aren’t constantly zipping along the highway, though. We pull over frequently. This really shoots down our tails’ ability to be inconspicuous. We spotted the first guy the next morning when he followed us from breakfast to breakfast to lunch. After that, he started trading off with a partner. Now they’re up to six people, taking turns being the lead man in the conga line of tails.

  Mary spotted them. Firebrand spotted them. I spotted them. Bronze, watching through windows in the trailer, spotted them. They’re not terribly good at being unnoticed. It makes me wonder how many other people we’re missing. The competent ones. The professionals.

  Yet, Mary and Firebrand tell me there aren’t any more. Mary says the people tailing us are actually doing a good job of it. We’re not like a typical person being tailed; we’re suspicious and know, not merely intellectually accept, someone wants to kill us. Firebrand says it can hear the people being bored with following us and agrees we’ve spotted all six of them.

  I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this. It’s a severe temptation to simply grab one some evening and ask him what he’s doing. But that may be what they want; why else would they follow us for the past few days without doing anything? Are they setting up an ambush farther down the road—and frustrated by our lackadaisical pace? Or are they ready to spring a trap and they’re waiting for us to take the bait—that is, grab a tail? Or are they only concerned with keeping track of us? Is it the same principle as having a wasp in the room?—you may not have anything to swat it, but you sure want to know where it is! Will grabbing one of their guys tip them off that we know we’re being watched and start a new phase?

  Someone once told me a statistic about smart people. They generally have a hard time making quick decisions. Why? Because they think of so many options and potential outcomes, follow them down farther, look more moves ahead. I suspect I have that problem; I’m moderately smart, although not terribly wise.