Cast them into the fire and let it purify them.
It was an old and powerful mantra.
Simon moved as swiftly as the wind, leaping over the three seated forms and landing in between me and them. He grabbed Matt by the shoulders and hauled his bulky frame up as if he were made of straw. Bloodstains still matted Simon’s shirt where the bullet had torn through him, but the wound itself was long healed. Bunching the fabric of Matt’s camouflage jacket, Simon lifted him so that he floated a foot above the ground.
“I’ve had enough of your talk, little man,” Simon snarled. His lips peeled back in a monstrous grin revealing two needle-sharp fangs. His eyes transformed into two blood-filled orbs, the pupils disappearing completely. It had been a long time since I had seen a vampire—any vampire—unleash themselves like this, and now as Simon dangled the big man tantalizingly close to his mouth I remembered how terrifying it was. “See the blood on my shirt, boy?” he whispered, soft as the breeze. “I need to be repaid for that. And I think yours will do just fine.” He leaned in, fangs a scant inch away from Matt’s throat.
The younger brother, who had sat dumbstruck just a moment before, now tried to struggle to his feet. I moved quickly and put him back on the ground with a shove. He gave me a hurt look as if I had betrayed him, as if I should have helped him protect his bigot brother. I pointed at the boy, indicating that he should stay where he was, and tapped the pistol in my shoulder holster just to reinforce the point.
I knew Simon, and I realized that he was delivering a lesson. It was a harsh, terrifying lesson, but one that needed to be taught.
“Oh God,” Karl squealed. At least it seemed like Karl had found religion. He sure was praying a lot lately.
Matt’s eyes were wide with panic as he struggled feebly in the vampire’s grip, legs kicking spasmodically, neck straining away. He had heard about what paras were and what they could do, but decades of separation from the human race meant that if you didn’t live in the merge then you probably had never met a vamp or wolf face to face. Everyone thought they knew enough, that they had seen the news feeds and the documentaries. They had read the literature, so they were ready for anything. But to see it on the news and to have it in front of you, to have it at your throat was a very different story indeed. I saw it all pass over Matt’s face in those few tortured moments just before his eyes rolled up into his head and his strength and rage pooled into a dark patch on his camouflage trousers and flowed down his legs to water the parched earth under him.
Matt went limp and Simon dropped him into his own puddle of piss. The younger brother tried to scuttle away but Simon grabbed his ankle and hauled him back. Turning Matt’s neck towards the kid, he showed him the smooth undamaged skin.
“You…you didn’t bite him?”
“No,” Simon said grinning. “I was just having a bit of fun.”
25
“I don’t think he’s comfortable back there,” Lily said grinning.
“Well it’s his own fault for not upgrading to a car with UV-protected glass,” I said loudly so Simon could hear me from his place in the trunk.
Dawn had snuck up on us quickly while we had been waiting for the local police to show up and take away the three hunters. The trunk had been the only safe refuge for Simon once those golden rays had begun spilling across the sky.
“If you had simply executed them like I suggested,” Lily said haughtily, “we wouldn’t have been forced to wait around. We could have done whatever it is you plan to do with that box and been done with it.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Got someplace to be then?” She scowled at me but said nothing, so I continued. “Right. You’re under my protection, so what does it matter to you how we spend that time? Besides, I’m not in the habit of killing humans, especially unarmed ones.”
We continued down the road in silence, time falling away like images in the rearview mirror. As much as I hated to admit it I was as impatient as Lily. The cops had taken an insufferably long time to respond to my call. They said they were sorry for the delay, that there were an unusually high number of calls this morning, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that they secretly empathized with the three men that they had put unceremoniously in the backseat of their squad car. And I couldn’t even tell Simon how frustrated I was because he was napping in the trunk. Instead, I was stuck with Lily in the passenger seat, her tiny legs kicking relentlessly against the glove compartment, her stuffed bear resting on her lap.
“Whatever you say, Uncle Frank,” she said dismissively.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked hotly. “No, wait. Never mind. I don’t care.” I pressed down harder on the accelerator, wishing for the return trip to go faster than the trip out to the safe-house. “I have a couple of stops to make. It shouldn’t take long.”
Lily sniffed in response.
Twenty long minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of Jon’s Magic Shop. The store was officially closed for business, but I saw that Jon and Juliet’s cars were parked on the side of the building. They were undoubtedly working on the reset that Juliet had been telling me about.
A large red closed sign hung on the door. I ignored it and knocked loudly, praying that they weren’t working in the back where they wouldn’t hear me.
“Isn’t this child abuse?” Lily shouted out the window to me. “Leaving a kid in a car unattended? With a vampire in the trunk no less!”
“I left the window open for you, and the vampire will only bite you if you do something to piss him off.”
I was about to ask about how she knew the term child abuse in the first place when the door swung open. Juliet peered through the small opening, squinting like she had just come from the depths of the earth and had forgotten how bright the sun was.
“Sorry, we’re closed.” I moved in front of the doorway to block the sun for her. “Oh, Mr. Goldman, I didn’t know it was you. Come on in.” She opened the door all the way and held it for me. I thanked her and entered, the ever-present yet nonexistent bells chiming softly behind me. “Aww,” Juliet crooned. “Who’s the little girl in the car? Why don’t you bring her in? She’s so cute!” she beamed and waved at Lily.
I grabbed Juliet by the arm and guided her away from the door. “Trust me you don’t want me to bring her in here.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, eyes flicking to the hand I still had wrapped around her arm. Embarrassed, I released her and awkwardly smoothed down my shirt. “All the dangerous stuff is locked up or under glass. She won’t get hurt,” she assured me as she closed the door behind us.
“That’s not why she can’t come in here, at least not yet.”
From the back of the shop, Jon’s voice rang out. “Who was it, Jules? Did you tell them our hours are clearly posted on the sign out front?”
Juliet let out a sigh and replied, “It’s Mr. Goldman, Jon. I let him in.”
Jon’s balding head poked out from behind a bookcase towards the rear, his gold-rimmed glasses coming perilously close to falling off his nose. “Oh, Frank, it’s good to see you. The place is a bit of a mess right now, but we’ll have it right by noon. Right, Jules?” Mounds of books sat piled on the floor next to the empty bookshelves. Off to the right, jars of potion ingredients sat on a glass countertop instead of in their proper places on the shelves behind them. Underneath the glass that the ingredients sat on were enchanted objects. None of them had been moved out of position I noticed. The powerful stuff always kept the prime location.
“If I don’t die of exhaustion first,” Juliet said miserably. She wiped an ink-stained hand across her brow leaving a long dark smudge behind. It joined a number of others that dotted her face and clothing.
Jon pulled a rag from his back pocket as he walked towards us, wiped his own similarly stained hands clean and shrugged. “You’re young, you’ll be fine. Go on and take a break while I talk with Mr. Goldman.”
She nodded eagerly and headed towards the back. Once she was be
hind him she turned, stuck her thumb to her nose and waggled her fingers at his back while sticking her tongue out. I quickly put a hand to my mouth and coughed to cover a laugh.
“I can see you in the mirror you know,” Jon said, pointing towards the anti-theft device positioned near the ceiling at the front of the store. She let out an embarrassed, “eep!” and ran for the back. Jon just laughed and shook his head. “Ah, to be young again.”
“She’s a good kid.”
“Best worker I’ve got,” he agreed, nodding.
Looking at all the work the two of them had ahead of them, I chuckled. “Not that I’m complaining that you’re here, Jon, but don’t you ever sleep?”
“Sleep’s overrated. So what brings you by at this unusual hour?”
Mustering the courage to ask Jon for help was harder than I had imagined it would be. The immensity of the situation and the danger he and Juliet would be putting themselves in was far worse than I would ever normally consider, but this was my chance to bring things back under control. All I needed was a little help. “I need to ask a huge favor of you. Several favors in fact,” I said with a weary sigh.
Boosting the glasses farther up on his nose, he nodded. “I’m listening.”
“First of all, is that magical safe room in back still operational?”
“It isn’t what it used to be,” he shrugged. “But it can still keep out a lot of the bad things.” He arched an eyebrow at me. “Why?”
And so I laid it all out for him: who Lily was, what was after her, and how I planned to get rid of him. To his credit he didn’t throw me out immediately like most people would have when I told him how his establishment fit in to the whole scheme of things. He simply listened and waited, until finally I finished by asking, “Well, what do you think?”
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” he said, wiping sweaty palms on his pants.
“I was afraid you would say something like that.” My shoulders slumped a little.
“Now hang on,” he said quickly, putting his hands out in a stalling gesture. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help, it’s just that…well, that’s a lot to ask. I mean I’m not just thinking of possible damage to my store, or even damage to myself.” He smiled tightly. “I don’t want Juliet getting near any of this.”
“Neither do I,” I interjected hastily.
“Here, let’s sit down at the counter and talk.” He walked over to the glass countertop and took a wand off of it.
“Um,” I said in confusion as I looked around for the non-existent chairs.
“Just a moment,” he said brightly, and began waving the wand and muttering words under his breath. He ended the spell with a sharp word and a jab of the wand at the empty space in front of us. Two brown folding chairs popped into existence, their rusted bolts matching the overall color of the surrounding metal, and shredded white padding covering the seat and back.
“Ow!” Juliet shouted from the back. “What the hell, Jon?”
“Sorry, Jules,” Jon yelled back, a devilish grin plastered on his face. “I didn’t know you were using one of these.”
“Stop calling me Jules!”
We took our seats. He leaned over to me and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Ever since I heard Mark call her that I haven’t missed an opportunity to rub it in. He’s a nice enough kid, but I’m afraid his horrible work ethic will rub off on her. If he ever does work up the nerve to ask her out I might hex him, nothing serious mind you, just something to make him think twice about it.” His eyes lost focus as he stared at a point over my shoulder. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her, Frank.”
At this unexpected revelation I felt a surge of something like kinship with Jon. He always played it off as if it were concern for his best employee, but this time there was no disguising that it was more like the way a father would try to protect his daughter. Jon had been married and was now divorced, but he had never had children. This place was his longest lasting relationship and he spent most of his time here. It made a kind of weird sense that the people working there would become a sort of extended family for him. As he grew older maybe he would regret committing so much of his time to this place, but until then his surrogate family would fill the void.
I, on the other hand, had always felt more of a sibling-type relationship with her. Growing up an only child, losing my father while I was a baby and my mother when I was a teenager, all of that made my life rather lonely on the familial front. Juliet had come to represent something I didn’t know I had been missing out on, and now I wanted to make sure that nothing happened to change that. I needed to get her out of here before the crap hit the fan.
Snapping out of my musing, I pointed to the cherry-colored stick that Jon was twirling between his fingers. “You’re using a wand now?”
“What, this?” he asked, using the point to push his glasses back up. An image of him inadvertently casting a spell and accidentally turning his head into a mushroom ran through my thoughts. Leaning back further in his chair, he inspected the crafted wood. “I only need them for interspatial transitions, like with the chairs, but I use ‘em around the shop to impress the tourists. They play well with them for some reason.” He stuck the tip in his ear and swished it around pushing the foot-and-a-half piece of wood farther and farther until only the part between his fingers was still visible. “They eat up this second-rate illusion crap.” He yanked it free and tossed it behind him without a second thought.
His expression hardened as his eyes met mine. “Listen,” he said tentatively. “I want to help, you know I do, but this….I don’t know, Frank. It seems like it’s bound to go wrong. Messing with Demons? How could it possibly go right?” He tapped his chin thoughtfully, something I had seen Juliet do on a number of occasions. I wondered who was copying who with that particular mannerism. “What about Ben or Terri? They know a lot more than I do about stuff like this. Well, Ben does at least. And Terri’s your apprentice, right? Where are they?”
“They’re dealing with the other end of this right now.” At least I hoped that’s what they were doing. After Christian’s cryptic message that they were getting a warning I wasn’t sure what was going on. Ben hadn’t called me to give me an update, and I was getting worried. I had tried to reach both of them on the ride back from the underground armory but calls to their cell phones were immediately forwarded to a voice mail service.
“Hey guys,” Juliet called as she wound her way from the back around piles of books. She cradled a small television to her chest, brought it over to us, and set it on the counter. “Check this out.” Grasping the plug in her hand she murmured some words and the screen sprang to life.
“Yes Juliet, that’s a nice electro-conductive spell,” Jon said, humoring her, “but I’ve seen it before, and I hardly see—”
“Shh,” she hissed, and pointed to the screen. “They’re saying it happened last night.”
The images of Ben and Terri resolved themselves, and I sat straighter in my seat. Two of Christian’s acolytes, along with ghouls and zombies, were attacking them from all sides. My heart soared as I watched my two friends fight off the corpses, and then sank into my shoes as, towards the end, Terri screamed and collapsed. I heard Juliet gasp, but paid it no attention. The whole of my being was focused on Terri’s limp form cradled in Ben’s arms like a newborn. The acolytes on the screen didn’t press the attack, but instead bounded off in the opposite direction. Blood pounded in my ears like thunder as the tape cut and they went back to the news anchor that was reporting the story. The tape played again in the upper left hand of the screen with a banner underneath that read: Dark Magic in Oakland!
“Where did this happen?” I asked in a distant and disconnected voice.
“The First City,” Juliet answered. “It was a human that took the video. They’ve been playing it all morning I guess.”
Jon rubbed his hands over his face knocking his glasses askew. “Just think: when paras start waking up this is what they
’re going to be greeted with. The humans are going to be scared and angry, and it won’t be long till they start gathering up the pitchforks and torches.”
“They just said that the National Guard is being mobilized.” Juliet’s face blanched. “Mr. Goldman what should we do?” When I didn’t answer she dropped the cord, breaking the spell and killing the picture. “What do we do?” she repeated.
I patted my pockets searching for my cell phone. Finding only emptiness, I realized I must have left it in the car. “Get me the phone, Juliet,” I said in a cold mechanical voice. She scrambled off. I turned to Jon, my body on autopilot, and pointed to the screen. “That is why I can’t ask Ben or Terri for help. This Demon is supplying dark powers to a necromancer who has no interest in the boundaries between us and humanity. If I can cut off his power source I might be able to stop him, but without doing that we have no chance. We got lucky this time because no humans were hurt, but you and I both know that luck runs out, and we don’t want the humans running around here pell-mell. It’ll be like Chicago all over again,” I said, referring to an incident fifteen years ago when a couple of teenagers went missing. Vampires had been the initial suspects, and when the master of the city refused to talk to the police the citizens had taken it upon themselves to burn several blocks of the Second City there to the ground. The kids turned up three days later, admitting that they had run away to get away from their abusive parents.
No one had offered the citizens of the Second City an apology.
I searched Jon’s eyes and saw the fear sitting back there, blooming like a flower. The knowledge of what humans could do when they found a common purpose, or a common enemy. “So,” I said, life creeping back into my voice. “I’ll ask again: will you help me?”
26
Clouds like cotton balls scudded across the sky casting weak shadows across the street and building fronts. There were a few people visible from my place in the parking lot. Two couples walked together away from the store, content in each other’s company and blissfully unaware of what was being plastered all over the news. They could have been tourists—most humans would only venture into our side of the city before noon when most of us were still asleep—but the way they moved about the street not bothering to take in the various window displays around them made me think they were locals. Also, I doubted we would be seeing any humans of the nonmilitary variety until the current crisis was resolved.
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