by Jes Battis
His expression changes. “Who else have you asked about this?”
“I don’t know his name. The bouncer at Blood Drive.”
“Is this how you conduct an investigation? You simply hail vampires on the street and ask them random questions?”
“I’m off duty, actually.”
“Ah.” He motions for me to sit down next to him. “So you want to combat idleness by investigating pointless things.”
I sit. “It sounds better in my head.”
“What was so strange about this drunken vampire that you saw?”
“I don’t know. There was just something off about him.”
“Wait here,” he says. “I have something to show you.”
He leaves and comes back with a DVD, which he puts in the player. He turns on the TV. I see Patrick sitting on the couch downstairs, along with a bunch of other vampires that I don’t recognize. They’re all singing in some language that I can’t understand. Patrick chugs his beer. Then he opens his mouth and belches so loud that it shakes the furniture on camera. Everyone laughs.
Modred turns off the TV. “That is a drunk vampire,” he says. “Did the one you saw behave like that?”
“Not at all. He seemed devious. And hungry.”
“Did he attack you?”
“No. I flashed a bit of power, and he backed off. But the next day, I saw him out with a group of his friends. It seemed bold. He didn’t go after me, but he made sure I knew that he was watching.”
“If he is that careless, I cannot see him living for too much longer. If I were you, I would turn your mind to more important matters.”
“I’m on leave, remember? I can’t involve myself in important matters. It’s either check this out or go for the all-time best score on Freecell.”
“I can see how that might drive you to distraction.” He looks at the paperwork again, then shudders. “I suppose we both could use something interesting to occupy us. How would you feel about attending a party tomorrow night?”
“A vampire party?”
“More or less. The crowd will mostly be young and stupid, but you may run into your bold friend.”
“I’d feel a bit like Lady Gaga when she wore the meat dress.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’d be on display.”
“I’ll be with you. Nothing can happen.”
“Knock on wood.”
“What?”
“It’s customary to knock on wood after you say nothing bad will happen. You’ve probably been dead too long to remember, but it makes everyone feel better.” I knock lightly on the surface of the desk. “See? Now you do it.”
Modred stares at me as if I’ve deeply disappointed him. Then he knocks three times, with deliberation. He puts his ear to the desk.
“Who is supposed to answer?” he asks.
“No one. It’s like whistling in the dark.”
“Whistling in the dark is sonar.”
I sigh. “It’s a propitiatory custom, like lighting a candle or wearing a talisman. I guess it’s meant to remind us not to take anything for granted.”
He continues to listen to the desk. “I hear atoms,” he says. “Nothing more.”
“What time are you picking me up tomorrow?”
“Midnight.”
“Fine. I’ll wear a turtleneck.”
Against my better judgment, I take a bus to Fourth Avenue and Vine. The posh stores have gone to sleep, but the bars and cafés remain aglow. Kitsilano is the land of joggers clad in formfitting Lululemon shorts, a place where, as Douglas Coupland observed, even the dogs have sweaters. The streets are filled with wandering prides of undergrads looking for drink specials. I avoid them and head to the Pleasure Box, an adult video store that shares space with CORE clinic 21B. The mannequins in the window seem to be having a good time. The blacked-out door chimes when I open it. A bored woman looks up from the counter, nods at me, then returns to her book. I walk past the rows of videos and sex toys with their lewd Japanese packaging. A nondescript door in the back leads to a flight of steps, which takes me to the clinic.
It’s a busy night. Several young people are being treated for materia burn. Someone or something howls behind a set of flowered curtains. I approach the front desk and ask the nurse on duty if Evelyn is working tonight.
“She just went for coffee. She’ll be back in fifteen.”
I take a seat in the waiting room. The chairs are the color of Habitant pea soup, and look as if they were donated from St. Paul’s. I wonder, not for the first time, how the CORE manages to keep all of this running. I suppose if the Templars were able to spread their influence across Europe and Asia, it stands to reason that people who can channel materia would be able to sustain a global corporation. But who started it? Nobody knows. Probably not even Esther. Maybe it was Merlin. The thought makes me laugh in spite of myself. A sullen goblin with a head wound glares at me. I smother my laughter and stare at the linoleum.
Derrick and I took Mia to this very clinic after we were attacked by a Vailoid demon, basically a man-shark. Killing him was messy. Afterward, we all sat around here, sedately drinking our juice boxes and trying to joke about what had just happened. I’d like to think that we made her feel better, but I remember the look in her eyes too well. She’d seen magic, and wanted to bury it, to run from it. I’d felt that way once. But now magic was just like red wine and cigarettes, something warmly inescapable that gave pleasure even as it exacted a familiar price.
“Tess?”
I look up. Evelyn is standing there, holding a to-go cup from Blenz.
“Hey. I have a question for you.”
“I’m about to start my second shift. Is this the sort of question that you need to ask in private?”
“It is.”
“Okay. Follow me.”
She takes me down a hallway marked with red and blue intersecting lines. Gurneys lie forgotten in the corners. It reminds me of a dream I had once, which ended in my father’s face becoming bloody wax. I suppose that was Arcadia’s touch. I wanted you to hate him like I did, she told me. What she hadn’t realized was that her counterfeit nightmares would fan my curiosity instead. Why the bones, the sand castles, the dripping tap? Maybe it all meant something to her.
We step into an empty exam room. Evelyn shuts the door. She puts down her coffee and gives me a long look.
“I know why you’re here.”
“You do?”
“There’s only one question that would bring you down here, alone, in the middle of the night. But I don’t have an answer for you.”
“Tell me it wasn’t a car accident,” I say.
“I only know what she told me.”
“What she told you to write on the report, you mean.”
“Her injuries were consistent—”
“Evelyn, please. I’m not stupid. If it had been a car accident, she wouldn’t have gone to a CORE clinic.”
“It was—” She shakes her head. “There was a normate with her. The guy wouldn’t leave her side, but she couldn’t very well tell him the truth.”
“But she told you.”
“She had a concussion. She was barely coherent.”
“She must have said something about what attacked her.”
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“Don’t you think I have? She just lies. Her lies are complicated, beautiful, like layer cakes. I can’t cut through them.”
“There’s a reason that she doesn’t want you to know.”
“Did you do an assault kit?”
“Tess, I can’t answer that.”
“Was there evidence of trauma?”
Evelyn calmly picks up her coffee and opens the door. “I promised her that I would never tell anyone. I’m sorry.”
Sadness crawls into my throat. I blink. “Do you know what it’s like,” I whisper, “not knowing where you came from?”
Evelyn pauses with her hand on the door. For a moment,
I see pain flash across her eyes. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible. “She wanted Rhophylac.”
She walks out before I can respond.
I can’t catch my breath. I’m wheezing as I leave the clinic. Outside, a warm rain has begun. I can’t stand still. I have to run. I pass the intersection of Fourth and Vine and keep running, until I hit the beach. This was where we found Ru. We thought he was dead, but he woke up on the autopsy table, like a small scaly miracle. The sand clutches at my feet, but I keep running awkwardly. When I reach the dark water, I drop to my knees and retch.
My phone begins to vibrate. I look at the call display. It’s Derrick. I try to answer, but all I can do is sob weakly.
“Tess? What’s going on?”
“She—” The bile rises in my throat again. “She knew. Derrick, she knew all along, but she—she—”
“Sweetheart, where are you?”
I hang up.
My hands are trembling. Slowly, I get to my feet. The cold water soaks my canvas shoes. The moon is a pitiless cat’s eye. I stare at the obscure waves until I can’t feel my toes anymore. Then I turn around and start back up the beach. In the distance, I can see an LED light flashing. A late-night runner or cyclist, immune to family drama, committed to fitness. The thought almost makes me smile.
I feel another cold that has nothing to do with my wet shoes. All I can do is laugh softly. Of course a fucking vampire would find me, tonight of all nights, wrecked and crying on a beach. It’s practically operatic. I pull out my athame. The blade is a bare suggestion of silver in the dark.
“Come out,” I say. “Or run. I don’t care. But don’t think for a second that I’m some little rabbit for you to gnaw on. I’ve got teeth just like you.”
The vampire from the convenience store appears. He has his hands in his pockets, like he’s just taking an innocuous stroll. His eyes are red and cloudy. He smells strange. When he sees my athame, he smiles. His teeth are stained wine dark.
“Who are you?” I raise the dagger. “I’m not playing.”
“I thought you people loved to play.”
I frown. “What people?”
“You’re CORE.”
“Right. Sure, we can be Byzantine, I guess. But what you seem to be forgetting is that your people and mine have a truce.”
He steps closer. “The truce ended with him.”
“I’m not sure you understand what a truce is. Lord Nightingale’s death hasn’t affected the law. If you attack me, you’ll be punished.”
“I’m not afraid of pain.”
“Oh, no? One of the downsides of being undead is that torture kind of takes on a whole new dimension.”
“When I’m finished drinking, there won’t even be enough dry pieces of you left for the wind to carry away.”
I assume a defensive stance. “You know what’s sad? That’s not even the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
He moves quickly. Too quickly for a whelp. Maybe I was wrong about his age. I slam the pommel of my athame into his mouth, shattering one of his molars. He swears and spits out blood, which is the same color as the black water. I reach for a strand of earth materia and let it slip into the blade, which becomes a singing blue candle. I level it at the vampire.
“I’ve been fighting your people since I was thirteen. You think you can intimidate me? I’ve looked into the eyes of a Manticore. I stabbed an Iblis, right in the middle of his flaming fontanels. You’re nothing but a drunk moron.”
He leaps. His feet push him off the sand, like the beach is his trampoline. He slams into me, and we both fall into the water. The shock of the cold makes me gasp. Before I can move, his hands are around my throat. It takes only a few pounds of pressure to strangle someone, and he has the strength of an insane wrestler who’s tweaking on PCP. I start to see spots. My athame is in the water. I search for it, but my numb fingers find only wet sand and lichen.
He leans in closer. That’s the nice thing about vampires. They love what they do a bit too much. The desire makes them vulnerable. When he’s close enough for me to smell his breath, I reach up and drive my thumb into his right eye. I push hard, until the sclera yields and warm fluid bathes my hand. The eye breaks like a split fruit. He screams, and the pressure around my throat lessens, enough for me to kick him and crawl away. My wet hand comes down on something hard in the water, and I pull out the athame, still shining.
“I’m not sure how the vampiric healing factor works, exactly,” I say, “but I feel like it’s going to take a while for you to grow a new eyeball.”
He stands up. His face is covered in blood. He screams a word that I can’t understand, then runs at me again. I spin to the side and slash just above his kneecap, opening the popliteal artery. A fan of blood soaks my jeans. Why do I never think to wear a damn slicker until it’s too late?
He howls and reaches for me. I kick him in the chest. He stumbles, but keeps coming. It’s not as if vampires have a lot of blood in them, and he’s already leaking like a sprinkler. Why is he so stubborn?
I slash again, aiming for another artery—a nice brachial one—but he catches my wrist. His hand moves swiftly. I feel a bloom of pain, as if someone has just set fire to my hand. I drop the athame. My brain registers the fact that my wrist is broken, but for a second, all I can do is stand there, like a cartoon coyote, perplexed by the impact of the falling anvil. Still holding on to my broken wrist, he pulls me to him. The pain makes me sick. He grabs my hair and yanks my head back, exposing my throat.
“You have beautiful circulation,” he says.
I stare at the moon. The fire trick won’t work this time, not in the middle of the ocean. Water is my mother’s element, not mine. But she’s also inside of me, just like he is. For every demonic protein running rampant through my body, there’s a piece of my mother, a mitochondrial knight streaming along embattled vessels. The water in my blood calls to the water around me.
I feel the something coalesce in my hand. A stinger of ice. A blade of astonished liquid, seaweed, and shell matrix, which I drive through his heart.
He stumbles back with the icicle stuck in his chest. Blood streams from his mouth, nose, and eyes. He’s laughing, but the sound is like rent cloth. His skin is already beginning to slough off. His fingers curl as they decompose. I smell the sweet reek of cadaverine, the tincture of decay, as it spreads through him.
“You don’t even know.” He laughs. “You idiot. You don’t even know what’s going on. That’s the funniest thing of all.”
“Tell me, then. What are you on? What was the point of this?”
“He’ll destroy you.”
“Oh, please. Did Arcadia put you up to this? Look, I know that my father is a crazy mofo, but this is getting old.”
He falls to his knees. His face is mostly gone now, a steaming crater of broken tesserae.
“Who sent you?”
He melts into the water. Seconds later, there’s nothing left of him but smoke and a vile odor. I start to shake. I can barely feel my broken wrist, which means that my body is going into shock. Numbly, I make my way back into the beach, holding my injured hand close to my chest. I see headlights. I hear voices. Someone is running toward me, and I realize that it’s Derrick.
“She’s here! I’ve got her!”
He sees the blood on me. He sees my wrist. Before he can say anything, I bury my face in his neck and start to cry.
“I’ve got you,” he whispers. “Geez. What happened? Did a shark attack you? What are you doing here at this time of night?”
“I don’t know,” I say, holding on to him. “I don’t know who’s lying to me and who isn’t. I can’t fucking tell anymore.”
“I’ll never lie to you again.”
I want to believe him, but I can’t. I look down and see a glimmer of light on the sand. It’s my athame, burning like a birthday candle too stubborn to realize that its peculiar life is already over.
6
This is an old dream.
; I’m in the pool with my mother. She spins me around in circles while I exclaim: I love my friend the water. I make waves with my small, prunish hands, while she holds me. I whirl in the heart of a golden mean. I am an overjoyed crystal in my mother’s arms, polished by the sun and the water.
I know that she will never let me go. We will spin like an eternal record in this flood, and after, on the drive home, I will eat a tuna sandwich with diced pickles and watch the trees effervesce. With my bare feet propped against the cooler, I can drift with the power lines as my mother sings us around familiar curves in the road. A blue spark glows in my hand. I look at it and smile. It’s a burning flake of our water I stole when nobody was looking.
I open my eyes. I’m in my own bed, doused in sweat. For a moment, the loss of the dream is so sharp that I can feel its exit wound. Then I realize that it’s just my fractured wrist, numbed by painkillers but still throbbing. I look up at the ceiling fan. All it can do is displace the muggy air. My sheets are a wet tangle. I could take a shower, but I can’t bear the thought of more water. I can still see the vampire melting before me like a hideous snowflake.
I don’t think that my father sent him. But if not my father, then who? Arcadia? She could kill me by blinking if she wanted to. She had no reason to send tweaked vampires after me.
I can’t stop thinking about what he said. The truce ended with him. If this is the public sentiment among vampires, then something has gone seriously wrong. Deonara isn’t doing her job as the new Lord Nightingale. I doubt I’ll have any luck brokering a meeting with her, but I can at least ask Modred about it. Figuring out what to wear to an undead house party will distract me from thinking about what I learned at the clinic.
I pull on a clean shirt and walk into the living room. Derrick’s watching television, and he frowns when he sees me.
“You should be asleep.”
“It’s too hot. The fan is useless.”
“Those painkillers are hard on your stomach.” He stands up. “I’ll get you some dry toast and ginger ale.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Nonsense. I’ll be back in two shakes of a rabbit’s tail.”
