by J. F. Lewis
“In the freezer.”
“What kind of a jackass keeps potatoes in the…” my voice trailed off when I opened the freezer. Frozen hash-browns? “This frozen crap?” I held up the plastic bag.
He laughed. “You vampires are all such food snobs. I’ll microwave them.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’ll cook your damn potatoes. Eat your eggs before they get cold and if you put ketchup on them, I’m going to kill you.”
He frowned. “Is salt and pepper okay?”
“It’s fine. Tell me what happened.”
I read the directions on the back of the package. Microwave instructions? Nope, don’t think so. I was a bachelor in the 1940s. I don’t need a microwave.
Some vamps like to nuke their blood, but I can’t drink that crap. Literally can’t. I have to warm blood bags up in a pot of water on the stove, or just drink them cold. The microwave changes it, my body rejects it—the result is very messy.
“About an hour ago, maybe forty-five minutes, I don’t know. My spell barrier was tripped by a fire spell cast with tantric energy.”
“Tantric? As in that the sex magic you talked about before?” I rubbed a little butter on the bottom of one of Magbidion’s skillets, sprinkled in a dash of salt and dumped a serving or so of the potatoes into it. I love hash browns, not as much as I love pizza, but breakfast, God, there is just so much good food that you can eat at breakfast: link sausage, biscuits and gravy, pancakes…
“Yes.” Magbidion tucked into his eggs. I like eggs, too. He broke the yolk with the fork. Rich and yellow, it ran out over the plate against a pork chop. It’s dangerous for any vamp to watch a human eat when they haven’t fed yet. Double dangerous for me. I wondered if I bit into Magbidion, would he taste like eggs, pork, and sizzling potatoes? If smell really makes up a large percentage of taste, then maybe.
“Eric?”
I retracted my fangs. “Just tell me what happened.”
“My barrier enchantment has a quick wake-up spell keyed to it. When one is tripped, the second goes off. Like dominoes. It’s a good spell. I learned it from a technomancer down in Orlando who works for one of the big theme parks. It’s the equivalent of five double shots of espresso and two energy drinks. You’re so awake your eyes vibrate.” He picked up the pork chop with his fingers and slopped it around in the runny egg yolk. Breading, a perfect golden brown, flaked away to land on his plate.
“I must not eat Magbidion. I must not eat Magbidion. I must not eat Magbidion,” I whispered softly.
“Did you say something, Eric?” Magbidion said with a mouthful of food. “Are the hash browns done yet?”
Close enough. I pushed them onto his plate with a spatula. “I need to eat.”
“Ah, the short version, then.” He slid away from his food, reaching casually under the table. I heard the rough calluses of his fingers rasp against wood. “Fire from her. Counterspell from me. She’s very sneaky. I couldn’t confirm that it was her, but I think it was. How can I help you?”
“I can’t feel her. I was going to track her down, but I can’t tell where she is.”
“Like I said before, if you had made her into a full thrall, if you’d finished the job, given her the blood tattoo, you would be able to sense her all the time. Tell me how you made Rachel again. Exactly what happened.”
“It involved blood, sex, kissing, and me pushing my mind into hers, which hurt. There was nothing about a tattoo or a bunch of words.”
“Then you may have formed a connection with her, but it wasn’t a bona fide thrall connection and I don’t know for certain, but it sounds like it might have given her more power over you than it gave you over her. Of course, you could make me your thrall. Then, you’d know for sure what it feels like. And I’d have protection from the demon in return.”
Like I said, Magbidion isn’t a natural-born mage. He’d signed his soul away in exchange for his magic and his contract was coming due soon. He’d been after me for years to protect him from the demon in exchange for his services. He was going into his whole spiel, but I barely heard him. “That’s just great. All my girls are gone. My club is gone.” The hunger roared inside my head; I could hear his heart beating. “I don’t remember ever being this hungry, Mags.”
“She may have been suppressing your appetite; a proficient thrall could do that. A tantric witch could also do that. I once knew a vamp who was fed illusionary blood for a few days. It took care of all the usual problems, except for the”—I heard his hands tighten around the wooden object, a stake—“hunger.” My vision ran to red. His flesh dropped away, becoming a mass of veins. Bump-bump. Bump-bump.
The nearest other living person was Talbot. Tabitha registered, too, and something else…cold blood, human blood in Magbidion’s fridge. I opened the refrigerator door, grabbed a bowl of human blood covered in plastic wrap. “This is human.”
“I was saving that for my next obscuration ritual, Eric. You can’t drink that.”
“Okay, then,” I turned on him, fangs bared, “I’ll try not to take too much from you.” I moved toward him. He thrust the stake at me; a stake through the heart would only immobilize me, but it still made me mad and I tore the stake away in a flash. Why does the speed always work when I need it not to? Why was I so angry, so hungry? The same feeling that I’d gotten a few minutes earlier, when I’d gone all red-eyed at Talbot, throbbed through my skull like someone had turned on the anger valve in a steady flow.
Fortunately, the speed kicked off again, allowing Magbidion time to do some fast-talking, “Drink the blood in the bowl. You’re welcome to it. Be my guest. I can get more. I’ll just find another blood whore. Sweetheart Row’s full of ’em.”
The blood flew out of the bowl and into my mouth, in one long thin stream, defying gravity. Magbidion tried to step back, but there isn’t that much room in an RV. “How did you do that? I’ve only seen that flying-blood trick in Asian vampires.”
“I don’t know.” I was still hungry, but it was enough to rein myself in. “I’m going to go outside.”
“Think over the whole thrall proposition thing…a magic-using thrall can come in handy,” he called after me. “If I were your thrall, you wouldn’t have to pay me.”
I stepped out into the deck. Fang was parked nearby, his paint job black again, as it apparently was every day from sunup to sundown. Fang unlocked the door for me. I climbed behind the wheel and instantly felt calmer, more in control of myself, too calm…as if that faucet of anger had been turned completely off.
Falling asleep in a parked car is a bad idea for a human. It’s a worse idea for a vampire who has a lot of people out to get him, but it’s what I did. Somehow, I knew I’d be safe with Fang. Twelve hours later I woke up to the sounds of “Second Hand Kiss” playing on the radio. Fang was parked on the upper deck with the roof down and the engine running. My car did a donut on the concrete. The engine revved twice of its own accord.
“I’m happy to see you, too, pal.” Okay, I guess I liked the damn undead car. “Let’s go hunting and then I’ve got business to take care of.” Fang tore out, leaving a layer of rubber on the deck, screeching toward the lower exit. Heading out into the night with the wind in my hair, I felt more normal than I’d felt in twenty years. When Fang ran over a possum and it didn’t come out the other side, I actually laughed. When I’d told Greta to go out and run over some small animals, I’d been kidding.
21
ERIC: FUN WITH FANG
My undeath is punctuated by things I should be doing. I should have been figuring out where Rachel went. I should have walked over to the Pollux to check on Greta, but she’d done fine for four months without me. She’d really grown up while I wasn’t looking. True, she still didn’t know how to clean up after herself, but that wasn’t a trait she needed for survival.
Tabitha. I should have gone to see Tabitha, listened to her explanations. Did she expect us to be back together and if so, why the fuck did she want me? Fang and I cruised Void City lookin
g for victims and answers. No answers leapt out, but we did wind up on Forty-third Street, locally known as Sweetheart Row. The strip between Third and Fourth Avenues is vampire groupie central, but not the nice, pretty ones like Tabitha or Rachel; the real bottom of the barrel. It’s where old groupies that never get their golden ticket on the undeath train go to lie to themselves that they still have a shot.
“Hey, baby. Want a fuck and suck?” A grandma in her late sixties wearing less than was decent or attractive waved at me as Fang and I drove past. Fang slowed and the blood whores began to gather. Either Fang knew what I was thinking, or maybe I’d stepped on the brake. He steered toward the curb, ready to hop it and mow them down, but I veered back onto the road and stopped. Up and to my left in the Bitemore Hotel, the sounds of eight or nine working girls were clear to my trained supernatural ear. The Bitemore was as long-standing a tradition as Sweetheart Row. It used to have a different name, but now Bitemore was on the actual sign.
“Hi, honey.” The woman speaking to me now was in her forties, but the bloom wasn’t entirely off of the rose yet. Someone must have broken her self-esteem in a serious way to drive her so far so fast. “Want a date?”
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me anything you want, baby.”
“Don’t play games with me.” I stepped out of Fang. What the fuck was I doing? I had no clue, running on instinct. Maybe Magbidion’s mention of blood whores had started me thinking about them. Now that I was looking at Sweetheart Row and the women who worked there, I knew it was wrong and I wanted to fix it, stop it, break it. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I step into another man’s strip club. Did the 401(k) I’d offered at mine, the health coverage, and the college tuition really make me any better? I liked to think so.
“It’s Cheryl.”
“Hi, Cheryl. I’m Eric. I’m the crazy asshole who used to run the Demon Heart before it got blown up.”
Her heart sped up and I smelled her fear. It was a brief burst of scent and she locked it down fast. Smart girl. Fear makes a vampire want to attack. I closed my eyes, concentrated on the transformation, certain I could go uber vamp on purpose. I grew taller, black as the night sky overhead. The street noises stopped. I announced myself, sent out my vampiric will into the surrounding area. The noises from the Bitemore stopped, too.
“What are you going to do?” Cheryl asked. Her voice sounded tired, beaten.
I didn’t know. My actions were becoming more unpredictable lately. Was this a nervous breakdown? Had postmortem syndrome come at last? Maybe it was some kind of aftereffect from the drugs J’iliol’lth had slipped me. No, none of that. If I concentrated, I could feel the valve on my anger tightening as I strained at it. Rachel was doing this, screwing with my head. Which is fine, it’s what women like her do even if they don’t have magic powers and I think I knew that from the beginning. What I wanted to know was, why?
Gently, with my taloned forefinger I wiped the smeared lipstick from Cheryl’s lips. “I think I’m going to kill a lot of vampires,” I said in that deep otherworldly voice that my uber form has. Her eyes sparked, an instant of real interest and I think I got a glimpse of the woman she used to be. She’d been strong and brave. I liked that woman, wanted to bring her back, let her have a life again. “Do you have a boss? I think I’ll kill him first.”
“Why?” she whispered. There was no fear in her now, only something else. I can’t describe it, but I think in those few seconds, she’d begun to hope.
“Because I don’t like what they’ve done to you. I’m hungry, and they’re already dead, just like me. Who runs Sweetheart Row these days?”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“Not tonight.” Her green eyes caught the light from the streetlamp. “I’ve been thinking. The other vampires in this city used to understand the whole stay-out-of-my-way thing. When I was in El Segundo, some of them took turns looking after the Demon Heart so that it wouldn’t be all fucked up when I got back, so that I wouldn’t go ape shit.
“I think they used to self-regulate, keep out of my portion of the city. But lately they’ve forgotten who I am. They thought Roger had actually ended me. If I was dead and gone, then it was fine for them to let my shit get sold off to the city, but I’m still around, and so is Roger.
“I’ve decided not to look for him. I’m going to make them bring him to me on a silver fucking platter and if they don’t, then things will get worse. If they hurt my people in retaliation, I’ll just up the ante. It’ll be fun, the vampire equivalent of mutually assured destruction, but to be honest…I think I’m a higher tonnage weapon.”
“They’ll band together,” she said breathlessly. “They’ll kill you.”
I laughed, a deep croaking noise in the uber vamp’s body. “I really don’t care. That’s the difference between us. Who runs Sweetheart Row nowadays?”
“Petey and the gang.”
“Is Petey a vampire, demon, or a human?” Jeez, I sounded like the damn answering imp.
“Vampire.”
“And where can I find Petey?” I asked. She pointed.
Petey was right behind me. I’d expected a Master vamp, one that I would sense when he walked up. Soldiers like Petey don’t even show up on the radar. He rammed a stake into my back, splintering it on my ebony uber vamp skin. Nice safety feature. Petey raked two sets of claws down my back, tearing angry rents in my flesh. Somebody else’s blood—my dinner—seeped out of the wounds. Too bad the safety feature that makes stakes splinter on my uber vamp skin doesn’t apply to claws.
One of the girls shouted, “Kill him, Petey!” Others joined the chorus, but not Cheryl.
Cheryl mouthed, “There are eight of them,” turned, and ran. It wasn’t fear that made her run, either, it was prudence.
In stuttering flashes I touched the same level of speed that other vampires get to use all of the time. Petey glared at me. He was a kid. I’d never seen him before; I would have remembered. In his whole gang, nobody looked like they’d been embraced at older than ten. If they hadn’t been dressed in modern clothes, I’d have thought I was fighting the Little Rascals.
The fat one stepped in front of Fang, which was a mistake. Darting forward, Fang knocked him flat and rolled over the front of his legs. Fat Boy screamed. Fang’s engine revved and the vampire began to slide under the car like he was being pulled in by a strong current.
“Help me!”
The rest of the gang didn’t give him a second glance. Only Petey had a set of claws; the others carried switchblades. “You guys are freaking me out,” I told them.
A little girl vampire in a pink dress, her hair done up in ribbons and curls, sprinted up my chest and stabbed me in the eye.
“Leave our bitches alone, fucko,” she snarled. Fucko? Petey clawed at my stomach and two differently weighted kids hit either shoulder, sinking their fangs in deep. The one on the right bit into my shoulder blade and fell off of me, screaming and clutching his mouth. A piece of one of his fangs still protruded from my shoulder. I guess he hit bone.
Dancing in and out of range, they stabbed and bit in tiny microbursts, like piranhas. I snagged Petey by the throat with claws of my own. Two of the kids drummed on Fang with their fists, but I lost sight of what was going on with the car. I had my own rugrats to deal with. Pretty-in-Pink went after my other eye, hacking into my cheek instead. Flipping backward like a ninja, she would have evaded my grasp if the speed hadn’t kicked in for a brief second. I caught her by the ankles and ripped her apart.
It was a blow to morale for the little bastards. Petey stopped fighting to cry, tears of blood running down his cheeks and soaking his shirt. One of the kids fighting Fang reeled back in horror, clutching a stump. Fang had chomped him with a well-timed hood slam. Three of the ladies of negotiable volume shielded him as if he really were a helpless nine-year-old boy, not a bloodsucking undead thing. Two more of the gang tried to get away, but the vamp speed had worked up a head of steam and I was firing on
all eight cylinders at last. At full speed, I’ve never seen any creature faster than me as an uber vamp.
Short and thin, a child vampire wearing a hoodie ran right up the side of the Bitemore Hotel. It’s not a trick I know, but I do know the “throw a discarded switchblade into the little fucker’s spine” trick, so it worked out. It never even occurred to me to fly after him. He fell into my waiting clutches and I beaned another one of the vampire delinquents with the dismembered head of his buddy, still wrapped in the hood. That made four for me. I popped off their heads and ripped out their hearts, just to be sure. Petey still knelt in the middle of the road, bawling his eyes out.
“How many did you get?” I asked Fang. Like he could answer me. He popped his trunk and I walked around back. Inside were the bones of ten or fifteen small animals, and two fanged children. I don’t want to know how that works. Fang’s dings and scratches were gone, and polished chrome gleamed on his bumpers.
Why couldn’t the prostitution ring have been run by a bunch of evil-looking guys with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads? How come I never get attacked by things like that? It’s always Bible-thumping werewolves or vampire babies. Okay, and the occasional demons.
A crowd of the bravest ladies of the evening was forming around me. In uber vamp mode, I could clearly see the thin golden veil blocking off both ends of the alley, steering most mortals unconsciously around the street from Third to Fourth Avenue. Petey must have been pretty well connected. He knew who to pay and how much to pay them.
“He killed Darla!” No way that tyke’s name had really been Darla. Vision, cloudy, but getting better by the second, returned to my left eye.
“Who provides the spells you use to shield Sweetheart Row?”
“None ya,” Petey shouted at me.
“Who is Nunya?” I asked stupidly.
“None ya business!” Without warning he charged, swinging this time not like a vampire, but like an angry kid, pounding on my legs with his fists. “You killed Darla!”
I read somewhere that your emotional development freezes when you become addicted to drugs. Petey made me wonder if the same thing wasn’t true of vampires. If you turned a nine-year-old, was he really forever stuck with the emotional maturity he’d had in life? I’d never done drugs and I’ve lived past thirty, what was my excuse? Was I stuck in some eternal midlife crisis?
