by J. F. Lewis
“The girls can help you with the blood, but you’ll have to buy the other stuff.”
“With what?” He ran his thumb along the other fingers on his right hand. “I have some money, but not what I’d need for a spell that big. To do the whole building I’ll need a whole claw, not just a piece of it, and a very expensive ruby—a huge one. Oni are happy to sell their clippings, but ripping out one of their own claws by the roots? For the RV, I used a small ruby, full of flaws, but to do more, I need better materials. On the RV, little gaps are less noticeable, on the Pollux, the gaps would be large enough to walk through.”
“I’ll work on the money side of things, then. Table the spell until I get back to you. For now, I want you to do a little research. Have you ever heard of…Damn. What was it called? The Rock of, no, the Stone of Eternity? I’m supposed to get it from some guy named Phil.”
“Phillip?” Tabitha coughed. “Do you mean the Stone of Aeternum?”
I snapped my fingers. “That! The Stone of Aeternum.”
“I think a vampire can use it to become more powerful, steal another vampire’s power,” Magbidion answered.
“You ever hear of it making someone immortal?”
“No. Well, wait. Maybe. I remember a few years ago there was a big brouhaha in the immortal community. One of my friends, Shelley, said that the Council of Elders wanted to locate it.”
“Immortal community,” I scoffed.
“Oh, yes, they are much more structured and regimented than the vampire hierarchy. They’ve divided the world into fiefdoms. It’s very intricate.”
“I don’t care about that, just tell me if you think it’s possible that the Stone could be used for that.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Mags admitted.
“Then I’ll go get it.”
“Eric,” Talbot and Tabitha spoke up in unison. An exchange of glances, a silent agreement between them, sent a spike of jealously up my spine, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Tabitha closed her mouth, letting Talbot continue.
“Lord Phillip is the vampire who owns the Highland Towers, where Roger lived.” He did his best to look straight at me, but Talbot’s eyes kept straying toward Tabitha. When it happened a third time, he took up a position directly in front of me with his back to her.
“He showed Tabitha a bunch of artifacts he used to elevate himself through the levels of vampiric power. He claims to have been a human wizard who made himself into a vampire to gain immortality. He didn’t realize that it would make him a Drone. Since then, he says he has found ways to make himself more powerful. He’s a Vlad now.”
“Not bad,” I said. Suddenly I remembered having heard Tabitha mention this guy. She’d said he was nobody. He didn’t sound like a nobody to me. “Did he fuck her?” Why do I even ask questions like that? It’s not like I really want to know.
Greta put a hand to her mouth, but said nothing. I caught Tabitha shaking her head in disbelief. I wasn’t supposed to bring up her guys, I know, but like I really wasn’t going to catch hell from her over Rachel sooner or later?
“Eric,” Talbot began.
“She was fucking a vampire up at the Highland Towers, the vampire I smelled on her diamond necklace. Is this Phillip asshole the one who fucked her?” I repeated. “It shouldn’t be a hard question unless so many people screwed her while she was with you that you lost count!”
“Yeah, Eric. He fucked her,” Talbot told me. “And before you ask, there was no one else, just me and Phillip.”
“Holy shit, Talbot!” interrupted Greta. “You fooled around with Mom? What does she have that I don’t have?”
“Catlike reflexes,” I answered, “and warm fuzzy feline genitalia, apparently.”
Greta’s eyes widened and she glanced over at Tabitha. “You guys did it as cats? And I thought Dad was kinky!”
“Greta, please,” Talbot pleaded. “No, we didn’t. It has to do with the way she moves, feline grace…Let it go, okay. I’ll tell you anything you want to know about it later.”
“No, he won’t,” I said abruptly. “That warning I gave you earlier—”
“The thing with the balls ripping off and the tortured animal cracker imagery?”
“Yes,” I said. “It now applies to Greta, too.”
“Understood,” he said quickly. Greta mouthed the words “tortured animal crackers” and shook her head. Was I the only one in the world who had ever eaten an animal cracker feetfirst because it would theoretically hurt more?
“So, this Phillip, he’s got the magic rock I need,” I continued. Then I couldn’t help but ask Tabitha, “Why’d you leave him?”
“God! He was a freak, okay? He’s rich and powerful, but he’s twisted. Everything is like a game to him, even people. He wanted to show me off to his special guests in ways even you would never have asked, so I told him to fuck himself. He’d already tried to get me to be the guest of honor in a Victorian-style gangbang. Not that you should even be asking.”
I turned Talbot around. “So I should pretty much kill him.”
“He runs the city, Eric,” Tabitha blurted. “You can’t just waltz into the Highland Towers and kill him. He’s got magic wards and security.”
“Is he awake during the day?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” Tabitha answered.
“How hard is he to wake?”
“Pretty hard. Why?”
“That’s all I needed to know.” I nodded to Talbot. “How long will it take to get there?”
“About twenty minutes,” he answered.
“Is there a parking deck or anything? You know what? I have a better idea. I’ll head over there in the early afternoon. Are there any good pet-supply stores around here?”
25
ERIC: PARKING
We pulled up outside the Highland Towers in Talbot’s Jaguar. I trusted the shade in his car enough to just peek my mousey whiskers out of Talbot’s shirt pocket. The building was impressive in a monumental Gothic sort of way. Very West Side, but I had to admit that I liked it more than the buildings around it. It wasn’t the tallest, but it had a certain architectural extravagance with which I identified.
Talbot pulled into the parking deck. I didn’t ask about the key card he used to get us in. I figured that Tabitha had one, too, and I didn’t want to think about it any harder than I already was. Despite its normal appearance from the outside, the deck was very vampire friendly. The subtle angling of the exterior wall maximized shade on the exterior parking spots. An interior divide granted access to a second parking area, completely sealed off from the sun, and a covered walkway connected the deck and the main complex.
My little detour to the pet-supply shop had run us later than intended, so Talbot pulled into the covered area. Each parking spot was labeled by suite name. Talbot parked in one of the four marked Reserved—Gryphon Suite.
“I wonder how much it set these rich assholes back to outfit this deck?” I asked, crawling out of Talbot’s shirt pocket and returning to human size.
“Are you sure you won’t let me just go inside and get you in?” Talbot asked again. “Tabitha was given Roger’s old suite as a gift. I should be able to get Dennis to let you in past the wards and then you could talk to Lord Phillip.”
I picked up the shopping bag from Void City Pets. Inside was a roll-around ball for hamsters and gerbils. I’d spray painted it black. My plan was more fun than Talbot’s. Talbot would shut me in the ball in mouse form and then point me toward the Highland Towers. In my new sun-proof plastic ball, I’d roll right up to the wards, go uber vamp, and…
“You suck all the joy out of life.” I pulled the plastic contraption out of the bag. “The SunRunner Five Thousand, man. It’s a cool idea.” Just not a practical idea, I completed the thought mentally.
“You named the plastic pet ball?”
I sighed. “I could just use the walkway.”
“You could.”
“But busting in through the front door just sounds like fun,
Talbot.”
“If you say so.”
“Okay, you win.” I tossed the SunRunner Five Thousand back into the car and stomped toward the interior corridor.
Unlike most parking decks, there was no trash in the stairwell, no stains on the floor or on the walls. Everything was very well kept and the lighting was good. Sand-colored walls were painted with little coral patterns and the floor was a rich brown. The door into the walkway opened easily into a small receiving area. It was carpeted in thick burgundy carpet and the walls were light brown. It was supposed to look welcoming, I guess. Instead, it reminded me of an Italian restaurant I’d taken the living, breathing Tabitha to six months before.
That was when I felt the other vamps. Most of them were sleeping, but a few of them weren’t. Fifteen Masters lived here. Their faces blurred in my mind’s eye. Some of them were old, others were new, but none of them seemed important. I never get much data off of any vampire, so it didn’t surprise me.
It did come as a shock when one of female vamps stood out. She felt familiar. I’d seen her face before, in the minds of some of the thralls spying on the Pollux. This was their owner, the one who made them thralls. She was asleep. Concentrating on her face made her appear more clearly. She was sleeping soundly, though I recognized one of her thralls moving around in the room. I deliberately reached for more information, a name, anything, and, for once, I got it. The vampire’s name was Gabriella, and she was old, far older than me.
Her eyes opened and she screamed. Her panic ripped through the connection and I heard a ramble of thoughts: Not during the day. He wasn’t supposed to be here yet. Good Lord, what if he knows? before she regained control of herself.
What if I knew what?
Let me in, I thought at her.
Roger is not here, she thought back. I will have him send Rachel back to you. Please, leave in peace!
Roger? Huh? I was here for the stupid stone thingy, not Roger. Of course, if he just happened to be in the building…
Our contact was severed when I sensed the Vlads. There were seven of them. I wondered which one was Phillip and in response, a balding little man, not a midget but still pretty damn short, swam to the front of my mind. He slept in a huge canopy bed with three humans lying on or next to him for warmth. Two of them were chatting while the third just lay there trying to sleep.
Even after decades of being a vampire, I felt like there was an instruction booklet that everyone else had and that people were purposefully keeping away from me. Previously, when I’d sensed other vampires, I’d known whether they were Masters or Vlads or whatever, and what they looked like. I’d never gotten such good, clear information before.
I heard the sound of Talbot’s footsteps on concrete and then he came running down the stairs and into the reception area. “Why did you kick in the superspeed?” he asked. “Are we in a race?”
“I didn’t know that I had.”
“Let me go in, see if I can find Dennis, and get you permission to come inside,” Talbot told me. “Just wait out here. It should only take a minute.”
A minute passed, followed by five. I looked at my watch, walked up to the door. There was something there that made the hair on my arms stand up and the back of my neck grow cold.
Reaching out with my left hand, I could feel it, a barrier. It was invisible, but very real. A presence touched my thoughts and then retreated. The double doors ahead of me swung open and the barrier seemed to part like a curtain.
“You are expected,” a voice whispered in my mind.
Talbot came around the corner. “Dennis is asleep.” A young woman with bleary eyes followed him. “Hannah says she can add you to the system, though. She’ll need a drop of your blood.”
Hannah held out a golden needle with a crystal at one end. “It’s for the security systems,” she said and yawned. “That’s all. I promise.”
“Fools rush in,” I cursed under my breath.
She pricked my finger. The crystal turned red, then purple. Her eyes widened and when she spoke next, the words tumbled out too fast. “That’s all. Will you be requiring anything else, milord?”
“No, thanks,” I told her. “I’ve got Talbot here to show me around.”
Hannah hesitated, but she did comply, wandering off into the complex toward her appointed task.
“Where to first?” Talbot asked.
“You’re going back to the Pollux,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Call it a hunch. I want you watching over my girls.”
Talbot shrugged. “Do you need anything before I go?”
“Leave the SunRunner Five Thousand in the parking place,” I told him. “I might need it.”
He turned to leave.
“Hey, Talbot. One question.”
He looked back at me, waiting.
“Is there something important I’m supposed to know about a female Master named Gabriella? She freaked out when we sensed each other.”
“She’s Roger’s sire?” Talbot said, his answer a question itself.
“So?”
“I know you don’t care about the whole who-belongs-to-who thing, but she’s a Society vamp and she doesn’t know you well. What she does know is that her offspring messed with you and technically, if you wanted to, you could take it out on her for not keeping him in line.”
“Thanks.” I watched him go, then charged into the bowels of High Society. There is a sickly sweet feeling you get in your chest, a burst of adrenaline right before you jump off of a cliff or stick your hand into a hornet’s nest. It’s the thrill of the moment, the challenge. I knew suddenly that I wasn’t about to walk over to the front desk or find an elevator, grab a house phone and call the concierge, or even go talk to Phillip. I was going to go find Gabriella and make her tell me everything she knew about Roger and Rachel.
“I’m about to whip somebody’s ass,” I sang under my breath like a little boy. I love those moments of enlightened “I don’t give a fuck.” If you survive them, later, you even get to look back and laugh. If you’re really lucky, you get to do it with all four limbs intact.
26
ERIC: LE DÉMON COEUR
Long ornate hallways and well-furnished sitting rooms took up the bulk of the interior at Highland Towers. Young men and women in bellhop garb manned old-fashioned elevators; each one slid the doors shut moments before I reached them. Talbot’s scent had vanished when I crossed the threshold, but I did smell Rachel. I even smelled Roger. It was all quite irksome.
Stained glass windows portrayed mythological scenes at regular intervals along exterior walls. At the end of one huge hallway was an image that grasped my full attention. It depicted an army of vampires marching on a church. The sky was thick with bats and only one knight stood before a hulking black thing that was a pretty good likeness for what my uber vampire form must look like, except this one had breasts.
At the top of the larger tableau, bats were shown to part for rays of sun to shine down on the monstrous vampire. As I studied the scene, the shards of stained glass began to move. Words I recognized as French danced across a scroll at the bottom of the window, narrating the events above. Slowly, the colors all faded to gray and then a title appeared on the scroll: Le Démon Coeur.
Seen from the beginning, the dog and pony show was much more impressive. Under the cover of darkness, a lone knight rode in on an injured steed and left his horse dying on the steps up to the chapel. He hesitated, tore off his helmet, and cowered before an immense cross above the door. Baring small fangs, the vampire knight gathered his courage and charged into the church.
Time passed. A stylized sun rose over the church and the white clouds transformed into a churning horde of black bats, blocking out the sun. A female vampire dressed in medieval finery flew into the image from the left-hand side. Thirty vampires on horseback followed her on the ground. She landed before the steps of the great stone church and dialogue in some foreign language flew past on the scroll. Maybe it was French,
too, but the font made it hard to read at all. Periodically the stained-glass figure’s lips parted and she seemed to laugh.
My guess was that the fancy pants vampire was taunting the one who had fled to the church. A priest in brown robes came out of the church. He held a golden cross before him in both hands. There was more dialogue. Fancy Pants didn’t seem pleased by it, whatever it was, and became the winged black beast with which I was familiar.
The vampire knight emerged from the church, snatched the cross away from the priest, and pushed him back inside. Flames engulfed the knight’s gauntlets around the base of the large crucifix. The knight walked toward the uber vamp, stopped at the center of the steps, and fell to his knees. His head slowly lifted up to the heavens and more dialogue went by on the scroll. I recognized some of it as Latin.
All of the vampires cast their eyes upward and gold-lettered text went by on the scroll; even I recognized the Lord’s Prayer. The knight held up his cross defiantly. Two angels with fiery swords parted the horde of bats. All of the vampires, the knight included, were bathed in the light of the sun. Wisps of gray smoke began to drift up off Fancy Pants, but the thirty vampires with her exploded, and their horses along with them. Fancy Pants had a few words to say and even though I couldn’t read them, the posturing led me to believe it was something indignant and threatening—very Wicked Witch of the West.
She exited stage-left in a huff and the knight collapsed in the sun but did not burn. His skin became less pale and he sat up, touching his chest, his teeth. I was betting that he had been given a free trip back to the land of the living—lucky bastard.
More golden text slipped by and the priest came back out of the church, looked at the knight, and fell to his knees in prayer. Miracles will do that to a padre, I suppose. Everything went gray again, the picture returned to the initial image of the knight opposing the uber vamp and her posse. The cross was gone and the knight held a sword in its place, but I just took that as poetic license.
