by J. F. Lewis
“I’ll never be this powerful again.” She paused as she flapped her wings hard enough to lift herself off of the floor, but the ceiling was too low to allow her much maneuvering room. “Not unless I can find another Emperor-class vampire just lying around. I mean, there are seven, and I even know where to find one of them, but as far as I know, she’s straight.”
I let her talk, allowing my vampiric metabolism to heal me and hopefully letting her run down the clock on her uber vamp power.
“Then why give up the magic if it’s so important to you?” My head wound was gone already, the skin smooth under my fingers. No more wince-producing twinges came from my back when I moved my shoulders.
“Don’t get me wrong; I’ll still have pyromancy from the demon when I’m free, but it’s more of a channeling thing. I need both the demon and the Emperor vampire to mainline this kind of magic.”
Blue flames coursed along her outstretched talons and I flinched. Please don’t let me be set on fire again.
“All healed up?” she asked mockingly. I lunged for her, but she spiraled away through the air and over the deck wall. In the sunlight, she turned to face me, her skin returning to normal, fangs receding. Out of uber vamp juice, or preserving it. Hovering in the air, with her tattered jacket and the backless top she wore underneath, Rachel was more beautiful than I’d ever seen her look, a ragged angel, hair backlit by the sun.
It was one more cruel reminder how much Rachel had paid to cling to life. I’d heard her claim that she hadn’t sold her soul, but she was fooling herself. Even so, damnation agreed with her.
“Come and get me, sis.” She tossed her hair with a shake of her head. “I’ll wait right here.”
Talbot floated after her against his will, pulled by the enchanted chains.
“No,” I mouthed. I didn’t love him or anything, but he had come running into a burning building to rescue me. I didn’t want him to die.
“Why do you want Talbot?” I yelled. “I thought you were here to kill vampires.”
“There you go, thinking again.” Rachel clucked her tongue and shook her finger at me. “Maybe I just want to have sex with him later.”
“You’re such a whore.”
“No, but I do like sex, always have…and now I get power from it. Although, technically I didn’t have to sleep with Eric. I could have done it with joint meditation or massage therapy; it was just an option I exercised, because let’s face it, sex is a hell of a lot more fun. That makes me an escort. But you, you shacked up with an ancient perverted old Vlad that disgusted you, just so you’d have a nice place to stay. You fucked him because you wanted what he could give you. So if there’s a whore here…it’s you.”
“You’re kidding yourself. Phillip was a bad choice, but once I got to know the real him, I told him to fuck himself and left. But you, you can’t just quit or your demon pimp will send you back to Hell.”
A wave of fire washed through the level of the parking deck that I was on. Rachel’s voice called out above the roar. “I was going to let you live, but you talk too much—”
I ran. Flames licked the back of my head, but I didn’t stop running. Patting my hair out as I went, I ran down, down, down, and down. What I was going to do when I got to the bottom level, I didn’t know, but I hoped I’d think of something.
On the ground level I spied Magbidion’s RV and Eric’s Mustang. The RV provided the best cover, but there was no way I could outrun Rachel in it. I just hoped Eric’s keys were in his car. The door was unlocked. I opened the driver’s-side door, still trying to guesstimate how long I could last in partial sun. Maybe I could duck down…drive with one hand at the bottom of the wheel or something.
“Where ya going, sis?”
Rachel floated down, lifting over the little concrete barrier at the edge of the parking area and landing gently on the concrete. Not bothering to glide anymore, she stalked in my direction, her head tilted slightly to the left as if she were listening to someone else. “The puppet danced just like he was supposed to,” she said. “Eric’s not coming to save you. He’s been kept busy at the Highland Towers. He might be the best lay I’ve ever had, but mentally he’s thick like brick, you know? There’s an animal-like craftiness, but he’s a total retard.”
There were no keys in the Mustang. Frustrated, I punched the steering wheel…and things got weird. The radio turned on all by itself. A heavy metal guitar riff rang out over the speakers, imitating a race car engine throttling up. All of the interior lights in the deck blinked out at once, leaving Rachel illuminated only by the high beams of Eric’s Mustang.
“What the fuck?” Rachel and I echoed each other.
The bright white of the car’s headlights turned to crimson, casting Rachel in a blood-tinted hue.
“Memento mori.” She said the words like a curse, as if they were a stand-in for motherfucker. “He cares about her enough for his darkness to intercede?” The last bit I heard only because my vamp senses were back to full, but she sounded hurt.
The Mustang’s tires squealed as they turned in place, leaving a layer of smoking rubber on the concrete. It was Rachel’s turn to run.
I recognized the song on the radio when the car took off after her. It was “Fuel” by Metallica. Eric’s car had his taste in music. Or maybe…“Eric, are you doing this?”
Nobody answered, but it felt like him, the angry him, the tall, dark, and purple-eyed him. Rachel leapt out into the sun, hovering just above the concrete barrier. She spun in the air, fingers twisting deftly at the start of what I assumed was the spell that would incinerate me and the car.
The car had other plans. It accelerated, straight for the concrete wall of the deck, bursting through it, clipping Rachel. Sunlight hit the car, but it didn’t burn. Flamelike detailing swirled up the hood, along the sides, and the windows darkened from clear to almost black.
The rest I heard rather than felt. A series of crashes and more tire-squealing, punctuated by several explosions that rocked the car, were my best indicators that Rachel was still alive. As the Mustang kept trying to catch her, as its ire grew, I felt Eric again, very muffled and far away, but he was coming. At that instant everything went quiet. We drove for a few more feet before the windows went clear. The Mustang and I were safely within the shadows of the parking deck.
I didn’t see Rachel anywhere, but I did see Magbidion, so I hopped out of the car to check on him. The car followed me, rolling over the blood that spattered the deck, leaving nothing but clean concrete in its wake.
Mags was unconscious, but seemed to be otherwise okay. On a hunch, I took his keys and checked his RV. Greta was in there—she’d been cleaned up a bit and carefully arranged on the fold-out bed, covered in a garish orange and pink floral throw blanket. She was badly singed, but I had no idea whether that had been from the burning of the Pollux, one of the creeps’ flamethrowers, or one of Rachel’s spells. I had a few seconds to wonder who’d gotten her off the third level and how they’d done it without being spotted by me or by Rachel before I heard sirens blaring. The Void City Fire Department had finally decided to give the Pollux their attention. I wondered if Captain Stacey would be with them.
Waiting for dark by myself was pure agony. Magic, tension, or something kept me awake, which was better for security but not good on my nerves. I hauled Magbidion and then Greta over to Eric’s Mustang and stowed them inside, then climbed inside myself. I figured we’d be safest there if Rachel came back. I put Greta in the front seat and pulled Magbidion into the back next to me, for warmth. After that I stared at the ceiling and pondered why I wasn’t falling asleep.
“That was really Rachel.” I tested the idea and the words together. Would I have done what she did to avoid dying? In a way, hadn’t I sold out by letting myself be changed? Maybe not the way she’d changed, but just as monstrously…She’d sold her services for magic and a second chance and I’d traded my life for a shot at a different kind of life. I understood the desire, but I didn’t want to identify
with her. Dead and buried, she’d been easier to love.
Thinking about my sister, I finally fell asleep. When I woke, it was to Eric’s hand on my arm as he knelt over me. “Tabitha? Baby? Are you okay?”
I was hungry, angry, and depressed. He had bad timing…or worse, it had all been planned and I was just as stupid as he was for letting myself be used. Greta was still unconscious. Magbidion was no longer next to me and Eric had brought yet another new girl with him.
Red-eyed and screeching, I tore into him. “Bastard! You’ve been gone for what? An hour? And you’re already fucking somebody else?” He didn’t block my claws as they cut his chest.
“I didn’t have sex with Beatrice,” Eric said, but I wasn’t listening. I raked his stomach and it burst open, little bits of meat and blood rolling down his pants and onto my chest. “I didn’t have sex with anybody.” One strong push sent him into the air. His head hit the concrete ceiling, but he caught himself as he fell and landed on his feet at the back of the RV.
“Tab, listen. Calm down. There has been some really strange stuff going on, and you’ve got to—”
His eyes were so open, so clear, so intelligent. He didn’t even sound like himself.
“Shut up!” I screamed. “You’d fuck anybody! You were fucking Rachel and worse, you wanted me to!”
“I’ll admit I did have the thought, but”—he shrugged—“I am a guy.”
I leapt up, but my feet slid in the blood and I went back down, catching myself on the side of Magbidion’s RV. I came up fast, with a hint of my vampire speed, but not enough to stop myself from slipping and falling again.
“My little sister! I know you don’t want to talk about it, but she’s back from the dead and working for Roger! And she almost killed us…would have killed us if it hadn’t been for your car. Where were you, you asshole?”
“I was being blocked. I thought everyone here was dead.” He shrugged. “So I handled some other business before coming here to try to trap…Wait. Did you say that your sister is back from the dead? When did she die?”
Something was slowing him down. He wasn’t as nimble as he had been, even after things had gotten screwy. Maybe Rachel was draining him, recharging. On a good day I was faster than him. But with him moving as slowly as he was, it was a massacre. Twice he tried to lock gazes with me, but I’m not stupid—he’d done that to me at the entrance to the Artiste Unknown and I’d had to go through with a really horrible evening just to fulfill the compulsion, going through the movements of having fun, while Eric had gone home with my little sister, with Rachel!
“You bastard! I thought you loved me. I’m so stupid. I really thought you loved me.”
“I never said that, Tabitha, but listen—”
Flipping over and behind him, I caught him by the neck as I’d seen him grab so many others. I seized his neck with one hand and his shoulder with the other. It was easy, like snapping beans in the backyard with my momma when I was little.
“Moist! Warm! Tightness!” It was all I could think of to say as I ripped off his head. He started rotting even before I let go of him and I stumbled back. Pulling his head off shouldn’t have killed him. The woman with him opened and closed her mouth without saying anything, like the words just wouldn’t come.
“You did great, sis!” said a familiar voice behind me. Rachel hovered in the sunlight just beyond the edge of the deck. With a simple gesture, she threw a tire iron at my head. I got out of the way, but as I did so, the tire iron altered direction and instead of striking me, it angled toward the Mustang, smashing straight through the engine block.
A second gesture and Talbot drifted back into view, the chain which bound him slithering across the concrete. As I watched, the links separated and reattached themselves to both imprison Greta and bind Eric’s remains. “You see, Tab,” Rachel told me casually, “once we had him where we wanted him, we needed someone who could subdue him. Sure, I probably could have done it, but there was always the outside chance that he’d find a way to kill me or stop me. He’s really good at that. But once I realized how much he cared for you…well, I knew he wouldn’t kill you, no matter what you did, especially after losing Marilyn.”
“Please let me go,” said the woman that had shown up with Eric. “He was going to eat me.”
“Get out of here,” Rachel told her scornfully. The woman fled and Rachel had us all in her grip. One question I wanted to ask burned brightly in my mind. She’d said subdue…Did that mean that I hadn’t really killed him? Now that I thought about it, I was sure Eric would survive having his head ripped off. He’d survived holy water, stakes, explosives…yup, he’d be fine. Chances were Rachel was telling the truth.
She’d also said he cared for me.
36
ERIC: DECAPITATED
Okay, I admit it. I knew decapitation wasn’t going to kill me. It had never happened to me before, but I’d come back from having no remains at all. The way I saw it, being headless couldn’t be all that bad. I hadn’t even tried to dodge Tabitha.
I used to think that the removal of the head was a reliable way to off a vampire. Of course, I also thought that having Roger eaten by werewolves was going to get rid of him for good. I guess some things just don’t work when you’re dealing with the high-end bad guys. You see, the idea was to let Tabitha blow off a little steam. I hadn’t counted on getting jobbed by Rachel in the meantime.
Rachel loaded us all up into a moving van; my body went into one box (I didn’t see what kind) and my head went into a red-and-white plastic cooler. In the box, I considered my options. I couldn’t feel my body and, try as I might, I was incapable of speech. Similar to being staked through the heart, decapitation apparently completely paralyzed those that it did not kill…Or maybe since I hadn’t been through postmortem syndrome, I still thought too much like a human and couldn’t wrap my brain around moving something to which I was no longer attached. Either way, I would not be busting my body out of its box and reclaiming my own head. I tried.
When the box reopened and Rachel pulled me out, I looked around as well as I could. We were on the top floor of the Lovett Building. I recognized the big golden dome even from within. From the inside, the dome was semitransparent and the stars shone brighter than they appeared from downtown. The rest of me was already chained up in the center of an elaborate ritual setup. An oddly shaped metal tree held my body upright while one of its branches bore a sharpened piece of wood that pierced my heart. That particular branch was hinged so that it could be folded in or out, removing the stake and then shoving it back in.
A circle of white powder and cat’s-eye marbles surrounded the tree. A golden pentagram had been etched into the floor so that the circle of marbles was in the middle. Five little black candles with blue flames decorated the points of the pentagram.
A series of raised bleachers had been arranged around the edges of the dome. They were empty except for the left side of the first few rows. On those rows sat an audience, mostly vampires that I’d seen before in The Velvet. In front of the bleachers was a small folding table with four chairs. J’iliol’lth sat in the left-most chair with two empty chairs to his right. The fourth chair held Ebon Winter.
Winter waved at me and strode over to my head. “Just so you know, I’m here on behalf of my sire to ensure that J’iliol’lth adheres to the rules. As are these,” he gestured to the folks in the bleachers, but they didn’t even look at him, eyes focused on J’iliol’lth, “fine people. I must say that I’m dreadfully disappointed in you. I abhor losing, especially after all I’ve done to aid you. You’ve still time to redeem yourself, however. The ritual doesn’t start for a few minutes.”
Looking over Winter’s shoulder, I saw the bastard who’d been behind everything standing at a podium at the tip of the pentagram. If I’d still been connected to my body, I would have charged him without thinking.
Roger smiled at me from behind his book, a huge cliché of a volume—it might as well have had Evil Book of Spells emb
ossed in gold on the cover—and gestured for Rachel to bring me closer. Roger had always been older than me and his vampiric embrace made him look older still. He wore thin reading glasses even though he no longer needed them. As affectations went, it just made him seem more bookish.
“Hey.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You almost got me with the werewolf thing. I have to hand it to you, I never thought you’d have the brains to use backup. I always said all you had to do to rule the world was control your temper, your lust, and your tongue. When your abilities become mine, everyone will see how true that statement was.”
He looked back at the book and then at my body. “Put his head on his body, Rachel. If I’ve correctly deciphered your notes, he’ll need to be intact for the ritual. It should also help with the smell.”
Rachel floated over the circle and placed my head upon my neck. She held my head in place with one hand and raised the hinged limb that held the stake in my heart. My transformation from separate to whole was almost instantaneous. Even my T-shirt was restored. Rachel drove the stake home again and my consciousness blurred; the buzz of the beer and the wine I’d had dropped me directly into the enlightened state of drunkenness where everything seems to make sense even when it really doesn’t. Marilyn. Roger. Melvin. J’iliol’lth. Rachel. Ebon Winter. They all danced around in my head.
The cat’s-eye marbles were soul prisons. I knew that because Melvin told me…Melvin who’d made sure that when I punched through the wall at Lady Gabriella’s, there’d be a hole in the wards right where I needed it to be. Melvin who worked for Winter, who’d bet that I could win. I wondered what else Winter had done behind the scenes.
“Check his enchantment.” Roger’s voice rose in pitch, nearly to a squeak. “Make sure your anger-management spell is in place.”
Familiar and friendly, Rachel’s cinnamon magic washed over me. “He’s fine,” she said, then chuckled. “I even put in a little extra buzz. He’s feeling no pain.”
