by J. F. Lewis
She walked away and came back out with Talbot, Greta, and Tabitha. They were bound by magic chains that moved across the floor in a serpentine manner. Greta and Tabitha had been staked. Rachel gestured, and the chains released the girls. Rachel propped them against the dome so they would have a good view of my death. The chain extended itself up along the dome as well, hanging Talbot next to them in the air.
My thoughts were slow, but smooth. I ran through my options with no sense of urgency or concern. I had all the time in the world to figure this out. Two minutes was an eternity. I had to find a way to kill Roger that didn’t involve moving. I had to save Greta, Tabitha, and Talbot in the process. Then, I needed to kill J’iliol’lth. If I couldn’t do any of those things, I still had to make sure that Roger lost.
He’d burned the Pollux and the Demon Heart. He’d been raping Marilyn; he’d made her his thrall so that she couldn’t tell me about it. He’d used Rachel to get at me. Rachel. My partial thrall. That gave me an idea. When I’d made Rachel my thrall—or attempted to—the ritual had only worked partway because I didn’t make a blood tattoo or say the ritual words. Is there a time restriction on completing the ritual? I asked myself. Or did I just have to…
Of course, they’d have to unstake me first or none of it would matter. The way I figured it, the entire reason everything had been so complicated was that Roger had wanted to be certain that I couldn’t go Grape Ape on him, lose my temper, and turn into the uber vamp.
“Unstake him,” Roger ordered. “He has to be intact for the spell to work. A hole in his chest might be a problem.”
Rachel pretended to be aghast. “But Master, he could turn into a revenant and escape.” This time, I could tell she was faking it and I think she meant for me to know. Rachel glanced pointedly toward the marbles. Cat’s-eye marbles. Soul prisons. With a memory like mine, it’s a miracle that I remembered. Maybe it was because Melvin looked like Dan Aykroyd or maybe it was the way he had geeked out over my revenant form, but the words Melvin had said stuck with me, word for word: “When they come at you next, they’ll try the soul prison route, but I can guarantee you they’ll get nonguild labor to put it together. It’ll look like a cat’s-eye marble. They’re wicked powerful, but they’ll shatter like glass if you hit them with a rock. Good luck.”
My plan didn’t require a rock, but it did hinge on someone whose name began with the letter R.
“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Roger ordered.
Rachel did as he asked, darting out of my reach, stopping just past the boundary created by the circle of stones. Did Roger think I was that stupid? Even without the info Melvin had laid on me, if I could go noncorporeal and escape, then all Roger’s preparations made no sense. Unless he needed me to go noncorporeal…so that I would be a revenant so that his little ring of soul prisons could trap my ass. All I would have had to do was go ghost-mode and I would have been all Roger’s.
For a split second, my rage broke through Rachel’s spell and when it did, I saw Fang being unhooked from a tow truck, saw Beatrice pulling a tire iron out of his engine block. I heard the creak of metal as his inner workings slid back together and he repaired himself. In that instant, I knew what Fang was. When I had rage blackouts, the part of me that made decisions when I was so angry that I acted on instinct…that part of me was Fang. Somehow, when I’d come back, I’d come back in two pieces. And neither one of me was going to play along with Roger’s undead makeover.
Roger. They must have taken the Stone of Aeternum out of my pants pocket before hanging me up on the tree, because Roger held it in his hands over the book. He looked smug. And a smug Roger is a stupid Roger. I needed time for my backup to arrive. Fang felt close, but I couldn’t tell exactly how close. Still, stalling wasn’t the problem. The real problem was Rachel. I needed her to be closer. Much closer. How could I get Roger to send her over here?
The answer was simple: act like me. As Roger saw me, I was a loud obnoxious dickhead with a soft spot for his friends, a hopeless romantic with no real sense of romance, a guy who’d make life-altering decisions on a whim, a guy who doesn’t hold anything back. Fine.
“So,” I asked, “Roger—how’s it feel to be a fuckup?”
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“I’m supposed to turn into my ghost form—a revenant or whatever—and come flying at you, is that it? It’s a good plan, but it’s sloppy, just like you. And it ain’t gonna happen. You can’t just use the Stone of Aeternum on me and get it over with, can you?”
“Eric, Eric, Eric,” Roger tut-tutted, “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You really do think I’m that stupid, don’t you? Look. This may surprise you, Roger, but I really don’t care what happens to me. I’ll do what you want, but you have to agree to let Talbot, Tabitha, and Greta go. You have to agree not to act against them unless they physically assault you and I mean no egging them on. No bothering them. No sending other people after them. You also have to reimburse Greta for the cash she paid to buy back my buildings and my stuff. Oh, and you also have to let Tabitha keep the suite at the Highland Towers.”
Roger licked his lips, leaving a thin trail of red behind. “She’ll have to agree to stay out of my way.”
“Fine.”
He said, “Done. Witnessed by Ebon Winter, J’iliol’lth, and the others present. Turn into your ghost form and fly toward me.”
“One last thing,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“I want to kiss Rachel good-bye.”
“I don’t know,” Roger said carefully. “You might try to kill her.”
“Do you need her for the ritual?” I asked.
He bit his lip, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes again before putting them back on. “No.”
“Then what? You’re afraid of me? I’m chained to a magic post here. What the fuck am I gonna do? God, you’re such a coward.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Yes, why call a spade a spade?” Winter laughed. Roger glared at him. “Oh, don’t mind me,” Winter continued, placing a hand to his chest. “Do what you will. I’m not the one who’ll have to live it down. Rabbit Roger, the Yellow Vlad of Void City. It has a certain poetry to it, don’t you think?” The audience in the bleachers went off like a laugh track, right on cue to push Roger over the edge. Looking across the room, I noticed Beatrice had slipped into the room unnoticed. She took a seat near some of the others and laughed inconspicuously on cue.
Roger cursed. “Do it,” he told Rachel.
“I agree to kiss him and then we’re straight? I’m free to go, but on retainer?” Rachel asked. And then I saw Rachel’s plan, too, because we both had the same plan. She’d played her part to the hilt trying to make sure that I had enough info to figure it out.
Roger nodded, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at J’iliol’lth. The demon nodded, too. He withdrew a thick stack of papers from a metal briefcase and turned to the last page. The vampires around him strained to get a look at it. J’iliol’lth cut his finger letting viscous brown nonblood drip onto a signet ring. He held it poised over the paper.
“The moment you kiss him,” J’iliol’lth assured her, “I’ll mark your contract fulfilled. The mortgage on your soul will be paid in full and you will be free.”
Rachel floated toward me, barely suppressing a smile, and I had butterflies in my stomach. I can’t tell you what to do, her voice whispered in my head, but please tell me you’ve figured it out. It could have been what remained of the steak and the beer, or it could have been that I was about to bet my unlife on a mouthful of blood, my ability to force Roger out of Rachel’s head, and one undead Mustang convertible circa 1964. I normally worry about tests, but I’d already done a practice run on this one, pushing Roger’s own sire out of Ebony’s head and my faith in Fang was unwavering. After all, if you can’t trust yourself…?
37
ERIC: THE POWER OF SPIT
When you become a vampire, o
ne of the first things you notice, aside from the hunger, is how gross everything can be. You have to be careful licking your lips or you’ll leave a trail of blood. Roger did that all the time; it was a basically disgusting habit.
All your bodily fluids are replaced with blood. When your mouth waters, you have to be very fastidious about drool. Bloodstains are hard to get out and drooling blood on your date can be a total deal breaker. When Rachel walked toward me, my mouth filled with what passed for saliva and I let it pool.
She had conditioned me to find her attractive and I did. Her presence was intoxicating and standing in the same room with her was all it took to make me crave her touch, her taste. Floating over the white powder into the circle, she touched my cheek and smiled.
“It’s a shame it has to be this way,” she said with apparently genuine regret. “You’re the best lover I’ve ever had and I really do like you.”
Leaning in for the kiss, she touched the back of my head, ran her fingers through my hair. Her lips parted. Her eyes closed and I spat a mouthful of blood onto her cheek. Shrieking involuntarily, she drew back and slapped my face.
Please, please, please, her thoughts hit me.
I concentrated on the blood, willing it to move according to my wishes. It slid across her left cheek, changing colors, taking the shape I desired: a butterfly. She wiped her hand across her face in disgust. When it came away clean, her eyes widened and she stared at her hand without comprehension until I started saying the words. It was the best acting job I’d ever seen.
“I mark thee and bind thee,” I incanted quickly, “Master to servant. Servant to master. You are mine until I set you free. You are mine. So mote it be.”
As before, I felt pain, but this time it was a pleasure. Across the room, Roger glared at me. Our eyes met. My mind touched his. I said you were a fuck-up.
Roger’s thoughts were as slippery as he was. I forced him from Rachel’s psyche, trying to keep a grip on his mind with mine. He wriggled free once, but I caught him again and hung on. “Rachel!” I hissed between gritted teeth, “Release me.”
It has to be an order, she thought at me. Mentally, I made it a command.
Roger’s mouth opened and closed like a fish animated by Art Babbitt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rachel glance at J’iliol’lth, saw her smile when she confirmed that he’d already made his mark on her contract. A single word from her unlocked the shackles, dropping them and me. I slid down the metal tree onto my knees.
“I think you probably need to be mad now,” she said and I felt the artificial calm that had been plaguing me drop away. Her soft caress brought my anger roiling back and with it, I saw a vision of Fang, driving up the wall of the Lovett Building.
“Now sic ’em!” I spat. I made that an order, too…. Just in case. Rachel giggled and turned on our audience, blue fire at her fingertips.
“He thought his way out of it,” Winter told J’iliol’lth with glee. “I win again! Isn’t it marvelous?”
Roger’s mind was slippery on the surface, strong and ordered beneath. Mine was absolutely chaotic, but I had fought several vampires mind to mind, I’d gone through the thralldom ritual, the real one, more than once, and from the feel of things, Marilyn may have been his only thrall. It gave me power, perspective. Besides, he had it coming from way back.
Roger’s fingers involuntarily relaxed and the Stone of Aeternum rolled across the floor. J’iliol’lth dived over the table to get the stone. Beatrice beat him to it. The rest of the audience ran like hell, and a communal scream went up among them as Fang crashed through the dome of the Lovett Building and landed on the middle of the group. Shards of gold-tinted glass rained down on the crowd as “Bodies” by Drowning Pool blared from the Mustang’s speakers.
The half-dozen vamps beneath Fang’s undercarriage pushed against him as one, only to shriek even louder when the flesh on their hands and forearms ripped free with the sound of tearing fabric. It flattened against Fang and sank into the metal. Inch by rapid inch, they were taken, stripped, shucked, and digested by my memento mori.
The ones he missed, Rachel nailed with dots of blue flame that caught and spread. They burned one by one, each adding to the blaze like a book of lit matches.
In the soft blue light, Winter pulled the stake out of Tabitha and pointed her toward Greta. He touched Talbot’s chain and gave an unintelligible command. Instantly the chains fell away, rapidly slithering into a neat coil at Winter’s feet. Once Tabitha freed Greta, I stopped watching the world outside my mind’s eye and turned all my attention on my ex–best friend Roger.
“You can’t fight me this way, Eric. You can barely think! You’re little more than an animal,” Roger said, lashing out at me mentally. I made no effort to defend myself, continuing my charge deep into his psyche. If he wanted to tear holes in my mind, he was welcome to it, so long as I got him, too.
“I let you go the first time. After everything you did, I tried to let you go,” I roared. “I would have let you go this time, too. But I had to watch Marilyn burn, not just her body, her soul. I could have made her young again if she’d been my thrall. We could have been together this whole fucking time!”
“You didn’t deserve her,” he shouted back. “She never even loved you.” He was a quick study. Shields popped up around his mind and I battered them down. His mental self manifested armor, a sword, and a shield. My mental self just looked like me. He cut deeply with the psychic sword and blood gushed from my image.
“Didn’t deserve her?” I concentrated on what it was like to be the uber vamp, focused on my rage, and sent it at Roger with a roar. Mental-me grew wings and black skin. In my head, I was the uber vamp. Roger shit himself. I guess in his head, his mental version of himself, he was still human.
“The stones, the ones in the circle, are called spirit wardens. I could have trapped you and then elevated myself to Vladhood. Then I could have used your spirit to become what you are.”
“Except that you can only ascend once every century,” Tabitha snarled, “If you’d ever asked Phillip, he could have told you that.”
I blinked and glanced about. I hadn’t realized that we were also speaking aloud.
Roger looked angrily at J’iliol’lth and I charged across the pentagram toward him in the physical world, trying to do the same in his mind. He threw himself backward in an awkward flip, but he wasn’t close to fast enough once I hit top speed. I felt like a coke-head mainlining for the first time. The rush rattled my teeth and numbed my tongue. Mint assailed my nostrils and I lashed out at the source without taking my eyes off Roger. J’iliol’lth screamed to my left and my hand came back covered in brown goop.
“Wanna know something really scary, Roger?” I shouted. “I’m not even going to kill you!”
I caught him by the neck and snapped his spine, my actions echoing from the physical world into the mental battleground in which we fought.
“You raped my fiancée, murdered her, and sold her soul to a demon!” I reached down, grabbed a fistful of crotch and tore off everything I’d seized. Roger desperately clawed and slashed at me, leaving long bloody wounds on my chest and shoulders.
“You should have stayed dead!” Plunging my fist through his sternum, I wrapped my fingers around his heart. He turned into a frog and squirmed free of my grasp. As he leapt free, he became human again and then went from human to bat, flying for the hole in the dome, flapping toward freedom. “Come back here, you sonovabitch!” I swore, just as a shot rang out from across the room.
Roger burst into flames to the sound of John Paul Courtney’s laughter. “Ain’t no way I’m gonna sit through another fight with that one.” Courtney’s ghost blew across the barrel of El Alma Perdida and met my eyes. “That’s yore one shot. Now git it done.”
I dragged the flaming shape-locked bat that was Roger into the pentagram next to the ring of spirit wardens, ignoring the flames that coursed from him to me. His tiny heart popped with all the resistance of a crack whore’s virt
ue. I tore off his head and let it burn. As his body did the same, one of the spirit wardens shone a vibrant green. Roger’s remains crumbled into powder. The flames vanished with him.
I picked up the spirit warden and inside, barely visible to the naked eye, a miniature Roger, humanoid, screamed and pounded on the walls of his tiny mystic prison, spectral flames blazing brightly on his back.
Rachel looked over my shoulder and laughed. “Oh my God. I didn’t know they worked that way. That is so cool! We should kill J’iliol’lth over one of these, too. That way he can’t mess with my—”
“No.”
The disgusting demon stood at the top of the ruined bleachers, back to the gaping hole Fang had left there. Beatrice was sitting in Fang’s passenger seat. A menacing engine rev made J’iliol’lth twitch, but he stayed put.
“Eric,” J’iliol’lth crooned, “you won! Now we can make you a true immortal—”
“No,” I said again. “You think I don’t know that you did all this? You put Roger out front, your little red flag to make the bull charge, but he couldn’t have done this without your help. Him I understand. He hated me. But you did all this for a magic rock.”
“I am a demon,” J’iliol’lth said.
“You get eaten.”
J’iliol’lth leapt backward, turning in one smooth motion as filthy, bracken-covered wings erupted from his jacket. I ran after him, the transformation to uber vamp effortless.
“He’s getting away,” Tabitha shouted.
“Not today.” I grabbed Talbot under his arms and took him with me, the two of us shooting through the hole in the Lovett Building’s golden dome in hot pursuit of the demon, the cold air of the December evening chilling my flesh, seeping into my bones. It felt like old times.
38
ERIC: DEMONS DON’T GET DO-OVERS
I didn’t see him. “Where’d he go?” I shouted. I’d spent more time flying as a bat than as the uber vamp and the uber vamp didn’t have radar. The long leathery wings sported by my vampiric form fell somewhere between the wings I sported as a normal-size chiroptera and the wings of a seagull—the membrane didn’t stretch and flex the same. My ghost time hadn’t provided me any useful practice, either.
