by Sloan Archer
And then fate stepped in and accepted the challenge.
12
Robert wanted to give Leopold a courtesy call to let him know we’d be home soon.
The sun had gone down about an hour ago, so Leopold’s night would just be getting started. It was about 8PM.
We didn’t want to ambush our host in case he had company of the female persuasion (a very likely possibility considering his penchant for mortals curvy and perfumed). My tour of London had been swell enough, so an unfettered view of Leopold’s pasty physique intertwined with another’s was not necessary or desired. Nor was a firsthand view into Leopold’s nocturnal feeding habits—what I dreaded most.
According to Robert, Leopold liked getting his blood straight from the source, like humans “picking fruit right off the tree and eating it while still in the orchard.” Mm-mmm, fresh as can be. I couldn’t make the connection between suckling sweet Florida oranges in the sunshine and slurping blood out of a human’s neck by the pale moonlight, so I just let that one go. There were some quirks of vampirism I would never understand.
As promised, Robert had left his phone in the car during our London tour. I’d left mine behind as well, which really meant that I’d forgotten it in the bedroom back at the house. I should have guessed something was amiss by the way Robert’s cell chimed and vibrated with implicit irritation the instant he powered it on. The phone seemed cranky: Hello! Don’t you know people are trying to reach you? Check your damn messages!
But I was accustomed to Robert’s urgent phone buzzing. It came with the territory when your boyfriend was a CEO. It was only when Robert made the classic panicked Oh Shit! motion (body starting, one hand clamping down on my thigh and the other white-knuckling the cell against his ear) that I knew our date was about to cease being perfect.
“What?” I whispered. “Who it is?”
Robert plugged his ear so he could hear the voicemail. Our efficient driver silenced the radio, which had been emitting a soft jazz number. I stopped chattering so Robert could listen. He swallowed hard and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Please no . . .” I sighed.
Why, I ask? Why did I always have to be surrounded by so much drama? Surely other people didn’t lead lives as chaotic as mine or else the world would be in a constant state of anarchy. Was it me? Was it the vampires I associated with? It wasn’t like I was out looking for it. I didn’t need to when it came to me readily enough. What was it?
I would have been okay with our date ending imperfectly, but apparently even that was asking for too much. As we crossed the gate into Leopold’s estate, it became clear that we were entering a shitstorm of the greatest portions.
The car swerved sharply, nearly plowing us into a ditch. And then from the front seat came a gasp: “Oh my God! OH MY GOD!”
“What is it, Ma . . .” For the life of me, I suddenly couldn’t remember the man’s name. Marcus? Manny?
“Martin,” the driver reminded me graciously.
“That was Leopold,” Robert murmured, dropping the phone at his side. “There’s been . . . some kind of accident.”
I craned around Martin’s head to get a better view. I instantly wished that I hadn’t. At the first sign of trouble, I should have pulled my jacket over my face and pretended to fall asleep in the car like a craftier woman would have done—maybe even taken a few Valium until the whole thing blew over. But, no, I had to go and be inquisitive. And now, like our driver, I was gasping.
I turned to Robert. “Looks more like a massacre than an accident.”
Illuminated in the headlights were bodies: lots and lots of bodies. They were strewn about the lawn, bloody and beaten. Some had been decapitated, some disemboweled. I had no hope that any of them were alive. And if they were alive, it would have almost been worse for them, as the bodies all looked as if they’d been plowed over by a steamroller.
When we got closer, I saw that many of the corpses were dressed in hospital gowns: Leopold’s patients. A few were wearing white lab coats: Leopold’s doctors. From what I could see, the dead were all human.
Martin jammed the car into park and vomited out the door. When he finished, he turned to apologize to Robert and me but then stopped midway to throw up again. I hardly noticed. A man hurling his guts out was nothing compared to a few dozen carcasses strewn about Leopold’s very English rose garden.
I found my voice but no tears. I’d become so jaded that crying hadn’t even occurred to me. How sad was that? Most distressing of all was that I didn’t scream—that I was so accustomed to horrific imagery that I couldn’t muster a single scream. What did that say about the sort of person I had turned into? “What in the hell is going on, Robert?”
Robert shook his head violently, like he was trying to rattle some comprehension loose. “I don’t know. Look over there.”
I followed Robert’s gaze to the lab—what was left of the lab. The fire had mostly been extinguished and it was only the roof that was still smoldering. Ten men surrounded the rubble, split off into two groups. Half the group—human—were using garden hoses to douse the roof. The other half—vampire—were sifting through the debris. I could tell they were vampire by their rapid, effortless movements. They tossed car-sized hunks of concrete over their shoulders like they were scrapping crumpled pieces of paper into a wastebasket. Nobody in the group wore uniforms. It was a ragtag assembly, which meant they were all probably on Leopold’s staff. That niggled me.
“Son of a bitch . . .” I scanned the lawn, looking for somebody—anybody—official. “Why hasn’t anyone been called? An ambulance? And where are the firefighters? The police?” Was Leopold planning a cover-up?
Robert pursed his lips. He seemed to be on the same train of thought that I was.
Robert and I jumped from the car, leaving poor Martin to puke in peace.
Before I could shut my door, Martin yelled after me. “Tell Leopold I didn’t see a thing. Okay, Mercy? I saw nothing.” The poor guy was terrified. And a complete liar. Unless he’d projectile-vomited for a completely unrelated cause, he’d seen plenty. He’d probably seen more than Robert and I had, since he had a front row view of the carnage.
I nodded. “Sure. Okay. I will.”
“Please!” he squawked. “You’ve got to tell Leopold that I didn’t see a thing. Tell him I won’t say a word. You’ve got to or else he’ll—”
“It will be okay,” I said, not wanting to learn what that or else was. Leopold had not lived as long as he had by simply letting things go, but I didn’t think Martin should be penalized for doing his job.
I nudged Robert. “Right?”
Robert reached in through the window and touched Martin’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, my friend. I will not allow harm to befall you. I give you my guarantee.” Yep, that was my man: protector of the people. I made a mental note to add it to the list of endless reasons why I loved him.
Robert and I ran over to the former lab. Leopold was pacing at the foot of the rubble, muttering under his breath. His butler, Edgar, was at his side, wringing his hands and spouting platitudes: Sir, I’m sure it looks worse than it is. Perhaps there are some still alive, sir. We shouldn’t lose hope, sir. Sir, it will all be okay.
Edgar was shocked to see Robert and me. “I thought you two flew home last night,” he gasped, a strange greeting considering all the carnage surrounding us.
Leopold shot Edgar a piercing scowl—Are you kidding me? Edgar fell silent and made the wise decision to give Leopold some space. He walked over to the vamps—now chucking aside slabs of roof—and offered his assistance. Edgar’s human strength wouldn’t be exceptionally helpful to the vampires—he was like a mouse offering lions muscle during battle—but at least it would allow him to contribute. It would also keep him out of Leopold’s hair.
“Finally!” Leopold exclaimed when he saw us. “I’ve been trying to reach you since sundown! Would you look at this?”
“What happened?” Robert asked.
“The lab cau
ght fire!” Leopold screeched. “The scientists are dead!”
Robert set his jaw. I knew him intimately enough to know when he was struggling to remain patient. “I can see that. Why has this happened?”
“How should I know, Robert? This all happened while I was asleep. I awakened to find this . . . this bloodshed!”
I looked over the rubble for telltale vampire remains: shimmering dust, goo, fangs. “Where are the vampire guards?”
Leopold looked at me like I was missing some great fact. So was Robert.
“What did I say?” I asked.
“If this happened when Leopold was sleeping then it still would have been daylight.” Robert pointed out. “Right, Leopold?”
Leopold concurred.
Okay, now I did feel like a dummy. “No vampire guards on the roof because they wouldn’t be in the sun. No guards whatsoever, then?”
Leopold grimaced. “I had a couple humans who stood by the door. They were more for show, glorified bouncers, really. I just . . . I didn’t think guards were all too necessary during the day, since no humans knew of my project. Those who had taken issue with my lab were immortal.”
“Those who had taken issue,” I intoned. I wanted to hear Leopold say it and face the music. “You mean the VGO?”
“I suppose.”
Robert and I glared at Leopold.
“Yes,” he admitted. “The VGO.”
“I don’t see how that can be,” Robert said. “This destruction is clearly the work of vampires. No human could have possibly done this amount of damage in such a short period of time, not without machinery.”
I swept an arm out over the lawn. “And they definitely didn’t use any. There’s no tire tracks, no ruts.”
“Humans could have started at dawn,” Leopold debated. “With no vampires around they would have had all day to do their dirty work.”
“There’s no way,” Robert said. “I think you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be mortal.”
Leopold sighed. “Perhaps you’re right.”
Robert continued, “For a human, I’m very strong. If I had fifty helpers built exactly like me and we worked for ten hours straight, we still couldn’t achieve this level of destruction. This would take a crew of humans days.”
“Are there no witnesses left?” I asked.
Leopold motioned to the vampires shifting through the rubble. “That’s what they’re looking for. There are a few unaccounted for. So many brilliant minds in there—biologists, genealogists, hematologists . . . They’re all gone. The world suffered a great loss today.”
It surprised me to see Leopold choking up. He was so calculating that I didn’t believe he was capable of remorse.
“All my work on the serum, it’s destroyed.” Ah. There it was: the real reason behind Leopold’s misery. His precious serum. “It was a top-secret operation, so I didn’t make copies—no hard drives, no USB, not even a paper journal.”
“And Robert’s cure,” I added, to keep Leopold in check (and to be a bit of a bitch). “You’ve lost all the work you’ve done for Robert’s cure.” He pretended not to hear me.
“Not that you need a witness to tell you who did this,” Robert sniped.
Leopold was taken aback. “Whatever do you mean?”
Now Robert and I were looking at Leopold like he was the one now missing the point. Even I had this one pretty much figured out.
“The VGO,” Robert spat with frustration. “Surely you cannot think that this is some great coincidence? They warned you to shut down your operation and you didn’t comply.”
“And?” Leopold snapped.
“And now your lab is gone and your staff has been assassinated.”
Leopold wouldn’t hear of it. “Impossible. You’re missing one major detail, Robert, and it’s that the VGO are vampires. No way they did it. Like I said, this happened while the sun was out.”
“They have their ways,” Robert reminded him. “Maybe they hired a human army to do this, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re behind this.”
Leopold squared his shoulders, on the defensive. I had a difficult time believing that he could possibly imagine anyone else being responsible for the attack, but of course he’d had a couple centuries to perfect his poker face.
“I guess we won’t know unless we find a witness,” Leopold said.
“You never should have let it come to this, Leo!” Robert yelled. “How can you be surprised? I knew this was going to happen!”
“You expect me to allow the VGO to railroad me into submission? No way I’m going to let them come in here and ask me—”
“The VGO don’t ask. They tell you—”
“Nobody tells me anything! I don’t care if . . .”
My thoughts wandered as Leopold and Robert duked it out verbally. They were far too magnanimous to stoop to a fistfight, though part of me wished they would. A punch or two in the face would do Leopold some good. Robert wouldn’t even need to hit that hard, considering Leopold’s miniature build. Just a couple thumps would do it.
The whole incident was very strange. Nagging me deep in the back of my skull was a thought—a slippery, dangerous idea that I couldn’t quite get a grasp on. Something close to anxiety—What was it that I was supposed to be remembering?
Oh well. If it was important enough, I figured I’d remember eventually.
The vampires were getting annoyed with Edgar. It wasn’t that he was purposely slacking, but he was slowing them down. He couldn’t compete with their agility. For every stone Edgar unturned, the vamps had moved about a hundred.
Leopold noticed. “Edgar, could you do me a favor? There are some papers blowing around. Could you gather them?”
Edgar got busy collecting the scraps of data, needless busy work. Everything had been destroyed in the fire, if not by the flames then by the ceiling sprinklers that had attempted to put them out. The few papers Edgar found were damaged beyond recognition: soggy and blurred or crisp and charred. Leopold had screwed up royally by not backing up his work, not that I commiserated with him in the slightest. He shouldn’t have been working on the serum to begin with.
Frankly, I was disgusted by Leopold’s reaction. He seemed far more distressed by the loss of his lab than the deaths of the humans on the lawn, which showed just how cavalier he was about human life. He should have been beside himself and vomiting like Martin was—well, if he was capable of vomiting.
I wondered if Robert used to be the same way, since the two of them had lived together for the better part of forty years, long before there were such things as underground vampire blood banks. Some things are best left unexamined.
One of the vamps hurled a large chunk of metal over his shoulder, nearly taking off my head. I ducked just in time.
“Careful where you’re throwing that wreckage!” Robert roared. The argument with Leopold had curdled his mood enormously. “You could kill somebody!”
At least the vamp looked repentant. “I’m so sorry! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten physical around humans.” That made perfect sense. The rubble would have bounced right off a vamp like it was lint. “I’ll be more careful. I’m so sorry.”
I waved to show that I was unharmed. I studied the flung debris with awe. Had I not moved it would have done serious damage, probably broken my arms and ribs and smashed open my skull. It was a piece of a door—imagine being hit at full speed with an industrial door. Its lock was warped and blackened from the fire, gleaming dully under the moonlight. I felt it again, that odd anxiety. But why would a lock—
I finally understood.
“What about the top secret area?” I demanded of Leopold. My pulse was beating so intensely in my throat that my words sound choked. “What was it like?”
“Like?” Leopold said. He flapped a hand at the ruined lab. “You can see it’s been destroyed. All my formulas are gone.”
“Fuck your formulas!” I yelled, and a collective gasp came from the work crew. Leopold glared at me like I
’d insulted his mother.
Even Robert was taken aback, and he’d seen me through some pretty grouchy times: near death, PMS, joblessness. “Hey, hey, Mercy.” He rubbed my lower back. “What is it?”
“Hello? Don’t you see?” I was trying so hard not to cry, but without warning the tears were flowing. Finally. “Don’t you get it? If they got into the lab . . . If they got to the scientists . . . If they got to the papers . . . They . . . Oh my God! My information! The VGO probably know who I am.”
Robert and Leopold didn’t speak, but they wore identical masks of dread. It hadn’t occurred to them, either. They’d been too busy arguing, those foolish men.
I was on a real crying jag now. I tried to continue my rant but could only snuffle.
Leopold took a step toward me. “Look, Mercy, we don’t know—”
“Don’t!” Robert hissed. “Don’t you dare!”
The men at the rubble started shouting, ceasing Robert and Leopold’s arguing. They screamed for Leopold and he sprinted towards them.
It was a scientist, they said. They’d found one alive.
13
The scientist’s name was Oliver Spleisker. I figured the least I could do was remember his name, since he’d be dead soon.
The vampires had been very careful when they pulled Oliver from the wreckage, as to not cause him further damage. He was a goner regardless. Blood seeped from Oliver’s ears and mouth in a steady flow. He’d been crushed when the roof caved in and his whole body appeared jellified.
One of the vampires said, “I offered to turn him, but he doesn’t want it.”
“No! No!” wheezed the scientist, substantiating the vampire’s claim. He was leaking tears from the corners of his eyes. “Leave me be.”
Leopold kneeled at Oliver’s side. “You’re in a lot of pain. If we turn you, it will end.”
“My wife, she’s gone,” Oliver murmured. “Ovarian cancer. I will . . . join her. She’s waiting for me . . . on the other side.”
