by Gary Jonas
The pouch pulsed and then there was shape in the air like a bridge arching from Ramona to the bats. The bridge was made of colored light and the air filled with the smell of rain and ozone. The bridge took on an almost human face, but masked. It reached out with long arms and captured the bats, which rained down to the street as shuriken again. They clanged against the pavement.
“That’s one hell of a Patronus,” I heard Amanda say.
The music across the street grew louder. Trixster, or Kokopelli, or whatever combination of the two he’d become, danced and played. Eleventh Hour took out what I thought was another flute as the green and blue bridge creature attacked. She put the flute to her lips and her cheeks hollowed. But instead of playing music, she lowered what I realized was a long pipe and smoke poured out of her mouth in an enormous cloud. The cloud enveloped the creature as the thing grabbed for Trixster’s flute.
“No!” Ramona screamed as lightning spider-webbed around the creature. It froze in place.
Brand and I took off across the street with one goal in mind – get the flute. Okay, two goals – get the flute then pound the shit out of our enemies.
As we ran under the bridge creature, it dissolved, raining down on us between lightning bolts like water dripping from a net. Cool and glowing rain slicked our bodies, washing away the vampire gore covering our bodies. I felt a crazy burst of energy and awareness, like what I’d experienced at the rave, but cleaner, pure. Every last trace of mental fuzz and confusion drained out of my body. I felt Brand running next to me, felt his heart beating in his chest, smelled the sweat on his skin, and couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather be with at that moment. My kind.
Then we were on Trixster and Eleventh Hour and it was kill time.
I stabbed my knife into Eleventh Hour. Her body parted around the blade, making a hole that light shone through where there should have been, well, a hole where blood poured through. Her skin moved in segments and I realized that her body was a composite of insects. Cicadas, specifically.
She laughed, only it wasn’t a single voice. It was a summer night chorus of tiny high-pitched voices that threatened to blow out my eardrums. If not my sanity.
Here we go again, I thought as the cicada woman swarmed me. I need to figure out how to stash a can bug spray in my cleavage.
Individually, cicadas are harmless, nearly weightless, a minor annoyance if they fly into your hair or if bugs creep you out. But get about half a million of them together and lash their minuscule bug brains into a single consciousness bent on killing, and you’ve got yourself a pretty formidable weapon.
The little bastards concentrated on my head. Their sudden, unexpected weight pushed me down to the sidewalk. I couldn’t breathe through the tightly-packed armored bodies. For every handful I pulled off, twice as many crawled up to take their places. I could only hear two things – their laughter and Kokopelli’s flute. I fought the urge to laugh or scream, I didn’t know which.
Disoriented, I tried to crawl back into the street. I fell forward as my hand slipped off the curb onto the road. The flute music stopped and I crawled faster, hoping there was something left of the bridge creature above me and that my plan would work.
It did. The rain fell, and the cicadas scattered. They reformed into Eleventh Hour, back on the sidewalk. I gasped for air and looked above me. The green and blue light faded as the creature dissipated.
Then the lightning holding it came home to Trixster.
And Brand, who had him in a choke hold. I watched his bones light up under his skin as the lightning folded around their bodies.
Brand kept fighting. He grabbed at the flute, his fingers brushed it. Then his hand exploded and he lost consciousness.
I rushed them. I might have screamed. There might have been tears at the corners of my eyes.
A surge of power behind me made every hair on my body stand up. Then a blue and green wave of liquid light crashed over us, slamming me to the concrete. The world went black.
***
When I came back to my senses, I rolled over. Ramona’s face swam into view. She looked pale, horrified.
“Brand?” My voice croaked like a frog’s.
“He’s going to be okay. Lie still. We’re checking you out now.”
Hands moved over my body with the surety of experience. They tested my joints, my limbs. They pressed on my belly. A second face peered down into mine. Ramona doubled, but with long white hair pulled back in a ponytail and countless wrinkles embellishing her face. They folded over each other as she smiled. “No broken bones, no puncture wounds, not even a hangnail. You’re a remarkable woman, Kelly Chan.”
Ramona’s face relaxed. “Kelly, meet my Grandma.”
Chapter 21
I sat up, wondering where Grandma had come from. Ramona crouched on one side of me and her Grandma on the other. I looked past them to where Brand sat with Amanda and Jessica, looking dazed.
“Remarkable man, too,” Grandma said. “Electrocuted, looked like his hand was blasted to bits, but now not a scratch on him. Though lightning can be tricky. Leaves a man blind one day and restores his sight the next time they meet.”
Brand saw me sit up and got to his feet. He came over, pushed past Ramona and took me in his arms. I caught the sour look on Ramona’s face just before she turned away. Her Grandma said nothing but got to her feet with no trouble. Spry for her age.
“How’s my pretty lady?” Brand brushed the hair out of my face and kissed me.
“They got away?” My words slipped out between kisses.
Brand stopped. His body tensed as he pulled away from me, the way he did whenever I frustrated him. “I thought that tsunami light show got them at first. Ramona says otherwise.”
“The opposing energies cancelled each other out, but didn’t kill them. They got away, with the flute.” Ramona studied the blood on her clothes. The leather pouch hung outside her blouse.
I pointed to the pouch. “What was that thing?”
Amanda, Ramona and Grandma all spoke at once.
“Patronus,” Amanda said.
“Released potential quantum energy,” Ramona said.
“Kachina,” Grandma said.
“Kachina?” I asked.
Grandma nodded. “Kachina.”
“What’s a Kachina?” I asked.
Ramona answered. “Servants of the gods, like angels. Forces of nature personified.” She clutched the now-empty pouch and tilted her head as she looked at her Grandma. “That’s not what you told me this was when you gave it to me for my birthday last year.”
Grandma shrugged. “You liked the scientific explanation better.” She surveyed the street, the dissipating shimmers of green and blue energy like evaporating rain. “We’ll make a corn sacrifice to him later to say thank you. For now, we’ve got to round up the bedbugs.”
People in the apartments above us stared out their windows or stood on narrow balconies, surveying the street. Some applauded, thinking what happened was some sort of flash mob or performance art or possibly a galactic shoot-out. I looked down the street to see a familiar Hummer had blocked traffic, which was now honking while a police car pulled up to see what the trouble was. Just another day in the life on Colfax.
***
Jessica used her own flavor of everyday magic to convince the Kin to help us. She and a Kin named Kess bonded several months ago as only combat vets can. Jessica and Kess’ daughter, Bliss, kept each other alive and sane under horrific conditions. I call Jessica a mundane, but that’s unfair of me.
“Kess says they’ve got a plan. Operation Pest Control. They’ve got Kin working inside the hospital already, sanitation, housekeeping, the morgue of course. They know where the bugs—”
“Patients,” Brand interrupted Jessica.
“Sorry, patients, are quarantined. If they shadow jump into the rooms at the same time, they can get out with all the patients at once.”
Brand looked at Ramona’s Grandma. “Ma’am? I have a question.”
She smiled warmly at him. “Yes, son?”
“Ramona said you know a lot of stories…do you know if, maybe we can save them before they turn into cicadas?”
The old woman’s eyes softened and her smiled evaporated a little. “I’ve never heard or told a story in which they are cured.”
Brand’s mouth turned down, then he smiled tentatively. “But, you’re a medical doctor, and you know magic, don’t you? Maybe you can think of a cure.”
“That would take time. Time I don’t think we have.” She touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”
Then Brand’s face brightened. He turned to me and said, “What about Lina? She’s a natural healer, maybe she can cure this.”
I hated dashing his hopes. Again. “Out of the question. Lina heals by taking on the injury first. She’d run the risk of becoming one of these things. I’m not even going to tell her what’s going on, because she’s soft-hearted enough to try. I won’t risk her.”
“So you’re going to make up her mind for her?”
“What Lina doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Literally. Closed topic.”
Grandma agreed it was best to round up the transforming humans and deal with them off-site, which meant the Sekutar clean-up crew would be putting our blades to good use. Then the people at the CDC would handle rest – inform the families of the deceased that the infection was contained but fatal, and here’s your parting gift of a beautiful ash-filled urn.
“Where’s the safe house?” I asked Jessica.
“An old forgotten ballroom under Denver. Crazy, huh?”
Brand and I looked at each other. “I know the place,” I said. “Keep me posted. See if you can get one of the Kin to give us a ride to the ballroom when the time comes.”
Brand shook his head. “I think the better plan is to go to the hospitals and ride along from there, just in case something happens during transit.”
I shrugged. “Let me think about it.”
Back in the dojo, I had two dead undead vampires and one incapacitated – unconscious but likely as active as a grenade when someone pulled the wooden pin. That someone was me.
I planted my foot on the vampire and tugged the tonfa from her heart. Her eyes flew open and she grabbed my arms. I started to plunge the tonfa back in.
“Is it over?” Her voice quivered.
I kept the tonfa poised above her heart and watched the wound close up. “Let me go,” I said, “or it ends for you again right now.”
She looked at her hands and frowned, then turned me loose. She felt the place where the tonfa recently aerated her chest. “But is it over?”
“Maybe, but I might stick you again depending on your manners.”
She grimaced and shook her head. “Stick me all you want if that’s what stops the music.”
“I’ll take off your head if I need to.”
“Fine.”
The back of my neck prickled. The whole appeal of becoming a stinking undead bloodsucker was to live forever.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, now. Everything.” She looked to the side where her companions lay in pieces. She gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh, Proctor.” She reached for the dead hipster and clutched his hand. “I just made you.”
She looked up at me as a blood-red tear slid down her cheek. “Is Janice dead, too?”
“If Janice is the other asshole who attacked my dojo, then yes.”
The vampire blinked back the rest of her tears. “We didn’t mean to. We couldn’t help it. The music.” She closed her eyes and moved her head back and forth like she was trying to shake something loose.
“You’re saying the music compelled you.”
She stopped and her bloodshot eyes fixed their gaze on mine. “We couldn’t do anything. Not even feed. Only what the music let us do. It was hell. The visions, the hunger—”
“Hell like when you compel a mundane to do what you want?” I pressed the sharpened end of the tonfa against her bare chest.
She looked at the point just piercing her skin and smiled. Her eyes met mine again with all the warmth of a rattlesnake. “Go ahead. Do me the favor. Proctor and Janice are the lucky ones.”
I started pressing down when Amanda grabbed my arm. I felt magic jump from her fingers into my bicep, freezing it in place.
“Speaking of compelling.” My voice was a predator’s growl. “Let me go, witch.”
“Not unless you promise me you won’t kill our best witness to this crazy shit.”
“Let her do it. One less piece of filth in the world.” Brand stood behind Amanda, arms at his sides but hardly relaxed, bloodlust darkening his eyes.
“Would you two cut it out and let me do my job?” Amanda pulled my arm away from the vampire. The magic gave her the strength to lift me like a child and set me to the side. As soon as she released me, I saw the strain in her face. This spell cost her. Good to know.
She bent and took the vampire’s hand and pulled her into a sitting position. “Amanda West, Human, Inhuman and Subhuman Resources for DGI. And you are?”
“Nadine.” The vampire pulled her hand away from Amanda’s. “DGI, huh?”
Amanda smiled with all her pearly whites. “At your service, under the Whetstone Accord of 1813. As a gainfully-employed witch from the HISR department, I’m an ambassador of goodwill to vampires in distress, and that’s you.”
“You’re making that accord up.”
“Check it later. Right now, I need you to tell me what just happened to you and your friends.”
Nadine lowered her eyes. “Not my friends. My family. I made them.”
Ramona and her Grandma joined us. I had questions for both of them, too. Instead, we listened to Nadine’s story.
Chapter 22
“It was Proctor’s idea. He knew the music scene, knew that after a night of dancing and drinking and drugs that we’d have easy pickings from the herd. Just scoop them off the floor like sleeping lambs. And he was right. We fed well. We had fun.
“Then we heard about a couple of DJs who were experimenting with music and mind-expanding drugs, trying to create a new reality, or open the door to a different one. We figured the feeding would be even easier. Back in the Sixties, I lived in San Francisco and I could do damn near anything I pleased in broad moonlight, thank you Timothy Leary.
“Proctor wanted to get directly involved. He missed being human. So young still, that he wanted to keep the connection. I was stupid and indulgent and I let him. So we found the DJs. Revealed ourselves, offered our services. The worst mistake we ever made.
“They were charming. Charismatic enough to con vampires. Janice introduced Eleventh Hour to Tally’s. Trixster got us to help him steal the…” The vampire paused, looked down, swallowed hard. “The flute. He’d gone hiking once near four corners and heard it calling to him. It spoke in his dreams, told him what to do. So he met us, met and befriended the flute’s guardians, got close to them using the same charisma, and we killed them.
“They didn’t stay dead.” Nadine looked at Amanda. “And that’s when our hell started.”
Trixster, like any musician, decided to master his new instrument. But it mastered him instead. Nadine told us how he’d play for hours, going without food or water. And so did anyone within earshot of the flute, the three hapless vampires included. They’d moved into the house by then. The flute would play and they would forget to go out and hunt, or to sleep if Trixster played during the day. They stayed in the pitch-black basement, listening, caught in a waking-dream. Nadine wouldn’t say what they dreamed, only that it made them scream almost loud enough to drown out the flute. Almost.
I don’t think I want to know what scares vampires that bad.
When it was night and the vampires could come upstairs, Trixster made them watch as he channeled more of Kokopelli with every song. He transformed, his body stretching and blackening, hardening into a shiny shell that reflected back everything that made them scream.
And E
leventh Hour changed, too.
“His mate,” Grandma said. “Kokopelli-Mana.”
“The drug-dealer.” Amanda had done a great job of not fidgeting while Nadine talked, though I could feel her desire to draw up magic. “The one responsible for Kokopelli’s offspring. Makes sense.”
“The former guardians, the ones we killed, they went back out into the desert and harvested the tobacco growing wild there. It’s tainted.”
“And made worse by Tally’s.” Amanda twined her long hair around her fingers. “Do you know what happened to the drugs?”
“No.”
While Trixster/Kokopelli played, he recorded the music. In human form he remixed the flute into other tracks. The music we’d heard at the rave. He and Eleventh Hour only transformed while he played the flute, so they could perform without giving themselves away.
“And still test the magic.” Nadine shuddered. “Create more recruits.” She looked at her dead family. “Like us. Helpless to do anything but what they want. To worship…” Her words trailed off into sobs.
“After their last show, we all came back to the house and took anything incriminating. They knew the police would have questions after the dancers didn’t wake up. We’ve been hiding out ever since. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll just charm the cops, too. They aren’t getting locked up. They have bigger plans.”
“More recruits.” I said.
Nadine shook her head slightly, looking at me like I was the slowest student in the class. “Worshippers. Slaves.”
“Zombies.” Brand said.
Nadine took one last look at Proctor and Janice. “I made them,” she said to herself. “I’m a monster, too.”
“Well, I’m glad this has been so therapeutic for you.”
Amanda shot me a hard look. “Kelly.”
Nadine touched Amanda’s bare forearm. I saw her flinch under the dead fingers. The vampire smiled at her, then looked at me. “Kelly’s right, I’m a monster. And all I have to look forward to is centuries of reliving a handful of torturous months, the mutilated bodies of my…of the ones I turned haunting my dreams. I’ll never turn anyone again. No matter how they beg. No matter how lonely I get.”
