by Andrew Dudek
Before I could press the attack, it lunged. One of its jaws closed around my wrist and squeezed. The sword fell to the ground. The middle head slammed into my chest and the third closed around my neck.
I closed my eyes. Well, this was it. Hopefully, Dallas would have some idea what to do with a three-headed demon-dog. I just hoped most of the people had gotten out of the building. I sent a silent prayer of apology towards Fabio and his family, towards everyone that the thing had killed, and I waited for the end.
Three sounds like tiny claps of thunder roared in my ear. Each time, the dog jerked like it had been kicked. It rolled off of me and spun to face down the street. There were more sounds. This time I recognized them: gunshots.
A bullet tore into one of the dog’s necks. It yelped in pain. Orange blood bubbled. Two of its heads were focused on the shooter, but the third twisted around to stare at me. The dog’s face didn’t change and the female voice didn’t sound, but I got the message: You and I aren’t finished, human. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the dog vanished. The smell of sulfur left with it, but the destruction remained. And the death.
I had gotten used to the burning from Bogart’s wallet-charm in my pants pocket, but now it was gone and my leg felt cold. I sat up slowly, keeping my hands where any twitchy cop could see them.
“That you, Carver?” Officer Fasano stood behind a parked car, her gun in her hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”
“You alright?”
“More or less. Why?”
“Well, you’re laying next to a big-ass sword that looks to be covered with orange soda.”
I looked down at the blade. It was soaked with bright orange demon blood. It would evaporate in time. I shrugged.
“What was that thing?”
“Demon. Some kind of super hellhound, I think.” I rubbed my wrist where the dog had bit me. I was bleeding, but it wasn’t deep. I didn’t think it’d need stitches. “Thanks, by the way. You saved my ass.”
My shoulder throbbed and I could feel a couple of shallow puncture wounds there, but my throat wasn’t bad. Certainly nothing that would be noticeable on top of the necklace of scar tissue already there. My chest was sore and I was anticipating a serious badass bruise.
Fasano was staring at the naked sword. I guess the mere presence of a medieval arming weapon can be enough to unnerve some people. Krissy had left my equipment bag. I made my way over to it, took out the scabbard and sheathed it.
The cop finally lowered her gun. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Queens,” I said. “I need to figure out a way to track that thing.” I stopped, realizing what she meant. “You want me to stay here, right?”
“This is a crime scene, Carver. I can’t just let you wander away.”
I nodded and pursed my lips. “Fasano, did you see that thing?”
“Of course, but—”
“You saw it disappear like that. It tore a hole in the fourth story of this building. It killed at least one person here. And I think it’s just getting started. I need to find it before it hurts anyone else.”
“Is this connected to the cemetery?”
“Same damned thing.”
She hesitated for a long moment. Finally, she turned around and pulled her radio from her equipment belt. “Fasano. I’m on scene. No witnesses so far.”
I smiled, nodded, my thanks, and ran around the corner. I was gone before she turned back around.
Chapter 12
You know the scene in Tom Sawyer when everyone thinks Tom and Huck are dead, and they watch their own funerals? Something like that, anyway—I never read the book, but I saw one of the movie versions. Anyway, that was how I felt as I strode into the office, my bag of weapons over my bloodied shoulder, my pants tore open at the hip, and the front of my shirt stained red.
I was also carrying two twelve packs of beer: Miller for Earl, Rob, and Dallas, and a grapefruit shandy from a local brewery for Krissy and Madison. I wasn’t planning on drinking—I could have used the booze, but I needed to keep my head clear.
The office staff—Krissy, Madison, and the other two knights, Elmore James and Rob Haney—were sitting at the round table in the conference room. Dallas and Harrison were perched near the edges of the group, as if they were unsure whether to intrude on the Table’s grief. Madison's eyes were teary, her lips quivering. Krissy was staring vacantly at the ceiling. Elmore—Earl—a tall, insanely broad-shouldered man with black hair shaved in a military buzz and a Marine Corps tattoo on his brown forearm, twirled a K-BAR knife on the smooth wood of the table. Rob—in his fifties with a bird’s nest of gray hair and an untrimmed goatee—was the only one paying attention to the office outside of the conference room, so he was the first to see me enter the office. I caught him nudging Earl as I joined the team at the table and set the beer down on the table.
“Oh, thank God,” Krissy murmured, flinging herself out of the chair hard enough that it rocked back and put a dent in the plaster of the wall. She threw her arms around my neck and breathed into my shoulder. “Thank God.”
Everyone else got up, too, albeit less speedily. When Krissy pulled away, looking faintly embarrassed, Rob and Earl each clapped me on a shoulder, then stepped back. Madison hugged me briefly, whispered that she was glad I was okay, then scurried back to her seat. Harrison looked unsure what to say, but he returned my nod. Dallas surveyed me for a moment and said, “You look terrible.”
I twisted the top off of a beer and handed it to the wizard. “Thanks, man.”
I filled them in on what had happened: my fight with the three-headed dog and how Officer Fasano had saved my ass. I held the most important tidbit for last: the location of Amy Vernon.
I pulled the folded-up postcard out of my back pocket and set it down on the table. Rob grabbed it, flipped it over, and read the note on the back.
“ ‘I don’t care what my people say—or the Ambassador’,” he read. “You think she went to the warehouse to hide.”
“It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?” I said.
On my first day as captain, Rob (who had been a knight for more than fifteen years and had extensive contacts in the supe community) had taken me to meet Flavian, the vampire’s self-appointed ambassador to humanity. He had been holed up in an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn with a bunch of his nearest and dearest minions. It hadn’t gone particularly well, but there had been no bloodshed. Not on that first visit, anyway.
“I’m gonna go pay them a visit,” I said. “Madison, can you do me a favor and go look up Paul Ellis. He’s a werewolf, supposedly lives on Staten Island.”
She nodded. “Of course. Maybe Harrison can help me with that?”
The young wolf blushed, but he said, “Yeah, I can do that.” The two youngsters hurried out of the room.
“You’re not planning on going to the warehouse by yourself,” Krissy said.
“It’ll be cake,” I said. “I got it.”
“Sorry, sir,” Earl said, “but last time you went into that pit, you had Captain Strain with you, and you still almost had to fight your way out.”
I frowned. The second time I’d gone to the warehouse had been less pleasant than the first. My ex-girlfriend, Mayena Strain, then a knight and a powerful witch, had been with me. Her magic had been the only thing keeping Flavian’s retainers from tearing out my throat. I mean, I had decapitated one of them, so it wasn’t like I wouldn’t have had it coming.
“We’re not at war anymore,” I said.
“Technically, maybe,” Rob said, “but you’re still not on any vamp’s Halloween card list. Could be dangerous.”
I grunted, but they were right. “Fine. I’ll take backup.”
“I’ll come, sir,” Earl said.
“No, Lieutenant, you stay here. We should have an officer in the building to run things.”
Rob straightened his back. “Let me grab my sword. The Mustang’s in the lot and all gassed up.”
I shoo
k my head. “Dallas, feel like visiting a vampire nest?”
The wizard looked from me to the disappointed angry faces of Rob and Earl. “You sure? Might not be a bad idea to have another sword with you.”
“Positive. You ready to go?”
“I guess.”
I put the wallet that Bogart had given me down on the table and looked at Krissy. “Keep this with you. It’ll warn you if the demon comes near. If it does, just get everybody out of the building. Run—don’t try to fight it.”
The knight’s faces had shifted into dispassionate masks. Neither said anything. Even Krissy looked angry and upset, but she managed to choke out a bitter, “Got it, Dave.”
As I stormed out of the conference room, I had the sense that my team would have thought better of me if I had died fighting that demon.
From the passenger seat of the Taurus, Dallas asked, “What am I doing here?”
“Helping me rescue Amy Vernon from the vampires.” I didn’t mention the possibility that had recently occurred to me: that she might not want to be rescued. The note on the back of the postcard didn’t suggest that Amy was some unwilling hostage to the fangs—if anything it indicated the opposite. No sense in complicating things.
“I mean as opposed to one of the other knights.”
“I want them protecting Harrison and the girls,” I said.
“Protecting them from what?”
“Can you predict the movements of a three-headed hellhound? Who knows when it might show up at the office? I’d prefer there were a couple of swords to deal with it.”
“You told them to run if it did.” Flat, no particular emphasis on any of the words.
“What’s your point, Dallas?”
“I want to know why I’m here, as opposed to one of the guys who works for you.” He paused. “Or Krissy, the girl you’re supposed to be training to do this shit.”
I lowered my voice. “You know what happened in March?”
“Your old teacher got a hold of the Gauntlet of Greckhite and almost destroyed humanity. So what?”
I sighed. He was really going to make me spell it out. “I killed Bill. I trusted him. He betrayed me. And I had to kill him. It’s not gonna happen again.”
An uncomfortable silence filled the car. I turned on the radio. Some pop song that sounded like a recording of a computer having sex with a keyboard. I turned the radio off.
“So you’re afraid that if you trust your team, they’ll betray you and you’ll have to put ‘em down,” Dallas said.
“Give the man a prize,” I snarled.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have a dangerous job, Carver. A dangerous life.” Dallas shook his head. “If you don’t trust the people at your back, you’re gonna lose both—sooner rather than later. Trust me.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can—for a while. But eventually you’ll make a mistake and if you don’t have people you trust covering your ass, you’ll wind up a snack.”
“What do you know about it?”
“More than you, apparently,” Dallas said. “I may not have fought in a war, but I know the importance of trusting your guys.” He paused. “Or your girls, if you wanna be politically correct.”
My lips curled. “I don’t need a lecture on camaraderie from a man who, as far as I know, never leaves his goddamn store.”
“I wasn’t always like this,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You’re heading down a dark path.”
“Let me worry about my path,” I said. “You worry about helping me save this girl from the vampires.”
The warehouse looked much the same as it had the last time I was there—more than five months ago. It was in one of the sleepier parts of Brooklyn, the kind of place you expect to find trust fund hipsters living in converted slaughterhouses or something. Lots of brick buildings all around as we cruised slowly down the street. It was so desolate, so empty. It didn’t matter how many times I saw something like this, it always set my spine a little straighter and the scars on my neck tingle: nowhere in New York was supposed to be this quiet. But that’s a common side effect of a vampire nest—eventually people start to notice. Sure, they don’t notice that they notice, but they sense something wrong. I think it’s a holdover from the days when homo sapiens was very much a prey animal, back when we roamed the plains with lions and leopards. We don’t think about it, haven’t in centuries, but we’re still prey animals. The predators are just better camouflaged. Those instincts remain, and when a supernatural predator sets up shop in your neighborhood, you’ll know it on a subconscious level that you want to be far, far away. I hoped that was all that happened to the bodega owners, waitresses, hipsters, laborers, and homeless people who should have been populating this neighborhood. With vampires the alternative was much worse.
I parked in front of one particular warehouse and we got out of the car. Before Dallas and I had gone three steps, a man appeared from inside a neighboring building, which had been a branch of a national bank in its previous life. He was my height and Dallas’s weight, but he carried it better. Solid muscles under military-style fatigues and a long coat, despite the heat. He didn’t have a visible gun, but I was sure he was carrying.
“Afternoon, fellas,” he said, the very image of amiability. “I think you’re a little lost.” Then his eyes landed on my left shoulder. On my badge. They darted down to my hip, where my sword hung sheathed. His disrespectful slouch vanished and he straightened his back. He didn’t reach into his coat, but he wanted to. “I didn’t know we had a meeting scheduled with the Round Table.”
“You don’t,” I said. “Call it a surprise inspection. Take me to whoever’s in charge, or Flavian will hear about it.”
The guard—a human, probably a mercenary, I thought—hurried to spin around. He pounded on the warehouse’s aluminum door and spoke into a walkie-talkie clipped to his shoulder. A moment later, a lock opened with an audible thunk and the guard muscled open the door.
The inside of the warehouse was different. Last time there had a dozen or so sleepy vampires lounging around in puddles of blood and their own filth. It had been dark and dank and it had smelled horrible.
Now there were long rows of computer desks, mostly occupied by young people wearing electric headsets. None of them shirked when the hot August sun pierced the room, so I knew they weren’t vampires.
The guard closed the door and spoke into the walkie again. Italian, I thought, but I couldn’t translate. An elevated door that would have led to the foreman’s office opened, and a woman made her way down a metal staircase. She was dressed in the same olive-green jumpsuit as the workers. She had pale skin, dark hair, and deep purple bags under her eyes.
“Captain Carver, I presume,” she said, in a European-accented voice. “What a pleasant surprise. My name is Stefanie. I work for the Ambassador.”
“What is this place?” I was too astonished to remember my niceties. The Pendragon would have been disappointed.
Stefanie smiled and spread her arms as if she were displaying the Titanic. “This is the new headquarters of the vampires of New York City, Captain. Ambassador Flavian wasted no time in establishing his new paradigm. Any vampire who resides in this city must check in once a week. We have a physician on staff who takes a blood sample to determine if they’ve been feeding on humans.” That saleslady smile widened. “Something good came after all of that war between our peoples.”
I whistled. For all of Flavian’s boasting about trying to reduce vampire casualties among the human population, I had no idea he’d been serious. Maybe the old bastard wasn’t so bad after all.
Stefanie bowed her head, a performer accepting gracious applause. “So, Captain, how may I help you? The Ambassador didn’t want to share our operation here with the Round Table until all of the wrinkles had been ironed out, but our primary goal here is to assist you.”
“We’re looking for a girl,�
�� I said. “A human girl, name of Amy Vernon.”
Stefanie’s smile shifted—it became less gracious and more animalistic. This was the way I pictured vampires: as hollow, inhuman monsters. It lasted only a second, and the saleswoman was back, but the emptiness of that smile stuck with me, and I forced myself to remember what Stefanie was.
“I know Miss Vernon quite well, Captain. And she is here, but I don’t think this is the best time for a visit.”
“Take me to her,” I said.
“As I said—”
I put my hand on the hilt of my sword. “Take. Me. To. Her.”
Stefanie nodded. “Very well.” She led Dallas and me up the metal staircase into the office. I hadn’t been up here on either of previous visits to the warehouse. There was a desk in one corner, papers scattered around in stark contrast to the neatness of the office space below. A queen-sized mattress lay directly on the floor, pushed against one wall. The sheets were tangled and sweat-stained. The smell of sex was heavy in the room. Opposite the door, there was a couch. Sprawled on the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling was a young woman.
Amy Vernon would have been beautiful if she wasn’t so strung out. She had short, raggedly cut blond hair which fell in a fringe over her eyes. They were big, wide and blue. She had a nice body—full breasts, long legs, and thin waist. The pink tank top she wore was torn and covered with blood and mud and worse. She was naked from the waist down. A pair of bright red holes popped against the smooth, pale skin on the inside of her thigh. Right above the femoral artery.
I knew those marks well: vampire bites.
If not for the gentle rise and fall of her chest, I’d have thought she was dead. She wasn’t, though. I knew exactly what had happened to her.
The sword was clear of its sheath before I made a conscious decision to draw. Dallas, apparently, had reached the same conclusion at the same time I did, because he said, as my sword leveled off to point at Stefanie’s throat, “Vampire venom.”
