by Ilana Waters
“A monkey,” he finally replied.
Chapter 3
“I’m sorry,” I said after a brief pause. “I thought you said you were looking for a statue. A monkey is a mammal.”
Beverly made a sour face. “It’s green, carved from jade, with a pedestal on the bottom. Not terribly big, maybe six inches.”
“Your MacGuffin is a monkey,” I repeated.
“It’s from the Chou dynasty.” Jimmy put his hat back on. “This other vampire, much older and more powerful than us, wants it for his collection.”
“Vampires again,” Barrington said, more to himself than to us. “This isn’t real. This cannot be real.”
“We sort of accidentally broke into his mansion a few decades ago,” Beverly explained.
“Accidentally?” I repeated.
Beverly scowled at me. “It was just before dawn, and we were running from a mob. We managed to lose them in the woods, but had to get inside before the sun rose. By some miracle, we chanced upon an estate with an enormous manor house.”
“Only it turned out not to be so miraculous,” said Jimmy, “because the owner was kind of pissed off about us coming inside. When the sun set later that day, he agreed to let us go only if we found the statue for him. We’ve been looking for it for the last thirty years—”
“Wait a minute.” I held up my hand. “You’ve been running around together for thirty years even though you can’t be in the same room for five minutes without arguing? I don’t mean to sound unflattering, but you’re acting a bit like my parents.”
“We don’t want to be in each other’s company.” Beverly gave Jimmy a dirty look. “But it’s a lot easier to find a missing object with two heads than one.”
I narrowed my eyes at the both of them. “Riiight. Well, be that as it may, this vampire gave you an awfully long lead time to find a tiny green monkey. Thirty years should be enough for anyone to—”
“He didn’t give us the time,” Jimmy said loudly. “He wanted it right away. It’s only taken this long because there have been complications.”
“Another gang of vampires is looking for it because the mansion owner killed their master—the vampire who made them,” Beverly explained. “So they want to thwart whatever he’s doing. They don’t dare attack him directly, because he’s much stronger, and they know they’ll lose. Besides, he isn’t stupid. He’d see them coming from a mile away.”
“But they’ll stop at nothing to prevent us from finding the statue, if only to irritate him.” Jimmy looked at his watch, his face tense. “And he’s grown impatient after waiting for it for so long.”
“Can’t say I blame him,” I murmured. “Not that I’m a collector of all things useless.”
“He says if we don’t give it to him by dawn,” Beverly said, her voice breaking, “then it’s over. He’ll find someone who will—and kill us.”
“Well, that does make matters a bit more serious.” I blew a puff of air out from my cheeks. “Kill you by dawn . . . you mean he’s here in Chicago?”
“Waiting at the Drake Hotel,” Jimmy said grimly. “We think Reaper might have a lead on the statue, but we don’t know for sure.”
“Who’s Reaper?” I asked.
“He’s the head of the gang trying to keep us from the monkey,” Jimmy said.
“I see.” I stroked my chin. “And where are this Reaper fellow and his associates now?”
“When they’re in town, they hang out in an abandoned car manufacturer’s about a mile from here,” Beverly said.
I nodded. “How convenient. Well, if you think they have a lead, why don’t we just swing by and ask them?”
Beverly’s eyes widened, and Jimmy’s jaw grew slack. “Are you insane?” he said.
“I don’t see any other options.” I put my palms out. “We need to know where that piece of jade is, and fast. We have no leads, but Reaper might. How many little friends did you say he had?”
“Two: a man and a woman,” Beverly said. “So there are three of them total. Wait, what do you mean, ‘we?’ You have no stake in this. You’re not involved.”
“Love, I think I became involved the minute you abducted me and my near-paramour here. As far as having a stake in things goes, let’s just say I like to help others from time to time. I propose we go hit this Reaper where he lives, so to speak.”
“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” Jimmy folded his arms across his chest. “That you’ll tuck tail and run the moment you get into the open?”
“Yeah,” Beverly said. “Where you know we won’t go after you and risk exposing our true nature.” She glanced at Barrington. “I have an idea.”
She moved so fast, it was as if she’d just appeared behind Barrington’s chair. Holding his jaw up in the crook of her elbow, she drew his head back as if to snap it off.
Jimmy waved his hands frantically in front of him. “Whoa whoa whoa!”
“Beverly, let’s not do anything rash.” I took a step forward. But I stopped when she pulled up harder on Barrington’s head, making his eyes bulge and his face go pale as he writhed in panic.
“We three will go to Reaper’s,” she said, her voice unwavering. “If you try to run away, or don’t do everything you can to help us, the first thing we’ll do when we get back is kill him.” A gurgling noise came from Barrington’s throat as he kept twisting against Beverly’s grip. “Assuming we survive, that is.”
I looked at Jimmy, who was still staring at Beverly. Finally, he straightened his hat and turned to me. “That’s the deal, then,” he said. “She’s right. We don’t know if we can trust you, and we can’t afford to have this go sideways. Our lives depend on it.”
I quickly ran the situation over in my mind. I could always attempt to take out these two (not ideal) and release Barrington, but I wasn’t wholly disinclined to the suggested arrangement. These vampires clearly needed help, and I might be in a unique position to provide it. My father would tell me I was sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, risking my safety for some meaningless moral code. I chose to ignore his hypothetical remarks.
“Agreed,” I said. “Er, you can stop throttling him now.” Beverly held my gaze for several more seconds, then released Barrington’s throat.
Barrington sputtered and made ugly hacking noises, with coughs that seemed to shake his whole body. “You people are crazy,” he gasped. “Completely fucking crazy. When this is over, if it isn’t a dream, I’m having all of you arrested. My lawyers will have a goddamn field day with you.”
“We can discuss that if we make it back,” I said as Beverly and Jimmy moved toward the door. “Ah, you’re just going to leave him tied up like that?”
“We can’t have him running away, telling people we exist,” Jimmy said. “Not to mention he’s our leverage.” I started to open my mouth, but Jimmy interrupted. “We don’t want to kill him, no matter what Beverly says. But we have no other way of making sure you fulfill your end of the bargain.” I sighed and walked over to Barrington.
“You all right there?” I leaned over him. “Need to, ah, use the loo or anything before we go?”
Barrington narrowed his eyes into slits. “I don’t know who—or what—you think you are. And I don’t know what you three are playing at, but I guarantee you’re going to regret this for the rest of your lives.”
“Right, then.” I stood back up. “Maybe you should just take a little nap till we return.” Barrington opened his mouth to say something else, but I passed my hand over his eyes, which slowly closed. The muscles in his face relaxed, his breathing slowed, and his head lolled to one side.
“Hey, that’s incredible,” Jimmy said. “If you can do that on Reaper and the others, all our problems will be over.”
“It’s a bit harder with vampires, I’m afraid,” I said. “But you could probably work it on mortals yourselves with enough practice.”
“Let’s work on getting through tonight alive,” said Beverly. “If we don’t, there won’t be much left to pra
ctice with. For any of us.” Her face softened a little, and she looked at me with something resembling sympathy. “If you mean what you say—if you really are going to help us—then I should warn you that Reaper and his gang are a nasty bunch. Even with our strength and your powers, we may be walking into certain death.”
“Madam,” I said, smiling as we all went out the door, “I assure you that is infinitely better than the odds I usually face.”
***
“So what happened between you two?” I asked Jimmy softly as we stepped into the manufacturing plant. Beverly was a few yards ahead, moving stealthily through rows of cars, listening for Reaper and the rest.
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked, also keeping a low tone.
“I mean, you’re together in body, but not so much in spirit.”
“It’s kind of a long story,” he said with a grimace.
“Better tell it quickly then.” I stepped over a deflated tire. “The bad guys might be here any minute.” And a good story would distract me from this migraine.
The worrisome thing was, the bad guys could be here already, and we might not even know it. There were plenty of places to hide in this room. Some cars were up on blocks; others were stacked on enormous metal tracks, like shelves, reaching almost to the ceiling. Still more were on an assembly line. A few looked like they were in the middle of being worked on, the arms of huge robots poised over them as if ready to attack. One could easily imagine that all the workers had stopped whatever they were doing and walked out the door.
It was eerily quiet and still, like a ghost town of cars. Street lamps outside provided the only light, which shone through high, horizontal windows. A great deal of plaster had peeled off the ceiling and fallen, coating most surfaces in a fine white dust. I half expected a tumbleweed to roll through the center of the room.
But I supposed my new vampire friends and I would be able to sense Reaper et al, now that we were on high alert. So far I felt, saw, and heard nothing. I continued to keep a watchful eye while listening to Jimmy.
“It was a while back,” he sighed. “Before this whole monkey business—no pun intended.”
“Of course not.”
“Beverly and I weren’t vampires yet. We were engaged, though. I was trying to make some money to save up for the wedding, get us a house, see?” He and I walked around a rusted car door in our path. “This was during the early days of the Depression, so cash was hard to come by. I got involved with some folks I probably shouldn’t have: bootleggers, y’know? And these weren’t small-time guys either.” Part of Jimmy’s shirtsleeve caught on the car door, and he ripped it off, swearing.
“Anyway, I made some deals with them I had a hard time keeping. One night, they cornered me and Bev in an alley, demanding I settle my debt right then. I tried to ask for more time, but they beat up me and Bev pretty good. I had two guys on either side holding my arms. They were about to kill me, then haul Bev off to do God knows what. That’s when I thought of a plan. I said I had their money back at my place. I just had to go and get it.”
“And they didn’t believe you and wanted to hold Beverly as collateral,” I said.
Jimmy looked at me warily. “You’ve done this before?”
“Let’s just say I have keen insight into the criminal mind.”
“Ah, yeah . . . so Beverly was begging me not to go.” Jimmy continued to walk carefully in the darkness. “I really couldn’t blame her. The guys were starting to get kind of frisky, pawing at her and all. We argued about it for a minute until their leader got impatient. He pulled a gun on Beverly and said if I wasn’t back in ten minutes, they’d kill her. After they’d had their fun.”
Jimmy closed his eyes and shook his head, looking even paler than before. “It was horrible. I won’t lie; I’ve never been so scared in my life. She was crying, screaming, those heartless bastards were laughing, and I was telling her I would be just a minute, just a minute. Then she called me a coward, said I never loved her—none of which was true. I just couldn’t think of any other way to get us out of there. I didn’t have the money, of course, but I had a gun at my place. I’d mug someone on the way back if I had to.
“But by some brilliant stroke of luck,” he continued, “I heard a pair of policemen walking by. I recognized their voices from the time I got hauled down to the station over some moonshine. The charges were dropped, but I never forget a voice. The head goon heard them, too, and tightened his grip on the gun and Beverly. Before I could think, I was yelling, ‘Officers! Officers! Over here!’
“I was actually surprised the gangsters didn’t just pop us right then and there. But I guess they figured if my yelling didn’t call in the cavalry, their gunshots sure would have. ’Course, after being arrested that one time, I’d be just as happy never to see those coppers again. Except I sort of needed them at the time. Anyway, they came running, and I took advantage of the situation. I tore myself away from the guys holding me and punched their leader in the face. He dropped the gun while I grabbed Beverly and we ran down to the other end of the alley. The last thing we heard were shots being fired, and the cops telling the gang they were all under arrest.”
“Well, thank God you got away.” I sidestepped a torn car bumper. “Sounds like you were pretty brave.”
Jimmy shook his head. “That’s not the way Beverly sees it. I would never have left her in the lurch, and after it was over, I told her so a thousand times. But I don’t think she ever believed me. Anyway, we were turned into vampires not long after that.” I opened my mouth, but Jimmy held up his hand. “Another long story, don’t ask me to tell it. We split up for a few decades, and just happened upon one another when we ran into that mob of mortals. We took refuge in a great big mansion, and, well, you know the rest. She’s given me the cold shoulder ever since, only working with me to find this monkey so we can survive and go our separate ways.”
“You want to tell him any more about our life?” Beverly called from up ahead. “I can hear you, y’know. Vampire senses and all.”
“We know,” I called back. “We were just whispering to be polite.” And it’s nothing I couldn’t have fished around for in your minds anyway. But again . . . politeness.
I’d actually put a block on their thoughts before we left for Reaper’s. This way, the enemy couldn’t determine our moves in advance, but we’d still be able to communicate with each other. Beverly and Jimmy would be able to read specific thoughts we sent out to one another, whereas I’d pretty much be able to read whatever I wanted. But I kept that last bit to myself.
“What makes you think Reaper will give up the statue’s location to you?” Beverly asked when we caught up to her. We’d walked the entire length of the main factory room. It was clear that, for now, we were alone. “We’ve only seen him a few times, and trust us: he’s more inclined to laugh in your face and then rip it off.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” I gathered magic and held it waist-high, like a globe of colored static electricity. I let Beverly and Jimmy hear the crackling, see the sparks fly off. “I’ve been known to be very persuasive in my day.” I’ve also been known to barely make it out of various situations alive, but I won’t be sharing that.
Jimmy took a step back when he saw the energy sizzling in my hands. “Ah, right. But we should probably have a plan before we search the rest of this place.”
“Yes, what is our plan, mage?” Beverly asked with a slight tilt of her head. “Distraction? Bribes? Violence?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “We might end up using all three. I like to keep my options open.”
Beverly looked at me severely. “This isn’t a joke, you know. There is a very real vampire at the Drake waiting for us, in addition to the other three already here. And don’t forget dear Barrington.”
“Ah, yes. Who could forget about him?” I peered over her shoulder at a pair of double doors. “Anyway, Jimmy’s right. Let’s keep searching the place. With any luck, they won’t show, and we’ll just—”
My last sentence was drowned out by Jimmy’s alarmed cry: “Behind you!”
Chapter 4
Only a lightning-fast dive between two cars—and a cushion of air magic to break my fall—prevented me from being skewered to the wall. Beverly and Jimmy dove down after me. I looked up to see three long metal poles vibrating horizontally about five yards from us. It looked as if pieces of car shelving had been torn off and sharpened to a point—before we arrived, obviously. If Jimmy hadn’t warned me when he did, one of those things softly going boing-boing might have been me.
We heard the sound of vampire laughter, which is a disconcerting thing, especially coming from vampires who’ve just tried to kill you. It resembles human laughter, but with an echo like breaking glass.
“I know vampires like to eat people,” I called, “but must you really have shish kebab tonight?” Throw a few chunks of meat and vegetables on those poles, and we could’ve roasted up quite nicely.
“Quiet, you fool!” hissed Beverly. She crouched down and tried to peer around a car’s bumper. “You’ll give away our location.”
“I think they already know where we are, dear,” said Jimmy wryly. We heard a noise like something clanking, then a series of buzzing sounds. One by one, fluorescent lights were turned on overhead, presumably by the other vampires. I gathered magic again, ready to strike, and we all stood up slowly. We had to shield our eyes for a moment because we were so used to the darkness. Then the view in front of us became less than agreeable.
On top of the tallest shelf of cars, right above one holding a tractor-trailer, stood three vampires. The first had light red hair, watery blue eyes, and a chain wrapped several times around his torso. The second was a woman with long brown hair in a dark purple sheath dress and heels. But it was the last vampire, the one in the middle, who I had a feeling was the leader. His leather jacket was open, revealing a pale, hairless chest. He had a medieval broadsword strapped to his back and a smug expression on his face. Even from twenty-five yards away, I could tell all their thoughts were blocked. Which meant this was going to be just as difficult as I’d imagined.
