The Obscurati

by Wynn Wagner

  “You look….” Oberon couldn’t find the word in any of the zillion languages he knew.

  “Natty,” Menz said. “You look very dapper.”

  “He looks amazing,” Pierre said, standing in the door. “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble just for me.”

  “Yes, he did,” Oberon said. “This is Hamlet.”

  “Ready?”

  “I think so,” Hamlet said shyly.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Chamber orchestra in Vienna,” Pierre said.

  “Good thing it is winter. It gets dark early, but you need to hustle to make it to the concert hall on time.”

  “Hamlet,” Pierre said. And with that, they were off.

  “WHAT’S with them?” Menz asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pierre is straight. He was with the same female vampire for at least three or four hundred years.”

  “Maybe he’s changing,” I said. “Maybe he just likes to hang out with Hamlet.”

  “Maybe the moon is just Swiss cheese,” Menz laughed. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think it has to be really strange.”

  “Just be happy for Hamlet,” Oberon said. “If they become a couple, it will be Hamlet’s first relationship in a hundred years.”

  Menz just shook his head and went back to his book.

  IT WAS winter, but vampires don’t feel temperature. Oberon and I were outside admiring the snow and the stars. Menz’s estate was still in the middle of nowhere. You could see the glow of Munich off to one side, but that was beyond the horizon. The first time I saw the garden on a moonless night in the winter, the only thing that made the snow sparkle was the glow from the stars. City lights, even way off in the distance, changed the night.

  “It was amazing,” Hamlet said. “The chamber group did two Bach concertos, and then they did the first Brandenburg after intermission.”

  “And Pierre?” Oberon asked.

  “He… I mean… he told me that he can take some time off.”

  “Okay.”

  “He said he could borrow the queen’s yacht. He wants to take me to America or around the world or something.”

  We were speechless.

  “How…?”

  “After the concert, we went to some bar in Vienna, and we talked for a couple of hours. We just talked. No necking. No sex. We just talked, and it was awesome.”

  “So he just wants to be friends with you?”

  “I think he wants to take things slowly and not make promises he can’t keep.”

  “Are you okay with that?” Oberon asked.

  “Huh?”

  “It sounds like he’s old-fashioned. It sounds like he is courting you.”

  “Yeah, I guess it does,” Hamlet grinned. “Me being courted.” And with a flip of his hair, he went inside.

  “You can put Hamlet in a €5,000 Italian suit, but he’s still Hamlet.”

  We both laughed.

  OVER the rest of the winter, Oberon and I got called out on sniper missions several times a week. We went all over the world killing rogue vampires.

  Each time they gave us gold bars—a kilogram each, sometimes more, rarely less. Some nights we would go out to three or four kills. We had quite a stack of gold in Menz’s basement. I was going to have to ask Pierre about how to store them. Menz wasn’t supposed to know about our work, so I couldn’t blurt out questions about a million euros of gold bullion.

  The trip from Menz’s mansion to New York City is 6,444 kilometers (roughly 4,000 miles). Even at ten times the speed of sound, it takes several minutes. Any time we went out of Europe, the locals would give us a place to spend the daylight hours, and they would arrange for blood donors. I guess we had become celebrities.

  Mårten and Oberon: ace vampire killers. The stuff of whispers. We were Obscurati, so nobody asked questions. They barely said anything, and we said nothing to the locals.

  One vampire in India, maybe an Obscurati, spent several days teaching us some tricks on being stealthy. It was after we had botched a kill in his area. The rogue vamp sensed our presence and shot out of the area like a rocket. I really appreciated the training. We weren’t as stealthy as Pierre, but we both learned how to mask our presence from almost everyone. If you were more than a hundred meters away, you didn’t know we were there. I was usually lethal up to eight hundred meters, so we could get in fairly close to up the odds of a clean hit.

  The locals always did the cleanup work. They just wanted me and my sniper rifle loaded with Oberon’s homemade silver bullets. He was getting better and better at making the bullets; his latest batch were ultra smooth. Silver bends under pressure, so making something out of silver that comes out of a rifle at over four hundred meters a second is an art form all to itself. Nobody in the world could make this ammo other than my husband.

  The new bullets were heavy toward the back but hollow at the tip. There was some kind of metal inside, but they were silver or silver-plated on the outside. I don’t know how he did it, but they exploded inside the vampire as soon as they hit.

  Oberon always carried several kinds of ammunition. He would select the kind for me to use once he saw the layout. I think he used more powder in some of the bullets, and he saved those for when we were way back at the upper range of the rifle. He used less gunpowder for shorter-range kills.

  What do I know? I’m the sniper. He’s the mad scientist.

  Over time, he stopped using the sniper calculator that they bought me. He said it was too slow. He found some software to use, and he started bringing an Apple iPad along for his computations. He also had a small digital weather station so he could get a fix on wind speed and humidity. I have no idea what all he did. Sun spots, maybe. Whatever it was, when he gave me the settings for the scope and then told me how to fudge the shot from what the scope showed, I didn’t miss. In fact, I could take out three vampires in less than a second. That is no easy accomplishment, because vampires can move quickly. With Oberon’s numbers and my PSG, I was faster and more deadly.

  It was always business with the local vampires. They may have been Obscurati, but we never exchanged names or phone numbers. We never had sex with any of them, although we never hid the fact that we were a couple. Nobody ever said a word. They didn’t just stay away from the topic of being gay; they didn’t say anything that wasn’t about the kill. I almost never knew the name of the target. Our local guide would have our sniper nest already located, and he (or she) would take us there. They knew how Obscurati operated, or someone told them the kind of sniper nest we would need. We’d get just enough background on what to expect. Some vampires would land nearby and walk to their lair. Others just whooshed down right by the door, and those always required fast action on my part.

  Once or twice I didn’t have a good shot, so I just told the guide that we’d try again the next night when the vampire was leaving the house or cave or wherever he was staying. Nobody ever objected. I guess they felt that we knew best.

  Oberon treated our sniping assignment as a science project. He almost always watched as the vampire’s head exploded, but he didn’t ever react to it. It was just our job.

  Once, in Russia, Oberon wasn’t his usual self. I had grown to know how businesslike he could be. Do this. Do that. Bang-bang, thank you, ma’am.

  After one of our kills, he just stood there and watched as the vamp went up in flames. Oberon always gets us packed quickly. He gets our payment as I swoop on ahead. He is so much faster than me that he always catches up in just a few seconds.

  This Russian hit had caused something. As he stood quietly, I packed up his gear and went to get our gold. The local jumped over to start cleaning up the dead vampire’s ashes, and I moved closer to Oberon. As my hand ran up his back, I saw a smile. He was crying and smiling, and the smile was as sincere as the tears.

  “What’s up, babe?” I asked.

  “I enjoyed it,” he said. “I mean, I enjoyed the kill. I watched you put a bullet that
I made into the vamp’s head. It was my ammunition, and I really liked… I mean…. God, what am I saying?”

  “It’s okay, Oberon.” He was really starting to freak me out. This was a side of him that I had never seen. I noticed that there were several locals down at the dead vampire’s lair, and they were giving us plenty of space. I just held Oberon as he watched the cleanup.

  “He looked like my dad,” Oberon finally said.

  “The vampire?”

  Oberon nodded. “You killed a vampire that looked like my father. I am here wishing that we could find somebody else like that to kill. I want to go out and hunt vampires. I mean, really hunt them. It’s something that… I mean, I have these dark feelings, and I’m so ashamed.”

  What do you say to that? It was a hundred years before he opened up enough to tell me that he had a dark streak to his personality. Vampires are predators. We are all killers somewhere deep inside. Oberon had found his dark energy, and he was finally able to tell me about it.

  “Do you want to shoot sometimes?” I asked. What a stupid thing to say. I felt the words as they left my mouth, and I tried to get them to stop at my teeth.

  Oberon thought I was trying to make him laugh. “I love you,” he said with a smile.

  “I love you too, husband.”

  I feel bad about squeezing the trigger. I don’t like the killing.

  Some of our targets were really old, but most were newly turned and out of control. Killing the newly turned vampires hurt me inside because I had been there. It wasn’t their fault that they were running amok. The vampire I should have been killing was the one who had turned them. You can’t turn a vampire accidentally. It takes lots of work on the Maker’s part. These new vampires were either partially or poorly turned, or their Maker had just abandoned them to figure things out by themselves.

  That’s what had happened to me. If Menz hadn’t rescued me, I would have ended up tearing up the countryside, leaving human bodies everywhere. I wouldn’t have known that I was doing anything wrong until somebody came and killed me. The Obscurati themselves never give a warning. By the time Oberon and I are called, all the warnings have already been made. We are called to finish things. We clean up vampires that the locals can’t control. Or won’t control. Or whatever.

  It makes me sick sometimes. I hate this killing, especially a new vampire. I know when a vampire is newly turned because I can feel it, even at eight hundred meters.

  The trouble is that there aren’t many people I can talk to. Nobody is supposed to know who I really am. It’s the way the Obscurati work. Queen Cécile in Switzerland knows I’m Obscurati, and so does Pierre. Hamlet knows too. I’m sure Menz suspects, but he also knows he can’t ever ask about it. Menz is a thousand years old, so he knows all about the Obscurati and how secretive we are.

  One recent kill was just a kid, maybe thirteen years old. It is criminal to make a vampire when the human is only a kid. It is cruel, and it never turns out well. The vampire who did it should have known better.

  “Even a thirteen-year-old boy has to take responsibility for what he does,” Oberon told me. He held my hand, and I remembered that he was that age when he killed his own father.

  “Is there a way I can find out who turned this boy?” I asked the local guide. She seemed uncomfortable that I was even speaking to her. Maybe I was breaking a lot of rules.

  “It isn’t possible,” she said.

  “I want to kill the bastard.”

  “So do I, but we can’t.”

  I took aim and made the kid’s head explode. We were somewhere in Africa. When we got to our resting area, a large building near Cairo, I sat up and cried. Oberon tried to get me to stop. He tried to be a good husband, but there was nothing he could do. I had just murdered a thirteen-year-old boy who didn’t know that murdering people and drinking their blood was the wrong thing to do. I couldn’t wait for morning, because this night was almost too much for me to handle.

  ON THE way back to Germany the next night, I asked Oberon to go ahead.

  “I need to go to Switzerland,” I said.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, I need to do this myself.”

  “MÅRTEN?” Pierre said. “What brings you to Bern?”

  “You.”

  “Is Hamlet okay?”

  “Huh, oh… yeah, this isn’t about Hamlet. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Sure, follow me.”

  He walked over to the fake lift that was nothing but an empty shaft. He punched in a code and let the biometric box scan his eyeball. The lift doors finally opened. Once we were inside and the doors closed behind us, the top of the cage opened to reveal a shaft the height of the building. He floated into the shaft, and I followed. In a flash, we were up about ten stories standing in front of a metal door. He and the biometric thingy came to some kind of mutual agreement, and the door buzzed. Inside was an empty room.

  “My office,” Pierre said. “It isn’t much, but the whole floor is shielded from everything.”

  I looked around as we walked—with real feet, not just floating—over to a set of oversized leather chairs.

  “What’s up?”

  “Two things,” I said. “First is the gold we get for killing vampires.”

  “You don’t want it?”

  “No, I’m sure it will come in handy. I can’t really ask Menz to hang onto it, and banks are closed when I’m awake.”

  “I understand,” he said. “You can give Menz some of the gold from time to time. You live at his house, and he’s never asked for anything in return.”

  “Right, but….”

  “He will understand,” Pierre said, “and he won’t ask any questions. For the rest of the gold….” He walked over to a desk and got a piece of paper and a fountain pen. Old vampires never really got used to ballpoint pens. He scribbled something on the paper and gave it to me.

  “Call Schmidt,” he said. “I guess that’s her last name, but I don’t know her first name. Everybody just calls her Schmidt. She is the manager of a bank in Zürich. She and her bank have been dealing with nighttime customers for generations. She won’t ask any questions either. Actually, she doesn’t really need to ask questions, because she will just know where your gold is coming from. She will be able to set you up with a credit card or whatever you need, so you can use some of your wealth. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “I couldn’t. Oberon and I are really rich at this point.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “Share a little with Menz and do something nice for all the human donors there. They’ll all appreciate it. What’s the other thing you want to discuss?”

  “I’m a sniper,” I said.

  “I know. You’re a damn good one. You’re known as one of the best in the world now.”

  “I hate it.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “I just killed a little boy.”

  “You need some time off? I’m taking Hamlet out on the queen’s yacht next summer. Would you and Oberon like to go?”

  “Sure, but that won’t help me with the killing.”

  “You want to quit being a sniper? What you did to that boy was probably the kindest thing you could have done.”

  “I know. He would never understand how to live as a vampire. He’d just be a killing machine and make things hard for the rest of us.”

  “So, what do you want?”

  “I want to go kill the bastard that turned the boy. That’s the real criminal.”

  “Where was the kill?”

  “We were put up in Cairo, but I think the boy was in Chad or Libya.”

  “Africa. That’s King Gadi,” he said. “Wait here.”

  Pierre was gone in a flash. In about five minutes, he returned, and the queen was with him.

  “Your Majesty,” I said. “I apologize for barging in without advance notice.”

  “Sit, sit,” she said. “My door is always open for you, so don’t worry about that. Pierre has filled me
in on the situation.”

  She paused to make sure I understood or to formulate her words. “I had words with King Gadi a minute or so ago, and he assures me that the vampire who turned the young boy is already dead,” she continued without any emotion. “You were called because the boy was so dangerous. He had already massacred two vampires who came to kill him.”

  “He was protecting himself.”

  “Right, but he should never have been a vampire. Not at that age. I have never seen a boy or girl so young turn into… wait. Menz was turned when he was very young. I do know one who developed into a good vampire. This boy was making a mess of things in Libya, and he was getting all the wrong kinds of attention from the humans. King Gadi tried to fix the situation himself, but he failed. You and Oberon are called only after all the other things had failed.”

  “Is there a way for me to be asked to kill the Maker in cases like this?”

  “Probably not, but only because that is the first thing the locals do. The Obscurati get called only when the local vampires can’t handle the situation. You aren’t the first one called, but you are always the last.”

  She thought about it. “Except that time in India,” she said.

  I think I blushed.

  “I can do this,” the queen continued. “When you are called, the request always comes to me or to Pierre. Nobody else in Europe knows your identity. I will ask if the job involves a botched turning. If it does, I will find out what has already been done to the Maker. If the Maker is alive, I will ask that you be allowed to kill him too. Fair?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “So formal for an American. A hundred years has made you quite European.”

  I nodded as Pierre handed me a handkerchief. I guess I must have been crying.