by N. P. Martin
I said nothing. Merely smiled and shook my head. “So why did Ray put you onto me? Did he think I would get bored and that I might need something to do? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s stepped in on my behalf.”
“Partly,” she said nodding. “Your uncle wants you to stop running and start using your gifts constructively, instead of fleecing casinos and giving most of the money away to the human detritus that lives on the streets out there. Did it make you feel any better, by the way?”
“Not really. What’s the other reason?”
“I need someone who isn’t known in this city. By a twist of fate, you happen to be such a person.”
Lucky me.
“And why would anonymity matter so much?”
Miss Crow sighed, and for a brief moment, looked more human—more vulnerable—than before. “My daughter has…run away. If she finds out I have people looking for her, she’ll burrow in deeper. There’s less chance of that happening if it’s you looking for her. She doesn’t know you. No one does. Except me now.”
Again with the thinly veiled threat. She was so used to talking like that, she hardly realized she was doing it. “May I ask why she ran away?”
“No, you may not.”
I shook my head. “You’re giving me little enough to go on here as it is. Knowing why she ran—”
“Wouldn’t help you much.”
God, she isn’t making this easy.
“Jesus,” I said after considering everything in silence for a moment. “I’m not the right man for this. I don’t know the city, and I’m certainly not any kind of detective.”
“That’s not what Ray said. He said you would be ideally suited to this job.”
“Oh really? Why?”
“Because you care, he said.”
I stared straight at her. “I’m not getting out of this, am I?”
“It’s either that or I kill you.”
“Ray said that as well?”
“No, August,” she said, then crossed the floor in a flash, and I found myself trapped in my chair as she leant down on the armrests and put her face right by mine. “I’m saying that.”
Then she bit me. On the lip. Hard. “Shit!” I said, tasting my own blood in my mouth.
Her face was still right by mine, her coffin-wood brown eyes looking right through me as she slowly ran her tongue over her lower lip to lick my blood. “Sebastian has a file outside, which he will give you when I leave. The file should give you enough to get started finding my daughter.”
Miss Crow straightened up then and stood tall over me. I noticed a speck of my crimson blood on the collar of her white Gucci jacket, though I decided not to tell her about it (the best idea, I think). She smiled down at me, seemingly satisfied that she had accomplished what she had gone there to do, and without any bloodshed (well, hardly any). “I think you will find, August,” she said as she was about to leave, “that after tonight, a whole new path will open up for you. You should be happy you decided to come to this city.”
Happy wasn’t the word I would have used right then.
Not that I told Angela Crow that.
4
The Eyes Have It
After Angela Crow left, her driver (or whatever he was, bodyguard probably), Sebastian, came to the front door with a manila folder and went to hand it to me. When I gripped the folder to take it from him, he held onto it, his piercing blue eyes intimidating as they bored into me. "Don't fuck this up, kid," he said in a calm, assured voice before letting go of the folder, smiling and walking away. And with those few words, he managed to convey quite clearly that if I did fuck things up, there would be unpleasant consequences.
What the hell have I just got dragged into? Thanks a lot, Ray.
Still cursing my uncle, I closed the door and walked down the hall and back into the living room where I tossed the folder on top of the mantel over the fireplace. Then I went to the phone that was hanging on the wall next to the doorway and dialed my uncle's number, knowing before I did so that the bastard wouldn't answer because he would be away on some expedition somewhere. I went through the motions of letting the phone ring several times before slamming the receiver back down. Then I stood there and considered doing a communication spell, which I had done before and which would give me a direct link to my uncle's mind. But I shook my head at the idea as it felt like too much trouble to go to so that Ray could blow off my concerns by telling me the whole situation would be character building and a good experience for me.
Like the time a couple of years ago when he underhandedly set me up to stay in an old mansion while I was traveling through the Romanian countryside, and when I got there, the place was full of ghosts. I couldn’t leave the mansion until I had found a way to exorcise the ghosts from the house, which ended up taking me a week to do, by the time I figured it all out using only the knowledge I was taught growing up in Ireland, which thankfully, was quite extensive. Even armed with so much knowledge of spells and supernatural lore, however, I still struggled, and those bastard ghosts put me through the mill before I managed to get rid of them (which is to say, force them into the Astral Plane where they could move on somewhere else). Uncle Ray was like a proud mentor when I next spoke to him after that, even while I was cursing him up and down. There were many more incidents like that during the rest of my travels, of which this latest was just one.
"When the hell am I going to learn not to listen to Ray?" I said aloud, seeking out the whiskey bottle again, finding it on the floor next to the armchair I was sitting in earlier. "'Check out Blackham City, August. It's a great place. You'll have fun there. I even have a place you can stay in. Trust me, you'll love Blackham!'" I shook my head. "Yeah right. I'm here less than twelve fucking hours and already a damn vampire wants me to go all Mickey Spillane and find the daughter who probably couldn't wait to get away from her. Shit." I took a swig from the whiskey bottle, then wiped a hand across my mouth before eyeing the folder on the mantle. Sighing, I walked over to the fireplace, lifted the folder and went and sat down on the creaky leather couch.
I stared at the folder for a moment before opening it, delaying because I knew that when I opened the folder to see what was inside, there would be no turning back. The thing about me is that if I see a problem that grips me even a little bit, I won't stop until that problem is solved, no matter how long it takes. When I was younger, I spent years on certain problems, nearly all of them in some way related to magick and spellcraft. Some of those problems I still hadn't solved and those were always in the back of my mind somewhere, being mulled over unless I drowned out the noise with alcohol, which I had a habit of doing. Ray knew this about me. He knew how easily I was gripped by certain challenges, and that I ended up caring deeply over whether a problem was solved or not.
Finding a missing person was a new one on me, though. As I said, the problems I gravitated towards were mostly of the arcane variety. How to get a certain spell to work. How to control a certain form of magick. Solving the mystery of how something works. Stuff like that. Nerdy shit, if you want the truth, because that's who I am, a nerd obsessed with magick and the arcane. It was who I was raised to be by my family, by my father especially. When that all collapsed, I ran away, but I soon found I couldn't leave my interest in all things magick behind. Even on the road, I would ponder magickal problems in my head (which also helped to counter the boredom and loneliness that came with traveling). In every town and city, I sought out libraries and studied books. Not just books on magick or esotericism, but books of all kinds, on every subject that tickled my interest. Learning and studying was all I knew growing up, so it's what I did when I hit the road as well.
And then there I was, in another city, about to tackle a different sort of problem than what I was used to. This one involving people. Vampires. Opening the plain folder, a tinge of excitement hit me at the prospect of what I might find inside, and at the prospect of sinking my teeth (no pun intended) into a new challenge.
“Fuck
it,” I said with the folder now open in my lap. “What else am I going to do?”
Forgetting about the likely dire consequences of failing the challenge before me, I instead reveled in the delicious feeling I always got upon examining a problem for the first time as I wondered what treasures, intellectual or otherwise, might lie within.
Inside the folder were two sheets of A4 paper. The top sheet was typed upon and contained information on Jennifer Crow, which I hardly looked at before examining the bottom sheet of paper, which held my interest more. It was an exquisite pencil drawing of a girl who I assumed was Jennifer Crow. What stood out most to me in that drawing was not the long mane of thick dark hair or the striking beauty of the girl herself, but the eyes. Whoever had drawn the sketch had done so with consummate skill, capturing the girl's soul in those eyes with barely a few pencil strokes. I was no stranger to an artist's pencil myself (having studied art in my own time during my apprenticeship), but I wouldn't have had half the skill of the person who drew Jennifer Crow's portrait.
Dwelling on the girl's eyes, I saw something there, something that I instantly connected with, though I wasn't sure what. Perhaps a sadness, or a yearning for something just beyond reach. Whatever it was, it made me instantly care for the girl (and almost forget about the fact she was a vampire and had probably killed innocent humans so she could feed on them).
Wherever Jennifer Crow was, I knew I had to find her. Not just because her mother would likely kill me if I didn't, but because my intuition told me the girl needed help. Help that I could give her.
Of course, my instincts about Jennifer Crow could turn out to be completely wrong and the girl could have winded up being a total brat bitch who liked to run away from Mommy (I suspected there was no Daddy on the scene, Angela Crow didn't strike me as the relationship type) just to get some attention and it was all just an oft repeated game of cat and mouse that she liked to play.
But I didn't think so. My instincts were rarely wrong, especially about people. Six years of mingling with every kind of person from all around the world saw to that (if you wanted to stay alive and unmolested on the road, you had to learn to read people).
So it was settled. I would find Jennifer Crow, wherever she was, and I would help her if I could. Hopefully, she wouldn't try to kill me when I did.
I also hoped her mother wouldn't kill me if the help I gave to her daughter weren't to her liking. Obviously, Jennifer had run away for a reason. If I found her, and those reasons turned out to be valid, was I going to just hand her straight over to be thrown back into the strife she tried to escape from in the first place?
Let’s just find the girl first, I told myself. After that, we would see what’s what. Although my gut was already hinting at future complications. Nothing was ever easy or straightforward in my experience, at least not for me. I had no reason to believe that particular situation would turn out to be any different, if only because of the simple fact that I was involved.
Sighing, I sat back in my chair, took a contemplative swig from the whiskey bottle and then proceeded to think about all the different ways one could kill a vampire.
5
Like A Virgin
I'm not much of a fancy dresser. Hell, I've worn practically the same set of clothes for the last six years as I've moved around the world on my travels (I say travels as if my wanderings had some higher purpose, like self-discovery for instance, when in fact, they were just that—aimless wanderings because I didn't know what else to do with myself). Growing up in Ireland, the dress code was quite conservative, especially in the McCreedy household, where suits and waistcoats were required dress for my brother and me each day. For my sister, it was a plain, shapeless dress that hung to her ankles. On the rare days that our father was absent, we would discard the jacket and waistcoats and roll up our shirt sleeves. Roisin, my sister, would borrow one of our mother's dresses. Those days were happy and free, the days without our father.
But even after leaving all that behind, the dress code still stuck with me, if only because I was used it and try as I might, I didn't feel comfortable in anything else. So I always wore dark moleskin jeans (they last longer than trousers, as I found out on the road), a shirt made from hemp because they last a long time, and a tan colored waistcoat. No suit jacket, though. Instead, I wore a trench coat that was given to me by my Uncle Ray before I left Ireland. The coat was made out of demon skin, and as such was resistant to most things, including bullets and fire. It was a dark green color and looked like thick leather. It also had secret pockets and hiding places all over it, and a stitched-in holster for a pistol, which I didn't carry as I didn't see any need for having a gun when magick had sufficed in every threatening situation I had encountered. The coat gave me comfort, and I felt more secure wearing it, which goes a long way when you are constantly traveling to strange new locales full of unknown threats.
Like Blackham.
It was just after 9.00 a.m. and I was sitting in a local diner having breakfast while I looked over the information that Sebastian had provided me with the night before. The waitress serving me looked like that pop star Madonna, or tried to, as she was too short and plump to pull the look off properly and came across as vaguely sad instead, especially as she looked to be pushing thirty. Not that I was any expert on pop culture (I preferred the comforting heft of an old book to the flimsiness of a record, especially from someone like Madonna, who despite being the world's biggest pop star at the time, didn't interest me one bit, except for the fact that she was so successful, which to me, had to indicate dark dealings somewhere along the line because what other explanation could there be?).
Growing up, my brother and sister and I were pretty much shielded against outside influences, which meant no TV in the house, no radio (except the one my brother kept hidden, but rarely ever got the chance to play) and no newspapers either. It was all about the magick and the studying in our house. I'm sure you can imagine my sense of culture shock when I finally left Ireland. When I hit London, I was left reeling for months as I desperately tried to acclimatize myself to what was nothing short of an alien world to me. Six years later, I still struggled to understand how the world worked and why people were the way they were. Why they all acted so damn crazy most of the time. Therefore, waitress Madonna might have totally got why she was dressed like an overgrown teenager, but I certainly didn't, and I doubted I ever would.
“Pretty girl,” the waitress said, smacking on that horrible chewing gum stuff with the sickly sweet smell. She was nodding down at the drawing of Jennifer Crow, which lay inside the open manila folder on the table next to my half eaten breakfast of bacon and eggs. “She your girlfriend or something?”
“My girlfriend?” I said. “A little young, don’t you think?”
The waitress batted her false eyelashes and made a not so subtle show of running her gaze over me. "You don't look so old. I love that coat, is that like cyberpunk or something? You one of those? Those guys are pretty intense, though you don't look nerdy enough. Cyberpunks are just nerds really, aren't they, underneath those punk haircuts, which you don't have, and those black clothes, which you don't have either. Maybe you're not a cyberpunk. It's just the coat, I think." She stopped talking, probably because of the utter perplexity that I was looking at her with. "Oh hey, sorry, I was just talking. Sometimes I don't know when to shut up." She laughed a school girl laugh, which had to have been fake. If it wasn't, I pitied her.
"I'll call you when I need the check," I said, turning my attention back to the piece of paper in my hand, hoping the waitress would take the hint, which she did, shuffling off without saying another word. I didn't see her face, but no doubt she was offended. Offending people was like a specialty of mine, largely because I had little or no tolerance for the modern ways of most people. I couldn't help it. Everyone just seemed completely mad to me most of the time. Maybe everyone felt like that about everybody else as well. Whatever. It didn't make it any less true.
I went back to
looking over the report (or whatever you wanted to call it) in my hand. In case you're wondering, the report didn't say very much. It gave a detailed physical description of Jennifer Crow, most of which I had already picked up from the sketch of her, except her height (5'8), weight (110 lbs) and eye color (sable, but I already guessed that). She also apparently had a tattoo of a dragon on her back, but as I had no plans ever to see the girl topless, I didn't focus too much on that detail.
What interested me more in the report was the list of places Jennifer liked to hang out in. I was glad to see there weren't many. A couple of bars and a club called Aquarius, which the report described as a "hangout for New Romantics and people who liked to read their desperately dire poetry on stage."
I smiled upon reading that description and wondered who wrote the document. It was cold enough in tone to be Jennifer's mother, but I suspected it was her right-hand man, Sebastian who wrote it. He seemed sneering enough of anything human, including me. He went on to mention the name of some boy (Jasper Conrad) who "was infatuated with Miss Crow" and that "Miss Crow called this miscreant her boyfriend."
Again, I smiled, but this time not at Sebastian's sneering tone, but at the fact that I now understood at least part of the reason Jennifer had run away. Like most teenage girls, there was always a boy involved somewhere, even with vampire teenage girls. Like in that movie I watched the year before in LA, The Lost Boys, coincidentally also about vampires. The girl in it, Star was her name, wanted to run away with a human boy. She ended up getting killed, I think. Let’s hope Jennifer’s story doesn’t end the same way, for my sake, if not for hers.
By the time I had finished my breakfast, I had decided to start my search for Jennifer Crow in the few bars that were listed in that report. I could throw her name around, and that of Jasper Conrad's, and see what came up. If nothing else, it would give me a chance to get to know the city a bit better. And who knows, maybe I would get lucky and find Jennifer and her boyfriend smooching in the corner of some dive bar.
