New Order

by Max Turner

  When he reached the Sheraton, he sat down on the curb at one side of the entrance. I sat on the other side. Seconds became minutes. They seemed to drag on for years. I wondered what would have happened if I’d killed the smoker. Would Charlie’s father have had time to get across to the other building? Would he have been able to keep Ophelia from being drawn into the darkness? Was there even a chance she was alive?

  Eventually, Luna poked her head outside the hotel and waved me over.

  “Tell me you have good news,” I said.

  She tipped her head back and forth as though she wasn’t certain. “The concierge says none of us are old enough to rent a room, even if we had the cash or some plastic to pay for it.”

  “Great … so what now?”

  “Keep your chin up, Zack. If you were anyone else, I’d be worried.”

  I didn’t get what she meant by that, so she explained. I was a person of means. The hotel was in the service industry. All it was going to take to grease the wheels was money. I was going to have to wire the hotel a damage deposit large enough to cover the cost of remodelling half the downtown and leave a healthy gratuity for the concierge. Luna handed me a slip of paper with a number on it. “This is all he’s asking. For you, this is chump change.”

  “Gratuity? What … like a bribe?”

  “Tomayto, tomahto.”

  I looked at the number on the sticky note. I was so desperate to put this night behind me, I would have paid the sum if he’d added three zeros to the end of it. Fifteen minutes later, we were punching our room card into the door lock of a suite.

  Charlie didn’t speak, and he didn’t look at me. He just picked up the remote, turned on the TV and started mindlessly flipping channels. Luna settled Vincent into bed.

  “He’s going to need blood when he wakes up,” I said.

  “Yeah. I used way too much wolfsbane to settle him down.”

  Suki was opening and closing the cupboards in the kitchenette. “He didn’t give you much of a choice.”

  “No,” Luna agreed. “But Zack’s right. He’ll need blood from one of us.”

  Charlie flicked off the television and threw the remote at the armchair across the room. Then he stood and made his way to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Suki asked.

  “I’m not anteing up any blood unless I can replace it.” He glanced at the fridge beside Suki. “There won’t be any in there.”

  “So you’re going to go out?” she asked. “After what just happened? You can’t be serious!”

  Charlie looked around as though he wanted to rip the place apart. “I don’t want to be here right now. There has to be a blood bank somewhere in town. I’ll find it and get what we need.” He took out his phone and started scrolling.

  “What about Ophelia’s contacts?” Luna asked me. “That Istvan guy? She said he was a friend of your dad’s. And there was someone else. The Baptist. It sounded like he might help us. Is there some way to get in touch with them?”

  I’d forgotten all about them. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Suki walked over to Charlie and picked something from his hair. “Don’t go right now.”

  He turned and kept his eyes on his cell display.

  “Zack and I can take care of it,” Luna said. “If Vincent wakes up, he’ll want you here.”

  Suki was standing behind him. “You’re his hero, Charlie. You heard Luna. She and Zack can go.” She slipped an arm around his waist. He flinched, then his expression shifted from irritation to a tired sadness. She rested her chin on his shoulder. “We’ll have some privacy …”

  That cinched it. He tossed his phone to Luna. She handed it to me so I could see the display. He’d been searching for blood donor centres.

  Charlie closed his eyes. “I just want this night to be over.”

  I think we all felt that way. I inventoried the equipment we still had in our possession. It amounted to five-eighths of sweet diddly. A pistol with one full clip, a knife, Ophelia’s rapier, four grenades and a can of tear gas. We also had two assault rifles and the Optimus Prime gun, but so few bullets that we’d be using them as door props before long.

  Don’t forget the case, Luna reminded me.

  We don’t even know what it does.

  No, she thought. But Ophelia risked her life to get it, so we know it’s valuable.

  I picked up the rapier, tossed Luna the pistol and headed for the door. She stepped in front of me. Her eyes flicked over to Charlie. He was leaning against Suki, looking like a crash-test dummy with half the stuffing removed.

  You need to say something to him.

  She was right, but he’d just lost his father. Nothing I said could fix that. And he’d been adamant about not being in danger. He was finding out how wrong he was. Nothing I said could fix that, either, so I decided to focus on the practical.

  “You have fifty-three rounds left, so I’ve set the assault rifles to semi-automatic. Keep them close. I don’t know how long we’ll be gone, but if you sleep, do it in shifts. If you have time, see if you can find out what’s in that case.” I tossed his phone to Suki. “If we get into trouble, we’ll call.”

  CHAPTER 17

  PARADIGM SHIFT

  IT SEEMED UNLIKELY that we’d been followed from Iron Spike Enterprises, but there was no way to know for certain. Being cornered in an elevator with a vampire like Pestilence definitely would have ruined our first night in a hotel, so we made for the stairs.

  “We need a plan,” Luna said.

  I leaned against the railing. “To get the blood, or for after we get the blood?”

  “Both.”

  “How hard can it be to break into a blood donor clinic? As for afterwards, you know what I want to do. I just have no idea how to do it.”

  “Mr. Entwistle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to have to move a whole lot of rock.”

  “I know. But I can’t see a way forward unless we get some help. Not with Ophelia gone.”

  My voice broke as I spoke those last words.

  Luna moved closer. She had this peculiar talent for standing right in front of me so that it seemed I couldn’t breathe without our bodies touching. “There has to be some other option.”

  “There is,” I said.

  She waited for me to answer. It took a while.

  “If I surrender to the Changeling, I might be able to buy you some time to hide. Maybe go back home to Jersey.”

  She fixed me with a cold stare. Her eyes had lost some of their colour—less emerald, more bleached ivy. It made them look frozen.

  “You can’t mean that. You’d just give up?”

  “I didn’t say give up.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t know. I just … I can’t help but think that if I were out of the picture, you guys would be safer. And Charlie is furious with me right now.”

  She slipped her arms around my waist. “He’ll come around. He just needs time.”

  “We don’t have time,” I said.

  “Not if you turn yourself in.”

  “It was just an idea.”

  “And what do you think Ophelia would say about it?”

  I felt myself cringe. She would have gone ballistic.

  “She’d expect you to soldier on. It’s what she trained us for. She believed in you, and so do I.”

  “I appreciate what you’re saying. But how confident could she have been? She wouldn’t let anyone go outside.”

  “She’s not a risk-taker. You know that. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t confident about your abilities.”

  “What abilities?” I asked. “Neither of you were on the stairs with Charlie and me when I went to pieces. I couldn’t breathe. I was a washout. If Charlie hadn’t kept his head, we would have been torn apart.”

  “But you both made it out.”

  “It was luck.”

  “Or something else,” she said.

  “What does that mean?�
�

  She glanced away, then looked back at me with an expression that could have been frustration, resolve or both. “How can you doubt the prophecies after all we’ve been through? Vlad. Hyde. This.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t believe them,” I said. “I’m just not convinced they’re about me.”

  “The rest of us feel otherwise. You can’t just fold your tent and give in.”

  “If I could buy your freedom that way, it would be worth it.”

  “Worth it for whom?” she asked. “If you disappeared, what do you really think would happen to us? Without you, we’d have no chance. They’d just hunt us down and kill us. You can’t jump ship. Not now. Not ever.”

  She leaned against me, her cheek resting on my chest. I closed my eyes and inhaled a deep breath, marvelling that after all we’d been through her hair could still smell so good. It reminded me of the first time she’d touched me. That was before she knew I was a vampire, when I was an escaped mental patient running from the police. Just a kid with some bizarre problems. It seemed an eternity ago.

  “I don’t think Charlie will forgive me for what happened to his father,” I said.

  “Of course he will. You’re his best friend. Just let him be for a spell.” She nestled closer. “It might take more than that, actually.”

  “Another gratuity?”

  She laughed. “No. You’re not getting off the hook that easily. It could be time to re-examine some of your ideals. I understand why you don’t want to kill. Mercy and forgiveness. I get it. But these people aren’t looking for forgiveness. They have no remorse. And they’re going to obliterate us if we don’t stop them.”

  I felt the comfortable pressure of her body against me as I quietly inhaled. She closed her eyes and waited for her words to take root. There was little I could say to refute them. On the staircase, I’d nearly been ripped limb from limb. Charlie had saved me. And now Ophelia was gone. Uncle Jake was dead. Our home was ashes. How much of this could I have prevented if I’d been more like Luna and Charlie in my thinking?

  “So it’s time for a paradigm shift.”

  She hummed an affirmative. “I think so.”

  “Okay.”

  Her eyes found mine again. She was probing for signs of uncertainty. I didn’t give her any. She slipped her arms around my neck. “We haven’t been alone enough.”

  “No.”

  “We’re alone now.” Her breath was hot on my neck. “You seem to need a reason to stick around …”

  I reached down and cupped the back of her head. Her long copper hair was soft against my fingers. I pulled her head back and winced as my teeth stabbed through my gums. Then I kissed her, and for a time I forgot the danger we were in and lost myself in the person I loved most in the world.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE SPY

  MY PLAN WAS simple. Rent a car, drive to the blood bank, steal what we needed, then get back to the others. On paper, it seemed about as easy as ordering a pizza. In real life—well, it never ceases to amaze me how complicated things can get.

  I was hoping to get the car through the hotel. I shouldn’t have been so presumptuous, but I had this vague notion from the movies that they pretty much took care of you once they figured out you were made of money and were willing to spend like an idiot to impress your girlfriend. This wasn’t the case. The rental agency affiliated with the hotel was closed, and that was that. Luna’s eyelash batting and my vampire charm got us nowhere.

  In the end, I had to buy a set of wheels from a night watchman—a Ford Festiva that was so old they probably stopped making parts for it when Justin Bieber was still in diapers. I’m sure I paid three times what it was worth. This took over an hour. It might have been easier to build one out of papier mâché.

  I didn’t have a driver’s licence, so Luna drove. Two blocks from the hotel I saw a vampire. He was an elder, and he reminded me instantly of Vlad. He had the same kind of confidence that probably came from outliving his enemies by about four hundred years. His eyes were deep set, his nose fine. A moustache, like two half moons joined together at the tips, curled out over his mouth. His brown hair was long and gathered in spirals around his shoulders. He had a witch’s lock—a streak of white hair on the left side. Luna saw him too and looked away, nervously.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “We should just keep going.”

  The Changeling’s spies were undoubtedly all over the city looking for us. This guy was a block from our hotel. If he found out where we were staying and reported our whereabouts to the New Order, we’d definitely lose our damage deposit. And maybe this one knew what had happened to Ophelia.

  “I’m not comfortable with this. He’s too close to the hotel.”

  She kept driving.

  “Luna, pull over. Please.”

  I probed her surface thoughts, but she’d closed herself off. I felt my stress meter go haywire. Aside from her and Ophelia, the only people in the world I cared about were back at the hotel.

  I undid my seat belt and opened the door. Even with the car moving at eighty klicks, I would have stepped out onto the street. Luna pulled over to the curb, threw the car into park and glared at me.

  “Okay, what’s your plan?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Great—”

  “Give me a second to think.” Cars whizzed past. Rain started to fall, spotting the windshield with tiny dots. “Let’s try this. You turn around and pull over in front of him, then step out so he notices you. While he’s distracted, I’ll sneak up behind.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’ll improvise.”

  Luna rolled her eyes. “That’s something Charlie would say.”

  It didn’t sound like a compliment. “His judgment isn’t the best, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’m alive right now because of Charlie,” I said. “If not for him, you’d be making this trip alone.”

  She looked away. The golden crescent charm of her necklace was in her fingers. “What about the blood?”

  “The donor clinic isn’t going anywhere. I’d say this takes priority.”

  “And what if this one has powers, like those two vampires from the roof? What if he does something and we can’t stop him?”

  I put my hand over her fingers, then gently pried the charm loose and let it fall against her shirt. “These elder types have a code. They don’t reveal themselves in public. If things get out of hand, smart money says he’ll bolt.”

  She stared out at the passing cars. The rain began to fall harder. The dots on the windshield turned into splotches, then rivulets. “This doesn’t feel right,” she whispered.

  I sensed things wouldn’t feel right for a long time. It was no reason not to act.

  One U-turn later, she was heading the car back towards the hotel and I was running through the shadows in pursuit of the vampire. He was hard to miss. He walked down the centre of the sidewalk like he owned the city. Not much of a spy, if you asked me.

  Luna pulled over to the curb about a half block in front of him and got out of the car. Her long copper locks sort of swirled around, then fell over her shoulder, revealing the perfect contours of her face and neck. She flashed her pale emerald eyes his way. It was so distracting, I nearly ran into a lamppost.

  The vampire saw her and sped up. She turned her back to him. He raised a hand like a sorcerer casting a spell, then moved it back. Luna jerked around as if a fishing line had snagged her shoulder. An expression of surprised panic came over her face.

  I put my feet into high gear. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had just happened. The elder must have been a telekinetic—a person who could move objects with his mind. I thought of all the things he could do with a talent like that. Send her cartwheeling into traffic. Raise her up in the air and smash her onto the ground. What was most distressing was that he could do it all from a distance, without implicating himself, and so the whole idea of him bolting to avoid attention was
poppycock.

  I should have thought twice about using my girlfriend to bait a trap. Now it was sprung, and if I didn’t move quickly, she was finished.

  CHAPTER 19

  A SHORT INTERROGATION

  RAIN WAS FALLING hard. Cars raced past. A few people scampered by, anxious to get out of the deluge. The vampire didn’t hear me as I approached. My canines were down and I was so stressed my heart was probably making more noise than my boots. I thought of Charlie’s father and Ophelia, and how I’d failed them, then put all of that anger into an overhand right and dropped it on the base of his neck. Vertebrae snapped. His head tipped back and his body stiffened, then he toppled to the ground.

  People had seen me, but I was more worried that the vampire might recover before I had a chance to get him back to the hotel so we could immobilize him. I draped him over my shoulder and ran for the car. Luna was fumbling with the keys.

  “Hurry!” I said.

  She unlocked the doors and I stuffed the vampire’s body in through the hatch, then slipped into the passenger seat. She was shaking and pulled out into busy traffic. Someone honked. She had to hit the brakes hard to keep us from being broadsided.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”

  She pressed herself back against the seat and took a deep breath. “No. But that thing he did. It caught me off guard. I thought I was finished. Then you came flying out of nowhere. And your face. It was so angry. I’ve never seen you like that.” She let out a tired breath. “Well, I asked for it.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to examine your ideals. Suppose I ought to be more careful what I wish for.” She glanced at me and her lips twitched into a nervous smile.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said.

  She didn’t look convinced. Her eyes darted to the vampire lying unconscious in the back. “What do we do now?”