He laughed a little, suddenly, and then looked sad. “We started playing ping-pong again. We played when we were kids. We'd play against each other, always, and never anyone else, and I would always win. We started playing ping-pong at the student union and we noticed if we pushed we could get faster and faster and we could maintain a volley for minutes at a time. The ball would bounce back and forth so fast I could barely see it. Someone said we sounded like popcorn in a microwave. It started attracting attention. I said we should stop playing in public because people were a little freaked out if they watched us long enough. Eventually we could go so fast I couldn't see his hands and he couldn’t see mine. If I tried to look for long it all fell apart, but if I just let myself go, if I let my hands do their own thing, we could play and play and play. It was like I could turn off the conscious part of myself and exceed all those boundaries I'd always pushed against as an athlete. Scott was experiencing the same thing. For the first time he could push against those boundaries and get past them.” He sighed slightly. “We loved it.”
“So you, what, bought a ping pong table and moved across the freeway to the sketchy part of suburbia?” I gestured at the world outside.
“Not right away.” He looked up and at me for the first time, but only briefly. He knew not to look a vampire in the eye. “We were roommates on campus. We would do things like play patty-cake – two grown men playing patty-cake in their dorm room at night – or we would go to the gym in the middle of the night and take turns trying to see how much weight we could dead lift. We were like kids again: anything fast and dexterous, any sort of physical task like that, we would compete at it. It was like in a racing game, when you can play against your own ghost? Like in Mario Kart?”
I had zero clue what the hell he was talking about, but The Bull’s Eye seemed to get it. She smiled a little and they shared a glance of understanding. She spoke. “But then something went wrong.” All business, all the time: I wondered if she’d always been like that.
“Yeah. Sometimes bad things would happen. I was in a soccer game and I got my feet tangled up with another player. I broke both his ankles. I didn't mean to. I didn't know my own strength anymore. I was an athlete in a body that had outpaced my control over it. I couldn't trust myself on the field. What was worse, everyone thought I had done it on purpose and they liked that. Sometimes soccer is a dirty sport. It's the price of playing a game that thinks it's still competing with football for attention. Sometimes players are dirty because they have a chip on their shoulder about that kind of thing, but it wasn't what drew me to the game and it wasn't what I wanted. I told Scott we should quit the trial. He didn't want any part of that, and I was scared of how much he still enjoyed it.” His eyes moistened for a moment. It was almost touching, except I wasn’t sure I should believe a word of this. “I was scared of what would happen to him if he didn't have someone there to watch out for him, watching his back.” The kid wiped his nose on the sleeve of his long t-shirt, like a little boy. “He loved everything about it. Now he had, like, superpowers. He felt he had gained…” He searched for a word, and I provided it:
“Abilities.”
He nodded after a moment. “Yeah. To him, it was an additive experience. To me, it was subtractive. I had lost something from it when I lost soccer. The truth, though, was he lost something, too. Once we were extra – that’s what we call it – he stopped trying all the stuff he had done before. He quit the Strategy Games League on campus and dropped out of College Bowl and basically just sat around doing things like shuffling cards really fast and putting his fist through scrap wood. He’s been so happy with himself for being able to do stupid little stuff like that. He didn't want to quit. I think if the guy had offered us more injections, he would have taken it.”
“So what broke up this happy arrangement?” I tried not to sound too sarcastic.
“The Duke Athletics people thought I had juiced. They were afraid the guy whose ankles I broke would sue them, or whatever. They asked me to take a drug test and when I did it came back with something they had never seen before. They said there weren't any of the, you know, banned substances, but there were 'anomalies.' They wanted to know what I was shooting and I told them all I'd done was get vitamin injections.”
I snorted. “Yeah, you and Lance Armstrong. How hard did the Duke Athletics people laugh?”
The Bull’s Eye gave me something like a glare but I ignored it.
Adam’s face grew haunted for a moment. “They didn't. They asked where I'd gotten the shots. I mean, they couldn't accuse me of anything without some proof, right? That's what an investigation is. So they asked me where I got them and I told them about the ad and about my brother and me going to this lab in the Physics Department.”
The Bull’s Eye and I shared a quick glance. “Physics?”
Adam nodded. “'Bioengineering.' That's the term. Scott read up on it. He said it was 'constructionist' in that it tried to come up with new ways to modify living things, usually people, for health-related purposes. That's what this guy was doing. He was trying to invent...” He didn't laugh, more like he caught his breath for a second before going on. “It was like in Captain America. He was trying to invent super-serum. The Duke Athletics people got all that when they went there. They called in the campus cops and interrogated the guy and asked to look at his records. He refused, so they got the Department to seize his records and in the long run it turned out he had been working on us without...” He waved a hand vaguely, slowly. “Approval or something. He was supposed to go before some board or something and he didn't and that meant it wasn't okay for him to have human test subjects and here we were, human test subjects.”
“All because you broke some kid's ankles.” I clucked my tongue.
“It was an accident. It was the first game of the season. I'd been on the field maybe five minutes.” He smiled a little. “That was months ago. The paper never quite got it right, y'know, but they reported something was happening in the Physics Department and someone had gotten defunded and had his graduate project shut down and booted out of school. I was kind of relieved, but Scott got an email from the guy two weeks later, just when I thought maybe things would go back to normal. The shots were starting to wear off. We weren’t so ‘extra’ anymore. Scott was angry but I figured it would blow over. Once he got that email, it was all back on. I couldn't send him by himself, now that I knew what kind of situation we were in.” He licked his lips. “I guess maybe I didn't want to give it up, either, so I said yes, and we kept going. We go every week. The guy gives us injections and has us do some tests for a while and then we go grocery shopping and come back home. We've been living like that ever since. We couldn't take the weird vibe people were reflecting back at us in the dorms so we found a cheap rental in a neighborhood where we thought nobody would care and we moved in and kept to ourselves. We haven't been to class in weeks. Mom is going to kill us. We haven't told her yet.”
I grimaced a little. All that crazy shit to deal with and he was still worried about his mom? He was a kid, just a kid, and some other kid had shot him full of gods knew what.
And, of course, used it on himself.
“Was the guy named Joffrey Hammerton? Blond, slim, good-looking?” I tried to describe how he was dressed the first time I'd seen him, before he stripped down and put on the El Diablo costume. I left off what else I thought: smooth as marble and defined like a dictionary.
“Yeah.” He smiled a little. “Joffrey. He had us call him 'Doc Hammer,' like the guy who writes Venture Brothers? It was weird, but it made it easier to trust him with a needle in his hand.” Adam hesitated. “And he was really, really cute.”
I smiled for a moment.
“What vitamins did he tell you he was using?” The Bull’s Eye's attention was fully on the kid for his answer. Delta Force get trained in the sciences, medicine, everything. Apparently it takes years. Some vampires pass the time by sitting around reading encyclopedias, cover to cover, whole sets one afte
r the other, and they do things like that: turn out to know a ton about some unexpected subject or show a reasonable working knowledge of countless disciplines. It's sort of amusing in a bloodsucker. It's kind of freaky in a human.
“B-12. I know: we were stupid.”
“Where do you meet him? Where do you go for the injections now?”
“This building next to Duke. It's... well, it's kind of hard to describe how to get there. It's in the woods. Sort of.”
Damn, I was impressed: El Diablo was not only still working, he was doing it from a building right next to campus. Hell, with all those woods around, the thing might be on campus. I thought of the dormant old houses past which I’d walked the night I’d seen him: offices and other spaces waiting for the University to find something to do with them.
“You can show us on a Google map or something. Now, the real reason we're here: tell us about the vampire who visits you every night.” I leaned forward to give that some emphasis, but the kid's eyes went wide for a moment and then shut like he had fallen asleep. He just sat there, frozen. The Bull’s Eye looked at me for a second and I shook my head. I knew what that was, and this wouldn't be the first time I had broken it. I reached over, put my hands on the sides of the kid's jaw, swiveled his head towards me and said, with all the mystical oomph I could pack, all the hoodoo, everything, “Tell me about the vampire who drinks from you.”
All the lights in the room dimmed for just a second. Outside, the night got just a smidgen darker and one of the streetlights down the block popped and went out. I hoped the neighborhood kids stayed up for this once we went into the house itself. I'd hate for them to miss a show.
I could feel him resisting – a reflex, something he didn't even know he was doing and was only doing because he had been trained by the interloper – so I pushed again. “That vampire has no hold over you. Speak as a free man. We are your only hope for survival.” Again the lights dimmed, flickering off for a few moments though that hardly affected me. The Bull’s Eye had stopped staring at Adam long enough to glance around at the special effects, then turned her attention to me for a long second. Deep in his mind, somewhere near whatever it is that holds the seat of who we are, I felt another rebound as my command bounced off yet more preprogramming. I hated to do it, but I went for the first emotional switch that came to mind. “If you do not tell us, he will take your brother and you will be alone.”
Adam ground his teeth together for a few seconds and then the dam broke.
“His name is Dmitri and we are his favorites.” Adam's voice came from somewhere high in his throat, straining, something barely surviving the trip up from his diaphragm. “He owns the house and rents it out. He says sometimes he cons someone into thinking they've bought the place, but the paperwork is all fake. He used to drain whoever lived here and rent it out again but he says he's going to keep us here forever. He says we taste the best. He says we make him stronger.”
There was more in there; he just didn't want to say whatever it was. I leaned in. “Keep talking.” This time I just needed to encourage; I hadn't needed to break down the mental blocks like before. Shadows writhed in the corners of the room, but it was a lot less intense this time. I felt his inhibitions drop much more easily. I let go of his head and sat back a little. I realized abruptly that The Bull’s Eye had been holding her breath and now she let it out very slowly.
Adam spoke in a drone. “He says he's lived in the Triangle for nearly a year but he owned the house longer than that.” The kid shuddered suddenly, blinked a few tears away and then looked from me to The Bull’s Eye. He was empty of information and my commands were already losing their grip. The preprogramming the interloper – Dmitri – had done was starting to reassert itself after only seconds. He was powerful.
It occurred to me he was probably very old.
Adam finished, looking me in the eye, with, “You can't let him take my brother away.”
“We won't,” The Bull’s Eye said. I absolutely believed her, and so did Adam.
“Is your brother...” I cleared my throat. “Is your brother, well, into it?” If I'd had a heartbeat I would have blushed.
Adam looked down for a few seconds.
I went on. “There's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
“Scott likes it.” Adam licked his lips, looking very pale.
I cleared my throat and tried to sound gentle. “I'm not trying to pry, I'm just saying neither of you did anything wrong. Hell of a way to come out of the closet, yeah, but it's not your fault you're being taken advantage of. He's doing something we're not supposed to do.” I stopped and drew a breath. “The things we do, some of them feed the person and some of them feed the monster we’ve all got deep down inside, and what he's doing is the kind of thing the monster likes. It likes to debase a human: to shame them and torture them and make them suffer. Feed it enough of what it wants and it takes over. We’re not all psychopaths and it isn’t your fault you happened to get caught up in the craziness of someone who is. It’s not your fault you’re victims, and it’s not your fault if you or he like it sometimes. It’s never too late to say no, to stand up for yourself, and I will absolutely put a stop to this.”
“’We’.” Adam's voice was very dead, but he almost met my eyes. “You burst into our home and attacked us and you want me to believe you’re the ‘nice’ one.”
I shrugged. I had no good answer. We do what we have to do in order to survive. It’s all relative. “Does he warn you before he gets here or does he just show up?”
Adam’s gaze wandered back to the floor. “He doesn’t have to call. We know his approach.” He mumbled the last, finally falling silent and still. His chest rose, but almost like he was asleep.
The Bull’s Eye looked over and mouthed, silently and slowly, “Mild shock.”
I sighed. By my watch, Dmitri was due to show up in roughly a couple of hours. We had to kill him the very moment he arrived.
14
I had wanted to put Scott and Adam safely away in the attic. I could hoodoo them both asleep so deeply they'd snooze right through any craziness that might happen while the rest of us did our work and, just maybe, I wouldn’t be able to smell them from there. No dice: Adam snapped out of it eventually and after that he wouldn't hear of it. He wanted to help. He said he would rather fight for their freedom and I respected him for that. It did occur to me they might be useful combatants given they were now “extra” but I had no idea for how many scenarios Dmitri had accounted in his programming. For all I knew, the kids would switch sides in the middle of the fight. The Bull’s Eye came up with our eventual compromise: Scott and Adam would be chained to a structural support pillar in the middle of the kitchen. They wouldn’t be able to break free – we hoped – but they could warn us of Dmitri’s approach.
We brought Scott into the living room, where I slapped him awake so he and I could go at it for a while inside his head. He wasn't as willing to let go of the experiences he'd had with Dmitri and I knew there had been a point when he had stopped considering himself victimized and started considering himself a willing, consenting participant. I don't claim to understand the complicated boundaries of the ethics of desire, so I didn't take away from him the parts of his Dmitri programming he clearly wanted to keep. Stockholm Syndrome, maybe, but who am I to decide what a body is allowed to like? It was tricky, but I had to try to build in him a sense of the larger context: he was going to be killed by this, sooner or later, and in the meantime it was driving his brother mad. That was what worked, in the end: that sense of having a responsibility to someone other than himself. It was slow-going and it took me the better part of thirty minutes. The things we can do to a human mind are usually imprecise and hurried. There’s a lot of “forget I was here” or “remember that we had a great time making out before I left” or maybe “drive home and remember only that you stopped to help someone on the side of the road”. We don't get a lot of chances to practice subtle manipulations or memory engineering. That
stuff is delicate work and it's never truly permanent. Lots of people turn up every year with what's called “missing time”: an hour or three that's just gone from their memory. Often as not, they decide aliens abducted them. We vampires are perfectly happy to leave them be.
Once Scott was allowed to remember what it had been like at first – the horrific pain of having one's neck literally torn open, healed with a clammy lick when the vampire got done with him; the hangover that wouldn't go away; the shame of being assaulted and getting off on it; the humiliation he felt when Dmitri callously turned that shame against him and used it to demand silence, to demand access to his brother, to demand loyalty – then he was willing to sign up to help. After that we let them spend a few minutes in the kitchen just sitting beside each other in silence. They had a lot to work out, the way I figured it.
Plus, it gave me a chance to talk to The Bull’s Eye alone while Roderick and Jennifer and Smiles and Dog waited outside.
“So,” I said, “There is something we need to talk about.”
“Just one something?” The Bull’s Eye was so damned hard to read. The training to mask everything must be good. I knew some vampires who could have used that.
“Probably not, but there's something that's just come up.”
She nodded, made a little mm sound that seemed to indicate to go on.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 20
