“Which ‘they?’” He was dressed like it was ‘80s night at a goth club he didn’t like very much: white pleather jacket, white parachute pants, a white shirt. It should have made him look less pale but instead it just made him look washed out, more pale than ever. His hair was loose rather than in a pony tail. I was dressed in my standard-issue black jeans, black boots, black trench coat, a black t-shirt for a band I’d never gone to see: SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS. I’d figured it was for the candy, at first, before someone had explained.
“The local vampires and whoever all they’re hiding,” I said with a shrug. It seemed so obvious to me. There was clearly a parallel organization up here, some gang of vampires who thought they’d escaped notice. The part that bothered me most about them was that they were right. They had escaped my notice for years upon years, and they would have kept doing so if one of the people protecting them hadn’t murdered my last mortal friend, and if Marty Macintosh hadn’t sweat bullets to tell me without telling me that something bad was going down.
“And whom do they hide?” Roderick dug a bent cigarette out of a soft pack on the inside of his jacket. From the look of the package, the cigarettes were at least twenty years old. We don’t have much call to care about stale smokes, though.
“I don’t know for sure, but I have a theory,” I sighed. I crossed my arms over my chest as Roderick stuck the cigarette in one corner of his mouth, palmed his lighter, began flipping it end over end between his thumb and index finger, impatient to light it but unwilling to draw a lot of attention to himself in the hotel were he slept during the day. I watched him flip the lighter back and forth a few times and then opened my mouth again. “This may be crazy, but I think there’s a bunch of them. Not just the two The Transylvanian paraded around in front of the other night and the one Carla confirmed might or might not exist.”
“Why?”
“I dunno,” I said. I reached up and rubbed the back of my neck again. “Just a hunch. And now here I am, reminding people I’m the boss and asking a bunch of questions and suggesting that I know a little – but not a lot – about at least one of them. If anything is going to get them to respond, surely it’s that. You know, Carla and Blaine both fed in front of me.”
Roderick grimaced in disgust, the cigarette bobbling between his clenched lips. “Gross,” he muttered.
“I know. Weird behavior. I suspect there’s a whole parallel society here: some sort of social scene to which neither of us are privy. It’s strange to think of because there are so few of us we don’t normally have trouble keeping tabs on each other. I mean, I thought I honestly knew the name, at least, of every vampire in anything like a city in this whole state.” I crossed my arms again. “I think if we find them, we find out the big secret.”
“And what if we walk into a bar full of super-secret vampires?” Roderick nearly lit the cigarette, then caught himself. The elevator was taking about ten years getting to the lobby, I had to admit.
“Easy,” I said, stifling a yawn. It was still early. “We kill all of them but one and make that one talk.”
“And then?”
“Kill him, too, of course.”
Roderick finally got to light his cigarette outside the front doors of the hotel. He was staying in a nice place right smack in the middle of town. There were four night clubs, three open-late coffee shops and two performance venues in Asheville proper. There was also the country and western place out at an old Holiday Inn by the airport, but that was where I’d go if we couldn’t turn up anyone at any of the places downtown. For some reason, downtown just seemed like a better place to start. We tend to be urban creatures; always have been, according to tradition. You always hear stories that somewhere or other - New York, Los Angeles, Paris, wherever - there’s a vampire who was a Roman Senator or a Greek philosopher or an ancient Chinese Mandarin, though I’ve never met any of them. All the history I’ve heard was oral tradition. Vampires are all mouth, anyway: teeth and tongue and talking. We don’t write much down. I guess the kids with blogs and Twitters are changing that now.
Roderick and I agreed to split up to make it easier. If I went one way, I’d be able to check out the juke joint and the goth bar, one of the performance venues and two coffee shops. Roderick could check the rest by going the opposite direction. If either of us spotted anything worth investigating we’d text the other with the letter T, easy to get to, easy to find, easy to type in a hurry. Roderick gave me a little salute and a mean smile and turned right to head off into the night. I watched him go for a second, thought about asking if we could go together, then shook it off and went my way.
We had a lot of ground to cover.
The coffee shops were a bust. There were a bunch of high school kids and a few college students who’d ventured away from campus. I could smell a pot deal going down in the bathroom. So typical. Nothing ever changed. I ordered a small coffee, black, and had a taste of it before dumping it into the trash on my way out. My maker had taught me to keep food down but I’d never been much for coffee.
The performance venue was this club right there on Pack Plaza, downtown in Asheville. There was some big-name band playing there and some protesters outside. I’d read about this in the paper: the club sold tickets online and a bunch of people from out of town had bought them all up. Hardly any locals could get in. They were pissed; there were letters to the editor. I figured if that was their biggest problem, Asheville was probably in pretty good shape.
I crossed the square, past the Vance Monument, the front steps and big glass doors of the BB&T building, the closest thing Asheville had to a skyscraper. The county jail and city police station were down the hill, across a long expanse of green lawn. In the summer, during Bele Chere, this would be packed with bands and crafts vendors and crowds and funnel cakes. I wasn’t there, of course – we give “sunburn” a whole new meaning - but I’d come down once after dark and watched some of the very last acts one of the nights. It had been fun but not really my scene. Too many people walking around laughing and drunk and having fun. Too much life for one of the walking dead to really enjoy himself. The last thing on my list was the little goth bar, this place catty-corner on the square from the rock club with the protesters. It was actually the likeliest place to find them but I wanted to eliminate the easy targets first. The night was cold and crisp and very clear and the moon was rising in the east like a big eye in the sky.
I could smell vampires before I got to the door. I stopped, looked around, sniffed the air. A kid in a fishnet shirt and a heavy winter coat came out the door of the little goth place and I felt the smell hit me like a weight pressing against the inside of my lungs. It was oppressive. It was like gagging on the reek of a corpse.
I flipped open my phone and texted Roderick. Fifteen seconds later I got this back: OMW.
Whatever that means, I thought to myself.
“On my way, of course.” I’d asked Roderick what it meant when he got there and he’d laughed like I was a kid asking what a cuss word meant. “What else could it mean?”
I shrugged it off and pointed at the bar. I was sitting on the edge of the reflecting pool in Pak Plaza, facing the door. I hadn’t seen or smelled anyone come or go, but every time the heavy door opened and closed again I got another dose of heavy vampiric presence. “In there. Lots of ‘em, by the way it reeks.”
Roderick settled in beside me, occasionally looking at his phone to tell the time. That was another thing he’d successfully scavenged from humanity: he never much wore watches anymore. It was nearly midnight - I’d taken a long time walking and checking out the places on my list - and the moon was very high, over halfway across the sky already. Finally, at midnight, a little girl in a sort of Funereal Cheerleader look bopped out of the door and down the street and when the smell hit me I saw Roderick physically recoil - at first - and then lean forward, eyes closed, nose up, right into the smell.
“I think this is going to be so fun,” he said. He smiled like it was Christmas morning.
I wasn’t carrying any guns, of course, and neither was Roderick. You don’t just go walking around town packing a bunch of heat. We wouldn’t need it, anyway. I wanted destruction. I wanted to reach out and end their lives with my bare hands, and a gun doesn’t give you that sense of satisfaction. All the Freudian fantasies of all the second amendment fruitcakes in the world are no substitute for seeing the life go out of another’s eyes while your fingers are still wrapped around their neck. I wanted that immediacy of experience. I wanted to feel it happen. I wanted to express and assert myself in a very direct, tactile way that a gun would never allow.
“Are you much for fighting?” I tried to ask it with as much sensitivity as I could.
“Cousin. Tsk tsk tsk.” Roderick smiled with only one corner of his mouth. “I enjoy a broad array of interests and murder is definitely one of them.”
Roderick and I stood up at the same time. I cracked my knuckles back and forth against the palms of each opposing hand, a loud and lengthy process that sounded like treading on a box of lighted firecrackers. Roderick simply took his hands out of his pocket and zipped his pleather jacket up to the neck. I looked at him slightly oddly, I guess, because he smiled again and said, “I like this shirt too much to get a bunch of blood on it.”
I laughed - I had to, I couldn’t pretend I was any better than he was - and we walked in step to the front door of the club. I opened it, gestured for him to enter, he demurred theatrically, insisted that I go first. I did so, finally, and the guy checking IDs at the door looked us up and down. I don’t know what he was going to say - it could have been a get the hell out as easily as a word of hello - but I put my fist straight through the glass window he sat behind and into his face so that he went down in a heap.
Roderick pulled the door shut behind him, wrapped one hand around the old-fashioned handle and twisted it so that the door would be stuck then yanked the neon OPEN sign’s cord out of the wall. I opened the door into the club proper, where no one had heard the thing with the window and the greeter because of the music. It was thumping, bass-heavy stuff with a gravelly voice going on about some damn thing or another. Roderick stepped up beside me and closed his eyes to sniff the air again. A few kids turned to look at us but I didn’t pay them any attention. There was a back room somewhere, I could tell that, because the aroma was still thick in here but it trailed off past the expansive wooden bar and around a corner somewhere. I figured maybe half a dozen vampires, I couldn’t be sure. Roderick was savoring their aroma way too much for my personal liking, so I walked over to the bartender - tall, skinny, long hair, very good looks, early thirties, with a Van Dyke going just the right amount of gray to invite closer inspection. I bet he got a lot of action with a face like that in a joint like this. There was a time when I would have come here just to flirt and leave embarrassingly oversized tips. I chucked a thumb in the general direction of the back room and leaned forward. “Blaine come in?”
The bartender looked me up and down and sweat formed on his upper lip. He wasn’t clueless; he knew enough to be scared, anyway. “Maybe,” he said. “Lots of people come in.”
“Not so many they can’t all get out in a hurry, though, right?” I reached into the inner corners of his mind, my own will crunching his to tiny fragments. Anger helps the hoodoo sometimes. “I think maybe you’re closing up early tonight.”
All the color drained out of his face as he gazed around and past me. “I think maybe we’re closing early tonight,” he droned in response.
“Everyone needs to go out the emergency exit.” I said that slowly and distinctly, close to his ear as he leaned farther in. “There’s something wrong with the sprinkler system and they need to go right now. The pipes in the back are making a funny noise.”
He leaned back, swallowed air once and with glassy eyes walked over to the DJ booth, climbed into it, turned down the music gradually and leaned into a microphone. “Everyone, I hate to do this but we need to close up early. I think there’s something wrong with the sprinkler system, there’s a funny noise in the pipes in back, so I need everyone to go out the side entrance over here.” He gestured with one hand and everyone looked at him, looked back at one another, looked back at him. “Seriously, folks, I hate to do this but it’s a safety hazard. We’ll be open again tomorrow night.” Sullen kids started to pull jackets and some backpacks and various things together and leave. I waited one minute, then two, and the twenty or thirty people there were all gone. The bartender came back with the same glassy expression and looked at me. “And now you and the DJ,” I said as I heard something wooden splinter nearby.
The bartender walked over to the DJ, grabbed him by the arm and dragged him, protesting, out into the street. The side door swung shut just as Blaine came around the corner from wherever the back room was. I guess he was going to ask what the hell was going on. He saw me and froze in place, mid-step.
Roderick had hidden in a shadow in a corner. He stepped out of it and drove a chair leg - that was the splintering sound - right through Blaine’s chest so that it stuck out covered in blood. Blaine gasped and wheezed and pawed at his own chest.
I smiled, walked over and took him by the neck with both hands. “Blaine,” I said, very calmly, “I felt like maybe you didn’t get the point the other night. It’s a shame; I kind of liked you.” Then I slammed his head down on the corner of a table so hard the table flipped up and over onto him. I grabbed it by the stem in the center with both hands, raised it, positioned the edge of the table over his neck and lifted it over my head to swing.
“Very creative,” I heard Roderick say, then I brought the edge of the table down so hard on Blaine’s throat that his head came off with a wet snap and a wrenching sound. I half-turned to watch it as it flew away across the tile floor, bounced once and then dissolved into ash in the span of a second. I turned back and his body had done the same. He was a pile of clothes and wasted potential.
I dropped the table on its side and dusted my hands with a little more drama than I’d originally intended. “That’s one,” I said.
Roderick grinned and clapped his hands a little. “Cousin,” he breathed, voice high and shallow, “I think I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in our whole family.”
I grunted. “Come on: less talk, more kill.”
We both set off for the back room where we could smell more vampires and hear nothing; they’d probably heard us dispatching Blaine. These wouldn’t be surprised. We were going to have a fight on our hands.
The back room was small with walls painted a cheap black that had flaked and chipped so dots of the white innards of cement blocks were visible here and there. It had a pool table in the middle with a red felt cloth on it and a couple of pillars of chalk in the corner and not a lot else: a few posters for bands that performed in a different time and place, a bunch of high wooden chairs, a couple of coat racks. What surprised me was how many vampires were in there. Half a dozen, easily. Luckily for us, they were all young. Roderick still had that white pleather jacket zipped up to his neck. I would have found it constricting to say the least, but he’s such a skinny little thing I’m not sure he noticed he was wearing it. He dropped into a crouch for about a quarter of a second before springing straight through the air and landing on the first one with his knees wrapped around the fellow’s chest and his thumbs in his eyes.
The vampire in question was some Latino guy, so the second surprise was that Blaine couldn’t handle a Puerto Rican with a flat tire, but he was fine with a hispanic vampire? That was one of those little factoids that snagged in my brain as I went about other business: namely, I had a pool cue down off the wall and was busy shoving it between the ribs on a skinny black kid whose fangs were out and whose eyes were bloodshot. I wondered idly if that was the guy Carla had meant – Charles, AKA Chucky - but I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. A scan of the room in my peripheral vision let me know Carla wasn’t there, which I found interesting. I hit home with the cue, felt lu
kewarm blood spray out around where the stick was protruding from the guy’s heart, and I let his weight help me snap it off at the wound so I could spin it with one hand and ram it through the mouth and up, into the brain pan of one that came flailing towards me the moment we walked through the doors.
Three down, three to go. Nope, make that four. Roderick stood up from the one whose skull he’d just torn open with bits of gore and brain dripping from his hands and there were four still standing on the opposite end of the pool table. Our entrance and those three killings had taken something in the neighborhood of four seconds. Ashes were still floating in the air from the first ones we’d killed.
Those remaining stared at us, two with their mouths open, one with her mouth closed, one with his fangs out and this ridiculous tongue-waggle like the lead singer for KISS. I made a little pfffffut noise of amusement.
“It isn’t fair if you get more than I do, Cousin Withrow.” Roderick was staring at the four of them, eyes flickering back and forth between them so fast a human wouldn’t have been able to keep track.
“Actually, given this is my state and it’s my autho-“ I paused, and edited. “My wishes we’re acting on, it’s totally fair.”
Roderick made a little tsk noise and then the four of them came at us. One - a big fat white bubba of a guy - leapt onto the table and sprinted forward, but I put my head down and one knee on the edge of the table so that I simply rammed him in the crotch with my forehead when he got to me. He went over my back, head first, hands grasping but finding nothing there; I rolled forward, spun around and leapt back over the edge of the pool table to plant both knees in his belly and punch him so hard in the chest that his sternum cracked and splintered ribs made little point marks at the outside of his Boot-Scootin’ Boogie t-shirt. It looked like he was smuggling a giant spider under there.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 17
