Day of Execution

by Lily Luchesi

  “Vincent told him that? And he believed it?” Danny asked, aghast.

  “You know how convincing he could be. Remember he told you that I only wanted you to keep you as a pet?” Angelica asked pointedly. “You believed him.”

  “I wasn't exactly in a great frame of mind,” Danny protested. “What else does it say? How far back does it go?”

  Angelica shook her head. “There are no dates, but at least a month, I’d say. And nothing said in here bodes well. … He told Daniel to get my books! He told him to find the spell to contact him further.”

  Sean glanced behind him at the other room. “The spell to kill that kid? And Daniel just did it? Is he fucking mental?”

  “Obviously,” Angelica said. Her hands were shaking, somewhere between fear and rage. Daniel had been fooled by Vincent, hoodwinked by his charm, and in return had fooled her and Danny. It was almost admirable. She lied for a living, and yet she had never been able to lie so cleanly, so easily. “Daniel told him how hurt he was when he found out you were alive all this time. That’s how Vincent got to him. He played on his pain, his sympathy. He talked about our family drama. Told him how I’d murdered him with your help and then took control of the vampires. As if he could ever run our Empire.”

  Danny’s eyes widened and he said, “Repeat that last part, Angie.”

  “As if he could ever run our Empire?” she said, confused.

  “Oh no. I think I know exactly what Vincent wanted,” Danny said. “And why he needed Daniel, in particular, to get it.”

  It took a moment, but it clicked in Angelica’s head and she dropped the notebook as her fingers went numb. “Daniel’s next in line to be the Emperor.”

  Danny nodded and Sean looked ready to pass out.

  “But … he can’t actually be the Emperor,” Sean said. “You guys would need to die first.”

  “Not both of us,” Danny said. “Just me. Just to give Daniel my powers, and that would be enough to lead the vampires who want to kill humans against Angelica and her side, the good side.”

  She nodded, putting the plan together easily in her mind. “Two warring factions of vampires, one war. Winner take all, loser goes to Hell. And if Vincent convinces enough vampires to get on their side, I might not stand a chance.”

  “But you’re not alone,” Sean protested. “There have to be more vamps on your side than on theirs.”

  Angelica shrugged. “I don’t know. They didn’t all follow Dakota because she wasn’t a vampire. Our species are very high and mighty, they won’t bow to any other species. But if Vincent and Daniel — the future Emperor — come out with a plan of attack against me and everything I’ve ever fought for … vampires will flock to them from the world over.”

  “Then we stop them before they can do it. Plus, wouldn’t Daniel need to be turned first?” Danny asked.

  Angelica gestured to the hallway. “The blood in the living room … it’s enough spilled to be from turning a human into a vampire. Vincent retained his vampiric abilities because he was a vamp when he died. I think Daniel’s already been turned.”

  Sean said, “But he needs a victim now, right? To kill to fully turn?”

  “That could be anyone,” Angelica said.

  Danny shook his head. “No. My vision … the first one … Alec was killed by a vampire bite. You gotta warn him!”

  Angelica took out her phone and punched in his name, glad she didn't need to remember numbers for the past century: technology had taken care of that and freed up her mind for more important things.

  It rang five times before the wizard picked up.

  “Oh, you’re alive!” Angelica gasped, unaware that she’d been holding her breath.

  “Excuse me? Of course I’m alive, didn’t you just text me?” Alec asked.

  “No, I did not, and whatever the text said, disobey it!” she commanded. “There’s a demonic vampire and another newly turned one on the loose. You need to stay somewhere safe until we apprehend them.”

  “I’m at the PID. Is there anywhere safer?” he asked. She heard an elevator ding.

  “NO!” she cried. “Get out of there!”

  There was a clicking noise, a shout of, “What the Hell?” and then a scream. And then silence.

  Angelica saw that the call had been disconnected. She lowered her phone slowly, trying to get a hold of herself. “They’re at the PID. Danny … I think your vision’s starting to come true.”

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Then God help us all.”

  “Where are we going?” Daniel asked Vincent.

  “You need to feed,” the vampire replied. “And kill. Your powers cannot be activated unless you kill a mortal.”

  “Does that mean that Danny and Angelica both murdered people?” Daniel asked. “After all the bullshit they’ve been spewing?”

  Vincent nodded. “Indeed. Mancini went the easy route, he killed an old man on his deathbed in hospital. It was a mercy killing. Angelica … she went a bit further. It was a moment where I was truly proud of her, as she tore into the throat of a human woman working at the PID.”

  “Murder in cold blood?” Daniel asked, unable to believe it. “How do they expect their subjects to listen to them when they — especially her — did exactly what they said it was illegal to do?”

  “It is part of why the vampires need you … need us,” Vincent said. “First you need to feed. And then we will execute the rest of our plans. By tomorrow night, the Emperor will be dead, and power will be yours.”

  A few more blocks passed and Daniel asked, “Are we heading to the PID?”

  “Yes. They will be out searching for us. This will be our base. The best way to defeat my daughter is to take away the center of her Empire. Are there any allies you might wish to get out of the way early on?”

  Daniel nodded slowly. “Alec, the wizard helping me with my powers. Nosy bastard, and I know he didn’t like me.”

  “Then he will be your initial victim, the vessel carrying your rite of passage. Get him to the PID,” Vincent said.

  Daniel sent a text: “It’s Angelica. New phone. Can you get to the PID ASAP?”

  A moment later the response came. “On my way. Are my trainees all right?”

  Fuck off, old man, Daniel thought. I’m done having my mind invaded by you. In Daniel’s mind, Alec was just as bad as his former psychiatrist, trying to pry where Daniel didn’t want him to go, telling him he could be doing better.

  They reached the PID and no one said a word. The employees all recognized Daniel, and it had been so long since Vincent was their “Undesirable Number One”, that no one had ever seen his photo to recognize him.

  They settled in Angelica’s office, and Daniel said, “Where would they be going to search?”

  Vincent scoffed. “You flat … apartment. Possibly the university. If they go to your flat and see the blood, they may think I’ve killed you.”

  “Oh no,” Daniel muttered. “I have my roommate’s body in his old room.”

  “Why on earth did you keep a corpse?” Vincent asked.

  “I didn’t know how to dispose of it,” he replied.

  The demon shook his head. “Amateurish behavior. Ah well, soon we can leave our victims wherever we please. This will be our world, under the banner of vampires, approved by Hell. No one will dare threaten our superiority again.” He cocked his head. “The elevator is about to arrive.”

  Daniel stood up, unsure of how to make his fangs extend or even how to drink from a victim. He was thrown into this life unawares, and while the latent power within him created confidence, there was just enough humanity left to doubt that they could possibly succeed.

  The elevator doors opened, revealing the old wizard, who was talking on his cell phone. “I’m at the PID. Is there anywhere safer?” he asked.

  Daniel could hear Angelica cry “no” on the other end of the line, and just that one, shrilly shouted word evoked a rage and darkness within him that he hadn’t even known was there.
<
br />   He reached out and grabbed Alec by the collar of his cloak.

  “What the Hell?” Alec cried, dropping his phone.

  Daniel yanked him aside and crushed the phone underfoot as he felt his fangs extend. There was pain, and he tasted his own blood, but he was too filled with hunger and anger to bother registering it further. He saw the fear gather in Alec’s eyes and he let out a scream as Daniel sank his fangs — just the two long canines like the other royals had — and tasted human blood for the first time in his life.

  The hot spray hit the roof of his mouth and almost made him choke with the force of the flow, but he moved his mouth and began to swallow with each pulse of Alec’s dying heart. It was Heaven, it was disgusting, it was perfect. With each swallow he felt his strength growing, his eyesight getting clearer, and his other senses intensifying tenfold.

  He felt Alec pass out from blood loss and kept drinking, sucking deeply to get the blood that the heart would no longer pump. Daniel felt his heart stutter and Alec breathed his last in gasping hiccups as Daniel twisted his neck before he died from the blood loss.

  He dropped the corpse to the floor, breathing hard, satisfied and elated. Power thrummed in every nerve ending, and he knew that he was meant for this, meant to lead the vampires. Meant to wield this unimaginable power that his great-grandfather wasted away in passivity.

  Vincent came out and gazed at the scene before him. “Excellent. Step one is complete. Now, why don’t you leave the body as a gift to my precious daughter while I handle the gathering of the Undead? By tomorrow’s sunset, the Emperor and Empress will fervently wish they’d never been born.”

  9

  “They’ve got him! They’re at the PID,” Angelica said. “We have to go.”

  “And do what?” Danny asked. “You think he’s alive? If your father and my psychotic great-grandson are there, then we need to hide. And plan. Besides, the sun rises soon. None of us can fight, and that includes them. We need to take the next two hours to figure something out to do when the sun sets.”

  She nodded. He was right, tempering her hot-blooded anger as he always had. “Daniel wouldn’t attack us on our turf if he didn’t have my father whispering lies in his ears. If they’re at the PID, they won’t leave it tonight. Which means we can go home.”

  Sean nodded. “You have computers there, right? I can get as many messages for assistance out as I can, on your behalf. And don’t give me any of this ‘vampires only’ bullshit. This is every creature for themselves, and I am going to fight at your sides. Got it?”

  “If you weren’t correct, I’d slap you,” Angelica said. “All right. Let’s go home and plan.”

  “And pray,” Danny added darkly.

  Using vampire speed, much to Sean’s protests, they got up to the Mancinis’ penthouse quickly, and made sure it was secure.

  Sean went straight to the laptop Angelica offered him and started typing away furiously.

  “Okay, they wanted the PID, and I can see why. It’s our base, and Vincent knows it was started solely to track him. So this is a kind of twisted revenge,” Angelica said, pacing. “Vincent is beyond saving. Question is, can Daniel be reasoned with?”

  Danny looked down at his hands and said nothing.

  “Doubtful,” Sean said. “Murder is a slippery slope. And so far Daniel’s killed his roommate, those two witches, and now Alec, apparently. That’s just in the past week. I hate to say it because I liked the kid, but he’s beyond redemption.”

  Angelica pressed her forehead against the mantle above the fireplace. “When he first came to the PID and signed the contract, there was this teeny tiny voice in my head screaming to kick him out and burn his contract. I should’ve listened to it! Intuition is never wrong.”

  Danny stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. “You can’t think like that. The past is the past and can’t be changed. It’s not your fault that this happened. In fact, if you’d turned him away, what’s to say he wouldn’t have been even angrier and of more use to Vincent than now?”

  “Stop being the voice of reason: it’s annoying,” she muttered. “Okay, you two were leaders of teams before, at the Chicago Police and in the Army. What did you guys do when hostage situations or hostile takeovers happened?”

  “We tried to reason with the perps,” Danny said. “Not going to happen here, that’s for sure. And when they wouldn’t be reasoned with, we smoked them out.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Sean said, surprisingly agreeing with Danny. “Can we flood the vents with garlic powder and choke them to death?”

  “Not without endangering other vampires in the building,” Angelica said. “And don’t forget, how would we get inside? Anyone in there could be against us now.”

  Danny leaned his head back against the couch cushions as he sat back down. “Okay, can we lure them out? Fight them in the street? More of an even ground?”

  “Not if they have allies already,” Sean said. “We need eyes inside the PID. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”

  Angelica snapped her fingers and ran to get her main laptop while Sean kept using the spare. “I have this system and I never bothered using it… The PID security cameras get sent over to me on a private feed. No one even knows about it because, as I said, I never used it after it was installed in like, twenty-twelve.”

  “Does it still work?” Danny asked.

  “One way to find out.” She clicked a few keys and remembered her login information to the software. After a moment of booting up and updating, her screen split into multiple sections, showing different rooms.

  “Jackpot!” she cried. “I see them.” She clicked on her office’s thumbnail to enlarge it, and there they were, her father sitting at her desk as though he belonged there. “You fucker, didn’t you take enough from me; now you have to take my company, too?” she asked, eyes glaring daggers at the screen.

  “Do you have audio?” Sean asked.

  “No, unfortunately.”

  Danny leaned over her shoulder and said, “I can lip read a little. Let me see…”

  “You can lip read?” she asked. Why didn’t I know this?

  “They taught it and ASL at the Academy. I never caught on with ASL, but I was great at this. I’m out of practice now, but I can see Vincent pretty well. … ‘Did they teach you to fight?’ he’s asking Daniel.”

  Now Daniel was nodding, but the camera didn’t let Danny see his lips.

  “‘It will be easier now that…’” Danny trailed off. “He did turn him. I thought how pale he looked was from the cameras.”

  Angelica bit her lip. Daniel still wouldn’t have the powers of the Emperor, but only one person stood in his way. Daniel was a psychopath, that much was obvious now, and Vincent was knowingly evil and vastly intelligent. I can’t let Danny out of my sight. Neither of us can do this alone, she thought. We’ll die for sure then.

  “Are they silent now?” Sean asked, still working on contacting as many vampires as he could. “And do we consider this a hostage situation?”

  “I don’t know,” Angelica said. “I think no one knows what’s going on right now. Our emergency button, did we install the app on Daniel’s phone yet?”

  “Nope. You want to alert everyone and tell them to leave?” Sean asked. “I have it right here.”

  “No,” Danny said. “There are two huge problems with doing that: one, the distress call will have this address pinged and therefore no one will know why the signal’s been activated. Two, they’ll both hear the simultaneous beeps from everyone’s phones and know we sent some sort of alarm.”

  “Are you always right, you asshole?” Sean muttered.

  “No, but when I am, I wish I wasn’t,” Danny replied. “We’d have to quietly evacuate the building, but how?”

  “Mass text message?” Angelica suggested. “I can access our files and get everyone’s numbers.”

  “If Vincent hasn’t compromised them,” Sean said. “Again, though, the simultaneous beeps from all the
phones will alert them.”

  At that, Angelica laughed coldly. “Please. He wrote a threatening note on a victim in calligraphy and on parchment. He’s not exactly tech savvy, and I doubt there are IT classes in Hell.”

  “That’s what we can do!” Sean said, snapping his fingers. “But I’ll need your help. This goes beyond what I know about computers.”

  “What?” Danny asked.

  “Angelica can access our personnel files. There’s an automatic alert set up to notify every agent when their file has been changed. And they have to be changed one by one, not all at once, so they won’t be notified at the same moment.”

  Angelica caught on then, logging into her account at the PID’s website and opened her employee records, clicking on ‘active employees’. “I can change their files to explain the threat and get them out of there, or keep them out if they’re our daytime employees.”

  “And Thing One and Thing Two in there will be none the wiser. Nice,” Danny said.

  “Will it work, you think, or am I overreaching?” Sean asked.

  “You are way overreaching, worse than early twenty-first century crime shows. But everything is worth a shot,” Angelica replied. She didn’t have time to type much, and she hoped that her instructions would be followed. If not, there was nothing she could do. You can’t stop stupid people from being stupid, and she was sure that some employees would go to her office to ask her what was happening. And there they’d meet their deaths. She just hoped that they wouldn’t reveal anything to Vincent.

  “This is Angelica Cross. There is a threat in the building who thinks I don’t know what is happening. Please exit the facility in a calm manner so as not to alarm the persons causing the threat. Do not speak to anyone. Do not engage anyone who may seem to be combative.

  “If you are not currently at the PID headquarters in Chicago, do not go there until you have been assured by the following people that it is safe: myself, Daniel Mancini, or Sean Wireman. I wish to spare anyone here from harm.”

  She auto-updated all active files except for Daniel’s and breathed a deep sigh. This was all they could do for the moment. She closed that screen and pulled up the cameras again.