by C. T. Phipps
“Am I getting paid for this?” I said, not sure I could stand being in the same room with her three days, let alone however long it would take her to write her book.
“Technically, as a public figure, I don’t have to pay you. Also, almost all of the money would be going to the Council of Ancients and my patrons.”
“Of course,” I said. “Then I think it stinks.”
“We could get you something, though! Maybe!” Rebecca said, enthusiastically. “Think of it, you could be the second most famous vampire in the world after Dracula!”
I was back to my theory of being punked. While she was certainly obnoxious in that rich old white lady sort of way, I wasn’t getting a serial killer vibe from Rebecca Plum. It was hard to believe she was a mass murderer and any real threat to Ashura’s reign in the city. Mind you, I didn’t pay that much attention to vampire politics despite being one of the undead. If Texas wanted to have a dust-up with New Detroit then that was none of my business. I also didn’t mind if she wanted to snack on a Neo-Nazi every night. Then again, maybe I was just becoming a bit too jaded to murder given it was still a human being.
Wait, no, Nazi, they didn’t qualify.
“Why would I want to be a famous vampire?” I asked. “You know, which would put me in the eyes of hunters for centuries to come?”
“Everyone wants to be famous,” Rebecca said, looking at me. “Women will throw themselves after you. You can kill them with impunity.”
“I’m not really into killing women,” I said, softly but firmly.
“Then you haven’t experienced what being a vampire is really about,” Rebecca said, her eyes flashing a predatory gleam.
Okay, I was starting to believe the serial killer thing. I was about to tell her to go kiss off when she collapsed to the ground. I rushed to her side. Her eyes had rolled back into her head and she had entered a premature daylight slumber. Given it wasn’t even midnight, that wasn’t a good sign. “Oh shit, please don’t blame this on me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Yukie said. “That’s just all the drugs I put into the Neo-Nazi.”
I was ready to go for my gun, mentally cursing I didn’t have silver bullets. “Why did you do that?”
“Because it’ll be better for the population of New Detroit if she sleeps through the majority of this trip,” Yukie said, sighing and dragging her to the bed. “The promotional tour for her latest book is almost over, and after that happens, I’m hoping the Council of Ancients will arrange a suitably tragic accident for my employer.”
“Not as long as the money’s flowing.” I decided to help her carry the body of Mrs. Plum. The two of us had her to the bed in no time.
Yukie smirked. “But if the author dies tragically then sales will go through the roof.”
I smirked. “I take it there’s no love lost between you and Mrs. Plum?”
“It’s kind of The Devil Wears Prada crossed with Hannibal. Except without any of the charm, wit, or class of either.”
“Why work for her then?” I asked.
Yukie tucked Rebecca in before pulling a sheet over her face. “I made a promise.”
I paused. “Lady, I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t Westeros, we don’t have to hold to every little thing we say we’ll do, especially when it involves being accessory to murder.”
“Isn’t that what you do?” Yukie raised an eyebrow. “I understand you’re the Sheriff and that involves either covering up the deaths of others or killing them yourself.”
“That’s only half true,” I said, knowing that was a crappy rebuttal.
“As awful as the people I work for are, I’m actually in this of my own free will. It didn’t take much to manipulate the Yakuza into selling my contract to the Texan Vampires, and it didn’t take much more to have them put me in charge of Mrs. Plum.” Yukie looked down at Rebecca’s drugged form, which was as still as a corpse. Probably because she was. I hadn’t known you could drug vampires into unconsciousness until tonight.
“You wanted this job?” I asked, stunned.
Yukie nodded. “It’s taken me to dozens of voivode courts across the Americas and some in Europe.”
“Doing some sightseeing?” I asked.
“No, I’m hunting down my father so I can kill him.”
Well, that was a new one. Apparently, we were in Westeros, and she was Arya Stark crossed with Tyrion. “Uh...huh.”
“It’s not exactly an uncommon desire when you’re demonkin.”
“My experience with them is pretty limited,” I said, thinking of the poor bastard I killed in the men’s bathroom of the Qwik and Shop.
Yukie walked over to the penthouse bar and poured herself a brandy. “It’s not really that complicated. Demons are real, just like hell and gods, and sometimes they possess or get summoned into human bodies. They get jiggy with mortals and the offspring are damned from birth to be horrible monsters.”
I chuckled. “Nobody says get jiggy with it anymore.”
“I’m a bit disconnected from pop culture,” Yukie said, looking to one side. “Does it bother you knowing there’s a literal heaven and hell? Multiple ones in fact.”
“Not really, Thoth clued me in. I’m not big on theology.”
My mother had raised me Baptist and I’d grown up believing in God, Jesus, the Good Book, and that if you stepped out of line, then all three would smack you in order. I’d seen stuff in Iraq, though, which had destroyed my faith in a loving God. Not that he existed, no, but that he cared. I’d had that challenged multiple times, but when Thoth had offered to damn my soul in exchange for immortality, I’d accepted it. To this day, I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right decision or not. Most vampires were evil, true, but I’d done more good than I’d ever done as a human. More evil too. I had no idea how to balance those scales.
“Yes,” Yukie said, lowering her voice. “I am aware of your creator. Thoth is one of the most powerful necromancers in the world. He did me two favors.”
“Yeah, everything Thoth does is awesome. Businessman, wizard, assassin, and memetic sex god.”
“He’s a god of sexy thoughts?” Yukie asked, misunderstanding my use of the word meme.
“Or just sex in general,” I said, parking myself on one of the fancy chairs in the room. “So, you want to kill your daddy for siring you?”
“For a lot worse,” Yukie said, drinking down her brandy in one gulp. “My father, the demon Magog, did not treat me or my sister very well. He treated my mother worse. When the Reveal happened and the supernatural became public, he revealed she was a werefox and then murdered her in public with a silver katana. Magog wanted to corrupt the people of Japan, so he ran a race-related defense at his trial that resulted in his acquittal—making everyone party to her murder. All the Japanese saw was his public identity as a Tokyo prosecutor. A lawman doing his duty by slaying a monster.”
I grimaced. “We’ve got some experience with that in the USA as well.”
“Thoth did his first favor for that,” Yukie said. “He came to my mother’s house with another vampire named Lucinda and promised me revenge. I don’t know what their relationship to my mother was, but they gave me my revenge.”
Lucinda was Thoth’s first wife. He had three, and as I understood it, all his wives had other husbands and wives. Vampires were not big on the whole monogamy thing any more than they were on heteronormality. I did know Thoth rarely spoke of her, and it was always with great affection. Every other vampire I asked, though, was scared shitless of even mentioning her name. Perhaps because she shared a name with the voivode of Mexico. Note: I don’t mean Mexico City but all of Mexico. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out if they were the same person given Thoth’s luck with women.
“What did they do?” I asked, having a lurid interest in revenge stories like this. Kill Bill remained my all-time favorite Tarantino movie.
“The prosecutor, jury, judge, and defense lawyer all experienced the murder every night they went to sleep. Most of them c
ommitted suicide before the end of the month. The rest are so drugged up they can’t even see straight. It helped put Japan off juries completely.”
“Damn. Your mother must have been important to those two.”
“I think she was,” Yukie said, offering a glass. “You want some?”
“Sure, pour me a bottle and put an empty glass next to it,” I said. “I’m a spitter, not a swallower.”
“Not the first man who has said that around me but probably the first who has been staring at my chest the entire night.”
“Not just your chest.” I gave an embarrassed shrug. I ignored the jibe since I knew nothing was meant by it. I was as comfortable in my masculinity as a vampire could be since you had to get used to things being flexible when you worked for centuries-old perverts. “You’re a better distraction than most things around here. So you think this Magog guy is hanging around in the vampire courts somewhere?”
“Somewhere, yes,” Yukie said, frowning. “As demon-kin, I can sometimes pick up his presence and what he’s doing.”
“What is old pops doing?” I said, taking a drink of brandy, swishing it around, and then spitting it out into the other glass.
It was a lot to take in that we were discussing a literal demon running around and making people’s lives miserable. As areligious as I’d become post-mortem, the simple fact that Magog was an evil far greater and far older than any human made me wonder how she dealt with it. How did one cope with being the product of pure evil? You know, a question that I’m sure people wanted to ask people like me every day.
Damn, was I drunk? There was just something about Yukie that kept me enraptured. It was like the effect Ashura and Thoth had on mortals. They just looked at people and suddenly you wanted to do anything to please them. It was a weird sensation to have since we were discussing her horribly abused family next to the body of an unconscious mass-murdering romance novelist. Rare was the day I got to use that sort of sentence.
“Ruining lives, siring more offspring.” Yukie shook her head. “Every day I’m afraid some witch hunter or mage is going to dispose of him first.”
“Thoth said to be patient with revenge.” I thought of Eaton and how it had taken years to finally kill him. Even then, it hadn’t been my hand that had killed the bastard who starved me, locked me up, and then put a little girl in a cage with my insane blood-hungry self. No, it had been that douchebag vampire-vampire hunter Renaud who’d killed him. So I sympathized with her desire to get her father before someone else did. “Personally, I’m of the mind you should get your revenge over with as quickly as possible.”
“This revenge is already a decade in the making,” Yukie said, frowning as she poured herself another brandy. “A lot of people, innocent and otherwise, have died because of it. My sister was one of the casualties.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning that. “What was her name?”
“Sakura,” Yukie said.
“Pretty,” I said, unsure of what else to say.
“You’re unusually sympathetic for a vampire.”
“I’m not usually this chatty either.” I took another drink of the brandy. “I’m only five going on six years dead. I still haven’t had time to shake away all those pesky human sentiments like empathy, compassion, and guilt.”
“Like Thoth and Ashura?” Yukie suggested. “I know Thoth’s heart. I don’t know Ashura’s. The Thoth I knew was very much in love with Lucinda. Now I see that he’s married to another woman who is known for her brutality even among vampires.”
It was hard to imagine Thoth being in love. “It’s a marriage of convenience. Also, I’ve seen a lot worse than Ashura. Still, I suppose I can summarize both as noble but not exactly good. They have a code of behavior they follow and that allows them to do what they did to those Japanese folks while also protecting the humans of Detroit from the worst of the vampire population’s depredations.” At least I hoped they were protecting the humans from the worst of the vampire population’s depredations. I’d hate to think everything I was doing was for nothing.
Yukie drank a third brandy. “You think what they did was unjust?”
I tried to figure out how I was supposed to feel about driving a dozen people to suicide and insanity. “Honestly, I would have just killed a few of them or maybe done it one night. Then again, if It was my mama who’d been killed, and I was forced to watch a jury say it was justice, I might have said screw Atticus Finch and burned the whole place down.”
“I like you, Peter. You speak your mind.”
“Not often enough. I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my time. Iraq. After I got back to Detroit. Sometimes in the name of the so-called greater good, mostly because I wanted money or because someone asked me to. It’s like being a video game protagonist. It doesn’t matter what I’m being asked, I just do it.” That was a dark confession to make. “Is it just me or am I being unusually chatty with a woman I’ve known two hours? Especially for a person who isn’t drunk.”
Yukie looked embarrassed. “Sorry, it’s a werefox thing. Just like werewolves can scare the hell out of people even in their human form, werefoxes make people unusually relaxed. It’s a useful trick when you want to put one over someone.”
“So you’re shifter valium?” I asked. “Do people still take valium?”
Yukie smiled. “I don’t know but, yes, we make people chatty. Especially when we’re attracted to someone.”
“You’re attracted to me?” I asked, surprised.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Yes.” I sipped my drink and tried to swallow but ended up coughing it up. Damn, still couldn’t do it. Some vampires could but it was not my forte.
“It shouldn’t be,” Yukie said, walking over to me and sitting down on the ground beside my chair. “Anyway, I’m making conversation. I admit this job has weighed harder on my soul than I ever expected. I may have been born damned, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“If you’re born damned, find a better God.”
Yukie looked taken aback then looked at me from the side. “Do you believe you’re damned?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I chose to become a vampire. Thoth didn’t lie to me the way so many other creators do to their progeny. I just didn’t believe him about the costs. I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn’t.”
Thoth had come to me after my brother had gotten gunned down in one of the pointless gang wars between Carl “Red” Jackson and his rivals. Damien Stone had never been the smartest of the family, but he’d always been the most passionate. He’d also been the most ambitious. He’d also made the reasonable decision that I was in more danger in Iraq than he was in dealing pot. In the end, he’d been wrong, and Jackson was the one person I wished was dead more than Eaton. It was part of the reason I’d accepted Thoth’s offer of immortality—to get a shot at him.
I’d failed.
“Would you do it again?” Yukie asked. “Make the choice to become a vampire? Knowing what it entailed?”
I didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know.”
Yukie looked down at her drink and stirred it with a single clawed finger. “Would you like to bite me, Peter?”
I looked up and over at her. “You know, that’s, uh, really sexual right?”
“I’ve heard,” Yukie said, starting to undress. “Which would go with the sex I’d like to have with you right now.”
I grinned. This night was turning out a lot better than I’d expected. “Do we have a spare bed? If we don’t, I’m happy to throw Rebecca in the bathtub.”
Yukie chuckled. “There’s three in this place.”
“Awesome,” I said. It made me temporarily forget I was supposed to contact Melissa and that we were kinda-sorta still in a relationship. Don’t judge me. Or if you do, judge me for all the other horrible shit I’ve done.
What happened next made it the best night I’d had in a long time. I should have known it was about to go horribly sideways.
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Chapter Six
The sex was hot, passionate, and a little on the rough side. I thought Yukie bit me more than I did her. It was a little weird going at it with Rebecca sleeping off her Neo-Nazi cocktail in the other room, but I’d had sex in stranger places and under weirder circumstances. In the end, it was very satisfying and the best blood I’d tasted in a long time. The potency of it actually managed to put me away earlier than daytime, and I ended up sleeping by her side in the penthouse guest room.
I woke up covered in blood.
And vampire body parts.
I could smell the thick ichor coming from the muscles, flesh, sinew, and bone spread around me.
“Ah man, not again,” I muttered, my head pounding and my vision not quite 100% if I’d been drugged or not.
Contrary to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampires didn’t turn to dust when they died. Instead, they reverted to whatever age they were when they’d died. So, some older vampires turned to dust, others became skeletons, and others still into fleshy rotting corpses. As a vampire for little over a year, Rebecca Plum was one of the latter with the only saving grace being her body parts didn’t have any smell of dismembered human corpses.
The guest room was exactly as I’d left it with black sheets, a metal shutter over the drapes that were time-locked to open only during the night, white blood-splattered walls, black marble floors, and a nice wooden dresser that was currently sporting Rebecca Plum’s severed head on it. The Cleaners were at work, disposing of the evidence that a particularly grizzly murder had taken place here.
Thoth was sitting at the base of the bed looking unhappy with me. He was wearing the same outfit from last night, which meant he’d managed to stay up the entirety of the day dealing with this.
I pulled myself up against the headboard. “I’m in a lot of trouble, aren’t I?”
Thoth frowned and stood up, leaning on a rune-encrusted walking stick. “That could be the understatement of the decade.”
I looked over at the digital clock on the wall, which said it was close to 9:30 PM. I’d overslept, which was something I never did. Vampires woke up usually an hour or two before the sunset so they could get themselves all prepared for hunting in the evening. I also was stronger than the majority of my kind and was getting up around noon, lately. That was another argument toward the drugged theory, especially given I knew Yukie was responsible for doing the same to Rebecca Plum.