by C. T. Phipps
I was such an idiot. “I don’t suppose saying I didn’t do it would help in this situation.”
“Of course you didn’t do it,” Thoth said, looking down at me.
I looked up at him. “Because you believe in me? That’s real sweet, T.”
“Because I can read your thoughts,” Thoth said. “Also, you haven’t mastered super-strength and speed to the point you could do this.”
“I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad that you’re supporting me solely based on evidence.”
“You’ll get over it,” Thoth said. “Unfortunately, we have bigger issues.”
“Which are?” I asked, slipping out of bed and looking for my underwear, only to realize it had been bagged as evidence.
I tried to figure out how I felt about Rebecca Plum dying and decided if I wasn’t the guy being framed for it that I didn’t particularly care. The crazy vampire writer lady was a murderous psychopath and serial killer, so it was better she was gone. I didn’t even mind it had cost me my chance to become part of the not-so-rich and famous.
“Because unless we can actually find her killer, you’re going to be handed over to the mortal authorities for execution,” Thoth said, handing me my pants.
I grabbed them. “Excuse me, what?”
Thoth looked over at the police. “The Bureau of Supernatural Services broke into the Apophis with a hot tip Rebecca Plum had been murdered. That gave us a heads up, and I’ve got my people working here on cleaning up the remains. However, we aren’t going to be able to produce her body.”
“We aren’t?” I asked.
Thoth raised an eyebrow. “Beloved vampire author dismembered by a creature of the night is a story capable of destroying everything we’ve been working for these past two centuries. The Council of Ancients would remove voivode Ashura and stake me for a century at the very least. They’d also offer you up as a very convenient scapegoat.”
“So what are you doing?” I said, slipping on my pants commando style. I got a couple of appreciative stares from some female NDPD officers and one male vampire. I hated going commando but what was I supposed to do?
“Ashura has shapeshifted into Mrs. Plum’s form and is currently doing a book signing.”
I blinked. “She can do that?”
“She did a performance as Freddie Mercury at the Apophis a month ago, so yes, she can. It’s not going to solve our problem for long, though. We need to arrange a suitably spectacular but natural-seeming death for her that will leave vampires off the hook. Maybe also hire someone entertaining but trashy enough to finish the last book so it can be released posthumously.”
“Get a fanfiction writer. They love doing this stuff,” I said, thinking of David. “In fact, I may have just the guy for it. Could we get back to the part where I’m getting blamed for this?”
“You were assigned to be her bodyguard and did a spectacularly poor job.”
I grimaced. “Not going to argue with you there.”
“Where is Ms. Onna? She is missing.”
“No idea,” I admitted. “Do you think she did this?”
Thoth didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “You slept with her, didn’t you?”
“Three for three,” I said, realizing just how deep of a hole I was in. “If we don’t have someone to blame for this, I’m going to get turned over to the BOSS as a scapegoat?”
“Worse,” Thoth said. “The Council of Ancients. They’ve threatened to destroy this city for derailing the gravy train.”
“Please tell me a bunch of millennia-old vampires didn’t use the term gravy train.”
“Sorry, they love their little idioms,” Thoth said, looking like he had a serious migraine coming on. Something I was pretty sure no vampire had ever gotten until today. “I would protect you if I could, Peter, but this is beyond my power to fix.”
I pulled on my shirt. “This isn’t your responsibility, Thoth. It’s my mess. I took for granted this would be a milk run and forgot people really are always trying to kill each other in the supernatural world. You’re...we’re like the mafia that way.”
“They learned such things from us,” Thoth said. “The same was as feudalism’s aristocrats.”
I grimaced. “I gotta face it, I got played. That Yukie woman is responsible for this, and I let her get away with it. I’ll find her and deal with her.”
Thoth paused. “I don’t believe she’s responsible for it.”
I looked up. “Why?”
“I trust her,” Thoth said, gesturing for me to follow him.
I did so, walking around a virtual army of Cleaners hard at work. There were also a few bogatyrs present, glaring at me like this was all my fault. Theoretically, the bogatyrs vampires underneath me in the “clean up New Detroit’s messes” business, but they’d all been selected by my predecessor and hated my guts. Also, I’d ticked them off by asking why everyone called them some old Russian named versus referring to them as deputies. Apparently, they took their cheesy vampire titles seriously.
Sam was flittering around the room flicking verbena on various items, which was like covering the place in tear gas for vampires but removed any aura of murder from the place. It also broke any spiritual connection the Bureau of Supernatural Services’ psychics might pick up on. Thoth and I ended up on the balcony by the pool where the two of us were away from everyone else. There was a severed arm in the pool around a circle of blood, which would be yet another thing they’d have to do their best to clean up. Yukie, or whoever, had done a real number on Rebecca before killing her.
I started off the conversation. “You trust Yuki? What are you not telling me, Thoth? You gave a pretty clinical description of your relationship with her back at the airport.”
“There’s not much to tell—”
“Bullshit, she said you and Lucinda drove an entire jury insane in revenge for her mother. You also went over to Japan to free her sister’s soul from hell. I’m a spiritual layman, but I know that’s some serious fucking mojo. Stuff you don’t just hire from a wizard, no matter how much they were willing to pay.”
“Very little,” Thoth said, grimacing. “This is not just my secret to tell.”
“She’s related to you, isn’t she?”
Thoth frowned. “An interesting assumption to make given neither she nor her mother is coffee-brown.”
“Except Kitsune can all shapeshift, and I bet her mother got that power from being the child of vampires.”
Thoth frowned. “You are on the right track but no. Her mother, Ichigo Onna, was Lucinda’s daughter with a Gaki or Japanese vampire. She’s not related to me, but I love all Lucinda’s children the way I love my own. Ichigo manifested her status as a shifter the way it sometimes happened, as much as we like to deny vampires and shifters are related.”
It was weird hearing Thoth speak of Lucinda that way and also ignoring the fact she’d had a child with another man. Then again, Old Ones didn’t view these sorts of relationships the way humans did. I understood some vampires had literally hundreds of lovers and thousands of descendants. It made me wonder if Wilt Chamberlain was undead. Still, it explained why Thoth trusted Yukie. She was his wife’s, his actual wife’s, granddaughter.
“Does Yukie know?” I asked.
“No,” Thoth said, frowning. “She does not. I didn’t even tell her when burying her sister. Lucinda felt that Yukie knowing about it would imperil her.”
I shook my head. “Dick move, Thoth. You realize she’s been hunting for her demon daddy for almost a decade, right?”
“Yes, a father who undoubtedly set her mother up as a method to hurt Lucinda and destabilize Mexico.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Yes,” Thoth said. “Lucinda has not been the same since Ichigo’s death. I was hoping the death of Magog would help her.”
I blinked, processing that. “Wait, when the hell did he die?”
“Three weeks ago,” Thoth said, looking at me very intently as if I should know this. He the
n shook his head. “I have my own adventures when you’re not looking, Peter. I killed his host body but before he was banished back to hell, bound his demonic spirit in his corpse, and then buried it under three tons of concrete.”
“You don’t fuck around with vengeance, do you?” I asked.
Thoth shrugged. “The things I do for love.”
“You realize Yukie doesn’t know this, right? It was her life’s work.”
“I suspect showing her where Magog suffers will help her get over it,” Thoth said, frowning. “I was going to tell her while she visited.”
“What about Lucinda, what does she think?” I asked, wondering how this all fit together.
“She was supposed to be here,” Thoth said, frowning. “Which, with Mrs. Plum’s death, would have put her in an enormous clusterfuck of a situation. One that would potentially benefit Texas.”
“I’m still stuck on the fact you deprived your wife’s granddaughter of the chance to avenge her mother and sister.”
I didn’t disagree with Thoth and Lucinda’s actions. Parents had the right to revenge every bit as much as children, but they should have told Yukie they were hunting him.
“Don’t overthink it,” Thoth said, sighing. “You have your own problems to worry about. As for Yukie’s innocence, I don’t doubt she’s capable of killing Rebecca. Hell, I would have thrown her a party if it had happened at a different time. It’s just the level of strength on display here is more than anything a werefox could pull off. They are a scalpel among shifters, not a wrecking ball. No, this was done by a vampire or other top-tier supernatural. Hell, I couldn’t do this, and I’m two hundred years old.”
“It might have been an Ancient,” I suggested.
“Thousand-year-old vampires usually have better things to do than kill romance novelists with their bare hands.”
“Her books were really bad.”
Thoth smiled. “Too soon, Peter. Do you have any alternative theories?”
“If not for the vampire involvement, I’d say our chief suspect would be the Bureau of Supernatural Services. Maybe they’ve got like an Iron Man suit they could use to do it. All part of some convoluted Hydra-esque plan to discredit vampiredom.”
“Let’s call that theory…unlikely.”
The Bureau of Supernatural Services was an offshoot of the Department of Homeland Security akin to ICE and filled with the federal government’s worst and dimmest. Vampires had predicted there would be a massive surge in funding for supernatural investigations when the Reveal happened. So, they’d done their best to make sure the agency created to deal with the unnatural was populated by vicious idiots. It wasn’t a foolproof strategy since they were still bigots with badges, but the optics of their activity was less, “look at these brave government agents protecting us from monsters” and more, “look at these jerkasses persecuting the cute widdle weredeer.” Rumors attested they had an association with several hunter agencies as well as a few white supremacist organizations despite the lack of general overlap other than things guaranteed to piss Peter Stone off.
“Actually, you may be onto something. The BOSS agents did, after all, know about her murder before we did,” Thoth said. “Even if they couldn’t determine where the body was located. That implies they were tipped off, if nothing else.”
“Which means they probably aren’t directly behind it since they expected to find it at the Apophis. It seems like whoever informed them was probably the one behind the hit and hoping to make trouble for us. Do you think it was a professional job?”
Thoth looked over to the severed limb being fished out of the pool. “There’s nothing professional about this.”
“Yeah, I bet you never left a mess like this.”
“Never,” Thoth said, completely missing my irony. “You should take Sam and David to follow up on whatever leads we have.”
“Aren’t you afraid of your pet witch getting killed?”
Thoth didn’t rise to my childish taunt. “No more than I am you being destroyed. I have no mortal children, Peter. I intend to turn Sam in the coming months, and that will only make her the third vampire I have ever created. I’d rather not lose either of you.”
Okay, that sounded way more serious a response than I wanted. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can come up with. I hate to ask, but did Rebecca have any enemies?”
“In Detroit you mean?” Thoth asked.
“Yes,” I said, annoyed. Thoth was sharper than this. I wondered if he was off his game because Yukie was missing. She might not be of his blood, but it was clear he still cared about her. I wonder if that made Ashura jealous? Like sands through the hourglass, so are the nights of our unlives.
Focus, Peter.
“There is one potential suspect,” Thoth said, frowning. “A vampire she was going to write a book about before dropping him for you. Apparently, he wanted far too large a cut of the profits.”
“You richer-than-God vampires really need to be less tight-fisted with the Benjamins.”
“It’s how we become rich, Peter. That’s a lesson I’ve tried to impart on you.”
“I already have experience being poor, Thoth, thank you. I need to try out being rich. So, who is this unlucky vampire?”
“Carl ‘Red’ Jackson.”
I stared at him as my eyes went cold and the world seemed to become a bright shade of red. “The man who killed my brother?”
“Yes.”
I gave a wicked smile. “Tonight is going to be even more enjoyable than yesterday.”
I now had an excuse to put that asshole in the ground.
Chapter Seven
Flashbacks one of the drawbacks of being a vampire. I don’t mean particularly vivid memories, I mean, “one second I’m there, the next I’m reliving memories from my traumatic past” detective movie stuff. Anyway, this memory was one I had mixed feelings about. It was a moment of triumph, hate, power, remorse, and regret. It was one of those days I exulted in being a vampire because it had given me a chance for revenge.
I was in one of the abandoned tenements of Old Detroit, a real shithole called Lincoln Park Heights. The place had been evacuated because they were moving out the majority of the inner city’s populace to better digs paid for by the vampires as part of their city renewal plan. Many of Detroit’s die-hards had resisted the resettlement, having been screwed in the past, but it hadn’t worked because it just meant the gangs had taken over instead.
The worst of those gangs were the 6th Street Knives, a group containing a lot of people I’d once called classmates and friends. In the nineties, when the city had been at its worst, Carl Jackson had recruited half of my neighborhood with promises of paper and a chance to improve their life. What he’d really given them was jail sentences, addictions, and or bullets in the chest as he spent their lives like dollar bills at a strip club. One of them had been my brother.
I’d been willing to let the past rest when Jackson was in jail for possession and trafficking, but he was out now. Worse, he’d thrown a party that he’d stupidly invited old friends of mine to. Ones who’d told me about it. I was a vampire now, and there was no way I was going to let this human piece of garbage escape justice. I was going to rip his goddamn throat out and suck every bit of warm red juice from his corpse. I was at that stage in my unlife where the only things I thought about were the Need and getting even.
“Jackson!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs, pumping the shotgun in my hands. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”
The third story hallway was riddled with bullets and more than a few bodies as I’d decided to go full-on Matrix through the place. I’d told the Knives to get the fuck out of my way and let me deal with Jackson, but they’d stupidly decided to defend their boss to the end. I’d pulled my shots, but the fact was I was a vampire and could heal anything they dished out at me as long as I had blood. As far as I was concerned, they were all guilty if they were protecting Jackson.
“Please, Peter, don’t kill
me,” a man on the ground I recognized as Tyrone Davis whispered, grabbing at my leg.
Tyrone had been in my brother Damien’s class and was bleeding badly from the bit of buckshot he’d caught. He wasn’t dead like his fellows but that was likely to change if he didn’t get to a hospital. My eyes glowed silver in the dark as I stared at the blood and wanted to lap it up like a dog. It made me sick but also excited me. There weren’t people around me anymore, just 7 billion Big Macs, only the Big Macs were like sex as well as a jolt of electricity to the brain with every order. I’d never done drugs harder than pot but, goddamn, blood was better than anything else in my life. Except revenge. That, alone, calmed me down.
I aimed the shotgun at his head. “Where’s Jackson? He needs to pay.”
“Come on, man, I loved Damien—”
I grabbed him by his now blood-soaked Detroit Pistons shirt and lifted him up against the wall before baring my fangs. He smelled good.
“Where is Jackson?” I hissed in his face, fangs bared.
He closed his eyes and started crying. “Down the hall, man. The last door on the right. He’s got like six guys with him, though. Don’t—”
I dropped him on the ground and started walking down the hall. “If you’re still alive when I get back, Tyrone, I’m going to give you some vampire blood. It’ll fix you right up. If you’re not, then life’s a bitch.”
I was talking tough but the smell of blood and sweat was causing me to shake with hunger. It took every single ounce of my strength to just hold onto the shotgun in my hands versus going after his blood. I would have killed him right there if not for my desire to kill Jackson above all else. That was when I heard Tyrone’s fingers wrap around the Uzi on the ground beside him. The one he’d dropped when I shot him.