by C. T. Phipps
Dammit.
“Why don’t you go inside, ask him to come to the Apophis casino, and then take him there,” Sam suggested.
“That’s a crap plan,” David said. “Anyone else think that’s a crap plan?”
“I don’t, actually,” I said, blinking. “Worst thing he can do is say no, and that still gets me close to him.”
“Really, Peter?” David asked, betrayed.
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears,” I muttered, unbuckling my seatbelt. “Besides, I’m the bellidix. He has to cooperate with me.”
“Because he’s cooperated with cops so well in the past,” David said.
“Vampire ones, yeah,” I said, thinking about what else I’d heard. “Also, I’m willing to drag him out.”
“Which is an even worse plan,” David said.
“Guys,” I started to say, stepping out of the car. “Here’s how it’s going to be—”
Sam was already talking to the guards at the front gate, though. “You will take me to Jackson now.”
“What?” One of them said.
Sam waved her hand. “You serve your master well, you will be rewarded.”
“Are you quoting Return of the Jedi?” One of the guards said.
Sam waved her hand again. “No.”
Both of them exchanged a look.
“We will take you to Jackson now,” they said in unison.
My eyes widened, and I looked at her sideways. “What did you just do?”
“Magic,” Sam said, shrugging. “Are you coming or not?”
Well, I suppose we could do it this way. Saves on the murder, I suppose. Dammit, I really needed to see a therapist or something about these compulsions of mine.
Walking behind Sam with David at my side, I took a second to take in how easily Jackson’s security was breached. He had a lot of guns and weapons, but it was clear he didn’t know much about mystical defenses. Someone had tried to pull this shit at the Apophis, or one of the Old Ones’ homes and they would have been greeting the sun the next day.
“Nice job, Sam,” I said, privately cursing the fact I was going to have to keep things nonviolent.
Your brother made his own decisions, Thoth said in my mind. You need to learn to respect that.
You can hear me all the way across town? I asked, projecting my thoughts back.
I was trying to contact you, Thoth said. The Texan bogatyr have arrived.
What are they like? I asked, ignoring his earlier statement.
Like they saw a dozen supernatural action films and decided to make a lifestyle from them, Thoth said. Murderers and scum who have been told to raise as much hell as possible until they have someone to blame for this. Their leader, Wyatt, has already stated how much he’d love to carve my face off with his Bowie knife.
So, not the cuddliest bunch ever.
Wyatt is a close friend, actually. We were friends in Tombstone.
Wait, I asked. Is he Wyatt Ea—
They have orders to bring you in, I’m sure, Thoth cut me off. You need to bring in Carl immediately as a peace offering.
Easier said than done, Chief. He’s got a small army of thugs here, and they’re armed like it’s the Green Zone. I don’t want to turn this nice neighborhood into a bloodbath with my friends along.
They’re there to make sure you don’t, Thoth said, irritating me. You need to use subtler methods of persuasion to get him to follow.
I’m fresh out of those.
Work on it, then, Thoth said. Also, there’s something else you should know.
Yeah, I thought back, clenching my fists.
Your brother’s death wasn’t your fault either.
I cut Thoth off, blocking him from saying anything else. Instead, I focused on my surroundings. The guards led us past the rest of their fellows, and I got a look at the interior of Casa De Jackson. I hadn’t known what to expect on the other side of the doors, maybe something equivalent to a rap video, but it was remarkably subdued. There were a lot of children present and their well-dressed mothers as well as fathers around.
“Jesus, is he feeding off the kids?” I asked, ready to kill every single person in this place over the age of fifteen.
One of the guards, instead, spoke, slurring his speech. “Jackson has put the families of all his men under his protection. If they die in his service, then they will be provided for from childhood to college by the Jackson Entertainment Group. He is a good leader.”
I narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, he gets their fathers killed and then starts training their kids as replacements. He’s got a regular little Afghan Warlord thing going on here.”
The guard started to twitch, and Sam put her hand on his shoulder. “Easy, just keep going.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard muttered.
Sam shot me a glare that said, “Do not fuck with my mind-whammy.” I gave her a helpless shrug. It wasn’t my fault that everything I was seeing seemed designed to piss me off. About the time I started to see framed photos of him with Snoop Vamp, I was officially ready to burn this place to the ground. Carl Jackson was the Houdini of karma and was sitting here in his little fortress of smug while too many good Detroit kids were in the ground.
I wanted him to pay for it.
David, thankfully, put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s okay, Peter. It is.”
“No, it’s not man. It’s really not.”
“Just think of all these people as Damien. People who have escaped the life. Remember, your brother was my friend too. Focus your anger on Jackson and Jackson alone. You know, versus all these walking slabs of tenderloin walking around looking delicious.”
I gave him a side-eye. “Dude, we need to get you to a butcher shop, stat.”
“Brains...” David muttered. “Which actually seem like the least appetizing part of the body by the way. I mean, I’m totally thinking about calves, muscle, hearts, and marrow right now.”
I slowly removed David’s hand from my shoulder. “The sad fact is your advice is pretty damn good. Now try to think of something else. Something innocent. Cartoons or something.”
“I tried thinking of Scooby Doo but now I just want to eat Daphne.”
“Poor Velma,” Sam said, sighing. “Never got much in the way of love. She was the first mainstream lesbian character on television.”
I tried to think of a response to that but just shook my head, following up the guards to the upstairs where another pair of guys decked out in body armor with assault rifles were standing. Sam clasped her hands together and started praying to some Celtic gods.
The guards, instead, aimed their guns at us.
It caused the two guards we’d mind-whammied to shake out of their fugue, draw their guns and turn on us.
“We’re werewolves,” the right of the two new guards said. “We don’t fall for mind tricks.”
“You weak-minded fools,” the left one shouted, slapping one of our accompanying guards before growling at the other.
“Seriously? Is quoting Star Wars just a thing in the supernatural world?” I said, staring at them.
“Really, Peter?” David said. “You’re saying that?”
“I thought it was my thing.”
The right of the two new guards shoved his gun in my face. “Give me one good reason not to blow your heads clean—”
I stared at him. “I’m Peter Stone, I could kill this entire mansion before you pulled that trigger. You could kill me, maybe, if you got lucky, then the Vampire Nation would know you killed the man who took down Renaud. That you killed the Sheriff in this town. They’d kill you, your family, your dog, and your best friend from high school plus the girl he took to prom.”
“Fuck it, it is Stone,” the left guard said. “Put your guns down.”
“Are you fucking serious?” the guards we’d mind-zapped said.
The left guard said. “Remember, Jackson isn’t the boss anymore.”
Interesting.
Reluct
antly, they all parted ways.
“Huh,” I said. “That was easy.”
Sam stared at him. “Yeah, threatening their families was really manly of you.”
“I wasn’t going to do it,” I said, shrugging. “That’s just how the game is played.”
“Yeah, well the game sucks,” Sam said.
“No argument there,” I said, feeling ashamed I’d said it. The fact was I wanted a fight, and that was going to make things awkward here.
What had Thoth been thinking sending me here? Oh right, that I needed some asshole to die in my place.
Fair enough.
“He’s down the hall with a concubine,” the right guard said. “We’ll tell the others not to interfere.”
The guard who’d earlier extolled Jackson’s virtues looked furious, but I could tell his opinion on the subject wasn’t shared by any of the others. Indeed, the two werewolves looked more than okay with this outcome. While Jackson was one of their kind, he was also a hybrid, and the majority of shapechangers had a low opinion of the undead unless it was one of their direct relatives. I’d never understood why some shapechangers loved the undead, and others loathed them but Thoth telling me we were fundamentally all branches of the same family made it all clear.
Relatives got a special kind of hate.
The three of us headed down the hall past a number of bedrooms, some of them containing Black vampires feeding on men and women. I figured these to be the undead Jackson had been allowed to turn as part of his service to the Vampire Nation.
None of them felt particularly powerful, and there had been a brief boom in creation following the Bailout before the Council of Ancients had made a serious crackdown on spreading our numbers. There were some two hundred and fifty thousand vampires in the world and most believed it would be better for there to be closer to a hundred thousand or even half of that. Needless to say, it was usually the Old Ones arguing this, and they rarely said it should be one of them on the chopping block.
My own opinion was most vampires in the world were assholes. The few who weren’t tended to be the ones created in the last century. I’d met a total of five or maybe six Old Ones who weren’t complete wastes of space, and it galled me I was on their side during this whole generational conflict. Then again, Rebecca Plum was probably the worst vampire I’d ever met aside from Renaud and she was created a year ago, so maybe it really was just natural selection at work. The best and worst of vampiredom couldn’t survive for centuries; only those who lay squarely in the middle had a chance.
I wonder what that said about me and my chances.
We arrived at Jackson’s office just a few moments later, and it was a glass room with purple carpet, the Knives’ color, and purple walls covered in framed platinum records. The desk was made of glass, but Jackson wasn’t sitting at it. Instead, he was sitting on a couch, drinking from the shoulder of a shirtless black man about my brother’s age. Jackson, himself, was wearing a fine purple suit with a white handkerchief in his left pocket. Jackson looked like he was drinking too deep and I could hear the man’s heart slowing from across the room.
“Oh, you hypocritical son of a bitch,” David muttered, looking down at him.
Jackson looked up, growling, his fangs stained with blood before his eyes widened at my presence.
I punched my fist. “Long time no see, Jackson.”
That was when Jackson threw himself down at my feet. “I’m so sorry, forgive me for not coming to see you directly.”
What the hell?
Chapter Eleven
I stared at the kneeling Carl Jackson as if he were a snake that was slithering up to my feet. The fact he was prostrating himself before me was completely unexpected and really made me want to punch him even more. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have gotten myself a steel stake from a sporting goods shop and stabbed him on the ground while he was prone. As such, I was only armed with my gun and claws that wouldn’t disable him.
Great.
I really hadn’t planned this through.
“Get up,” I said, looking down on him. “We are not friends.”
“I owe you,” Jackson said, rising from the ground. There was an adoring and subservient expression on his face that made me sick.
“What?” I said, again, genuinely confused. “I hate you.”
Jackson looked hurt even as he said, “That’s unfortunate because I really want to do everything in my power to help you.”
I looked at him sideways before looking at Sam. She was checking the pulse of the guy on the couch, who looked completely out of it. “Yo, Samantha from Bewitched, could you give me some insight here?”
“I think he’s mesmerized,” Sam said, removing her fingers from the part of his neck that wasn’t leaking blood. Jackson hadn’t entirely sealed the wound with his saliva, which acted as an anticoagulant, and was endangering the poor bastard’s life. I wasn’t about to go over and lick the injury shut, though.
“I’ll do anything for you,” Jackson said, sounding like he really wished he didn’t mean it.
I looked back at him. “What, he’s mesmerized into thinking I’m Dennis Rodman?”
“Really? Dennis Rodman?” David asked.
“I worship him,” I said. “He brought peace to East Asia.”
Sam rolled her eyes.
Jackson clasped his hands together. “After you rescued the Council of Ancients from Renaud and became bellidix, I went to my sire to complain. I thought you were a war-junkie piece of shit who never should have been a vampire in the first place.”
That sounded more like the old Jackson. “And?”
“Enil was so happy with you saving so many that he changed my mind,” Jackson said, cheerfully. “Permanently.”
I could have throttled Jackson and wanted to. “He screwed with your brain?”
“Yes,” Jackson said, cheerfully. “He just opened the door of my mind and did some furniture rearrangement.”
Damn, I couldn’t be angry at him if he’d been violated that way. Oh wait, yes, I could. Still, there was a lot of shit I hated about being a vampire. The Need, the casual violence, the manipulations by older-than-dirt assholes, and the fact everyone seemed to be rich but me. I used to be upset about the fact everyone was getting laid instead of me, but I’d had sex last night, so I wasn’t going to complain about that.
The thing I hated most, though? The fact your creator could fuck with your brain. Some vampires could mesmerize people with their gaze or voice and others couldn’t, but all vampires could do it with their blood. If you fed a human being your blood, it established a psychic connection that favored the vampire in every way. It was even stronger for those who created a vampire. Your creation was your bitch if you wanted them to be for the rest of eternity. At least until you became an Old One and gained immunity to that sort of thing.
If your creator wanted to, he could make you kill your family, your friends, or change your views on a subject. I’d seen men and women think they were in love with their creators for decades or even centuries, only to have them realize they’d loathed them once someone took their masters out. Thoth had been able to kill his creator because he’d been a latent magic user in life while others broke through the control using sheer hatred. Seeing Jackson reduced to an obedient dog almost made me feel sorry for the guy.
Almost.
“So, you’re my biggest fan now, huh?” I asked, not too unhappy with the situation.
“Absolutely,” Jackson said, cheerfully. “I’m happy to do anything you want, bellidix.”
It was like a smile had been painted on his soul. Damn.
“I was happy to help your creator with his little matter a few weeks ago, which I’m sure you are aware of,” Jackson said.
“Wait, what?” I asked.
Jackson twitched. “I guess not.”
Dammit, Thoth. Were you keeping more secrets from me? Wait, of course he was. He was an Old One. Dude probably had a secret passage to the bathroom and
vampires didn’t even use toilets. “I’m sure we can discuss it at length. Would you like to accompany me downtown? To have a nice chat with some people from Texas?”
I could see Jackson struggling against the command. He had to know I didn’t mean him any good. Going with me was probably a death sentence.
“Sure,” Jackson said.
“Sweet,” I said, happy this was going to be easier than I thought.
“I just need to go talk to my sire downstairs,” Carl said, gesturing to the door.
“Goddammit.”
“I knew this was going too well,” Sam muttered.
“You jinxed it,” David added, looking back out the door at a guard’s leg.
I wasn’t in the mood to speak to the Second Eldest. Enil was the most powerful vampire in New Detroit and while he’d gotten sotted over the past few millennia, part of the reason he lived here rather than in Romania, I doubted he was just going to let me carry off his creation to be destroyed. No matter what Thoth said. Then again, Enil had created literally thousands of vampires over the years and he owed me, so it was probably best to run this by him before I did anything rash.
Putting my hand over my face, I muttered. “Sure, you can go speak to Enil first.”
“Excellent,” Jackson said, his gaze brightening. “He’s downstairs. He came here during the morning, nursing some wounds.”
I blinked, wondering what the hell could injure a thing like Enil. Had he an encounter with our mysterious Ancient? Enil was one of the most laid back, hell, outright lazy vampires I’d ever met so it didn’t seem likely he’d get in a fight with one, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
“Yeah, you do that,” I said, staring at him. “Why don’t you also ask him to come upstairs and talk with me.”
That removed Jackson’s cheerful expression. Whatever he thought I was pulling, he hadn’t thought it was something I’d be comfortable talking with his creator over. “Alright. I’ll go do that now.”
It was weird having that sort of power over a man and made me think I probably would make a terrible Old One. Really, it sucked the whole joy out of the vengeance thing. On the other hand, not only would it make this whole confession/framing thing easier, it would mean no one had to die. Mind you, I’d still have to convince Emil to let me take him but apparently, he thought he owed me. Besides, it probably would be a good idea to ask his help on finding out who this renegade Ancient might be. Emil was a good guy, as antediluvian monstrosities go, so if anyone knew who else might be in the city his age—well, he was my go-to guy.