Last Call

by Lloyd Behm II

  “DPS is going to list her as missing and do the usual ‘Missing Person/Amber Alert’ for her. We don’t know that they’re going to use her as a replacement for the vampire they lost,” Terry said.

  “That’s cold,” I said. I could feel the tears starting to run down my face.

  “Hard, too,” Terry replied, “but it’s the truth. From what Jed said on the way over here, you want the truth, not some happy story to keep you going for the next year until we find her skull being sold as a ‘true ancient artifact’ on the internet.”

  “True enough,” I replied. “I…I guess that answers the question she and I have been arguing over, though.”

  “What’s that, if you don’t mind me asking?” Terry said.

  “What I’m going to do now that I’m out of the seminary,” I replied. “That is, if y’all are still hiring.”

  “Oh, we’re always hiring,” Jed replied with a feral look.

  “Just remember what they say about revenge,” Terry said.

  * * *

  I was still sitting in a chair in Billy’s kitchen. The TV on a cabinet at the foot of the table was dark, still tuned to a dead channel.

  “That was a whole lot of not fun,” I said, sipping from the glass in front of me.

  “It’s only going to get better,” Mel said, a small smile on her face. “Now you know how things work, so we can get to the fun stuff.”

  She reached out a hand to touch me again. I tried to dodge it, but somehow Iulius was behind me, holding me in place.

  “Fuck me,” I said as Mel pushed again…

  * * *

  First real mission, and it would be raining, I thought as I followed Jed to the run-down light industrial facility. It had been a number of things over the last fifty years, most of them dealing with the meat trade. Ten years ago, a local group of artisans had bought the place and were going to start producing “Fair Trade, Ethically Raised, and Ethically Slaughtered Meats,” with a sideline in other animal products for night dwellers—aka, the things that went bump in the dark.

  “How you holding up, Jesse?” Dave asked through my earphones. He, along with the massive mute called “Dave’s Keeper,” were manning the support truck, a huge Mack Granite with more electronics than I’d ever seen in one place, short of a Best Buy.

  “Fine. I’m doing fine,” I replied.

  Jed held up one hand in a fist. We halted in place.

  “Capdepon, covering position. Jesse, Crash, stack up,” Jed said, sotto voce. He eased up to the door. “Shit. Capdepon, I’m going to need the charges.”

  Officially I was filling in for Reverend Polk, Jed’s number two and religious expert, because she was on mandatory down time. Unofficially, I was filling in for Terry because Jed thought he’d found Mel, and it was my job to make sure she made it to her final rest.

  That part sucked ass, honestly.

  “I’ve never seen a meat packing plant with a vault door like that,” I said as Capdepon brought the charges forward.

  “Good thing we’ve got explosives, huh?”

  “Be nice if we had someone who’s experienced in placing them,” I replied. “Two days of training does not an EOD tech make.”

  “True,” Jed said, working the charges in place around the doorframe. “Experience, however, is a good teacher.”

  “At least the walls are stone, not cinder block,” I replied, sliding down the wall to minimum safe distance.

  “Once we blow this…”

  “I know the drill,” I replied. “You go in first with that damn scatter gun, I follow you, and Crash follows me. Shoot anything that’s still moving. Fun times.”

  “Something like that, yeah,” Jed replied. “Fire in the hole!”

  The door blew inward under the impulse of the explosive; Jed followed it into the structure, and I entered on his heels.

  Crash hung up in the door for a minute, then eeled through.

  Inside, the room stank of rotten flesh and corruption, with just a hint of dried blood. The door had cut through a meat counter before continuing through the outer wall of the showroom cooler. It had also cut down someone, or something, leaving a broad red smear across the filthy black and white checked tiles.

  Jed tossed a flashbang through the hole. Flashbangs are great against humans. Against beings who see in infrared or ultraviolet spectrums, or have extra-sensitive hearing? They screw them up.

  The flashbang went off with, well, a flash and a bang, and we followed it into the cooler. Jed chopped up a ghoul in the corner that was batting at the pretty balls of light. I hit the emergency release on the inside of the door, and then Crash leapt—he did one of those flying kick things you see in some bad Hong Kong cinema—to open the door.

  The cooler opened onto the killing floor. Someone had known we were coming and cleared the room—except for a coffin, framed in the half-light of a filthy skylight.

  That smell…Jesse?

  “Shit,” Jed said.

  “This screams trap, Jefe,” Crash said, trying to scan the entire killing floor at once.

  “No shit,” Jed replied. “Capdepon, move inside, let Dave and his Keeper cover the outside. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  He’s got a bad feeling about this?

  Jesse…the Master says I must kill you and those with you…

  “How do you want to handle this, Gunny?”

  “Only one way to do it,” Jed replied, flipping his shotgun over and reloading. “Hey-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle.”

  “Compensating for something, Jefe?” Crash quipped when Jed clipped a twenty-one-inch-long bayonet onto his forty-inch-long shot gun.

  “Yeah, I’m compensating for not carrying a magic sword,” Jed said, pointing the rig at the katana and wakizashi combo hanging from Crash’s left hip.

  Honestly I felt a little blade deficient myself, since I was only carrying a machete.

  “Let’s dance,” Jed said, stepping out onto the killing floor.

  If this had been a Hollyweird vampire-hunting movie like Blade, we’d have reached the point in the movie for the musical killing montage, set to “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” or “Sympathy for the Devil.” Instead, Dave was out in the Granite pumping “Hazy Shade of Winter” through our headphones. At least it was the Simon and Garfunkel version, and not that crap thing the Bangles turned out.

  Right then I swore one day I’d lead my own team and set the music.

  As soon as Jed cleared the first row of equipment, ghouls started falling through the suspended ceiling like some sort of supernatural airborne drop. I’ll admit it, I hung up in the door for a minute—flashing back to the desert, watching a hungry ghoul eat Morrison’s face.

  “Damnit, Jesse, move!” Capdepon shouted, pushing me out the door onto the floor.

  I moved, killing a ghoul on the wing—it was only sporting, you know?

  Master…Master? They’re killing the ghouls you left to protect me! I can’t move…

  “Ammo check,” Jed said as the last ghoul hit the floor.

  “Dry,” Crash reported. I’d watched him fire a big Smith and Wesson Model 29 dry, then toss it and the hilt of his broken wakizashi into the face of an attacking ghoul, before drawing his katana, and slicing a ghoul in half from groin to shoulder.

  I dropped the mag in my UMP and checked it. “One magazine, ten rounds,” I reported, reseating it.

  “One hundred rounds,” Capdepon called from the door. “Y’all were in the way, a lot.”

  “No worries,” Jed replied, wiping goo off his bayonet. “I’d rather not catch a stray round, you know?”

  Why have you abandoned me, Master? Jesse? Why are you here?

  “You still have the tools?” Jed asked me.

  I felt the pouch hanging from the side of my armor. Inside was a box containing holy wafer, water, and wine, the short form of a prayer for the release of the human soul from eternal damnation. Hanging from my belt was a hammer and a pouch of wooden stakes.

 
“Yeah, I’ve got them,” I said, dropping my UMP to hang from its sling and pulling out the box.

  “You’re probably going to need this,” Jed said, handing me a casket-locking key.

  “At least they put her in a nice box,” I said, looking at the casket.

  All you can think of is how nice the casket is? Oh, Jesse…

  I started opening the casket, and Crash grabbed the “informational scroll” from the other side. If nothing else, it might help us track down who’d sold the lich the casket.

  There’s a scene in Bram Stoker’s fictionalization of the hunt for Dracula where the Heroes gather to kill Lucy Westenra. Stoker describes the changes to Lucy—her voluptuous walk, the unclean hellfire in her eyes, the blood-soaked robe. Mel showed none of these things. She looked like she’d come home from work and dozed off on the couch, waiting for me to get home so we could fix dinner.

  My heart ached as I pulled the hammer and a stake off my belt, took a deep breath, and drove the stake home—just at the base of the sternum, angled slightly toward the head. Mel gasped once, then froze as the stake bit into her flesh.

  Thank you…

  * * *

  “A little warning next time, huh?” I asked as the kitchen came back into focus.

  “If I warn you, it’s not as fun,” Mel replied, a wicked grin on her face.

  “Damn, woman, dying changed you,” I said.

  “Somewhat, yes,” she replied. “Although if it makes you feel better, what you did sent me here, rather than to hell.”

  “What?”

  “I was on the cusp of hell,” Mel replied, sliding a glass of amber fluid across the table.

  I sniffed it—whatever it was, it wasn’t tea. A sip showed it was a rather nice whisky.

  “Thought you’d need that,” she said. “I was in a state of balance when you freed me.”

  “I get that part,” I replied. “But how?”

  “I wasn’t perfect when I was alive, but my soul was headed for heaven, until I hit that truck. There were some things I did while under the lich’s sway…you know how being a vampire works, right?”

  “Michelangelo has explained it, yeah,” I said, taking another sip of whisky.

  “Did he explain it, or explain it?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is this—I can tell you what it feels like the first time you wake after feeding, or, if you’d like, I can let you relive it from my point of view.”

  “If we have to do it, I’d rather you tell me about it. Nothing personal, you know, but reliving my past mistakes is going to be hard enough,” I said. “I take it that’s a high point in the life of a vampire?”

  She threw back her head and laughed, a clean, joyous sound.

  “In some ways it is. In most ways, it’s a stain on your soul that never goes away. I wonder why Michelangelo never discussed it with you.”

  “Probably because he never went through it,” I replied.

  It turns out that everyone who’s ever worked with Michelangelo over the last hundred years has asked him about becoming a vampire. These days he holds a special briefing so he can answer all the questions at once when FNG’s join a team in an area where he’s working. That still doesn’t prevent awkward questions when he’s sitting on a stakeout.

  “He never went through it?”

  “Correct, Socrates. He never went through the ‘mindless leech boy’ phase, instead awakening as a vampire on the day he ‘died,’” I replied.

  “That’s…that’s not right,” Mel replied. “All the power on day one with none of the costs?”

  “I wouldn’t say he hasn’t faced any ‘costs.’ It took him a century or more to realize he could replace human blood with pig’s blood, for example.”

  “Then how did he survive?”

  “His art was still in demand after his death, so he took on an assumed name and started painting and sculpting again in the Mannerism style.” I shrugged. “One of his patrons at the time kept a…zoo, I guess you’d call it, of curiosities. Michelangelo was one of them, and he met another vampire while he was there who explained how to survive without consuming human blood.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say to that,” Mel answered.

  “I’ll be honest, when I read that in the company records, I swore off rare meat for a couple of days and thought about going vegetarian. The details of the formula he survived on for centuries are…disgusting. Before reading about that, I just figured Group had a deal in place where he was to get out-of-date blood from the local blood bank or something to keep him going.”

  She shuddered. “Not an option.”

  “Why?”

  “The anticoagulant they use makes the blood taste off,” Mel replied with a shrug. “The lich that had me created forced me to try it to prove I’d never escape its control.”

  “I’m sorry, that sounds horrible.”

  “It reminded me of those Rip-It things you drank when you came back from Iraq,” Mel said. “That metallic, chemical taste. Still, it was better than when it fed me on meth addicts for a week or so.”

  “I’ve heard that can have effects on vampires,” I replied.

  “Oh, yeah. One of the metabolites of meth does a number on vampires. When you’re up, it’s the highest high. The crash, however, is horrible, and that bastard of a lich kept me on the downside for a long time trying to break my spirit.”

  I took her hand. “It took another year after we tracked you down, Mel, but we did hunt that bastard down. Crushed his skull into powder, burned it, and scattered the ashes after soaking them in holy water.”

  “At least you were thorough,” she replied with a grin.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 8 – Diindiisi

  While I had been learning the finer points of dragon paroles, Austin emergency services had shown up and were doing their jobs—the police started crowd control, and the fire department checked the structure and offered aid as needed. Tatsuo did her best to hide behind my “retainers”—a word she insisted on using because it made her surrender easier.

  “Lawyer will meet us at the QMG Office,” Fred said. “She’s on retainer to QMG as well, but I don’t have a clue who’s paying for this.”

  “Legal fees are usually paid by…” Tatsuo started.

  Fred rounded on her. “The parolee, if I remember correctly. Ori! What does mining law have to say about it?”

  “In essence, that’s correct for mining law,” Ori said. “It’s been a while since I took the human law course, though, so there could be some differences.”

  “What are you, a lawyer?” Tatsuo asked Ori.

  “No. Mining accountant.”

  Tatsuo shuddered daintily. “I’ve heard of you guys. You’re almost as bad as otaku.”

  “Human law, at least here in the States, says if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you,” Singh said.

  “I thought that was just in criminal cases,” Padgett said.

  “No, it’s been expanded to cover supernatural forces as well,” Singh said.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Padgett replied. “You’re what, pre-law?”

  “Yes. Well, I was before I tracked down a Buru in a river in England,” Singh replied as my phone began ringing.

  “What the hell is a Buru?” Padgett asked as I interrupted “The Blue Danube” to answer.

  “Diindiisi?” Jed asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you meet Jesse?”

  “The Shadow Lands.”

  “Good,” Jed said. “Sorry about that, someone was playing games with our phones. Do you need anything?”

  “No. Although that explains why we all got the same message,” I replied.

  “I’ll have IT pull new phones for your team.” Jed sighed. “I understand there was some excitement downtown?”

  “You could say that. I’ve got a dragon for us to question. But there are some issues.”

  “Don’t tell
me you took its parole…”

  “Yes.”

  “Hot damn! Let me check and see who the resident expert on dragon paroles is…”

  I could hear keys clacking—Jed was an energetic one-fingered typist.

  “You know, it’s worth it,” he said finally.

  “What is?”

  “The resident expert, the guy who wrote the book on dragon paroles for QMG, is Sola Stellus. I get to wake the bastard up.”

  “Enjoy that. We’ll be bringing Tatsuo to headquarters as soon as APD clears us to get the cars out of downtown.”

  “I’ll see you then, Diindiisi.”

  I slid my phone back into a pocket. There was an APD officer waiting a polite distance away.

  “Yes, Officer?”

  “Ma’am, the…person of short stature over there,” she pointed generally in Fred’s direction, “said, quote, ‘this is your circus, and they’re your monkeys.’ Is that correct?”

  I gave Fred a look. He tried to look like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  “Yes. I’m the senior QMG representative on site. There was an incident, and we have the situation under control.”

  Something came crashing through the windows at ground level, smashing into Lou’s Studebaker.

  “I take that back; we had the situation under control. Hold your fire!” I shouted as weapons came up.

  A stagman stepped from the wreckage of the car, shaking its head to clear its antlers. A wolfman in the remnants of a suit and trench coat stepped from the building.

  “Shit, that’s Lou,” Fred said.

  “Who’s the Stag?” Dalma asked.

  “Probably Ryan, from the rags of robe it’s wearing,” Fred replied. “Light him up?”

  “No. Let Lou handle this,” I replied.

  “Not this shit again,” Dalma said as the stagman reached up and pulled the remnants of its robes off. It was male and rampant.

  Decidedly rampant.

  “I had heard Ryan was a bit…selective in his tastes, ma’am,” Tatsuo said. “Wonder what he did to piss Lou off?”

  “Or what Lou did to piss Ryan off,” Padgett said.