The Tome of Bill Series: Books 5-8 (Goddamned Freaky Monsters, Half A Prayer, The Wicked Dead, The Last Coven)

by Rick Gualtieri

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t try,” Sally offered.

  “You wouldn’t,” Tom replied.

  Sally, in response, merely gazed back at him.

  “Okay, maybe you would.”

  Did Someone Leave the Oven On?

  My worries about spending the night at the Brooklyn safe house, a dump if ever there was one, were fortunately for naught.

  As the afternoon grew late and the shadows began to lengthen enough so a vamp could venture outside, we finally turned onto our block. I was happy to see the normal row of apartment buildings loom over us. Though there were far more boarded up windows than we were used to seeing before the world turned to shit, the neighborhood otherwise looked as it always did. Even better, our building hadn’t been reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.

  Sadly, that didn’t mean it hadn’t been affected by our absence.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “What?” Tom asked. “They fucking burned it down, didn’t they? Oh, I am so sending the Draculas a bill when this is all over. Somebody turn my head so I can see what’s going on.”

  “Relax, the building is still there.”

  “It’s the door that isn’t,” Sheila added, pointing out the source of my annoyance.

  “Goddamn, people suck. You can’t even leave for a long weekend without some asshole deciding to help themselves to everything you own.”

  “We don’t know that’s the case.”

  “Oh yeah,” Sally scoffed. “I’m sure it was just a concerned neighbor deciding to check on you guys, make sure you were dead, that sort of thing.”

  The second car in our two-vehicle convoy pulled in behind us. If there was only one benefit to the impending apocalypse, it was that the parking situation in Brooklyn had improved dramatically. Of course, even if it hadn’t, it wasn’t like any of us would care much if we got towed. Heck, the only one of us who even owned a car...

  Shit! I let that thought trail off as I considered Ed. Wherever he was, it was a safe bet his situation made ours look like paradise in comparison. That was something to keep in mind.

  This homecoming was temporary at best. None of us could afford to get comfortable. There were too many lives at stake. Maybe it would be a good thing if we’d been cleaned out. It would give us cause to move more quickly in our efforts as opposed to letting the malaise of familiar surroundings sink in.

  Regardless, if the building had been emptied, there wasn’t much we could do about it. If the vandals were still around, though, well, they were in for the rudest homecoming party they could imagine.

  “Let’s go.” I made it all of two steps toward the door when the stench hit my overly sensitive vampire nostrils. “Ugh!”

  “What’s wrong?” Sheila asked from behind me. Whereas in the past I’d found myself envying her Icon powers, now I couldn’t help but be jealous of her human sense of smell. Ratcheted up senses weren’t always a blessing.

  “Smells like melted body fat,” Sally said casually.

  “Why would you even know that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Serves them right for touching my shit,” Tom said.

  “Shut up or you’re going into my back pocket,” I warned my roommate as we crossed the threshold.

  I glanced back as the rest of our contingent approached. Two vamps, an Icon, and four witches. Unless a primal god had taken up residence here, anyone still inside would be in for a nasty surprise.

  Actually, it really wasn’t outside the realm of reality for a god to have done so. I mean, shit, hadn’t I already met at least one?

  “What’s the hold up?” Sally complained from behind.

  “Just contemplating theology,” I replied before forcing myself to continue onward.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Once inside, the stench became more concentrated, like a pig roast gone insanely wrong. I took another breath, letting the unsavory aroma assault my olfactory receptors. “Smells like it’s coming from the basement.”

  “The basement?” Christy asked from near the rear of our lineup. “Damnit! Out of the way!”

  “Huh?” I barely had time to open my mouth before I was elbowed to the side. The hallways of our building were fairly narrow and Christy had bulked up just a wee bit in her current pregnant state. So I found myself pressed up against the wall as she shoved her way past me.

  “Where you going, babe?” Tom asked.

  “Hold up,” I said. “We don’t know if it’s safe or not.”

  A second later, Sheila pushed past me, too. “Don’t just stand there; let’s go.”

  Sally was hot on her heels, both of them hurrying after Christy. So much for caution. Oh well. With fingers crossed that some demon from the Abyss wasn’t waiting for us below, I made my way after them.

  The top of the stairs were dark, not that it was an issue for those of us with night vision. However, that changed as we made our way down. The door leading into the basement, normally kept locked, had been kicked in much like the front door.

  However, unlike the front entrance, shimmering light came from inside. That’s when I remembered the glowing energy ball Christy and her coven had set up in there to keep our power on while the rest of the grid suffered from increasingly common outages.

  Sally’s confirmation of what we were smelling, combined with that knowledge, gave me a sinking feeling in my gut. However, that was still more pleasant than the sinking feeling from my feet once I entered the basement and stepped in something with the consistency of pudding.

  Sheila voiced what I was certain all of us were thinking. “What the hell happened in here?”

  That was an understatement. At least five charred skeletons, maybe more – it was hard to tell – lay around the room. The bones had the consistency of a rack of ribs that had been sitting in a smoker all day. As for the rest, burned scraps of clothing lay here and there amidst the puddles of, well, what I assumed were the rest of them. Christy herself stood almost ankle deep in human soup as she studied the glowing ball of magic connected to our main breaker panel.

  “Holy fucking hell!” Kelly said from behind me as she and the other two witches joined us.

  “I’d say that about sums it up,” I replied before focusing on Christy again. “Any idea why this place looks like a scene out of Hellraiser?”

  “Good,” she murmured, seemingly more to herself than any of us. “It’s still salvageable.”

  I cleared my throat. “Seriously, what the fuck happened here?”

  She no more than glanced over her shoulder as if she had better things to worry about. “They messed with power beyond their understanding and paid the price. They’re lucky they didn’t vaporize the whole building.”

  “Yeah, about that. ‘Lucky’ isn’t quite the word I’d use.”

  She stepped past me as if I wasn’t there. “We have a lot to do, sisters. The prism needs to be stabilized if this is going to work. The rest of you should check the upstairs while we get started.”

  “I don’t suppose we could maybe mop down here first,” Kelly said from the doorway.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m gonna barf if we don’t,” the auburn-haired member of their coven, Veronica, added.

  Christy simply glared at them, a shimmer of red power crackling around her for just a moment.

  Neither of them moved until Meg stepped past them and squished over to Christy’s side. “You heard the lady. There’s work to be done if we don’t want to be reading by candlelight tonight.”

  “Or blown to bits,” Kelly added under her breath.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Unsurprisingly, Sheila wasn’t too happy at casually brushing off the deaths of nearly half a dozen people. Sure, they were probably scumbag looters, but being liquefied might have been a somewhat harsh punishment for their crime.

  Still, she seemed to realize that sticking around and arguing was pointless. That, or the gnarly smell was finally getting to her. We heade
d upstairs to check on our respective apartments while the witches worked their mojo ... and hopefully also took Kelly’s advice on mopping.

  Amazingly enough, the apartments were still locked up tight, necessitating me breaking into mine since I’d lost just about all of my possessions during the trip up north. It seemed our would-be burglars decided to start at the bottom and work their way up, much to their own detriment.

  I flipped on the light switch, then quickly turned it back off again after seeing how everything flickered. Though I couldn’t help but think it shouldn’t be her top priority, I still wished Christy well in fixing the glowing thingee.

  Alas, lights or not, the place felt disturbingly empty. My roommates had been with me last time I’d been inside. Though a cloud of impending doom hung over us, at least our number had been whole. Now, Ed was kidnapped for God-knows-what nefarious purpose, and Tom was dead.

  “Let’s check out my room and make sure everything is okay.”

  Dead, but not quite gone yet. A small miracle, but in the gloom of the apartment, it gave me hope. And so long as there was hope, we’d keep pushing forward.

  “I said to check things out, not touch anything. Hands off Cheetara!”

  Oh, fuck this noise. I laid out the ThunderCats figure on his dresser, then positioned Tom on top of it missionary-style.

  “Dude, the fuck? Hmm, actually, this is kinda hot.”

  I closed the door to Tom’s room behind me. Yeah, hope would keep us moving forward, but a little douchebag spite didn’t hurt either.

  Down Time in the Dumps

  Three days ... three fucking days!

  I slammed my fist onto the cheap countertop of our kitchen nook, cracking it down the middle. Hell, I was tempted to tear the entire fucking thing out and throw it across the room, security deposit be damned. Not like there was anyone around to refund it anyway.

  I steadied myself and took several deep breaths. When that didn’t calm me, I opened the top cabinet, grabbed the bottle of Jose Cuervo sitting in it, and poured myself a shot – a Sasquatch-sized one.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d almost flown off the handle since arriving back home, and that had me worried.

  A part of me was convinced it was just the stress of waiting, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. Dr. Death had been silent in my head ever since I tried blowing myself up in a bid to rid the world of Vehron. That act had somehow shut him up and resulted in the nice – if minor – perk of not needing to wear my glasses to see. I was hoping that last part was permanent but was still paranoid enough to carry them in my back pocket just in case I went all nearsighted again at the worst possible moment.

  The thing was, what if my fraying temper was also a side effect? What if this wasn’t frustration, but his essence oozing into the pores of my subconscious? He hadn’t been able to win by browbeating me. What if he was trying something more subtle?

  What would that mean for me? For my friends? For any innocents who happened to be around if I finally lost it and went batshit vampire insane?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The days were toughest for us. The witches had sequestered themselves in the basement. I assumed they were hard at work reverse-engineering the ancient spell we hoped to use against the Jahabich and a few other folks. At the very least, the smell of human bacon had dissipated from the place. But beyond that, I was mostly left in the dark.

  Hell, Christy had even retrieved Tom to be with her, leaving me alone in my apartment with nothing but my thoughts. At least the lights had stopped flickering, meaning I could amuse myself with some single player video games, but they served as little more than a temporary distraction. Also, I lost one hard fought level at the last second and almost pounded my desktop into mush. Damn thing was liquid cooled and had cost me over a grand.

  The nights weren’t an issue, though.

  Sheila apparently liked being cooped up as much as I did, despite having the freedom to go out during the day. She’d suggested the three of us – she, myself, and Sally – start patrolling together at night, not entirely different from what we’d done up in Boston ... albeit hopefully more competently.

  Sally had demurred. I’d hoped she’d bounce back quickly once her memories had returned, and at first that seemed to be the case. However, the more time that passed, the more withdrawn she seemed to become. I also saw the way the fire went out of her eyes whenever I mentioned Starlight. I got the impression – between Alex mind-raping her and that – she was barely holding it together.

  Though she kept her thoughts close to the vest, I knew from experience when someone was busy overanalyzing things and beating themselves up over it. Unfortunately, despite my entreaties to the contrary, she didn’t appear to want to talk about it.

  So that left the two of us – Icon and Freewill – to team up as a dynamic duo of sorts. Manhattan was currently devoid of vampires, but that didn’t mean shit these days. It was a big city, full of tasty people, and there were plenty of things more than happy to treat it as an all-you-can eat buffet.

  We’d taken to patrolling the seedier areas, places where the power was out and where the red and blue flashers of the police didn’t seem to have a presence. For two nights we’d done so, and it hadn’t been boring in the least. Monsters, both human and otherwise, turned out to be not so hard to find. Sadly, their victims were plentiful, too.

  But that’s also where my salvation lay. Though neither of us talked about it, the irreparably wounded or very recently deceased could still help us. With bagged blood no longer in ample supply, we couldn’t afford to risk the two vamps in the house getting peckish.

  It gave me a way to fill up the tank and use it against who or whatever had left those victims behind. Though Sheila’s healing powers were pretty potent, there were limits to what she could fix. We’d come to an unspoken agreement of sorts during those moments. She’d turn away and let me do what I had to. I made it a point to not prolong anyone’s suffering and to try to be neat about things. Unspoken agreements worked so much better when the other person didn’t look like a walking slaughterhouse.

  Also left unspoken was my fear of the anger inside me and the potential for me to start to enjoy this new way of life once the disgust wore off.

  For now, though, it was an arrangement that bore fruit. Just last night, we’d tracked down a trio of creatures made of greasy black smoke – Wisps, if I recalled correctly. Anyway, the pyromaniac little fuckers had been having a merry old time setting homeless people ablaze before we’d arrived.

  Sheila’s powers worked just fine against them. As for me, thankfully, they had a solid core deep inside their burning exterior that was perfectly good for punching. Yeah, it hurt, but it wasn’t like I was a stranger to being set on fire.

  The problem was, the euphoria of our outings didn’t last. Spending time with Sheila was great, but it wasn’t the same as it might have once been. Even a month ago, kicking ass by her side would have qualified as one of my wet dreams. Now, though, we once again had that fucking prophecy standing between us as the ultimate cock-blocker. Frustration over my inability to save Ed, Dave, James, and the others, as well as worry for Sally, only compounded it.

  It wasn’t unlike trying to cast a wish spell during one of Dave’s game sessions. Never would I have thought that being alone with the girl I used to fawn over would be so anti-bonerific, but it was. The whole saying about being careful what you wished for turned out to be apt indeed.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I swallowed another mouthful of tequila and stepped to the front window. I looked out at the sunny street below and rued the fact that there wasn’t nearly enough left in the rapidly depleting bottle to get me good and shitfaced. One of the many downsides of being a vampire was a drinking constitution that would have made me the grand beer pong champion of any campus in America.

  Yeah, the days were bad and seemed to be getting worse. To have so much power at my disposal – in theory, at least – yet sitt
ing around while one of my best friends was being tortured or worse.

  I barely noticed when, in frustration, I shattered the mug I was holding. By the time I looked down, the cuts on my hand were already closing up.

  Movement below caught my eye and I glanced out. The day was bright, but thankfully the sun had moved out of a position to shine directly in. A car had just double-parked down below. That in itself wasn’t surprising. People typically double-parked in Brooklyn as readily as they breathed. Nowadays, with the law of the land a dubious thing, I was half surprised the entire block hadn’t turned into one giant parking lot. It was more the size of the vehicle that caught my attention. Too long for even four doors – a limo, by the looks of it.

  Go figure. Even during the apocalypse, some folks had to flaunt it over everyone else.

  Oh well, some pretentious asshole stopping to grab a slice of New York pizza wasn’t my concern, not by a long shot. I’d started to turn away when more movement below registered in my periphery: a car door opening and closing, followed by a flash of black hair.

  I was just noting that they’d appeared to be heading toward the stoop of my building when there came a commotion from below. Had I been human, it would have been easy to dismiss from this high up. To my vampire ears, though, the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass was loud and clear.

  We’d jerry-rigged the front door closed again shortly after arriving here, and now some asshole had just done us the favor of kicking it in again.

  A Sunny Disposition

  Fuck!

  It’s bad enough that a group of dipshits decided to liquefy themselves in our basement the second we stepped away. Now some rich douchebag was doing it in broad daylight. What the hell? It’s not like we were the only building left standing in this neighborhood. Were they on a mad bender for some Grey Poupon?

  Pity for them they’d caught me in a bad mood. I had a very simple rule when it came to humans: if they were innocent, I didn’t hurt them. Shitheads, however, were more than qualified when it came time to dole out a beating. It wouldn’t help rescue Ed, but giving some looter a broken face might distract me for a few moments.