While Bobby grabbed a bag of gauze and medical tape from the back of the ambulance, I pulled out my phone to text Greg and Sabrina. I looked at the shattered screen and sighed. “Hey Bobby?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I borrow your phone?” He gave me the laugh that all my friends give me when I break yet another cell phone, and tossed his over to me. I sent Greg and Sabrina a quick text to let them know that everything was fine, relatively speaking, and that I was about to completely explode Fitzpatrick’s worldview, then sent William a text telling him where to pick me up and to send a cleanup crew to the same location. We were in a medical office parking lot off Queens Road a little past the hospital, and there wasn’t a car in sight. Beyond the parking lot was a ritzy residential neighborhood; so long as Sean didn’t shoot me, we could probably get this whole mess sorted out with no further interference by other cops or much in the way of nosy neighbors.
I walked over to Sean, who sat on a parking lot divider as Bobby tended the wounds on his neck. The holes didn’t need much tending, mostly just a quick wipe down. The bites were already closed, one of the benefits of being a supernatural parasite. We don’t leave a whole lot of evidence behind. Bobby stood up and walked back to the ambulance as I came over and shot me the “this one’s your party” expression as he passed me.
Fitzpatrick looked up at me, and his eyes flashed wide for a second before he got himself under control. I heard his heart speed up, and I made sure to keep my hands in full view. No point in getting him even more upset. “Hey Sean, you okay?”
“What the hell was that, Black?” The plea in his eyes was for me to give him an explanation. Not necessarily the truth, but a rational explanation that he could hang his hat on. He was about to be seriously disappointed.
“That was a young dead girl being reborn as a vampire, Sean. She woke up hungry and tried to drink your blood. She wouldn’t have stopped with a sip or two, and if left to her own devices, she would have drained you dry. Then in about eight hours, you would’ve woken up the same way, and either killed someone, or wandered out into the sunlight looking for food and turned into a pile of ash.” I didn’t make jokes, I didn’t sugarcoat it. I just told him the straight story. Now it was up to him to decide how he was going to handle it.
“No, what really happened?”
Pretty normal so far. Admittedly, I didn’t have a ton of experience introducing humans to the world of vampires, but Sean wasn’t veering off script yet. “Exactly what I told you. A vampire murdered that girl, and when she came back, she was starving for blood. You happened to have the nearest ready supply.”
“Why didn’t she try to drain you? You were closer.”
Well, he was a detective. I guess that’s why he got to that question quicker than expected. I took a deep breath. “She needed living blood, Sean. I don’t qualify.”
He looked me up and down. “You’re a vampire?” He patted the breast pocket of his jacket absently, then shook his head. “This is when I’d be reaching for a smoke, but I quit three years ago.”
“Good for you. I hear that’s really hard. I never picked up the habit myself.”
“Don’t dodge the question.”
“Was there a question?” I asked.
“Are you standing here in the middle of a parking lot in Charlotte, North Carolina, claiming to be a vampire?”
“No,” I said, and saw his shoulders relax a hair. That wasn’t going to last long. “I’m not claiming anything. I’m telling you that I’m a vampire, and that whoever murdered that girl—and Julia O’Connell before her—was also a vampire. I’m telling you that she woke up crazy for blood, and if I hadn’t put a stake through her heart, she would have drunk every drop you have.”
“You’re an asshole.” He struggled to his feet and stalked back over to the ambulance.
“That’s probably true, but irrelevant,” I said as I followed him. “What are you doing?”
He jerked open the doors of the ambulance and climbed inside. He walked up to the girl and lifted her halfway up into a sitting position. “You’re telling me this girl is a vampire?”
“Was, but sure,” I said. I was willing to give him as much time as he needed, within reason. It was winter, so we still had about an hour and a half before sunrise, but people were going to start waking up around us before that, and I didn’t want to explain our situation to any early birds coming in to grab the first doughnut at the office.
Sean pried her mouth open. “Where are her fangs?” He held the dead girl by the back of her head, all sense of respect for the dead gone in his shock and anger.
I stepped up into the back of the ambulance and laid the body down. “Here,” I said. I opened her mouth open wide, then reached into the roof of her mouth with an index finger. I pressed on her soft palate and felt the bony nub that marked the back of her fangs. I pushed in with my fingertip, and the fang grew out of her gum a little behind her normal teeth. “It’s not like in the movies, where our incisors magically grow when we bite somebody, and they don’t flip down like a rattlesnake. They just stick out a little bit behind our teeth and give us something to tear better with. They aren’t hollow, either. We don’t have a pair of straws in our head. We just tear the artery a little and let the blood spurt into our mouth. She did a really good job on you, for a newborn. Usually it’s a lot messier the first few times. I remember what a mess I made—” I cut myself off. I didn’t need to share the murder of my best friend with Fitzpatrick.
He sat back, staring at me. “You’re serious.”
“Deadly serious.”
“She was a vampire.”
“Yup.”
“And you’re a vampire.”
“Yup.”
Now the shock was really settling in. The adrenaline from the fight was wearing off, and the endorphin rush from the girl’s bite was fading, and Fitzpatrick was actually coming to grips with the fact that he knew a lot less about the world than he did when he reported to work that night. I didn’t envy him the awakening.
“So who killed her?” I watched him shift gears like he was flipping a switch, going from rattled normal human to homicide detective in an instant. It was impressive, the way he compartmentalized all the crap he didn’t understand and circled back to the parts he did.
Then something else shifted in his eyes, and he drew his sidearm, leveling the Smith & Wesson pistol at my face. “You have three seconds to convince me that you didn’t kill this girl, and about that long to tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the head.”
Well, shit. That escalated quickly.
Chapter 19
STARING DOWN THE barrel of a forty-caliber pistol is not how I like to spend my nights. I often react poorly to having guns pointed at me, and the fact I even know my standard response to people wanting to shoot me is a testament to how weird my life has been the past few years. I looked down at Sean Fitzpatrick, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Detective and my girlfriend’s new partner, and said, “I know it’s been a bad night, Sean, so I’m going to try to keep things low-key. Please put the gun away.”
“No. You’re going to explain a lot of things, or I’m going to shoot you. That’s the way this—” One second he was looking at me over the barrel of his pistol, the next he was looking at his empty hand as I ejected the round from the chamber, released the magazine, and held out his gun.
“You can have this back, but don’t try to reload it.” I reinserted the loose bullet into the magazine and slipped that into my back pocket. I was pretty sure he had a spare on him somewhere, but why make it easy on him?
He took the gun, his hand trembling a little. “How did you do that?”
“I’m really fast. Not like The Flash fast, but fast enough that I’m not worried about any coyotes catching up with me.”
“What the hell are you?”
&nbs
p; I sighed. “I thought we were past that,” I said. “I’m a vampire. Remember? We talked about this, like sixty seconds ago?”
“Bullshit.”
Okay, that was new. I hadn’t outed myself to too many people over the years, but normally, faced with irrefutable evidence of my supernatural nature, they pretty much bought into the whole vampire thing. Sean was proving to be something else entirely. “You don’t believe me?”
“Vampires aren’t real.”
Wow. I wished I was as certain about anything in the world as he was about my lack of existence. “You know it’s literally impossible to prove a negative, right? Vampires exist. The dead girl in the back of the ambulance was one. Not for very long, but she was a vampire nonetheless. I am still one, and have been for more than twenty years now.”
“You’re telling me you’re really in your forties?” Seemed like that was something he could grab onto, where the whole vampire thing was proving difficult.
“Forty-five this year,” I said with a nod. “If there’s anything to like about being the walking dead, it does do wonders for the skin. But you still have to stay out of the sun.”
“Bullshit.”
Now I was getting frustrated. “That seems to be your default answer for a lot of things, Sean. What will it take? Do I need to move super-fast?” I ran to the opposite end of the football field-sized parking lot, waved, and ran back in about two seconds flat.
“Do I need to prove that I’m really strong?” I walked over to the end of the ambulance and lifted it onto two wheels. That stunt wasn’t easy, but I did it. Those things are heavy.
I loomed over him, fangs extended. “Do I need to drink some of your blood? I’m not hungry, but there’s always room for dessert.”
He drew his gun again, and this time I was done screwing around. I slapped it out of his hand, and the pistol went clattering across the asphalt. Then I reached down and lifted him off his feet with one hand. When we were eye to eye, I leaned in and said, “I am not playing a prank on you. I am not just being funny. I didn’t want you involved in this world at all. As a matter of fact, a large part of my life is dedicated to making sure that you, and people like you, know nothing about us except that Bela Lugosi is a badass and Twilight is the most dysfunctional teenage story since Romeo & Juliet. But then you got nosy, and that girl came back hungry, and now here you are, neck-deep in the supernatural. And I’m sorry about that, but the sun will be up in ninety minutes, and that puts me on a little bit of a schedule here, so if we could move right on to depression, or acceptance, or whatever the next stage of your discovering that the world is bigger than you ever thought it could be, then that would be great.”
I dropped him and turned away, walking toward the sleek gray sedan that had just pulled into the parking lot.
“Where are you going?” he called after me.
“Home. I like to get good and drunk after I have to re-murder innocent girls.”
“But I have more questions!”
“Then you’d better get your ass in the car.”
I opened the passenger door and slipped into the soft leather. William turned to me. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“We’ll know when he gets in the car,” I said. Seconds later Sean slid into the backseat behind me and closed the door. “Good call,” I said. “The booze at my place is really good.”
THREE HOURS LATER, Sabrina walked into the den, and I was drunk. Again. With her partner passed out on the sofa opposite me. She looked over at Sean, and at the empty liquor bottles, and at me, then sighed and collapsed into the armchair at the end of the sofa.
She looked over at me while she unzipped her half-boots and set her shoulder holster and ankle piece on the coffee table. “You just going to sit there staring at my legs, or you going to fix a lady a drink?”
I got up and walked over to the bar. “Any details on our victim?” I called over my shoulder.
“Kara O’Grady, 23 years old, worked at a theatre supply store. No criminal record, no known associates with criminal records, no local family, no partner or spouse, just one roommate who was more upset with being woken up at five in the morning than with the girl’s death.”
“Compassion not her strong suit?” I poured Ciroc vodka into a rocks glass, doused it with a little cranberry juice, and dug a bag of O-positive out of the minifridge for myself.
“They were roommates of convenience. Angela, that’s the roommate, said they didn’t hang out, just split costs on a two-bedroom apartment and occasionally watched Netflix together. I’ve got a black-and- white sitting on the apartment today, just in case she is involved and bolts. I was going to see if Greg could run a deep background check and see where the victim and roommate overlap, and if either of them have any connection to Julia O’Connell.”
“Don’t you have people for that?” I asked. I walked back to the couch and sat down, leaning forward to pass Sabrina her glass.
“I do, but Greg’s better than almost anyone we have at the department, and his tech is better. Where is Captain Spandex, anyway?” She looked around, but the devastation in our den had been wrought by nobody but me and Sean.
“He was already in bed when I got home. Left a note in the foyer that if I woke him up for anything less than the zombie apocalypse or Eliza Dushku finally showing up for a date with him, he’d put a stake through my left eye.”
“That’s very specific.”
“That’s Greg.”
“True. You think he’ll be up anytime soon?”
“He’s been running for a few days now. I’d expect him to be out like a light for the next few hours at least. Can you crash for a few, or do you have to get to headquarters?”
She looked over at Fitzpatrick’s snoring form facedown on the couch. “Well, it looks like my partner isn’t going to beat me into work today, so I think I can get a few hours’ sleep.”
“I’ll join you,” I said with a smile.
“Down, tiger. You need a shower first. You smell like a distillery that happens to be in a sewer. Where the hell were you before I called you in?”
I filled her in on the nest under Eastland Mall, the fight with Alexander, then moved on to the ambulance ride and killing the baby vampire, whose name I now knew was Jennifer. I mentally fixed that name to her, and added her name to the lengthening list of bodies I’d left in my wake over the years. I didn’t remember them all, but in recent years they’d come to matter more than they did in my first years after turning.
“So you told him everything?” Sabrina asked, giving me a steady look.
“Not quite everything,” I admitted. “I probably glossed over some of my activities as Master of the City a little.”
“Like the drug trafficking and prostitution?”
“For the record I don’t actively participate in those things,” I protested, then sighed as she gave me a dark look. “Yeah, I didn’t tell him I’m a crime lord on top of being an undead parasite. Hell, Sabrina, I never wanted to run a bunch of gangsters. I only took over as Master so Tiram wasn’t in charge anymore.”
“And now you’re afraid you’re becoming him?”
I paused, really considering it for the first time. “Yeah,” I finally said. “I guess I am. Sean asked me something tonight, and I didn’t have a good answer to it. He asked me if I was one of the good guys, because he could tell there was something off about me. Turns out what he was picking up on has nothing to do with me being dead, but more what I do for a living.”
I leaned back on the couch, my now-empty blood bag dangling from my fingers. “This guy I fought earlier tonight, Alexander?”
“Yeah, what about him? You said he was like a cult leader.”
“A little bit,” I said. “But he also took care of his people. I never knew he existed, because he didn’t swear fealty to me like t
he criminals did, but he lived by the same rules as I ask them to do. He kept his head down, and his people safe, and just tried to get along. He had most of the vampires living in his nest hooked up with telecommuting jobs and tech stuff that kept them from ever having to go into an office. If I didn’t have to die to give up the title, I probably would have let him be Master of the damn City.”
“So quit,” Sabrina said.
“Yeah, right.”
“No, seriously. If it sucks so bad, just quit. Find a replacement, pass on the magic, and quit.”
“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“It can, if that’s what you really want.” William walked over and sat on the couch across from me, sipping from a blood bag with a silver straw. I always forgot we had straws.
“What are you talking about, William?” I asked.
“You can certainly abdicate your position as Master of the City. Neither the magic nor the Council wants an unwilling Master. It hasn’t been done for some time, but there are records of it occurring.”
“How long?” I asked. “When was the last time it was done?”
“Let me think . . . 1809. The Master of the Country at that time abdicated rather than continue to rule. This also coincided with the end of his second term as President.”
Sabrina got a thoughtful look on her face, then said, “Thomas Jefferson was a vampire?”
“Oh certainly,” William said. “He was Master of the United States for a time. But he saw the country growing much too rapidly, so he oversaw the division of the country into regions, which further divided into smaller territories as more people came here. He was an excellent Master.”
“I bet he didn’t have to sell dope to pay for his house,” I muttered.
“Well, he wasn’t exactly a saint,” William replied. “Master Jefferson was a brilliant man, but he was a product of his times. And his times started in about the seventeenth century, I believe. So he didn’t sell drugs, but he did sell people.”
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