by T. A. Pratt
She almost never got to show off. This was fun. “So you want to work for me, Cam-Cam?”
“Ah, that is, I'm at your service, Ms. Mason.” Marla decided to take pity on their bent necks, and her own screaming abdominal muscles. She walked down the wall, then stepped onto the ground, relaxing at last—locking her knees and holding her body out perpendicular to the wall had been a greater strain on her core strength than she'd expected, despite all the crunches she did every week. It was worth it for the dazzled expression on Cam-Cam's face, though.
Jason, on the other hand, hadn't betrayed a flicker of surprise, either at finding Marla here in person, or at her gravity-defying feat. She strolled over beside him, and Rondeau moved over to join them, so the three formed a semicircle with Marla at the center, all facing Cam-Cam. “Let me ask you something,” Marla said. “Are you afraid of vampires?”
“I'm not sure I've ever considered it. Are vampires real, then?”
“All kinds of things are real, Mr. Campion. You really have no clue. Fucking undead. I hate them all, but vampires are the worst. They're so goddamn smug. I want to wipe them out like the vermin they are.”
“That seems reasonable.” Cam-Cam was trying hard to maintain eye contact, keep his spine straight, all those tricks his daddy had probably taught him about looking strong and cool in business negotiations, but Marla could see the sweat on his forehead despite the cool air, the little tremor in his hands, the slight widening of his eyes. He was tense, anxious, afraid…and he was also excited.
“I wish everyone was as right-minded as you are, Cam-Cam. There's a whole nasty colony down in Virginia, the biggest in America, living underground, an actual organization with leaders and rules and laws. Like they're something more civilized than mosquitoes in opera cloaks. A long time ago one of Felport's chief sorcerers signed a nonaggression pact with that colony. Sure, we get the occasional rogue vamp, and I've beheaded and barbecued a couple of those myself, but I can't move against the main body directly, for political reasons. The bloodsuckers are old, smart, powerful, and connected, which some people think is reason to let them go on living. Or unliving. You know what I mean. If I declared war on them, that would be the end of me—the other sorcerers would turn on me in a heartbeat as an oathbreaker and a betrayer. So, since direct action is off the table, I've been exploring, what do you call it…”
“Covert ops,” Jason said.
“That's it. Funny, huh? Sorcerers are already a secret society, and I want to keep secrets from them. It's that kind of business. Anyway, there's this guy I know—or, rather, I know about—who also hates vampires. He calls himself the Aeromancer. We've been in back-channel communications through blind intermediaries—literally and figuratively blind, people who are trustworthy because they'd die if they weren't, get me? The Aeromancer leads a band of vampire killers, sniping at the edges of the Virginia vamp settlement—the leaders of which, incidentally, claim they ate the Roanoke colony, the lost colony, if you can believe that. But the Aeromancer isn't even making a dent in their numbers. Vamps don't have to brainwash new recruits. They can just take anybody they want and turn them into one of their own. So the Aeromancer is looking for more efficient means of attack than wooden stakes and flamethrowers. I've been thinking about how to help him, but my options are limited. I can't risk anyone discovering my involvement.”
“Of course.” There was a shine in Cam-Cam's eyes that might have been reflected torchlight, but Marla thought it was the look of a man seeing his lifelong dream come true. It was almost enough to make her feel bad for what they were doing to him.
“I've found out about an opportunity,” Marla said. “There's a weapon—well, it can be used as a weapon—that, in the Aeromancer's hands, would mean vampire genocide in this country, maybe in the world. But it's expensive, and the guy selling the stuff isn't swayed by moral arguments. He's not willing to donate it free to a good cause. I could afford his asking price, barely, but it would require a lot of liquidating of assets and shifting of funds, and if I did that, it would get noticed by the other sorcerers in the city Questions would be asked. It wouldn't end well. So we've been looking for outside investors, people who won't be linked to me. Frankly, that's the only reason I've agreed to talk to an ordinary like you—you're so far outside sorcerous circles that nobody would connect me with you.”
“How much does this weapon cost?”
Marla marveled. It was just like Jason said. The chumps begged you to take their money.
On cue, Rondeau said, “Before we get into that, Mr. Campion, you need to know what we're talking about here. Vampires have gotten a serious makeover in books and movies in the past century or two. We're not talking about suave guys wearing silly medallions, or hot chicks in velvet who just happen to like a little blood-play These are flesh-devouring immortal monsters, and they're about as sexy as a shark attack. You have to understand, if you get mixed up in this, they might come for you. Hear what I'm saying? Your role would be to pay for the weapon in question, keep it safe while we make arrangements to meet the Aeromancer, and then help us transport it to him. Marla's name would never come into it, but the vamps might get wind of this, so your name might. Jason and I would do our best to protect you, but we can't make promises. And with vampires, you're lucky if they kill you. They can do worse.”
“I understand,” Cam-Cam said. “The dangers are acceptable. How much will it cost?”
“Ten million dollars,” Jason said.
Marla was gratified to see Cam-Cam's furious spate of blinking.
“That's… a lot of money. I'm not sure I can… Huh.”
Marla turned away, flipping her cloak. “Told you his financials were overestimated.” She put as much disgust into her voice as possible. “He doesn't have that kind of liquidity, his money's all tied up in holes in the ground and bulldozers and shit.”
“I could get the money, I just couldn't afford to lose it, not all at once—”
Marla whirled, frowning at her brother. “Jason, what is he talking about?”
“We didn't get into details.” Jason held up his hands. “We wanted you to talk to him first.”
Marla sighed. “We're not asking for your charity, Cam-Cam. I hate vamps, sure, but I'm a businesswoman, too. We buy the spores from my weapons guy at ten million, but we sell it to the Aeromancer for fifteen million. My organization takes two million for our trouble, you pocket your original investment plus another three. That's what we're talking about.”
“That's a thirty percent return,” Cam-Cam said thoughtfully. “That's quite good.”
“Eh, the weapons dealer owes me a favor, so he's cutting me a she-once-saved-my-life-and-she-can-take-it-away-again discount. The price we'll offer the Aeromancer is still a bargain. If the spores went on the open—well, not ‘open,’ more like secret sorcerous—market, they'd fetch a lot more, probably But my guy's got a conscience, at least by arms dealer standards, and he knows I won't use the spores for anything too nefarious. In the wrong hands…” She shuddered.
“The weapon is… spores?” Cam-Cam said.
“Wow, Jason and Rondeau really didn't let anything slip. I'm impressed by their discretion. The way they've been trying to sell me on working with you, I was afraid they'd already spilled some secrets into your lap and were trying to cover their asses. Yeah. Spores.”
“They're called the Borrichius spores,” Jason said. “Like any kind of spore, they're tiny and easily inhaled. There are some famously nasty spores in the world—anthrax. Stachybotrys. Ugly stuff. Tear you up inside, kill your lungs.”
“These Borrichius spores are a biological weapon?”
“Only if you want them to be,” Marla said. “They were designed by an herbomancer who'd pretty much gone around the bend, a guy unsurprisingly named Borrichius, and he made his spores self-replicating. Once one person inhales them, the spores start reproducing, and with every cough, the infected spews out more spores, which float in the air looking for new hosts.
&n
bsp; But the spores don't just copy themselves—they're programmable. A sorcerer with the right skills can tell the spores to affect only very specific types of people. Want to kill everyone on Earth with green eyes, or red hair, or both? The spores can do that. Don't want to kill people? Just want to paralyze them, or give them hallucinations, or make them go blind, or make them your mindless slaves? The spores can do that instead. Anyone who inhales the spores who doesn't fit the template is just a passive carrier, spreading the contagion, but once the spores find their appointed target… they work fast. Or slow. Whatever the engineer wants.”
“That's extraordinary,” Cam-Cam said. “A weapon like that…”
“It's a war crime in a bottle,” Marla said. “For tu nately, the spores can be configured to destroy nothing but vampires, and mass-murdering the undead is more like burning out an infection than killing people.”
“Once you buy the spores, why can't you just program them yourselves?” Cam-Cam said. “Spare all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”
Because the cloak-and-dagger stuff is helpful for scamming you, Marla thought, but Jason had worked out an answer for that, too. “Truth be told, we don't know how to program the spores. It's not exactly common knowledge. The Aeromancer does, though—he was once Borrichius's apprentice, before the old gardener went nutso—and once we get the crate to him, the Aeromancer can make them work. In the meantime, though, we have to be really careful with the stuff after we buy it. We don't know what the spores are currently programmed to do. Erase our brains? Make us into ravening zombies? Kill women, or white people, or guys over forty, or trust-fund babies? No telling. This shit is more dangerous than plutonium, but it's wrapped up nice and tight in a magically shielded box, where it can't hurt us as long as we don't break the seals.”
“How do you know the weapons dealer isn't scam-ming you?” Cam-Cam asked. “That it's not just an empty box?”
Marla smiled her least-nice smile. Cam-Cam paled. “Because,” she said, “very bad things happen to people who try to cheat me, and the seller knows that. Now, what do you say? Are you up for it?”
“I'll put up the money,” Cam-Cam said. “But I have one additional condition.”
Here it comes. So far Jason had predicted Cam-Cam's responses so perfectly that the guy might have been reading from a script, and she supposed he'd turn out to be right about this part, too.
“I want you to teach me magic,” Cam-Cam said.
“I'll tell you what,” Marla said. “Help us pull this off, and kill the vamps, and I'll make you my motherfucking apprentice.”
Cam-Cam shook his head. “That's not good enough. I want—”
“Fuck that. I don't care what you want. Your money isn't the only money in the world, Cam-Cam. Yes or no.”
He set his lips grimly, and for a minute, Marla thought he might say no. That would be interesting. She wondered how Jason would make that work, though she had little doubt he would, somehow.
“All right,” Cam-Cam said. “I suppose your word can be trusted.”
“My word is my bond.” True enough. “Help us eradicate the vampires, and I will make you my apprentice.”
“Agreed.” He stuck out his hand, and Marla shook it.
“Rondeau and the boatman will take you back home. Jason and Rondeau will be in touch to work out the details. For safety's sake, you and I won't talk again until the last bloodsucker runs dry. Good luck. Try not to get eaten.” She turned, doused the torches with a gesture, and vanished into the night.
But not very far into the night. She hung out in the shadows of the trees while Rondeau got Cam-Cam moving. After she heard the boat engine start up and buzz away into the distance, Marla sauntered back, relit one of the torches with a snap of her fingers, and clapped Jason on the shoulder. “Surprised to see me, bro?”
“You, my dear, are the greatest little sister that ever has been or ever will be. That was a command performance. Christ, I almost believed you were a witch myself. How in the hell did you manage that standing-sideways-on-the-wall thing? That was fucking uncanny It was like watching one of those remakes of a weird Japanese horror movie. And those torches lighting themselves! Great stuff!”
“All done with wires and pyrotechnics, Jason. This is a spooky island. I use it sometimes when I need to scare somebody, so I've got it rigged up nice. Who's the guy driving the boat?”
“Old friend of mine named Danny Two Saints. Jack of all trades, absolute workhorse of a grifter, plays all parts, can get his hands on anything you need, you know the type.”
“Nice touch with the glow-in-the-dark paint on his cheeks. Otherworldly demon eyes. Good stuff.”
“Oh, I thought Cam-Cam was going to shit himself when Danny let him get a glimpse of the spooky eyes. No doubt you're the master of the hoodoo grift, but admit it, I'm coming along okay, too.”
“You were always a quick study. I wish I could've worked out some more of the details of this scam with you beforehand, though. A huge colony of vampires living in Virginia?”
“The Old Dominion,” Jason said. “What, too much?”
“Eh, big groups of vampires living in harmony don't make much sense ecologically. That many apex predators, eating humans? It's silly You don't find dozens of tigers hunting in the same small area—it takes a ton of prey to support even one predator.”
“I can see you've given this a lot of thought.”
“It's my business, Jason. But it doesn't much matter. There's no such thing as vampires anyway So technically, I didn't lie when I made my promise to Cam-Cam. If he manages to eradicate a race of supernatural monsters that doesn't even exist, he deserves to become my apprentice.”
“You know,” Jason mused, “the apprentice thing could be a good scam, too. Find some rube who believes in magic and charge him money for ‘lessons.’ Grifters do that kind of thing sometimes, find a mark who wants to become a con artist because they've seen one too many episodes of Hustle, and then scam them. Somehow they never see it coming.”
“There's a lot of stupidity in the world.”
“From your lips to God's ears.”
“Want to ride on my boat back to the city?” Marla said.
“What, you didn't fly here on a magic broom? I'm disappointed.”
“Brooms are for amateurs. Give me a twenty-two-foot Spencer Runabout with a three-eighty horsepower motor anytime.”
“Thank you for helping arrange that introduction.” Cam-Cam no longer seemed discomforted by the dark figure at the tiller—maybe he believed himself under Marla's protection now.
“No worries.” Rondeau was attempting to segue into the buddy-buddy relationship that Jason had suggested for the next phase of the con. “Marla's blustery, but the truth is, you're really helping us out. Controlling information flow—not to mention providing protection—is a lot more difficult when you've got a bunch of people putting up money. A single investor makes things simpler. And, hey, not a bad deal for you, either.”
“Hmm? Oh. You mean the money I suppose. I don't really care about that part. It's the chance to work with her, to learn her secrets.” Cam-Cam smiled—the first smile Rondeau had ever seen from him, maybe the first to grace his face in a long while. “I'm very excited about this.”
Rondeau tried not to shift or show his discomfort. Personally, he'd take a few million bucks over learning cantrips, but wasn't that always the way? You want what you don't have. Cam-Cam didn't think money was important, because he had all the money in the world. Once that money was taken away from him—and the ten million up-front investment was just the start of the cash Jason expected to extract from Cam-Cam—he might feel differently “Not to pry,” Rondeau pried, “but why the, ah, abiding interest in magic?”
Cam-Cam stared out at the dark water for a moment, then said, “My father tried to teach me the fundamentals of the family business. Mining. It's an unforgiving business, dirty, messy, practical, hardheaded. Dependent on engineering. I remember my first tour of the smelting factory, the noise
, the heat, the obvious misery or vacancy of the workers, and I thought, ‘Is this all there is?’ I knew there had to be more to life than tearing wealth out of the earth. Mining is… this sounds silly, but… it's not spiritual.”
Rondeau pondered that. He suspected laboring in a dark crevasse miles below the surface of the Earth was actually very conducive to mystical experiences, if not necessarily pleasant ones. Though he was willing to accept that hanging out in the business office at a smelting plant probably didn't attune one to the numinous.
“That was the start. I read fairy tales and novels about magic, but my real interest was always in nonfiction—stories about cryptozoology, UFO abductions, psychic phenomena. I was foolish and credulous, of course, I believed almost anything, but even once I became more jaded and skeptical there was still a part of me that was desperate to believe. And then, one day when I was about fifteen, my mother called me into her bedroom and calmly told me she had recently begun conversing with angels.”
Rondeau whistled. There were certainly beings that claimed to be angels, but Marla said they were almost certainly anything but. “You believed her?”
“She… knew things about me, secret things… I don't think she could have found out on her own, that no one should have known. I thought she would be angry, but she was forgiving, and loving. She told me she was dying. The doctors diagnosed her with a brain tumor, which caused temporal lobe epilepsy, and they said that was the cause of her angelic visions.” Cam-Cam smiled faintly. “Of course, then she told the oncologist the angels had told her about the affair he was having with a radiologist half his age, and I could see the doubt flicker across his face. From that point on, I was convinced there were forces beyond physics and chemistry and finance, and I devoted my life and my fortune to studying them. My father was… disappointed by my interest. But I was his only son, and he let me inherit the business when he passed away, though he begged me not to run the operation personally. He was afraid I'd turn all his drills to the purpose of finding a passage to the hollow Earth, or start digging for the underworld.”