by Ben Zackheim
“Being a Vampire lair could be a strike against it,” Fox said.
“Lucas!” I yelled.
“Whaaaat?” he yelled back, annoyed.
“Find out who holds the deed on 59 Great Jones Street in Manhattan.”
“That’s how you ask?”
“Please!”
I heard grumbling from above and then the distinct hum of Pars being opened. Pars was a kind of Facebook for demons. They’d had it for over a thousand years, as Lucas liked to brag. He shared knowledge with fellow librarians and researchers there. They could Like and comment and post Moments, which are actual moments stolen out of time where the people in the image are stuck there for all eternity. I accidentally saw one that he posted a few years back and still can’t get it out of my head. Demons are fucked up.
Lucas came to the edge of the balcony. “This might take awhile,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Rebel asked.
“Well, I don’t know how to say this but no one knows who owns the building. The good news is that us demons don’t like a mystery. It’s bad for the digestive system. My post has gone viral so we should get an answer soon.”
“Viral as in viral? Or viral as in viral?” I asked, worried that we were mixing demon and tech lingo.
“Whatever it takes to get you your answer, Mr. Kane.”
I could swear he smiled.
***
The Jeep Rubicon was a beast but it was my beast. I’d never taken it to the city before. It’s not exactly urban material. But it was the only vehicle I had that wasn’t a two-seater.
“Don’t worry about me,” Fox said. “I’m not going with you.” He jumped straight up, dropped until he almost body slammed the driveway and then swooped up like a kite catching the wind at the last second.
He was out of sight within two seconds.
“What an asshole,” I said.
“I’d love to be able to do that,” Rebel said.
Fox would be happy to neck the hell out of you if you want.
Almost said it out loud. Didn’t.
We buckled up and I slammed my foot on the gas to show off. Rebel didn’t flinch. She just looked ahead, deep in thought.
Her cell rang and she sighed.
“What do you have, Lucas?” She listened for a moment and then banged her head against the headrest again. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Sounds painful. But I was actually referring to the deed on the old mob HQ. You sure? No one? How can New York City not have a record of an owner of a building in Manhattan? No, it’s not your fault, sorry. What? Really?”
“What?” I asked, curious. The mood in the Jeep had shifted. I knew that expression on her face. She was focused.
“You’re kidding me,” she said to Lucas.
“Is it the twins?”
“Quiet, Kane,” she hissed. “So looks like we know where to go next. Thanks Lucas. Great work. No I’m not referring to your nose job. I didn’t know you had a nose job. Okaythanksbye.” She hung up before he could throw any more unwanted information at her.
“There’s a phallus museum,” she said. “In Iceland.”
“Great,” I said. “Looks like you were right. Embrace the dick.”
“We need to get back there, Kane.”
“After we scope out Great Jones Street.”
She sighed. “Why are we doing this? We have the shield. We need to find out what to do with it. Maybe there’s a cock map in the museum.”
“Oh, you mean a MAN-ual?”
“That’s borderline funny.”
“Tabitha knows what to do with the shield,” I said. “She knows a lot. If we find her and get her to trust us it will save a lot of time.”
“And you know this because your dick told you?”
“That’s borderline funny, Rebel. No, I know because she’s the one who told me about the shield which means she’s in on the Mjölnir-shield connection.”
“Yeah, she’s in on it, all right.”
“Yeah. It could be a trap, but I’m not convinced.”
“No, you’re just delusional. You’re getting played.”
“That’s why I have you around. Keep me grounded.”
“Oh, I thought I was here to keep you alive.”
“You say tomato…”
“Okay, look we follow this one clue and then we hop in your thingy and go back to Iceland first thing. Got it?”
“It’s like you can read my mind.”
“No thanks. I don’t want to get anywhere near that thing.”
As usual, we people-watched as we rolled down New York City’s avenues. It’s the one thing Rebel and I have in common. People fascinate us. We’d seen the best and worst of them and we still couldn’t figure them out. Sure, we were human, but we never felt like it.
We hit downtown fast after a surreal run of green lights on 11th Avenue.
“There it is,” Rebel said, pointing to the decrepit building sitting amongst the most upscale shops in New York City.
I took one look at the place and I knew.
Tabitha was nearby.
59 Great Jones was exciting, dark, and not at all what it appeared to be. On one side of the building was a boutique, packed with socks that cost a month’s wages for most people. On the other side was a cat carrier shop for hedge funders. I think there were maybe five carriers total in the store.
Attractive, young people passed 59 as if they didn’t see it. I wasn’t sure if it was a spell or if it was just rich people not able to see the dirty side of the city. Rich breeding does that, I hear.
We sat in the Jeep, watching. I saw some movement on the roof and squinted to get a better look. Rebel saw it too.
“Is that Fox?” I asked.
“Nope,” Rebel said.
“You sure,” I asked.
“Yup.” I turned to look at her and Fox was peeking into her passenger’s side window.
Rebel popped open the door.
“You fly fast,” she said.
“Second thoughts,” Fox said.
“You don’t have to go in,” I said.
“I don’t think you should either,” he said.
“Why?” Rebel asked. She always gets to the point faster than the rest of us.
“Bad feeling.”
She pushed her door open wide, forcing him to take a step back.
“You have to do better than that,” she said. She turned to study the building one last time.
“Shall we go through the front door?” she asked me.
“After you,” I said.
“Such a gentleman,” she said, smiling.
“Only a gentleman makes a lady take point,” I said to Fox. He wasn’t amused. “Cheer up, grumpy. You have to plow ahead in this business, especially when your instincts tell you not to. Trick of the trade.”
“I’m not afraid for me,” he said. “I’m afraid for you.”
“Meaning Rebel,” I joked.
“No.” He left it at that.
I’d find out what he meant ten minutes later.
Chapter 26
We wove through some cliques of young, coiffed New Yorkers. The building was an eyesore but it was also a peek at the way New York used to be. Rough around the edges of the edges. The whole city used to look like that, minus the Upper East Side. Graffiti and tags had covered everything back then. Personally, I liked it better. It made the place more interesting. New York still had its rough parts, especially when it came to the supernatural, but it had been tamed by billionaires who want their front yard to be well-groomed. It just so happens that their front yard is all of Manhattan.
The door was covered by a pull-down gate. Both sides of it were bolted by heavy-duty locks. I flipped one of them up. Six pounds. Someone didn’t want people to get in.
“Check the roof,” I told Fox. He glared at me. “Please.”
He soared into the sky and disappeared over the edge.
“Whoa!” A group of Jersey girls stopped in their tracks behind us. “Did you s
ee that? Take me with you, sweetheart!” she called out to the sky. “You a vampire too?” she asked me, ignoring Rebel.
“No, but she is,” I lied, pointing my thumb at my partner.
The girl wasn’t impressed. Her disinterested eyes passed over the woman who could tear her to pieces with a thought. “I don’t roll like that,” she said.
Fox landed softly between us.
“Locked up tight up there,” he said.
“Will you take me flying?” the girl asked him, snagging his arm. “I’ll make it worth your time.”
“You don’t have anything I want,” Fox said. He didn’t even turn around to look at her.
“Come on, gorgeous! Take me for a ride!”
He turned and said, “Go.” All the girls screamed and ran off, slapping the sidewalk with a dozen stiletto heels. They sounded like marbles falling. When Fox turned back to face us he looked normal, but I knew he’d pulled his hunting face on the poor things. They wouldn’t sleep right for years. That shit is like looking at the rot at the core of all existence.
“So how do we get in?” Rebel asked, pleased with her favorite vampire.
Fox folded his fingers around one of the locks and yanked it off like it was made of paper.
“Through the front door,” Fox said.
“Like civilized people,” I said while winking at a couple of tourists who crossed the street to avoid us. They trained their cell phones on us as Fox tore the second lock off. Rebel and I were used to the attention. There were a bunch of videos of us on missions. A whole group of people were trying to figure out who we were. We had to be careful, but we weren’t obsessed with being too secretive. Nothing stays hidden for long. Not anymore.
We lifted the gate together, Fox yanked the front door open and we followed him in. By the time we entered he was nowhere to be seen in the darkness ahead.
“Where the hell did he go?”
“He knows something about this place that we don’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would be great to get the heads-up on what he knows once in awhile. You know. Like teams do.”
“So you think he’s part of the team now?”
“Not even close if he keeps disappearing.”
We pointed our flashlights at the dark and came up with nothing. An old counter. Some shelves on the wall. Some chairs that hadn’t felt an ass in decades. The ceiling was a series of pipes and stray wires. And the air was dusty. I had to kill a few sneezes. It didn’t feel like anyone was there, but I didn’t want to blow it. We needed to find Tabitha if we wanted to stay ahead of the Vamps.
I pulled a Glock out of its home. It felt like a one Glock job. Feelings can be wrong. There was a single door at the back of the small space. I nudged it open with my foot while Rebel shined the light in the room.
But it wasn’t a room. It was a stairwell. Going down.
“This building has a second and third floor,” I said. “Where are the steps going up?”
Rebel shrugged and then followed me down the steps. She ran her fingernails over the wall gently. She liked to do that. Said it got her ready for battle.
“Cut it out.”
“Don’t you feel it?” she said.
“More feelings? Are we all following our feelings tonight?”
“Something big is coming up,” she said. I had to admit she was right. Not out loud, mind you. No way. But there was a heaviness to the air like the world had taken a big breath and held it.
Instead of scraping the old walls, she clicked her nails together and made a sound like breeding beetles. I didn’t bother saying anything. I felt like the next words we uttered would be in front of whoever, or whatever was waiting for us at the bottom of the steps.
The stairs ended in a small landing with a 3/4 height door. The kind you see in old Colonial houses. Then I remembered this was a mob building. It could have been a speakeasy at one point. And the second and third floors, with their hidden stairwell, could have been a place to hide the booze and the people drinking it.
“You first,” Rebel said, smiling.
The door didn’t open easily It hadn’t been used for a long time from the looks of it. I pulled it open and it scraped a semi circle in the dust on the floor. I crouched down, pulled out my pen light, and marveled at the space on the other side.
“Wow,” I said.
“What?”
“How far underground do you think we are?”
“Far enough underground for me to kill you and leave you here and feel like you got a proper burial if you don’t tell me what you see.”
“I see the drama of the undead.”
Chapter 27
It was a theater.
We crawled through the door and emerged near the middle row of seats. The old mahogany chairs with red velvet armrests glowed in my flashlight’s glare. The brass trimming on the rails and steps were rubbed raw by the hands and feet of thousands of people.
But it wasn’t a normal theater. Each row of seats had a lot of leg room. It was more like the United Nations.
“Very nice,” Rebel said. “Probably used for meetings of some kind.”
I flashed a light down on the stage area. What we saw wasn’t a stage, but a platform with two large thrones. Old, splintered thrones. Even burnt in some places. The thrones had seen some hard days and no one bothered to try and cover it up.
When I could pull my eyes away from the ugly things I saw the wall of portraits behind me. Some were drawn, some were photos.
One photo made my heart stop.
One photo was of my dad.
I only had passing memories of my parents. I was eight when they died. I had zero photographs. They were private people. It made it hard to find out anything about myself or how I ended up training for Spirit with Skyler. The old man couldn’t tell me anything because he claims that revealing the secret would activate a spell that would make him spontaneously combust or some kind of bullshit.
“What is it?” Rebel asked from behind me. “Who is that? He looks like you. Oh, shit.” Rebel is sharp in a number of ways.
“Yeah, it’s my dad.”
“But that photo is old. Look at his hair. That’s 30s or 40s. Your dad couldn’t have been that old. Maybe your grandfather?”
I took the frame off the wall and checked it for a note of some kind. Anything. And, of course, there was nothing. I popped the picture out and peeled it off the frame board. ‘1934’ was written in browned pen in the lower right corner.
“I told you this was a mistake,” Fox said. His voice slithered from the darkness.
“The truth is never a mistake,” I said.
“You know that’s not true,” he said.
“Who is this?” I demanded, holding the picture up to my best estimation of where he was. I was wrong. He floated down from directly above me and gently touched the ground.
In punching distance.
“You know who it is, Kane,” he said.
“This thing is 80 years old. It can’t be my dad.”
“It is.”
“Was he a vampire?”
“No, he was a mobster.”
“What happened to him? Where is he? Where’s my mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” I said. Rebel could see I was getting close to losing it. She put her hand on my shoulder but I shook it off.
He backed away a step. Out of reach. Of Rebel, not me. “I didn’t know your father personally,” he said. “I only know what people have told me.”
“Like Skyler,” I said.
“Yes. He told me your father was a mobster. I guess he was in the Three Pointers Gang but I didn’t know that. If I did, I never would have told you about Tabitha.”
“That’s why you tried to call tonight off,” Rebel said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. It was stupid of me to help you. I should have known that any digging into New York mobsters could lead to Kane’s father.”
“It’s a good thing I fou
nd out,” I said, stepping up to him and jabbing a finger in his chest. “Now I want to know more.”
“Look,” he said. “I told you. All I know is what Skyler and couple of other Vampires have told me. Your dad was obsessed with us. He knew we were out there and he wanted to be one of us. I may have met him once at a Manhattan fundraiser in the late 20s but I can’t be sure.”
“You said on the boat that he fell from grace. You said I could end up in the same boat. What did you mean?”
He hesitated.
“Don’t even think about it, Fox.”
I didn’t know if he would lie, fly away or even fight. I could tell that he didn’t want to be there. I could tell he’d do almost anything to get out of telling me.
But he didn’t have to do anything.
The bullet ended the conversation for him. Fox’s chest exploded in a mess of red.
He fell to the steps with a sick thud.
Chapter 28
Rebel and I rolled behind the seats, ducking low.
I gestured to the scaffolding above the thrones.
She pulled out her kukri blade from the sheath on her back and scooted down the aisle, staying low.
I needed to get a bead on the guy. I never shoot blind. I have a record to maintain. But to do that I needed him to shoot again.
He wasn’t shooting again.
Why wasn’t he shooting again?
Rebel raised her hand over the seats to get him to reveal himself. He didn’t take the bait. Which meant he was gone.
Or it meant that he was changing tactics.
I looked over my shoulder to see how bad Fox had been hit. He was gone. A blood-stained handprint slashed across the wall, ending where my dad’s photo had been hanging.
The shooter dropped on me from above. He wrapped his legs around my neck and pulled me down with him. He rolled over on top of me, blocking my view of him with one hand while he put his gun to my forehead to end me there and then.
Rebel smacked him off of me with a kick that sounded like thunder. I shook my head to gather my senses and saw our attacker dip behind the seats two aisles down.
It was the skull helmet guy. The guy we’d fought in Hel and the museum.