“I have to go,” she said. “I look forward to your summons.” She waved at me, an exaggerated motion that looked awkward on her frame.
I blinked, and she was gone, leaving only the familiar, faint smell of sulfur behind.
* * * * *
Chapter Five: Well-Laid Plans
I had a few messages waiting for me when I got back. They weren’t the kinds of messages I expected or could easily translate. Despite two years with the Patron, my knowledge of devil etiquette was spotty at best.
When Amalfi drew the mark on my floor (which, in hindsight, I wish she hadn’t done—good hardwood flooring is not cheap, and satanic sigils never look good with anything), I figured there’d be more knocks at the door or something like that. Instead, I arrived home at sunrise and saw a pile of mail. It wasn’t all letters and envelopes—at least one was a roll of parchment—but most of it was run of the mill mail.
I picked up the pile and went inside. I sat on my ruined couch and wondered if I could get delivery of the new one moved up, then I started sorting through the mail.
Most of the mail was junk. The first letter I opened, written in all-caps Comic Sans, simply read “MORTAL MAN, BE THOU CONCERNED ABOUT THINE MANHOOD’S PERFORMANCE OF MARITAL DUTIES? IF SO, CONTACT WESSEX, FINEST SEXUAL ALCHEMIST IN THE TWIN CITIES!” I crumpled it up and threw it away.
The second offer looked very serious—it was a Victorian-style letter, beautifully written in ink, but it was nothing more than an offer to refinance my home with blood, so it joined fantasy Viagra in the garbage bin.
I went through half the stack of letters before I found something interesting. The letter was more modern—a standard, USPS letter, though the stamp was some kind of sigil of an angel.
I opened it and pulled out a flyer. The flyer was colorful, with pictures of smiling humans armed with guns, as well as a bunch of American flags and crosses.
“Josiah’s Gun Club,” it read, “where salvation comes in all calibers from .22 to .50!”
It was an address 45 minutes south of the city, in an area that was pretty firmly controlled not by Hell, but by agents of Heaven. I set that one aside.
The other interesting letter contained a message in beautiful, feminine script, signed by “Lotus,” who was apparently an envoy of the Roseville Coven. She dual-signed in English and what I thought was Chinese, but my knowledge of East Asian languages was too elementary for me to be sure.
She addressed me by name.
Why was I suddenly so goddamn popular with vampires?
I kept her letter and the advertisement for Josiah, and put the rest in the shredder.
Ignoring the screams from one of the letters (cute trick, basic spell, and screams didn’t faze me), I started planning my day, looking up addresses and potential meeting places. I hadn’t slept well, so a Mountain Dew Kickstart substituted for a good night’s rest as I headed to my first visit.
I left the Jeep at home and rented a car from a nearby Enterprise franchise under the name, “Pat Bates,” a fake ID from New York. I drove to the address Lotus had sent me.
Roseville is a suburb of St. Paul, north of the city, full of the kind of middle-class Americana you’d expect in the Midwest. There are a lot of big box stores and chain restaurants, the kind you’d expect on the edge of any city. In Roseville, though, there are also a lot of unique shops. I stepped into one that was one of the largest comics and gaming stores in the world.
I checked my sidearm as I took a look around the comic shop. The store looked like a small warehouse with an arced roof and held a formidable array of comics, nerd swag, and games. They had every type of board game, card game, miniature game and role-playing game imaginable. I swore I saw a small section of replica weapons, which were probably sold to geeks who liked to go out on the weekends and pretend to beat each other up. The place was doing good business for a weekday. A couple of well-groomed college-aged kids chatted excitedly about a newly released game they were greedily unpacking from shrink-wrap, while a greasy, obese, man with a neckbeard, wearing a fedora and an anime shirt two sizes too small ranted to a pale, gangly girl in goth garb about whether Batman could beat up Iron Man. The clerks looked animated, taking inventory and helping customers. A pretty young woman sat cross-legged on the floor, eagerly looking through a comic book.
I walked up to the cashier, a professional-looking elderly man in a bright red polo, but he motioned to me to hold on as he took a phone call. Instead, I had to deal with the other cashier—an overweight, greasy guy in his early 40s whose demeanor and garb screamed “COMICS ARE MY LIFE!” He had too many buttons on his red uniform shirt, each displaying some faction or character I was totally unfamiliar with.
“Can I help you, sir?” the man asked, smiling and presumably resisting the urge to tell me about his vintage Spider-Man comics.
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound confident. “I’m here to see Lotus.”
The cashier raised an eyebrow. “Lotus isn’t here yet. I suggest you take a seat in the gaming area. She called and said she’d be here soon. In the meantime, we’ve got a great special on…”
I tuned him out as I walked toward the gaming area, throwing my hand up in a friendly “see ya” gesture. I really didn’t want to hear about affordable deals on stuff I’d never buy. The gaming area was a legion of tables, mostly picnic.
I took a seat and tried to look like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t, but my past life had taught me to look occupied. I hit up a vending machine and sipped an aspartame-laced diet cola.
I was fucking around on my phone when I heard the sound of matched footsteps approaching. I looked up and saw an elderly Asian woman in a wheelchair attended by two burly, Caucasian men. The two men stepped forward in eerie unison, their blank faces conveying nothing. The woman’s face was battered, and despite ample makeup, she had a greenish tinge to her otherwise porcelain features. I was shocked to see someone like that out in the open. She looked old, but well-preserved, as if someone had pickled her, then sent her on her way. Her clothing was of the highest contemporary Asian fashion, a Chinese, high-collared silk dress.
“Hello, Mr. Soren,” she said, her mouth barely moving. Her voice carried no trace of a Minnesota accent, instead bearing the flat tone you heard in Midwesterners from Ohio to Colorado. She held out a hand, awkwardly. “You may show me tribute.”
I leaned over and tried not to gag—she didn’t smell rotten, having doused herself in layer upon layer of perfume and what I was pretty sure was a body spray marketed primarily to teenage boys. I kissed her hand, and she grinned a skeleton’s grin.
“I am Lotus,” she said. “I am pleased you accepted my invitation. I assumed daylight hours would make you more comfortable.”
“They do,” I admitted. “I was surprised to hear such an offer from one of your kind, though.”
She smiled her broken smile again. “Mr. Soren, unlike our cousins to the west, my type suffers no ill effects from sunlight. It is uncomfortable on my old skin, but that’s the worst of it. As for venue, I know this place well, and assumed it wouldn’t be somewhere that threatened you.”
She was right about that. It was a lot more relaxing than the usual tense meet-ups with the Patron.
A slightly pudgy college aged kid walked over, adjusting his glasses. He cleared his throat, and Lotus looked up at him.
“Oh, hey, Lotus,” he said, preventing me from continuing the conversation. “Are you planning on coming to draft night on Friday?
“Of course, Michael,” she said, her voice creaking a bit. “I still have fond memories of the last time my dragons overran your zombies!”
The kid smiled, awkwardly. “I think I can take you next time.”
Lotus chuckled. “I’m sure you do, young man. But if you do not mind, I’m quite busy. Can we please talk later?”
“S-sure, Lotus,” he said, eyeing me nervously as he left to examine some role-playing books.
“People know you here?” I asked.
&
nbsp; Lotus nodded. “Look,” she said, pointing a bony finger at the wall. On it hung the leaderboard from a card tournament from the past weekend with her name firmly at the top.
“I’m not judged here,” she said, plainly. “And it’s an excellent place to practice the strategic arts for an old woman like me.”
Her broken smile crept through again, and I sensed power. Her age had not weakened her in the least. Lotus could be a threat. I found my hand unconsciously reaching toward my holstered VP9.
“Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked.
“We have a mutual problem,” she replied, casually. One of her thralls produced an oriental style fan and began fanning her, while the other produced a smartphone, and slid it toward me.
“The Lyndale Coven,” she said. “We know they’re after you. I wasn’t sure it was your address that popped up, but the idea of trading weapons for blood so soon after a disturbance with the coven? We took a risk. I’m pleased to see it paid off.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do you have against Lyndale?”
“They’re encroaching on our territory,” Lotus said, “and they’re hitting some of our establishments. We’re going to have less tribute next solstice than we’ve had in the past thirty years, largely due to their interference. My mistress is displeased. And, as an extra insult, they are run by primitive, filthy males.”
She grinned her rictus grin.
“No offense to present company,” she said.
“I’m not into property insurance,” I said, the words not sounding as cool out loud as they did in my head.
“This is true,” she agreed. “Which is why I want to barter. Trade information for a life.”
“What life?” I asked.
She motioned toward the smartphone. On it was a maps application with a pin marking the Road Angel franchise I’d been to yesterday.
“You know who lives here?” she asked. “He has offended me. He has the gall to mock my appearance, after all my years, and his impudence knows no bounds. He is conducting some of the strikes against my coven’s holdings. I like it when business and personal matters overlap, so my request is simple—eliminate him. Bring me his ashes, and I will know.”
I wouldn’t mind killing Anders. Truth be told, I thought it would be a good stress reliever. But I wasn’t about to volunteer for charity work for the sake of preventing an ulcer.
“What information would you give me?” I asked.
“The names and locations of the Lyndale Coven leadership,” she replied nonchalantly. “Surely, that is something valuable to you in your present plight.”
That would be helpful. I doubted Anders would be missed enough to escalate the attacks on me. I wasn’t sure what position he held within the coven, other than the accountant roll. I had no idea how these things were structured. Vampires always seemed stupid to me, like kids playing Model UN or Diplomacy; their delusions of grandeur made manifest through parliamentary procedure and arbitrary factionalism.
I opted not to share that thought with Lotus.
“I think we have a deal,” I said. “What kind of timeline are you looking at?”
“Whatever is convenient for you,” she said. “I trust you will not delay. It would not be in the nature of a servant of the duke, former or current, to procrastinate.”
“Sure, sure,” I said. “I’ll get it done quickly.”
“Excellent,” she said.
She snapped her fingers, and one of her thralls walked away. Before I could ask why, she spoke.
“With business out of the way, if you’d care to spend an hour with me,” she said, “I’d like a partner to practice my strategic arts against.”
I took it as less of a request and more of a demand, and I could delay heading out to Josiah’s for an hour or so. Besides, it seemed likely she’d be happy with me for staying with her longer. I was taught early it’s always best to keep your clients happy.
“Sure,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
The thrall returned with an imposing board game, still shrink-wrapped, fresh off the shelf bearing the title of a battle in World War II. The thrall cut open the box and began assembling the game in front of Lotus. He laid out the board, showing a snowy map of somewhere in Russia, while the other thrall punched out cardboard tokens representing soldiers, tanks, and artillery pieces.
“I will play the Germans, if you don’t mind,” Lotus said as she began assembling her forces and arranging her tokens in neat little lines. “Your Soviets will be numerically superior, but worse equipped. I think that is a fitting metaphor for my kind against yours.”
I suppressed a snarky remark about who won World War II, trying, instead, to figure out what the numbers on the little tokens meant.
The game was complex, with layers of rules, most of which I didn’t understand, but said I did, in the hope of finishing quicker. That gambit didn’t pay off. The game lasted well beyond an hour. Several customers watched. I played the best I could, though the rules didn’t make much sense—they were just an endless series of tables and many-sided dice rolls. Lotus appeared to have played this game several times.
She grinned as one of her Panzer IIIs overran yet another one of my infantry positions. “You’re aggressive, Nick. I like that. Good trait in a shooter. But as you see, aggression can counteract aggression.”
I tried not to grimace. I didn’t like losing, not even in games I couldn’t understand. This game was rapidly looking like a loss for me as we rolled the dice and consulted the tables for damage, and more and more of my pieces left the board.
As she captured my headquarters with her Waffen-SS, she looked at me. She did not grin, and she showed no signs of pleasure. Her thralls began cleaning off the table and putting the pieces back in the box.
“Mr. Soren,” she said, her mouth awkwardly half opening as the words came out. “You are still a novice in the strategic arts. But you show potential. Please, when our business is concluded, consider some tutelage. I would be pleased to instruct you.”
She snapped her fingers, and her thralls began wheeling her away.
“I’ll see you when the job is done, Mr. Soren,” she called over her shoulder. “There’s only one number in the phone I gave you. That’s how you’ll reach me to tell me what a good job you did.”
She left, whistling a tune I didn’t recognize.
I got up, ignored the nerd trying to talk to me about the game I’d just played, and walked out to my rental car.
The drive to Josiah’s was uneventful. The indie music station I was listening to had a special guest DJ. He sounded like a jackass, but the music was good so I tolerated the moron.
Suburbs gave way to rolling green hills, and traffic went from a steady flow to a trickle. Just outside the final ring of suburbs, I found Josiah’s. Josiah’s was located next to a white chapel, the kind you see in Americana paintings and on the covers of countless books and albums. It looked humble—a tin roof, flaking red-painted boards, and a battered and chipped wooden billboard with some missing chunks advertising the guns inside. The logo, a pair of crossed Colt Single Action Army revolvers with a J stamped over them, adorned the front of the store and the side panels of a brown cargo van parked out front. As I pulled in, a guy sauntered out to meet me.
He was a Caucasian male, taller than me, wearing a John Deere hat, a plaid shirt, and jeans. His blonde hair was shoulder length, and he had a matching beard. Grey and white hairs were creeping into both, though they did nothing to detract from his youthful exuberance. He was slightly overweight, and I knew I could probably outrun him, but from the look of his arm muscles, it would be difficult to outpunch him. He had an easy smile on a confident face, and his demeanor suggested that if he didn’t own the place, he certainly thought he did. He had a handgun on his right hip and a knife on his left. He wore a tourniquet and an army-issue medical kit behind the knife. He waved at me, and I saw that his hands were clad in nomex gloves, the kind military pilots use.
“Hey there, Buddy,” he said, his Minnesota accent strong enough to land him a bit part in Fargo. “Welcome to Josiah’s Gun shop. I’m Josiah. What can I get you shooting today?”
“I got a message about salvation,” I said, hoping he’d get the hint.
“Of course, you did!” he said, beaming, his pearly white teeth, perfectly aligned. “All souls cry out for salvation, and fortunately for you, you’ve wandered through the aether to a place where we have an ample supply. Walk on in, and we’ll get your soul saved.”
He led me through the double doors, into an open space full of firearms. I was reminded of Vinter’s bunker. Despite the tin roof and the faded wood, the interior looked sleek, modern, and clean. The walls looked like heavier concrete than the outside would’ve implied. They were likely reinforced against bullets, either as a fire safety measure or a defensive measure. Both potential reasons meant the store owner was well-prepared for disaster. The Minnesota flag, US flag, and flags for each of the military branches hung on the wall, with a large NRA seal in the center. A silhouette of a kneeling soldier in front of a cross adorned the entire left wall of the store, along with arced, cursive writing proclaiming “Self-Defense is Salvation.” Posters and signs offered self-defense courses, and a bulletin board hung near the cash register, which was adorned with a bunch of pro-gun stickers. There were other customers, as well as a couple of guys decked out in tactical gear, talking loudly about war stories their ample bellies and grey beards suggested were either long past or entirely fictional.
I overheard snippets of the usual conversations you hear at gun stores—someone posturing about stopping power, an overeager salesman insisting an awful gun was really a “war-tested killing machine,” and a few guys discussing their preference of holster.
The store had several glass cases full of handguns, as well as aisles of shotguns and longarms in the middle of the store, and shelves of shooting accessories on the sides. A couple of guys dressed like Josiah, with similar features, walked around or manned the register, watching me carefully.
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