The lights went on.
Roderick and I were standing on a stage, wearing guitars. Smiles was crouching next to me, a growl rising in the depths of his chest. Roderick took a picture with his phone and shoved it back in his pocket. I wasn’t even sure the curtain was out of the way. Sometimes he gets excited and jumps the gun like that.
Dog – Roderick’s massive St. Bernard – was seated on the stool behind the drums.
Roderick stomped on a pedal with one of his go-go boots and swung his arm in a huge arc, producing a chord like a chainsaw biting into a nail.
“HELLO, SUNSET BEACH!” Roderick screamed into the microphone. It was almost lost under a piercing squeal of feedback. “AND HELLO ITALIAN-FOR-HUNTER! WE ARE JUST DANDY AND THE MOUNTAIN MAN AND WE ARE READY! TO! ROCK! YOUR! WORLD!”
I could hear the front door open.
Even with the wind, I could hear an argument break out at the front of the restaurant.
There was no one in the audience watching us. Every seat at every table was empty. The vampire who was supposed to be auditioning summer acts was nowhere to be seen.
“I didn’t order any fucking pizza. This is a fucking restaurant!” I heard that from the front of the place, out of sight around some latticework covered in fake vines. Fifteen very long seconds passed – normally time enough for Roderick to craft three one-line jokes and a dirty limerick, but he stood there, frozen, mid-guitar-riff, his face slowly falling in disappointment – and I heard someone make a sort of startled noise of surprise.
Smiles barked and I tore off the bass guitar to cast it aside. The light at the front of the restaurant shifted from the slightly blue flicker of fluorescents to the yellow flash of a sudden burst of flames, followed by the roaring fwooshboom! of a small explosion. A car alarm went off in the parking lot, and glass shattered somewhere inside. Roderick roared in frustration. I leapt fifteen feet forward from a standing start, my trench coat rippling behind me, to land on a four-top table and hop off onto the ground, Smiles bounding at my heels.
I thought for about the millionth time of The Bull’s Eye, and her first night as a vigilante, and I wondered when I had crossed the line from half-assed dictator to action hero.
Beach restaurants like this are always decorated for the 1987 Southern Living summer special issue: smothering pastels and a bunch of wicker furniture with thin padding and tables held half-steady by an old matchbook under one leg. They always feel just a little bit forgotten. The owners are trying to squeeze some kind of profit out of a million and a half bucks of investment so they cut corners where they can. Sure, they rake it in for four months out of the year, but the rest of the time they’ve got to pay property taxes and make mortgage payments and I doubt that leaves a ton of cash lying around to buy artisanal cheeses and humanely murdered beef. The places usually look a little more ÜberBargains than Belk Simpson and the food is a little bit fresher than cardboard.
The interior of Cacciatore’s lounge and bar was upholstered floor to ceiling in the floral prints of yesteryear, and maybe from the year before that, with a few sand dollars and a once-jaunty nautical birds theme turned sad. I hung the corner out of the lounge area of the restaurant and into the big, central dining room and saw two people there. The first was a young woman with at least a couple of addictions written in the dark circles under her eyes. She stood in front of the door to the kitchen, having just walked in from there, screaming with her mouth open and her teeth showing. She was completely frozen in a rictus of wide-eyed shock and horror. The second person was a kid who looked vaguely familiar for some reason: Latino, young, maybe 20, with the same expression of excited fear as a kid in the last moments of their virginity. He wore unseasonable blue board shorts and a white tank top and he was standing just to one side of the front door, outside it, peeking in around the edge. He looked down to examine a ring of smoldering linoleum just inside the door. In one of the kid’s hands was a pizza box. In the other was a big flashlight that had a bunch of extra stuff tacked onto it: wires and electrical tape and what looked like colored gels from a stage theater’s lighting rig.
I opened my mouth to yell at him, but he beat me to it: “What are you doing here?” He shouted it directly at me, over the screaming girl whose cry faded as she ran out of breath. Instead of speaking I made eye contact with the kid and I probably looked pretty stupid while I wondered who he was.
Of course, I finally thought. Jennifer McCordy. This kid was one of the technopagans from Durham, the people to whom Jennifer and The Bull’s Eye had gone for help against El Diablo.
What are you doing here was supposed to be my line. I growled at him like a great beast, my fangs out, and pointed at his super flashlight. Whatever it did – and I had a decent guess – I didn’t want it going off by accident. “Put that fucking thing away!” I shouted, and with my other hand gathered up my coat tails to throw them over the screaming woman when I tackled her from the side.
Roderick appeared beside the technopagan “pizza guy” and put one hand on the kid’s forearm, swinging the flashlight down and out of the way. The kid tried to resist, but humans never get very far when they try to fight a vampire. Roderick nodded at me and spun the kid around so he was facing the other way.
My cousin knows I hate it when people watch me eat.
The screaming woman was just a regular human and she was in extraordinarily poor health. They hadn’t been feeding her well – the vampires who’d enslaved her – but they’d kept her hopped up on her substances of choice. I could tell there had been plenty of meth, just from the way her blood tasted like burning paint thinner. She died in my arms and it took maybe six seconds. Her heart was beating like a hummingbird already, but a sick one that isn’t sure how long it can stay in the air. The last of who she’d ever been flowed into me and, with it, the very little she knew about these vampires and what they’d been doing.
I set her corpse down on the floor as gently as I could once I was finished. Ramon – that was his name, I now remembered – Ramon was still holding the fancy flashlight but Roderick had his hand on it also. With a twist of his wrist, Roderick took the flashlight and threw it the whole length of the dining room and beyond, into the lounge, in one smooth movement. “We shall have no need of that,” Roderick said in his very calm voice.
Ramon frowned and started to say something, but cocked his head slightly as if listening to some fourth person we couldn’t see. He said aloud, “It was a Code Five, and he’s gone, and so is his thrall. And those two from last year are here, too.” He paused. “You know, Dan’s ex-boyfriend and the big guy.”
I spluttered. “What?” Dan was a queeny kid from Duke University and another member in the technopagan coven in Durham: lots of sass and attitude and he was really good at something involving computers.
Roderick sounded skeptical. “Well, now,” he said to no one in particular, “I think the term ‘boyfriend’ is a tad strong.”
“What in the hell?” I glared at him and said it with two syllables: hay-ull.
“Always keep tabs on interesting people,” Roderick said to me. “Especially when they are adorable and flirtatious.” He sniffed.
Ramon turned to me. “Jennifer says hello,” he relayed. “She’ll keep the bridge tied up for a few minutes while you…” He couldn’t bring himself to speak even some euphemism about the corpse on the floor. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was going to bury it or eat it with a fork and spoon. Neither seemed to make him very happy.
I pointed a fat sausage of a finger at him. “Jennifer? Why, I…” I worked my jaw in silence then growled at him, “Tell her I said…” I paused again as I struggled with how to express the combination I felt of nice-to-hear-from-you and get-the-hell-off-my-lawn. I liked Jennifer. I liked her too much to encourage her getting embroiled in shit like vampire turf battles, and I distinctly did not like the idea of her people becoming vampire hunters. I walked over, met Ramon’s eyes with mine, and leaned close. “Tell her I said see you soon.”
2
Jennifer puffed air across the top of a mug of coffee to cool it. Ramon had made it for her using whatever he scrounged up in these dead vampires’ restaurant kitchen. “So anyway, when the cop pulled up I was standing beside my car with four shredded tires and my phone in my hand. I pretended to be talking to the motor club. I convinced him teenagers must’ve put tire spikes on the bridge as a prank.” Jennifer chuckled slyly at me. “It’s a pity to be out my last set of tire spikes but I guess I didn’t buy them to keep them on display, you know?”
“Why were you carrying tire spikes in the first place?” I was just as baffled as I could possibly be by finding Jennifer and her cadre of computer witches here in Sunset Beach, trying to do my job for me. “How did you even know about this place?”
“All questions I could just as easily ask you.” Jennifer was as cool a customer as I’d ever met in my life – and had been since the night I first met her. I knew I wasn’t going to bluster her into spilling the goods. Jennifer took another sip of coffee and set the mug on a counter. It bore a few odds and ends already, the detritus of whatever life the addict had led as a slave to vampires, scrounged from her pockets. “I figured we were the only people on the trail of the old guard.”
“I’m the boss,” I said. “I hunt down problems. Specifically, I deal with vampire problems. Let me say that first word again: I. Not y’all. Jennifer, these people are dangerous. You shouldn’t be drawing their attention.”
Roderick stepped into the restaurant kitchen with a smile for Jennifer. “But it is good to see you,” he said.
The two of them exchanged a friendly nod and my head spun with the possibility Jennifer and Roderick had struck up a friendship of their own while I was busy trying very hard to keep her – and all the other curious humans I seemed to acquire – out of the affairs of my kind. More than once I rebuffed Jennifer’s offers of friendship. She was the most capable mortal I had ever met but she just didn’t get the fact vampires and humans are not meant to be buddies. The lion does not lie down with the lamb.
Roderick threw me a bemused glance. “Of course we keep up. It is the age of social media. Everyone keeps up with everyone they ever meet. There are no strangers anymore, Withrow. There are merely acquaintances you have not yet made.”
I worked my jaw but I couldn’t think of a thing in the world to say. Technopagans littered the restaurant, scattered around it like castoff shoes. Ramon and Dan were going over something on their smartphones out in the lounge. Sheila and Xi were seated under the small front awning, playing casual lookouts. The whole crew was here. What was supposed to be an extremely quiet operation known only to Roderick, my second-in-command in Raleigh named Seth, Marty, and myself had all of a sudden gotten really crowded. Eventually Jennifer stepped in and filled the silence.
“What did you find out from the thrall?”
They kept using that term: “thrall”. They’d picked up our jargon for this stuff. They were studying us – vampires – from outside and understanding us as well as ourselves. Two types of people do that: scientists and hunters. I very much wanted to know which they were. I was frustrated by the needling voice in the back of my mind telling me I’d turned Jennifer into an enemy by refusing to make of her a close friend. I was frustrated by the technopagans being here. I was frustrated by the killing of a vampire I wanted to kill. I was frustrated by only finding two vampires after weeks of lurking in the shadows of this very small place. I was frustrated by not being home with my feet up and nothing on my mind. I’d come here thinking I’d spend a few nights ripping apart elder vampires and instead I’d spent it hanging around listening to the surf sing that old, sad song and not getting much else done.
Roderick cleared his throat. “Cousin?” Very innocently, he steered me back towards the here and now.
“She didn’t know anything,” I sighed. “She hadn’t seen the Rhinemaiden and she didn’t know here the elders are keeping it.”
Jennifer arched one eyebrow. “Rhinemaiden?”
I smiled a little. “That’s what we’re calling the resurrected vampire the elders have somewhere. She’s supposed to be mindless, unfathomably powerful, utterly destructive, and unable to be swayed by ideology or pleading or bribe.”
“The title was my idea,” Roderick beamed. “Positively Wagnerian. I could not be happier.”
Jennifer shook her head. “Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid.”
Roderick’s eyes were half-lidded and he looked away, out one of the restaurant’s explosion-shattered windows, as he spoke. “The Rhinemaidens are supernatural figures from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. All-powerful, perhaps driven by whim, perhaps motivated by a grand design too large for others to detect. They seem to be omnipotent and to come from some mysterious source left unidentified.” Roderick held out a hand as he spoke, as though gesturing at something only he could see. He gazed into the distance, at the night, and beyond the night to the invisible sea. The smile slid off his face as his expression fell into the neutrality of the dead or the mad. “The opera is about a magic ring with the power to rule the world, passed from each possessor of it as they are slain by the next. Wagner was relentlessly an asshole as a person, but the composition is so great elements of it crop up in pop culture everywhere one looks: the One Ring of Tolkien, the wands of J.K. Rowling, the operatic mayhem of the Bugs Bunny cartoon.” He smiled a little again, and his eyes swung back to Jennifer and then to me.
Jennifer and I snorted in unison at the Bugs Bunny reference, then looked at each other and laughed. Annoyed as I was to find Jennifer in the middle of all of this, standing here talking with her felt a little bit like putting the band back together.
“So maybe this Rhinemaiden isn’t in Sunset Beach at all?” Jennifer shrugged, her mind always trying to get back to the practical matters.
I shook my head. “Our best intel says there’s got to be either one very old vampire or a bunch of very hungry ones around here. The patterns of disappearances map a perfect arc about 20 to 30 minutes driving time from this town. Someone here is routinely driving somewhere else and gathering prey in what they think is a random pattern.”
Jennifer nodded, immediately comprehending. “But in reality, they’re constrained by their willingness or the time they can invest or some other factor and so, in actuality, ‘random’ is itself constrained to a very specific and limited set of options for where they can hunt on a regular basis.”
Roderick smiled at her. “Precisely.”
“How did you figure this out? Just out of curiosity?” Jennifer asked it in the most innocent voice I’d ever heard: two choir boys and a troupe of mewling kittens couldn’t have sounded more pure-hearted if they’d been singing All Things Bright And Beautiful in four-part harmony.
I chuckled derisively. “As if. Hand to the gods, I will keep some secrets from you, and you can bet your last nickel one of them will be how to find vampires on demand.” I drew a breath. “Except it doesn’t seem like you need that one, does it?”
Jennifer let one corner of her mouth twist up for just a second. She’d taken it in the multilayered spirit I’d intended it: we all liked each other here but we all had to be careful we didn’t push our luck with each other, too. “So what now?” Jennifer wasn’t going to comment, and she wasn’t going to ask too many questions. She hadn’t so much as mentioned the human addict. She knew I killed the girl to rob her of her memories. Either Jennifer didn’t care at all or she didn’t care enough.
I’ve only done that sort of thing a few times, ever, because cracking open someone’s life out of idle curiosity is both too tempting and also too far into Definitely Confirmed Monster territory, even for a devoted monster such as myself. I did it to that girl, that night, because I needed information and I needed it bad. I was tired of waiting for something to happen and I was tired of having no idea how to make something happen on my own. That girl’s slim potential to know something useful had been worth more to me than what little was left of
her pitiful life. Not all of me was entirely comfortable with that, but not all of me was entirely upset about it, either.
“You tell us what y’all’re doing here,” I said. “That’s what’s next. Then you cut out and leave this to the creatures of the night.”
Jennifer quirked up both her eyebrows for a second, a look that said oh is that so in the blink of an eye. “I’m here to find a war to fight,” she said. “Same as you.”
I shook my head. “I’m not here to start any wars. I’m here to prevent one, or maybe to finish the one that started a long time ago. However you want to put it, I’m here to prevent these bastards from coming back in a big way. I’m here to stop things getting worse.”
“Well good luck with that,” Jennifer sighed. “But on behalf of the rest of the natural resources you’re fighting over, it looks like you’re a little late to the peace process.”
I knit my brow together and said, “What do you mean?”
Jennifer gave me a look. “Don’t, Withrow. Dumb’s not a good look on anybody.” She met my eyes, and her face softened a little. Now she was the Jennifer who wanted to be my friend – perhaps already considered herself so – and I realized this was the version of Jennifer I had in my mind whenever I thought of her. “Why do you think vampires are fighting? Why do you think the rebellion happened?”
I sniffed. “Freedom,” I said, stupid in my easy answer. “Freedom to live how we want to live. The freedom to be a part of a larger society to some degree or another instead of imprisoned within our own plantation house.”
Roderick looked a little surprised by something in that statement, but Jennifer nodded. “I hadn’t quite imagined putting it that way,” she slowly said, “Do you believe that?”
“Sure,” I said, being not at all.
“Okay, Withrow. I’ll take it at face value if you say that’s what you believe.” Jennifer said. “I wish I could agree with you, but I can’t. You make it sound like your ideals are in the right place. The bad news is, nobody ever fights a war over ideals. You – vampires, I mean – are fighting over blood: my blood and the blood of every other human on the planet. You can tell yourself it’s over something more complicated if it makes you feel better. I’ll happily give you credit for being complex enough creatures to have more than one reason to do a thing, just like anybody else. But the elders are fighting to be able to reassert direct and extremely violent control over the blood they consume to live. They want to run the whole ranch, just like the old days, and ‘young’ vampires like you are fighting for the right to invite the cattle inside for a chat before they fire up the grill.” She shrugged. “I think it’s that simple.”
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 2