No one spoke as Beth and all those birds – large and small, light and dark – communed in silence for a long span of seconds. Then two of the same type, white with grey wings and black tails and rings around their beaks, flew up and took the GPS tracker between them, right out of her open hand, and flew away. The remaining avian mass shot back into the sky and formed a living debris field around the two doing the carrying.
At a couple of hundred feet – invisible to the humans, but visible to the vampires – they began a slow, looping flight.
Beth lowered her face, opened her eyes and turned to Jennifer. “My birds will run the rest of Xi’s assigned route. If the elders fire on them, there will be many birds between the ground and the ones carrying the tracker. They will return to me when finished.”
Everyone stared at her. Jennifer opened her mouth but had no idea what to say. Finally, she got out something so normal in its good manners it made Roderick laugh aloud. “Thank you,” Jennifer said to Beth. “That’s very helpful.”
“Well,” Roderick said after he recovered. “You have just been attacked and survived. We should prepare to leave as soon as possible lest the elders send a second wave.”
“My birds will run interference while we leave,” Beth said. To her it seemed completely obvious.
Jennifer shook her head. “They saw us take out their colleagues without a single injury,” she said. “They’re not going to fight us.”
“Without serious injury,” Roderick corrected. “Why would that stop them?”
Jennifer smiled a little. “Because each individual vampire values his own survival above anything else,” she said. “Your cousin told me that at UberBargains when we met.”
Roderick opened his mouth to speak, held it that way a long moment, and then produced words as though from far away. “I suppose that is why we became vampires in the first place. We want to live forever, and to hell – perhaps literally – with anyone else who has to die in the course of that pursuit.”
I skidded down the last dune to the place I left Old Shoe standing. The dark, sticky pit where Ross teleported away was still there, but fading: turning gray, and sand was sticking to it. Soon enough even this unstable patch of earth would wipe from its mind the memory of a thing like Ross.
A few feet away, right where Old Shoe was standing when I last saw him, there was a second unholy stain.
In the distant sky, I saw all those birds start to return.
This time I didn’t silence Smiles when he started barking. A barking dog was probably the most ordinary thing going on for two miles in any direction.
10
I didn’t know what was up with the birds, but they went to – and came back from – the same direction Roderick went to check up on his boyfriend – ex-boyfriend, “date,” whatever. I figured that was a safe bet. I ran back across the water, Smiles on my back, and up onto land and right down the middle of the street.
When I rounded the corner, Sheila was in the driver’s seat of their wrecked mini-van and the rest of the coven were trying to push it from behind. I glanced at the back seat of the van, where Beth and Marty were just settling back in rather than, you know, using their vampiric super-strength to help. I wondered why in the hell I let them come here. Did either of them even know how to defend themselves? I assumed every vampire fought as often as I did. I assumed we’ve all had to kill hundreds of times by the time we’ve been dead ten years. The look on Marty’s face sure as hell told me how wrong I was.
Ramon filled me in on what had happened. I tried to help move the van, but it was dead. Two tires were blown, one of the vampire explosions had done something bad to the front end, the headlights didn’t work – hell, the hatch was ripped off and one of the doors wouldn’t shut. We were all in for a long walk back to the hotel. Out there, they didn’t even have Uber.
The others gathered together their stuff. As they did, Roderick looked expectant. I wasn’t ready to tell him Old Shoe seemed to be gone just yet. I wasn’t ready to interpret what that text was supposed to mean.
I couldn’t believe how selfish I was in bringing these kids here to help me settle my own score. I was the boss. I was supposed to protect them, not ask them to fight in my place. If you were worth your fangs, you’d go door to door from one end of the island to the other, right now, and murder everything that moves.
That’s what the animal deep inside my gut said, anyway. It always pulls at its chain, always tests the fences we put up around it. That animal is not a rational man. It is not the part of us that used to be human. I used to think it was the part of us that came from outside when we get turned into a vampire: the part that gets poured down our throat, the part that kills off everything we used to be with the significant exception of our appetite. We don’t talk about it to one another, but it’s easy enough when vampires disagree to see that flash of lightning behind our eyes and know the monster in our belly wants to assert itself.
Sometimes, though, I’m not so sure. I think maybe that animal is a part of all of us, human and vampire alike. If it’s the part of us that hungers for life in its purest, reddest form, it’s also the thing that used to hide in the back of a cave when lightning struck outside. It’s the part that came down out of a tree for the first time because it wanted what another monkey had. It’s the thing that shivered with cold fear when a predator walked past and then raged at its tracks once they were cold.
Just as it did in Mary-Lou Reinholdt’s house – and at the ÜberBargains on Thanksgiving night, and when I stood over the corpse of my last mortal friend, and so many other times in recent years – I felt that animal yank with vicious strength at its chain in the kennel of my heart. Would it be nice to go door to door and kill? Sure. It’s a great way to pass an evening. It wouldn’t get Old Shoe back, though, and it wouldn’t make the humans feel too great about helping us.
Before we left the parking lot, Roderick walked over to a utility poll and, using his own strength, drove a nail into the wood to post a handbill. He then walked to another, did the same, then another, and did the same. I looked at them: hand-drawn caricatures of Ross suffering various awful fates. In one he was being trod upon by a giant foot; in another he was simply lying in pieces with cartoon X’s for eyes.
“Alright,” Roderick said, “We may go. And no, you may not yet ask.”
We walked as a group, right down the middle of the street. To hell with caring who saw us, or asked what we were doing. It was that kind of night. It didn’t seem to matter, anyway: the houses were almost entirely dark and the ones with any lights at all only had one or two. Partly I attributed that to it being the dead of winter and partly I attributed it to the elders’ time as their neighbors in this tiny place. Like the villages of yesteryear, the people who lived here over the winter probably grew terrified and in that terror they fell silent.
I was right back to thoughts of that animal inside, the ghost of whatever ancestor was forced to hide from the dark and all the things in it – and resented every moment. It occurred to me the elders were destined to lose eventually, either to the humans or to us, because this was no longer a world that would support open enslavement. People have to be bought these days – bought by corporations, by cheap toys and next year’s model and this year’s nostalgia. They could be quelled for a year or maybe a decade, as the people on this island seemed to have been quelled for a season, but sooner or later people grow weary of cowering.
Without noticing it, I fell behind the others, first by a few paces and then by more. Eventually I looked down from the stars above, where I stared as I walked. Roderick was beside me and the others were at least fifty yards ahead. Dog and Smiles were behind us, looking around, sniffing the ground. Sometimes the creepiest thing about a hellhound is when they suddenly act like a normal dog again.
“Where is Old Shoe?” Roderick asked it without preamble. That’s my cousin: no beating around the bush.
“He…” I sighed and looked at Roderick. “I don’t know. I�
��d like to think Ross kidnapped him. He was gone when I went back for him. There was another one of those sticky scorch marks.”
Roderick showed no visible reaction. “Where were you?”
“I was watching the ghost of a vampire eat one of those historical society assholes.” I fluttered my lips. “Hand to Jesus, cousin. She showed up, the leader of the pack acted like he was seeing his long-lost mother, she ate an old lady from the inside out, and everybody else ran hell for leather. They were digging for something out there. The leader tried to talk to the ghost, too. ‘We’ll make you whole again,’ he said. He knew who she was, and he knew to be afraid of her. Did you get my text? I don’t think that guy’s exactly what he seems to be. I think… I don’t know, that he’s possessed by a vampire, or he’s a vampire in disguise, or something.”
I filled Roderick in on the whole story, in the right order this time, and when I was done he nodded. “Joyriding,” he said. “It is an unusual power. It is probably what Herman has – well, whatever vampire now controls Herman. Normally they inhabit the flesh of the victim for a short time, leaving their body behind. There are stories, though: the cautionary bedtime tales of the dead. They say a joyrider leaves her body behind, unprotected, and that if that body is destroyed the rider is stuck in the flesh of their victim. In some versions the vampire’s spirit retains its powers. In some versions, it loses them, forced to live out their victim’s natural life. If he used, as you call it, the hoodoo, I guess the former must be true. It is reputed the vampire’s powers put stresses on the mortal’s body. It degrades faster than it otherwise would – much faster. Soon it fails. The joyrider must return to his own body or find another victim into which he can jump before it is too late.”
I nodded at him. “So if whatever vampire jumped into Herman subsequently, you know, got waxed – well, his body got taken out of the picture somehow – and he got stuck there, but being stuck there started causing an already-frail body to start going downhill…” I trailed off and picked up again. “And if he needed to stay in that body to keep control of this little cult he’s started so they can find something they need to ‘restore’ this vampire ghost…”
Roderick nodded at me. “A vampire’s ghost. We live in a most unusual world, Cousin.”
“So, the obvious question is, is that ghost…”
Roderick met my eyes. “The Rhinemaiden? It would seem obvious enough.”
“But why’s she a ghost, then? When I drained Dmitri, he knew about a vampire they brought back from the dead, just like all those zombies on Z-Day, not a ghost.”
Roderick smiled just slightly. “When the zombies rose from their graves, were they made whole?”
I thought back to that first night, years ago – so many years, and I could feel every night of them in my bones, but at the same time it felt like last week – and the first zombies I saw stagger around the streets of my quiet little suburban neighborhood. Those not-faces, the caved in pits of flesh, the eyeless sockets, the lips eaten away by time and worse: that was as far as I could imagine from “whole.” Their faces were so awful the news had to blur them out when they showed them on television, and grody-as-hell zombies show up on television all the goddamn time in fiction. “No,” I said. “No, they were rotten and desiccated. They just stood up the way they were and went about doing their thing.”
“Which was?” Roderick had the tone of a teacher leading me patiently to an answer he already knew and it grated on me like steel wool.
Then it dawned on me. “They were hungry. They were only hungry, nothing else.”
“Exactly, Cousin.” Roderick smiled more broadly. “The elder vampires did their magic to bring back the dead, but they did not do the magic to restore them. It is that story – The Monkey’s Paw – all over again. When the mortal dead answered the call, they came back in what was left of their original bodies. So did she: but she was a vampire. When we are killed, there is no body, only ash. They got back the spirit, and it is hungry, but there is no body for it to inhabit.”
There was a thread there – a vampire who could hop bodies, perhaps stuck in the one he was now using, and a vampire with no body at all – but I pushed it aside. It was one of those symmetries I would just have to think about later.
“And Old Shoe?” Roderick clucked his tongue. “I suspect this was all too much for him. He hesitated, sent you his text of resignation from the field of battle, and the demon captured him as a hostage. We will undoubtedly hear a ransom demand.”
“I never should have brought him here,” I said.
“Cousin,” Roderick said, and his eyes softened, “Do not pretend Old Shoe is some innocent waif in your charge. Do not let his childish face fool you. He is as much a monster as any of us.” My cousin shrugged mildly: que sera, sera: what will be, will be. “This is not generally the life of one who thinks of others first, as I believe you once said to Jennifer, though with other words. Shit, as they say, happens. In the meantime, we must assume whatever he knows is now compromised.”
I was quiet for a few moments and then said, “Some of us are more monster than others of us, and some of us are never monsters at all no matter how ugly we get.” It sounded silly and oversimplified once I said it, just a bumper sticker philosophy I could say in response. I was feeling something I didn’t quite know how to express, though. Now, with some time to reflect, I know what I was feeling then: disappointment. Vampires feel plenty of things – anger, hatred, fear, lust (of a sort) – but we don’t often feel disappointment because of what it requires to be felt: preceding hope.
I was afraid, by then, that I needed people in my life: mortals, other vampires, persons who weren’t just like me, persons who could be trouble and cause feelings and find a crack in my armor plating every now and then. I knew if I relied on others I would wrestle the animal inside more and more over time. It feeds on the inevitable disappointment that comes from dashed hopes and errors in judgment and personal failures and unrequited affection and all the other stumbles coming from giving over a little of our psychological real estate to another. I also feared that struggle – with my feelings and with the animal inside – was the price required not to turn into an elder myself.
I drew a breath at long last. Roderick was still standing there. His face was turned towards the shore of the Inter Coastal Waterway, where he dived in and I ran across, but his eyes were cut to the corners to look at me while I ran through it all in my head. “You’re damned right,” I said. “To hell with a bunch of pretending any of us is a saint. So, what do you think of this ambush thing?” I nodded at Jennifer and the technopagans, who were still ahead of us but starting to notice how far back my cousin and I were falling.
Roderick smiled a little and turned towards me. “I think the elders got a nasty shock. But I think they also probably sent their weakest forces against the technopagans. There are clearly more of them than we anticipated. Or there were. But the elders did not survive this long by being reckless and losing fights. They will move, now. They are under too much pressure from too many corners. The Rhinemaiden is acting without guidance and they are desperate to contain her. We are harrying them. Their havens are under attack. The locals undoubtedly notice too much by now. Eventually not even fear will keep the mortals acquiescent – and the tourist season is just weeks away. The elders must pull the trigger on something, as they say.”
I nodded at him. “My thoughts exactly. And they’re probably hoping this fight was scary enough to get the technopagans to hole up for a hot second, and maybe Old Shoe’s…” I hesitated. “…Maybe Old Shoe’s abduction would make us stop and question ourselves, giving the elders just a little bit of breathing room.”
He nodded at me. “Perhaps.”
“So,” I said, “Let’s just assume from this point forward that Old Shoe is already dead.” I shrugged. “Let’s just take him out of the equation entirely. If they haven’t already killed him, just because, we know they will as soon as they think they’ve extracted all h
is useful information.”
Roderick nodded, standing a little straighter. “Oh good,” he said.
I arched one eyebrow.
“I was afraid I might have to convince you to set it aside and move on,” he said, ducking his head a little. “I apologize. I should have had more faith in your professionalism.”
“You think I’m getting soft,” I said with a grimace. “You’ve got a fucking boyfriend.” Roderick and I were stopped, standing in the middle of the street just yards from where the night started: the road we walked to get back to the motel we were using as home base ran through the golf course abutting the Waterway. Right there, on a narrow strip of green between the asphalt and the Waterway, were the chunks of turf I tore out with my own boots not two hours before. We both turned our eyes up, looking at the stars, letting the humans get farther and farther ahead of us with each second.
“I say again, ‘boyfriend’ is rather a strong term for the connection Dan and I share. That is beside the point, however, which is that I never left the world. Not like you did, Cousin,” Roderick said. His tone was very even. He wasn’t being snide or cruel, just honest. He met my gaze with steady eyes and behind them were more sorrows, more psychic scars, than I would have guessed. “You all but died to mundane society. I did not. I wonder sometimes how it is for you, having left the world and come back to it. I sometimes fear your feelings will be… delicate; or that you will be confused.” He laughed suddenly. “I mean no offense.”
I smiled a little. “None taken. But I’m fine. Trust me.”
Roderick held up a fist, as though to punch me straight-on, not with a Wild West roundhouse but like one of those guys in a kung fu movie who punches straight out like a robot arm. “Bump me,” he said.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 18