I chewed my lower lip for a second. Maybe I should have agreed to the second question, but it was too late now. Lorraine, when a deal is done, is done dealing. “Alright,” I said. Then: “And thank you.” And then: “I really mean that.”
Lorraine was smiling again, but I didn’t know if it was with me, or at me, or at my expense. “You’d better,” she said.
I killed five minutes – and then another five – looking at the Internet on my phone. The modern world is remarkable and I have no fucking clue how anyone gets anything done.
Eventually I got out of my Firebird, Smiles beside me, and we clack-clack-clack-clacked our way up the cement stairs of the ratty old motel. I could smell the livestock from here. It had only been a couple of nights, but Crew Cut hadn’t kept the place clean. He was probably too busy digging at the behest of his fake-ass not-vampire cult leader.
I was still struggling with exactly what I was going to say when I got to his door. I stood there, raised my knuckles to rap on it, lowered them again, and turned to pet Smiles for a moment. He didn’t pant or wag his tail, but sometimes the most comforting thing in the world – in addition to being the most distressing – is to pretend he’s just a normal dog all the same.
As the seconds passed, I realized something changed: there had been no light coming from the other side of the peephole in Crew Cut’s door. Now there was.
He heard me coming, and had been watching out the peephole while I stood there debating what to do. Awkward.
The door opened a quarter of an inch – the chain was latched, bless his heart – and he spoke to me from the other side of the gap. I considered it a very safe bet he was armed, but probably not with a gun. He was likely holding a sharpened stake made out of a mop handle or some shit. “Why are you here?”
I looked at that gap in the door, and at the cages beyond it, lined up all around the room. I looked at the sliver I could see of the big map he kept in the tank. I drew a breath to speak, let it out in a long flutter of my lips with a sound like a great fart, and drew another. “Because I need your help,” I said. “And because you need the help of somebody, and I don’t see any other candidates around. So we might as well work together on this, whatever it is.” He started to say something but I kept talking right over him. “You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to like me. Some days I’m not even sure the people who like me actually like me. You don’t have to think I’m a nice vampire, and you don’t have to pretend you don’t plan on knocking me off eventually, too. That’s all for another night, Deputy. Right now you have a ghost problem, and I have a vampire problem, and it happens they apparently overlap. So let’s finally get it all out there in the open and help each other for five minutes, like the civilized people we both probably used to be.”
There was a long silence from the other side of the door. I knew what he was doing: weighing the pros and cons, the risks and rewards. He was wondering how good an idea it would be – or how bad – to make nice with an enemy just long enough to defeat something worse. He was wondering if he could – aw fuck the Book People and their word games – handle pitch and escape defilement.
“How do you know about the ghost?”
I blinked. “I was hiding behind a dune. Tonight. When you were digging.”
“Tell me what’s wrong with… the guy in charge.”
“I think you just tried not to say my cult leader, Deputy.” I snickered a little. It was a dangerous gambit, going for a tease, but you never know what makes some people feel comfortable with you.
“Oh, rich, especially coming from a fucking vampire.”
“We’re not all blood cultists in the sway of a fake demon.”
“Fake?” That seemed to get his attention.
“Long story,” I said. “My cousin thinks it’s actually a case of Tulpas Gone Wild.”
“I thought the same thing for a while,” Crew Cut said after a moment. I could hear him scratching his own neck. (We get an ear – and an eye, and a nose, and a taste – for necks.) “But I actually think maybe they summoned the real deal.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I just want to destroy it. And them. And then go back to my quiet little house and watch reruns and pay the neighborhood kids to mow my lawn and take my dog for long walks and maybe play a hand of solitaire once in a while. Forever.” I licked my lips. “Deputy, this is supposed to be my state. I, myself, killed off the last generation of vampires in charge and I did it for that exact reason: so I could be left alone. I don’t want to take over the world. I’m not even especially interested in saving it. But these vampires and their pet evil spirit are bad news for everybody and especially for my remaining me time. I’m saying all this in hopes it will convince you I don’t want to make you a slave again. I don’t want to stop your one-man crusade, either. Actually, I admire you for breaking free. I’m assuming that’s what happened anyway: that you were enthralled by a vampire in Charlotte – and believe me, there are reasons why I have about a million questions around that but not right now – and eventually you got free and vowed revenge. I like that. I’m big on righteous revenge-seeking. But right now you’re worried that,” and I paused to draw a breath, “A man cannot handle pitch and escape defilement.”
I was going to finish the thought – something about how he could trust me, or it was worth the risk, I don’t know, whatever came out when I get to babbling like that – but I stopped. When I said those words – the words Lorraine gave me – I felt power unwind all around me. I felt like I threw open the curtains on a window and fresh air blew in. I felt like I cranked the last turn of a jack in the box but when the lid swung open a thousand white doves flew out.
I felt magic happen.
The feeling of the universe opening a birthday present shot through me, out of me, and across the threshold of Crew Cut’s door, over his room, a wave of something positive in a place where there had only been fear. The animals in cages stirred, and I heard sounds from them: mewling, sick sounds, sounds of creatures on the brink who longed to be pushed over the edge, to let go, to be free of suffering, but suddenly wanted to live again.
Deputy Crew Cut drew a sharp breath, like something panged him, as though someone pressed a knife to his back or kissed him by surprise.
I didn’t hear her or see her, but I could feel Lorraine saying, somewhere in my head, Now, you only have a few moments.
“But I am here to tell you, Deputy,” I said all of a sudden, “That if you want revenge for the sake of revenge, that is what will taint you forever. If what you want is redemption, you need to seek justice and you need others around to help remind you of the distinction between the two. I’m not exactly perfect, or even marginally good, and I don’t pretend I’m redeeming myself, but I am trying to be better: better than I was before, better than I was when I didn’t know a single soul who smiled to see me walk through the door. You will be better – better – if we work together than if you get trapped in evil of your own making no matter how satisfying that might seem.”
I stopped and drew a breath. In the silence beyond the door, I could hear Deputy Crew Cut’s heart pounding like it had been buried alive and was trying to get out. For my part, I was feeling total euphoria: like a shaft of sunlight was shining right out my ass. For that one moment, I felt genuinely good again.
“Fuck,” I said aloud. “I mean, what else can I say? You can try to kill me later, Deputy. I’ve got all the time in the world. Right now, we can do something good for everyone and we can do it together.” I paused, feeling high as a Georgia pine. “Shit, this is a gas.”
Crew Cut unlatched the chain and opened the door to look at me with narrowed eyes. “What the hell is going on with you?”
I held out my hand as though to shake. “I don’t have any fucking clue,” I said. “Now shake my hand and let’s be friends for a little while. Please.” I could have tried to put some hoodoo behind it, of course, but in that moment I knew I shouldn’t. Maybe it would have worked really well i
n the wake of the Book People’s magic, maybe not, but that… goodness? No, maybe not goodness so much as camaraderie: that sudden rush of camaraderie with the whole human race just wouldn’t let me. I wanted Crew Cut to like me. I wanted everyone to like me. That was certainly a novel feeling.
Crew Cut looked deep into these old eyes of mine. I don’t know if he saw anything in particular there other than the bafflement I was feeling, but he reached out and took my hand and pumped it up and down. “Okay,” he said. “For now.” He hesitated again, then stepped to the side and held the door wider. “Come on in and let’s talk. I’m tired of being the only one in this.”
Something nagged at the back of my mind about that, but I was feeling way too good to care.
We sat down in Crew Cut’s jumble of a room. He sat on the end of the bed, which was covered in linens twisted and braided like he spent all night doing twirls. I sat on the one chair tucked in the corner, moved aside and covered in papers and maps and pop magic books about demons and angels and shit. Probably not a word of it was worth a damn. Roderick was probably right: if Ross was a product of the beliefs about him, he was probably more accurately described and constrained by Dungeons & Dragons than by a book some crystal-licker tossed off about their sleep paralysis bullshit.
I set the books on the floor in a pile – which immediately fell over – and eased into the chair. “So here’s what I know: they tried to bring a dead vampire back to life, and when they did, it worked. But they also got all the zombies from Z-Day, like, years ago, and the vampire came back uncontrollable in some way. And now it sounds like what they got back was actually her ghost, because she didn’t have a body to inhabit anymore.”
Crew Cut nodded at me. “That’s right. But it’s more complicated than that. She’s not just uncontrollable. They brought her back and she was more of a monster than they could imagine. She still feeds, but…“ He shrugged, searching for words.
“Like I saw on the beach,” I said. “She consumes a person from inside. She does to them basically what happens to us when we get waxed.”
“They think she needs to do it – to consume people? – to become permanent, like maybe if she does it enough times she’ll have a full-time body again, but I…” Crew Cut looked at the carpet for a minute. “In my old life, I saw people sometimes who were cruel just for fun. I saw people who let a momentary impulse drive them to make a spectacle of pain.” His eyes flicked outside, towards the world beyond, for a moment. “I saw how she made a show out of killing Gwen. I think The Mistress does it for pleasure,” he said. “And she loves doing it to vampires. They – and I – think that’s because she gets more, I dunno, juice from a vampire, you know?” He gestured with his hands as he spoke and I nodded. “And here’s the thing: the older, the better.”
“Okay,” I said, “Let’s come back to this older-the-better thing. So she can’t manifest full-time, I take it?”
He nodded. “That’s what they thought in Charlotte. They didn’t know why, but she can’t stick around for long when she manifests. It’s like it wears her out. But, vacuum out a human, or a vampire, and it seems like next time she appears she can stick around longer.”
I thought of that flash of gray profile I saw dash in front of my car the night this all started, and how it was gone right away. I wondered if she had just come from feeding on a weak human or if she was running low on gas. “So, obviously they want to stop her from feeding on them,” I said. “I mean, they wanted her back, but they ain’t volunteering to be the Tinker Toys she uses to put herself back together.”
“Originally they thought they had a way to give her back her body. Now they don’t want her back anymore,” Crew Cut said. “Ross promised them they would get her back in a controllable form: that she would be a slave, basically. He promised them no mind, no agency, just a hungry vampire ready to be pointed at a problem and fired like a gun. They got the opposite: an appetite with no body, no ability to be controlled, and it wants to destroy them rather than work for them.”
“How did they think they could get her body back?” I shook my head. “That’s, I mean…” I wrinkled my brow. “If there’s an especially big gotcha to being a vampire, it’s that: once we’re dust, we’re dust.” There are vampires, of course, who look to that old Bible passage about dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes, and they see the judgment of an angry god in what happens to us when we die. Me? I say if God’s so eager to be pissed off at somebody he ought to start with the bastard in the mirror.
“So,” Crew Cut said, shuffling around a little as he dug into the topic. Lorraine’s magic worked: he was spilling everything now. “When she died, it wasn’t back during the big revolt. It was years later. She was on the run for decades, moving around, staying out of sight. She was one of the best at that part of surviving the revolution. I think the rest of them considered her kind of a mentor in that regard. But eventually a bunch of you guys, the young ones, found her hiding out here. This was in the 1940’s, when Sunset Beach was just a village. It wasn’t a vacation destination yet. Hell, nobody was even sure exactly where the state line ran through the island because nobody had a reason to care. This was a rock with a couple of huts on it. The war was on, and people had to keep their lights off at night. Nobody much was around. It was the perfect place for her to set up shop and meet with her right hand man.”
“Who was that?” I figured it was Herman, the cult leader, the one I thought was a vampire trapped in a human body, but I wanted to see how much Crew Cut knew.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is it was a Nazi officer in a U-boat. Imagine that: U-boats operating right there on the coast of North Carolina.”
I smiled a little. “Oh, it happened. A lot. North Carolina saw more U-boat action than any other Atlantic state. That’s why the lights had to be off all the time. It was hidden from the public until later. But rumors traveled, and eventually they were more or less honest about it,” I shrugged. “We used to hear about it even way up in the mountains. But, go on.”
“They caught her out here, having a meeting with that U-boat officer,” Crew Cut said. “I’m guessing it was a hell of a fight, but they managed to destroy her. The henchman got away, apparently with her ashes. Later he came back with a bunch of them and they buried those ashes on the spot as a memorial to her greatness or something.” Crew Cut shrugged. He had no time for considering a vampire to be a great anything. “Ross told them if they found the ash canister he could show them how to bring her body back and use it to bind her. If she makes – well, whatever it is she’s doing when she sucks down a person…” Crew Cut shook his head. The metaphysics were too much for him. “Anyway, I think they’re worried she’s doing something that will make it impossible to control her.”
I held up a finger to stop him. “You’ve been out on that beach. The wind is crazy. Ain’t nobody gathering up any ashes out there while they run away from a fight.” In my mind’s eye I saw nothing but a puff of grease gray dust blowing away the moment a vampire got dropped. The parking lot where Jennifer was ambushed was clean of all but the clothes when I got there, and they weren’t even exposed to the heavier winds on the beach.
He shrugged. “That’s the story, though.”
I shook my head. “Then it’s bullshit. They’ve got something else they’re looking for. And they don’t care about controlling her at this point. They’re just scared she’ll kill ‘em all before they can put her down.” I thought for a second. “Put her back down, I guess.”
“Why do you say that?” Crew Cut knit his brow.
“Hunch,” I said. “But it would go a ways towards explaining why my crew’s managed to kill so many of them and they’ve only killed one of us: they’re distracted, big-time, about as big-time as it gets, and the quickest explanation for that is they’re scared shitless of something a lot worse than a couple of whippersnappers and their magical mortal friends.” I looked back at him. “They’ve all pulled out, by the way. They’ve gone somewhere else t
o hide. We thought we were going to force them to move, show themselves, try to relocate their secret weapon, whatever, but it sounds now like it isn’t us they’re trying to get away from. I’d hoped we were going to make them regroup someplace convenient we could just set on fire and watch the show, but maybe instead they’re hunkering down and…” I shook my head at myself. “And what? I don’t get how going to ground helps them right now. I mean, why leave Herman out there on his own? Unless he’s a patsy – you know, bait to keep her busy while they get farther away.”
Crew Cut nodded. “I know Herman knows something about all this, but I don’t know how much. I figure he’s a thrall. Maybe for the other elders. Sometimes he has that aura of elitism they can have. It tends to rub off on people.”
“’Other’ elders?” I raised both eyebrows.
“The ones out here are, as far as I can tell, maybe kind of a splinter faction? I don’t know. There are elders in Charlotte who are pissed off these guys are out here. That’s what I can tell from what they said around me, anyway.”
I drew a breath and sighed. “So you were a thrall of the elders in Charlotte?”
Crew Cut flinched. “Yes,” he said, though it took some time.
I nodded. “And you betrayed them.”
“I saved myself, and…” He trailed off.
“There’s no crime in that, certainly,” I said.
Crew Cut looked at me with dark eyes. “Try telling them that.”
I shrugged. “Maybe one day I will.” I could tell I’d pushed it too far, though, so I switched back to the topic at hand. “Why would Herman be leading the effort to restore The Rhinemaiden – what you called The Mistress – if he works for ones who are pissed off this is all happening?”
Crew Cut shrugged at me. “Nothing they’re doing is working. They haven’t found whatever they’re looking for. They haven’t mounted a successful defense or counterattack against you. They haven’t managed to control The Mistress. It kind of feels to me like someone is sabotaging things from the inside. He’s a prime candidate.”
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 20