I knew why my maker, Agatha, and the vampires who were her contemporaries, had to rebel against the ancients who made them.
I knew the fear they must have felt when they were commanded by horrors like this, and I knew just as surely the hatred that fear fostered in them.
Kneel, I heard The Rhinemaiden command in my mind.
Jennifer produced a dagger from somewhere on her and hand to Jesus I could smell magic on that knife. Roderick bared his teeth. Crew Cut let out a battle cry, a meaningless yell from deep inside. Smiles started to lunge, and Dog shook his enormous flanks to do the same. Beth and Marty still stood there staring at nothing. I punched one fist into the other hand, hearing my own heart pump black blood through my dead body, and figured if this was how I was going to die, at least I had my boots on and my fangs out. I was not going to goddamn -
The Rhinemaiden waved a hand, and all went dark, and that was the end of thinking I could fight her with my fists and a little moxie.
14
My eyes snapped open, and my senses told me it was almost sunrise – but not quite.
In movies, whenever somebody wakes up from being knocked out, you get that blurry vision thing that slowly resolves into the faces of the hero’s enemies leering at the camera. That doesn’t happen with vampires. With vampires, you’re awake or you’re asleep, period. There doesn’t seem to be a transition period. In that sense, I know intellectually that days happen, and I can sense their approach, but their passage is just a blink from my perspective.
In the same way, there seemed to be only a blink between The Rhinemaiden waving her hand at me in the middle of the night on the sand of Sunset Beach and it being hours later, almost morning but not quite.
We were in what looked like a misshapen movie theater – one that had seen better days. Everything was 1970’s rust-red-and-burnt-orange, and the pattern on the carpet was just a bad case of vertigo: lines and circles and paisley all over the floor like the pattern delivery truck hit a bump in the road as it drove past. Even the walls were carpeted, though they were solid colors.
The ceiling was high and domed, and there were thick black curtains draped all over it. In the center of the room stood an apparatus covered in lenses and eyes, like an ebony alien mantis the size of a golden retriever. The chairs were arranged around it in three rows. The apparatus was on a raised stage, so a presenter could walk around it in a circle and speak if they wanted. The sign on the machine read: star projector courtesy of Astronomy Live! c. 2002.
We were in the small planetarium in Sunset Beach, the one that did light shows in summer and had a glass domed roof for lectures at night.
Ah, I thought. A big glass room. Hell of a way to execute vampires.
We – Roderick, Jennifer, Crew Cut, Dan, Sheila, Marty, Beth, and me – were arranged in an arc in front of and beneath the raised platform, facing it. We were on those shitty old auditorium seats you’ve surely been forced to suffer for the duration of someone’s high school talent show.
I resolved right then and there I would not die in an uncomfortable chair.
There were three chairs on the platform, bigger and plusher, like they had been pulled from the lobby. They were just as old as everything else in the place – covered in mildew stains humans probably wouldn’t notice, fraying at the seams and long since missing some stuffing – but I guessed they were as close to a throne as these assholes could manage.
Seated on the one in the middle was The Rhinemaiden. She was looking at us, one at a time, and when she got to me I could feel the same sort of probe I sometimes felt from Roderick. Whereas his invasive mind is like a gentle pressure, hers was like a drill. She was in my mind, reading it, sifting it, sorting it, and I couldn’t do a damned thing to stop her. I tried to shut her out by force of will, but it was like trying to arm-wrestle a strongman while covered in butter. It was pointless. I couldn’t get a grip on the part of her that was in my head.
I tried to strain at the chains being used to bind my hands behind me, but I couldn’t make them budge. Maybe they had been magic-ified somehow, but maybe I just couldn’t get good leverage. The elder vampires of Sunset Beach used the same chain on Smiles, binding his front paws together with an extension of the chain they used to bind my wrists and hands. Too short a length of chain to allow either of us to move linked us to each other through a gap in the arm rest.
I gritted my teeth as I strained, and I could see Roderick doing the same thing but with much more composure. He didn’t blink or look away from The Rhinemaiden. He merely flexed his spindly arms to no effect.
Whereas Roderick seemed composed, Marty was visibly frightened. He looked to Roderick, who didn’t look back, then to me. I shook my head slightly side to side: don’t bother fighting. Not right now. Save your strength. I didn’t know what strength I thought Marty would have, but it seemed like the thing to try to convey.
Jennifer’s eyes fluttered open but sharpened in a heartbeat. She looked around the planetarium, lids narrowed, assessing. She didn’t bother to try to overcome her bonds. She just took in the room and what was around us.
Beth was staring at the thick, dark curtains over the glass-domed roof as though she could see the stars beyond them.
Dan and Sheila, when they awakened, turned slightly pale but stayed quiet.
Seated on The Rhinemaiden’s right was Ross, blue-silver skin shining in the dim globe lights and that too-perfect smile on his face. It was a kind smile, a generous smile, the smile of a judge who knows you’re about to be sentenced to death and is frankly glad to see you go but doesn’t want to seem like he’s being too much of a dick about it. I hated him so much I thought my spleen might cut its way out and take a flying leap at him.
On The Rhinemaiden’s other side was someone it took me just a second to recognize, but of course that was also the case a couple of nights before: Old Shoe, but still in his “Brodie” form, recognizable only by how generic and forgettable he was. He wore a different popped-collar polo shirt and a different pair of beige cargo shorts and a different pair of boat shoes, but it was like flipping pages in a Sears Roebuck catalog and seeing the same model wearing only marginally different outfits. Somebody could stick him in one of those find-the-one-that’s-different visual puzzle things, where there are like a thousand panda bears and you have to find the skunk or whatever, and you’d never spot him in a million years.
Around them, down at floor level with the rest of us, were maybe half a dozen other vampires. One of them, I noticed, was one of the three card players from To Kill A Sunrise.
Another was the woman who tended the bar.
So it wasn’t just that the elders or The Rhinemaiden ate or scared off almost all the people in town: they were desperate enough to start converting en masse any locals unlucky enough to be left. At least we made them feel the hurt before they caught up to us, I thought.
The others were an assortment: a guy dressed in hunting camouflage. A woman dressed in kind of a plain-Jane modesty dress: black and high-collared, with tall lace-up boots that disappeared under her long skirt, like a schoolmarm from the early 20th century. A dude who looked like he probably drove a big-rig for a living.
“So when did you go over to the other side?” I was looking at The Rhinemaiden when I spoke, but Old Shoe knew I was talking to him. “Or were you always one of them?” He was sitting by her, right there on the dais, and there wasn’t a chain around his wrists. Old Shoe was nobody’s prisoner. He was a defector.
“I’m sorry, Withrow,” Old Shoe said. “I never signed on to be a hero.”
I looked at him now. “What did you sign on for? What did they offer you?”
“They can fix me,” Old Shoe said. His voice was very soft, and his hands were fidgeting with one another in his lap. He wouldn’t look at me, or at any of us.
“I didn’t know you were broken.”
“Don’t patronize me,” he said, and this time Old Shoe’s voice was stronger. “I’m a monster, Withrow. You made m
e live in the sewers.”
Now I looked at him. “N-“
I stopped.
I was going to say no, to deny what he just said. But it was true. I told him to stay out of sight. I told him he was a danger to the rest of us. The Bobs told him the same thing, and I could have pointed at them and claimed it was their fault, but I could have changed the rule, too.
That he was a danger to us, that having someone who looked like Old Shoe – face half-peeled away, skull split open, burns across a third of his flesh, a hand he couldn’t use, a foot that turned the wrong direction, everything about him screaming he was walking, talking road kill – didn’t change the fact it hurt to be shoved literally underground and told to stay there. Sure, it turned him into our resident gossipmonger. It made him a useful spy. It granted him a unique role in the community of vampires living in the very specific realm of Raleigh, North Carolina.
It also made him more alone than any of us could have imagined.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Old Shoe looked up and blinked at me.
“I’m not going to defend myself,” I said. “I’m just sorry.”
In five minutes you will die. The mind-voice of The Rhinemaiden spoke to all of us. The curtains open on a timer. We have set them to open at a specific time of our choosing. When they do, the sun will be up. You will perish.
Roderick and I looked at each other in confusion. I said aloud, “But the sun comes up before then. We’ll be asleep.”
“Lady Beatriz has a number of unusual abilities,” Ross said. I followed his gaze and he and Roderick were staring at one another. I wondered which of them was trying to hoodoo the other, and which of them would win. “One of those is the ability to extend a vampire’s – or many vampires’ – wakefulness beyond dawn.”
“Well,” I said aloud, looking back at The Rhinemaiden – Lady Beatriz, I guessed – and harrumphed. “Touch her.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Ross said mildly. He smiled that death-sentence smile again. “She has rather an unfortunate effect on vampires who come into physical contact with her.”
“Osmosis,” Roderick said. “It is another of the Last Gasp powers. Are there any she does not have?”
“I think perhaps your generation have misunderstood the nature of your condition,” Ross said to us. “You seem to think each of you has some special gift only available to you once certain preconditions of a mystical nature have been met. That is not how your maturation works.”
“Fucking great,” I said to the room. “We’re about to have vampirism mansplained by a demon.”
Ross went on without missing a beat. “In actuality, that event you consider so momentous, when the world of the living no longer knows you, is just the beginning of your maturation, not its conclusion. Vampires of sufficiently strong blood and experience are able to call upon a vast array of the powers you think are one-of-a-kind. To her, each of your powers is just…” He paused, searching for the right term. “Vampirism 101.” Ross shrugged lightly – lithely – and I hated him all over again. He still wasn’t inspiring the sort of lust or attraction he did before, but he was radiating a kind of calm certainty I felt in my bones was not natural. He wanted us to chill out.
I smiled to myself: he was trying to keep us acquiescent by the use of his powers.
That meant he was afraid.
Ross went on blathering about how Lady Beatriz this, and Lady Beatriz that, and she could make an angel pole dance on the head of a pin, and blah blah fucking blah. While he did, I looked around the room and realized none of the vampires other than Old Shoe had spoken. They were barely even looking at us. They were looking at each other, or the floor, or the raised platform where The Rhinemaiden sat, but not actually at her.
She was staring at us, but she wasn’t using that power of hers to speak to us. She was letting Ross kill time so none of us would try anything.
Something about this didn’t add up. Something about the whole thing of coming out here to the beach, and doing this whole charade with the historical society, and knowing how to resurrect The Rhinemaiden’s body but not doing it, and Herman trying to make it look like he killed himself to bring her back so he could run away, and Crew Cut being right under their noses but not going after him – it just didn’t make sense. And now The Rhinemaiden was stalling, and the vampires were cowed, and that meant there was a chance things could still go wrong for them.
If they did, that would almost certainly mean they went right for us.
I don’t know what I was hoping for, to be honest. I couldn’t move, my dog couldn’t move, my cousin couldn’t move, and I doubted any of our powers would work on The Rhinemaiden. If our powers worked on any of her minions she would probably just override them somehow. Ross had made it clear The Rhinemaiden was all that and a bag of chips when it came to mystic firepower. We were screwed on that front.
But everyone here was still scared, and I was pretty sure I was starting to figure out why.
“Herman was trying to destroy you for good,” I said to The Rhinemaiden, interrupting whatever campaign speech Ross was in the middle of making on her behalf. I looked right at her as I said it. “He knew all along how to bring you back. He told me he was trying to get his body back instead, but I don’t think that’s true. He didn’t have a hope of getting his body back. The ash he turned into was blown away seventy years ago. I think he was trying to figure out how to keep you from going too ape-shit crazy while his people tried to deal with me. He was getting mortals involved in something secretive so he could feed them to you without lots of other people knowing where they were or what they were doing, just to cover his own tracks. Mortal blood wouldn’t be strong enough to restore you fully but it might keep you occupied. That would buy them time so they could focus their efforts on bringing you back, bodily, but only to kill you again and get rid of you forever.” I wasn’t totally sure what I was saying, but it kind of felt right when I said it. “It would explain why I never quite seemed to be the focus of their attention even though we were actively killing them. It would explain why we thought they would have all kinds of traps laid for us, plans within plans, but in fact they did nothing but react.”
“Cousin,” Roderick said mildly, “Of course they had some other priority. Not everything is about you.”
I didn’t take the time to give him a shut-up look. I just kept yammering. “In fact, I wonder, now that I’m talking about it, if maybe he didn’t betray you that night on the beach, all those decades ago. I mean, sure, he would tell everybody else it was a group of rebel vampires who sprang a trap on you, fine, whatever. But what if that wasn’t it at all?” I licked my lips. “What if what actually happened is that the elders knew they’d already lost to the rebels, and the best thing to do was to go ahead and hurry on over to the side of if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em. Like, the rebels kind of drew an arbitrary line: the old don’t-trust-anyone-over-thirty thing the hippies used to say. They drew their boundaries of “young” and “old” and started fighting, but that left some vampires on the young-ish side of old, right? And maybe even some sort of in limbo in the middle, not really trusted by either side. And maybe some of them went along with the elders because it was better, to them, to be a living slave to something powerful than the distrusted outsiders among a bunch of know-nothing kids in the throes of rebellious fervor.
I licked my lips and drew a breath too fast for anyone to interrupt. “Then, eventually, some of them would figure out they were on the wrong side after all and maybe y’all should just surrender and let the other guys declare victory. But they knew the really ancient vampires like you would never understand, would never give in, and so some of them decided to rearrange circumstances in favor of their argument. You know, set the ship on fire so there’s no choice but to abandon it. Herman was basically a suicide bomber: he would get you out there on the beach and they would spring some trap on you that would destroy both of you. But he, of course, would have someone else
around into whom he could jump to get away.” I made a little hmph noise. “Probably sunlight. Yeah. Get you on an eastern-facing beach and keep you there until the sun came up and fried both of you, but he has a mortal on hand he can use to get the hell away at the last possible second, and then boom, he’s stuck in mortal bodies for the rest of his days but it beats being dead.” I laughed suddenly. “You fought the rebellion so hard, and so single-mindedly, you drove your own closest allies to gin up an entirely different rebellion.” I looked around. “And then they had to spend, what, months? Weeks? The whole winter, anyway, trying to figure out exactly where you died because it’s been so many years the beach itself has changed: erosion and ‘renourishing’ and a million footsteps by tourists stomping down to that mailbox full of messages for the ever-after. It all changed the shape of the beach and they couldn’t be sure where it happened anymore. All that blood, all the sacrifices, all those rituals, the maps in the secret rooms in the houses they rented: they weren’t trying to find some artifact. They were trying to identify the right spot to bring you back. They wanted to be sure they were in the correct location when they brought you back so they could kill you again. And you know that.”
Roderick’s eyes narrowed. “That would explain why this particular display of hubris: bringing us to a place that can be exposed to the sun, after sunrise, and forcing your ‘followers’ to be here also. You wish to prove you are not afraid of having it happen a second time. You need to show them you can annex the plans they had for you and use them yourself.”
I looked around at the others. “And that’s why nobody came running from Charlotte to help you when my cousin and I started knocking you off. They’re the ones who wanted her back. You didn’t tell them you were coming out here to try to give her a material form again, because you didn’t want them to help her against you. You aren’t the elders I’m trying to find and fight. You’re the elders who are trying to double-cross the ones I’m trying to fight. I just happened to get in the way of your double-cross. Shit, we might’ve even been allies if you’d just fucking told me.”
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 24