by Al K. Line
"Ugh, I haven't told her, if that's what you mean." Damn, she wouldn't be happy. Fae and vamps had never been the best of friends, and this certainly complicated things no end. Sasha knew what went on in the world of mortals, but was very choosy about what she helped me with or said. Something to do with the whole interfering in mortal affairs thing, with a bit of time-travel-like danger of paradox thrown in. She explained it to me a few times but it just made my head hurt.
She could only interfere if she knew she'd interfered, as that meant there would be no paradox. Could only tell me what she knew she was supposed to. Her home world was not ours, and time was very different for the fae. They were on their own particular timeline, where the ages meant little and to them our world was nothing but a distraction, hardly even real. So although they could come and mess about, there were limits imposed because this wasn't their home. Where the line was drawn I had no idea. Whenever she tried to explain the difference, the way things were, it ended up being like trying to explain the concept of flying to a fish. It was another world outside of my experience, and the concepts didn't compute even a little.
"I know everything," said Sasha from the doorway, now open even though I knew for a fact Vicky had locked it.
"Hey, Sasha, how you doing?" I asked, hoping she'd come to help not to scold.
"Sasha!" said Vicky, up out of her chair in a flash, ushering Sasha in, closing and locking the door behind her.
They hugged, holding it a little too long for me to feel comfortable, and their hands were placed a little too low, and were a little too excited, for me to feel comfortable either. I've often wondered if... Nah, just my overactive imagination, I'm sure.
"You gave the ashes of the First to the vampires, didn't you?" said Sasha, waggling her finger at me in accusation.
I winced, and kept trying to lean away from her finger. It'd been known to go off and do terrible things and she sure as hell didn't need a wand to make you very dead very fast.
"Hey, I didn't know. A heads-up would've been nice."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was faery godmother to an ape. I thought The Hat was a wizard. I didn't for one moment think he was a person who could carry around the ashes of the most famous vampire in history without knowing."
"I—"
"Do not interrupt!" warned Sasha, her brow creasing. Trust me, when something as beautiful as a faery brow creases you shut the hell up, do the zipper motion, then throw away the key.
"And, I didn't realize he could walk into the den of the only remaining vampires of any power in the country and hand over said ashes without considering maybe it wasn't a good idea."
"You had to be there," I mumbled. It was rather harsh but she did have a point, I guess.
"Okay, your idiocy aside, what did you want? I'm busy, got a date."
"A date? With who?" I asked, suddenly feeling paternal and wondering if her date had a good job and sound prospects. Yes, I'm fully aware of the pot calling the kettle black, thank you very much.
"None of your business!" snapped Sasha before she brushed past me, seemingly in a mood for some reason, then checked her hair and make-up in the reflection on the monitor screen.
Vicky said, "You look beautiful."
"Thank you, my dear. See, Arthur, some people have manners."
"You do look beautiful, as always. I just, er, didn't know fae had dates."
"How do you think we meet men and have sex, then?" asked Sasha, head cocked to the side, body wrapped up tight in sheer fabric that left just about nothing to the imagination. I got that funny feeling again, the one that made me utterly discombobulated. I knew she wasn't a relation, but she was my faery godmother, so having those kind of thoughts messed with my head no end.
"Don't talk about sex, it confuses me," I said, putting my hands in my ears.
Sasha spoke and put her hands on her hips, waiting.
"Sorry, couldn't hear you," I said, removing my fingers.
"I said, it's easy once you get the hang of it."
"Huh? What are you talking about? Oh, no, I didn't mean sex confuses me. Although, er, I suppose it does. No, I meant thinking of you having sex is... Damn, can we change the subject?"
"How about a cuppa?" asked Vicky, fawning over Sasha.
"Sorry, gotta dash. My date is very hot, and I mean literally." Sasha winked at Vicky and they shared a laugh together. I had absolutely no idea what they were laughing at but didn't ask. I knew better.
"Why did you come?" I asked.
"To say hello to Vicky."
"Aw, that's so sweet."
"My pleasure," said Sasha, smiling a gorgeous smile. "Ah, almost forgot. And to warn you. Fix this, or the vampires will be the least of your worries." Sasha was serious, just about every magic user on the planet, plus plenty of true preternatural creatures, would be out for my blood if I brought about the rise of the vampires after so long without them being more than a footnote to history.
"I'm trying to fix things," I protested. "If all these damn government spooks, Hounds, whatever, and the rest didn't keep getting in the way it would make my life a lot easier."
"Excuses, excuses," said Sasha with a tut. She was an expert tutter, had medals, I was sure.
"I know, right?" agreed Vicky.
"Get Vicky here to help."
I stared at Sasha to see if she was trying to be funny or not. I had no idea. "Why do you think I'm here?"
"I mean take her with you to help. You need a new sidekick."
"That's what I said," squawked Vicky, practically packing her bag for the fun vampire infiltration outing.
"No way, she has kids. She'll get hurt."
"You have a kid. You'll get hurt. You do get hurt," said Vicky as if stating the obvious to a child. "You still do it, though."
"That's different," I said, knowing it was lame.
"It isn't," said Sasha, and with a wink to Vicky she was gone in a sparkle of faery dust. I'm sure she made dramatic exits just to impress Vicky. When she was with me she walked or drove away like a normal person.
"Ha!" said Vicky.
"Ugh," said I.
Sometimes, I was sure there were too many women in my life. Women of the wrong sort. Meaning, women that refused to treat me with anything approaching respect and seemed to delight in abusing me and making my life more difficult. It's the hat, or the trousers, or something.
To Work
"Okay, look, you can tag along if you want, but won't it be awkward, what with the kids and all?" I was hoping I could guilt Vicky into changing her mind about becoming my temporary sidekick. Pepper's death weighed heavily and I didn't want her in danger. She was tough, but had no idea what it was really like out in the wilds where people would chew up and spit out daydreaming moms without a second thought. She'd tagged along plenty of times before, but not when there was anything to actually worry about.
"Really, you mean it?" Vicky performed a cringeworthy mom dance but I smiled and turned away lest it put me off her for life.
"You shouldn't do that, you know," I said, talking to the wall.
"What, this?"
Resigned, I turned to watch as Vicky gyrated her hips and did a weird rolling motion with her arms. Looking like the demented, sleep-deprived, exhausted and lonely insomniac that she was. Her movements got faster and faster.
Then the inevitable happened.
"Ugh, it burns, it burns." It was too late. The belt on the heavy dressing gown came undone and the fabric parted. She had nothing on and, I have to admit, she was a lot rounder and curvier than I'd ever imagined. I'd assumed she'd be skin and bone, but the gal had curves.
"Haha, you big baby. Oops, haha." Vicky blushed in that cute way of hers, but seemed rather brazen if you ask me. Showed a side of herself I was rather surprised at. She sorted herself out and thankfully the dancing was at an end.
"Enough messing about. If I don't deal with this and come up with something then life won't be worth living. I need information, and I need it fast."
"Then we go fight vampires?" asked my diminutive sidekick with utter, unbridled glee.
"Yeah, then we go fight vampires," I agreed, with about as much enthusiasm as a man being given the last rites. I was playing it down a little to calm Vicky, but this was serious and she had to understand the risks. I hadn't lost hope, though, wouldn't until I breathed my last. Even then, I knew I'd keep on trying even if I had to battle the vampires from some nasty hell for wayward wizards.
Vicky sat at what she liked to call her office chair, when in fact this was no office. It was a smelly basement rammed with tins of paint and the assorted detritus accumulated over years of living in the burbs. She had a tiny desk with a good quality chair because she spent every spare moment she could in here, which, with her busy life chasing about after her family, meant she usually came down after everyone else was sleeping soundly.
Vicky found it hard to sleep, same as me. Although not a true insomniac, years of being a mother had forced her to cope on little sleep. The extended deprivation had resulted in her being restless most nights, so she turned to something creative and became what many would call rather black hat with her computer activities.
This slight, immaculately made-up, prim, bolshy and bossy mother of two, and my friend, was a hacker. She did it for fun, so she said, and never did anything that would hurt anyone else, but I knew her skills had grown to be considerable over time. I also knew she'd used said skills to hack into the school she had chosen for her girls, and with some careful manipulations of the records had seen to it that her kids were accepted. I didn't doubt she'd made plenty of other tweaks over the years to if not outright steal then to certainly make life go in the direction she thought best.
"Okay, what do you need?" She cracked her fingers and then her hands hovered over the keyboard, eyes glazed and already in the zone. Expectant and waiting for the adventure to begin.
"I need everything you can find on Mikalus and what happened to him. The state of the vampire community in the country now, and worldwide, and I need to know how they plan on resurrecting him. And you need to be quick, as I don't know how long we have left."
I wondered how long the hole would take to burn through my head, deciding it wouldn't be long judging by the intensity of the gaze Vicky leveled on me. "What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"You mean to tell me you gave them the ashes, they want to resurrect Mikalus, and you didn't try to stop them right away and you don't know whether or not they're right now bringing him back from the dead? What if they've done it already?"
"You are such a noob."
"Am not!"
"Are too."
"I'll open my dressing gown again. And do my dancing," Vicky threatened as she moved to stand.
"No, okay, I'll talk, haha."
"That's my boy."
Somehow, within the last five minutes or so, I seemed to have lost my power of authority. I would be reduced to sidekick status if I didn't get my act together. Vicky had that effect on people. She took charge, was a whirlwind, and it could leave you dazed and confused, wondering what the hell just happened unless you kept a careful eye on what she did and made you do before you even realized it.
"They won't do anything in a hurry or half-arsed, it's too important. Nigel wouldn't have made arrangements to hand it over until he was sure he had it first. They must have been keeping a close eye on me, or him, making sure everything went smoothly, and when it didn't they jumped in and played it by ear, same as everyone else."
"So what? They could still be resurrecting him right now."
"Nah, you know what they're like. Gotta have rituals and all that good stuff. Actually, it isn't optional. They will need seriously strong magic for this, and there will be rules. A resurrection is almost impossible at the best of times. How many necromancers do you know?"
"Um, none."
"Exactly! So—"
"But I don't know anyone who uses magic apart from you," interrupted Vicky.
"Um, yes, well, you know what I mean. Black magic is hard, and scary, and you can't just chuck a bucket of blood at the ashes of a long dead vampire and BAM, he's back. It takes time, lots of time. There will be cleansing rituals, all that good stuff. I know the basics of these things, just not the specifics for someone like Mikalus. It'll take hours even if they were ready to go immediately. So, get to it and find out what they'll do and how long we have left."
"Yes sir." Vicky saluted and got to work.
I drank coffee and thought about my options. It didn't take long; I didn't have many.
A Plan (Kinda)
Vicky's nimble fingers flew across the keyboard faster than a vampire to a blood buffet and just as keen. She set up some kind of bot that would trawl places not accessible via regular search engines, the more secretive and unlisted private networks used by universities and institutions more likely to have research or downright speculation on the more arcane stuff. Pity there was no wizard intranet, but it was a surefire way to get into trouble, fast. The powers-that-be absolutely refused to allow the knowledge gathered over millennia to be digitized.
It always surprised me how much stuff was hidden in this digital mire, and Vicky'd told me there was more information in these private networks for governments, libraries, corporations and the like than in what most of us thought of as the World Wide Web. But the moment she started talking about Tor and Onion networks and how to access these places using proxy servers my eyes glazed over and I lost focus. I'd mumble appropriate sounds but understood none of it. I may have been black hat, but not in this digital world.
Anyway, it didn't take her long to get the information. There was a surprising amount of written work based around the vampires, much of it little more than fairy tales, but some of it was seriously old, and some of it was damn close to the mark. There were books, private and secret books, that had been kept under wraps but could be accessed if you had a computer genius like Vicky, as the pages were always either scanned into a system somewhere or painstakingly copied out to be sure they were preserved for posterity. Rare, but it was there.
Vicky accessed several such ancient tomes, ones I'd heard of but never read. Most of the really important stuff, though, the truth behind the myths, could never be accessed this way. It was too important, too well hidden, too dangerous to be known about by scholars unschooled in magic. My work meant I'd seen enough important books over the years to know they were too powerful to ever see the light of day. Passed down over the ages, kept secret and the information shared only with a select few, but she did what she could, and it was enough.
"The Book of Mikalus," she said as she brought up a frighteningly long piece of work. The musings of a now deceased professor who'd uncovered a book thought lost that mysteriously disappeared once he'd managed to read it. It concerned the resurrection of the fabled original vampire, and this dude had written extensively on the book he'd read, what he could remember. It droned on and on, mostly with a wry amusement that the authors clearly seemed to believe it was the truth.
"Think this is about as good as we're gonna get," I said. "And we need to get going. Give me the gist of it, how they can do it." I tried to read what was on the screen, but Vicky was one fast reader, and she scanned through the endless pages too quickly for me. Then she got exasperated and threw up a few search queries and sat back while the computer did its work. Whittling the endless waffle down to a more manageable size.
After an intolerable amount of time listening to her mumbling as she speed-read the relevant pages, she finally sat back and said, "Seems like you were right. It'll take a while."
"Good. I've heard the basics, of how they do it. Something to do with a blood sacrifice, and lots of the usual washing and donning of cool robes, all that kinda stuff. What's the real deal?"
"This professor, and this is just what he could remember, said the book talked about the ten. Ten true Children of Blood. The blood children of Mikalus."
"Okay, that'll mean Seconds. H
is firstborn, so to speak. What else?"
"Most of it's kind of nonsensical. Even he had a hard job making much sense of it. He talks about the blood of the ten needed to resurrect Mikalus, that it has to touch what remains, and then there's this." Vicky pointed at the screen where she'd highlighted a paragraph. "It's about the only passage he could actually remember properly, probably as it's the most important."
I leaned forward and read, "And you shall be cleansed by the pure one, unsullied and touched by the universe."
"What does that mean?" asked Vicky, looking at me like I'd have the answer.
"Not sure. Does the Prof say who this was directed at?"
"Hang on." Vicky clicked about a few times, going back and forth, and said, "Well, the whole book is like a guide for those that would resurrect Mikalus. It's written for the ten. So this is telling them they need to be cleansed by this pure one. What does touched by the universe mean?"
I stood, back aching from leaning forward. "No idea. Touched by the universe. Unsullied. All those words could be the wrong translation, or they could mean something different back then. Not that I know what they mean now. Okay, enough of this. Go get dressed, it's time to leave." If I'd thought I could have changed her mind I would have tried, but I knew when I was beat.
"You got a plan?" Vicky was practically ready to run out the door, dressing gown gaping.
"I do. But you won't like it."
"How do you know?"
"Because I sure as hell don't."
Vicky smiled at me then ran up the stairs to go creep about and prepare to go hunting vampires. This would not go well at all.
Bit Obvious
The drive was surprisingly quiet, meaning Vicky stopped to breathe now and then. I tried to warn her about Merrick, the guy we were going to see, but she just smiled that mom smile of hers, like I was talking about a bully at school and not to worry as the adults were here now.