by Jim McDoniel
Nora hadn’t said a word, but Amanda understood. She placed a hand on her brother’s shoulder and nodded to her friend.
Nora turned and sped off after the vampires.
“Damn,” said Catherine, watching her leave. “I wanted to get a picture with her.”
Chapter 32
No twisting dark forest nor fathomless abyss of stygian caves nor intricate system of endless crypts is quite as labyrinthine as a corporate office building. Even illuminated as it is in halogen lights, what it lacks in darkness, it more than makes up for in an exacting homogeneity, which can be achieved only by way of mass production and mediocrity. One corporate hallway looks very much like another, with doors and windows laid out in the exact same pattern. Not even the fake potted plant can appear anywhere other than the designated “fake potted plant corner.” And just as in the dark forests and underground realms, some people never find their way out of this maze of hallways. These people are called office managers.
The point of all this is to explain how six vampires managed to become irrevocably lost.
At a crossroads of four halls, Yulric stood weighing his options. Thus far they had taken two rights and one left before doubling back, moving up a junction, and facing the same decisions all over again. He had already tried magic, scent, and logic to guide them, and each had failed in turn. This time, he went with random guesswork.
“This way,” he called to his companions. There would have been mutinous whispers, except that none of the others could sense the correct path, either. Even Tezcatlipoca’s excellent jaguar nose was thrown off by air fresheners, which puffed out the same random blasts of sweet-smelling spray each time they passed. And so they followed Yulric around the corner.
Whoosh! Something ran past, down the hallway they had just left. The collection of vampires turned as a second figure ran past. And a third. As a single entity, they glanced back at Yulric.
“That way,” he growled in embarrassment. The vampires shuffled around the corner to find their way barred by an action tableau.
On the right side of the hall, Nora faced them, her eyes narrowed, her hands on her hips, the drape of her jacket baring a shoulder for a bit of sexy attitude. On the left, Berwyn faced them, cracking his knuckles as menacingly as one can when one is completely terrified. And in the center, Phantom stood, seemingly unconcerned, his hands casually stuffed in his pockets.
“No farther, monster,” Phantom said, his voice now a well-practiced calm.
“I have no interest in you.” Yulric took a step forward. The beautiful vampires twirled unnecessarily to counter his movement and wound up in a new tableau: Phantom, crouching, knees bent and hands clawed; Nora, a hand over her head as she leaned back on one leg and held the other outstretched; Berwyn, standing over both in anime-power-up position. “Yulric Bile,” intoned Phantom. “I challenge you for leadership of this coven by the laws set down by the united elder councils of the vampire nation.”
The ancients looked to each other and then to Yulric, murmuring in a handful of dead languages. The younger immortals mistook this to be a sign of dissension or fear. Really, they were asking each other, “What did he say? Laws? Since when do we have laws?”
Yulric himself was staring down the hall, past where Phantom was standing, to the far door of what his vampire eye told him was a conference room and what his nonvampire eye told him was a blur. Then, both his eyes focused on Phantom. He raised a hand, and everyone fell silent. Since elder vampires don’t like being shushed, it was a very pissed silence.
“I accept your challenge,” he said, his voice filled with restrained wrath. Yulric had no intention of hurting the boy. What he had decided in that moment was to bind both Phantom and Nora with black mucus and stick them to a wall. He had not considered, however, that Phantom might have a plan, too.
As soon as the first bullet hit, Yulric knew something was wrong. He’d been shot before, by both Amanda and her brother, and by comparison to the gun they had used, Phantom’s firearm looked practically demure. The pain from the actor’s, however, was tenfold what the Linskes had previously managed. Combined. This bullet burned—literally burned—its way through him, even setting his robe alight as it passed.
He was struck a second time. Then a third. While he couldn’t have said that the pain was like nothing he’d ever experienced, it definitely ranked in the top one hundred wounds, which, for a thousand-year-old vampire who’d been hunted, tortured, and nearly murdered more times than he could remember, was pretty good. A fourth bullet hit, and he was backing away.
A fifth, and he was kneeling on the ground. His chest heaved with pain rather than with breath. A click from above alerted him to the proximity of gun and shooter, who, distracted as he was, he had not noticed approaching. Phantom stood over him, gun pointed right between his eyes.
“Any last words?” asked the firearm-toting vampire.
Yulric spat out some blood, being sure it hit the fool’s pristine and probably very expensive tennis shoes. Phantom’s smile disappeared. His finger pulled the trigger. Yulric Bile, the great and dangerous vampire, fell to the ground in a heap of finality.
“I did it,” cried Phantom, first in disbelief and then in rising excitement. “I did it!”
Any sort of dignity or style that a great noble hero is supposed to display upon defeating his enemy was momentarily forgotten. Phantom forgot Nora was mad at him and lifted her up in a great big spinning hug. Nora also forgot she was mad at him and let him. Berwyn, feeling left out, came over and, with his huge arms around the pair, hoisted them both in the air. They all three laughed. It was the happily-ever-after moment, where in a single action, all the wrongs of the season are set right, all the leftover bad guys melt away, all the relationship missteps are forgotten, and everything goes back to the way it was until the reveal of next season’s main villain. In other words, damn fine television.
And just like on television, this perfect moment was being watched.
“Oh. Oh right,” said Phantom, remembering that there were still five other hideous monsters to deal with. He raised himself impressively, and his voice deepened as he assumed what he meant to be a commanding tone. “As your new leader, I command you to leave this place. Disperse. Go back to your dark and secret places, return to the sleep of ages, and do not rise till you hear my voice or the trumpets of judgment day. Do you understand?”
It seemed they didn’t. None of them moved. None of them blinked. A few turned their heads to the husk of what Phantom assumed was a woman and a hunchbacked black man.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” Phantom asked the collection of grotesques.
The stony woman’s empty sockets met his soulful brown eyes. “The recommencement of battle.”
“Uh, what?” he said, all dignity and command gone from his voice.
“Round two,” rasped a desiccated voice behind him. Phantom’s face fell, as did his stomach and his hopes. His testes, meanwhile, went up. Yulric Bile was on his feet once more.
The young vampire raised his gun to unleash a fresh volley into his eldritch opponent. His mind gave the order to pull the trigger, but nothing happened. For some reason, he could no longer use his gun. He could no longer even feel his gun. And now there was an intense pain coming from the end of his arm. Upon closer inspection, he found that both problems had the same cause—the hand holding the gun was gone.
Phantom let out a tear-filled scream of pain. He clutched at the stump, interspersing the high-pitched noise with frantic pleas of “Oh God! Oh God! My hand! My hand!”
During this din, Yulric Bile was prying the gun from Phantom’s cold, severed fingers. After pressing several catches on the firearm, the part that held the bullets fell out and clattered to the floor. Everyone except Phantom leaned in to see that each and every bullet was etched with a cross. A shiver ran through the elder vampires.
Yulric approached Phantom, who was still rocking on the floor, mourning the loss of his hand, beauty, and career
, though not in that order.
“You probably thought yourself wise,” Yulric said, “shooting me with these. But you forgot one thing, dear boy.”
He held up a lumpy, indiscernible piece of metal next to Phantom’s face. “Musket balls deform when they strike.” The younger vampire gulped as he stared into Yulric’s eyes. Reasonable, rational, fan-of-the-show Yulric had checked out. Only the psychotic killer remained.
Phantom had less than a second’s warning. One moment, the creature was kneeling down next to him, showing him the bullet, the next, he was whirling his medieval battle-ax through the air where Phantom’s neck had been. Were it not for the small twinkle of warning that had appeared in the old vampire’s hazel eye, he’d have been fit for only a Sleepy Hollow adaptation. Instead, he rolled out of the way and started dodging.
Yulric chased him. Not by running, the hallway was too small for that. He simply kept swinging his ax anywhere his prey landed. Phantom evaded the blade each time by smaller and smaller margins until one swipe caught a few hairs from the young vampire’s head. Phantom felt his scalp, just as dismayed by the violation of his haircut as he had been for his hand. Yulric roared triumphantly, certain that his next swing would be the end of it.
In a split second, a decision was made. Yulric brought his weapon around. Phantom leapt out of the way. And Berwyn found himself pushed forward.
“No!” Nora’s voice pierced the veil of rage in Yulric’s mind and coming to, he was shocked to find Berwyn, not Phantom, standing in front of him. For one horribly comical moment, they were both united in gaping at the large red cut through his midsection. Then slowly, he began to tilt.
“No!” Yulric shouted. He dropped his ax as he reached out to grab Berwyn’s upper half, but the young vampire slid through his fingers, collapsing into a cloud of dust.
“I thought we were not supposed to kill the tellers of stories,” Tezcatlipoca said sarcastically.
Cebrian chuckled.
“Disgusting,” said Phantom as he sputtered and spat, trying not to breathe in his friend.
“You!” Yulric cried. The TV star found himself suspended in midair by a pair of bony hands.
“Do it then. Kill me,” Phantom said, closing his eyes.
Yulric scowled. Moment’s ago, in his rage, he’d been more than ready to unmake the arrogant idiot. But now, his rational mind had returned and, with it, a reluctance to harm the actor. Also, a desire to get an autograph.
Phantom smiled. He knew. “You can’t, can you? You’re too much of a fan. Get him, Nora!”
Yulric looked over his shoulder to where the vampiress stood holding the ax that moments ago he had discarded. There was a nagging sense of familiarity about the whole thing. This had happened once before, he was sure of it. On the show. Season three, episode twenty-four. The finale. Lord Dunstan, still evil at this point, had been holding a recorporealized Phantom by the throat when Nora appeared out of nowhere and ran him through with Excalibur.
Yulric remembered. Phantom remembered. By the way she gripped the ax, Nora, too, remembered. For a moment, it looked as if life would imitate art. But then she threw the weapon.
“N-Nora?” Phantom called out, not quite believing what was going on. “What are you doing? Get him, Nora.”
Nora shook her head. “You pushed him.” She walked past the elder vampires and down the hall.
Phantom began to panic. “Please. Please, Nora. Nora? Where are you going?”
She turned as she reached the stairwell door. “I’m going with them. At least they look out for each other.” And with that, she bumped the crash bar with her hips and exited backward. Nora was gone.
Now Phantom’s cool abandoned him just as Nora had. His eyes bulged, his voice squeaked, and he began to struggle madly against the steely grip that held him. He clawed and pulled at the hand in ever-increasing desperation. Yulric let him, again enjoying the emotion of his prey. Blood may have been a vampire’s food, but fear was what they truly lived on.
Yulric watched as the struggling subsided into hopeless despair. Tears welled up in Phantom’s eyes, and silently he pleaded for mercy. Yulric pulled him in close so that the two were face-to-face.
“Your mistake was in believing your own fiction,” Yulric whispered. “What you experienced before was a story. In a story, your friends always save you. In a story, Lord Dunstan is defeated. In a story, you never die.”
Phantom mouthed the word please.
Yulric began increasing the pressure of his superhuman grip. “But this is reality. Your friends are not coming, I am not Lord Dunstan, and you—”
With a monumental display of strength, Yulric severed Phantom’s head with his bare hands. Most of the former TV star fell to the ground and disintegrated. Yulric looked at the nine-pound head still in his hands as it crumbled around his fingers. There was so much he would never know. It was The Canterbury Tales incident all over again.
This is not what I wanted, he thought.
Ha! That’s a lie, replied a voice in his head that was not his own. Yulric slammed a door in his mind. Hard. Hard enough that from the other side of his mental barriers, he could just make out the sound of Catherine’s thoughts saying, Ow!
Stay out of my head, woman, Yulric thought.
Fine, replied Catherine. Her consciousness departed, leaving only a lingering be careful.
“Pah,” Yulric snorted. “Careful.”
“What was that?” asked Arru as the vampires re-formed around him.
“Let us go,” Yulric said, retrieving his ax from the ground.
Nothing could stand in their way. Not a hundred vampires. Not the cast of Phantom. And certainly not The Doctor Lord Talby. They were invincible. They were power. They were proper vampires. And, as the collection of Old Ones pushed through the double doors, they all had the same thought.
Everything is going according to plan.
Chapter 33
The Doctor Lord Talby looked up from the end of a long conference room table. “Ah, be with you in a moment,” he said in Latin. He turned back to the lawyer standing next to him. “What’s next?”
“Sign there,” the man instructed pointing at a piece of paper. The Doctor did. “And on the next page, you need to initial—”
Where he needed to initial, they did not learn, for at that moment, Yulric’s ax separated the man’s head from his body. The body fell with a thump. The head remained balanced on the blade of the ax, which was now imbedded in the wall.
Talby looked up at the suspended, severed head. “That was uncalled for.” He finished signing his papers. “There. Shall we talk surrender?”
The elder vampires laughed.
“You think we should surrender?” Yulric snarled. His body tensed with power and magic as he prepared for the final battle.
“Oh no. I was speaking of my surrender,” Talby answered.
“What?” the vampires uttered. They looked from one to another, confused. Their kind did not surrender.
“I am surrendering to you. Unconditionally.” The Doctor smiled pleasantly. He picked up the papers on his desk. “That’s what these are. I have officially signed over all my assets and holdings to you.”
“This is a trick,” Yulric accused.
“Afraid not,” Talby indicated the six chairs around the table. “If you’d like to have a seat, I thought before you killed me, we should go over the details of the empire you now command.”
In a flash, Yulric was on the good doctor. With one hand, the older Englishman held the younger’s head to the table; with the other, he retrieved his ax from the wall. “I think not.” Yulric raised his weapon.
Cold, hard fingers wrapped themselves around his wrist. Yulric turned to find Arru firmly holding his arm back. “Let us hear more.”
Turning from her to the others, he realized his misstep. In his fury, he hadn’t noticed the slight emphasis Talby had put on the word empire. And now greed had subtly wormed its way into their minds. Just as the Doctor had undoub
tedly intended.
Reluctantly, Yulric released Talby. The Doctor stood, straightening his suit. “Please, have a seat.”
They vampires spread out along the table. Yulric took the space on the end opposite Talby. He did not sit.
“Now, before we get started, can I offer you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea?” The Doctor paused strategically. “Blood?”
“Blood,” said Cebrian and Tezcatlipoca at the same time. They wheeled their chairs away from each other, as if proximity had betrayed that they had something in common.
“Anyone else?” the Doctor asked. Slowly, more hands were raised.
“Well, in that case . . .” Talby smiled. He pressed a button, and a few seconds later, some excited young people entered through a side door. Seven, to be exact. They were dressed mostly in black, with mostly black hair, and black lipstick, also mostly. There was nothing mostly about the amount of eyeliner present.
The leader was a short young woman with curly black hair, slightly more filled out than her companions, who all looked as though Famine had just ridden by. She went straight up to the Doctor and, with a frightened glance at those watching, curtsied.
“My lord,” she said, “you asked me to bring my coven?” She shook, obviously unnerved by the collection of horrors the room provided. All manner of thoughts passed through her head, primarily involving the Doctor betraying her and feeding her and the others to these . . . things. To her credit, she almost managed to keep the fear out of her voice.
“Do not worry, Cassandra. You are perfectly safe, I promise you.” The girl breathed a sigh of relief at the Doctor’s words. “I have afforded you a great honor. For your good service, you and your coven shall be the first to pledge themselves to the elder vampire lords.”