by J. F. Lewis
Relief washed over me, and it was not the right emotion. Anger keeps me awake, but relief . . . My eyes slid shut and I couldn’t get them open.
“Dadburnit,” JPC shouted. “Try to turn inta a cat if yore gonna go and do that.”
“Tha-yut,” I mumbled, mimicking his accent. As numbness worked its way from my skin inward, I thought catlike thoughts. I hoped I had managed to change into a cat. I couldn’t tell. Numbness reached my core, and the lights went out.
Help me, Obi-John Paul Courtney. You’re my only hope.
45
ERIC:
NOTHING REALLY MATTERS
I was up before the girls. I only sleep a few hours each day, and the soft predawn is my favorite time of the morning. At home, I was often the only one up. Before I turned Greta, she’d alter her sleep patterns to spend those few hours with me watching videos or cable, even running a reel or two over at the Pollux. I knew we’d worn out more than one UNO deck in our time, even though it had been just the two of us. As a result, UNO or Scrabble with more than one other player wasn’t fun anymore, unless the third player was Marilyn.
Speaking of not fun anymore: Irene and Rachel lay sprawled on the bed in a tangle of limbs, neither one wearing more than a tiny hint of clothing. A mediciny taste coated my mouth, which wasn’t all bad, because almost any taste is better than none. My limbs were heavy, my eyes drooping, and I would have gone back to bed if not for a nagging feeling of wrongness.
“What are you doing, Eric?” I gazed into the full-length mirror near the door of the hotel room, staring at the reflection that wasn’t there. Slipping into my discarded clothes, I crept out of the bedroom and into the adjoining sitting room of the suite, trying to remember the name of the hotel we’d wound up in.
Once there, I picked up the phone and punched numbers until I got the front desk or the concierge and got them to walk me through making an international call. I dialed Marilyn’s number first.
Three chimes and a message. “We’re sorry,” said the voice, “but the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”
I dialed it again. And again. I dialed variations of it. No Marilyn. Directory Assistance didn’t have a listing for her either. No one answered at the Pollux and when I dialed the Demon Heart’s number, I heard my own voice.
“You’ve reached the Demon Heart Lanes Bowling Alley.” I sounded still and unnatural, like I was reading from a script, “Our hours are 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., with Cosmic Bowling after 8 p.m. on most weeknights.” My voice then gave the office number to call for special events, and then there was a pause. “Oh and for all you idiots that keep leaving messages about our former business, I said bowling and I meant bowling, and no, it’s not some stupid joke.
“If you’re interested in seeing naked girls, get a girlfriend, head down to Melons, buy a DVD, or try the Internet, but don’t leave a message for me about it, ’cause you morons are filling up the voice mail with drunk dials so much that I’m gonna start tracking you down if you keep it up. So stop it!” My voice got louder. “I miss the girls too, but they have better things to do than dance for your amusement. And I have better things to do than listen to you whine about it. And I’m not changing this number either, because it took me twenty frickin’ years to remember the damn thing and I’m not learning a new one. Have a nice day.”
I hung up the phone, stared at it a little longer, dialed the Demon Heart again, wrote down the number for special events, hung up, and dialed that one.
“Hi, ya’ll.” It was a woman’s voice, sultry, southern, and familiar. Her name was there, in my brain, but I couldn’t bring it to the forefront. “My name’s Cheryl and I’m the special events planner for Demon Heart Lanes Bowling Alley. You just go ahead and leave your name, number, and the kind of event you’d like to schedule and I’ll get back to you soon as ever I can. Bye, now.”
So familiar. Had Cheryl danced at the club and moved over to the new business? And when the hell had I started the new business? I didn’t know.
I couldn’t think of Roger’s number, couldn’t even remember his current last name, so I looked around for the television. A fancy remote on a table next to a big rectangular picture frame with a name and a logo promised me television even though I couldn’t see one in the room. I clicked the power button and the black expanse within the frame blinked on, displaying a list of channels and services.
“Holy shit!” I jumped from channel to channel with the remote. Everything looked wrong, futuristic, or . . . I mean, how the hell did France have cooler TVs than the U.S.? It’s fucking France, right? The Frogs would all be Germans without America’s help and now they had better TV? And the special effects! What the hell? I’d seen Hollywood movies with special effects worse than that.
I’d thought the cars looked a little different, but I’d honestly assumed they were just different models of cars made only in Europe, and it wasn’t as if I’d been paying attention to things outside the car much.
Still . . .
Pushing the channel button sent me through more shows: a newscast, a . . . The date on the screen stopped me cold. June 6th. If you aren’t a war buff, that date might not mean anything to you. But to me and folks like me, it’s D-Day, when me and a whole lot of less lucky men took a stroll on the beach to set the stage for the eventual end of Hitler and his goose-steppers.
“More than forty years ago . . .” I said, my face tightening at the corners as I gave a grim smile. Strains of “Der Fuehrer’s Face” by Spike Jones and His City Slickers ran through my mind and I chuckled without meaning to as the image of Göring on piccolo from the German oom-pah band in Disney’s “Donald Duck in Nutzi Land” popped unbidden into my head.
Forty years. But the number on the television screen didn’t match my head, nor the year. June 6th, 1944, we agreed on, but according to the news, it had been more than sixty years since D-Day, closer to seventy.
I’ll be the first man to admit I have a crappy memory, but to be wrong about the present date by more than two decades?
“Wait right there,” I told the too-big, too-flat television. Back in the other room, I found Rachel’s purse, sat down in an overstuffed Louis XIV chair, and dug through the purse for a passport or something with the date. The stamp on Rachel’s passport confirmed the television’s story, and I cursed loudly.
“Master?” Rachel leaned up, bleary-eyed and blinking. “I mean . . . um. Eric? Good morning. What are you doing up?” Her heart jumped when she saw the passport in my hand. “Is everything okay?”
“My brain is screwed up,” I said slowly. “I seem to have forgotten the last twenty years, and it’s the anniversary of one of the scariest days of my life. Marilyn’s number is disconnected.” I threw the passport back into Rachel’s purse. “I can’t remember Roger’s current last name or his number, and apparently I run a damn bowling alley now.”
“Oh, baby.” Rachel climbed out of bed and cradled my head against her breasts, putting me eye-level with her piercings. “Not again.”
“Again?” I asked.
“I know you can’t help it, but you have to get past this. It’s not your fault, not really.”
“What’s not my fault? D-Day? No shit. I blame Hitler.” I pushed her out to arm’s length. Sad eyes and a pout told me she didn’t think that was funny.
“Poor baby,” she said again.
“What?”
Her eyes focused on the ceiling as if fighting back tears.
“What?” I repeated.
Rachel breathed in and out, a doctor preparing to deliver bad news. “Are you all the way back to the seventies again?”
“Eighties. And what do you mean ‘again’?”
“The eighties?” She hugged me, but I shrugged her off, standing. “Well, that’s an improvement.” She spoke the words at my chest, but I assumed she meant the memory, not her new vantage point.
“Over what?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you unless I have Ire
ne or Greta handy to stake you if you go off.”
“Stake me?!” I sat back down with a resigned thud and the chair gave, dropping me to the floor. “Why would they need to stake me?”
“You have a tendency to black out.”
“Did I feed from you last night?” The question, generated by my new view of her exposed thighs and easy access to her femoral artery, surprised both of us.
“You feed from me most nights, silly.” Rachel ran her fingers along her inner thigh, tracing the vein. “It’s okay, I’m your thrall. I make blood faster than a normal human.”
“Thrall.” I hated that word, hated the whole concept. “I can’t believe I made you my slave.”
“I’m not a slave,” Rachel reassured me. “True, you could give me commands and I’d have to follow them, but you don’t usually, and I get really good sex, agelessness. I don’t have to keep down a real job, my muscles stay toned, I heal fast, and my body doesn’t gain weight no matter how much I eat.” Moving closer, she held her legs apart. Her scent revealed a readiness not just to feed my appetite for blood, but any other carnal appetite I had in mind.
I drank deeply, flavor on my tongue, hot and sugary, more cinnamon than blood. My heart beat as I drank, in a heavy steady rhythm, and I had to stop drinking to breathe. “This has been happening.”
“I’m a very talented thrall.” She sat on my lap, blood from her wounded thigh coloring my jeans. “I can wake your body up for a little while when you drink me or fuck me.”
We kissed, and when she pulled away, her own blood tinted her lips.
“Tell me what you’re not supposed to tell me.”
“Okay, but let me get ready to calm you down, okay?”
“How?”
“It’s called tantric magic,” she said. “It’s what I do. I get in touch with your chakra, help keep you calm, but I’m not supposed to mess with your moods without permission. Do I have your permission?”
“Fine.”
As she touched my chakra, warmth and calm settled over me like a blanket. “Wow,” I said softly.
“Nice?” she asked.
“Very.”
“Relaxed?” She gently kissed her way down my torso, then back up.
“Uh-huh.”
“Not too long ago, you found out Marilyn and Roger had been cheating on you, since back before you died. When you died in Roger’s car, it wasn’t an accident. It was murder. When you found out—”
“What?” I clutched her arms. “What did I do?”
“You’re hurting me,” Rachel whispered.
“Sorry.” I let go, staring down at the row of wounds my claws had dug into her skin. “Did I hurt them?”
Rachel nodded, her voice so low only a vampire could hear it. “They died.”
“I killed Marilyn?” Drops of blood wet my face, my voice catching as I spoke, cracking in the middle of Marilyn’s name.
“You didn’t mean to,” Rachel cooed. “Him, yes, but her . . . that wasn’t your fault, you even tried to save her. You made a deal with a demon even, but the demon betrayed you.” A grown man sobbed as she spoke. I think it was me. “Don’t cry, baby. That’s my blood in those tears.” She kissed my cheek. “You’re wasting it.”
I hugged her tight as she continued to coo, to comfort me, and my thoughts flew apart, one thought and one thought only resounding all too coherently in my mind: I killed Marilyn.
When Irene woke up that evening, the thought was still rolling through my head. She knew something was up, and she was furious with Rachel, shouting, “You told him he killed Marilyn?” followed by “What the fuck were you thinking?” over and over again until I told her to stop.
I was useless to both of them after that, and Irene decided it was time to get out of the city.
“I have this place near Montpellier, not far from the southern coast,” she told me. “A winery. I learned to make blood wine. It’s not as refined as Duke Gornsvalt’s, but it’ll do the trick, and I think that’s what you need, to get roaring drunk and look up at the stars. Sound good?”
“Fine,” I remember saying. “That’s fine.” The coolness of being able to possibly drink alcohol was lost on me.
Rachel and Irene exchanged a look I couldn’t read as we rode in the limo. Maybe she was mad Rachel had put a damper on the honeymoon. As we left the city, I felt a consciousness brush my thoughts. It was a female Vlad. She was young, beautiful, and newish, but the touch was brief and Rachel was driving fast.
“Eric!” the young vampire shouted in my thoughts.
“Hey,” I answered back, but the contact was already gone.
“You want to listen to some music?” Irene asked me.
She interpreted my shrug as a yes and showed me how to work my iPod. I scrolled through the playlists and clicked on “Marilyn.” XTC’s “All of a Sudden (It’s Too Late)” played and I closed my eyes. Andy Partridge’s soulful musings drove deep, and the French countryside shot by virtually unnoticed and thoroughly unappreciated. When the song ended, I backed it up with a click of the little back arrow and played it again, then pressed Menu and scrolled through the other songs.
A duet by Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford, Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love,” different covers of “Time after Time”—a whole song list devoted to melancholy and lost love.
I whistled—one long note—hit Play/Pause, and scrolled through the artist menu, clicked on “Queen” and selected “All Songs.” Freddie Mercury broke out into “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the smile was hard to fight. The laughter followed.
“Eric?” Irene’s smile was wary. “What’s so funny?”
No wonder Irene had gotten me to marry her. It wasn’t the ménage à trois. It was that nothing mattered. Just like Freddie sang at the end of the song. With Marilyn gone, I was one step away from, well . . . anything.
46
TABITHA:
UNHEX MY HUSBAND
He didn’t even recognize me,” I shouted at John Paul Courtney as I ran full speed in human form down the side of the road in Paris. People were noticing, but the way I looked at it, that was the True Immortals’ fault. If they’d just left Eric and me alone to have our honeymoon, none of this would have happened. “He sensed me and he didn’t even recognize me. He said, ‘Hey.’”
“That little sister of yours done hexed the boy.” John Paul Courtney’s ghost floated alongside me on a horizontal plane like a bad rear-screen projection effect. While he had saved me from burning up by using the handle of El Alma Perdida to shove my unconscious little cat body up under a car, I attributed at least half of my survival to sheer dumb luck. I mean, what if someone had moved the car? I’d assume he had a backup plan, but . . .
“Well, duh!” Zipping along the roadside, I took a swipe at the ghost, averted an unintended plunge into the River Seine with sheer willpower, regained my stride, and shot on after Eric and my sister. It wasn’t about spending a night in Paris now, it was about getting my husband back before he had to fight la Bête du Gévaudan, the thought of which was terrifying. I’d never seen Eric in a fight he couldn’t win, but against la Bête du Gévaudan, he’d been powerless.
I caught up to the car again, close enough for Eric to sense me, and kept announcing myself in the hope that he’d hear me or remember me. He didn’t, though. It was weird: I got a connection, but it was like a one-way mirror. I could see him hovering in my mind’s eye, a semitransparent hologram. Queen’s soundtrack to the movie Flash Gordon—the football fight portion—playing on his iPod rang clear as a bell to my ears. The scent of him filled my nostrils, but to him, I was invisible. “It’s me, damn it! Eric! Eric!”
Everybody’s seen those cop shows where the witness is behind the glass, pointing out the suspect, and an idiot turns on the light in the room so the one-way glass becomes a window. In the mental contact, a light turned on and Eric vanished as if I’d been seeing, feeling, and hearing a reflection, and in its place was Rachel, driving the limo and watching me through the re
arview mirror. It was just an image, a mental projection, but my little sister stared at me, eyes in a mirror, eyebrows narrowing, and spoke in a voice filled with derision.
“Hello, slut. Your master is busy at the moment, but luckily for you he has a thrall powerful enough to intercept your attempt at reaching him and tell you to fuck off. Enjoying your honeymoon?”
“I don’t have time for this, Rachel. If we don’t leave Paris tonight, then Eric is going to have to fight la Bête du Gévaudan.”
“So? Eric can kill anything.”
“La Bête is an immortal werewolf, Rachel. Eric already fought him once and this thing batted down the uber vamp like it was nothing. Whatever you’re doing has to stop, and we have to get him out of here.”
I dodged a little Citroën Nemo, vaulting over the rear and dashing down the hood. My ankle buckled on the asphalt and I rolled back onto the hood for a fraction of a second, long enough for the driver to see me, and balled myself up, feet flat against the bumper, palms on the hood to launch off again. The driver lost control of the car and swerved into another lane, sideswiping a minibus.
“How athletic,” Rachel mocked.
“Rachel, why the hell are you doing this?”
“Because I made a deal.” Her eyes softened. “I didn’t want to completely screw up your honeymoon, Tab. I would have let you have a couple of nights, but I was going to get killed if Ebon Winter hadn’t given me a get out of jail free for a favor card . . .”
“Winter put you up to this?”
“He said if Eric didn’t lose in Paris, then he wouldn’t win in Void City.” Rachel’s image flickered as the car sped up, and I increased my pace to match it.
“And you believed him?”
“He said it was a bet.” Her eyebrows drew in closer at the center, the outer edges arched high. “Have you ever known Winter to lose a bet?”
No, I hadn’t. Winter never lost. Eric had to lose here to win there. Win what? Lisette had headed to Void City. Did Winter mean Eric had to become embroiled in all this Immortal Politics crap to have a chance at Lisette?