by AnonYMous
Stephanie smiled. This was a big moment for her.
‘I think I know,’ she said.
Twenty-One
The hotel that Dante had booked for his surprise honeymoon with Kacy proved ideal as a staging post for his undercover mission. After a quick upgrade, paid for in cash by Robert Swann, they found themselves in an impressive third-floor suite. The happy couple had a double bedroom to themselves, and as well as a large sitting room there was a spare bedroom for Swann and a female colleague who were ‘babysitting’ them.
Dante was sitting on the large double bed in the bedroom he and Kacy were sharing. It was a decent-sized room with the bed positioned in the middle of it, covered with a crisply laundered orange duvet. He was now only minutes away from the start of his first night attempting to pass himself off as a vampire.
Swann entered the room and approached his charge, holding a syringe full of serum. ‘You ready for the injection?’ he asked, sitting down on the bed.
‘Stick it in me, you sorry piece of shit,’ Dante growled back.
Dante had the left sleeve of his maroon shirt rolled up so that Swann could make the necessary injection of lifesaving serum. Kacy, wearing a pair of blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, was sitting beside him. She was holding his hand, making the most of the last few minutes she had with him before these cowardly Secret Service lowlifes sent him off to do their dirty work for them. She hoped and prayed with all her heart that he would make it through his first night among the vampires and survive undetected because of this serum. It had been explained to them that the chemicals in the serum would lower Dante’s blood temperature enough for him to move among the undead without being eyed up for dinner.
Agent Swann looked as if he was taking a degree of sick pleasure from injecting the clear liquid from the syringe into Dante’s arm. To his credit, the young man didn’t flinch as the needle went in and was kept there for about fifteen seconds, far longer than was necessary. Sadistic by nature, Swann had already started to take a considerable dislike to him (as most figures in authority tended to do), so prolonging any pain Dante might be feeling gave him something of a kick.
With them in the bedroom was Swann’s new colleague, Special Agent Roxanne Valdez. She was a tall black woman with scraped-back beaded hair, wearing a figure-hugging white sweater that showed off some great curves. She also wore a short brown skirt. Their clothes were all part of the façade they had created for the hotel staff – two couples on vacation together. Swann had dressed like a tourist in a blue Hawaiian shirt with knee-length chino shorts. So much for discreet, Dante thought, as he endured the injection at the hands of the special agent. Talk about advertising yourself as undercover. Stupid prick.
It was Agent Valdez who brought the inappropriately lengthy injection to an end. She could see her colleague was taking too much pleasure in his work.
‘Come on, that’s enough,’ she snapped. ‘You’re just being an asshole now. Stop it.’
Swann cast a quick, spiteful glance at her as he pulled the needle out of Dante’s arm. ‘I was just taking extra care to make sure I injected the right amount of serum. Better more than less,’ he said, unconvincingly.
He checked the syringe was completely empty and then got up and carried it out of the room. He passed through the large sitting room with its sofa, two deep armchairs, minibar, coffee table and television, before disappearing through a door in the corner into one of the suite’s two bathrooms. When he had gone, Roxanne Valdez made her way over to the side of the bed where Swann had been sitting as he carried out the injection. She sat on the edge by Dante and took hold of his arm to check it over and ensure there was no identifiable bruising where the needle had gone in. Kacy was convinced that she gripped Dante’s bicep in a manner that implied she was checking to see just how firm it was, rather than to see whether it was bruised. The agent also sneakily placed her free hand on his thigh, as if she was trying to steady herself. Not only that, but she seemed to hold on to Dante for just a second longer than was absolutely necessary as she looked him over.
‘Okay, you’re looking good,’ said Valdez, smiling at her patient. ‘How’re you feeling? Ready to take on the underworld?’
Dante looked her in the eye and forced a fake smile. ‘Bite me, bitch,’ he snapped.
Kacy was relieved to see that the smile and ever-so-slightly-inappropriate bicep touch had not made her man warm to the agent in any way.
‘Hey, don’t be like that,’ said Roxanne, still smiling warmly at him and caressing his arm once again. ‘Now, do you think you’re ready to wear a wire tonight? Or would you rather leave it for now?’
‘Wear a wire? Do I look like a cunt to you?’
‘No,’ Roxanne responded calmly. ‘Nobody here looks like a cunt.’
‘I disagree,’ said Dante pointing at Agent Swann through the doorway. ‘Look at him. Cunt.’
Swann marched back in. ‘I heard that. Cut it out. We’ve all got our orders, right? I didn’t think up this mission for you. I’m just the guy they dumped the babysitting assignment on. I’m not thrilled at having to sit in this fucking hotel room all fucking day and night watching over your whiny little girlfriend, either. So quit it with your shitty comments.’
‘Boo-fuckin’-hoo,’ said Dante, mocking him. ‘Now, you call Kacy whiny again and I’ll give you something real to cry about.’
‘Is that right?’ Swann asked over his shoulder as he walked back into the sitting room.
‘Yeah.’
Roxanne, deciding to put an end to the macho talk, which in her opinion was approaching kindergarten levels of puerility, stepped in to defuse the situation. She stroked Dante’s arm again, then pulled his sleeve back down to cover the site of the injection.
‘Look, Dante,’ she said quietly, ‘forget about the wire for this evening. Just see if you can get yourself into one of the vampire clans. And see if you can work out which one your buddy the monk is most likely to be hiding in. He may already be dead, in which case just see what you can find out about the Eye of the Moon, and whether any of the clans have managed to get their hands on it.’
‘She’s right, pal,’ Swann called from the other room, where he was leaning back against an oak table outside the bathroom. ‘As we discussed earlier, your best bet is to head to the Nightjar. That’s where all the vampires hang out. See if you can get in there and use your winning personality to become buddies with one of the vampires who’s on his own, then get him to introduce you to some of his friends. Next thing you know you’ll be havin’ drinks with fuckin’ Count Dracula. Piece o’ piss. You’ll be fine.’
‘If it’s so fuckin’ easy, why aren’t you doin’ it, tough guy?’ Dante retorted.
‘I would, but I don’t know what your buddy Peto the monk looks like, do I, numbnuts?’
Swann tutted as if annoyed by Dante’s stupidity, even though he wouldn’t have swapped places with the young man in a million years. He walked towards the bedroom again, but stopped off at the minibar in the sitting room to get himself a drink. As he bent down to look in the fridge, Kacy squeezed Dante’s arm to get his attention. Her lover stopped watching Swann and turned to look at her.
‘Don’t ask any questions if you think it’ll get you into trouble,’ she said, failing to mask the now permanently worried look on her face. ‘If you think it’ll blow your cover and make you look like an outsider, don’t ask. In fact, don’t do anything other than fit in, for now. Fuck these two and their demands. This is only your first night undercover. Take your time. Don’t say anythin’ stupid. Just listen where you can for something useful.’
Dante leaned over and kissed her on the mouth to reassure her, pulling his arm free from Roxanne Valdez and stroking Kacy’s long dark hair in an effort to calm her.
‘Trust me, baby. I know what I’m doin’. I mix well with everyone when I have to. Don’t you worry, I’ll be back before the sun comes up.’
‘Just be careful. And for fuck’s sake stop using the expression “Bite
me”.’
‘Sure thing, babe.’ Dante winked at her and stood up from the bed. ‘Right, it’s about that time.’
Swann appeared in the doorway and wagged his finger at the young man. ‘Listen to your girlfriend, pal. Don’t do anything stupid, but do try an’ find out all the stuff we talked about. And I wanna know about all the different clans. And see if you can find out who the head of each clan is. It’ll impress the boss, an’ then maybe you’ll get some reward at the end of this.’
‘Like I give a fuck about impressin’ your boss,’ Dante muttered, walking past him and on across the sitting room. ‘Your bald cockhead of a boss can find out the heads of the clans for his fuckin’ self.’
He walked into the bathroom and disappeared out of sight round the door. It was a small room (there was a bigger bathroom off Dante and Kacy’s bedroom), with a white porcelain washbasin to his left and a matching shower unit opposite it, as well as a toilet in one corner. Dante stood over the basin and looked at his reflection in the mirror. You can do this, he whispered to himself. You’ve got nerves of steel. You can handle this. It’s just a walk in the park.
He clenched his fists and pulled a tough guy face at himself in the mirror. He didn’t want Kacy seeing him nervous like this, having to pump himself up for action. He needed her to see the cool-as-you-like, unflinching version that had taken the injection in the other room. No sense in worrying her any more than was absolutely necessary. It wouldn’t help if she knew that for the first time in his life he was absolutely petrified.
After a quick staring contest with his reflection he turned on the hot-water faucet above the basin and used both hands to catch some water and wash it over his face. The serum was starting to kick in now and he was beginning to feel the initial chills as his blood temperature dropped. The warm water helped him to deal with the initial icy shock.
After a short while the dark face of Roxanne appeared around the door. ‘You okay?’ she asked. ‘You look a little nervous, honey. Maybe you should have a drink before you go?’
‘Nah, ‘sokay,’ said Dante. ‘These vampire fucks prob’ly drink like fish, so the smartest thing I can do is at least stay sober before I go out. I could end up havin’ a skinful of beer and tequila tonight, and let’s face it, the drunker I get, the more likely I am to get myself in trouble.’
Roxanne stepped fully into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. She walked over to stand beside Dante and began rubbing his back.
‘You know, Dante, you’re actually a lot smarter than people give you credit for,’ she said, offering a comforting smile.
‘Thanks.’ He smiled politely back at her as she ran a reassuring hand down his arm. Maybe she wasn’t such a bitch after all. So far, she had actually tried her best to keep him calm. He had to be at least a little bit grateful for that.
‘I better get goin’,’ he said giving her a grateful pat on the back. Then he manoeuvred himself around her in the small space between the shower and the washbasin and opened the door. He smiled at her one last time, and then headed out of the bathroom, ready to face the undead world for the first time since he had left Santa Mondega a year earlier.
So it was a pity that, even with all his wits about him, Dante hadn’t been quite smart enough to notice something when Roxanne had been standing beside him rubbing his back.
The mirror over the basin had shown only his reflection.
Twenty-Two
The locker room below the police headquarters had been off limits for years. Officers still went down there on odd occasions to discuss things privately, but it was frowned upon, and the official line was that anyone caught trespassing down there could expect to find themselves in line for a public dressing-down.
Even so, Stephanie now found herself in that very locker room with De La Cruz, Benson and Hunter.
‘What exactly are we looking for here?’ she asked nervously. A stickler for procedure, she didn’t like being somewhere that was officially out of bounds.
‘We’re not looking for anything,’ said De La Cruz. ‘We’ve found something, and I think you should see it.’
De La Cruz led the way through the musty, dingy locker room towards the long-disused showers at the back. Stephanie trusted Michael De La Cruz, but being in a subterranean locker room with three males (albeit police officers) was a little intimidating. In spite of this, she did her best to hide the tension she was feeling. She followed directly behind De La Cruz, while Benson and Hunter hung back a few feet, as though they wanted to whisper among themselves. Which they did.
Once they were inside the open-plan shower area De La Cruz turned to face Stephanie.
‘You ready to see just why this locker room has always been out of bounds?’ he asked.
Stephanie raised her eyebrows. ‘Go on.’
De La Cruz hit the ‘on’ switch for the shower furthest from the entrance. There was a sudden whirring sound followed by a drawn-out but very loud grating noise. The light-blue-painted wall at the back of the showers began moving to the left. De La Cruz had just opened a secret passageway. A gateway to things that were probably best left alone. Stephanie began to feel even more uneasy. What was about to be revealed to her here, exactly? Intrigued, in spite of herself, by what she might find, and allowing her curiosity to get the better of her, she peered in to see what it was that was so secret it had to be concealed behind this shower-room wall. On first inspection it didn’t look like much. In the gloom of the small chamber the moving wall had exposed, she could make out only an antique wooden table on which had been placed a book and a golden chalice. She turned back from the darkened room to look questioningly at De La Cruz.
‘This, my dear Stephanie,’ he said softly, ‘is the Holy Grail that you have been reading about in The Book With No Name. Or, if you prefer, the Cup of Christ. It has been here at police headquarters stashed away beneath our noses all this time.’
Stephanie, unsure exactly how to react to this bizarre statement, simply smirked. After all she thought, De La Cruz had to be shitting her, surely?
‘You’re kidding, right?’ she asked, checking the reactions of Benson and Hunter behind her. Both looked deadly serious. ‘Well, aren’t you?’
De La Cruz shook his head. ‘See that book on the table?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘We believe it was written by Archibald Somers. Looks like a diary or series of memos of some sort. It confirms much of what you have told us from what you read in The Book With No Name.’
‘Really? So why have me do all that research?’ Stephanie was confused. And irritated. If they already knew so much from reading this new book, why make her read the whole of the fucking Book With No Name?
‘Well, it kinda looks as though Somers was writing his own version. Only this is a diary of sorts, detailing all of his wrongdoing and rewriting the story of The Book With No Name in his own words,’ De La Cruz replied. ‘As a member of the undead, he couldn’t touch the original book. As we’ve established already, to touch the book would kill him, so he appeared to be writing his own version with a whole bunch of new chapters.’
‘What’s the relevance of this?’ Stephanie asked. This whole business was making her more nervous by the minute.
De La Cruz ran a finger inside his shirt collar to loosen it. ‘Don’t you want to know why it’s hidden away down here?’
‘Does it by any chance cause the death of everyone who reads it?’
Behind her, she heard Benson laugh briefly. She glanced at him, but his face had resumed its stern and serious look.
‘It’s hidden here,’ said De La Cruz walking over to the table and flipping open the book’s black leather cover, ‘because I hid it here.’
Stephanie suddenly felt even more uneasy. What was De La Cruz driving at?
‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say,’ she stammered.
De La Cruz sighed, then said patiently, ‘This book revealed the hiding place of the Holy Grail. I came here, along with
Benson and Hunter, to find it. Problem was, of course, that, as you confirmed from your findings in the original book, there’s no blood of Christ left to drink from it.’ He paused a moment, marshalling his thoughts, before continuing. ‘So in order to achieve ultimate immortality – in essence, to become a god – an individual would have to drink the blood not just of a mere mortal, but also of a vampire and, for good measure, the blood of a descendant of Ishmael Taos or Armand Xavier. And drink them all from this very cup.’ He picked up the golden chalice and held it up in front of his face, marvelling at its beauty. It wasn’t much more than eight inches in height and was shaped somewhat like a brandy glass rendered in metal, only with a slightly longer stem.
‘So what are you intending to do with it? Call the FBI?’ Stephanie asked, not grasping where the detective’s explanation was heading.
‘Oh no, my dear,’ said De La Cruz, putting down the cup and leaning back against the table. ‘You have now told us you think you know where to find the Bourbon Kid, the son of Taos. Which means we only need to drink his blood, with the blood of a vampire and the blood of a mortal, to gain immortality. And you, my dear Stephanie, are a mere mortal.’
Stephanie turned back to Benson and Hunter to see if they were as confused as she was.
Both men stood staring at her. The hunger had overcome them, and they opened their mouths wide to reveal perfectly formed fangs, thirsty for blood. Utterly terrified, she turned back just in time to see De La Cruz move in upon her. He was clasping a six-inch silver dagger in one hand and, like his colleagues, he too now sported a set of hideous fangs. The flesh on his face had thinned to reveal the blue veins beneath, ready for their fill of her blood.
With the silver dagger the smartly dressed detective sliced Stephanie’s neck wide open with a single sweep of the blade. He watched wide-eyed and with a ferocious thirst as her blood began to pour out into the cup he was pressing against her chest with his other hand.