“This is Elsie,” Manny said, even as he thought it. “She’s my oldest.”
Black nodded, giving her the symbolic tip of the cap.
Now holding the half-asleep little girl in her arms and against her shoulder, she looked him over, a faint smile playing at her lips.
“This is him? The seer?”
Black tensed, his mind flipping into full-blown military alertness in a single beat. His paranoia faded within a second or two of her saying it, even as he realized that shot of fear and adrenaline was more instinctive and memory-based than based on logic.
The way she said “seer” wasn’t like how Black heard it back where he was from.
It struck him that “seer” was probably just what they called psychics out here.
He confirmed that by reading her mind a few seconds later.
She associated “seer” with some kind of creature from Navajo mythology that could read minds and dreams––and fly. Fine by him.
Even so, Jesus fuck. She’d nearly given him a heart attack.
On the plus side, he felt marginally more sober now, even if his heart was beating somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.
“Where is he?” Black said. “The prisoner?”
She jerked her head sideways rather than pointing, her arms still full of sleepy little girl.
“In there.”
“Have you tried to talk to him?”
She snorted, glancing at her father, then at Red. “What do you think we’ve been doing in here? Having a pot luck? Playing cards?”
Black glanced at Manny. Frowning through the alcohol and now adrenaline, he gave him a disbelieving look over his sunglasses, holding up his hands.
“Is everyone in this dusty shit-hole this touchy, Manny?”
It was a rhetorical question, but she answered him anyway.
“Not usually,” she said, her voice harder. “We are right now. You would know why, too, if you were remotely damned sober.” She looked at her husband, then at her father. “Is this a joke? How is this guy going to help us? He looks like he drank his lunch… and his dinner.”
Manny waved her down a bit, giving her a warning look.
“That’s my fault, El,” he said. “I gave him the drink. We haven’t seen one another in a good long while. He didn’t want to come down here, so the alcohol might have been a bit manipulative on my part, too.” Looking at Black more seriously, he added, “Don’t let his bluster fool you. He’s the right guy for the job. Believe me.”
Black grunted at that, but didn’t bother to disagree.
Still rocking her child, Elsie looked even more skeptical than her husband.
When Black didn’t make a move after a few beats more, she stepped out of his way, however, nodding again towards the door she’d nodded at before.
“Well?” she said. “You going in there, super-seer? Or are you waiting for a formal introduction? And what’s with the mirrored sunglasses? Are you a pimp? Some kind of drug dealer? Or just too drunk to know you’re wearing them?”
Black decided to more or less ignore that too, muttering under his breath as he headed for the closed door she’d indicated.
“Why is it always the ‘clients’ paying me pocket lint who give me ten times the amount of grief?” he muttered.
He said it loud enough that Manny heard him and laughed.
“Go on, you bastard,” Manny said. “I’ll pay you in whisky and steak and my better than decent cooking. Just go in there and tell us what you see.”
Black frowned.
Once more he felt the fear on all of them though, even through the alcohol, so he only nodded. He started towards the door, but Manny held up a hand.
“Leave the gun,” he advised. “Guns only piss them off anyways.”
Black hesitated a bare second, then nodded, unable to argue with Manny’s logic. He tugged the strap from around his shoulder and neck and left the rifle leaning against a wooden desk covered in stacks of paper and an old-fashioned black rotary phone.
“No wooden stake?” he said, smiling faintly.
Instead of smiling back, Manny’s daughter handed her sleeping daughter back to Red. Once she had, she felt around on her belt, then pulled out an actual, honest-to-goodness, sharpened wooden stake. She tossed it to him wordlessly and Black caught it one-handed.
“Good reflexes, at least,” she grunted, giving him a half-smile.
Black gripped the stake, staring at it. He opened his mouth to make a crack, then shut it, shoving the stake in his belt at the small of his back.
“You know swords are a lot more efficient,” he said, giving her a sideways glance she probably couldn’t see because of the sunglasses. “If someone told me what this party was about, I would have brought mine.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’re a little short on swords out here, Mr. Black.”
Black shrugged, yanking the leather coat back down and around his torso to cover the stake.
“Sounds like maybe you need to invest in a few.” He frowned then, looking around the small police station. “Don’t you have a blacksmith? This town just screams ‘we have a blacksmith,’ and ‘we know how to churn our own butter.’”
She grunted, rolling her eyes and looking at Red as if to say, is this guy for real?
Black wasn’t sure how to tell her he wasn’t really kidding––about any of it––so he just shrugged a second time, aiming his feet at the door leading to the cells. Gripping the handle, he glanced back over his shoulder when none of them moved to follow him.
Scanning their faces, he frowned deeper when he realized he was going in alone.
Whatever they had in here, vampire or no, they were genuinely afraid of it.
Jerking on the door’s handle, he walked through and closed the door behind him. He made his way over the warped, wooden floorboards of the old-fashioned-looking jail, stopping in front of the only occupied cell in the row.
When he saw the guy standing in there, his back to the cell door, Black cleared his throat.
“Hey,” he said, his voice sharp. “Vampire.”
The figure didn’t move. He didn’t even flinch.
Black raised his voice.
“Hey… compadre. Is it true you don’t speak English? Or are you just fucking with them in there? Trying to get them to leave you alone?”
He waited a few beats.
When the thing still didn’t speak, he switched to Romanian.
“Ești vampir?” he said. “Haide frate, asta e copilăresc.”
The thing didn’t move.
Black tried Arabic.
“Ma hu allaenat ‘ant ya ‘akhy?”
The man didn’t so much as twitch. He didn’t look up, or turn his head.
Black tried Russian after that. Then French, German, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Dutch, Polish, Hindi, Thai.
Not a single word he spoke stirred a flicker of reaction off the man in the cell.
Black looked him over in the silence, frowning at the dusty black clothes he wore, which were nothing like what the Navajo nation folks wore in the other room.
His clothes were too dark, too expensive-looking and made of the wrong fabrics for the area, despite the generous coating of red dust. There was something wrong with the fabric, but Black didn’t know enough about clothes or fabric to have a strong opinion about what it was.
The clothes were just… off.
They almost suggested a different time period.
Or just a different… something.
Black couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was about them that disturbed him.
Maybe he really was a vampire.
He probably was a vampire. Black had known that before he even got a look at it, but he couldn’t help indulging in a bit of doubt and denial, even now.
Anyway, what the hell was wrong with it? Was it deaf? On drugs?
Could the vampires that stumbled out here be a little crazy from everything that happened in New York? Blac
k had no idea how connected vampires were to one another, but maybe they were more like seers than he’d initially thought.
The clothes weren’t too far off from what Brick might have worn, or one of his minions, despite the difficult-to-pinpoint strangeness of their cut and the materials used. Then again, they weren’t too far off from what your average San Franciscan might wear, in terms of the goth-y dark heaviness of the style, a style that almost evoked the Victorian era.
Anyway, clothing had never helped him ID a vampire before.
Vampires basically dressed the way most humans dressed, which was kind of the point.
Black continued to look the guy over, from the dusty black coat he wore that reached his ankles up to a black hat that looked almost like a wide-brimmed bolero, although it had definitely seen better days and there was something weird about it, too.
Everything the vampire wore looked well-made, and fit him perfectly despite his height and the thinness of his frame. His clothes fit him so well, they were likely tailored.
Every article he wore was black.
He even wore black boots, and thick black gloves.
“What’s with the sauna suit?” Black said, still trying to get a reaction out of the guy. “You can’t possibly be that cold in here, even with the sun down. You trying to lose weight? Because you’re pretty fucking thin now, if you want the––”
He trailed when the man turned.
Shockingly familiar, crystal-colored eyes glowed at him, the pupils rimmed with a bloom of crimson, like a liquid flower in the middle of his eye.
Black felt his heart hitch briefly––
Then he scowled.
Definitely a fucking vampire.
Miri was going to be so pissed.
Now that he was faced with it, however, some of his resistance to dealing with it faded, maybe in part because it was already in a cage––maybe in part because he was already more than a little drunk.
Anyway, like Red and Manny said, he was here.
He may as well try to help Manny and his family as much as he could before he left the next morning. If they really were overrun with the damned things, they’d need his help.
Exhaling with a frown, he stepped closer to the cage, hands on his hips.
Even knowing what it was from those crystal and crimson irises, he tried to read the thing.
Just like he knew he would, he hit a big stretch of nothing––a blank, unending silence where the vampire’s mind should be. From his light’s perspective, it wasn’t there at all. It was a void where a living being should be.
That silence was impenetrable enough that Black flinched involuntarily, despite having encountered it more than once before.
Something about vampire minds not only made him sight-blind, which disoriented and frustrated him, since seers understood their world primarily by their nonphysical sight––they also made him feel weirdly lost. It was as if, despite feeling nothing, a vampire’s mind somehow ensnared part of Black’s living light in a void.
Emotions swam through him as he tried again––fear, anger, annoyance.
They were definitely his emotions, not the vampire’s.
“Hey. Vampire.” Black’s voice lost every shred of humor. “Cut the shit. I know what you are. What are you and your pals doing out here? Not exactly inconspicuous, picking off the kids of the local humans. They tend to be touchy about that.”
Waiting a beat, he went on with a scowl when the thing didn’t answer, but just continued to stare at him with those lifeless, light-less eyes.
“Are you one of Brick’s boys?” Black said. “You out here hiding from the Feds? Because if so, I have bad news for you.”
The other male smiled at him, so wide it stretched his lips as thin as razor wire, exposing over-long, over-sharp looking teeth.
“Yeah, that’s cute with the vampire teeth,” Black said, frowning more. “Really scary. Can we stop with the ‘freak out the human’ games and have a conversation? That crap isn’t going to work on me. Trust me, I already had my initial freakout about your kind.”
He took off his sunglasses, exposing his gold eyes, knowing the odd-colored irises would signal to this jackass what he was, unless he really was clueless.
“I know what you are, because I’m your worst fucking nightmare,” Black said. “If you don’t believe me, ask some of your buddies who Quentin Black, Private Detective, is. Then ask them what happened to your buddy, Brick, back in New York.”
He glanced down the hallway leading into the other part of the building.
“Listen, friend. These humans are a lot nicer than I am. They don’t want to kill you. They have options you might even be interested in––assuming you’d prefer not to be dead by the end of the week, along with the rest of your bloodsucking family.”
He paused, mouth grim.
“Ever seen what napalm does to one of your kind?” he said. “Trust me when I say––it ain’t pretty. Well,” he amended. “It is to me, but I’m a sick fuck.”
The vampire didn’t move.
It didn’t even blink.
Truthfully, Black hadn’t tried napalm on a vampire yet.
He had a feeling it would be really damned entertaining, though.
The other male continued to stare at him, its irises flicking to and fro, like some kind of reptile assessing its prey.
Watching it look at him, Black frowned harder.
Was it mentally damaged for real? High on something?
It really didn’t seem to understand English, which struck Black as bizarre in the extreme, given how old these things generally were, and how hard they worked to blend in. This particular vampire certainly didn’t look young, or modern, or even likely to have been created any time in the last eighty years. Everything from its strange clothes to its odd mannerisms and demeanor suggested to Black it was probably on the old end of the spectrum, even for a vampire.
Stepping forward, he banged a palm on the iron bars.
Since the barred wall was slightly loose in its moorings, his banging made the iron shake, creating a clanging sound as it vibrated against the concrete and metal.
“They’re about to drive a stake through your heart,” Black said, pointing behind him at the door to the main room of the police station. “Is that what you want? To die a premature death for no reason apart from being an idiot?”
Exhaling in frustration when the other’s grin didn’t waver, he motioned a seer’s gesture of reassurance. “I’m the last and only warning you’re going to get––”
The thing hissed.
Then it let out a string of words––in a language Black was positive he’d never heard before in his life. Guttural, deep, inhuman-sounding words, they came out of its mouth and throat like a religious chant, unfamiliar to the point of feeling structurally wrong.
Then it lunged at him.
Not lunged––it flew at him.
Seers were fast.
When trained, seers were significantly faster than humans, even humans who were similarly trained. Seers were faster than most animals, even predators that hunted fast game. Seers were fast enough that a highly-trained seer couldn’t always be tracked accurately by the naked eye, even by another seer.
Even so, Black had never seen any living being move as fast as this.
He hadn’t even blinked when the thing slammed up against the iron bars.
It hit hard enough and fast enough that it threw Black back, making him stumble, then lose his balance––also not an easy thing to do to a seer, especially one trained like him. He landed on his back around the same time the door above him slammed open.
Then the thing was on him.
It hissed and growled like an animal, teeth bared.
More of those words came out, now sounding like open threats.
Black’s mind stripped of thought, of emotion, of alcohol.
Purely in survival mode, his hands slammed up in reflex, catching hold of the thing by its pale white throat. He g
ripped hard, his whole body tense as he held it up over his face and chest.
Even using both hands and all his strength, he could barely keep it off him.
He hadn’t made a sound.
Since the door slammed open, he’d barely taken a full breath.
Even now, he couldn’t make himself focus any part of his attention on anything other than keeping it from killing him.
Inches over his face, it hissed, louder.
Now, with its mouth fully open, the teeth extended still more. Black stared at dark-green veins in the too-long teeth, which looked as sharp as razors and now too long for its mouth. He’d never seen teeth that long on a vampire. The crystal eyes were now washed out in pure red, vertical pupils slicing through those flames, glowing with their own odd light.
Black stared at those pupils, and wondered what the fuck kind of vampire this was.
There was something wrong with it.
There was definitely something wrong with it.
The thought didn’t linger in his mind.
It growled more of its guttural language at him, snapping its teeth at the end of every string of words, drooling on him. It lunged harder at Black’s neck, trying to break his hold.
Black remembered the stake stuck in the back of his belt, under his coat. He was lying on it, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was, if he let go of this thing’s throat with even one of his hands, it would be latched onto his throat.
He considered calling Manny, or Red, or Elsie––then realized he’d only get all three of them killed.
The thing hissed at him, clawing at his chest with long nails, wrapping its fingers around his arms as it thrashed.
Staring up at its face, Black hocked up spit and spat it right in one of the thing’s eyes.
It blinked, jerking back in surprise, and Black used the opening to twist it over onto its back. Once he had it pinned to the floorboards, he slammed its head, hard, against the wood. He didn’t stop, but did it again and again––
“What the fuck is going on in here?” a voice asked by the door.
Black didn’t turn his head. He slammed the thing’s head down again, gasping with the effort when it continued to thrash under him.
“Get the fuck out of here!” he snarled. “Now! Take your family and go!”
Black To Dust_A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery Page 6