I sighed. “All right, but just a small taste.”
* * *
I never saw that particular vampire again, and it was also the last time I encountered one living in a lake. That doesn’t mean there aren’t more out there, subsisting off fish blood and wandering land animals, only that I don’t spend enough time in lake water to look for more. I also don’t really fish in bulk any longer.
I did touch base with Menachem a few times after that night, both to see if his mermaid returned, and to assess the health of his livestock.
As I said, I can only understand the world as well as the historical period I’m in allows. Back then, we didn’t comprehend disease at all. Most sicknesses were ascribed to evil spirits, and while I didn’t really put much stock in this as an explanation, I also didn’t have a better explanation.
As a consequence, I never knew what disease Menachem’s animals were actually sick with. More importantly, I never learned what the vampire in the lake had to do with them getting better.
I still don’t. I’m ruling out magic, but that leaves a lot of other options.
4
I made it back to the parking lot about an hour after leaving The Fancy Mermaid, having swung by the library for a good long browse. In the interim, the lot filled up with the cars of locals, all parking in a neat row beside the SUV. This is a consistent source of amusement for me: there are no parking lines in the lot, but people pretend they’re there anyway.
The other thing that filled up in the interim was the hood of the car. Mirella was sitting on it.
She was in shorts and a tank top, and had on her running shoes. Her cell phone was in her hand, but she wasn’t looking at it. It looked like she was working on a tan.
“Isn’t the hood a little hot?” I asked, unlocking the car with the remote.
“It’s very hot. I anticipated your return would precede it becoming unbearable.”
“Did it?”
“Yes, but only just barely. Another five minutes and I would have found some shade and left a note.”
She slid off the hood, more or less literally, as there was a layer of sweat between her legs and the metal.
“Are you sober?” she asked.
“Of course. I took the car. Is something wrong?”
She looked at the spines of the books in my hand.
“More history?”
My reading habits consist of about 70% history books. People who know me think this is weird because I lived through all of it, but I could only be in one place at any given time, and I have a deep interest in learning what was going on in places I was not, because what happened in those places often had an impact on my life in some way. Ripples on the pond, and all that.
I also enjoy reading history books because a lot of them are utterly incorrect and thus inadvertently funny. I react the same way to every period drama I’ve ever seen, from the inexplicable regularity of white-skinned Egyptians, to Romans with English accents and everything in-between.
“Yeah.”
I put the books in the car.
“Cousin called,” Mirella said, waving her phone.
“So something is wrong.”
“Enh. It’s hard to tell with him sometimes, you know that. Wants us to look into something for him. I think he just wants an excuse to put dinner on his expense account. He’s at the hotel. We can leave the car here.”
* * *
The island’s police force, while small, was actually pretty impressive. I wasn’t around for the founding of the local government structure, but I’m guessing at some point somebody realized if they were going to be inviting all of these exotic beings here, the local law had to be somewhat specialized.
Mirella’s cousin Esteban happened to be an extremely specialized individual, which was why he was the perfect sheriff for this island. (They didn’t call him sheriff, or chief. He was capitan to everyone, and I had no idea why. If I didn’t know him I’d worry about a military coup.) He was a goblin. The whole force was, actually, and while this wasn’t inherently impressive—half the island was goblin or elf—these particular goblins used to kill people for a living. More than that, they had a reputation for doing so. Basically, putting Esteban in charge of the police was an idea straight out of one of those westerns, where the gunslinger becomes the sheriff.
Not that they used guns. I mean they had them, but if it turned out the guns on their hips weren’t loaded—were perhaps actually props—I wouldn’t have been surprised. These were goblins, and goblins used swords. If you think that put them at a disadvantage, you’ve never seen a goblin use one.
“He didn’t say why he called?” I asked Mirella, as we made the long walk from the lot to the hotel. She was keeping a pace that was hard to maintain in flip-flops. This meant she was a little annoyed with me, usually, although it could also have been that she’d jogged down the hill and was still working off the adrenaline.
“He wanted us to consult with him about something, is exactly what he said. I’m sure he meant you, since he has a team of experienced ex-mercenary goblins already, so I don’t imagine he has significant use for me. I, however, know how to find you and bring you places, which I expect is all he needs me for. Also, I’m going to have the cell phone argument with you again later.”
“Okay. So he called from the hotel.”
“Whether he called from there or not, that’s where he said to meet him.”
Yeah, she was annoyed with me.
Here’s the thing: I’m not really good at relationships. Real ones, I mean, the long-term kinds that last more than a weekend. I’d like to say this is mostly attributable to my simply not sharing a common upbringing—my cultural background is settled caveman, which runs contrary to just about every other background—but it’s probably also because I’m just difficult.
In other words, while Mirella and I were doing pretty great, I was still getting on her nerves for stupid things. And I mean, that’s probably totally normal.
Not having a cell phone was one of those things. From my perspective our life on the island was a vacation from the entire rest of the world, and on that vacation I’d rather not have a cell phone, because nowadays those things are a connection to the entire rest of the world, and I don’t want to deal with the rest of the world. From her perspective, this isn’t a vacation, it’s a life decision, and that life includes being able to reach me on a phone now and then.
We’re both sort of right, too, just for really sad and depressing reasons. Her entire lifetime is a short vacation from my perspective, but nobody wants to approach the argument from that angle because it’s terrible.
Instead, we’ve gone back and forth. I’ve pointed out I’m with her all the time, and when I’m not, there are only about a dozen places I could be instead. On top of that, how many emergencies are there that would require immediate communication? I can think of hundreds of instances when having cell phone technology on-hand would have been tremendously useful, but this wasn’t one of those instances, and I wasn’t expecting there to be one later.
Her cousin asking for help was maybe an exception, but I kind of doubted it. He’d asked for help before. So far as I was aware, he was the only other person on the island who knew how old I was—not sure how he even found out—and liked to put my experience to use. I didn’t mind, both because it was something to do and because I kind of liked the idea of playing civilian consultant to local crimes. All I needed was a private investigator license and it’d be some kind of film noir story.
Well, okay, we’d probably need a murder first for a proper noir setting. Those happen all the time in the movies, not so much in real life, and so far as I knew there hadn’t been one on the island yet. Admittedly, the government apparatus is the sort that could make something like a murder disappear (I feel the same way about Disney World, to be honest) but I imagine Esteban would have shared such a story if one existed.
Also, it’s too sunny for noir.
* * *
&nb
sp; The hotel was just “the hotel”. It didn’t even have a name over the front of the place, because it was the only hotel on the island and it was pretty obvious what it was, from every angle. It was also, needless to say, the largest building around.
Large, but not tall, partly because of the stability of the sea-level land it was resting on and partly because of the wind and the fact that a taller building would block the view from the rest of the lower island. The hotel was only two stories high, but those two stories were spread across acreage nearly as large as the town it was next to.
It was also only technically a single building. There were six distinct areas, with a seventh at the center for the front desk, the bar and restaurant, and the conference rooms. To the public, getting from one space to the next required walking outside, but the staff could go from area to area without doing that. This made perfect sense if you’ve ever tried to deliver room service in a rainstorm.
Each area was defined by grotto-like swimming pools. I don’t entirely understand this, because the ocean was right there, but at the same time there’s a lot of scary things in that ocean, so maybe it did make sense.
We walked past the front gates—there was a guard box at the front, but I never saw anybody in there—and headed straight for the front desk.
Most hotels have large parking lots in front and the beach/swimming pools in back. This one was set up mostly the same way, except the parking was almost nonexistent because nobody vacationing on the island had a car. There were scooters to rent, but that was about all. Those weren’t really used much either, because just about everything interesting could be walked to. Plus, there were a few cabs for hire.
So weren’t a lot of cars, and there were also not a lot of people around, because we were at the landward side of the hotel and it was a nice day. Most everyone was at the beach or the pool, not loitering around near the front.
The hotel quite thoroughly blocked any view of the ocean from this side. We couldn’t even see the pools. There were no inexpensive rooms with a view of the parking lot in this hotel, either. Everything faced some kind of water.
Mirella and her walking shoes reached the door before I did, waited for me to catch up, and then led the way inside. The air conditioning hit immediately. It was the kind of cold that was incredibly refreshing for five minutes, alarmingly chilly for the remainder.
There was nobody at the front desk, so she rang the little bell. This was not inherently unusual because nobody was checking in or out at this time of day or even this day. The flights were only twice a week, and the next boat wasn’t due for another day.
“Hey,” I said, “are you… mad at me about something?”
I’ve learned to ask these things when in relationships. It seems counter-intuitive, because a lot of the time it forces the other person to look for ways in which they might be mad about something, and maybe they wouldn’t have stopped to interrogate their own feelings otherwise.
This is what happens when I think too much about these things.
“No,” she said, but in a way that sounded almost like a yes. “I don’t like having to hunt you down. It frustrates me. If there’s an emergency.”
“Is this an emergency?”
“This is a house call. You understand what I’m saying.”
“Yes. But you and I haven’t faced an actual emergency since we moved here. I’ve come to appreciate that.”
“Have you? I wonder, sometimes, when you go off. Not with the drinking. Goodness knows, we’re not going to be undoing four thousand years of training with you and alcohol.”
“Hey, I’ve been pretty good.”
“Yes, you have, which is why that isn’t what I mean. I wonder if you’re bored, and this is why you drift off and can’t be found.”
“No, nothing like that.”
In my last actual relationship, I used to go on hikes by myself for two or three week stretches, just disappearing into the woods for a while. I told myself it was to stay in touch with nature, and that might have been true, but what was interesting—in hindsight—was that I was a lot closer to a lot more nature on this island, and I hadn’t gone off on any extended hikes. So maybe it was the girl.
It struck me that this would be a nice sentiment to express to Mirella, but I couldn’t figure out an easy way to say it. You don’t make me want to live off the land for weeks on end like my last girlfriend wasn’t a very greeting-card-worthy sentiment.
“You aren’t bored?” she asked. “You don’t miss all the excitement?”
“I don’t miss constant peril. I like boring. Honest.”
“Well then,” she said, smiling, “maybe I’m the one who misses it.”
I was glad she was the one who said it.
The door from the office area behind the front desk flew open.
“Hi, sorry, sorry. Can I… oh, hi, guys.”
It wasn’t true that every island resident knew every other island resident. There were important economic differences between a hotel employee and a resident of the upper island, for instance, which could easily result in one of us not knowing another of us. The island also had its share of hermits, or very private vacationers, depending on your perspective.
Mostly, though, we did know one another.
The woman at the desk was named Cathy, and she was an elf. She lived in one of the dozen or so off-the-beach apartment complexes a mile closer to the mountain. I drove past it on my way into town. It wasn’t at all a terrible place to live, since the same rules about building heights were observed inland as they were closer to the shore, so the apartment buildings had the same open-air sprawl as the hotel. But the quarters were pretty small, there was no pool to speak of, and I was told the walls were unpleasantly thin. This would have been an unfortunate combination if all the residents were human. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for the species mixture this place had going on.
“Is my cousin still here?” Mirella asked.
“I think so, is his car still out front?” She looked over my shoulder and out the panoramic windows of the lobby to answer her own question. “Yep, there it is. He always parks in the same place.”
“Where can we find him?”
“Four twenty-two, Bali,” Cathy said. Bali was the name of the hotel wing in this case, not the Indonesian island.
“Thank you,” Mirella said.
“So, what’s going on?” I asked. “Can you say?”
“Vandalism or something, I heard. Don’t know why they called Stubby. Most times that’s no big deal.”
“Or why he called us,” Mirella said.
“Yeah, don’t know that either. You know the way, right?”
“We’ll figure it out, thanks,” I said.
Cathy waved and turned back to the office. On our way out the door, I said, “I was kind of hoping for a murder or something.”
I was kidding.
“So was I,” Mirella said.
I don’t think she was kidding in the slightest.
* * *
We found Esteban outside of room four twenty-two chatting quietly with one of the hotel managers, a satyr named Paul. I knew Paul mostly for being one of only four satyrs in residence on the island. I have a certain affinity for the satyros, mostly because some of them think I’m a god and that can be pretty cool. If I wanted free drinks at the hotel I could probably tell Paul one of my more interesting names, but until I did that, to him I was just Adam, the human.
Esteban knew better.
“There you are,” he said, shooting his cousin an unpleasant look. It was hard to tell what this meant, because about half of the average goblin’s expressions appeared at least a little threatening. In Mirella, it was incredibly hot. In Esteban, it was mostly just alarming.
Esteban was shorter than his cousin, and a lot stockier than most goblins. He had a curious blend of Spaniard and East Asian that only really made sense if you already knew he wasn’t human. He had a scar across his right cheek that turned purple when he
was angry and when he was drunk. He never ever, under any circumstance explained where the scar came from, so I assumed it was an accident involving a kitchen knife or something along those lines. I’ve had scars like that. For about fifty years I had one across my nose that I claimed was given to me by highway brigands, when in fact I walked into a brick wall I mistook for a doorway while extremely not sober.
“It took some time to find him,” Mirella said, “I told you this would be the case.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know there was going to be something urgent. I’ve been trying to avoid having to worry about urgent things. Afternoon, Paul.”
“Mr. Adam,” Paul greeted.
“Just Adam.”
Paul gave that not-a-smile smile satyrs have been perfecting over centuries in an attempt to fit in with the rest of us. A real smile from a satyr tended to look like an animal baring fangs, so they went with a closed-lips sort of thing in public so as to not frighten people.
Paul always called me Mr. Adam, and I always corrected him and he hasn’t stopped doing it yet. I have no last name, though, so he hasn’t got a lot of choice, having already decided to address everyone as Mr., Ms. or Mrs., which I guess is a decision you come to when working in an expensive hotel.
I guess I could make up a last name. As it is, Adam isn’t really my first name either, but my real first name was a sort of grunt so I can’t go with that. (It’s Urr, and the only person who still calls me that is older than I am.) I just never bothered to dream up a family name to tack onto the end of Adam, and Adam has really stuck with me of late.
“It isn’t an emergency,” Esteban said. “And I appreciate you taking time to offer your opinion.”
“No, it’s fine. Is there a body?”
“No, that would constitute an emergency. I also don’t know what sort of situation involving a body would require your expertise, unless I considered you a suspect. You haven’t been leaving bodies lying around of late, have you?”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 7