by Jasmine Walt
“Stay behind me. Don’t engage with them unless you have to, but be prepared to fight.”
I nodded nervously, and he walked in the main entrance. It had had a buzzer at one time, but the lock had been broken open. The building wasn’t abandoned, though. There were stained welcome mats in front of a few of the apartment doors, and I could smell something cooking, something spicy, like curry. From a floor somewhere up above, I could hear a baby crying.
We made our way up two flights of stairs. Nick walked to a door and without hesitating, kicked it in.
I’d never seen someone kick in a door before. It’s pretty impressive. I guess the vamps inside thought so, too, because when I followed Nick into the apartment, they were cringing against the far wall, hissing and growling.
This was the first really good look I got at a vampire—I’d been too busy killing the first one and running away from the second one to get more than a fleeting impression of what they looked like when they were alive—or undead, anyway. I realized that these vampires didn’t look like the vampires I’d seen in movies. In movies, the vampires look fairly human; they just have some long pointy teeth up top.
These vampires looked fairly human, too, until they opened their mouths. Unlike movie vampires, they had long pointy fangs both top and bottom—upper and lower fangs. Once they opened their mouths, they looked utterly inhuman. They looked like animals. The sort of animals who will eat you for dinner.
Nick stepped slowly across the threshold, and I followed behind him.
Black painted plywood covered the windows, but from the single bulb dangling in the hallway I could see that the apartment was a mess. A yellowed carpet full of small cigarette burns covered the wooden planks of the floor. There were several stained blankets on top of the carpet, but no furniture.
Ashtrays overflowed onto the floor and onto the body of a young woman.
Very young. Sixteen or seventeen, at the most. She lay on her side, as if she’d gone to sleep. But her skin was white and bloodless, and her eyes were open. She was totally naked and had bite marks all over her body. All over. Up and down her arms and legs, on her neck, I could even see one in her armpit. She was thin, with stringy brown hair. In fact, she was thin to the point of emaciation, like she hadn’t eaten well in a long time. Probably a runaway.
A red haze crossed my eyes, and when it cleared, I was furious. I couldn’t stand the thought of these two leeches bringing that poor defenseless girl up here and draining her dry. Her life might not have mattered to anyone else, but suddenly it mattered to me.
Nick had told me to stay behind him.
I had every intention of staying behind him.
Really.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I flew past him in a rage, screaming that same wordless scream I’d howled out when I’d seen Greg dangling from a vampire’s grip.
I wanted them to die. Painfully.
And then they were away from the wall and I was in between them, spinning and dancing and jabbing at them with my stakes.
I don’t think they even ever knew what hit them, really. They had stepped away from the wall to attack us as soon as they realized that the light streaming into the darkened apartment was from a light bulb and not the sun. But instead of jumping us, they found themselves set upon by a screaming banshee with a stake in each hand.
I took the first one out almost instantly. I slammed a stake into his heart, up under the ribcage, just as Nick had shown me. I flipped the other stake from my left hand into my right and turned to face the second vampire.
He grabbed at me, but I swerved away from him and spun back to smash the second stake into his heart, as well.
I stood still for a moment, breathing heavily, looking around for something else to hit with a stake.
The only possible target was Nick, and he was still standing in the doorway, his mouth hanging open in surprise.
I let my hands drop to my sides and stood up straighter.
“They pissed me off,” I said.
“Apparently,” he replied. And then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard that he bent over and held his stomach.
“What?” I growled.
Nick controlled his laughter with some difficulty and looked up at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “You just call me if you ever need backup, okay?”
Nick pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and called his team in to help with the clean-up. When they got there, the three guys looked around.
“Nice place,” Dominick, the shortest of the three, muttered.
“Good kill though,” John said.
“It’s not mine,” Nick said. “It’s hers.” All three of them turned around to stare at me.
“By yourself?” John asked me. “Again?”
“I got angry,” I offered. It sounded lame, even to me.
Dominick let out a low whistle. “Wow.”
Tony didn’t say anything, just looked at me appraisingly.
Nick and I left before the other guys had finished their Merry Maids routine. I wondered what they did with the dead bodies, but I didn’t ask. Nick drove out to the Bronx and dropped me off at my apartment.
“Call me if anything important comes up, okay? See you later, Dixieland.”
“Dixieland?”
“Yeah. You know. New Orleans. Dixieland.” He grinned and waved.
I waved back and went inside, happy to be home. And even happier to know that the first time hadn’t been a complete fluke. I could kill vampires.
It made me feel a little safer.
5
A day and a half later, as I got dressed to meet Malcolm Owens, I reminded myself that I wasn’t going on a date. It had been less than two weeks since Greg had turned all evil. I hadn’t even called my mother yet to tell her that Greg and I were… well, that we weren’t anything any longer. Except maybe mortal enemies.
And even if this were a date, the sorts of things I was considering asking him to do for me weren’t the sorts of things one brought up on a first date. I could just hear it now: My fiancé was attacked by vampires, and now he is one, and I keep getting attacked by vampires, and I think the law firm he worked for may know something about it. So what I want you to do is sneak into the law offices, break into their files, and see if you can find out what they know about vampires and my ex.
Wait! Where are you going? Come back!
Right. Definitely not first-date material. Or any date, for that matter.
So. Not a date.
I nodded firmly to myself, grabbed my handbag, and trotted down stairs to the street.
I’d been going to the gym in the afternoons, and I could already feel a difference as I headed for Arthur Avenue and the restaurant we’d agreed on—I felt stronger, more confident, more able to take care of myself.
The four pointy chopsticks I was carrying in various places—taped to the small of my back under my shirt, slipped into the top of my boot, held by my bra in the cleavage between my breasts, in the back pocket of my purse—didn’t hurt either.
I’d suggested that we meet at Giovanni’s on Arthur. They have the second-best Italian food in the neighborhood, which is saying a lot. The best Italian food is at Roberto’s, but I’d rejected that as too date-like; the tables were small and intimate and the whole place was lit by candles. Giovanni’s back room was big and airy, with plants in the window and red-checkered tablecloths. More “family friendly” than “first date.”
Malcolm was already seated at a table in the back when I got there. He stood up and helped me into my chair. Not a date, I reminded myself.
We both ordered and chatted about inconsequential things as we ate. Everything seemed perfectly friendly, but I was nervous. I knew I wanted to ask him for his help, but I couldn’t figure out how to even begin to bring the conversation around to vampire attacks. I think that perhaps that’s a difficult conversational gambit under any circumstances, and I didn’t want to break the pleasant mood. But I was also beginni
ng to fear that Malcolm did see this as a first date, so I needed to figure out some way to bring it up.
Then, as we drank our after-lunch coffee and shared a piece of cheesecake, Malcolm reached into the backpack he’d carried into the restaurant and brought out an object wrapped in a plastic grocery sack. He placed it on the table between us.
“The other night after the security guards left to take you home, I walked back across campus,” he said, nodding toward the plastic bag. “I found this on the ground over by the fence.”
Watching him warily, I unrolled the bag and looked inside. At the bottom of the sack lay my letter opener, covered in dark brown streaks. Well, I thought, at least the forensic guys don’t have it. I looked back up at Malcolm without responding.
“You want to know what I think?” he asked. I still didn’t respond. Instead, I rolled the bag back up and put it back on the table. “I think,” he continued, “that you were carrying that thing the night you got attacked. I think that you stabbed the guy with it. And I think that’s why you didn’t want me to call 911.”
I sat completely still, not answering him, but not denying what he said, either.
“And what I’m wondering is this: if you stabbed the guy who attacked you, why didn’t you tell the police that? Why didn’t you tell them that this thing existed? They could have gotten a blood sample from it, maybe used the DNA or something to track him down.”
I frantically tried to think of something to say, but Malcolm didn’t give me a chance.
“So what I’m thinking is that you know more about that attack than you’re telling anyone. I think that attack wasn’t random. I think you know who that guy was. And I think that you believe carrying around things like this can help you.” And with that, he reached over and plucked out the chopstick I’d so carefully hidden in the front of my shirt—apparently, it had worked its way up sometime during lunch and part of it was sticking out above the top button.
Conflicting emotions flitted through me: embarrassment that my fabulous wooden-chopstick-turned-stake-hiding technique hadn’t worked out so well, fear that Malcolm might decide to turn the bloody letter opener over to the police, elation that he’d figured part of it out by himself and maybe I wouldn’t have to explain everything to him after all.
All of this was followed by a moment of sheer gut-wrenching humiliation. I’d been working hard to remind myself that this wasn’t a date, but I suddenly realized that it was emphatically not a date; it was an attempt on Malcolm’s part to figure out what had happened—something he’d already told me he was inclined to try to do.
I was on an anti-date.
I felt myself blush a deep red, part embarrassment, part anger.
If my life were a movie, at this point Malcolm would announce that carrying around a bunch of pointy wooden sticks clearly indicated a fear of vampires. But it wasn’t a movie, and he didn’t make any announcement at all. Instead, he just stared at me inquisitively.
“If you’ve had this since the night I was attacked, why didn’t you bring it up when I saw you at the train station?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as I stared at him. “Or turn it in to the police yourself?”
“I don’t know for sure what it is,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m just guessing. I’m hoping you can tell me what’s up.”
I looked at him for a long time, then finally went with an edited version of the truth: I told him that my ex-fiancé had worked for a law firm. That he’d gotten mixed up with some unpleasant people.
That we’d broken up over it (well, we had, sort of) and that now I thought he was possibly stalking me, or maybe those unpleasant people were stalking me for him.
“I don’t know who that guy was,” I said, lying through my teeth. “I just assume he was somehow connected to whatever’s going on with Greg.”
“So why carry chopsticks”—he grinned a little as he said the word—“instead of, say, a knife? Or a gun?”
“Do you know how hard it is for a normally law-abiding person to get a gun in this city? I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Okay. Why not a knife?”
“They scare me.” I knew that didn’t make much sense, but it was all I could come up with.
“So why not call the police and report him?”
“Greg’s a lawyer, Malcolm. He knows his way around the legal system. He’s mixed up with some very scary guys. I don’t want to make myself even more of a target.”
“So he’s mixed up with the mob?”
“Something like that.”
Malcolm still looked suspicious, but he couldn’t really think of anything to say to that, so he just stared at me. I had to fight myself to keep from babbling into the silence.
Finally he spoke again. “So other than carrying around a chopstick, what are you going to do?”
This was my chance. Maybe my only one. I knew that I had to have Malcolm’s help or I might die. But I still didn’t quite know how to broach the subject.
After a long silence, I said, “I guess I’m going to try to find out what exactly he’s gotten himself into. Once I know why those guys are willing to attack me, I’m going to try to figure out what I can do to make them leave me alone.”
“You’re going to blackmail the mob.” He wasn’t asking a question, but I answered him anyway.
“I guess so.” I’m going to blackmail a vampire mob, I amended silently.
“And you think that reporting them to the police will make you more of a target than blackmail?”
Malcolm sounded incredulous.
“I think that reporting them to the police might be less effective.”
Malcolm didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat in his chair tracing the checkerboard pattern on the tablecloth. Finally he looked up.
“How can I help?”
I stared at him for a long time, unable to believe that he’d volunteered. “Why?” I finally asked.
“You barely know me. I tell you that I’m about to start blackmailing the mob, and you want to help?”
His look became more calculating. He opened his mouth and started to say something, then shook his head and closed his mouth again. Finally, he just smiled and said, “Let’s just say I have a savior complex. Along with my need to figure everything out.”
I had met up with Malcolm planning to ask for his help, but now I found myself feeling suspicious. Sure, he could walk around in sunlight, but what if he really was connected to the vampires?
Not that I had much choice if I wasn’t willing to drag my friends into it. And I wasn’t.
So I took a deep breath and said, “Okay. I’m planning to break into a law office and look at files.
Are you ready to do something like that? Something illegal?”
He gave me another thoughtful look. “I’ll bet we can find a way to get them to let us in, completely legally.”
“Legally?”
“Yep. And they’ll never realize why we were really there.”
He told me what he was thinking and we refined the plan over another two cups of coffee each. I had some research to do, but I was ready for it.
I had help.
I left the restaurant buzzed on caffeine and feeling prepared for anything.
Malcolm and I spent the weekend preparing for our undercover operation, which Malcolm took to calling “The Sting.”
The first thing we needed, of course, was a way to get into the law offices, and Malcolm was in charge of that. The second thing we needed was time to search without being interrupted.
I began by visiting the New York City Department of Records on Chambers Street on Friday morning. I had to show my ID and walk through a metal detector before I was allowed into the building. Good thing they didn’t have a wooden stake detector. As it was, the guard on duty looked at the chopstick in my purse with a certain amount of suspicion.
“What’s that for?”
“I use it to hold my hair back sometimes—I don’t like it in my face while I�
�m working.” To demonstrate, I quickly twisted the top part of my hair into a knot and stuck the chopstick through it. It held, to my great relief. This might be a great new vampire-repellent hairstyle.
Satisfied, the security guard waved me through.
It was still early, so there were a few microfilm machines left to rent. They quickly filled up, though, so I was glad I’d left the Bronx when I did. If I’d thought about it, I would have realized that lots of people do genealogical research in the Department of Records.
I spent much of the day sorting through microfilm copies of the “docket books” for the building that housed Pearson, Forster, and Sims. By the time the Municipal Archives offices closed at 4:30, I had copies of the building’s blueprints.
I stepped out of the building and turned my face up to the late-spring sunlight, stretching my arms above my head to work out the kinks from spending all day staring into a microfilm screen.
I needed to pick up a few items before I headed back to the Bronx, so I made my way to 14th Street and ducked into the “Wigs and Plus” store. I came out sixty dollars poorer but one long, curly, black wig richer. With my medium-toned skin, it made me look like any of the locals in my neighborhood—vaguely Italian or Puerto Rican or Albanian. I also stopped at a Duane Reed pharmacy and picked up a handful of makeup, all in rich, dark tones that distinctly contrasted my usual neutral palette. The wig and heavy makeup would, I hoped, complete my disguise.
When I got home, I found Malcolm leaning against the brown brick wall that made up one side of my building, his arms crossed in front of him, one booted foot kicked out in front of him, and a plastic Staples bag dangling from his left hand. He looked both completely at ease and anticipatory.
I’m not sure how he managed that combination. It was clear to me that he could hardly wait to show me something but was prepared to wait all day if necessary.