Magic and Mayhem: A Collection of 21 Fantasy Novels

by Jasmine Walt

  He shook his head. “No. The other two weren’t as good at it. Their bites hurt a lot—a lot more than Deirdre’s—but they weren’t just pain.”

  “Did it bother you that one of the vampires was male?” Tony asked.

  “I’m not gay. But…” he paused for a long time, then whispered. “But by the last day, I was begging the guy to do me.”

  We were all silent for a moment.

  “They broke me,” he said.

  “Oh, Malcolm,” I said, “you couldn’t help it. Their bites are addictive.”

  Malcolm looked at me sorrowfully. “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s not the bites. That’s not the worst of it.” Again, he was silent for a long time. Tony and I just waited for him to speak.

  “The worst of it is,” Malcolm finally said, “the worst part of all of it, was that they were trying to get me to tell them where you lived. And I did. I told them. I think I would have done just about anything they asked me to.” With that, he put his head in his hands and began to cry.

  I didn’t wait for Tony’s approval; I moved to sit beside Malcolm and put my arms around him.

  “It’s not your fault, Malcolm,” I said. “They would have found out somehow. It’s not your fault.”

  “She’s right,” Tony said. “This is just like rape, Malcolm, and that’s never the victim’s fault. There is nothing you could have done differently, no way you could have known what might happen to you. And as for telling them where Elle lived, that’s not your fault either. They were torturing you.”

  Malcolm set his jaw and wiped his eyes angrily. “I shouldn’t have told them,” he said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “If anyone’s to blame here, it’s me. I’m the one who knew what they were, and I didn’t tell you.”

  Tony closed his notepad and tucked it back into his pocket. “I think that’s enough for today,” he said. “Why don’t you two join us out in the common room in an hour or so?”

  Tony closed the door behind him. I reached over and rubbed my hand up and down Malcolm’s arm.

  “You aren’t angry with me?” he asked.

  “No. No and a million times no,” I said. “I meant it; they would have found me eventually, with or without you. This is not your fault,” I said, emphasizing each of the last three words.

  Malcolm exhaled heavily, as if he’d been holding his breath while he waited for my answer.

  “Have you ever cleared out an entire den of vampires before?” I asked Nick. He and I were standing outside his office.

  “We’ve taken out dens before, but never one as big as this one,” Nick said. “If I’m interpreting what you saw correctly, then my guess is that we’ll be taking out most of the major vampires on Long Island.”

  “Does that worry you at all?” I asked.

  “Only inasmuch as it might piss off the other vamps in the city.”

  “What are we going to do if it sets the rest of them against us?”

  “I don’t know yet. I need to talk to Alec Pearson about that.”

  “Have you told him about Greg yet?” I asked.

  “Yes. I don’t know how much he believes me. I think he wants to continue to trust Greg.”

  “That’s really stupid,” I said.

  “I agree. I’ll give Alec a call right now, in fact. Why don’t you go wait for me in the common room? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He moved into his office and shut the door, but a few moments later I heard his raised voice through the wall. “Then you can damn well clear your appointments. This is your show, Alec, and what happened to that girl is your responsibility.”

  His voice fell again to a murmur behind the door. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more, anyway, so I left him to his discussions with his former guardian and made my way back into the common room to snuggle into the sofa not far from Malcolm, who was flipping through the latest issue of Time.

  When Nick joined us a few minutes later, he said, “I’m calling a brainstorming session in here.”

  The other guys showed up a few minutes later and we spent the next hour discussing vampires—fleshing out our addiction theory and sharing everything we knew, or thought we knew, about vampires.

  “It makes sense, biologically,” Tony said. “If being bitten by a vampire creates an addiction, then vampires and humans can form a sort of symbiotic relationship. The vampire needs blood, the human needs the vampire to take that blood.”

  “Do you think it’s a physical addiction?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m running tests on the blood samples I took from Malcolm and Elle. And I’m watching them both for signs of physical withdrawal. I’ll know more in a few days. But really, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical or psychological. Either form of addiction would have the same result.”

  “So why was Malcolm more affected by it than I am?” I asked. “Is it just because he was there longer?”

  “I’m sure that’s part of it. Increased exposure could certainly play a role in the development of the addiction. So could individual body chemistry and psychological makeup. Some people might form an instant addiction, whereas others might be more resistant to whatever it is that causes the addiction.”

  “What do you think that might be?” asked John.

  “Maybe something in the vampire’s saliva? Some chemical that gets into the bloodstream? At any rate, it’s almost certainly some sort of chemical compound that works on the brain.”

  “And,” said Dom, “the whole addiction thing might explain why there are so many stories about vampires being able to control their victims.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said. “There’s something else going on with the whole mind-control thing. The first time I saw Greg after he’d been turned, he just about hypnotized me, and I didn’t do anything but look him in the eyes.”

  “So it could be a combination of addiction and mind-control that draws humans to vampires,” said John.

  “Great,” I said. “We’ve got a bunch of mind-controlled vampire junkies to get through before we can even start to think about killing Deirdre and her vampire gang. Kiss. Slither. Whatever.”

  “You know,” said Malcolm slowly, “I’m really not okay with the idea of killing people whose worst crime was to get caught by vampires. Especially if there’s any hope of curing them. I mean, I could just as easily have ended up being one of them.” It was the first time he’d said anything since the conversation started. He spoke quietly, but his comment had the effect of a loud bomb in our midst.

  We all sat staring at him, stunned.

  “Jesus,” said Nick, and put his head in his hands. “He’s right. We can’t go into this with guns blazing.”

  We all nodded, except for John, who said, “The problem with that is that you can’t trust a junkie not to go back to his drug of choice. Leaving them alive as witnesses means that there’s a good chance that some, if not all, of them will go running off to find other vampires and end up telling some big bad vamp who it was that destroyed Deirdre and her group.”

  He was right, too. So what it came down to was that we had to find a way to get past the humans without them ever seeing us.

  “But that will entail finding out what their schedule is like and figuring out a way to incapacitate them while we finish off the vamps,” said Tony.

  We tossed ideas around for a while, but no one could think of anything viable. Our best chance of getting past them was to drug them; we agreed on that. But the problem of getting into Deirdre’s house in order to slip a mickey to every single human servant seemed insurmountable.

  Finally Malcolm spoke up again. “I have an idea,” he said. And then he explained it to us.

  His idea was brilliant in its simplicity. It also scared the hell out of me.

  And out of Nick, too. For that matter, we all tried to talk Malcolm out of it.

  “I’m the best choice for this,” Malcolm argued for about the tenth time. “Deirdre will
have no trouble believing that I have to come back, that I need to be bitten.” He laughed bitterly. “It’s all but true, anyway,” he said.

  “That’s why it scares me, Malcolm,” I said. “You don’t know what might happen to you in there.

  And we might not be able to come in and rescue you this time. If you go in, you know she’s going to want some sort of proof of why you’re really there. You’ll get bitten immediately.” He shivered, and I couldn’t tell if it was from horror or desire.

  “But at least I’ll be inside and can spike the servant’s drinks. Or food, or whatever.”

  “What if you get so deep in that you can’t bring yourself to do that? What if we can’t get you back even if we get you out?”

  Nick put his hand on my shoulder. “Malcolm’s right, Elle,” he said. “He’s the only one who can do this. He has to go in.”

  “Then we at least have to wait until he’s all healed up,” I said.

  “The longer we wait, the less believable it becomes that he’d go back at all,” Dom said.

  “As his doctor, I am not allowing him to go anywhere until he’s at least a little more stable,” Tony said. I shot him a grateful look.

  “Then how will he explain being gone so long?” Nick asked.

  “I’ll tell Deirdre that you guys held me prisoner here and that I got away,” Malcolm said.

  “She’ll want to know where the shop is,” I said. “And you’ll have to tell her something.” I couldn’t believe I was actually participating in this conversation. I didn’t think he should go back in at all.

  “Tell her the truth. We can be cleared out of here long before she could send anyone to check it out,” Nick said. “And with any luck at all, we’ll get to her hideout before she gets to ours.”

  “It might take a few days for Malcolm to get into a position to knock the servants out. How will we know when to move in?” John asked.

  “That’s easy,” said Malcolm. “I’ll just walk out the front door and wave at you. The vampires will all be sleeping during the day, right? No problem.”

  “But what if you’re locked in and can’t come out?”

  Dom answered me. “I can come up with something that will allow him to communicate with us.

  Some sort of bug that he can drop at some point. Something that looks innocuous. We’ve got enough time for me to work something out.”

  “Why can’t I go in?” I asked.

  All of them turned around and stared at me.

  “What? I’ve been bitten, too. I could just as easily as Malcolm have an uncontrollable desire to go back to get chewed on. Besides, I wasn’t exposed to it as long as Malcolm was, so it’ll be safer for me.”

  They all spoke at once.

  “Absolutely not,” said Nick.

  “No,” said Tony.

  “No way,” said Dom.

  “Uh-uh,” said John.

  Malcolm just shook his head.

  “I am not some innocent little girl who needs to be protected,” I said angrily. “You were all perfectly willing to let me go in and kill vampires with you in the Bronx. What’s changed now?”

  “No one said you needed protecting,” said Nick. “And we’re going to take you in with us to kill these vampires, too. But your own argument is exactly the problem. You weren’t exposed to the vamps for as long as Malcolm was. We don’t know enough about the addiction process to know if you had enough exposure to even cause you to become addicted. What we do know is that Malcolm was there longer and is therefore the more believable candidate for going in undercover.”

  “And what if we’re wrong altogether? What if a vampire’s bite isn’t addictive at all? We could end up getting Malcolm killed.” My voice shook as I spoke.

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take, Elle,” Malcolm said. “I need to do this.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. I had lost the fight before it had even begun. Malcolm was determined to go back into that nightmare of a mansion.

  20

  That’s when I started looking for a knife with wood inlay on the blade. Not that I hadn’t had perfectly good luck with the wooden stakes, mind you. I mostly felt the need to be out and doing something.

  Preferably something productive. And really, what could be more productive than arranging for a special weapon when one’s ex-almost-boyfriend is planning his almost-certain suicide?

  The whole thing was horrible. Beyond horrible. And I knew that he was absolutely right: he was the only one who had any chance at all of doing the reconnaissance we needed to make our plan work.

  I started out on the internet trying to find precisely what I was looking for. The wooden stakes had worked just fine, but every strike had taken almost all of my upper body strength. I wanted a weapon that would do the work of a stake with the ease of a knife.

  Besides, I was beginning to form a few unpleasant suspicions.

  I waited until no one else was around and took a break from the internet. I was sitting at one of the several computers in Dom’s bank of equipment in the reception area and I called Nick over to me.

  “Hey, Nick? I want to run something by you,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Okay. I know that we’ve only got my experience—and Malcolm’s—with Deirdre and her gang to go on. I mean, we don’t know if that sort of ‘biting to train the new vamps’ scenario has happened very often.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But does it seem at all odd to you that she would have to be training all those new vampires?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Just bear with me here for a minute. Have you ever heard of a vampire feeding party like that scene I ended up in the middle of at Deirdre’s?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been going on. I don’t exactly have a strong connection to the vampire community.”

  “Okay. And how many vampires have you killed since you started working for Alec?”

  He thought for a minute. “I’m not sure. Maybe a hundred or so?”

  “How many dens?”

  “Two or three.”

  “How hard was it to kill all these vampires?”

  He cocked his head to the side and spoke slowly. “It varied.”

  “And by comparison, how difficult was it to kill the vampires in the Kingsbridge Armory?”

  “They were easy. Very easy.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. They seemed easier to kill than the first vampire I killed. But I was kind of crazy that night, so I needed to double check.”

  “I take it you have a theory about all of this?”

  “The beginnings of one, anyway. I haven’t pieced all of it together, but here’s what I’m thinking so far. At first I thought that there’s a good chance that new vampires are easier to kill than old ones.

  But then I decided that maybe it’s not age that matters, but experience. So one: the less experienced vamps are easier to kill than the more experienced ones.” I held up my fingers to count off the points as I spoke. “Two: I think that Deirdre is creating a bunch of new vampires to infiltrate the other boroughs, starting with the Bronx. I don’t know why she’s doing it, but I’m happy to go with the relatively simple theory that she’s a power-hungry bitch. Three: she feels like she has to train all these vamps. Four: she’s holding vampire-feeding parties in her well-equipped-for-feeding mansion.”

  Nick watched me intently, nodding as I iterated each point.

  “And that is the ‘why’ that’s important here. Why does she feel like she has to gather all these vampires together and teach them how to feed off humans? I think it’s because every time a vampire feeds, he gets a little stronger, a little harder to kill. And the more the vampire can control the victim, the more the victim wants the vampire to suck his or her blood, the stronger the vampire gets.

  “I think that maybe vampires feed as much off the psychic energy—or sexual energy, or whatever—of their victims as they do off the blood of t
hose victims. I don’t think Deirdre was just holding a little vampire party. I think she was arranging for her vampires to get stronger.

  “I think Deirdre is building a vampire army.”

  Nick went utterly still and stared at me.

  “I’m right about this. I’m a historian, Nick, and a good one, at that. I’m trained to look for patterns in things. I’ve been thinking about this all morning, and this is the pattern I’m seeing.”

  “I think it’s time for you to meet with Alec yourself,” Nick said. “He needs to hear your theory, if you’re willing to tell it to him.”

  I sighed. This was not going to be fun. But it had to be done.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

  Nick left without saying another word, but came back a few moments later. “Tomorrow morning at 10:00,” he said. I nodded in acknowledgment.

  I ended up having to find someone to custom-make my stake knife (pun totally intended, of course).

  John was a big help with this. I was still running Google searches when he wandered through and asked what I was looking for. Had I been thinking about it clearly, of course, I would have gone to our in-house weapons specialist first.

  I explained what I had in mind and he pursed his lips in thought. “Yeah. That might just work. I know an old guy up in Westchester who might be able to put something like that together for us. You busy with anything else right now?”

  The last time I’d seen Malcolm, Tony had been running some sort of medical tests on him, so I didn’t feel any obligation to stick around on his account. Anyway, I was beginning to get a touch of cabin fever from having been cooped up in the shop for two solid days.

  “No, I’m not busy. Please. Get me out of here.”

  John grinned and headed off to tell Nick where we would be.

  We took the van up to Larchmont, a chichi little town north of the Bronx, wending our way through narrow streets lined with two-story colonial-style houses. We passed through the downtown area, where a small section of curving streets sported rows of artsy shops in which one could buy things like lamps imported from Morocco or chairs imported from England. Lots of imports.