Bring On the Night

by Jeri Smith-Ready

  By this point I’d realized that the Control’s unofficial motto was “Whatever it takes.” I admired their pragmatism—when it wasn’t screwing over me or my loved ones.

  Tina bowed her head, the corners of her mouth all twitchy tight. “I’m sorry for my mistake, Sergeant.”

  “Don’t be sorry for your mistakes. You’re here to learn.” Kaplan closed her clipboard with a loud clack. “Be sorry for your pride.”

  A muscle in Tina’s jaw jumped. “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “And you”—Kaplan pointed her pen at me—“take a shower.”

  I walked back to my dorm across the central commons of the Control’s regional headquarters. The grass, which during the day mixed winter browns with spring greens, glowed in shades of gray in the moonlight.

  The vampire Control agent Elijah, aka Captain Fox, strolled ten feet to my right, upwind. One of his strides equaled two of mine, so I had to hustle to keep up.

  “Good thinking,” he rumbled, “with the pizza.”

  “Next best thing to bug spray.”

  Garlic has no special powers, but a vampire’s acute sense of smell means that any strong scent turns them off—chemical products being the worst.

  “It wouldn’t have stopped me if I was really thirsty.” Elijah checked the buttons of his black uniform shirt. “But people like you already know that.”

  “People like me?”

  “Yoosie lovers,” he said with a scoff. “As your partner calls you.”

  If he thought Tina wouldn’t tell anyone about their affair, he was naïve to the oversharing ways of women. While Tina and I weren’t exactly buds, we’d hung out on occasion, since she was one of my best friend Lori’s bridesmaids. As the maid of honor, I felt it my diplomatic duty to offer to be Tina’s orientation roommate and training partner, though I knew we weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. More like a match made in sitcoms.

  Sure enough, the better we knew each other, the worse we got along. Between Tina’s breakup with Elijah and her discovery that I pretty much believed in nothing, she’d been hell to live and work with.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I told Elijah, “but I’m not my boyfriend’s donor. I’m my boyfriend’s girlfriend.”

  He angled a glance at me, the whites of his eyes flashing under his black cap. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Huh.” He turned down the path for the vampires’ quarters. “Poor guy,” I heard him mutter under his breath.

  I watched him go, marveling at the grace and precision of his step despite his enormous bulk. Other than that brief fling with Tina, Elijah tended to keep a respectful distance from humans, no matter how they smelled. His size and strength meant he didn’t need fangs to intimidate. He didn’t just look like a linebacker—he’d actually been one for the Cleveland Browns before he was vamped in the late seventies.

  I jogged the rest of the way to my dorm room so I could catch the aforementioned poor guy’s show.

  A clock radio sat on the nightstand between the twin beds. I switched it on to hear the closing strains of the Boomtown Rats’ “Looking After No. 1.” As usual, Regina’s Goth/punk Drastic Plastic show was running over into her progeny Shane’s midnight hour. I peeled off my dull black training jacket as the music faded.

  “Happy Saturday, my friends.” Shane’s voice crawled out of the little speaker, so deep and soothing my knees turned to jelly. I sank onto the bed, forgetting my own reek. “It’s two minutes past midnight here at 94.3 FM WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. We’ve got forty-six degrees here in Sherwood, fifty in Baltimore, and fifty-two in Washington, with clear skies all over the map.”

  The mountains between the Control’s regional headquarters and our hometown of Sherwood weakened the station’s signal, but I still felt like he was speaking straight to me.

  “The Easter Bunny has left the South Pole and will be heading your way in twenty-four hours—so, kids, behave yourselves. This next one goes out to all the secret agents. Give me a call and tell me a secret.”

  I was dialing his cell number before the opening bars of R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush” were even finished.

  He picked up after the first ring. “Come home. Now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing in particular. Everything in general.” He let out a long sigh, and I could picture him leaning back in his chair and propping his feet on the studio table. “I miss you, Ciara.”

  After almost three years, I still got that zing across the back of my shoulders every time Shane said my name. Like it was created to be uttered by him, perfectly pronounced (KEER-ahh) with just the right amount of breath.

  “I miss you, too, but the month is almost up. Besides, the way I smell, you’re better off missing me.” I described the unclassified parts of my latest training session.

  “Sounds like you got high marks,” he said.

  “I ace strategic thinking.” I massaged my shoulder, sore from yesterday’s push-up marathon. “But I suck at teamwork and martial arts. I barely passed my tae kwon do final. On the plus side, I learned the Korean word for ‘doofus.’”

  His laughter came low and rich, making me twist the blanket with the desire to hear it in person. Preferably naked.

  “How’s Dexter?” I asked him.

  “Same as usual. Cold and furry.”

  I missed my dog almost more than I missed my boyfriend. At least I could talk to Shane on the phone or get his messages. Dexter’s vampirism—developed years ago in a Control laboratory—made him smarter than the average pooch, but he wasn’t big on texting.

  “He’ll be psyched to see you Sunday night,” Shane added. “You’d better wear a life jacket so you don’t drown in drool.”

  I laughed at the image, to ease the stab of homesickness in my chest. “I can’t wait to sleep in our bed again. And not sleep in it.” When he didn’t answer after a few moments, I prompted him. “Get it? Not sleep? In a bed? Hubba-hubba?”

  “Sorry.” His voice hushed. “Jim just walked by the studio.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Bloody.”

  I rubbed my temple, where a headache the size and shape of a certain hippie vampire was forming. “What if a cop had seen him driving back from his donor’s like that?”

  “We’ve pointed that out, but he won’t listen.”

  “If he doesn’t knock it off, we’ll have to get him some help.”

  Shane snorted. “Spoken like a true Control agent.”

  “Jim isn’t just risking himself—his recklessness could blow everyone’s cover and show the world that vampires exist. That means the end of all of you, and the station, too.”

  “I know.” He let out a long sigh. “We’ll try again. But Jim’s not the best candidate for an intervention. It’s more likely to drive him over the edge.”

  A key turned in the lock. Tina shoved open the door, banging it against the wall. Her face crumpled in disgust when she saw me. “You still haven’t showered?”

  I angled my shoulder away from her. “Shane, I gotta go wash up. See you soon.”

  “I’ll wake you when I get home from work,” he said, his voice rich with promise. “After three.”

  “Please do,” I said after a long moment, when I could scrub my voice of all tension and speak of April 5 as if it were just another Monday. As if it were just the beginning of another work week.

  As if it weren’t the fifteenth anniversary of the death and resurrection of Shane McAllister.

  After showering, I returned to my room to find Tina sitting up in bed, writing on a legal pad. Her heavy dark brows pinched together, and her lips folded under her teeth so hard I expected them to bleed.

  I collapsed in bed with one of the textbooks for my History of Eastern Europe class, my last course at Sherwood College before graduation. My professor had let me off for Control orientation, and here I was repaying him by falling way behind in assigned reading.

  Unfortunately, the rhythm
ic scratching of Tina’s pen soon lulled me into drowsiness.

  Just as I was falling asleep, she slapped down her notepad. “Goddamn fucking precepts.”

  When she left the room to go to the bathroom, I crept over to her bed and looked at the legal pad. So far she had written in long hand, “Cooperation before coercion” one hundred and seventy-three times. The repetitions grew shakier as they continued.

  “Ouch,” I muttered. “Not just old-school punishment. Grade school.”

  I took a small towel into the bathroom and soaked it at the faucet, avoiding Tina’s glare in the mirror. She was using her left hand to brush her teeth, her right hand no doubt sore from scribbling.

  In our dorm floor’s kitchenette, I heated the towel in the tiny microwave. When I got back to our room, Tina was sitting on the bed again, listening to her MP3 player and gritting her teeth as she wrote. I held out the steaming towel.

  She glared at me through a pair of taped-frame glasses, which she’d put on after taking out her contacts. “What the hell is that?”

  “For your hand. Moist heat’ll help the ache.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is you have to pull that six-foot stake out of your ass and be a real person to me. Or neither of us will pass orientation.”

  Tina’s mouth tightened, but she lowered her gaze to her legal pad. “I can’t stop writing. Kaplan wants a thousand reps of this by 0600.”

  “Your fingers will fall off. Give it to me.”

  Another stunned look, but she shook her head. “It has to be in my handwriting.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Tina bit her lip, then traded me the pad and pen for the towel. “Thank you,” she whispered. She placed the towel on the inside of her wrist and let out a groan of relief. “I’m not used to writing by hand. Haven’t done it since sixth grade.”

  I wrote Cooperation before coercion in Slot 207 in a passable forgery of her handwriting.

  She looked at the page with awe. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “Parents taught me.” I sat on my bed and kept writing. “They were professional fakers.”

  “Wow.” She took out her earbuds. “Are they in jail?”

  “Yep.” Two out of three of them, I thought but didn’t add out loud. I was hoping that a little openness on my part would thaw the chill between us, but as a rule I preferred to keep my personal details—both past and present—locked safely away.

  “It makes sense now.” Tina shifted her hand on the towel. “The way you are, I mean. Smart and jaded and… you know.”

  “Selfish?”

  “Self-preservative.”

  We shared a laugh. I let my posture relax, relieved my gamble had paid off in goodwill.

  Tina’s humor faded, however, when she saw my Romanian history book.

  “Why are you reading that?” she snapped.

  I ordered my hackles to stay down, hoping to restore the brief harmony. “It’s for school,” I said, resisting the urge to add, not everything is about you. “Hey, since you’re sort of Romanian, can you suggest a good paper topic?”

  “I suggest you pick another country. You don’t want to mess with my people.”

  “I’m not messing, I’m just researching.”

  “I mean it, Ciara. Blood is in our blood.”

  The way she uttered those words sent a chill down my back, which was probably her intended effect.

  “It was crazy when I left.” She winced as she flexed her hand. “My parents got me from an orphanage in Bucharest when I was five, right after the revolution.”

  “I didn’t realize.” Since she’d told me her parents here in the states were Romanian, I’d assumed they were her original mom and dad. “Your birth parents died?”

  “Maybe by now they have.” She tugged her black bangs to veil her eyes. “My father got taken away. Maybe he was a Communist. My mom couldn’t afford to keep all her kids, so she dumped me and my little brother at two different orphanages. I think she got money for us.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My biological mom couldn’t take care of me either, but at least I’d ended up with my dad and the woman I’d thought was my mother for the first twenty-four of my twenty-six years before I found out the truth. “I’m really sorry.”

  Tina shrugged as she moved the hot towel atop her wrist. “She had to survive. And it was for the best.” Her posture straightened into her usual haughtiness. “My adoptive parents picked me out of two hundred kids. You know why?”

  The sharp look in her eyes told me there was definitely a right and wrong answer, so I just shook my head.

  “They could tell I had magic.”

  “Huh.” I’d perfected the noncommittal grunt through years of discussing Lori’s fruitless ghost hunting with the Sherwood Paranormal Investigative Team (SPIT), of which Tina was the treasurer.

  “I know you don’t believe in that stuff,” Tina said, “but that doesn’t make it not true. I’ve spoken to the dead.”

  “I speak to the dead every day. They’re called vampires.”

  “Not undead. Dead dead.”

  “Do they talk back?”

  Her gaze faltered, and she adjusted her glasses. “Not yet.”

  “Then how do you know they hear you?”

  “It’s in my blood.” Her voice turned urgent. “My father—the one who adopted me—said that he could tell I was of noble Romanian heritage like him. He says there’s more magic in the Carpathian Mountains than in the rest of the world put together.”

  “Ah.” I went back to copying sentences, the politest response I could think of.

  “Daddy would know. He’s psychic.” She rushed out the words as if their speed could overtake my skepticism. “Plus he and my mom are both high-level necromancers.”

  “Uh-huh.” I wrote faster.

  “And he’s in charge of the Immanence Corps.”

  As I looked up, Tina gasped and clamped her hand over her mouth. I remembered a shaded triangle on the far edge of the Control organizational chart. “What is the Immanence Corps? None of the Control people will talk about it with recruits.”

  “Nothing,” she said, but her hand muffled her voice, so it came out “Mumfig.”

  I suspected her slipup had been intentional, so I turned back to the legal pad and approached the question at an oblique angle, feigning ignorance. “What exactly does a necromancer do? Is it like the mediums on TV?”

  She lowered her hand and took a deep breath, as if she’d been suffocating herself. “They communicate with the restless spirits of the dead.”

  “Let me guess: they’re all restless.” Or at least the ones with relatives who have more cents than sense.

  “Actually, no. If a spirit’s at peace, it takes a lot more skill to raise it and a lot more work. Besides, it goes against a necromancer’s ethics to disturb those who’ve fully passed on.”

  I wanted to change the subject, but I wanted even more to find out about this Immanence Corps. Holding my metaphorical nose, I kept digging. “Do they do séances?”

  “Sometimes, but most of the ritual is just for show.”

  “The show is everything. My parents used to be ‘faith healers.’” I mimed the obligatory air quotes. “They would sing and pray and work the crowd into a money-giving frenzy.”

  “Did they really heal people?”

  “They faked it. Some of the folks were shills we paid to pretend they couldn’t walk or see. I could’ve won an Oscar for my cute-crippled-kid act.”

  Tina stretched the fingers of her right hand, not wincing this time. “What about the regular people, the ones who weren’t hired?”

  “They felt better after my father touched them, but—”

  “So they were healed.”

  “They were gullible. In the heat of the moment, people will believe anything that gives them hope. I’m sure once we left town, the pain and suffering came right back. Along with much lighter bank accounts.”

  Tina groan
ed. “Why won’t you see?” She snatched the legal pad out of my hands. “Belief is a powerful force, Ciara. Just because your crooked parents made money off it doesn’t mean it’s not real.” She plopped back on her bed, creaking the mattress, and reinserted her earbuds before scrawling out the next Cooperation before coercion.

  I wanted to tell her that disbelief was just as powerful as belief. Thanks to my soul-deep skepticism (with a little genetics thrown in), one taste of my blood could heal vampires’ holy-water burns or release them from traps sprung by religious artifacts. For the last two and a half years, I’d been donating blood samples to the Control so they could study this odd trait I’d inherited—in the most potent form ever seen—from my Irish Traveller ancestors. The agency hadn’t shared any of their conclusions with me, but my con artist father said the strength of the anti-holiness lay in my capacity to create my own reality—and not buy into those that were fed to me.

  Which meant that if I ever believed in anything, I’d lose my abilities.

  I often wished I was normal, so I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming some crazy vampire’s personal pharmacy. When I first started giving my blood to the Control, it was only to buy my double-crossing father some leniency. Then it was part of a deal—which included this year of service—to let Shane visit his human family, a privilege forbidden to nearly all vampires.

  But I’d started to realize it wasn’t just about me. It was about a world on the edge of another Dark Age, with superstition feeding the fires of hatred, and belief taking the place of thought. I couldn’t stop nutcases from blowing up planes or shooting physicians, but maybe I could help answer a few questions about the nature of good and evil.

  Because against the armies of zealots, the rational world needed more than convincing arguments. It needed its own magic.

  3

  Kryptonite

  Sunday morning I sat on the non-colonel side of Lieutenant Colonel Winston Lanham’s wide oak desk, waiting for my assignment. I counted the awards lined up along the wall and tried to convince myself that I didn’t care where they put me. I could survive anything for a year.