by J. F. Lewis
I had half an idea that she’d run off to find Talbot or get some other sort of help. Maybe one of her friends at the Irons Club, the local thrall hangout, knew something about putting explodicated vampires back together again. When the headlights pulled up, I’d convinced myself that it was her until I saw the Void City Department of Public Works logo on the side of the van.
In Void City, most humans don’t know about the supernatural. I’m not sure how it all works, but I know there is an enchantment in place that keeps them from remembering all the spooky crap that goes on unless they’re into the whole scene. The spell replaces the memory of actual events with mundane occurrences which can explain it all away. The magic isn’t always very thorough in the way it creates the new memories, though, so a lot of us hire magicians to do touch-up work. I use a local guy named Magbidion. He’s not a member of the guild because he got his powers by selling his soul. Apparently the high-born magical families frown on that sort of thing, so he’s an outcast. It also means that he works cheaper than a guild mage and doesn’t ask as many questions.
I also use Magbidion when my victims stick around after they die and try to haunt me. He moves them along, no fuss, no muss. The city can’t use him, though; they have to pay guild rates. Half of the money taxpayers call graft and corruption is actually money that gets paid out to the guild. In exchange, the guild provides memory alteration service, ghost removal, and whatever else they do, at a reduced rate.
Ghost removal…I think not.
The van parked in front of the Demon Heart, and a portly looking goofball with brown hair and a disarming grin stepped out of the driver’s side. He wore the same blue jumpsuit that the sanitation workers do. The name tag on his left breast pocket said Melvin. He tugged a portable two-way radio out of his right pocket and spoke into it.
“Big Top, this is Mother Goose. I see him. He’s a mean mammer jammer, too. You should feel the noncorporeal manifestants he’s putting out. Are you sure we want to contain him, not just send him to the great beyond?”
A male voice responded. “This is Alpha-One, Mother Goose. Big Top advises to continue with containment.”
Melvin sighed. “Okay, but this is going to cost extra. He’s a full-blown revenant.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Is there a difference?” Melvin sounded as indignant as a Trekkie who’d just been asked if Spock is the one with the funny ears. “Revenants are an earthbound manifestation of anger and rage. They’re capable of class five contact with the natural world: drastic temperature alteration, applied telekinetics…These bad boys can suck the soul right out of you. A ghost is just spam mail compared to one of these guys!”
“Just capture it!” shouted Alpha-One.
I floated over to Melvin, and the windows on his van fogged up. “Can my code name be Yosemite Sam?”
He jogged around the van and stood on the other side of the white line in the middle of the road, still talking on the two-way. “I sense a secondary presence as well. Nobody said anything about two. Guild regulations require one mage per ghost present.”
“If you were doing this on the books then you could whine to the guild about it, but you aren’t. Just capture the damn thing and get it back here!”
Melvin pulled a picture out of his breast pocket and gave it the once-over. He showed me the picture. It was me, Roger, and Marilyn standing in front of my classic Mustang convertible, back when we’d all been alive. My face had been circled with a black Sharpie. “Nice car,” Melvin said. “Do you still have it? My uncle had an old ’67 Mustang. What kind of mileage do you get on her?”
I let it distract me. His fingers danced in tortuous knots. Words that hummed like wasps in my head cut through me. Never underestimate a mage. A lambent purple coffin-size box snapped shut with me inside. Numbness flowed up my ghostly extremities where I braced against the sides of the glowing prison.
He shouldn’t have underestimated me, either. “You ain’t dealing with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man here, you Dan Aykroyd–looking motherfucker!” The cage held for about three minutes, with me pounding on it as hard as I could. I treated it like a workout, punching it over and over again, locking in on the wall of the box closest to Melvin, focusing my rage.
I smelled the sickly sweet mixture of cigarettes and machine oil from Carl’s garage. The lights in the garage were turned off; the only illumination came from the high beams on my car. For three seconds I could see the interior as clearly as if I’d been sitting at the wheel. Then multicolored shards of energy flew in all directions as the walls surrounding me gave way.
My vision cleared. Melvin picked himself up off the ground and grabbed his radio. “Alpha-One, this is Mother Goose.” His voice contained equal parts excitement and respect, but he wasn’t afraid. “Nope! Can’t contain him. He tore through Hamnard’s Holding Cell like he was opening the fridge to grab a beer. You’ll have to pay for a high-end soul prison if you want to snare this bad boy.”
“For Christ sake!” Alpha-One sounded irritated. “I thought you were the big man on campus when it comes to ghost crap.”
“Tell him to come down here himself if he doesn’t like it,” I snarled. Tendrils of ice raced along the pavement from my feet to the vehicle. Frost formed on the public-works van.
“Did you copy that, Alpha-One?” Melvin asked. “Subject suggests you come down in person.”
“My ass,” the radio crackled. “How much for the soul prison?”
Melvin frowned, working it out in his head. “Well, you’d have to call Jimmy over at the local and get official clearance. I can’t just do something like that freelance. There’s no way I could slip magic of that caliber under the radar with Sheila on monitor duty. If you want to do it next month, when McGibbons is up on the rotation—”
“Forget it,” the voice snapped angrily. “Just get the hell out of there. We’ll pay you for the site visit, but that’s it.”
“Not what we agreed on, but okay. Sounds fair to me.” Melvin put the radio back into the pocket of his jumpsuit and looked directly at me. His smile was open, honest and indescribably childlike. “I’m done. Would it be okay if I got back into my van now?”
I stepped back, and he climbed in through the passenger’s side. The driver’s door was frozen shut. He cranked the van and rolled down the window. “I gotta tell ya. I’ve never seen anything like that before. You had to be approaching a class six physical interaction there when you laid the smackdown on my containment spell. Very impressive. You’re the most powerful revenant I’ve ever seen…in fact, I’m not even sure that’s all you are.”
“Thanks,” I said in confusion.
“When they come at you next, they’ll try the soul prison route, but I can guarantee you they’ll get nonguild labor to put it together. It’ll look like a big cat’s-eye marble—more than one, maybe. They’re wicked powerful, but they’ll shatter like glass if you hit them with a rock.” He gave me a thumbs-up. “Good luck.”
I watched him drive away. Melvin seemed like a good guy. I made a mental note to look him up if I ever got my body back and my own mage wasn’t available. He might frown on the whole vampire thing, but aside from the supernatural powers angle, I was betting Melvin wouldn’t see much difference in working for a bloodsucking undead monster than for a politician.
Melvin stopped at the street corner and began cordoning off the area. Normal people would see the sign he was putting out as whichever public warning sign they were most likely to heed: Road Closed, Police Line—Do Not Cross, or whatever. He blocked off one end of the street, drove back by, and finished up on the other side before speeding off into the night, leaving me alone again.
Or was I? What was it Melvin had said about a secondary presence?
“Hello?” I called out tentatively toward the Pollux. The response was immediate and it came from behind me.
“If you’re done fornicatin’, consortin’ with demons, and chewin’ the fat with the locals, son, I’d like a wo
rd.” The country drawl reminded me of my granddad, a syrupy cocktail of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Sparkling in the rising sun, a single-action Colt revolver lay beneath the remains of the Demon Heart’s runway.
The gun caught my eye when I turned toward the sound. Gun smoke rose from the barrel as I recognized El Alma Perdida. In English, the gun’s name translates as “The Lost Soul.” It had been used by one of my ancestors, John Paul Courtney, in some crazy crusade against werewolves. I’d been shot with it the night before and it’d been stuffed down the back of my pants when I’d blown up.
Manifesting in the smoke like a cowboy stepping through the hazy dawn, a man with my blue eyes and a face a lot like my dad’s puffed on the stub of a spectral cigar. Red mud caked his boots and pants, running halfway up his thighs. The buckle of his gun belt displayed a cross. He took a drag on the cigar, smoke billowing out through a multitude of bullet wounds in his upper torso, curling back in as he blew the smoke out through his nostrils. Old blood had turned the red-and-white checkered shirt he wore to a uniform shade of brown, the pattern only emerging at his shoulders.
I guessed this was the ghost of John Paul Courtney, the gun’s original owner. His brown leather duster flapped in an unseen breeze. His head lolled from side to side as he walked toward me, like his neck had been broken. He steadied his head with both hands, snapping it into place with a sickening crack, and took another long draw off of the cigar. The end flared brightly, but the cigar didn’t burn down, stuck forever with an eternal puff or two left in it.
“Great, it’s the Ghost of Fuck-Ups Past,” I said. I wondered if that made me the Ghost of Fuck-Ups Present or the Ghost of Fuck-Ups Yet to Come. The way the morning was going, it could have been either or both.
“Figures you’d talk like some no-account heathen.” He ran “no” and “account” together like it was just one word and the way he said “heathen” included an “r” near the end that wasn’t supposed to be there. In short, he sounded like I might’ve if Mom hadn’t been from Michigan.
“If I’m a ghost, do I have to have a bad Southern accent, too?” The ghost of John Paul Courtney didn’t respond to my question.
Just what I needed, a stick-in-the-mud ghost of some ancestor I didn’t give a shit about. Another person might have wanted to ask him questions or hoped he was there to help, but I don’t think that way.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want Judgement Day to come so I can change my shirt.” He stopped a half step too close to me, nearly nose to nose, or rather, nose to lip since he had a couple of inches on me. “I want to see Jesus and find out if I done enough good to keep myself outta Hell, boy.”
“Fine.” All I wanted was my thrall to come back and fix things, but did I get that? No. I got Hillbilly Roy the Gospel Cowboy. Where the hell are you, Rachel? I thought. I closed my eyes. Since Rachel was my thrall, I was supposed to be able to feel her presence if I concentrated, but I couldn’t. Whether that was due to a lack of concentration or because I was a damn ghost was anybody’s guess. I wanted to know why Rachel wasn’t out here doing her job. She knew more about vampire mystic bullshit than I did. Maybe she could get me out of this. I hoped that she hadn’t taken off after the explosion. I opened my eyes again and the cowboy was still there. “You wait over on your side of the burned-out strip club and I’ll wait on mine,” I told J. P.
“I can help you, not that you deserve it.” His cigar bounced up and down with the motion of his lips.
“You can help me get my body back? You know that it blew up, right?”
“Your body? This ain’t about your body, son. This is about your soul, about your destiny.”
“I’d rather have a body, thanks.” I tried to re-form myself, rematerialize, coalesce, whatever you want to call it. I reasoned, if I tried hard enough…Nothing. I glimpsed my car again and stopped pushing. I didn’t need my car; I needed my frickin’ body back. “Damn!” I cut my eyes over to the ghost. “Are you in it?”
“Am I in what?” He drew back and cocked his head to one side; something gave, and his head fell over, cheek flush with his shoulder.
“This destiny of mine that you’re talking about.”
He straightened his head again, forcing it back into position. “I am.”
“Then, no offense, but fuck that. I’m not going through the rest of eternity with a cowboy bobblehead bitching and moaning at me about Jesus.” If Rachel didn’t show up, I knew Greta would come resurrect my happy ass. She’s my daughter, vampirically speaking, but it’s more than that. To her, I’m Daddy with a capital D.
His laughter came from all directions, surrounding me, disorienting. “Suit yourself. You’ve got the Courtney temper, boy, yes sirree. Like a young stallion with a brood mare’s scent in his nostrils. You’ll get that pounded out of you soon enough.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I stepped closer.
“Oh, no!” He shied me away with his hat. “You git on, young buck. You need time to simmer down.” Smoke curled up from his chest, obscuring his expression. He cleared it with a wave of his hat. “I was just like you in my day, boy. I mean it. Just like you.”
Really? He was a screwed-up vampire who got reamed by his best friend, framed for murder, and blown up over a lame-ass real estate deal? ’Cause that’s what happened to me yesterday and I doubted he could say the same. “Just tell me what you were going to tell me.” I sighed.
“Go ask your demon friend or that fat magician for answers.” He spat the cigar out of his mouth. It vanished when it struck the ground, coming apart like smoke. “Just like me,” he said. “You’ll go to Hell and back before you’ll be of any use.”
I waited for him to swirl back down into El Alma Perdida, like a genie in a bottle. Instead, he flashed, burning brightly with an inner light, and then he was gone.
4
TABITHA: IN THE PRESENCE OF EVIL
I sobbed, fumbling with my crystal glass as I sat in Phillip’s suite at the Highland Towers. Blood wine sloshed up the side. A human wouldn’t have noticed, but as the wine ran down the side of the glass, it moved more slowly than real wine would have. A thin residue clung to the surface for a fraction of a second until something, maybe magic, maybe gravity, pulled it down.
“I…I’m sorry.” I cursed myself for crying, but I knew Phillip didn’t mind. Phillip’s an old vampire, or so he says. He feels younger when I sense him, but he says that’s because he’s used magic to make himself more powerful over the years and since he basically rules Void City, I believe him. He probably thought my crying real tears was sexy, miraculous, interesting—any number of things. Once you’ve been a vampire as long as Phillip has, anything different is good. I’m different.
I reached to put my glass down on a little half-moon table, but missed the edge. The long tapered crystal tumbled and I froze, unable to react with sufficient speed. My vampiric abilities don’t work well when I’m seeming human and I had turned my abilities all the way on (heartbeat, body heat…the works) to impress Phillip. He righted the glass as it toppled, moved it closer to the center of the little table, and returned to his chair so quickly that I barely saw a blur.
“I just didn’t know what to do…where to go…so I came here, because…”
He didn’t smile. I was so thankful that he didn’t smile. I don’t know why, but if I had looked at him and seen happiness, I think I would have exploded, or died, or shattered…something. He patted my hand and crossed the room to stoke a small fire. His small wood-burning stove was putting out a lot of heat. I didn’t remember having seen it before.
“Tell me everything,” Phillip commanded gently.
“Eric died,” I whined. My voice was high-pitched and sobbing. I hated myself for it. Trying to stop just made it worse. “I broke up with him out at Orchard Lake…He went there because the werewolves were trying to kill him and he wanted it to stop, but they seemed so much like normal people…there were teenagers and little kids and old ladies. One
of them looked like my grandma. I couldn’t deal with it. I told him that there had to be another way, but…”
“But he disagreed.” Phillip touched my hand, his fingers warm and comforting, his cheeks rosy, like he’d just fed.
“Yes, and then I told him that I hated him.” I smiled weakly at Phillip, fighting back the tears. Phillip was being so sweet to me. He leaned forward and I got a glimpse past him at the last person who’d made Phillip really angry. His name is Percy. Phillip keeps him, staked and immobilized, but conscious, in a glass display case at the center of his living room. There is a plaque underneath that I’d read before: My dear Percy, who serves as a remembrance to all that I do not bluff, I do not make empty threats, and there are indeed worse fates than death.
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I picked up the glass, staring down into it before drinking. In the sparkle of blood wine, I could see the Demon Heart, my ex’s strip club, burning to the ground. I hadn’t mentioned that part yet.
“Anyway, I…” I could have saved Eric, come to his rescue, and instead I ran off to the Highland Towers to make a point, to make him chase me? I didn’t think Lord Phillip would appreciate being chosen as a convenient jealousy device.
“I don’t know why I even came here, it’s just that you’re the only other vampire I know and I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“You were right to come here,” Phillip crooned. He leaned in closer, the firelight glinting in his pale colorless eyes. In another frame of mind that predatory look might have frightened me, but I didn’t give it much thought. “But what, if you don’t mind my asking, makes you think Eric has been ended?”
“I felt him burning.”
Something about my glass must have bugged him, because he stalked purposefully over to the table, grabbed the glass, and pitched it toward the woodstove, following it quickly with his own. The metal door on the stove opened all on its own, accepting each glass like a hungry pet gobbling down treats.