by J. F. Lewis
After I’d eaten, colors bled back into my vision, but everything still had a tinge of red to it. If I’d drained the girls dry, it might have cleared up immediately, but since there were two of them, I didn’t have to kill either of them. The girls were unconscious and I had my unwanted color tint, but I hoped we’d all be fine in a night or two. I also felt more mellow, artificially so, sleepy, too. “Okay, what was in the blood?”
“Nothing that will harm you, I give you my word.” His tone made that sound important, believable. “Just a little enchantment to calm you so that we might speak on more friendly terms.”
“I don’t like being drugged.”
“You have my apologies, Eric,” J’iliol’lth said with debatable sincerity. “Shall we move to an interior room?”
“As long as it isn’t a trap.” You have to expect deceit from demons. I’d forgotten, and now I was drugged. I decided I was going to get one hell of a discount on Marilyn, or Jill was going to be on the tooth and claw end of my anger stick. “And I’ll want my gun back,” I added, pointing the sword tip at him.
He handed El Alma Perdida to me and I changed back to my human form, tucking it into the back of my jeans. I pulled the sixth bullet out of the mouth of one of the dead dog demons (where I’d stowed it) and dropped it into my pocket.
“It isn’t a trap, Eric. You have my word. I can put it in writing if you like.”
“So long as it’s nothing that I have to sign and I’m not agreeing to anything.” Bullshit. With demons, it’s always a trap. Why else would he have given me my gun back if not to lure me into a false sense of security?
“Touché,” he laughed. “Touché.”
Twenty minutes later we were in a plush conference room with leather chairs and a plasma screen television someone had obligingly set to the sports channel. Rachel and I sat down, but not before I sliced into each seat with the frost sword just to be sure.
“What the hell were we talking about?” I asked.
“Miss Robinson’s soul?”
“Something else, too.” I racked my brain and, very unusually for me, I remembered. “The contingency you worked up with Roger.”
J’iliol’lth’s mossy covering turned blue. “A vampire can be restored to unlife after destruction once and only once through the willing sacrifice of a human soul.” I threw the long sword through the television. It didn’t explode like they do in the movies.
“I had his happy ass eaten by a pack of werewolves and you brought him back?” J’iliol’lth stared at the smoke drifting up from the television. “Don’t look at the damn TV. Look at me!”
“You’re a very expensive guest.”
“Get over it, peckerwood. You tried to kill me.”
“And you killed my brother.”
“Your brother fucked with me while I was on vacation and he got dead. He had a dumb fucking name anyway. Johnny something. Besides, don’t you guys come in clutches or something, like flies? You must have a few hundred brothers.”
“Eric,” Rachel cautioned.
“Give me Marilyn’s soul back, right now, for free, or I’m going to tear this building down around your ears.”
“That’s not going to happen. If you damaged the building enough that I had to leave, I’d drag Miss Robinson’s soul with me. You can banish me, but my death would be far from permanent. You are not the only being that is insufferably hard to exterminate. You don’t have your mouser here, Eric. You have no leverage.”
“Like I give a shit. People try to kill me, unmake me, and screw up my junk all the time…or haven’t you been paying attention?”
“I assure you, Mr. Jones. No, let us dispense with such foolish pretenses. We both know your true name, don’t we, Mr. Courtney? I know that you are the great-great-grandson of John Paul Courtney, just as surely as I know that you do, as you so quaintly put it, give a shit. You care for humans. Your family always has.
“True, yours is a sporadic and capricious morality, but you have one. You’re a Courtney. You care. You mean well. You make an effort. That is where we differ.” He put his hands on the table between us and leaned toward me. “Go to war with me and you will find that I understand you all too well, where to hurt you, how to make you cry at night. I’m a demon, Mr. Courtney, it’s what I do, but,” he made a placating wave, “I have no wish to fight with you. As you say, I have many siblings.”
He attempted to snap his fingers, succeeding on the third try, and a glowing purple cube rose up out of the table. “She’s in there.” I reached for the box, but my hand passed through it.
“What gives?”
“I will send her with you, as a good faith gesture, an advance payment for the services you will render. I want you to obtain the Stone of Aeternum for me in exchange.”
I jerked the sword out of the TV. “I don’t work for demons, Jill. Come on, Rachel. We’re leaving.” Rachel peeled herself out of her chair and we started for the door. “Thanks for your time, Jill. It’s been real fun. I’ll be back with my mouser. If it doesn’t work out, you make sure to tell Marilyn that I tried.”
“Are you sure you aren’t even the teensiest bit interested in being able to eat food again? Bask in the sun? Enjoy the sound of your own eternal heartbeat?”
I stopped. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s quite simple, actually,” the demon said. “Without a contingency, I’m uncertain that your friend Roger is willing to work with me. He’s used his last get out of jail free card and, for him, there are no other routes back to this world if he is destroyed again. Any being may come back once through supernatural means…being turned into a vampire, zombie, et cetera.” His eyes cut to Rachel for less than an eyeblink and I nearly missed it. “To come back one other time requires the expenditure of a soul, a willing sacrifice.”
“And a thrall qualifies?” I asked. “I thought you said she was forced.”
“Normally true as well, but it’s all a matter of intent.” He licked his lips. “Roger didn’t force her to sign the contract using his power as her master, he forced her to sign it by threatening you.”
Fang’s engine roared in my head and the red tinge to my vision went purple.
“He’s dead,” I said in a whisper. “He just doesn’t know it yet.” I turned to leave.
“But, Mr. Courtney,” Jill said. “You haven’t heard my offer.”
“What are you talking about, the stuff you promised Roger, the wanting to be a Vlad thing? I am a Vlad…you have no leverage,” I mocked. “I’m going to go kill Roger and then I’m coming back here for Marilyn.”
“A Vlad? Please, Mr. Courtney. I thought we were being honest with each other. We both know that you are not a Vlad, just as we know I can’t make you a more powerful vampire than you already are. But I can make you something better, or at least, better as far as you are likely to be concerned.”
He stood up. He was taller than me, but from his posture, the extra height didn’t reassure him any. “I’m not interested,” I said. You can’t trust demons.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I could make you an immortal, Eric, a true immortal. Living, breathing, yet undying; untouched by death, disease, or the ravages of time. You wouldn’t be able to change shape anymore, true, but—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Jill was up in the air with my hand around his throat. “You’d better not be lying to me, Jill. You won’t like what I’ll do to you if you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”
“I assure you, it is possible. It will only work for you. You are different. For one like you, it will work.”
I set him down.
Different. Sometimes I felt different. It wasn’t just the eyes. I’d never been a typical vampire. It sounded…possible. I struggled to remember something that ghost-Marilyn had said, but it was gone. “Tell me more.”
“Indulge me for a moment first,” J’iliol’lth said. “What do you remember about how you died?”
“Memento mori,” I murmured.<
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“What?” J’iliol’lth’s eyes widened and he drew back. “I assure you I would never ask—”
“Remember your death,” I translated. “That’s what you want, right? Me to remember it? Well, I do and pretty well, since I just relived it a little while ago. Why do you want to know?” I asked suspiciously. J’iliol’lth walked back over to his seat and lifted a small glass paperweight with a scorpion carapace preserved inside. He held it up so that I could see it.
“Why do I have this?” he asked. “Curiosity. I like to look at it. I like scorpions. We have things like them where I’m from, but they are intelligent and quite dangerous. Here, they are not so dangerous, but look exactly the same. I like having it. It amuses me.”
“So?”
“So I want to know because I don’t know and because it would amuse me to know.”
Sounded very Hannibal Lecter to me. Rachel and I both sat back down. “I was driving Roger’s car,” I told him. “The brakes went out and it went down into a quarry. When I woke up, I was a vampire.”
“So you never knew your sire?” J’iliol’lth asked eagerly.
“No, I always assumed it happened in the hospital or in the ambulance or something.”
He put down the paperweight and crossed the room to stand in front of the TV. “And the next evening you rose as a vampire.”
I decided not to tell him anything about what had happened when Magbidion brought me back, about the curse, or about Fang. “No, I was dead for a while. Marilyn always said I rose after the funeral.”
Rachel looked like a bee had stung her on the butt, but she didn’t say anything. Her breathing picked up, her pulse started to race, and I could smell the sweat. There was something very important about all of this and I had no clue what it was, but I wondered if it had something to do with the curse.
“So you rose on the seventh night and—”
“Day,” I corrected. “It was in the afternoon. Two weeks later.”
J’iliol’lth turned to face me; his eyes glowed a burnt copper color. “By any chance, were you embalmed?”
“I think so,” I said. “Why? Is that important?”
J’iliol’lth smiled again. He was always smiling, frowning, and then smiling again. Maybe it was a hobby. “Embalming a person who is going to rise as a vampire stops the process. They die without rising, but you did not die, and in that gray area, between life and unlife, there is much power to be had. You are a Child of Wrath…a person who rose as a vampire second and as something else first.”
“Horse puckey.” John Paul Courtney chuckled in my head. “He’s pulling the wool over your eyes, boy. Child of Wrath. Huh, sounds like one of those so-called music groups you listen to.”
I should have listened to old J. P., but something about what Jill was saying sounded familiar…I’d heard it before from someone I trusted. Hadn’t Marilyn said something like that?
I smelled mint again as J’iliol’lth continued, “I think it is very likely that you were murdered, Eric.”
“Yeah, I know that,” I told him. “It was Roger. He was screwing Marilyn behind my back.”
“Even better,” Jill crowed. “I think you rose as a revenant, but some unique circumstance caused you to rise as a vampire as well. Sometimes it’s a family curse, or it could have been something as simple as a vampire having fed on you in the ER. It’s very rare and it makes you exceedingly unique. I’ve only heard of it happening once or twice every few millennia.”
Family curse. I knew Jill made a living by capitalizing on things that sounded right, but it was the little bits that weren’t exactly true, the lies of omission, that he used to turn a profit. The thought of being alive again, living in the sunshine forever, made it hard to walk away, even though I still had the feeling a smart man would have done just that.
“What else does it do?” I asked. “I can see why I would want it, but what do you want with this thing…the um…”
“The Stone of Aeternum,” Rachel inserted.
“Right,” I continued, “this Stone of Aeternum, what do you want with it?”
J’iliol’lth pretended to consider it, but he already had an answer planned out. The way he spoke, the subtle motions he made as he crossed the room or answered a question, it all had the feeling of something rehearsed, a script or a speech. He knew what I was going to ask him. I had fallen right into the role he wanted me to play. It wasn’t a feeling I enjoyed.
“It will only work once per century, but it can grant certain desires of the supernatural. It is within the Stone of Aeternum’s capabilities to, under the correct circumstances, elevate a Master vampire into a Vlad or change a normal lycanthrope into an Alpha. Its transmutative properties are substantial,” he said with unfeigned avarice. “If one were to possess such an item, the profit would be equally substantial. One could even raise the dead, and not just the newly dead like a Zaomancer can, but the long dead—if the stars were right and the ritual done properly. But, silly me, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”
He walked away from the television to put a placating hand on my shoulder and I gave him a look that made him wince. Removing the offending hand, he turned away from me. “Get me the Stone of Aeternum and not only can you have Marilyn Robinson’s soul as previously discussed, but I will make you immortal as I have described. You will have enhanced senses, strength, and speed, you will no longer need to sleep, eat, or drink, but will be fully capable of enjoying all three. You can even have children, if you want. You get to retain your soul and you will not gain any hidden weaknesses.”
“And all I have to do is bring you the…ah…”
“Stone of Aeternum,” Rachel provided again.
“Right…” I stared at Rachel and then continued. “I don’t suppose somebody can just buy one?”
“Of course not,” J’iliol’lth answered. “I would have purchased it myself long ago, if such were possible. No, the Stone is something that can only be freely given or taken by force. The current owner might be persuaded to surrender it, but most likely you would be required to take it.
“Even so,” he continued with a dismissive wave of his hands, “the current owner is a vampire and we all know you have no qualms about killing them.”
“Why haven’t you tried to take it by force yourself?”
“Because, Mr. Courtney, I must still function in this city. If I sent a force of demons to assault the Stone’s owner, it would be bad for business, but if I send you…Well, let’s say it would be very simple to claim that I had nothing to do with that. You are an unknown quantity.”
I stood up. “Who is he and where do I find him?”
“His name is Phillipus and he lives at the Highland Towers.”
I nodded. Highland Towers. According to Talbot, that place was a real bitch to get into. I’d have to be creative. But, on the other hand, that was where Tabitha was shacking up with some guy, so I wanted to go there anyway, find out who he was, knock him around.
“One last thing,” I said before Rachel and I left. “Someone had my human ID declared legally dead; you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
The demon shook his head. “Not specifically, but Roger did strike me as the kind of person who would have taken steps to avenge his own death.”
I started toward the door and Jill held out his hand. “The sword, please?”
“Sorry,” I said. “This bad boy’s mine. Magic sword. Magic gun. I’m starting a collection. All I need now is a spear and magic helmet.”
“Fine,” the demon purred. “Take the cube, too.” He picked it up, a casual arrogance in his demeanor as he tossed it to me. I caught it in my off hand. It felt solid enough this time, cold to the touch. “My secretary will even give you a canvas bag in which to transport…everything. But remember this, Eric. I want to work with you. I’ve gone out of my way to be as reasonable as possible. Working with me on this is a win-win scenario.”
I looked at Rachel’s tiny purse and bit back my usual
obnoxious retort. “I’ll take you up on that bag.”
I was so on the ball that I even remembered the sun was out. We headed for home, with me squashed in Rachel’s purse jouncing alongside a canvas bag (with the Lovett Building’s name and logo on the side) containing a glowing purple cube and a magic six-shooter. The sword wouldn’t fit, so she had to carry it separately.
Rachel had a hard time hailing a cab while holding the longsword, but not too hard a time. After all, this is Void City.
17
TABITHA: WINTERRIFIC
A single claw sensuously pricked the skin above my sternum before wending its way down my torso, across my belly, and lower. Talbot’s touch was masterful, scratching the skin without breaking it. It was a wake-up call that I’d enjoyed yesterday. I glared at the clock. Exactly one hour after sundown. What had everyone else been doing in that lost hour of wakefulness? What…no, who had Eric been doing in that hour? It irked me.
“Get off.” I slapped Talbot’s hand away.
He rolled off the edge of the bed. “What?”
“I’m not in the mood,” I said, heading for the shower.
Hi, slut. Where you been? Rachel’s voiced echoed in my head. I twisted the shower knob to hot before staring at myself in the mirror. No reflection. I willed myself to appear in the glass.
He doesn’t need your cold dead cunt anymore.
“Damn it!” I couldn’t concentrate enough to make my image appear.
Talbot poked his head into the bathroom. “You okay?”
“Tell me that I’m beautiful.”
“Why?”
“Just tell me!”
He smirked. “No.”
My fangs and claws extended of their own accord. Talbot’s heartbeat echoed in my ears, but the heat of him was dulled by the shower. “Tell me!” Red light from my eyes cast odd shadows on the wall.
“No,” he repeated.
I slammed the door in his face and stepped into the shower. Too cold. My speed kicked in instinctively as I tried to avoid the water. Each frigid droplet stung as it bounced off my skin, then froze, suspended in midair as the universe slowed down. Sometimes the speed is a blessing and sometimes, like when you’re standing on a wet surface, it’s a curse. My feet went out from under me, sending me backward into the glass shower door.