I half expected us to drive to some headquarters, the sort of building we’d occupied during the war: an empty office building; a vacant warehouse.
Instead, Short and Tall parked, illegally, I was sure of it, in front of a sidewalk café. One of them walked back to tell me to just part, my car would be safe there.
“It’s not a parking space,” I told him.
“It’s alright,” he said, in a tone that implied I was daft for even worrying. “You’ll be safe here. No one would ticket you.”
I got out of the car, my overnight bag over one shoulder.
And felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Joseph Heron, good old Joe, was getting up from a small table not ten steps from me.
***
He looked exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him, which was a stupid thing for me to think since of course vampires don’t change, not once they’ve been turned. Early forties, I’d guess, with his blond hair hiding any suspicion of white threads in the mix and the very same wrinkles in his unnaturally pale but still sun tanned skin. I wondered if he used tanning mixes or if the tan, like his age, had frozen when he’d been turned.
His hand was extended and he smiled at me, and his blue eyes glinted with remembered friendship, “Mary,” he said. “So good of you to come and help us.”
I didn’t take his hand, and after a while he let it fall. Why didn’t I take his hand? I don’t know. I don’t know if it was a fear of touching him or of touching him and finding him dead cold, vampire cold. From his expression, though, he thought I’d refused to touch him because I despised him. There was a look of resignation to him and, beneath it, a look of amusement.
The amusement galled me. “I’m doing it for Michael,” I said.
He sat back down at his table, and I pulled back the chair and sat across from him. Standing would only let him know how nervous he made me. The two goons stood on either side of us, and it made me wonder if there were there as bodyguards. Guarding from whom? Were they afraid I’d leap across the table and throttle Joseph with my bare hands? Fat good that would do me, since it took a wooden stake – or a wooden bullet – through the heart to kill a vampire. Or was it to protect us from the crowd?
The crowd, sitting at other tables didn’t even seem aware we were there. They dressed well and were all – or mostly – immortals, judging from their smell, which mingled oddly with the smell of coffee, which was, at least, a relief. They weren’t drinking blood in those diminutive espresso cups.
A waiter minced over and Joseph said, “Have an espresso, Mary, they’re good here.” And to my cross-eyed look of disbelief. “Yeah, we can drink them. We can drink most clear liquids. Have some espresso.”
I didn’t say anything, but little cups of espresso were set before us moments later, and I thought that the ceremony of sweetening it and drinking it would give me something to do with my hands and a way to avoid looking up at Joseph while I did it. “I’m doing this for Michael,” I repeated, tearing the sugar packet open and pouring sugar into the coffee. “I must know what you intend to do with him when you capture him.”
Joseph shrugged. That part of his body I could see rose and fell indicating the movement of the shoulders up and down. “The penalty for killing an Immortal is death. He’s killed at least three that we can prove, and I suspect ten more we can’t prove, and maybe more that we haven’t discovered yet.”
“So you intend to kill him?” I said.
“He’s my kid brother,” he said, his voice uncomfortable and stiff. It was a tone of voice I knew well, used when he was trying to tell me I must not pry closer into the background of a mission and I absolutely must not pry into his actions. He’d had a similar look when I’d last talked to him as a human. When he’d planned to head out to that lone mission that got him turned. Infiltrate the immortals. How else to do it, but by becoming one? “I will not hand him over to the howling mob of immortals who want his blood.” He gave a rueful smile. “Literally. Michael... I’ll do what I can for Michael.”
“The army will let you do that?” I asked, looking up. “They’ll let you negotiate a separate deal for your brother?”
“The army?” he looked momentarily shocked, then shook his head. “Mary, I’m not in the army. There is no army, at least not in the states, not since the truce. I’m a Captain of police.”
“Oh,” I said.
“In fact,” he said. “We’ve been trying to organize a division of humans, working in our force, to investigate crimes against humans and to protect the rights of humans.”
“I didn’t know humans had rights.”
“They have the right not to be drained. They have the right not to be turned.” His answers fired back, whip-sharp and stinging like lashes, but then he took a deep breath – odd I’d killed so many of them and until this moment I didn’t know vampires could breathe. Of course they didn’t need to breathe. We knew that much. In the early days we’d found out that they could remain alive in an hermetically sealed chamber, and they could remain alive underwater. Fire would kill them, as would wood through the heart or beheading, but that was it. Perhaps breathing was a pastime like drinking coffee, and, from the clinking of glasses nearby, wine.
“We do need someone to head that department, someone we’ll trust to bring in other humans, to convince them to work with us to protect the population at large, Mary. Think about it. You don’t have to answer now.”
Which was good, as I didn’t want to answer at all. I didn’t want to work surrounded by and commanded by vampires. And I didn’t want to see Joseph Heron more than I needed to. When he looked at me like that, it was hard to remember he was one of them, and I swear that he didn’t smell at all like the other immortals, but as he had always smelled – like fresh clay with a hint of pepper.
***
There was an office, after all, though it was in the bottom floor of one of the trendy condo buildings. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder what had happened to the mortgages on those buildings? What did the vampire take over mean for the economy? In my day the economy had been in crisis since no vampire would plant and till and many of the farmers who’d been turned had walked off the farms leaving behind the production of food they no longer needed. Was that still true? I had got the impression from the feed store that everyone was better fed now and that some of the horrible tension that had kept everyone struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table had eased.
Did this mean that they paid mortgages? That vampires stooped to participating in the economy?
At least Heron paid for the coffee as we headed out. In his office, seated behind a vast expanse of glass desk, he laid out information on Michael’s crimes. He’d killed – they were sure of it, though they could only prove three – ten vampires.
“Almost all of them were personally known to him. Five were in the black sheep with us,” he said. “And the rest were friends I’d introduced to him since.”
“Michael stayed nearby?” I asked. “He remained friends with you after.... after your turning?”
Joseph smiled, ruefully. “Not everyone is as pure of mind as you, Mary. Not everyone as dedicated to the idea that all vampires are incontrovertible evil.”
I bit my lip. For someone dedicated to that idea, I’d managed to maneuver myself into a room full of them. I intended to help Michael, I told myself.
“We stayed friends,” he said. “We stayed close by. I helped him while I could. When I could.” He quirked his mouth. “I don’t think he adapted well to civilian life.” He shuffled some papers. “He worked, for a while, at a wine shop downtown, but when Ria was killed, he disappeared from his job and from his apartment.”
“Ria was killed?”
“She was the third of those we can prove,” he said, and shuffled the reports to put uppermost one of a beautiful dark haired woman, shot through the heart, blood everywhere.
“But you said those were vamp– Immortals.”
He didn’t say
anything and I realized he’d turned is wife. Of course, he’d turned his wife. Most couples did that. Who wanted to be separated from the love of their life for eternity? And why did I feel so bitter? It was none of my business what he’d done. “I thought it was against the law to turn humans?”
“There were three months before the truce,” he said. “There was no law.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, Michael left his lodging and disappeared.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to go looking for him.”
“No. We know where he is. I’ll give you the address. Tomorrow morning you can visit him, talk to him, convince him to surrender. Or at least convince him to see me. If he doesn’t, I’ll no longer be able to protect him. I won’t be able to help him.”
“Have you tried?” I said. My voice cracked. “You have his location. Surely you could call him.”
“I tried at another address,” he said. “He moved. You must talk to him for me. You must get him to see me. You must–”
His voice sounded concerned, truthful. How could I refuse his attempt to help the person he called my kid brother though Michael, like myself, had been catching up with Joseph in years and though Michael had killed Ria.
At least Michael was human.
***
Michael didn’t look human. He looked more like the vampires of legend than the clean cut, sleek immortals I’d consorted with in the last few days. By the rays of the morning sun, he looked ill awakened, gaunt, his face too pale, his eyes consumed by some secret grief.
“Mary,” he said, and the voice had both a tone of shock and a tone of disappointment as though, perhaps, he thought I’d not aged well.
“Yes,” I said.
He frowned at me. “Joe sent you.”
“Yes.”
He frowned again, and hesitated. I was dressed in my hunting clothes, in the crisp Colorado morning, and had my weekend bag slung across my shoulders. “I can still come in on my own,” I said. “I haven’t been turned.”
He grinned, a pale grin. “I knew you hadn’t,” he said. “My brother is a stickler for the rules and that law of theirs.” He stepped back, though, without inviting me, as though making sure I could still step into houses I hadn’t been invited into, like all humans could.
I walked into a small studio apartment, minimally furnished with a sofa and a table. From the blanket and pillow, it was obvious he’d been sleeping on the sofa.
“Do you want anything?” he asked.
“Only if you’re having it.”
“Depends,” he said. “You were with them all night, weren’t you? It’s amazing that they never seem to realize we need to eat.”
“I had dinner at home last night,” I said. “And it’s barely time for breakfast. I’ll be okay.”
“Nah, let me make you breakfast.” He walked ahead of me to the small kitchenette, his clothes so big on his body that they seemed to flow and bend with independent movements all their own.
I sat at the counter while he opened an almost empty fridge and took out bread and eggs and milk and set about making scrambled eggs. “Your home... we never found out where you’d gone.”
“It’s a farm, right in the mountains,” I said. “Or not a farm, just a few acres, but enough to garden for myself and to sell a bit extra for stuff I can’t grow. And I keep chickens.”
He looked over his shoulder at me, startled, as if he hadn’t expected that. “You’ve chucked it all,” he said.
“Well enough,” I said. “I took my saved pay and bought the place. It’s peaceful. I figure even if there’s a future in which we’re all vampires, it will take them a while to get to me.”
I hesitated while he set a plate of scrambled eggs with toast and a cup of coffee in front of me. I noticed that for himself he took only plain toast. “You stayed,” I said, plunging my fork into the eggs. “You stayed friends with Joe.” It was no point at all trying not to call him by the nickname we’d used when we all fought together. It would only alarm Michael.
“Yes.” Shrug. “He’s my brother, isn’t he?”
“And Ria?” I took another bite of the eggs. For all I knew he’d spiced them with arsenic, but they tasted well enough, and we all had to go sometime.
He tensed momentarily but then the answer came, with a shrug, “Yeah. And Ria.”
I started to wonder if the immortals for all their vaunted skill at detection had the wrong man. This didn’t seem like an embittered vampire hunter.
“Michael, what is with the vampire hunting? Joe seems to think you’re picking them out one by one while avoiding him.”
He stopped mid-bite on his toast, then chewed deliberately, swallowed and said, “I don’t think the truce was a good idea. I love Joe... or I loved Joe, the human Joe. He was my brother, you know? I ... I thought that being turned wouldn’t change him that much, but ... But it has. You know he had that legalistic turn of mind, but he always managed to find a way to do the right thing, even if it was against the law? Well, now it’s all law. I don’t think he cares for anyone. I don’t think any of them does. I think it’s all just laws and the laws are twisted to give them an advantage. I think it’s like... like a truce between predator and livestock. They just want to ... to use us, to enslave us as producers of blood.”
This accorded so much with my inner reasoning that I must have looked at him for a hint I’d told him all this before. He smiled. “That’s what you thought, isn’t it? It’s why you left?” His blue eyes, so much like his brother’s, were haunted.
“Yes,” I said. “Even then I could see we were headed for a truce.” Besides the fact that I couldn’t tolerate the thought Joe had been turned and that not everything I could do or dream of doing could make him a human again. “And I knew it wasn’t right. It was either leave and stay right away from all of them, or...” I took a deep breath. “Take a rifle and start reducing their numbers, to equalize things.”
He laughed. “Exactly the conclusion I came to, at last.”
“But wouldn’t you want to kill Joe? He says you move when he tries to talk to you. He says you won’t see him.”
Michael laughed, weakly. “When it comes right down to it, courage fails me. I look up at him and I remember my big brother. I know he’s not quite the same. This Joe is harder edged, merciless. He’s one of them. But there’s still the memory of my brother there.”
“Did I tell you about the summer I graduated from High School? Joe was already leading the black sheep, but he took a month off and came home. I had this ratty van my friends and I had bought, we wanted to tour the country in it after the war was over...” He paused and swallowed and for a moment I could see a much younger Michael and his dreams of unfettered travel. I also knew without his telling me that his friends had died. Or been turned. That his friends weren’t available to tour the country when the truce came. “Joe spent that month with me, in dad’s garage, helping me make that van work. And by the time he left, it purred like a kitten.”
“Yeah,” I said, because one of the other of the brothers’ Heron had told me that story before. “I even understand your point. But Joe wants to talk to you. They’ve figured it out, you know. Three murders of immortals they can prove.” I read the objection in his eyes before he opened his mouth. “Yes, we used to kill them by the hundred, but now they’re part of a civil society and the law says we can’t kill them. You’ve committed murder. And they will kill you for it. But Joe thinks he can get you out of it. If you talk to him.”
Michael had finished his toast and his coffee, and rolled his empty coffee cup between his hands. “I don’t ... I don’t know which is best,” he said. “To go out in a blaze of glory, killing as many of the bastards as I can or...”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think that’s an option. I think they’ve been tracking you close and only your brother has held them back. If you don’t surrender to him, I think their law will come into effect. I don’t know what they do, but Joe seemed
to think it was much worse than just plain killing you. I mean, I got that feeling.”
He nodded. “Probably, but...”
Suddenly his face contorted and he bent in two. He ran out of the kitchenette, past me, to the bathroom where bent over the toilet. It took me a moment to realize he was vomiting, a while longer to go in and put him hand on his forehead and one hand over his shoulders while his paroxysms shook him as he threw up all the toast and coffee. He felt cold and clammy.
When the spasms stopped, he cleared his throat. “Thank you.” He flushed the toilet, extricated himself from my support, and went to the tiny sink, started brushing his teeth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”
“You’ve been turned,” I said. “You’re one of them. That’s why you kill them.”
He laughed and almost choked on toothpaste, then spit it out on the sink and rinsed his mouth. “No. The opposite. I am dying, Mary. Inoperable cancer of the esophagus and stomach. Not that it would be operated on anyway. There aren’t that many resources... Doctors who were turned left forever, and besides ...” He shrugged again. “It isn’t like that. But I’m dying. Three months. Maybe six. All I can do now is sort of hold on, hold on...” He sighed deeply and put an arm over my shoulder and lead me to the sofa. “I didn’t want you to know. I don’t... I’m not as strong as you are. When I became sick, when I knew I was dying, all I could think was that my brother was going to live forever. It was bad enough to age and know he didn’t, but ... I wanted to be turned. I asked Joe. He said no. I asked all our friends...” He shrugged elaborately. “None of them would do it. So I ... shot them. I don’t want to die like this Mary. They must turn me or kill me. I’d rather they turn me, but death would be preferable to this, but their own law forbids their just killing me... I shot them. I thought Joe would have to do something then.”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 12