by Jim C. Hines
I retreated a step as she opened the back door of the sedan. Three more vampires emerged. Two guards gripped the arms of the third, a handcuffed figure with a heavy blanket cloaking his head and upper body.
One guard, a woman built like a snowplow, had a set of sharpened wooden stakes strapped to her thigh. Her choice of weapon meant Nicholas was one of the vampires who could be killed by wooden stakes, and in all likelihood, she wasn’t. The second guard was smaller, almost classically nerdy, save for the semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder. His ears were slightly pointed, and the lumpy bone structure of his face made his condition obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. His tortoiseshell glasses perched on a lump at the bridge of his nose.
Deb nodded to both in turn. “Sarah and Rook have the pleasure of being Nicholas’ keepers today.”
Either of them could probably kill me between one heartbeat and the next, but it was Nicholas who made me want to get back in Nidhi’s car and put a few hundred miles between us. Beneath the hood of his blanket, he made Deb look positively healthy. Yellow-and-purple blotches covered his white skin like bruises. His lips made me think of bloated purple leeches, and his limp brown hair hung past his eyes like greasy seaweed.
Smudge was a tiny furnace in his cage, glowing like an eight-legged coal in a barbeque. I saw Lena’s grip tighten around her bokken. A low growl emerged from Jeff’s throat. I don’t know if he was even aware of it.
Blood oozed from cracks in Nicolas’ lips as he smiled, revealing incongruously white teeth, clean and straight and perfect. I got the sense that he not only knew exactly how he was making the rest of us feel, he was enjoying it.
“This is the ghost-talker?” I asked.
“Strongest one in the Midwest,” Deb confirmed. “They’ve got a prettier one down in Dallas, but you said you were in a hurry.”
Nicholas stepped toward me, dragging his guards like a dog straining at the leash. Up close, his breath smelled of rotted meat. A silver chain was locked around his neck like a collar, and a smoldering wooden cross hung over his flannel shirt. Both guards clutched him by the arms, their fingers digging deeply enough to make a mortal man scream in pain.
I had been hoping for a nice Sanguinarius Meadus from the Vampire Academy novels. I had no idea what species Nicholas was. Possibly an experiment, fed and transfused with blood from other species, mutated into a tool and a weapon.
Over the centuries, vampires had deliberately worked to preserve as many subspecies as possible. Even the most monstrous and dangerous were kept around, locked away from “civilized” vampire society on the off chance their powers might one day be needed. I wondered how long it had been since Nicholas had seen the sun, or been given any kind of freedom.
“You think we should head inside before someone calls the cops?” Lena suggested.
“Nobody will call the police,” said the woman with the stakes, her voice low and dreamlike. “The neighbors will pay no attention, and the family inside is sleeping.”
“How long have you held them in a trance?” asked Nidhi. “Did you check to make sure they were okay?”
Sarah’s face crinkled in confusion.
“They should be fine,” I said softly. “I read that research paper, too. ‘In the first twenty-four hours, side effects of magically-induced sleep were rare. Of the observed effects, the most common was bedwetting.’ Better that the family has to do an extra load of laundry than someone starts taking potshots at us for breaking and entering.”
“When did you read that?” Nidhi asked.
“At dinner last week. You were making enchiladas. You had the papers on your coffee table.” I gave her a halfhearted shrug. The study had been done four years ago by a pair of Porter researchers, a continuation of a project started in Hungary. “I see words, I read them.”
“Then you know one person in that study ended up in a coma for a week.”
“And the longer we argue about this, the longer those people stay asleep.” Deb pulled a tin from her back pocket, popped the lid, and snatched a live snail from inside. She crunched it down, shell and all. When she noticed me staring, she extended the tin and grinned. “Help yourself.”
I grimaced, and my stomach threatened to evict my lunch. Deb just laughed and shoved the snails back into her pocket.
She had been a friend once. I wasn’t sure what we were now. Her laugh was sharper, honed by bitterness and cruelty. The last time she was at my house, she tried to kill me with a Tommy gun, but she had the decency to feel bad about it afterward.
“Do you miss it?” I asked as we walked up the driveway. “Being human?”
She sighed, knowing exactly what I wasn’t asking. Do you miss the magic? “As long as I stay fed, I feel stronger and healthier than I ever have. Don’t let the skin condition fool you. And there are plenty of other advantages.” She cocked her head and gave me an appraising stare. “You might even appreciate the lifestyle.”
Give up magic and start a lifelong diet that would make a Klingon puke? “I don’t think so.”
She smiled slightly. “Isaac, do you remember the moment you first realized you were mortal? That no matter what happened, you would never live long enough to read every book you wanted to read? That you’d die having accomplished only a fraction of your goals?”
I had been eighteen and fresh out of high school. Ray Walker had taken me to New York to meet with a Porter who worked for one of the big publishers. It was the first time I truly understood just how many books a single publisher put out every year.
I had known intellectually that nobody could ever hope to read or learn everything, but that was the moment I did the math and started to understand how many books there were in the world, and how many more were being written every day. For every book I explored, there were literally hundreds I would never have the chance to know. Likewise, for each bit of magic I mastered, an infinite number of possibilities went unexplored.
“What would you give for an extra century?” Deb asked, giving me a knowing look. “Time to read and learn twice as much as you could in this life?”
Trade my magic for greater knowledge. “Is that how they convinced you to let them turn you?”
“Let’s just say their form of persuasion was more aggressive than mine.” She chuckled bitterly and climbed the concrete steps to the front door. A wrought-iron railing bordered the small porch, and a sunflower-decorated sign welcomed us to the Sanchez home. Deb tried the doorknob, which was locked. She didn’t appear to exert any effort, but the doorframe suddenly splintered inward. “There are other benefits, too.”
The house smelled like dog fur and old Play-Doh. I stepped cautiously onto the brown plush carpet of a cramped family room. A thirty-something Hispanic man was asleep on the couch. A three-legged black Lab sprawled on the floor in front of him. On the TV, two New York cops interrogated a drug addict. A birdcage hung by the window. Inside, a blue-and-white parakeet lay with his head in his seed dish.
It was creepy.
Nicholas doffed his blanket and strode through the room, pulling the rest of us in his wake. He moved so smoothly he appeared to float over the floor. He stopped abruptly, reaching out to touch a patch of wall on the arched entryway that connected the family room to the kitchen. “Victor Harrison,” he murmured, as if to himself. “He was afraid.”
I bit back an unexpected surge of anger. Victor had been afraid because a gang of vampires had broken into his home to kill him. Fresh paint and new carpeting hid the signs of violence, but they couldn’t erase what had happened here. I wondered how much the Sanchez family knew about the former owner. “Can you talk to him?”
“Given time,” Nicholas said lazily.
On another day, I would have been fascinated to study a ghost-talker’s magic up close. Some of the bitterest feuds among Porter researchers revolved around the matter of ghosts. There was no question that, in certain cases, something lingered on after death…but was it truly the spirit of the departed?
&nbs
p; One school of thought argued that ghosts were nothing but memories given form by survivors. Living humans created ghosts through the mourning process, much as readers provided the belief libriomancers used for our magic. That theory had been mostly debunked, as there were documented cases of ghosts providing information the survivors shouldn’t have known.
Others believed that people with magical powers of their own could leave behind an “impression” of themselves, a kind of magical shadow. Unfortunately, the research had never found any statistically significant correlation between reports of ghosts and magical ability.
And then there was the theory that so-called mediums actually used a form of temporal projection, mentally reaching backward through time to read the minds of the deceased before they died. Given what I had seen and done yesterday in the woods, this line of thought held possibilities.
“How much time?” I asked.
Nicholas waved a hand. His skin reminded me of mildew-damaged paper.
Jeff’s upper lip curled back in distaste. “This place smells like blood, bleach, dog piss, and too many damn people.”
“Do any of those people smell like the man from the woods?” Nidhi asked. “If Victor left something behind, anyone from this family might have found it.”
“I can’t say for sure in this form.” From the front pocket of his jeans, Jeff tugged out a worn leather pouch. He picked at the knotted cord, then peeled back the pouch to reveal an object wrapped in black velvet. “Hold this.”
It was heavy and oblong, solid as stone beneath the wrap. I started to peek beneath the layers.
“Not yet, dammit.” Jeff finished unbuttoning his shirt and tossed it onto the floor. He kicked off his shoes, then unbuckled his belt. “The youngsters think it’s cool to keep their clothes on for the change, to burst through the seams like they do in the movies. The shredded shirt and jeans look is always in style, but then they figure out that not only are their parents going to make them pay for a new wardrobe, but shapeshifting in your clothes hurts. You ever tried to rip a pair of jeans with your bare hands? I’ve seen kids howling in pain, stuck between forms and desperately chewing at their own crotch, trying to tear out a stuck zipper.”
Age-spotted skin and tufts of white hair couldn’t conceal the lean strength in his chest and arms. And legs, for that matter. He kicked his shoes and jeans aside and dropped to all fours. Blue boxer shorts followed next.
“You brought me a werewolf strip show?” Deb smirked. “But I didn’t get you anything.”
“Now, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Jeff.
I tugged the wrappings loose. Silver light shone from between the layers. I slid the rest free to reveal a long, gleaming crystal attached to a loop of black leather. “Jeff, is this what I think it is?”
“Yah.” Black fur poked through Jeff’s skin. The sound of popping bones and tearing muscle made me wince. His next words were low and gravelly. “Kristen Britain, I think.”
“Green Rider, or one of the sequels. Dammit, Jeff, do you know how much trouble you could get in for this?” I was holding a moonstone. A muna’riel, to be precise. Britain’s Eletians, essentially an elven race, collected the light of the silver moon in these stones. The purity of the muna’riel made it an exceptional lantern, and the light tended to be off-putting to evil, which might explain why Nicholas was scowling at me. “I thought these things only worked for Eletians. Though I suppose if you pulled it from a scene in which it was already lit, you might be able to lock it into that state…”
“Don’t ask me. I never read the book.”
I could barely understand his words anymore. I didn’t ask him which libriomancer had reached into Britain’s books to create the stone, nor what Jeff had paid for it. The Porters kept a close eye on black-market magic, but they couldn’t catch everything.
Jeff snatched the crystal from me and looped it over his head. His fingers were curled and knotted. He was panting hard. Pointed teeth dug into his lip. He grabbed his hand and bent the fingers back with a grunt of pain. The knuckles cracked so loudly I thought he had broken his bones, and he gasped. He did the same to the other hand. His fingers finally shrank into furred, clawed toes.
“Damned arthritis.” Whatever else he might have said was lost as he finished his transformation into a lean, black-furred wolf. He lowered his gray-dusted muzzle to the floor and sniffed. His lips peeled back in a low growl.
“Oh, cool,” I said.
“What is it?” asked Lena.
“I can understand him.” Jeff wasn’t speaking a true language, but the fish in my head could pick up the thoughts behind his vocalizations. “He doesn’t think the family was involved, but whoever killed those wendigos was here. The scent is too faint for it to be someone who lived here.”
Jeff padded into the kitchen. Dirty dishes and pans filled the sink. Others were stacked in a wire rack to one side. A toddler and his mother slept at a round table, a half-eaten jar of applesauce between them. The toddler lay with his head on the tray, black hair full of food. Nidhi stroked the hair back from his face and used a napkin to wipe a chunk of applesauce from the side of his nose.
“One of ours died here,” Nicholas said, brushing his fingertips over the edge of the sink. He breathed deeply, like he was sniffing a fine wine. “She cried out in pain and anger.”
“Anyone else find this guy creepy as hell?” Lena asked in a low voice.
Nidhi, Deb, and I raised our hands. I glanced at Nicholas’ guards. With a shrug, Sarah raised her hand as well.
I had read the reports of Victor’s murder. He hadn’t died without a fight. His home was well-protected, and his tricks had taken several of his would-be killers with him. A long footnote on page three had proposed several explanations for the pair of fangs found in the garbage disposal, and recommended destroying the disposal altogether rather than attempting to study its magic. I swallowed and turned away. “We need to talk to him.”
“Patience, Isaac.” Nicholas closed his eyes and inhaled. His smile grew. “The instinct to survive is so strong. Stronger than love. Stronger than fear. Threaten a man’s life, and you push him to truly live.”
“That’s why you agreed to do this, isn’t it?” Nidhi asked. “To remember what life feels like. To touch what you lost.”
The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and for a moment his smile flickered. The amusement snapped back into place an instant later, along with a dismissive sneer. “You expect me to mourn my lost humanity? To weep for the forgotten days when I scurried about as one of you, an insect scavenging in the dirt?”
Deb cleared her throat. “Dr. Shah, please don’t play mind games with the sociopathic ghost-talker.”
“Victor fought well,” Nicholas said. “But he soon realized there were too many for him to defeat. That understanding broke his will. It marked the beginning of his death.”
“We didn’t bring you here to give you a peep show into Victor’s last moments,” I said tightly.
“No, you brought me because you need my help.” Nicholas turned. “There are too many dead. I have to find the moment the life left his body. Only then will he speak to me.” He scowled and crossed through the family room, then climbed the steps to the second floor. A narrow hallway separated two bedrooms on the left from the stairs and bathroom on the right. The right side of Nicholas’ face twitched as he looked about, his eyes tightening as if he could see through the walls. A moment later, he relaxed. “Ah, yes. Victor retreated to his workshop.”
Nicholas stepped down the hall and opened a door into a pink-painted bedroom. A rainbow-colored ceiling fan spun lazily overhead.
“Watch your step,” said Lena.
A young girl had stripped the blankets and pillows from her bed, turning them into a makeshift fort. She lay sleeping, a yellow pony clutched in one hand. From the array of toys spread through the room, it looked like the Jedi and the My Little Ponies had been fighting an army of Barbies and LEGO figures.
“Victor kills
two more vampires here,” said Nicholas. “Metal creatures bore through the heart of the first, reducing him to ash, but Victor is injured. The life and will drain from his body with every step. Another vampire follows him into this room.” Nicholas stepped to the side, as if clearing a path for the phantom assailant. “Victor snaps his fingers, and the overhead light flickers. The vampire’s skin begins to sizzle.”
“Ultraviolet bulbs,” I guessed. They would have burned many species of vampire as effectively as sunlight. “Tell me about the metal creatures. How was Victor controlling them? Where did they come from, and how many were there?”
Nicholas ignored me. “Another enters through the window. His skin sparkles in the light. He smashes Victor into the wall. Pain and confusion flood Victor’s senses. He is angry. Frightened. He isn’t ready for death. There’s so much yet to do.”
“That sounds like Victor,” Nidhi said quietly.
Nicholas whirled. “Be silent!”
Nidhi jumped. Both guards moved in, and Jeff’s hackles rose, but I didn’t think Nicholas was talking to us. His attention was elsewhere, and he sounded genuinely angry.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Death attracts death. The ghosts are pulled to this place. They clamor like children.”
I looked to Deb, hoping she would know whether this was normal behavior or a sign that our ghost-talker was about to snap. She spread her hands and shrugged.
“Victor’s thoughts tunnel inward.” Nicholas’ words grew louder. “Why him? Why now? He doesn’t want to die alone.”
“Enough ghouling.” Deb swatted him on the back of the head like he was a misbehaving puppy. “Can you talk to the dead guy or not?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said grudgingly.
“Ask him about the insects,” I said.
Nicholas mumbled to himself, repeating the questions in another tongue. An old form of French, if I wasn’t mistaken. “He reverse-engineered one of Gutenberg’s automatons.”
Deb was the first to recover her voice. “He did what?”
“It’s all about miniaturization and user interface these days,” Nicholas said. The intonation was Victor’s. It was spooky. “Microscopic spells laser-etched onto the inner workings, telepathic interface, and as much memory and storage as I could give them.”