‘You’re right,’ said Tamar, jumping up. ‘I should be out there, saving people, it’s what I do. You don’t save the world by killing gods or destroying all evil, it can’t be done, and I know that, I always have. You save the world …’
‘One person at a time,’ Denny finished for her.
‘What are you two talking about?’ said Stiles. ‘What about Ran-Kur?’
‘Irrelevant,’ said Tamar. ‘At least to us, we can’t kill him, we don’t have that power. And while we’ve been sitting around here, worrying about him …’
‘Twiddling our thumbs,’ put in Denny.
‘Exactly – while we’ve been doing that, innocent people are dying. Like you said, we can’t just sit here while the bodies pile up in the streets.’
‘I hate to interrupt,’ said Denny, nevertheless doing so. ‘But there are no bodies piling up in the streets, I should know.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Tamar.
‘I mean, they’re not killing, they’re siring new vampires.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Why?’ asked Stiles.
‘Vampires are snobs,’ explained Denny. ‘They’re usually extremely fussy about who they sire. And also they don’t want their numbers to grow too large. Imagine a world with all humans and no animals, or no whisky, just lemonade, and you’ll understand why.’
‘I won’t have to imagine it, if the sun doesn’t come back soon,’ said Stiles.
‘And vampires don’t even have the “cannibalism” option,’ continued Denny.
‘Yuck,’ said Tamar.
‘You know,’ said Denny. ‘For someone who has seen as much death and destruction as you have, caused as much death and destruction as you have for that matter, you certainly are squeamish.’
‘I see your point,’ said Stiles. ‘So, why are they doing it?’
‘Ran-Kur’s orders I assume,’ said Denny. ‘The more vampires he has believing in him, the more powerful he becomes. Gods feed on belief, like all mythical creatures.’
‘So he’s creating an army?’ said Stiles.
‘You could put it that way.’
‘We have to stop him.’
‘No, we have to get out there and start saving lives – killing vampires,’ said Tamar.
‘She’s right,’ said Denny. ‘That’s our job, and I suggest that we start with him.’ He pointed at the bathroom door.
Stiles shrugged. ‘Suits me,’ he said.
‘OK,’ said Tamar. ‘Bring him out.’
Denny and Stiles manhandled Peirce into the living room.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked them. ‘Have you decided to let me go?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Tamar. ‘But we have decided to do something with you.’
‘What?’
‘This,’ said Denny, plunging a stake into Peirce chest.
Peirce pulled it out easily. ‘I thought you might try this sooner or later,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Look at that, you’ve ruined my shirt.’ He laughed at their dumbfounded faces.
‘Must have missed,’ muttered Denny, preparing to strike again.
‘Don’t waste your time,’ said Peirce, holding up a hand. ‘Look.’ He pointed to the wound; it was smack in the centre of his chest, exactly where it should be.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Stiles. ‘Surely you kill a vampire with a stake through the heart, that’s basic folklore, isn’t it?’
‘It’s certainly always worked before,’ agreed Tamar.
Denny could have told them of at least one other occasion when it had not worked, but he held his peace, for now.
‘Did you really think I’d come here, to the enemy stronghold, without taking some precautions?’ sneered Peirce. ‘For all I knew, you would have staked me first and asked questions later.’
‘What do you mean – precautions?’ asked Denny.
‘Well, it couldn’t hurt to tell you, I suppose, since there’s nothing you can do about it,’ said Peirce. ‘If you must know, I’ve had my heart removed; it’s safe in a vault somewhere.’
‘Yuck,’ said Tamar, predictably.
‘Ingenious,’ said Denny. ‘It’s not as if he’s using it,’ he explained to the bewildered looking Stiles. ‘He’s dead; his heart doesn’t pump blood like ours, that’s why they drink it, to replenish the supply.’
Stiles recovered. ‘So, decapitate him,’ he suggested.
‘Won’t work,’ said Denny. ‘The ritual is, you stake it through the heart and then cut its head off and stuff garlic in the mouth. It’s part of the folklore; traditionally the stake through the heart is to hold the corpse in the grave – figuratively speaking. The fact is, with his heart safely stored away, he’s invulnerable.’
‘What about sunlight?’
‘What sunlight?’ Denny gestured to the darkness outside.
‘Oh, right, well fire then.’
‘Nope, when you use fire you have to burn the actual heart, and he’s never going to tell us where it is.’
‘Actually,’ said Peirce. ‘I don’t know where it is, I never asked.’
‘Why don’t all vampires have this done?’ asked Tamar.
‘It’s a very expensive operation,’ said Peirce. ‘Very specialised, to most vampires it’s just not worth it.’
‘Well we can’t just let him go,’ said Stiles. ‘He might claim to be on our side, but he’s still a killer.’ Denny blanched, but Stiles did not notice.
‘We can’t hold him,’ said Tamar. ‘Tying him up was just symbolic, he could escape easily.’
‘Look,’ said Peirce. ‘Why don’t we just put this behind us? I’m not one to hold a grudge. I mean I expected this, but there’s a larger purpose here. I don’t even want to know why you suddenly decided to stake me, but why don’t you just let me go? You can’t stop me anyway, and I’ll try to track down Ran-Kur, and report back.’
‘And when you’ve found him, then what?’ asked Tamar, following Denny’s gaze as he slid his eyes meaningfully towards the mantelpiece.
‘No,’ she said decisively. ‘We’re done with all that – lock him up boys.’
Denny nodded to Stiles and winked at Tamar. They shoved him in a broom cupboard, locked the door and quickly blocked up the space under the door, while Tamar grabbed her old bottle off the mantelpiece and held it up to the keyhole. Fog started pouring through the keyhole, straight into the bottle. After a few minutes, Tamar slid a piece of card over the neck of the bottle and hurriedly stoppered it. ‘Got him,’ she said. ‘Or at least probably most of him, good thinking,’ she added to Denny.
‘Hey, why mess with a winning formula?’ grinned Denny, referring to the occasion when they had shanghaied a homicidal Djinn in much the same way.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That takes care of him – let’s get out there, and do some damage.’
‘There are swarms of them,’ said Stiles. ‘We need an army.’
‘Two superheroes and a copper with a grudge,’ she answered. ‘We are an army.’
* * *
The “Master” steepled his fingers in that disturbing way he had when he was displeased, when he heard of this latest development. ‘Bloody woman,’ he said.
Damn! Damndamndamndamndamn.
* * *
They went out in three hour shifts, with Stiles taking every other shift and sleeping in between. He went out with either Tamar or Denny, and they alternately stayed at home with him. They had not forgotten that the vampires were still after him.
Although Stiles possessed no super-powers, he was holding his own with a surprising repertoire of dirty fight moves, picked up when breaking up bar fights in his early years on the force. When, as he told them, the idea was to walk away with all your extremities intact and to hell with ethics. Any fool who tried to fight fair against a drug pusher with a flick knife is destined to have a short career, due to the fact that the police still have not extended their equal opportunities programme to inclu
de employing the dead. There seemed to be no trick too low that he would not use it to keep an opponent down, even Denny was impressed.
He was glad, he said, to be doing something again. ‘I’ve been driving a desk for too long.’ He said. ‘I’d almost forgotten what this feels like, to be out there getting on with it – feels good. This is what it’s all about.’
Stiles had been loaded up with stakes axes and various incendiary devices to make up for his lack of a magical armoury, but, as he said. ‘You have to catch the buggers first.’ And this was where Stiles excelled, small and wiry, he could run very, very fast. But more than that was a sheer love of the chase, a dogged determination. Where others would have given up after they ran out of breath and their legs felt like blancmange, this only seemed to spur him on. ‘If I feel like this,’ he would gasp. ‘Imagine how he feels. He’ll give up any minute.’
But all this, he was aware, was, for him at least, just a distraction. In his off hours, his brain was working overtime. He was frantic to start the investigation again.
Ran-Kur had sent assassins after him and had caused a whole lot of trouble on the way. Stiles wanted fervently to know why, and he wanted to nail the swine. All this chasing vampires around the streets was just a stop-gap measure as far as he was concerned. A crime had been, and was being, committed. He was not quite sure what it was, well obviously there was attempted murder, and the mass slaughter of innocent people, but those were just the consequences of a far bigger crime, one that he could not quite put his finger on. But he was determined; he would find out what the crime was and, if necessary, give it a name, then bring the perpetrator to justice.
Stiles’s thinking had been conditioned by twenty odd years at Scotland Yard, and he also shared with Tamar, a conviction that everybody was guilty of something.
But Tamar and Denny seemed happier now that they had decided on the course of action they were taking, as if they were relieved of a burden, and the chances of changing their minds was remote. Tamar had said that perhaps the answer would come to them, if they stopped looking. But in twenty-five years of police work, that had never happened once to Stiles. You had to look; it was just how it worked. Answers or criminals did not ever just drop into your lap. Stiles personally had no case on record of a perp walking into his office and saying. ‘It’s a fair cop guv; I’m the man you want.’ (They often did not even say that, when you found them bending over the corpse with a bloody knife in their hand – or even after ten years in prison.)
Plenty of innocent crack-pots did this, but to date never the actual suspect or guilty party.
Stiles was forgetting of course, that he had left normality behind him quite a while ago. The world he now inhabited did not follow the rules that his mind was imposing on it. In other words, he was wrong, the answer was about to drop into their lap.
* * *
Denny was dreaming; he was vaguely aware that he had had this dream before. It seemed important, he tried to concentrate, but it made little sense.
It made even less sense when he awoke and scribbled down a few notes before he forgot it. There had been a talking beast of some kind, with antlers and a crown?
Hank? He wondered. Even with all he had seen, he had never come across talking animals, and there had been a medal – this was very familiar; he knew that he had dreamt this before. Also, there had been a knife – no, a sword, and it dripped with blood – hearts blood. He knew this because of symbolism in the dream, which he could not quite remember, but he was quite certain of it, just as you are certain, in a nightmare that the monster is behind you, even though you cannot see or hear it.
He looked at his notes in confusion, they read thus: -
1, Animal – antlers – stag? – Deer? (Royal)
2, Sword – hearts blood.
3, Medal – courage?
He scratched his head, what the hell did it mean? As premonitions went, and he had no doubt that it was one, it was pretty vague. At least the first one had been absolutely clear. Then he remembered; it had not started that way. The first few times, it had been just as mystifying as this was, it had taken several nights to take shape, but he had hardly slept lately. This was only the second time that this dream had come to him. Maybe he needed to sleep more, but if this was a message, then he needed to try to figure it out. He had a nasty feeling that he should have been having this dream for a week or more, and should have figured it out by now. He felt slightly guilty that he had not. He manifested a cup of coffee and sat at his computer with the notes in front of him.
Tamar appeared behind him. ‘Hi, what’s up?’
‘Can you just – leave me alone for a while? I need to try to work something out. – Actually no, wait.’ He handed her the notes. ‘Mean anything to you?’
She glanced at the notes. ‘No, what does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. Never mind, I’ll figure it out.’
She looked curiously at him and back at the paper. ‘More dreams?’
‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘You made notes like this about the first one.’
‘Did I? I’d forgotten. Actually, could you grab me some books? Um, ‘Allegorical Animals’ and, um – ‘Mystical Weapons’, there might be something in there.’
‘Okay.’ She fetched the books. ‘What’s this?’ she brushed his shoulders, and a silvery powder came off on her hands. ‘Dream dust,’ she said. ‘Someone’s been giving you these dreams.’
‘That’s very – helpful of them. Although, it might be more helpful if they just sent an e mail.’
‘That’s magic folk for you; they delight in the vague and mysterious. Sure you don’t want any help?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Okay, then, I’ll see you later.’ She went back out, leaving Stiles to sleep.
When she arrived back, three hours later, Denny still had not got anywhere, and it was time for his shift on the street. Tamar suggested that perhaps he should carry on his research. But he said that he could do with a break, to clear his head and stretch his legs. Stiles slept on.
Denny found himself going over the dream as he walked, going over each point until it no longer made any kind of sense at all, like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning. It was frustrating the hell out of him, especially as he knew perfectly well that, as Tamar always said, the answer, when it came, would be obvious. He took out his frustration on a bunch of vampires and decided to go home and get some sleep.
Denny dreamed. The answer was there, right on the edge of his brain, tantalising him. The earlier research he had done was floating on the surface of his unconscious mind, connecting the dream images together. The answer was there, just out of reach.
He woke with a start and leapt up to the bookshelf.
‘Eureka?’ asked Tamar.
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘I just need to check in “Mystical Animals”.’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Stiles, appearing, bleary eyed.
‘Shhh,’ said Tamar. There was a long silence, except for the swishing of pages.
‘Aha,’ said Denny, triumphantly.
‘What?’ they both said, excitedly. ‘What is it?’
‘I have found a way to kill gods,’ said Denny, dramatically. This was greeted with a stunned silence.
‘You’re kidding!’ said Stiles, eventually.
‘H – how?’ Tamar had found her voice.
‘Denny pushed to the book toward them. ‘The Purple Hart!’ he said, ‘a mythical deer whose blood is the only substance that can kill a god.’
‘Surely that’s the Golden Hind?’ said Stiles after a moment’s thought.
Tamar laughed. ‘That was Homer for you,’ she said. ‘He used to do that a lot – change the names to protect the innocent. You know what Hercules was really called? It was …’
‘I thought Homer was before even your time?’ interrupted Denny.
‘Oh he was, but I’ve heard all about him, from people who knew him, you kno
w.’
‘Are you saying that this thing, whatever it’s called, is real?’ asked Stiles, feeling that they were getting off the point.
‘It must be,’ said Tamar, that’s why he was having the dream, it was a message.’
‘So how come, if you can kill a god this way, you didn’t find this before?’
‘I didn’t know what I was looking for,’ said Denny.
Tamar was reading the text. ‘This was thousands of years ago,’ she said. ‘How are we supposed to find one now.’
‘Him,’ corrected Denny. ‘There’s only one.’
‘Okay, how are we supposed to find him?’
Denny shrugged. ‘A summoning maybe? What does it say?’
‘It says – go to page ninety-seven – typical!’
Page ninety-seven turned out to be an index. Denny found the heading – ‘Questing for mythical beasts’.
When Tamar heard this, she groaned. ‘Not another quest.’
Stiles looked from one to the other, perplexed at their downcast faces. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’
Part Two: The Quest
~ Chapter Twenty ~
First, they had to find a witch.
‘No problem,’ said Tamar, ‘we’ve already found one.’
‘Not just any old witch,’ said Denny. ‘According to this, we have to find “The old Witch of the Caves”, whoever she is.’
‘Where do we find her?’ asked Stiles.
‘It doesn’t say,’ said Denny. ‘It’s written as if the reader should know.’
‘Well,’ said Tamar. ‘Most of these old books were written by witches, for witches. So a witch ought to know.’
‘Okay, okay, you win,’ said Denny. ‘You go and ask her. Now, we have to decide who is going on this quest.’
‘Aren’t we all going?’ asked Stiles.
‘No,’ said Tamar. ‘I’m going on my own – someone has to stay here and carry on the fight.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ argued Denny. ‘If the last quest we were on is any guide, you’ll get into trouble on your own. Trouble that you might not be able to get out of.’
Reality Bites Page 12