by Jon F. Merz
When I went through Fixer Training, my instructors had hammered home the importance of not sticking out. It’s just another fact of our society. We’ve got a whole fifth column of sorts to make sure things flow smoothly for us. Vampires work in every arm of the government, able to obtain social security cards, picture identifications, hell we even pay taxes. I imagine that would really make old Bram Stoker jump into an epileptic seizure if he knew how easily we melded with human society.
After all, it’s our survival at stake, so why wouldn’t we?
One of the other things that I learned during training was the importance of continued discipline in training myself. I had to maintain a degree of readiness and strength that would aid me in my job. If I failed to ever be able to carry out my responsibilities, it would most likely result in my own death.
Therefore, I kept myself in superb condition.
That meant a lot of exercise. And martial arts.
You probably think it’s hysterically funny for a vampire to need martial arts. Well, let me tell you something: when you’re trying to take out a nut job like Cosgrove, you’ll want all the advantage you can get. Especially since the nut jobs frequently are as adept as Fixers.
So, in this case, I chose to borrow from the humans and study martial arts. No, not those pitiful sport-oriented arts where you see folks sweeping the floor with their hair as they do insanely stupid high kicks that expose their groin to attack. No, I needed something developed for combat. Something designed to impart as much damage on an opponent with minimal effort. Something natural.
So I chose ninjutsu.
Again, you’re probably shaking your head at the thought of a vampire cloaked out like a Hollywood ninja in a black mask and sword strapped across my back.
Not so.
This was the real deal. The ninjutsu I studied was authentic stuff handed down for almost a thousand years. Hell, it was older than I was. It actually comforted me in some small way to know I was dwarfed by it in terms of age.
I’d been studying for ten years now and had a second degree black belt. The school I attended was owned by a man whom I respected infinitely. He put his heart and soul into learning the art as well as he could. He passed everything on to his students and made sure we all knew how to protect ourselves. He was definitely not into churning out black belts like a copy machine. People in this school knew how to protect themselves.
Still, I always enjoyed the thought of what they’d do if they knew what I truly was.
When I got to the dojo in Allston, the class was already in session. I spent the next hour working on a dizzying array of knife-defense techniques and it felt great to be able to lose myself so totally in the exercises.
But it was all over far too quickly. And outside, the afternoon had slowly drawn down the shades of night. Once again ushering in Cosgrove’s hunt.
I drove back to Jamaica Plain and the old white Victorian I owned near Jamaica Pond. Ditching the gray charcoal suit into a pile in the corner of my bedroom, I showered quickly, soaping off the sheen of sweat I’d accumulated during the martial arts class. Back in my bedroom, I stood in front of my closet again. The choice was simple this time. I dressed in a black turtleneck, dark slacks and a dark blazer, definitely more my flavor of clothing. I strapped my piece just behind my right hip where its outline would be hardest to discern.
Another facet of my training.
Constant discipline and attention to the smallest details ensured success.
I left a fresh bowl of water for Mimi and Phoebe. I’d feed them later. One quick motion to grab my keys, wallet, pistol and flatten the tuft of hair that kept sticking out of the back of my head then I headed back out into the darkness.
Boston’s a gorgeous city at night. Sure, New York has the tight, congested skyline that speaks volumes about the millions of people clustered there, but Boston’s skyline has a pride all its own. I crested Mission Hill and paused to look at the sweeping expanse of lights that jousted with the darkness. Twinkling yellows and whites looked like a star field superimposed on the city.
Down past Northeastern University, I passed Symphony Hall and made a mental note to get concert tickets for the upcoming season. They’d be playing a lot of Vivaldi. I’m a big fan. Well, next to Gustav Holst. But they’d done his series last year.
I turned left on to Dartmouth and then right on to Boylston, following it past the giant Teddy Bear sitting outside the FAO Schwartz. A block further down Boylston and I slid the car to a stop in front of the Four Seasons. It’s a damned nice hotel. Newer than the Ritz Carlton, but they both suck in a lot of money.
Damn.
I rested my hands on the steering wheel and took a deep breath. I was doing it again.
I sighed. Women cause my otherwise airtight discipline to slip like a shoddy knot tied by a lazy boy scout.
I left the keys with the valet and wandered inside to the piano bar. To the left side there was a deep velvet couch with small table in front of it. It gave me a clear view of the entrance to the bar and also the street outside.
I was nursing a Bombay Sapphire and tonic when Talya came in. I hadn’t realized until then that I wasn’t even sure I wanted her to see me. I’d just kind of planned on having a drink, maybe shadowing her once she went to hunt Cosgrove. You know, keep an eye on her. And all of a sudden, here she was, looking like my being there was the most natural thing in the world.
I don’t know what disturbed me more, my lack of discipline or the fact that she seemed undisturbed by it.
The girl knew how to dress, that’s for sure. Dark slacks that outlined muscular legs, a white blouse that showed an ample amount of bosom, and a blazer under which I was certain she packed a certain high degree of heat.
She stopped by the bar and ordered a vodka, straight, in an iced glass. I watched the bartender take a bottle out of the freezer and pour some out. She must have tipped him special for that.
Talya hefted the drink, winked at me and wandered over. We were just casual acquaintances meeting in a bar, not a pair of top-notch killers waiting to stake an evil vampire.
She slid herself onto the couch next to me, took a sip of the vodka and exhaled. "Nice to see you again, Lawson."
"Christ, if I hadn’t know you worked for the Russians before…"
She smiled. "What, you’ve never known a woman who knew the proper way to drink vodka?"
"Maybe." I shrugged. "We going to swap love stories of old now?"
"Not a chance. I could go through mine in five minutes. We’ve
got work to do and I don’t want to bore you to sleep."
"That ever happen to you before?"
Talya smiled. "What do you think?"
Hell no. But I didn’t say anything. I just sat there watching her.
She took a long sip and then put her drink down on the glass table top. "Before we get started, I need some information from you."
"Just because I’m here doesn’t mean we’re working together, you know."
"Doesn’t it?"
"No."
"Then why are you here?"
I took a long haul on my drink and rested it back on the table, scanning the room. "Checking up on you, I guess."
She smirked. "I’m touched. You needn’t worry about me."
"So you say."
"Well, even if you still claim that we’re not working together, I still need some more information."
"About what?"
"Cosgrove."
"What about him?"
"You have a photograph?"
"No. The last photo we had went obsolete courtesy of some plastic surgeons in Geneva."
She nodded. "Describe him to me, then."
I did. She sat there absorbing it all and when I finished, she polished off her drink. "I need to get going."
I nodded. "Fair enough. Say, you know the club scene in Boston is fairly limited on Mondays and Tuesdays."
"I know."
"You know?"
She ran h
er fingers along the rim of her glass and sighed. "Lawson. I did some homework today. I do have some experience in this type of thing you know."
"Sorry." I finished the drink and set it back down. "I’m not even used to the prospect of working with anyone. I always operate alone."
"Speaking of which," she said. "Who exactly do you work for?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you know all about my past-"
"Not all."
"Enough," she continued. "I don’t know a damned thing about you. Aside from the fact that we’re similar. But different."
"That’s probably enough."
"Not for me."
I studied her. Strange bedfellows doth destiny make. Who’d
have thought when I rolled out of bed this morning that I’d be
sharing a drink and god knows what else with a human woman who had all the appearances of a true professional and was a damned sight better looking than I could have imagined ever finding in an assassin? Sure as hell not me.
"I work for a group called the Council."
"Private or government?"
I smiled. "Yes."
She frowned. "Lawson, you’re as much of an enigma as the man we’re hunting. Maybe sometime soon you’ll share some more of your secrets with me."
"I don’t know about that. You already know far too much."
She laughed. "So you say." She checked her watch. "It’s time I got started. Any later and I might miss him, no? I want to finish this tonight if possible."
"That may not fit in with Cosgrove’s plan."
"The hell with his plan. After tonight it won’t even matter anymore."
I hoped she was right. Check that, I prayed to every god I’d ever heard of that she was right.
Chapter Eight
History was something I never did particularly well in during my school years. Actually, I never did well in any of my subjects since I spent my time more interested in girls than anything else.
My race evolved out of the same line as modern humans. I know it’s strange for the traditionalists to accept the idea that vampires aren’t the undead at all, but a living evolving race just like you. Seems weird, doesn’t it? It weirds me out too, and I’m one of them.
Between 25,000 and 14,000 years ago, during the height of the last ice age is about when most of the elder historians believe we began a separate evolutionary trail from homo sapiens. But we were so much alike at first that for a while we probably co-existed.
Humans at that time were the first hunter/gatherers, often preferring to attack feared predators as a means of acquiring the powers they believed the animals possessed. A hunter back then might eat the predator, drink its blood and wear the pelts as a way of trying to gain its power.
We did much the same thing.
But we hunted humans.
We were nomadic by nature. We left no paintings on cave walls for anyone to speculate on thousands of years later. And our skeletons have largely confounded most of modern science. Sure they find the same size skulls as humans with the elongated incisors but fail to conclude a separate evolving race. The chalk it up as an oddity that this "tribe" might have all shared this tooth abnormality.
But it was us.
Gradually, as time moved on, we grew into a larger body of people. We chose remote areas to settle. Usually in mountainous regions. Places like the Himalayas, the Andes, the Carpathians, even the Canadian Rockies became home to our kind. Small villages grew out of the first settlements. Later, we began to spread. Wherever we could settle in reasonable anonymity without attracting suspicion.
It was tough. We were hunted to extinction in several countries.
Elsewhere, we flourished.
In the Himalayas, they called us the yidam. We weren’t seen as evil. In fact, some of the monks even thought of us as enlightened.
With the onset of the Industrial Revolution and a rapidly shrinking world, communities of vampires reached out and established loose networks with each other. We became ingrained in every human city and town around the world. But our population growth is much slower than human. We might have two children to every ten human. It’s nature’s way of keeping things in check. Like sharks that have one pup at a time. Too many predators ruins the food chain.
And we were predators.
Sure, you could romanticize it, but the fact remained that we needed human blood to survive. The ingestion of the life-force is what sustains us. We can eat human food, but our metabolic process demands human blood. It’s within the blood that human life force energy rests. Oxygenated blood crackles with electric energy. The Chinese call it chi; the Japanese call it ki.
We call it food.
It’s not pretty, but it is necessary.
The result of borrowing life force energy evolved us into a much stronger race. We’re pretty much invulnerable to the usual causes of death. Fully nourished, we’d be a pain to put down.
But puncturing the heart with wood upsets our ability to keep blood and the vital life force flowing. Doesn’t sound logical, I know, but for some basic elemental reason, wood can kill us once it pierces our heart. It’s a theory I heard was based on the five elemental theory of Asian philosophy. Expanding energy characteristics of wood break up the concentrated stability of life-force energy.
We age as well, and yes, even die from it. Our typical life span can be hundreds of years. Think it sounds cool? It’s probably the most boring existence imaginable.
Unless you’re a Fixer.
In that case, life can be pretty exciting. That is, if you like tracking down scumbags, getting shot at, and leading one of the loneliest lifestyles you never had the displeasure of living.
Talya left the Four Seasons and walked further up Beacon Street, making no attempts to move discretely. I shadowed her from a block back, knowing she knew I was there. Watching her move, she reminded me more of one of my own than a human. She was as much a predator this night as I was.
I kind of liked it.
The Alley, as it’s known, was packed with bars that attracted post-college kids who were now entering the upward river corporate swim. Like so many salmon unsure of why they do what they do, but do it nonetheless, these young office kids packed the bars and pubs surrounding the Financial District with mindless devotion. It’s a kind of useless existence that has always baffled me. Humans seem curiously attached to doing what society thinks they should do, even if it’s something they don’t want to do in the first place.
Strange.
On a Monday night, most everyone else in the world was home trying to forget about their least favorite day of the week. But the young professionals were out in force. The boys, still trying to pull off their former fraternity glory days appearance when they all had full heads of hair, were mostly stocky. Once proud muscles quickly accumulated fat when forced to reside inside tightly-quartered cubicles for up to twelve hours every day.
The girls were much the same, finally realizing that precious youth, while still a resident in their life, was nevertheless anxiously looking to move to a better neighborhood. That, and the omnipresent biological societal clock, were stomping loud enough that even on a Monday night, there’d be a lot of balding, paunchy guys heading home with a lot of marriage-seeking gals.
Except one.
They’d be dead before the night was over.
Another victim of Cosgrove’s hell bent streak.
Unless Talya and I had any say in the matter. Well, more so Talya. I had to be honest with myself. I wasn’t exactly crazy about taking Cosgrove on again so soon after my last fiasco on Saturday night. I’m not a big fan of repeating mistakes over and over again.
I’m much more into successes.
But I didn’t really have much of a choice. It’s what I do, you know? I guess I was as locked into my job as these youngsters swirling around me were. So much for my enlightened existence.
Whatever tonight brought my way, I was going to be ready for it even if facing Cosgrove
made my stomach hurt and my sphincter pucker like a nervous virgin in prison. After all, I’d fed before I met Talya and that would keep me going at least until I could get home and have another swig of juice.
Talya disappeared inside the club without so much as a lingering glance from the bouncer. I waited five minutes and then headed for the door. I had my piece on my hip, but the overzealous bouncer didn’t noticed it. Either he was too lazy to spot it, or he was too interested in frisking my crotch. I think I’d prefer option number one. But that’s just me.
Inside, Talya slipped as easily as I did through the masses of people. She moved like a shark, but I suspected had she wanted to, she could have easily attracted anyone in the room. The ability to turn a magnetic personality on and off again at a whim is a pretty potent weapon. And I had no doubt it was one of many tools in Talya’s arsenal.
She grabbed a seat by the main bar and gestured the bartender over. I saw him put a vodka in front of her and what looked like a gin and tonic in front of the empty seat next to her. I sighed and wandered over. I couldn’t refuse the drink. That would be rude.
"It’s Bombay Sapphire," she said without turning around. "Unless my sense of smell is off that was what you were drinking at the Four Seasons, right?"
"Yeah." I tasted the drink. "Thanks."
"Ready to work together yet?"
"No."
She shook her head. "Why is it that women are called ‘stubborn’ and men are called ‘determined?’ If you ask me, they’re two sides of the same coin."
I ignored that comment. "So, what’s your plan?"
She looked at me like I had two heads. "Didn’t we discuss this already?"
"Did we?"
"We’re going to kill him." She smiled. "Sorry, I forgot. I’m going to kill him."
I shook my head. "Yeah, I got that part. How are you planning to do it?"
She smiled at me. "How do you usually do it?"
Okay, so she knew I was a professional as well. Damned if she didn’t seem to know more about me than I was comfortable with. "I’d just walk around and look for him."