Be My Valentine

by Niall Teasdale

  9th March.

  Pat smiled as she saw Silas walking into the pascua, and then the smile faded as she took in his expression. He looked serious, and if there was one thing Silas rarely appeared to be, it was serious. He was also carrying a rucksack, which did not bode well.

  ‘What’s up?’ Pat asked as he closed the distance to the reception desk.

  ‘I, uh, just stopped by to let you know I’m moving on,’ Silas said. ‘Not sure where to yet, but I’ll drop you a card, let you know where I end up.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Things have been a little tense at the hostel. I can tell when I’m not wanted and I’d prefer not to have to do another moonlight skip ahead of a murder squad.’

  Pat frowned. ‘It’s really that bad?’

  There was a small shrug. ‘Maybe I’m a little paranoid, but…’

  ‘You can stay here a few days. At least until you’ve thought this through better.’

  Silas smiled at her, but it was a thin sort of smile. ‘Oh, I can’t do that, girl. I can’t impose–’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Your little blonde friend won’t like it, Pat. She doesn’t like me. Don’t think the Hunter does either.’

  ‘Lisa will be fine with it. She just doesn’t know you. Neither of them do. Come on. You can’t just set off with no idea of where you’re going.’

  Silas sighed. ‘Okay… I guess I could… Just a couple of days. You’re sure Lisa will be okay with it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pat said. ‘I’m sure.’

  ~~~

  Pat watched in exasperated horror as Lisa stuffed clothes into a bag. ‘Lisa…’

  ‘No,’ Lisa stated flatly.

  ‘But… If you just take the time to–’

  Lisa paused and looked around at Pat. ‘Look, I understand he’s your creator and you’re worried about him. That’s great, but I don’t want to get to know him. He gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘If he’s really only staying a few days, then I can stay with Di. I’ll be quite safe there.’

  ‘If it’s because he’s a valentine–’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You are a valentine. No, it’s him. I don’t know what it is, but he twists my guts up the way no other vampire ever has.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘No, Pat. While he’s here, I won’t be.’

  ~~~

  Dione opened the door at the top of the flight of stairs which led to her apartment and raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you had a falling out with Pat?’

  ‘No,’ Lisa replied and then she sagged a little. ‘Yes. Not exactly. Maybe.’

  Dione took Lisa’s case from her and turned toward the bedroom. ‘That was certainly a precise answer.’

  ‘She invited Silas to stay with her.’

  ‘Oh, really.’

  Lisa closed the door behind her and followed Dione. ‘He came to her with some sob story about feeling threatened at Carbon Fourteen and she invited him to stay “for a few days” while he sorts out where he’s going to go. I am not staying under the same roof as him, Di.’

  Dione dropped Lisa’s bag in a corner of the room and turned around. ‘Very well.’

  ‘Pat says I just need to get to know him, but he makes me nauseous.’

  ‘We can’t have that.’

  Lisa pursed her lips. ‘Do you think I’m being silly?’

  ‘Often, dear,’ Dione replied, smiling. ‘It’s one of your many endearing features. About Silas, however, I’m not sure that’s the case.’

  ‘Huh. I thought this year was supposed to be quiet. Peaceful. What else can go wrong?’

  ‘Oh… Don’t say things like that. It’s never wise to tempt the Moirai.’

  10th March.

  Night-shift maintenance was one of the things that was necessary, but not always pleasant. Graham Folds had been working it for four years and could not wait to get promoted out of it. He was taking classes in management. That was how eager he was. Graham had always considered managers to be the spawn of Satan and here he was trying to become one. He had joked about it, but he did sort of wonder whether having your humanity surgically removed was painful.

  Tonight, it was something of an important job, however. Graham could see why it needed handling, and early, before the rush-hour traffic was delayed by it. Someone had reported some sort of obstruction on the tracks between Herald Square and Times Square. A driver had reported seeing something in his headlights and the sound of the car scraping over something. Not an immediate danger, but since no one knew what it was, no one knew whether it might be something which could cause a more serious accident, like a derailment. Consequently, Graham was down in the tunnel, walking along the side with his three colleagues, looking for whatever it was the train had hit. Graham’s money was on a gopher, or a drunk stupid enough to wander down the tunnels. One of the guys had suggested that one of the sewer alligators had got lost. Big laughs.

  ‘There.’ Bernie, at the front of the column, flashed his light over something in the track. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Let’s go look,’ Graham suggested. ‘Line’s clear, right?’

  ‘Line’s clear.’

  Graham stepped down and headed for the lump. That was the best way he could describe it right now: there was a lump between the rails. As he got closer, the first impression remained, but clarified. If anything, it looked like a really big mole had dug its way up into the tunnel, leaving a molehill. You could see where it had been taller and the train had sliced off the top of it, spraying dirt and concrete down the line.

  ‘You ever do any gardening, Bernie?’ Graham asked.

  ‘I live in a fifth-floor apartment.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, good point. I was wondering whether you knew what was good for moles.’

  ‘If that’s a molehill, I don’t want to meet the critter that made it.’

  ‘That’s a damn good point.’ Graham turned, panning his light around the tunnel. ‘It’s gotta be the size of a–’ He stopped as his light flashed over something, but when he moved back, there was nothing there. ‘I’m seeing things.’

  Bernie sniffed. ‘What the Hell is that smell? Maybe the sewers are backing up. We should–’

  Something grey, about the size of a man but on all fours, was caught briefly in the flashlight beams as it hit Bernie, dragging him down and out of sight. His screams, however, indicated that whatever it was, the thing was not giving him a loving hug.

  ‘What the–’ Graham began, turning his flashlight. The beam caught another greyish creature as it leapt at him and Graham got a partial answer to his surgery question: having your ‘humanity’ removed by teeth and claws definitely was painful.

  ~~~

  ‘There’s something of a rush on this one,’ Dione said as she was led, alongside Mike, to the crime scene they had been asked to examine.

  ‘No kidding,’ Mike replied. ‘This entire section of track has been out of service for hours.’

  ‘Hasn’t helped that the cops decided to call you lot in,’ their guide pointed out.

  ‘If they’ve called us in, there’s a reason for it,’ Dione replied. ‘They said they’d found “body parts?”’

  ‘Yeah. Work crew went missing sometime around two a.m. Another crew went looking for them when no one had seen them by end of shift and they found a hand.’

  ‘And being hit by a train isn’t in the running?’

  ‘Trains weren’t running this section. Possible obstruction on the tracks. Derailment hazard.’

  ‘And did they find the obstruction?’

  ‘They found something…’

  What they had found was, indeed, a hand, sticking out of a mound of earth between the rails. There was an ME on hand, peering at it through plastic goggles and pointedly not moving it. ‘That’s just where we found it,’ the ME explained. ‘They found a foot thirty or so feet down the track. Not from the same person.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Mike asked.

  ‘
The hand’s white. Thing is, there were four people on the team and we’ve got one hand and one foot.’

  ‘Have you got some gloves I could borrow?’ Dione asked the ME. ‘Can you smell anything, Mike?’ she asked while the ME found her some.

  Mike sniffed. ‘Decay? Vague smell of decay, maybe.’

  ‘Probably the arm,’ the ME suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Dione replied and, with gloves on her hands, she carefully pulled the arm free of the dirt. There was about four inches of arm and wrist attached to it, and then it ended in a ragged edge.

  ‘Shit!’ the ME said. ‘It looks… chewed.’

  ‘Yes, it does. What about the foot?’

  ‘That was torn off. Ligaments are ripped through.’

  ‘Right.’ Dione placed the limb back on the mound of dirt, lifted her head, and raised her voice. ‘Please, everyone, I need your attention. I need you all to leave this area. My colleague here will accompany you to Herald Square. Do not leave once you get there. We have a potential biohazard situation. You’ll all need to be given medication as a precaution.’ There was a lot of rumbling from the gathered cops and workers, but Dione ignored it and turned to Mike. ‘You head out with them and call Mary. You tell her we have a possible “Protocol G” situation, and then you wait for Winthrop to turn up. Keep everyone away from anyone else up there.’

  ‘Protocol G?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ll hear all about it soon enough.’

  ~~~

  ‘Ghouls,’ Mike said, and he shuddered inside his plastic biohazard suit.

  ‘And for those of us who haven’t been training in everything vampire as long?’ Juliana asked. Her next question was going to be why she had not got a suit, but she suspected she knew the answer and was saving it for later.

  ‘Mike,’ Dione said, ‘demonstrate you’ve learned something.’

  ‘Huh,’ Mike grunted. ‘I’m not going to forget ghouls. I had nightmares after that lesson. Uh, well, ghouls are basically a degenerate form of vampire. Which is not to say that vampires can degenerate into ghouls. It’s more like some strain mutated and started making ghouls instead of vampires.’

  ‘One theory suggests they could have come from the necros strain,’ Dione said. ‘Another suggests they are an offshoot of the original strain, the ortus, like all the other lineages. Yet another suggests that ghouls are the ortus and modern vampires actually evolved as a more successful version of ghouls. Honestly, I’m not sure which is the least unpleasant.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Mike went on, ‘they regenerate damage fast, but various bits of them don’t come through the conversion process, like their whole frontal lobe. They’re animals. Smart animals, but still animals. Semi-upright, claws and fangs, grey skin, constant smell of decay. Oh, and they don’t drink blood. They need living human flesh the way vampires need blood.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain the biohazard gear,’ Juliana pointed out.

  ‘They’re infectious. They grow viral spores in their skin which can be breathed in or absorbed through a cut. Once they infect a human, when that human dies, they turn into a ghoul. And the spores are like anthrax. They’ll sit around dormant in soil for years until the soil is disturbed. They often turn up in graveyards because they’ll eat just about anything, including corpses, most of the time, and graveyards are great places for the spores to settle.’

  ‘Modern funerary practices have reduced their numbers significantly,’ Dione said, ‘but they turn up now and again. I’ve just never heard of them frequenting subways.’

  ‘They are diggers,’ Mike pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but… Well, never mind that for now.’

  ‘I take it vampires are immune to these spores?’ Juliana asked.

  ‘And ghouls are immune to your bite and my scent,’ Dione said. ‘Normally, I’d find that annoying, but I don’t believe I want a ghoul trying to hump my leg.’

  ‘That’s going to be some more nightmares,’ Mike muttered.

  ‘Okay, what am I doing?’ Juliana asked.

  ‘You are collecting evidence. Anything which looks out of place, starting with the severed limbs, goes in a sealed container. We also need samples of soil from that mound. All of us are going to go over this place on our hands and knees if necessary. We need to be absolutely sure that it was ghouls before we declare full Protocol G.’

  The ex-nurse sighed. ‘Okay, I’ll handle the body parts and the soil, and then I’ll join you on the floor.’

  ‘Good. Be careful of the live rail. It might not kill you, but it really stings.’

  ‘Why aren’t you warning me about that?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Well, you’re almost certainly wearing enough insulation that it won’t affect you. Don’t test that just for the fun of it, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Juliana sighed as she picked up the severed hand and prepared to move it into what looked a lot like a beer cooler. ‘And I’m back to wondering why I didn’t get a suit.’

  ~~~

  ‘No spores at all?’ Dione was looking perplexed, but Winthrop was looking confident.

  ‘None,’ Winthrop said. Actually, he was looking confident and a little puzzled. ‘All the other evidence points to ghouls, but I found no spores in any of the samples.’ They were in Winthrop’s lab, all of SCU except Mike, as Dione had sent him home for a decent meal. Winthrop had spent the entire afternoon and most of the evening analysing the evidence brought back from the subway.

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Juliana asked. ‘I mean, no spores means no one infected and no more ghouls.’

  ‘Ghouls, my dear, produce spores when they feed on live flesh. These ghouls have just fed, ergo they should be producing spores. That they are not is perplexing. However, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that ghouls killed these men. I’m just not sure whether we need to move to full Protocol G if they aren’t infectious.’

  ‘Hmm…’ Dione mused. ‘Mary? What do you have for me?’

  ‘I have,’ Mary replied, ‘a sewer tunnel which runs more or less right under that subway line. They could have dug up from there.’

  ‘There wasn’t much scent of them outside the immediate area, so I suspect they went back down the way they came.’ Dione gave a nod. ‘Okay, we’ll hold the Protocol G until Mike and I have surveyed that sewer. Tonight.’

  ‘Better you than me,’ Mary commented.

  ‘I’d love an extra nose for tracking…’

  ‘Like either of us is going to get much down there.’

  Dione flashed a grin. ‘I know. I’ll get Mike and come back for protective gear. Plot us a route to that area from the nearest surface access.’

  ‘Poor Mike,’ Juliana said.

  Dione shrugged. ‘I’m sure he secretly knew that taking on this job would end up with a hunt through the sewers. Maybe he figured we’d be hunting giant albino alligators rather than ghouls, but the sewers were inevitable.’

  ~~~

  ‘Are there actually alligators down here?’ Mike asked as they trudged through a sewer which was, mercifully, only about ankle deep in dirty water and had a walkway along the edge anyway.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ Dione replied. ‘I rather doubt it, but I don’t actually know.’

  ‘I guess ghouls are better suited to this environment than reptiles. I mean, ghouls can survive on just about anything, right? Aside from the need for live flesh once a month.’

  ‘Basically, yes. Though I think even they would be hard-pressed to survive on just the stuff down here.’

  Grinning inside a filter mask proved fairly pointless. ‘Maybe they’ll starve to death before we find them,’ Mike said, hoping the humour would carry.

  ‘Unlikely. I just hope we find them.’

  Suffolk County, NY, 11th March.

  Andrew Quarry was fairly old for a valentine. Born at the turn of the century, he had come through the Depression with his fortunes relatively intact and a fairly conservative attitude to money. It had served him well enough and he now lived
in a sprawling, ranch-style house near East Hampton where he lived a quiet life with his supplicant of sixteen years. Quarry was not the kind of valentine who used his powers to sleep with a different woman every night: he was conservative about that too.

  As with many large houses in the Hamptons, Quarry’s house had excellent security. It came as something of a surprise then when he was awoken from a sound sleep as four men dragged him and his partner out of their bed in the middle of the night. He knew he was dealing with vampires as soon as his sleep-addled senses came together: carpathians and a nubian. The latter was dragging Sandy out of the room.

  ‘Take what you want,’ Quarry said. ‘Leave Sandy out of this.’

  A face hidden behind a balaclava loomed in front of him. ‘We’ll take what we want all right, valentine.’

  Quarry was slammed up against his bedroom wall by two of the carpathians. He heard Sandy screaming and began struggling, but there was nothing much he could do as the third carpathian advanced on him with a hammer and what looked a lot like a railroad spike.

  New York, NY.

  Mike and Dione continued on in silence for much of the trek. Their filter masks eliminated most of the smell, but Dione would pause occasionally to remove her mask and try to scent ghoul through the other smells. She generally looked disgusted and disappointed after doing so, and they moved on. GPS was useless in the tunnel, but they had some form of inertial navigation gadget to follow. The sniffing was just a precaution, or maybe a case of over-optimism. It was, in fact, right on the spot below the subway tunnel above them that they found the hole dug through the side wall of the sewer.

  ‘There’s blood here,’ Mike said, shining a light into the dig site. ‘Looks like it goes in about… three or four feet and then stops.’

  ‘They backfill as they go. This is probably the part that collapsed out since it’s loose.’ Dione had taken her mask off and was sniffing at the ground. ‘Oh, I’m going to need my nasal cavities cleaned out with a scrubbing brush after this. I think they came from further up the tunnel, but it’s definitely them.’ She pulled her mask back in place with a distinct look of relief.