by Lily Luchesi
This boy, the one with the heavy Welsh accent, had red hair shaved on the sides in what he probably thought was a seventies punk ’do. He dialed with shaking fingers and said, “Hannah? …Are you reading? We’re bein’ held up upstairs, an’ you’re reading! …Yes, the guy came home. Some lookout you are! Y’gotta come up here. An’ don’t try anything. I—I think he’s some kinda psychic.”
Maybe not as dumb as he sounds, Danny thought. The redhead had a ripped denim jacket over a white tee, worn jeans, and even worse shoes. The other boy had Harry Potter glasses, dark hair that hadn’t seen a brush in at least a decade, and he was so pale and thin he had an unreal, otherworldly look to him.
Danny heard light footsteps and searched for a thought, but this girl cloaked her mind as well, though her fear was so strong it was making Danny’s heart race. When the girl appeared in the doorway he was dumbstruck: she was just a teen, too! With her honey-blonde hair cut in a pageboy style, dark eyes, and plaid sweater and jeans, she looked like the picture on the cover of a brochure for an English boarding school, not a teenage delinquent.
“What the fuck is this? Are you some kind of criminal Peter Pan?” Danny asked, not bothering to conceal his ‘language’ around the teens.
The man chuckled. “Hardly. We’re not here for you…whoever you are. We’re here for the monster that usually sleeps there.” He gestured to the coffin. “Tell us where she is and we’ll be out of your hair posthaste.”
“What do you want with her?” Danny asked.
“That is none of your business,” the man said.
“If you broke into my house because of her, then you can bet your ass it’s my business. Who are you four, and what do you want? I won’t ask again before I exercise my rights to shoot any intruders on sight.”
“Just tell him!” the girl snapped. “We’re not getting anywhere with you men acting like stubborn oxen!”
The redhead hid a smile, but Danny could feel the wave of love that surrounded him and the girl. It was strong, as strong as only teenage love could be.
“We’re hunters and we want her to lead us to Augustus,” the boy with the glasses said. “Happy? We want the Emperor and Empress dead.”
Danny lowered his gun, sensing the truth in the boy’s mind. He dug a little deeper, found his name, and said, “Thank you, Ronnie. Actually, that makes me very happy.”
“H-how…what are you, man?” Ronnie asked.
“Human, and that’s what matters in the long run,” Danny replied. “Now, all of you, don’t make me pry. I want names and longer explanations.”
The man put an arm around Ronnie’s shoulders. “Ronnie Wright is my nephew. I adopted him when he was a toddler, after the vampire Augustus killed his parents. This is James Meyers, and that’s Hannah DeWitt. My name is Edgar Wright. And you are?”
“Danny Mancini. And I want Augustus dead, too.”
Edgar arched an eyebrow. “Really? Then why are you housing his Empress, the newly crowned Angelica Cross?”
The thought entered his mind before he could stop it: She’s not his. “As of three hours ago, she and I no longer have any association,” Danny said. “It’s a long story, but she’s just as bad as he is, deep down.”
Edgar scoffed. “You don’t say? All vampires are, Danny. A lesson we all learned long ago. Sorry it took so long for you.”
“I’m sorry, too. Now, shall we all go downstairs and each tell our stories in turn?” Danny suggested. “I’d like to know a bit more about the absolute imbeciles who’d break into the home of the vampire Empress.”
“So you’re not gonna shoot us?” James asked.
“Not yet.” Danny had them walk ahead of him till they got to the living room. As James had mentioned on the phone, one of his books was face down on the coffee table, where Hannah must have been reading it.
“Um, Mr. Mancini, I’d really appreciate if you didn’t keep pointing your gun this way,” Hannah said softly as she sat down in his armchair.
Danny looked at her and smiled. Out of the four of them, she was the one he sensed the most danger from. It was always the quiet ones you had to look out for. “I’ll stop pointing the gun when I decide that one of you isn’t going to pull a fast one. Unlike you four, I’m a former police officer and FBI agent. I actually know what I’m doing.”
“If you were protecting Angelica Cross, I think that might be debatable,” Edgar said.
Danny couldn’t disagree. “All right. Tell me everything. I know you’re not professional hunters, not like the Price family. You’re all far too sloppy.”
Edgar nodded. “You’re right. I started all this. You see, my brother stole prey from Augustus. My brother was human, but Augustus had been courting his wife, wanting to turn her, I think. And she met my brother, broke Augustus’ thrall, and married him instead of becoming Undead. Augustus took two years to hunt them down and get his revenge. He killed my brother and then my sister-in-law. The only thing that kept him from killing Ronnie when he was a toddler was the holy water and garlic that they rubbed into his crib every night.
“I came in to find them dead, and I knew who did it. I knew. It was then I was given custody of Ronnie and I started searching for more information on Augustus, learning everything I could, trying to track him down. In the process, I sent Ronnie to a religious boarding school in Scotland to try and keep him safe.”
James grinned. “That’s where we come in.” He gestured to himself and Hannah. “My whole family went to that school to be kept safe. Um…Augustus killed one of my brothers. An’ my other brother watched it happen. He doesn’t just kill for food, he kills for fun. He likes fear, I think, an’ he feeds on it just as much as blood.
“Mum hates that I decided to do this, but I had to. The twat deserves to die an’ I wanna see it happen.”
Hannah gave him a sympathetic look from across the room. “I’m the only person who has no murderous connection whatsoever to Augustus. My mum and dad were archaeologists who unearthed his legend in Rome, and then more things about vampires from Egypt. They think I’m mad to have gone off on a hunt like this, but I just don’t believe that evil like that should be allowed to walk the earth. …Aside, I couldn’t let these guys just run off to America. They’d be lost without me.” She winked at James.
“Now you,” Edgar said.
Danny began to talk, to tell a tale that just got stranger as he kept speaking and more details came to light. He realized, halfway through, that if any ‘normal’ person overheard him, they’d tell him he was a great fiction writer or send him straight to Reed Center. Hello, I’m a reincarnated monster hunter who is now a psychic, married to the Empress of the vampires twice, my ex was a vampire and I cut her head off. I was once pursued by a demonic witch, my ancestor was a hunter and also became a demon before I shot him to death, and I now have a remnant of an old friend haunting me until I kill the Empress. Yes, that would certainly make a great movie or story for a shrink to tell to a medical journal.
Ronnie and Hannah were hanging on every word, Ronnie’s glasses slightly slipping down his nose as his rapt attention failed to make him notice. Hannah looked as though she was taking notes in her own mind palace. James looked disbelieving, and Edgar was radiating waves of doubt like Wi-Fi signals.
“What is it that you don’t believe, Edgar?” Danny asked.
“That you just up and left the Empress like that tonight. How do I know you’re not just keeping us here until she gets home?” Edgar asked.
“If Angelica wanted to find mortals, she’d be able to do it on her own. She wouldn’t need me to corral you like horses,” Danny said. “And believe me, after what she did to Helena, you can trust that the next time I have anything to do with her will be when I avenge my friend.” He turned to look out his window. “I really loved her…believed in her.”
A deep wave of empathy went into him from Ronnie, and Danny wanted to go inside that kid’s mind. Beneath those glasses, his eyes were hurt and dull. He wanted to know why.
“So are you with us?” James asked. “Will ya help?”
With reluctance he knew he shouldn’t feel, Danny said, “I’m with you.”
***
Angelica always had a backup plan. When she moved in with Danny, she never gave up her penthouse in the building near the PID offices. In her line of work, you never knew if you’d need a hideout for any reason, a safe house.
She never thought she’d need a hideout away from Danny.
Her furniture was covered in dust cloths, but she employed a cleaning service twice a month for this and any other currently vacant apartments in the building, so it was as if she had never left. A majority of her clothes and things were at Danny’s, but she’d get them back eventually. They were just things, after all, and if she wanted she could buy most of them back, with the exception of her rare book collection.
She didn’t want things. She wanted Danny, and every piece of clothing or fandom collectible she owned could be destroyed before her eyes if it meant she could undo everything that had happened in the past five hours. But she really did hate that he now had all of her books.
Sighing, she took off her jacket and laid it on the still-covered couch. What was she to do now? What did she do about the PID and her semi-involvement? If Danny told them everything, it wouldn’t make a difference: Harriet already knew. But how could she work with Augustus and the PID? Danny couldn’t be removed from the company unless he wanted to be. She couldn’t force him out, or make Harriet force him out.
“Never work with someone you love.”
Or, better yet, never fall in love with a mortal. Angelica should have known better. Falling for a mortal makes the heart grow weaker, be it from death like with Jonathan Price or the vampiric nature getting in the way of human morals, like right now.
She wanted to strangle Augustus. She wanted to tie him up with holy water soaked ropes so he couldn’t break them and torture him slowly. Fillet his flesh, drive a steel-tipped stake in his heart over and over again, perhaps a small one in his ear canal as well. Cut out his tongue, oh yes that would be first, because it was his big mouth that ruined everything.
Are you sure you want to put all the blame on Augustus? That little voice was speaking up again, and Angelica wished she could tell her own brain to fuck off. Her conscience—or whatever that voice was supposed to represent—was an inconvenience that she had thought would abate when she was fully turned. If anything, it had gotten worse.
Her mind was correct, however. She was the one responsible. How could she be mad at Augustus for telling the truth? She had killed Helena for the power she needed. No one had forced her. It had been a moment of panic and a split second decision she made on her own.
She could try and pin the blame on Augustus, or Leander, or even Helena and her stupid remnant. The fact remained that she was the only one to blame. And she did regret it. Of course she did. She hadn’t wanted to kill anyone, least of all a colleague, but she’d been unable to control her bloodlust, which was intensified by her innate weakness.
Why couldn’t Danny see that she was sorry? Angelica had been sick over this from the moment she realized what she’d done. While she knew she should have told him immediately, she’d been afraid of this very thing happening. That Danny would not understand what had happened. He compared her with human perps, but there was a huge difference.
When a rapist claimed in court that they “just couldn’t control themselves”, it was complete bullshit. Unless they have an actual diagnosable medical condition that makes their impulse control diminish or are impaired by alcohol or drugs, every human being is capable of stopping themselves from doing things that are wrong. Rape, murder, robbery…it didn’t matter. Humans are not just mammals, they are highly intelligent beings, despite what reality TV shows seem to depict. They can control themselves. Vampires cannot always do that when the bloodlust is upon them.
It is not darkness, it is not evil, it is nature, and no one can control nature. When a vampire is deep into their hunger, their cognitive abilities diminish and they are very close to being animals themselves. That was how the PID’s laws came into effect, to assure that vampires were feeding properly and none of them would go into bloodlust and kill a human. The self-induced thrall Angelica had been under, no blood bank could have satisfied.
Danny, a mortal, could never understand that. He had always been the one to tell her that he loved her no matter her species, but now that he knew what being a vampire, what being the Empress, really meant, he did a one-eighty. One moment he loved her, and the next he was telling her he wanted to kill her.
Well then, fuck him, Angelica thought, her sadness giving way to hurt and anger. Fuck him. I have bigger fish to fry, starting with a new vampiric regime. And if Augustus doesn’t agree with what I want, fuck him, too.
Chapter Nine
Angelica needed a day of rest in her spare coffin, which she kept in her home, before tackling anything more than she just had the night before. The part of her that had never really grown up from the pale little girl who used to listen to stories at her father’s then-human knee was still hoping that everything had been a nightmare. That was extraordinarily stupid: she didn’t have nightmares anymore, she was a nightmare.
It was the beginning of April, which meant she only had about a month of decent night hours to be awake. That only infuriated her more, that she had to limit her time to tackle her new position as the Empress.
She began to realize that all of this began when she had nearly been murdered with her own blade by Miranda Valdez, a vampire PID agent who had been engaged to Danny when she was a human in the eighties. She’d gone rogue and teamed up with Fiona to kill Angelica. Danny had saved Angelica, but it had been too late to do anything except kill her or turn her, lest she remain comatose for eternity.
She’d been changed without permission, the biggest rule after not killing humans for vamps in the PID. The person being turned had to give their express consent, and she had not due to her injured state. Danny had made the choice for her, Danny had started all of this. Or Miranda had. It was almost hard to pinpoint the blame anymore, but one thing was certain: now that she was forced into this position, she was going to make the most of it.
Sure, she’d begun the PID with the sole purpose of creating a peaceful world where humans were unaware of and unharmed by the paranormal community, but she could no longer deny that she loved the control she had over almost every creature out there. Angelica had always denied that she did what she did for the love of power, but she could not deny to herself that it felt good to be simultaneously respected and feared.
The previous night she had been hurt deeply, and there was no denying that. She now had a choice. It was a new day, and she could wallow in self-pity or she could get up and kick ass. And everyone knows that Angelica Cross can kick ass better than anyone, so that’s what she was going to do. Fuck Danny and his remnant. Fuck Augustus and his false sense of entitlement. She’d built this world back up when it was in ruin, and she was going to keep it running for all of eternity. On her own. Augustus could tag along, but this was her show, and she’d make sure he knew it, too.
He might have some abilities she didn’t, like the telekinesis and the intense thrall, and she’d ask him to teach her because she was humble enough to know that there was no shame in asking for knowledge, but he’d be a foil to her, not a competitor.
As she was getting ready to leave, her cell phone rang. Harriet.
“Cross.” Angelica would be damned if she was going to use “Mancini” now, even if she had legally changed her name when she got married.
“The shit hit the fan, didn’t it?” Harriet asked without even a hello.
“Big time. Did Danny call you?” Angelica asked, locking and warding her door as she stepped into the hallway.
“Yes. He wanted complete and total resignation and excommunication from the PID. He said, and I quote that he ‘wants nothing to do with people who associate with mo
nsters’.”
Angelica felt a punch in her gut as she got into the elevator. “Wow, he really loves flinging that word around now, doesn’t he? Let him do whatever he wants. I hope Helena’s remnant tears his fucking brain inside out. I’ve got bigger things to deal with, like Augustus.”
Harriet paused before saying, “Dare I ask what you’re doing about the Emperor?”
“I’m giving him an ultimatum. He follows my laws and teaches me everything he knows, or we’ll fight to the death and whomever survives controls all vampires,” Angelica replied.
Harriet laughed. “Wow, whatever happened to working with people?”
“He’s not a person. He’s a snake,” Angelica said. “I gave in to one of his demands, and that is all he’s getting from me. I’m the one who was here leading everyone while he stalked me Slenderman style. I run this show, not him.”
“That is the Angelica I have always known,” Harriet said, clear warmth in her voice. “Whatever you do, you have the full PID’s support behind you. This is your show, love. I’m just running it. …Oh! I got Sean Wireman on a plane. He’ll be here in about fifteen hours.” She paused once again. “You know, Angelica, I don’t know what went on between you and Danny, but I imagine it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorn shit. Just know that one slip-up, especially considering you were half dead, doesn’t cancel out all the good you’ve done.”
I think you might be wrong about that, Angelica thought. Aloud, she simply thanked Harriet for her kind words and hung up.
She debated driving, even though it was half an hour from her home to Augustus’ place, but decided not to. If she needed to make a quick getaway, she didn’t want to leave Dracula there for God knows how long.
In the span of less than a minute, she was outside Augustus’ manor, walking up his crooked front steps. The front door was open and she paused to get her gun out. She couldn’t smell or hear anything out of the ordinary, but why would he leave his door unlocked? No one, not even an immortal ruler, was that stupid.