by Max Turner
“Of course it matters!”
“That’s not what I meant.” She paused. It was so quiet I could hear both of our hearts beating over the hum of the lights. “Have you read Victory?” she asked. “It’s a Joseph Conrad novel.”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“It contains an interesting passage. ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.’“ She looked at me as if I should understand what this meant. I didn’t.
“You are connected to all of us. We are your ties, Charlie and Luna especially. It doesn’t matter if there’s no bounty on your friends. If any of them venture out and are taken, you can be leveraged. If you didn’t do as you were asked, they would be made to suffer. It would tear you apart.” She raised the box of shells and tapped the corner of it against my chest. The rattling of the bullets inside made me uneasy. “You need more training. There’s barely been enough time since the summer for us to cover the basics. You know next to nothing about the enemies you’ll have to face. Their talents. How to protect yourself. You want to risk a movie or a night at a dance club? Forget it. Those things will still be waiting when this is over.”
“And when will that be?”
“When we end it. After you’ve trained more. When we have a better sense of who we’re up against. And after our enemies spend a bit more time wiping one another out. It might take a year. Maybe two. Maybe ten. I can’t say for certain.”
I resisted the urge to throw up my hands, a gesture I sometimes borrowed from Charlie, but it wasn’t the time for theatrics or complaints. Not with Ophelia. I owed her too much.
“There has to be some middle ground here. I haven’t had a decent run in months. And my friends feel like prisoners. It isn’t fair to put them through this. Not because of me.”
“No, it isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is. This danger is real. After tonight, you can’t pretend it isn’t.” She held my gaze until she was certain the message had settled in. “Your friends will understand.”
A moment later she left, and I was alone with the weapons and equipment—everything from construction tools to night-vision goggles and laser tripwires. Most of it we’d probably never use. My eyes came to rest on a long silver tube. It was six feet long, two feet wide and rounded at the edges. Charlie called it the photon torpedo because it looked as though it belonged on the starship Enterprise, but none of us had any idea what it was for. I’d once asked Ophelia about it, but she’d been vague, almost dismissive. “Nothing we can use at the moment,” she’d said, or something like that.
As I took the elevator up to the penthouse, I considered what to say to Luna and the others. After my father’s death, I had grown up in a mental ward, with routines and rules, security guards and medical staff. Nurse Ophelia was central to that. The others weren’t used to her, or to such unusual restrictions. And now there was a bounty on my head. I wondered who had offered it and how much longer we’d have to wait before someone else came around to collect.
Turned out, it wasn’t long.
CHAPTER 4
CHARACTER FLAW
WHEN THE ELEVATOR reached the top of the building, the doors slid open. I heard a distinctive giggle echoing down the hall from Charlie’s room. It was Suki. The girls weren’t even supposed to be up there—part of Ophelia’s no-nonsense house rules. Our dinner on the roof was to be the first exception since we’d moved in.
“Is that you, Flash?” Charlie shouted.
I stayed in the hall. “Yeah. It’s me. What are you guys up to?”
Charlie laughed. “Well, there are only so many things you can do on a bed.”
I heard the whump of a pillow. I reached in to close the door, but someone yanked me into the room. Luna. She didn’t look happy.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
I glanced at her, then at Charlie, who was lying on his bed in his housecoat, his hair dripping wet. Suki was standing over him, poised to hit him with the pillow again. Everyone was looking at me.
“Tell you what?”
Luna crossed her arms and gave me a stern look that might have been borrowed from Ophelia. “A man came here to kill you, and you didn’t even think to mention it to me?”
“I was about to. You never gave me the chance.”
“Don’t blame this on me!”
Charlie rose from the bed. “If you two are going to fight, do it somewhere else.”
Suki hit him again with the pillow. It flew out of its case and crashed into his dresser, upsetting a photo of the two of them at Charlie’s cottage on Stoney Lake. He caught it before it hit the ground, then examined it for a second before setting it back. It had been taken before his infection.
Suki had been a different person then. Confident, bubbly and athletic. But after witnessing the gruesome murder of a friend, then suffering the disappearance of Luna and Charlie, she fell apart, dropped out of school and stopped seeing her friends. According to Luna, she saw a therapist regularly, but no amount of counselling could fix the real problem—her confused and angry parents. Dr. and Mrs. Abbott fought constantly, which made the house more a pressure cooker than a home. I understood. One of their daughters was suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder and the other was a vampire, a condition medical science couldn’t understand, or even put a name to. It was too much for the Abbotts, and their frustration amplified Suki’s distress. And so she went from being the most likely candidate for prom queen to being so nervous she didn’t like having people look at her. She chopped off most of her hair, dyed it black and started dressing like every day was Robert Pattinson’s funeral.
But things were improving. Charlie adored her—that helped. So did moving away from home. And she was our only set of eyes in the daytime, which meant once the sun was up she was the only one who could look after Vincent, a lycanthrope we’d more or less adopted. I took it as positive sign that she’d gone back to dressing in colour. And the dye had disappeared from her hair. It was still short, a bit boyish even, but she was blessed with a face that would never be hard to look at, especially when she smiled, which she did often now, despite all the constraints in place under Ophelia’s watchful eye.
Charlie tossed a balled-up sock at me from across the room. “Snap out of it, Sleeping Beauty. What did Ophelia say?”
I knew better than to start that conversation. Luna was waiting for an apology. “Sorry,” I said. “I meant to tell you about the bounty hunter. I was just waiting—”
“Well, that’s the trouble,” she said. “You’re always waiting. You know, it wouldn’t kill you to be more assertive.”
I frowned.
“She’s right,” Charlie said. “You dither all the time. You’ve got to tackle things head-on.”
“Dither?”
“Yeah. You could have turned that bounty hunter into a corpse, but you didn’t, so he got away. If he puts a bullet through you tomorrow, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.” Charlie looked around at everyone. There seemed to be some consensus about this. It was suddenly obvious that they’d been discussing this character flaw of mine right before I’d come in.
A tired breath escaped my chest. I felt like a deflated balloon. “Let me see if I understand you correctly. The bounty hunter got away—and that’s my fault because I could have cut his head off. And so if he comes back, it’s on me. It won’t be his fault, or the fault of the guy who hired him. It will be my fault?”
“Well, there’s no need to get sarcastic!” Charlie said. “I’m just saying you could have stopped it.”
“What about you?” I asked Luna. “Do you think I should have killed him?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her eyes flickered over to Suki, who was watching us all with a nervous expression on her face. “I’m not going to judge because I wasn’t there. But that guy came here to kill you. He forfeited certain rights when he made the decision to do that.”
“Exactly,” said Charlie.
“None of us want to,” Luna said. “It isn’t about want. It’s about necessity, and the right to self-preservation.”
“And who decides when it’s necessary? Who has the right to do that?”
“We do,” Charlie said. “When someone threatens us—we have that right.”
“I can’t accept that,” I said. “It feels … I don’t know, just wrong.”
“You’re being naive,” said Charlie.
“And you’re …” I didn’t know how to finish.
“Hey, it’s just my opinion,” he said. “You’ll get over it. Now give us the bad news. What did Ophelia say?”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” I said.
“I’m not trying to change the subject. I am changing the subject. It’s part of my assertive nature. Did she flip out, or what?”
“No, she didn’t flip out, actually. She’s just worried about what could happen if we leave.”
Charlie scowled. “What—like we might have some fun? You know, she ought to be worried about Endpoint Psychosis. Isn’t that what your father called it? When a vampire goes mental and bites everything in sight?” He opened his closet and started rummaging through his clothes.
“Maybe she’ll change her mind when your dad is here, and we have a bit more protection.”
“We don’t need my dad’s protection. We can look after ourselves. We proved that tonight. Ophelia worries too much.”
She had ten billion reasons to be worried, and so did I, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue any more. I just wanted to be alone with Luna. “Can’t we talk about this later?”
“It’s always later with you,” he snapped. “Now is later.”
I looked at Luna.
“I’m with him,” she said. Her arms were still crossed. She pointed an elbow in Charlie’s direction. “You always want to put things off, especially when it might upset Ophelia.”
“Can’t you be on my side for once?”
Her face softened. “I am on your side. I totally freaked when Charlie told me what happened on the roof. But he’s right too. None of us are happy living like this.”
“It’s better than having someone kill us.”
“Someone?” Charlie asked. “Like the nitwit in the Elvis costume? Do you really think anyone’s going to show up that we can’t deal with?” He shook his head in disgust. “I need to get outta here. One night—that’s all I’m asking for. What have I got to do, strap a bomb to my head and run screaming down the halls? I’m going nuts!”
That much was obvious. I stared at his bedroom windows. Even with a thick layer of black paint over the bulletproof glass, and a set of shutters, blinds and curtains in the way, I could feel the night dying outside. The sunrise was minutes away. I finally felt like a thousand pounds of water crashing down the mountain. I just needed my bed to break the fall.
“This isn’t a problem we’re going to solve tonight. I’ve got to get some sleep. We can whine all we want. I agree with Ophelia on this.”
“So do I,” said Suki. She avoided Charlie’s gaze. Her face started to redden. “It might be Halloween, but staying alive trumps a dinner date.”
“That depends on who you’re dating,” Charlie said. He gave her a look. She smiled and glanced away. It seemed his good humour was making a comeback.
It was time to make an exit. Luna and I walked out the door and into the hall. We were finally alone. Then her phone buzzed.
“Please don’t get that,” I said, but she was already scanning the text.
“Oh, shoot … Ophelia says Vincent’s up and he’s hungry. I gotta go.”
My face drooped.
“What’s that look for?”
“Nothing …”
“It’s not like Ophelia would let us stay together anyway. Haven’t you noticed how she always shows up when we’re alone for more than a minute?”
I thought she was exaggerating, then I heard the clump of the elevator doors opening down the hall.
“See what I mean?” She turned and sprinted for Charlie’s room to save him and Suki from whatever mischief they might have been considering.
I slipped into my room to avoid Ophelia. The air of disapproval around her would just bring me down. She’d want to take Suki and Luna downstairs—especially now that Vincent was up. He was Hyde’s son, and, like his father, had been infected with lycanthropy. Although he could subsist for a short time on normal food, to stay healthy he needed a regular dose of blood. Ours was preferable, so we had to donate regularly, then replenish ourselves from blood donor bags my Uncle Maximilian had stolen. Vincent always turned when he fed this way, and so he had to be restrained within an elaborate matrix of steel manacles. Even chained, he was terrifying. Just the scent of him as a beast made my teeth drop. Vampires and werewolves were natural enemies. It was one of the reasons there were so few of them. It was also why the girls fed him, Suki most often. He didn’t feel as threatened by her.
I entered my room and removed my armour. It was similar to a suit my late friend John Entwistle had worn. Until his death at the hands of Hyde, Vincent’s father, he’d been the oldest vampire in the West. His body was buried in the same cave-in that killed Maximilian. If things were as bad as Ophelia implied, we might need their expertise. Since both were vampires, we could raise them up once we managed to find them. All that stood in the way was time, lots of blood, a few million tons of rock and Ophelia’s reluctance to venture out from our high-rise sanctuary.
I debated having a shower, but I was feeling the groggy pull of sleep. I lay down, pushed my head into my pillow and started thinking about the tunnel of light. This was another part of our training. Ophelia had us focus on the same mental image whenever we needed to restore our inner harmony. We were supposed to choose something deeply personal. For me, it was the warm glow I saw each time I died. A healing light that made me feel whole.
A few moments later I was dreaming of Charlie’s cottage on Stoney Lake. I was on the dock, sword in hand, my armour tight against my skin. The night was cool and crisp and deadly quiet. Mist rolled in off the water, the chill of it raising goosebumps on my arms. I sensed that something sinister was approaching. Soon the air was so thick with fog I could barely see more than a few feet away. A shadow flickered in the corner of my eyes. I spun but saw nothing. A pain in my gums followed as my teeth dropped. The presence was drawing nearer. I could feel it.
I turned in slow circles, scanning the fog, but it remained out of sight. Then my armour started to fall apart. A shoulder plate slipped out first, then the metal over my chest. I tried to stop it and dropped my sword. As the blade disappeared through a crack in the dock, I dove for the handle. It detached. One quiet splash later, I was holding an empty piece of leather-wrapped wood. I sensed the evil presence behind me and spun to face it. Woven Kevlar unwound. What was left of the moulded platinum inside tumbled out like so many tin plates. My underwear was missing. It left me naked in the moonlight.
Someone laughed behind me, then a man’s voice crackled like dry leaves. “A naked dream. I know what that means!”
I quickly used my hands to cover myself, and turned. A vampire was floating in the air. His legs were crossed. Each hand was buried in the opposite sleeve of his orange habit. His eyes looked closed, but I knew otherwise. This was Baoh, the prophet. He had no eyes. Skin grew over his empty orbits. His large eyebrows, which I’d once likened to insect wings, floated gently on the breeze.
“A word to the wise, young man. If you find yourself naked with an audience and you wish to remain anonymous, cover your face. Very few of us are recognized by our privates.”
He had a point, but I kept my hands where they were.
He snapped his fingers. Jeans and a simple T-shirt appeared where my armour had been. “I didn’t come here for a skinny dip, gweilo. You are in danger. Enemies gather in the shadows. The bounty is just the beginning. Come. There is littl
e time.”
CHAPTER 5
THE NEW ORDER
BAOH DROPPED SILENTLY to the dock, cocked an ear to the wind and listened. I heard nothing unusual—waves lapping the shore, crickets, the patter of moth wings, the hum of mosquitos, bats hunting overhead, the creaking of the pines and the swish of needles.
He moved closer, his slippered feet soundless on the wood. We were walking the Dream Road, a spiritual highway that connected people who slept. At Ophelia’s request, we’d met in similar circumstances during the summer so we could deal with the werewolf Hyde. Baoh and I had played Wii Boxing together and discussed the prophecy. He was about as weird as a guy could get without adding extra heads.
“You need to take us somewhere safe,” he said.
“Isn’t this place safe?” I asked.
“Safe? This is a dock. It doesn’t even have walls. Bah! Even a blind man could find you here.”
I looked at his eyeless face. “Good point.”
“We aren’t the only ones who travel the spirit planes, you know. A new power is rising. The New Order. Not a terribly original name, but they are incredibly dangerous.” He took me by the arm, his bald head level with my shoulder. “Quickly, get us somewhere you’ve been that no one else knows about. Didn’t you have a secret hiding spot as a kid?”
As soon as he asked the question, the dock and the landscape around us blurred and shifted. I remembered that from my last visit to the Dream Road: whoever was dreaming had the power to alter the surroundings.
Baoh turned and bumped his head against a hook in the wall. “Oooh!” He took a step back and his foot came down on a stack of comics, which slipped out from underneath him. “Whoa! What is this place, a death trap?”
“It’s the closet in my old bedroom.”
“Is there somewhere we can sit?”
I looked around at the comics, shoes, Star Wars figures, unmatched socks and green plastic army men scattered everywhere. “Um … not really.”
He didn’t seem pleased with my answer so I pushed everything to the far end of the closet to make space on the floor. His joints cracked as I helped him sit. Vampires, even old ones, didn’t usually have that sort of trouble.