by Kat Turner
“I am not an egomaniac.” Brian’s cheeks pinked, and he furrowed his forehead in the way he did when someone called him out.
Jonnie allowed himself a chortle and patted the other man on the arm. “It’s okay, mate. We love you anyway. What’s with the dogs?”
Brian glanced at the hyper pups circling his bare feet. “The lighter one’s Dolce and the other’s Gabbana. They’re Tilly’s. A gift for acing her midterms. Speaking of, she’s supposed to be taking them for a walk. We’ve got cider on the stove, so grab some and make yourselves at home. I’ll take your jacket, Eve love.”
Brian collected the coats and strode through the living room, soles padding across gleaming hardwood floors. He disappeared down a hallway while calling for his daughter.
Eve walked up to a wall covered in mounted gold and platinum records, and Jonnie admired her reflection in a shining silver disc.
“You need to bring Brian up to speed.” She spoke curtly, right to the point.
Embarrassed, Jonnie studied Eve’s profile instead of looking at his own reflection. She cut a regal portrait with her high cheekbones and corkscrew curls piled in a bun atop her head, stately as a Victorian cameo.
“You’re right.” He kissed the shell of her ear, brushed his lips against a warm spot on her neck right above her scarf. “I’d struggled for years trying to figure out how to choose my words, how to frame it. But after talking to Meg, I see the value in pulling the trigger once and for all. Launching right into it.”
She stared into that record like the thing was an oracle. “Well, there are those things we can’t say or don’t quite know how to say yet, even to those closest to us.”
Jonnie played with his tee shirt collar as he processed her words. He caught strange notes in her voice, the sound of things unsaid creeping to the surface. She spoke of something other than the matter at hand, but it wasn’t his place to pry. “I thought that for a while, but now I’m a firm believer in honesty and bluntness. It worked out earlier, more or less.”
Tilly breezed by, lissome in a velour track suit whiter than the virgin snow settling outside, her excitable dogs in tow. A matching stocking cap covered her cropped hair. She waved, hustling to the front door and pulling on a pair of brown sheepskin boots. The girl and her barking pets exited the house.
Eve hugged the massive volume to her chest. “I guess he’s no stranger to the weird and outlandish, but we should play it carefully all the same.”
Jonnie laid his hands on Eve’s upper arms. “It’ll be fine. These are our friends, we don’t have to worry about getting stories straight. We’ve got support.”
Wood flooring creaked as someone approached. Jonnie turned to see Helen, dressed in dark jeans and a black hoodie that had seen many washings. A faded graphic of a kitten riding through the cosmos atop a slice of pizza graced the front.
“The witch has arrived,” Brian’s wife said in her thick Minnesota accent.
“Make that witches.” Eve held up her book, a sly hint of humor drying her voice.
“I am so here for this. Excuse us for a minute.” Helen grabbed Eve by the wrist and led her off.
“We need to talk.” This from Brian, who sidled up to Jonnie as he watched the women duck into a room.
“Uh oh. The worst words. If we were in a relationship, I’d be wincing.”
Brian stepped an inch closer, his gaze heavy. The lines cornering his eyes and grooving his forehead deepened with concern. “I’m serious, mate. This—whatever this is—has gone on far too long.”
In the grand home, Jonnie turned inward as the gravity of it all hit him. He’d been keeping a monumental secret from his best friend for decades, hiding a life-changing facet of his identity from the people he considered nearest and dearest.
He’d acted on fear. Fear of rejection, alienation, being marked as different and strange. How wrong of him, to assume the worst of his best mates. Because that’s what he’d been doing. Using lies and secrecy to protect himself from exposure and rejection. But reckoning time had arrived.
“You’re right.” Jonnie met Brian’s eyes, settling into his truth. “You’re absolutely right.”
Awash in night, Jonnie leaned over the second-story deck railing and appreciated his view. At least the move outside to the deck, where he and Brian could talk in private, provided a serene setting to offset his impending, bombshell confession.
The Lake of the Isles lay beyond the yard and quiet street, placid black waters dotted with frost patches shining beneath the moon. Robust breezes zipped across his arms and face, carrying scents of burning wood. A carved pumpkin decorated a glass patio table, its interior candle peeking through triangular eyes and dancing in the wind.
Jonnie silently thanked the autumnal evening energy for providing the backdrop of his confession. Inner warmth compensated for his lack of coat.
Brian’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. “What is it?”
He mentally bumbled through a few attempts at opening lines, then spit out, “You’ve felt it. The pressure. To stay young forever.” Jonnie’s breath came out in white clouds, corporeal traces of his speech giving the words heightened impact through their tangible presence.
“Well sure, but it’s about reinvention at the end of the day. Negotiation and growth, the growth that happens when we acknowledge that we aren’t the same people, the same band, that we were twenty years ago. I don’t have to tell you this, mate. You know this. We’ve talked about it.”
“I suppose I haven’t internalized it before now.”
Brian bent into a deep lean, resting elbows on the wrought iron railing. “Is this what’s bothering you so much that it’s making you sick? A personal crisis over the industry, the trajectory of our career, and your role in it? Because believe me, I’ve been there. And if that’s it, I’m your ear. I’m here for you.”
Brian’s face came into and out of relief in the pumpkin candle’s jerking glow, bringing Jonnie’s attention to the wrinkle splitting his cheek. Awareness of the line, the character mark of a life fully lived, filled Jonnie with an odd mixture of envy, resentment, and discomfort.
The context of the conversation, its subtext about aging and death and all the rest, penetrated every small and inconsequential detail Jonnie would have otherwise taken for granted.
Regardless of how the next few minutes transpired, Brian would get to go on as a regular person. Instead of someone’s blood or rancid vegetable juice from the Amazon, he would drink apple cider with his family.
He would lovingly nag his child about taking proper care of her silly little dogs without worry of when he’d need to manage his vampirism again. Brian was normal. Uncorrupted and clean, at peace with the lines on his face and the linear shape of his life cycle.
Brian was united with his humanity, at one with himself.
Heat balled in Jonnie’s stomach, followed by a guilty, draining sensation and desire to apologize to Brian.
“Jon.” Brian shook his head. His distinctive, classically handsome face went blank. He tilted his head and touched his lips. Even in the low light, Jonnie could make out the clouds in his distant gaze. He detected palpable confusion setting in as Brian tried to figure out where they stood, what was happening, how to acquire sufficient detail without acting insensitive.
Jonnie clenched the railing, his stare falling to the tendons straining beneath his knuckles. “I bought the pitch. That the greatest asset is youth, the most valuable commodity. And I accepted a treatment, and it had side effects. Then they got worse and worse. I’ve been managing it, sneaking around as long as I have. Until I couldn’t anymore. Then I sought out Eve because of her work with dead people. Thought perhaps she could help undead, too.” He muttered the last sentence.
A gust whistled, bringing with it a flurry of dead leaves that skittered across Brian and Helen’s frosted lawn. Quiet followed, as deep as the abyss of a lake stretching beyond the two mute men. The flow of time calcified, everything locking up.
“
What are you saying?” Brian whispered.
“I’m a sodding vampire. An actual, real, vampire.” In a sort of perverse humor, his declaration echoed off the trees, raised voice splintering into a chorus of accusatory ghosts.
“Bollocks. Vampires aren’t real. Everyone knows that.”
“A year ago, you would have said the same about witches. But you’ve witnessed the symptoms of my transformation firsthand.”
Several more awful seconds of mummified silence lurched forward.
“The episode on stage.”
“Yes.”
“The disappearances.”
“Yes.”
“How long?” Brian’s voice trembled.
“It’s been twenty years now.”
Far off, a dog barked. A ripple of water glimmered in wobbling concentric circles as a fish surfaced, splashed, and vanished. The waves smoothed before they hit the shore. Jonnie swallowed a lump, his heart aching. He sought numbness, but the crunch in his chest wouldn’t abate. He’d betrayed his dearest friend. For decades, he’d lied to the person he considered a brother.
“What the fuck, man?”
“I know. I know.” Jonnie swallowed tears and pain, along with the more articulate words and eloquent explanations in his vocabulary.
“This is a lot.” Though shock flattened his voice, Brian laid an arm around Jonnie’s shoulders, his touch bringing relief. At least the man didn’t storm off in rage or contempt.
Jonnie squeezed Brian’s hand. “I guess this was the only group I’ve ever fit into, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize that. At some point the secret took on a life of its own and became a project that I protected, kept safe. As twisted as that sounds, perhaps on some level I got invested in it. I had a thing that was just for me. Because let’s be real, you have Fyre. You’re the leader, the one on magazine covers, the face people picture. And the lead guitarist, to boot. I’m second fiddle. Literally. But with this, I had something no one else had. I was peerless. Alone at some imagined pinnacle of my own making. And the cliché is true, in case you were wondering. It’s lonely at the top.”
Brian hugged him tighter, a wholesome assurance. His healthy smell of fall spices and cooking smoke promised the permanence of home. “What do you go through?”
Jonnie spilled his guts. The treatments, Connors, the symptoms, and fears of coma. His wrongheaded plan to die for Cara. All of it. When done, tears streaked his face. But a hundred-pound millstone dropped from him at last.
Shedding the weight of the ages left him so unburdened he could fly. Chase the gossamer strips of clouds racing through the October sky and run with them to the edge of the world.
A hard hug from Brian yanked Jonnie close. Brian cradled the side of Jonnie’s head with one hand. His breath was hot on Jonnie’s jawline, his hand dove in his hair.
“I love you. And don’t you forget it. Never ever, no matter what.” The private words, an intense and hoarse whisper in Jonnie’s ear, stoked within him a grand fire, a marked elevation.
With it, a mysterious cousin to sexual arousal lit him up, expanded him, merging with the magic of night. The pair, closer than twins as it was, now shared a bond of fierce and surprising intensity. Together, they identified and embraced the limits of loyalty.
As if joined by a psychic wire bringing them into attunement, the bandmates broke away at the same time. Two sentinels looked out over still waters and fast skies. Streetlights like giants offered muted illumination. A pedestrian passed on the sidewalk, two leashed Saint Bernards walking him as he stumbled behind.
“So how do Eve and the book fit in?” Brian asked, his tone returning to its conversational cadence.
Metal burned icy hot against Jonnie’s palms, dampening as sweat melted snow crystals. “She does spiritual work. She’s trying to do right by a family she made a mistake with, and in the course of doing so ended up at their home with the intention of casting a spell. She showed me the book where she found it.”
“I can tell there’s more.” Brian waved at his daughter as she hiked up the stone steps inlaid in the steep front lawn, Dolce and Gabbana buoyant at her feet.
Jonnie hung his head and lifted it before relaying more information. “The company I got my treatments through is part of some conglomerate dealing in all kinds of shadowy business. This family Eve’s trying to help is mixed up in it, too. She went to their home and found some kind of exotic species of bloodthirsty animal penned up in the mum’s shed.”
When conversations veer in a certain direction, into the realm of the esoteric, the conspiratorial, the outlandish, one expects the other person to balk. To laugh a derisive snort and dismiss certain suggestions as barking mad lunacy. But Brian didn’t do that. He simply stood, gazing out over his front lawn, posture rigid and exhalations translucent clouds. “There are things I never told you, either.”
In the film of snow covering the deck, Jonnie made a fan with the bottom of his shoe. When you tell your best friend you’re a vampire and he replies with such a remark, there isn’t much to do except wait.
“Last summer I found myself deep in an unspeakable nightmare with Joe Clyde.”
“Haven’t heard that name in ages.” Fyre’s former manager committed suicide. Before he’d taken his own life, Brian had fired him over irreconcilable creative differences and inability to reach a consensus on Brian’s vision for Fyre’s artistic future. Shortly thereafter, the band had survived a stage disaster, but Jonnie hadn’t seen a reason to connect the dots until now.
During that tumultuous period, Jonnie had been happy to focus on making music and playing onstage while Brian handled the uglier aspects of band leadership.
“I suppose I can relate to you. About being unsure. How to tell anyone, even those in the core of your inner circle, about a secret you yourself can’t fully believe.” Brian’s shoulders relaxed, and he tilted his head as if to invite a response.
Jonnie scratched the side of his neck, a vise in his midsection creating discomfort. Anything having to do with secretive involvement couldn’t be good. “Sounds like you need to get whatever it is off of your chest.”
“The cult that Joe was mixed up with was deeply into demonology. Thought it was rubbish at first, but then he led me to a party with masks and ritualistic overtones. I got the hell out of there and cut him off Fyre like a melanoma. But the cult didn’t give up. They used the stage accident as a ruse and kidnapped me. They’d summoned some fiend.”
In the cold evening, warmth crawled over Jonnie’s scalp. He bit a hangnail. “A demonology cult.”
Brian’s jerked his neck, his face swiveling in Jonnie’s direction as he slashed him a scalpel-eyed stare. “Sounds like it’s not a closed subject after all.”
“No. The girl who died, whom Eve couldn’t help pass over, was supposedly in a Hollywood cult before her family brought her back to her hometown. At first her death was listed as a suicide, but after visiting with the mother, Eve came to believe it was something else altogether. More akin to a voluntary sacrifice.”
A low growl from Brian. “That’s how Joe died. It wasn’t really suicide. He was sacrificed.”
Jonnie almost asked Brian if he thought the two deaths might be connected, then with a somber awareness realized that he knew the answer. He’d known at the time that the circumstances surrounding Joe’s death were strange but had chosen, for his own well-being, not to involve himself to closely in the matter. “Why did Joe want to bring you into the fold of his cult? What was the endgame?”
Brian hissed out a ragged breath. “They wanted me to consent to my own murder at the hands of this entity they had in their thrall. Then, as best I could surmise, they’d have a better shot of guiding their demon into my body, to possess me. So I’m easier to control, a more profitable singing, dancing monkey. And, ideally, immortal.”
Light flashed in Jonnie’s brain. His thoughts raced. “That’s the agenda.”
“What’s the agenda?”
“To make a race of immortals.
To synthetically engineer beings who will live forever. First, they gain control of the body through procedures like mine. Then they claim the mind. That’s where the possession element comes into play. So we’re pliable drones they can pilot, control. Living, breathing ATM machines that they can bend to their will.” Jonnie’s speech sped to a rapid spray of bullets as it struggled to keep up with his sparking mind. “How did you break free?”
“Helen. She used her magic. Saved my life.”
Ideas unspooled at a breakneck pace. “It’s Eve, too. The women and their books. They’re some kind of counterbalancing force to whatever this cult is doing, to how they’re using the conglomerate to execute their deeds. Susan, the girl’s mom, she’s a wild card right now. But she’s significant. Important. She wants to get her hands on Eve because her magic matters to their scheme.” He paced back and forth, treading a track in the snowfall.
“Helen blamed herself for what was happening to me. She claimed the demon came into being when she got in touch with her powers, when she activated them. She thought she cursed me.”
“Mmm. I don’t think that’s quite it. It’s more like some cosmic machinery, seeking equilibrium.” Still pacing, Jonnie raised a palm. “When one side takes an action, the other responds.” He flipped his other hand.
Brian tapped his chin with two fingers. “Think it’s about time to see what the ladies found in those books?”
Jonnie could only nod.
Twenty
Inside the front flap of Helen’s book sat a simple black circle. Eve lay on the floor of the other woman and her husband’s bedroom while the duo silently perused each other’s spell texts. Heady jasmine incense filled the cozy space, a sanctuary decorated in sea foam and cream tones. Two decrepit old cats, one black and one white, napped on a king-sized bed.
“It makes sense that you have the earth one.” Helen brought Eve’s book close to her face. “Checks out with the necromancy. Your ability to pull their spirits from their bodies and reach the parts of them stuck on the material plane after death.”