by C. T. Phipps
I wasn't sure what the Vampire Nation had done to it was an improvement. In a very real way, Detroit had gone from being a city in a severe economic downturn to a weird combination of Vegas and Manhattan. Some people described it as a kind of Vampire Dubai. The “New” in front of Detroit wasn't just for show; it was a fundamental paradigm shift and transformation of the city’s soul.
The outskirts of the city were still much the same, with overcrowded, crumbling buildings and tenements in bad need of repair. Strip clubs, liquor stores, massage parlors, drug dens (since they'd legalized almost everything in Michigan), fortune tellers, occult bookstores, and more were everywhere outside of Downtown. Those weren't so different, but they catered to the out-of-town crowd now for a lot more money. The closer you got, though, the more things became strange. Opaque black glass towers rose from the ground alongside hotels, casinos, nightclubs, and film studios. There were only a handful of vampires, comparatively, in a city of two million, but those two hundred undead had fundamentally changed the culture of the city.
Everyone worked for vampires, either directly or otherwise, with plenty adopting their style and dress, which had led to “New Detroit Goth” becoming an actual fashion term. Those citizens who didn't get with the program and work for the undead were still influenced by them, with churches and groups like Melissa's being more common than you'd believe. There were even some sham and not-so-sham health clinics that promised simply to hypnotize your addictions away.
There weren't just vampires too, as the Bailout had opened the way for hundreds of other supernaturals to immigrate to cities, where they felt there would be more acceptance. Shapeshifters, wizards, witches, demonkin, rakshasas, tengu, and otherkind all called the city home. Many of them hated vampires more than regular humans did, but it was better to be in a place you could be yourself than live a lie, no matter how bad the company.
Melissa looked like a deer in the headlights, looking at all the strange and crazy things going on around her. I didn't blame her, since there was presently a naked goblin walking down the streets beside us, spouting beat poetry.
“Man, why don't you have a piece of this?” David said, shaking his head in amusement. “This should be your place … and mine.”
“Doesn't work that way,” I said, shrugging as I slowly drove down Main Street toward the Apophis resort. “Everything here is owned by twenty vampires.”
“You're shitting me,” David said, appalled.
I shook my head. “Nope. New Detroit is owned by twenty vampires, their servants, their dhampyr children, and whatever human or supernatural hangers-on they've chosen to work with. They also pay a tithe of their profits to the Council of Ancients back in Romania. Most of the rest live in Midtown, trying to eke out a living getting selfies taken with the locals or running whatever business they can drum up with their innate mystique. Most of the places with ‘vampire’ in their name are run by something else, but that's how society rolls, I guess.”
It was part of the reason I'd moved out, though I hadn't expected to fall quite as far as I had. Thoth had wanted me to make my own way, but he'd been offended when I'd tried to cut him out of my life completely. Every single door in the city had promptly shut in my face and my stupid pride had kept me from apologizing. I expected him to be ecstatic when I came up to his door needing a favor. That or slam the door in my face while gloating.
He was that kind of guy.
“The top one percent of one percent of the world's wealth belongs to the undead,” Melissa said. “I didn't know that wasn't vampiredom in general, though.”
“Yeah, well, they saved us when China cut us off,” David said, crossing his arms. “Or would you prefer to have bread lines like in the Soviet Union?”
“I heard China cut us off because they found out how much of the American economy the vampires already controlled,” Melissa said.
David nodded. “I also heard the Eastern vampires arranged for China to cut us off so they could take over.”
“Yeah, because when I think secret mystical capitalist conspiracies, I think communists,” I said, snorting at their conspiracy theories.
David and Melissa both looked at me. Apparently, even David thought they could pull it off.
They gave the Old Ones too much credit.
“What?” I said.
Neither of them had an answer for me as we came into view of the Apophis hotel and casino. It was, in simple terms, breathtakingly beautiful. It wasn't perhaps the most original design, being essentially just a larger version of the Luxor casino in Vegas with a pair of jackal-headed sphinxes plus an amusement park built into the side, but the place was the center of New Detroit's nightlife.
When vampires came in from outside the city to hold conferences, they stayed in the Apophis. When Washington D.C. congressmen and senators came to Michigan looking for bribes, they received them here. It held the hottest acts and the hottest tables and was a place many vampires wanted to live permanently, even if it meant subordinating themselves to Thoth while they were there.
A relatively small number of religious protestors were gathered outside the casino strip walkway, only a few hundred rather than the tens of thousands that would be necessary to actually shut the place down. Indeed, there was an equally large crowd gathered around them. Some of them were counter-protestors, but a lot of them were just pissed off and very drunk vacationers looking for a fight.
“Your people?” I asked, pulling toward the Apophis's private parking lot near the side entrance.
“Yeah,” Melissa said, frowning. “I expected more of them to show.”
“Don't come to Hell to talk about God,” David said, shrugging. “The nice part of it, at least.”
“If you say so,” Melissa said, disgusted. “I look forward to talking to your creator.”
“I’m glad someone is.”
Something in her voice told me Melissa was hiding something. I could also sense apprehension and unease through our blood connection. It was possibly just the normal fear and uncertainty of being a newborn vampire, but it felt like something else. I couldn’t put it into words.
My beat-up Jeep Liberty didn't exactly fit in with the sports cars, limousines, Cadillacs, Mercedes, and Audis that filled the private parking lot. However, when one of the lot’s security guards tapped on my window, I gave him a hiss with my fangs and sent him running without turning his back, bowing the entire way.
“You enjoyed that,” Melissa said.
“You're damned right I did,” I said, getting out of the car.
“This is all overwhelming,” Melissa said. “Do you ever miss it?”
“Do I ever miss what?” I said, looking at the giant pyramid next to us. “The club sandwiches with cold Mexican beers, the ten-thousand-dollar-a-night hookers, and shirts laundered like they do in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo?”
Melissa blinked. “Did you just quote Johnny Mnemonic at me?”
“Finally!” I said, startling her. “I've been making variants of that quote for years now and you're the first one to have gotten it!”
“I got it,” David said, shrugging. “I just didn't give a shit. You should only quote horror movies.”
I rolled his eyes. “Says the guy who thinks he looks like Fright Night’s Colin Farrell in the right light.”
Melissa looked over David and gave a disbelieving shake of her head. “The right light being darkness?”
I laughed at her. “Hey, Sunshine, you're all right.”
“Sunshine?” Melissa said.
“It seems like a good nickname with you being an enormous anti-vampire bigot and all,” I said, chuckling.
Melissa muttered something about vampires not being a race before following me into the side entrance that celebrities and other VIPs used to get into the casino. The sounds of slot machines, live music, and hundreds of people pressed together in a tiny ocean of blood bags filled the air. The air was oxygen-rich to keep the customers awake as well as their blood fresh.
Looking at the sights before me, I took a deep breath. “You want to know whether I miss it? Really? Well, the answer is, yeah, sometimes.”
That was when a fat man in khaki pants and a flowered shirt pointed at me. “Oh my God, honey, look! It's Forest Whitaker!”
An equally obese woman dressed similarly looked at me sideways. “Forest Whitaker is a vampire?”
I pulled up the hoodie on my sweatshirt and started walking toward a private elevator between a pair of obelisks. It was in the presence of all this grandeur that I wondered if my creator felt the need to overcompensate for the fact that he'd come from nothing. Then again, maybe it was just like he'd said. He'd worked his way up from nothing and managed to achieve all of this. Maybe he just wanted to show how far he'd come.
Or maybe he just liked faux Egyptian crap.
Reaching the elevator, I saw it still had the same hand scanner as before. I hesitated before putting my palm over it, then reluctantly did so. It scanned my handprint and accepted it. The doors proceeded to open to a beautiful wood-paneled elevator with a mirror in the back. My eyes caught a little gold crucifix around Melissa's neck and I was transfixed because, for a second, I thought the cross glowed.
I was about to head in when the vampire I least wanted to see in the world came up behind me. He was wearing a dark ill-fitting suit over a button-down white shirt, with a fedora improperly resting on his head. He wasn't ugly despite his slovenly appearance—a bit like Charlie Sheen before he completely lost his mind. In his mouth was a thick cigar, a mix of pot, tobacco, and fairy dust from the smell of it.
Theodore Eaton, Ashura's creation and the voivode's bellidux. He was the chief torturer, bully, and thug of New Detroit. In order to keep all the supernaturals in line, he was given free rein to beat, torture, or kill anyone he considered out of line. In other words, he was a rabid cop, and coming from one of Detroit's tougher neighborhoods, you could guess what I thought of rabid cops. He’d also wronged me.
Horribly.
Seeing him, my hands extended claws. “Eaton.”
Melissa stared at me, perhaps sensing through our bond just how much I hated that evil, racist son of a bitch. Strangely, in that moment, I sensed just how much she hated vampires and all the ones around her. It was a hot and passionate hatred, not at all like her understated demeanor. In that moment, I saw images of her in a red cocktail dress luring vampires outside, and moments where she stabbed them through their sleeping chests with cold iron spikes before setting them on fire or dragging them out into the sun with chains. I couldn't tell if they were fantasies or reality.
But Melissa just became a lot more interesting.
“What did he do to you?” Melissa asked, having sensed more than I wanted her to.
“None of your business.”
I remembered being locked away in the basement of a building scheduled for demolition, my arms and legs chained to a metal chair and every part of my body sore from where Eaton had worked me over with his men. Vampires didn't bruise easily, but he had the advantage of superhuman strength, and his men were equipped with aluminum bats.
I was newly turned back then, still flush in my belief that I was invincible and that I was the good guy. It was a stupid belief given what I'd done, but Thoth had been very persuasive about why we'd done good things building New Detroit and taking down those who stood in the way of its construction.
Eaton, wearing a leather jacket and jeans and sporting a greaser haircut for some reason, punched me across the face. “You shouldn't have interfered in your better's feeding.”
“Fuck you,” I said, spitting blood on the ground.
The ultimate insult among our kind.
Eaton smiled and said, “Do you even know why you're down here? Why even your creator can't protect you?”
“Don't know, don't care,” I lied, wondering how I'd ended up here.
“You took what didn't belong to you. That girl belonged to an Old One.”
I remembered attending one of Voivode Ashura's parties where a despicably greasy-looking Old One had tried to take one of the mortal party guest's children. I'd ushered the child back to her parents and away before telling Thoth about it. Apparently, that had pissed some people off. Now, looking at Eaton, I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.
“She was eight years old, you bastard,” I said, staring at him.
“She would have been eighteen eventually, or not,” Eaton said. “Mortals aren't important.”
“Do your worst,” I said, not realizing he was only getting warmed up.
Eaton laughed. “They won't let me do my worst, Negro. The voivode was clear I couldn't rape you, cut anything off, kill you, or do any permanent damage. Then I have to release you in a week. That still leaves quite a few things open. I'm going to starve you for that time and leave a little girl of that age for you.”
I blinked in horror. “You son of a bitch!”
Eaton laughed. “My mother was a baroness, son. She taught me everything I know about keeping the wrong kind in their place.”
It was perhaps the only mercy I had that I don't remember actually killing the little girl, whose name I discovered was Sarah. I was a rabid dog when I attacked the scared, helpless little girl Eaton had dumped where I'd been imprisoned. I'd only come to after the horrible deed had been done and her broken, black-haired, doll-like form was in my arms.
I eventually tracked down Eaton and beat the living shit out of him. I would have killed him, had tried to kill him, but I'd done such a shit job of it that he'd managed to heal in just a few nights. The perils of using guns against the undead.
That was when I saw Melissa’s eyes widen and I realized she’d seen what had happened. “My God.”
I closed my eyes, ashamed.
“You're not welcome here, Exile,” Eaton said, his voice dripping with disdain. “You don't have your creator's protection anymore and are any vampire's meat.”
He licked his lips.
“This isn't your casino,” I said, struggling not to throw myself at the self-styled lawman. “You can't afford shit. You're one of the poor vampires just like the rest of us. Tell me, is it true the voivode writes you a weekly stipend and insists on having mortals manage your money because you can't be trusted with it?”
I wasn't any good at vampiredom’s catty “high school with murder” bullshit, but that was how the game was played here in the Big City. You weren't supposed to rip a man's face off; you were supposed to make him want to rip yours off so he could be dragged off for punishment. Normally by someone like Eaton.
Seeing he wasn't going to get me to attack him, Eaton sneered. “I look forward to feeding you to my dogs.”
“Goodbye,” I said, walking into the elevator with my servant before Melissa reluctantly followed.
The doors shut on us.
Chapter Five
It was a long elevator ride to the top.
“You know, really, I think Reality Bites is the worst movie ever made,” David said, unable to avoid making conversation for five minutes. “I mean, a bunch of whiny crybabies sit around their apartment complaining. Was that really all my teenage self wanted to do back then? I mean, get a life, guys. What were you doing in 1994?”
“I was ten,” Melissa said.
“I was trying not to get shot,” I said, really wishing we'd get to the penthouse already. “Why are we friends again?”
“Because I used to work here and shared the graveyard shift?” David added a little rimshot noise at the end, presumab
ly because he thought graveyard shift was funny. It wasn't funny the first five hundred times.
“Ah, good,” I said. “I was afraid it was something that had to do with your personality and I was wondering what was wrong with me.”
David wasn't going to let it go, though. “Being a terminally uncool poor vampire, but we knew that.”
I was cool, dammit! “Now listen here—”
“So, what's your creator like?” Melissa, thankfully, changed the subject. “Do I have to like bow or anything?”
“He'd like it,” I said, staring upward at the numbers above the door. “I wouldn't recommend it.”
“Thoth is the youngest of the Old Ones,” David said, sounding like he was discussing a baseball card. “He's the last one to turn two hundred and it was right before the Bailout, which he helped organize. He's a former slave, mercenary, assassin, painter, philosopher, wanderer, and magician. Oh, and he also gets more—”
I stared at my servant. “What are you, part of his fan club?”
“I'm just saying we'll be family as soon as you change me,” David said. “So, you know, it's good to suck up to the rich relatives. No pun intended.”
“Vampires actually slurp rather than suck,” I said, correcting a long-held misconception. “The heart does most of the pumping, so you really just open your mouth and let it go into your throat. The trick is to swallow it in gulps or you lose all the flavor.”
Melissa looked ill. “I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.”
“Actually, you probably couldn't have gone another night. It's pretty much why your hair has blood in it.”
“Oh, I didn't notice.”
David reached up to touch her hair, only for Melissa to slap his hand away with a bit more force than necessary.
“Damn! I think you broke my hand.”
“Deal with it,” I commanded. “Also, shut the hell up during this conversation and be respectful. I don't need you getting your throat torn out. Shitty servant as you may be, you are my friend and I don't want to see you killed.”
David opened his mouth to reply, then closed it before adopting a respectful posture and pose, keeping his hands behind his back.