by C. T. Phipps
He didn't get to say anything else before Thoth shot him too. The rest concentrated their fire on Thoth's position behind a yellow Mercedes, pinning my creator as they filled it with hundreds of bullets. One of them also tossed a grenade at it, sending him on the run. Unfortunately, they still had numbers enough to send someone after me in my moment of vulnerability. I tried to move, but I had bullets in my shoulders and legs, and two near my heart. If they'd been any closer, I would have been effectively staked.
Not good.
That was when a black hunter who looked like my cousin Dre come forward with a flamethrower on his back. He then spoke in a deep, James Earl Jones-like voice. “You're going to pay for all of the men you killed, Parasite. The holy flames of God are going to end your accursed existence.”
“Keep it in church, chief.” It wasn't the most badass line to go out on, but it was all I could think of.
Fire was a bad way to go.
Especially for an immortal.
“I'm sorry, Sean.” Melissa came up from behind me and sliced the bastard's head clean off with a single stroke of the katana. She then moved at lightning speed to the last of the hunters, cutting them down one after the other. One of them seemed to recognize her and pulled a pin on a grenade, looking like he was trying to take them both out. She just ran away, leaving him to explode with yet another delivery van.
All in all, there were probably about thirty dead bodies around us in the end. It was a massacre, and worse than anything Detroit had seen since the gang wars during the Great Economic Collapse. Even so, I was glad we'd done it, since despite all the grenades flying around, nothing building-destroying had gone off.
But I couldn't enjoy it right now. The scent of blood was in the air, a massive amount of it, and it was overwhelming all reason. Crawling on my hands and knees due to the painful burning rounds in my flesh, I went from body to body, tearing at them to drink the still-dead blood inside. I slurped blood from their wounds until my body managed to force out all of the bullets and heal itself. It was ugly and sick, but I felt stronger and better fed than I had in years. Corpse juice was, after all, still human blood.
“That's disgusting,” Melissa said, looking at me.
I looked back at her, spitting out the arm I'd chewed on. “Tell me you're not just barely holding back from going into these guys.”
Melissa looked away, clearly queasy. “I knew some of these people. Their names. Their families. Ezekiel, the one with the flamethrower, was a man I went to school with.”
“And they were ready to blow up a building full of gullible tourists,” I said, standing up and looking down at my bullet-hole-filled shirt. “You're buying me another one of these, Thoth. I just saved your casino, that's the least you can do for me.”
Thoth came out from behind one of the cars, limping, with his right leg all but destroyed by gunfire, and bullets in his left shoulder blade. “I'll give you a lot more than a shirt for your role in thwarting this. It's the least I can do.”
“That's for damned sure,” I said, hoping I could move out of the damn trailer park I was currently living in. I mean, a vampire in a trailer park sounds like an A&E show waiting to happen, and I didn’t want to be the subject of it.
“First we need to make sure the bomb is disarmed and to see what we can learn from any survivors,” Thoth said, still clutching his enchanted rifle.
“What survivors?” I asked, surveying the carnage around me.
That was when the sole remaining delivery van's back doors burst open and a young white man dressed like Kurt Cobain jumped out. He started running for the stairwell, not thinking clearly given he intended to get away from a trio of vampires (two with super-speed) on foot. He might have gotten away with it if he'd tried to drive away, though it was possible he didn't have the keys.
Thoth lifted up his rifle and fired.
The survivor stopped dead in his tracks.
“I have the detonator to the bomb!” the survivor shouted, obviously lying. “You don't want to kill me.”
“You're quite wrong about that,” Thoth said. “However, you might yet escape from this alive.”
“He might?” I asked, looking at Thoth skeptically. I wasn't the mad-dog killer type, but screw these guys.
“Oh yes,” Thoth said, his voice cold. “Would you do me the favor of interrogating him?”
I smiled, getting his meaning.
Chapter Nine
I held the surviving hunter up by his arms as the two of us floated two hundred feet in the air above the Apophis. Fireworks were going off in the background as part of the impromptu show by the (probably) fake Freddie Mercury, which was actually pretty good. I mean, Queen wasn't usually my cup of tea, but the guy was good.
“Oh God, oh God,” the sole survivor said, repeating over and over again. It was painful to listen to.
“Tell me who helped you get into the casino, where Renaud is, and whatever else you're planning.”
“Screw you, parasite!” the sole survivor said, defiant. “You killed all my … ahh!”
He started screaming when I dropped him and let us both start dropping toward the ground. I grabbed him and started floating us both slowly back up around fifty feet from the ground. A couple of tourists on the ground took pictures, thinking it was part of the show.
“What was that?” I asked, pausing. “I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over all the wind up here.”
The sole survivor threw up and I grimaced, hoping that didn't hit anyone down below.
“I, I—”
I dropped one hand.
“I'll talk! I'll talk! Jesus!” The sole survivor shouted, ironically almost causing me to drop the poor bastard again.
“Let's start with your name and can the prayer. You can do that when you get down,” I said. “Play your cards right and you might walk out from this.”
“Really?” the sole survivor gasped. “You're not going to kill me?”
“Sure,” I said, not sure at all if that was the case or not. “You might even avoid jail time if I like what I hear. I might also kill you like those other bastards, and I think you'll find a martyr's death isn't as glamorous as they've described it.”
Back when I'd been Thoth's head of security, he'd taught me quite a few things that had enhanced the training I'd received back in Iraq. One of these was, as he put it, the “lost art of interrogation.” Working over a guy—or hell, torturing him—sometimes worked but often went disastrously wrong. After all, it made people hate you and more inclined to lie. If you really did a number on them, then they might actually start remembering things differently from reality, as the mind was a lot more fragile than people realized.
Don't ask how I learned that.
Thoth argued that it was good to scare the shit out of people and then give them a reason to want to work with you. It wasn't anything more complicated than Good Cop, Bad Cop really, but vampires had to be both. No one believed we weren't monsters, so we had to be the manipulative, emotionally abusive bastards we were during interrogations.
And it worked.
“All right,” the sole survivor whispered. “I'll tell you everything I know. Please, just don't kill me.”
“Name, dude.”
“Dude?” the sole survivor asked. “You're a vampire who says dude?”
I dropped him five feet.
The sole survivor shouted. “My name is Reggie! Reggie Porter, I live on 2555 Iroquois Avenue in—”
“We have your wallet,” I said, cutting him off. “Tell me about what the hell you were trying to accomplish here.”
“It was the Vampire Knight!” Reggie said, actually crying now. “I don't know why we allied with him but as soon he talked, everything he said started to make sense. He said we needed to blow up the Apophis as a distraction.”
I blinked. “A distraction?”
“He said the real danger from the Vampire Nation wasn't the younger ones but the Old Ones. He said if we destroyed the Apophis, then the entire c
ity would be crippled and confused. Renaud would then hunt down and kill all of the Old Ones in the city. Without them to cover up the other vampires' crimes and keep the money going, then humanity would turn on the undead and kill them all.”
He probably wasn't wrong. When the Bailout had come with the terms of humanity accepting the legality of vampires, giving them their own legal system separate from regular humanity's, and a dozen other rules, some politicians had argued it would just be better to kill them all and confiscate their wealth. After all, we were dead, so did we really have a legal right to all those hidden trillions?
“Can you please set me down now?” Reggie whined.
“No,” I said simply. “Where the hell is Renaud?”
“How should I know!” Reggie shouted, now angry as much as scared. “He just popped in and popped out, sleeping with our wives and girlfriends when he wasn't telling us what to do. Hell, he was outright dating our previous head.”
“Melissa?”
“Yeah, that's her!” Reggie said, sighing. “Stupid bitch never understood this was a war and … argh! You're breaking my hands.”
“Be nice to the ladies,” I said, simply. “Maybe someday, one of them will be nice back. If this is all you got, you might as well be road pizza.”
Honestly, if this was all he had, I was inclined to drop him anyway. Renaud was proving to be pretty damn skeevy for a genocidal religious nut, but wasn't that always the way? It also bothered me that he'd apparently used his powers to make all of these guys into terrorists, though I suspected it hadn't taken much persuasion since Reggie didn't seem very repentant. It did cast a shadow on just what sort of relationship he and Melissa had, though.
“Wait! Wait!” Reggie shouted, practically begging. “There's more.”
“I'm listening.”
“We emptied out all of the Human Rights League's coffers for this job to pay off some vampire. A guy in a cowboy hat, real asshole, named Tom.”
“Theodore Eaton?” I said, once more tightening my grip.
Reggie winced. “Yeah, that's the guy.”
Vampire blood was already cold, but if it wasn't, then mine would have turned cold in an instant. It was almost too good to be true, but the HRL paying off that piece of garbage was just the sort of leverage I needed to get a death sentence handed down on him. Not even Ashura would want to protect him after she found out he was involved in anti-vampire terrorism.
I was about ready to take Reggie down when he continued talking. “There's a backup plan, too.”
“A backup plan? What?”
“I don't know!” Reggie snapped. “All I know is Renaud was talking to some other vampires. Young ones. Guys he said the Old Ones had been kicking around every bit as much as humanity, which is bullshit if you ask me.”
“Did he give a name for this group?” I asked, my voice measured.
“Some kind of network?”
“The Network?”
“Yeah!”
“Goddammit!” I snapped, grimacing.
The Network was one of the few “spooky” groups I respected. It was a kind of mutual support—well, network which had emerged in the aftermath of the Bailout. All of the various supernaturals getting in touch in their daily lives and on the Internet now that they no longer had to hide what they were. The Network had actually fought to have supernaturals treated like any other citizen of the United States in hopes of getting out from under the thumb of the mafia-like racial leaders. The Old Ones had responded brutally during the Network Riots, and the organization had been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
Just as planned.
Still, there were a substantial number of members here in New Detroit, and if the organization was a shadow of its former self, then it was still in existence. I had played a part in bringing them to that state, and it was a source of considerable guilt for me. I would have refused to believe them involved—I had friends among them, after all—but the simple fact was plenty of them had reasons beyond class warfare to hate the Old Ones. There would be massacres in the street once this information came out.
Dammit.
“Can I go now?” Reggie said.
I was tempted to just find a nice spot with no pedestrians and drop the son of a bitch, but as bad as I was, I was a man of my word. Usually. Besides, I had bigger fish to fry.
Slowly levitating to the ground, I found myself next to Thoth, Melissa, Fatimah, and David. The four of them were behind a set of metal-grate barriers, which they'd used to provide themselves some privacy.
Thoth had changed out his damaged “sexy pirate” attire and put on one of his signature suits, this time a bright red. Melissa was wearing a conservative trench coat, blouse, and knee-length dress to replace the cheap sweats I'd bought her on the way here.
Fatimah was the one who I had changed the most, as she was now wearing a tight black leather corset, the kind only vampire women could pull off (since they didn't have to breathe), as well as a pair of achingly tight pants. It made me uncomfortable because, well, I considered her akin to a sister and she was looking like an Afro-American version of Bloodrayne.
“Doesn't Islam have a prohibition against wearing stuff like that?” I said, setting my feet down on the ground before tossing Reggie before Thoth's feet.
Fatimah snorted. “It has also has a prohibition against drinking blood and bisexuality, but I manage to get by.”
“You totally lied to me,” David said, pointing at me. “She has a frigging harem.”
“Who doesn't?” Thoth asked, shrugging. “I mean among vampires that matter.”
I glared at them. “Great, now you've corrupted my servant.”
“You should turn him soon,” Fatimah said, smiling. “He's enjoyable company. Very useful in explaining why everyone had to leave the building without ruining their night.”
I felt my face in horror.
David raised his hands up. “I also have this great deal for how we can cover up all the dead bigots. We take the bodies out to some church or safe house of the HRL along with their bomb, then blow it up. We then have the guy here explain they were working on a bomb and it looks like they blew themselves up preparing for an attack of some kind. The vampires don't look like mass murderers and the terrorists look like—well, idiots.”
“I'll never betray my people like that!” Reggie said, seemingly acquiring a case of amnesia.
“Fatimah?” Thoth asked.
Fatimah reached down and picked him up by the back of his shirt, holding him in front of Thoth.
Thoth pulled out long curved ivory dagger, I think it was called a kukri, and slit his wrist before holding Reggie's mouth open so he would be unable to resist drinking the blood. Seconds later, the wound on Thoth's wrist sealed up and Reggie was staring forward as if in a trance.
Thoth stared at him. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Reggie said.
Thoth said, “You are now my servant. Not my Bloodsworn, but a Bloodslave. You will never receive rebirth, but be forever in the service to vampiredom. You will lie about what we want you to lie about and do what we tell you to do. You will serve as food to our guests when we acquire it and obey their commands as if they are your own. Your life will be one of toil and subservience from this point on. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Reggie said.
“Good,” Thoth said. “Run along to the security room to join your compatriots we found there. You'll be all receiving your new instructions shortly.”
“I understand,” Reggie said.
“I understand, master,” Thoth said.
Reggie twitched before responding. “I understand, master.”
Fatimah let him go.
The HRL terrorist turned around and started walking away.
“You should have just killed him,” I said, watching in disgust.
“I am not feeling that merciful,” Thoth said. “When I killed my owner, his pain was over in a minute, while mine has lasted lifetimes.”
&nb
sp; There wasn't much I could say to that. “Wait a damned minute. If you could just mind zap him that way, why did you have me interrogate him?”
Thoth shrugged. “Mind control is even worse for interrogations than torture. I've accidentally convinced people they're chickens or from ancient Egypt with the wrong word choice. Besides, you have a knack for breaking people.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, gee, thanks.”
“You're welcome,” Thoth said.
Melissa's expression was troubled. “Reggie had a wife and six-year-old daughter back home.”
“He should have thought about that before he decided to ruin both their lives as well as his,” Fatimah replied, walking over and then placing her hand on Melissa's face.
Melissa practically jolted at Fatimah's touch. “Uh—”
Fatimah smiled. “Look upon the thousands of people gathered around this place and know they continue to draw breath because of you. You think of us as the predators, but we are actually humanity's protectors. We have helped bring many wars and conflicts to a swift close as well as helped safeguard the environment. We have nurtured cities, the arts, learning, and culture where human leaders would have had their people fall into superstition or poverty. Vampires are the shepherds of humanity.”
“Yeah, the better to shear them,” I said, not at all convinced by Fatimah's spiel. “New Detroit is one gigantic all-you-can-eat buffet, except the food comes to you and pays you for the privilege of eating it.”
Melissa actually laughed at that and pulled away.
Fatimah withdrew her hand. “You're such a spoilsport, Peter. Though I suppose we should give you your death name now.”
“What?” I asked.
“You have come to your power,” Fatimah said. “Most impressive.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“That time slowdown effect,” Melissa said, staring at me. “I've never seen anything like it.”
“The Time Gift is a rare but not unprecedented ability,” Thoth explained. “It's a more powerful version of the manipulation of our auras to produce super-speed. Practitioners have been known to see into the future and the past, draw images off from objects, and manipulate the flow of time as you saw it.”