by C. T. Phipps
“Will I be able to go back in time if I run eighty-eight miles per hour?” I asked.
“Only if you have a Flux Capacitor,” Thoth said.
Fatima, David, and Melissa stared at him.
“What?” Thoth said.
“Yeah, well, I have no idea how I did that.” I tried to remember the circumstances that had brought it about. I'd been thinking about the worst day of my life, and then someone had tried to blow me up. Neither were things I really wanted to repeat in order to figure out how to go back into instant replay mode.
“Did you learn anything about Renaud?” Fatimah asked.
I contemplated what I was going to say and hoped Thoth wasn't listening to my thoughts. “Yeah, Eaton's involved in this shit. He helped set up the attack on the Apophis in exchange for a big payoff. Also … Renaud is planning an attack on the Network.”
Thoth raised an eyebrow. “The Network, are you sure?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.”
“You should go warn them then,” Thoth said. “I’ll inform the voivode of Eaton’s treachery. Take Melissa with you. She’s earned a measure of our trust and still might be useful in tracking down Renaud before he strikes again.”
“Great,” I said, wondering why the hell I’d just lied for the Network. What had I gotten myself into?
Chapter Ten
I bought a brand new black sweatshirt and hoodie to go with a new pair of sweatpants from the Apophis gift shop. Aside from the gigantic ankh symbol on my chest, which practically announced to the world I was a vampire, it was nicer clothes than I was used to wearing lately. Thoth gave me his wallet's cash, and that turned out to be two thousand dollars. Pocket change for him, but enough to seriously improve my situation.
God, I hated being poor.
I could have probably taken a number of the Apophis's rentals or one of my creator's cars to visit the Network, but that wasn't going to improve my chances of getting anything out of them. The Network was mostly made up of poor and struggling vampires like me, but there were rakshasas, half-demons, fairies, shapeshifters, and others among them too.
If I walked in there looking like one of the establishment I'd get my ass handed to me. The Network might not have much power left, but there was a reason the Bogatyr didn't just go smashing up their meetings. So we took my Jeep Liberty instead.
Sitting in the driver's seat, I was very conscious of the fact Melissa was beside me, probably pondering how she'd just gone from being a woman desperate to protect humans from vampires to a spree killer in three seconds flat.
I didn't have the heart to tell her that was part and parcel of the vampire package. A vampire might feel immense guilt over being a killer, even kill himself over it, but the fact was we were made by biology to kill. The wiring that prevented most humans from even contemplating murder wasn't there anymore.
It had its upside.
David was in the back as before, but he was also next to a couple of duffle bags and a set of towels, which were covering up all the weapons Thoth had lent me. I wasn't exactly comfortable driving around even as vamp-friendly a town as New Detroit with the small arsenal in my backseat, but it was better than going into this situation unarmed.
Thoth had also made sure I had some extra protection, which I was grateful for. I relived that moment in perfect clarity too, despite it just being an hour ago and not really something I needed to re-experience.
“Take this,” Thoth had said as I loaded the car. He handed me an ivory kukri covered in blood runes. It was beautiful, with an artistry I'd never felt before in a weapon.
“I'm not really a knife man,” I said, sensing the power radiating from it. “You make that from an elephant?”
“I made it from my creator's arm.”
I grimaced. “What the hell are you giving it to me for then?”
“Doubye had his arm torn off in a battle with lycanthropes in Haiti after they tried to free the island from his corruption of the Voudon faith,” Thoth said. “I was still his slave and could do nothing about it, but as he recovered, I took his severed arm and boiled the flesh from it. I spent weeks carving it and pouring all of my hatred into it while praying to the Loa to give me the strength to do what needed to be done.”
“Which was?”
“Stabbing it into his heart and killing him,” Thoth said. “The ultimate sin among our kind.”
“I thought only an Old One could kill an—” It dawned on me what he was saying. “Wait, it's that easy?”
Thoth frowned. “I wouldn't say killing an Old One with weapons made from another Old One’s bones is easy, but yes, that's one way of getting around it.”
I took the knife in hand and stared at it. “So, I could just kill you right now?”
Thoth didn't react. “Do you want to kill me, Peter?”
I sighed. “I'd say sometimes I do, but no, not even then. You pissed me off, though, when you didn't have my back. You should have stood by me.”
Thoth closed my eyes. “Yes. I suppose I should have.”
“You suppose right.” I held the weapon tight. “So all I have to do is jam this into Renaud's chest and he's toast?”
Thoth paused. “Probably not. As you can imagine, this object has some great personal importance to me and I've been steadily enchanting it and adding to its power over the centuries. Renaud is an immensely powerful immortal, though.”
“You're scared of him.”
Thoth didn't deny it. “I don't expect you try and kill Renaud. In fact, if you see him, I advise you to run so we can call in a full-scale assault. I don't want you without protection, though. Time Gift or not.”
“Yeah, well, I don't know how to use that.”
“Not all vampires have daily vivid recollections of their past, Peter. You've had it for a long time now.”
“Lucky me. And it's Stone now,” I corrected him. “If I have to have one name, I'd like to at least be the coolest-sounding of my three.”
“You are the rock on which New Detroit is built.”
I shook my head. “Don't compare yourself to the messiah, T, that's just wrong.”
I wasn't intending to use the dagger on Renaud. Vampires got stronger the more they aged, and seven hundred years old was a pretty big difference to try and cross even with automatic weapons. Hell, look how much good they'd done the HRL hunters. The knife was the perfect weapon for killing a much stronger but still young vampire, though.
Someone like Eaton.
Best of all, it would also look like some long-dead Old One did him in if they did any magic on his ashes. As far as I was concerned, it was Christmas. Weird how that holiday didn't give me the heebie-jeebies the way other uses of the Big J's name did. Maybe the fundamentalists were right about it getting too commercialized.
Nah.
“So, why did you lie to your creator?” Melissa asked, almost causing me to wreck.
“Huh, what?”
David looked up from reading his Kindle, still acting like all of this was perfectly normal. I had been the same way. Being one of the Bloodsworn was pretty normalizing to all sorts of crazy shit. I blamed the blood. “What did you lie about?”
“I didn't lie about anything!” I said. “How did you know?”
David paused. “Okay, Pet—er, Stone—that's a really bad way of trying to claim you didn't do something.”
Melissa shrugged. “I picked it up from your thoughts over our connection.”
“Dammit,” I muttered. “That's not how the bond is supposed to work. It's supposed to one-way, you to me.”
“Actually, she shouldn't be picking up anything from you at all,” David pointed out. “Renaud made her rather than you.”
“Yeah, well, I gave her my blood during her change, so I suppose Melissa has two daddies now,” I said, trying to shrug it off. “Look it up on the Internet to see if it's ever happened before.”
“Righto,” David said, playing with his Kindle some more.
“You realize I'm not going
to be so easily distracted,” Melissa said. “Who are these Network people to you?”
“That's none of your business,” I said, shaking my head. “Just because you weren't willing to blow up a bunch of Midwesterners spending their vacation money at the slots and pointing out the freaks doesn't mean I don't know that you're a vampire hunter.”
“Oh, is that why you punched me in the throat!” David said from the back. “I was wondering what the hell that was all about.”
Melissa paused. “I lied to you.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“My family was killed by vampires,” Melissa said, changing her tone. “It took me a while to find out, and I had to use a witch, but the drunk driver who slammed into their car had been hypnotized into doing it.”
I held back my retort—that her father had it coming for being an anti-vampire bigot. Right or wrong, the fact was that you wanted to avenge your family. “You ever find out which vampire did it?”
“No,” Melissa said, staring out onto the road.
We were entering the bad part of town now, which we'd have to cross in order to get to the place where we were going: the really bad part of town.
Old Detroit.
“I looked for a long time and dealt with a lot of people I shouldn't have in order to find out who he might have been. I even let myself be bled by vampires.” Melissa said it like it she had performed some great sacrifice versus something guys and girls paid two hundred bucks a bite for at the Velvet Room.
“And a dead end?”
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “I devoted myself to trying to oppose vampire special privileges and go after those who slipped through the cracks of the legal system. Also to developing a cure for those who wanted to transform back.”
“Yeah, pray back the day,” David said. “Vampirism isn't a disease, Melissa.’”
Melissa didn't respond to that. “I was already starting to regret those feelings towards the end. I killed someone who didn't deserve it.”
“You don't accidentally kill someone when you track down and murder them,” I said, disgusted with her evasions. “Thoth told me about the alleged rapist who turned out to just be some girl's boyfriend.”
Melissa actually looked stricken. “Her parents contacted me and told me the whole story. I interviewed a half-dozen people from cops to the local judge to the girl herself. All of them repeated the same basic story. That he was a monstrous predator who needed to be put down. That he'd caused the immense amount of bruising and abuse she'd endured. That he'd even caused her to lose the baby she had by her good Christian boyfriend.”
I grimaced. This story was starting to sound familiar. “Let me guess. The girl's baby was actually the vampire's, and the bruises were from her parents trying to make her lose it. That or to make sure she was going to give you the story they wanted.”
“They succeeded,” Melissa said. “Apparently, it's not abortion if it's a half-human monstrosity.”
David looked especially pissed off by her story. “So you tracked him down and killed him.”
Melissa sighed. “It was ridiculously easy. He was at his mother's house in a closet. I pulled him out while he was unconscious, put him on a tarp, hammered a wooden stake in his heart, and cut off his head. His mother said it was better this way.”
“His mother? How old was he? Really?” I asked.
It wasn't often I said a Black woman looked white as a ghost, but this was one of those occasions. “Seventeen. He'd only been a vampire for a few months. An older vampire had changed him while passing through and trained him just enough to hunt on his own. He mostly lived on animal blood and his girlfriend.”
“How did you feel when you found out the truth?”
Melissa stared at the road. “I wanted to die. I wanted to bring up the parents on charges of murder and I wanted to confess my crime to the police. I wanted to atone for what I'd done even if I never could.”
“Why didn't you?” David asked, his voice acidic. He’d really come around to the view of “we all have to be free if anyone is to be free.” I felt kind of guilty because I didn’t think half as well of vampires as he did.
“My fellow HRL members convinced me not to,” Melissa said, sickened. “They told me it wouldn't do any good. That it had been an honest mistake. That I would just ruin all the good work the HRL was doing in showing the crimes of the actually-guilty vampires and would become a tool to make them even more legally unaccountable.”
“So you chickened out,” I said.
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “I didn't want to go to jail for the rest of my life and was willing to accept an excuse, any excuse, not to do it.”
“Is this when you started screwing Renaud?” I asked again. I didn't know why it bothered me so much. Well, actually, I knew, but I didn't want to admit it. That wasn't happening.
Melissa stared at me. “Fuck you. That's none of your business.”
“Just saying, we're going to kill the guy. Don't quite see the appeal there myself.”
“Renaud came to me when I was on the verge of resigning from the HRL. He approached me first and said that we needed to take a more proactive approach against the undead. That we could build a better society where the guilty vampires were punished and the good allowed to go on with their unlives by destroying the Vampire Nation. To do that, we had to target the leaders rather than the general citizenry.”
That was actually useful information and indicated Renaud might not just be the random genocide-seeking psychopath Thoth described him as. Unfortunately, even if he wasn't, he was still willing to kill thousands to achieve his aims. “Go on.”
“He gave me his blood and I became his lover as well as partner in the hunt. There were other women he was with, but somehow, that didn’t seem important at the time.” Melissa paused. “We destroyed a lot of vampires together. The voivodes of New York, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and a lot of their courts’ membership.”
I didn't know how to react. “I would have heard of that.”
“I understand they're supposed to have been summoned back by the Council of Ancients,” Melissa said. “It's a cover for the fact that they're all dead.”
“You realize there's no way the Vampire Nation will let you live if that comes out,” I said, processing what she’d said.
“I'm prepared for what comes next,” Melissa said, her voice even. “Even though we managed to do all that, though, Renaud felt it wasn't enough. He'd been regenerating after a bomb hit him during World War II and it seemed vampire numbers had gotten so out of control, there was no way for any one man to deal with them all.”
“That's when he came up with another plan to get humanity to turn on us,” I said, finishing for her.
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “I thought he was brooding, cursed, and tragic, but it turned out he was just a controlling evil asshole sleeping with half the women in the group.”
David actually laughed at her. “You got Twilighted.”
Melissa leaned back beyond her chair and gave David the finger.
It actually wasn't that uncommon. A century of vampire-controlled media had done a lot to de-fang us, so to speak, and the reality was less than what a lot of people hoped it to be. God knew I was still waiting for my nightclub and spooky mansion where I sipped blood from wine glasses.
But that wasn’t important now. “I'm not going to turn you in and neither is David.”
“I'm not?” David asked.
“You're not,” I commanded him. Really, I was surprised I'd resisted doing this to him before. It was a lot easier on the mind than I'd expected. “I've got enough problems right now without adding ‘protecting Old One murderer’ to my list. Just keep it to yourself and we'll call it our little secret.”
Melissa seemed stunned. “Thank you.”
“You're welcome.”
We were now well into Old Detroit, the place where all the people who hadn't been willing to get with the new vampire-ruled paradigm had been sent. The name was
a bit of a misnomer, since much of the original city had been redeveloped and this was actually a part that reached just outside of town. It was, however, pretty familiar to me since it was exactly the sort of overcrowded crime-ridden hellhole I'd grown up in.
Detroit had something of an unfair reputation as, economic difficulties aside, it had been a place with strong community ties and people who were willing to fight for their city. Neither of its successor states had any of that going for them. The people trapped in Old Detroit were there either because they hated vampires or because they were vampires who'd pissed off the Old Ones. New Detroit was a glittering piece of red zirconium promising a better life while being built on fraud and lies.
The building I was looking for was a former church that had been deconsecrated and turned into a bar. It was surrounded by old beat-up Harley Davidson motorcycles and had a couple of snipers visibly patrolling on the rooftop, if you weren't yet understanding what sort of place Old Detroit was. The name of the place, The Razor, was prominently displayed across the front in half-functioning neon.
“This isn't going to go well,” I muttered, parking my car across the street. “I never did answer you why I was so protective of the Network, did I?”
“No,” Melissa said.
“Yeah, well, my ex-girlfriend is the head of it.”
Chapter Eleven
“Your ex-girlfriend? Really?” Melissa asked as all three of us got out of the car.
“Elisha Hernandez isn't the head of the entire Network, obviously,” I said, trying to downplay what she was. “She's just the head of the local branch.”
“The branch in the biggest supernatural hub in the world,” David said, smirking. “You could basically call her the Princess Leia of the Resistance to the Council of Ancients’ Evil Empire.”
I gave my servant a stare that could have melted steel. “Really, David?”
“Hey, they'd take the evil empire thing as a compliment,” David said, defensively.
They probably would. “Yeah, well, it's complicated, but if anyone can find out where Renaud is hanging out in the city, then it's very likely her people.”