by Chris Lowry
It was worse with vampires because there were a ton of issues that went along with immortality, I bet. Plus the whole sparkling vampire craze of the last few years really did a number on their street cred.
He poured the alcohol into a glass in front of her and slid it on a coaster beside her hand.
She took a sip and gave him an approving nod.
I glanced at Elvis.
His eyes were roaming the floor of the casino, searching for other impersonators.
"We can't talk here," Kiko leaned over and whispered into my shoulder.
"Then why the hell did you bring me?" I grunted. Took a sip of my own.
"You look thirsty. And tired."
I was, but I wasn't about to admit it.
Elvis and I had just came from New Orleans fighting the second witch from a coven in Memphis. They had called up a group of demons that I accidentally scattered to the winds, and now was charged with hunting down.
The Big Easy wasn't so much. We met good witches, good vampires and a lot of trouble solving that particular problem.
Which led us to Vegas and the enigma sitting beside me.
"You have to get permission to work here," she told me.
I took another sip.
Snorted.
"She's telling the truth, Marshal," the bartender was back.
He heard every word because vampires have super hearing, which my companion knew.
I drained the beer in two swallows and set the empty on the top of the bar, which gave me a reason to keep both hands on the marble countertop.
"I've got the only permission that matters," I said. "The Judge sent me."
7 chapters on Kiko and the Dragon
7 Chapters on the Dragon lance quest
7 Chapters in Montana
7 Chapters on hunting the Scorpio Demon
CHAPTER
Elvis wants to help the trapped ghosts of Elvis impersonators.
This leads them to a local witch who is secretly working for Gloria.
She pretends to help the Marshal and betrays him.
Kiko demands payment for driving him around.
They go dragon hunting.
I'm not some Vegas Knight on a dragon Quest, I snapped.
Tell me about it. She sneered. I met the Vegas Knight. I worked with the Vegas Knight. And you sir are no Vegas Knight.
I lifted and eyebrow and tried not to laugh.
Wait, there really is a Vegas Knight?
Of course.
I was just kidding. On the verge of breaking out in a Monty Python sketch.
What is a mighty python?
Monty, I corrected.
No, his name was Loyen.
The Vegas Knight was named Sir Loyen? Now you're just messing with me.
Why would I joke about a dead Man? She stared over at me, right hand on the wheel so her chin was tucked into the curve of her arm. Dark eyes flashing as the oncoming headlights played off them.
I felt a surge in my sirloin and did a quick check on the extent of the Vegas spell.
Nope. Out here, it was all me.
Dead Knight, I said like a man trying to take his mind off certain things.
She smirked.
By the dragon.
Did you know own about this? I asked Elvis over my shoulder.
I am the one telling you, am I not? Kiko said.
A dragon in America, the ghost answered. No. But the watchers know about the Knights.
Knights? Plural?
Yes, Kiko sighed. There are on every continent where dragons live. Who do you think keeps the humans safe?
I didn't know what to think so I couldn't answer her.
Until thirty minutes ago, I didn't know dragons were real.
Vegas Vamps
Rock and roll vampires.
One gets the drop on me and almost takes my head.
This gets me introduced to the head of the Nest who has a ripper problem.
Thank a God your here. Now it's your problem.
He sounded bored as if giving it to me to solve was gauche already.
How is this my problem?
You are the Marshal. It's your job.
The Scorpio is a sex monster. A local witch is working with it to build up sex frenzy with the last spell. Last.
Gloria us using local witches to do the heavy lifting and sweeps in to steal the essence e.
I watched the fields pass by on one side, the mighty Mississippi on the other, though once it flowed past Memphis it really earned the nickname, Big Muddy. The water was pitch black in the faint light of a crescent moon, but I'd seen enough of it to know that hundreds of thousands of pounds of silt poured into the River from tributarys that leeched topsoil into the water.
As the River descended, it got wider and muddier, until it roared past New Orleans and down into the Gulf. Give a hundred years without manmade intervention and all that silt would form islands. In the past hundred years, manmade intervention had prevented that, hence the changing landscape of the Lousianna coastline.
I turned away from the River and it's muddied history but got just as morose looking out over Cotton fields. Highway 61 stretched over there somewhere, known as "The Blues Highway." Not many people knew that the blues originated in Mississippi, created by newly freed slaves still searching for their place in the South.
Jazz in New Orleans, Blues on the way down. I loved music, and in my almost one hundred years got to hear a lot of it.
"Did you see that?"
Elvis floated on the seat beside me.
"What?"
"Out there."
He nodded toward the cotton fields.
I couldn't see anything, just puffs of cotton flashing by in the field. Cotton that was impossible for me to see in the moonlight. That wasn't cotton.
"Ghosts," said Elvis.
"Where are they going?"
"I don't know. It's not like theres a newsletter."
The man came on the announcer and said we were stopping in Greenville.
"Greenville, maybe?" Elvis took a guess.
The brakes on the train squealed as it rolled to a stop. The Greenville station seemed like it was lifted out of the fifties. It was a long box building set up on a rectangular platform on the edge of a field. The lights in the building were on, but the platform was practically empty.
After midnight in rural Mississippi, I'd expect nothing less.
Elvis floated up out of his seat and toward the door.
"We don't have time for this," I said.
"Do you hear that?"
He floated outside.
I almost didn't follow him. Seriously, I had a job to do, and twelve monsters to stop. The longer I delayed, the worse things would get. I didn't have time to go chasing my ghost all over the emptiness of Mississippi cotton fields.
Huh. My ghost. Like he was my pet or something.
I hopped off the train and chased after him.
He was standing in front of another ghost. This one was an old black man, shoulders hunched, hair white around the edge of his bald head. It kept going into a beard that was snow colored, against a brown suit that looked second hand.
"Marshal," said Elvis. "This is Blind Dog."
I nodded a hello and he pulled a porkpie hat out of thin air and tipped it before covering up his bald spot.
"Blind Dog, this is the Marshal. Tell him what you told me about the Devil."
"Ain't no devil, son, not like you done gone and think about him. Scratch is real, Legba is real but he's one of them there demons. Makes his trade along the crossroads."
"You trade your soul to a demon to play the guitar?"
Blind Dog waved his hand and a smokey guitar materialized beside him. He slung it across one knee as he squatted off the ground. His fingers picked along the strings and played a gorgeous throaty blues riff.
"You get more than just playin when you do something like that," said Blind Dog.
He picked a riff and slid through a progression.
Elvis found his foot tapping along. He turned to me.
"You feel that?"
I nodded my head in time with the music. I couldn't help it.
"Yeah, I feel it."
"We have to help them."
"We don't have time," said the Marshal.
"Then make time. They're trapped here. No souls means they can't move on. Look out there."
He pointed a ghostly finger as shades and appiritions appeared out of the darkness of the fields, drawn to the edge of the station by the strains of a blue's guitar.
Thousands of them.
A soul demon haunting the hinterland of Missisippi.
You still love her, she said. It was in a low voice that carried across the room, muted by the large woolen tapestries that hung on each wall.
And the thing was she was right and also wrong because I did love her, or at least I loved the memory of her for after all it had been more than a decade since I had seen her, more than that even.
How can you possibly explain that to someone, except that of all the people in the world, she would understand for she had lost someone too. Several someone's through several lifetimes and it never got easier.
I knew this just as well as she for the losses in my life stacked up like boxes and I had a time trying to sort and store and try to forget them.
That part of her sung to me, called to me because she too had lost her parents, and lovers and her sister, so many people for do many years that she built up walls around the place where her heart had been.
Maybe the walls in me recognized the walls in her or somehow something inside of me was peeking through a Sally port and saw something peeking back. Maybe it was our souls.
"Let's just recap okay Elvis? I'm chasing a Voo Doo woman named Phyllis through the Big Easy, we have to find and stop her Zodiac Demon, and the head of her Coven has put a bounty on my head for any supernatural spell slinger that wants to come along and take out a piece of the Marshall. Does that sound about right?"
"And you have to find the Watcher."
"Find the Watcher too. Right. Think we'll have time for Cafe DuMond?"
"I don't know boss, think ghosts can smell?"
I watched him take a really dramatic sniff.
"No. Ghosts can't smell. So I don't give a damn about Cafe DuMond."
As far as magic goes, there are things you can do to enhance the power. Wards come to mind or objects, especially if those objects have signifigance.
Mine was a pistol. A Colt .45 military issue from 1941. Carried by a soldier, SGT Rankin, who stumbled across a hidden treasure trove in Italy where he was killed. The Pistol was taken by Hermann Gerring and gifted to the Furherer.
The same pistol old Adlof ate on that fateful day in 1944.
Hitler used the gun to kill seventeen powerful Jewish Kabbalists. All that mystical energy surrounding a hunk of metal created a very powerful channel.
I stole the gun from a German Mage in Romania, spoils of battle and all.
He was working with the damn Sidhe, picked the wrong side. And I was lucky.
FLASHBACK in WITCHMAS DAY (III)
The Marshal recovers in Las Vegas where he runs into a real paranormal expert, a ghost hunter who has taken a shine to capturing Elvis.
Elvis haunts the Flying Elvi, and the four major Elvis impersonators.
The Marshal has to get permission from the Vegas Vampire Coven to do something- or work with them to get something.
A wee person reaches out after the Gnome sends a psychic signal her way, it's the KITSUNE who comes to rescue the Marshal from a witch attack.
She tells the story of how the Vampire got to Vegas.
Nevada Territory - 1876
A Conestoga wagon rolled across the arid landscape, driven by a lonley emaciated man.
He spies a snake slithering across the rocks, jumped from the driver's perch and chased it down. He picked up a rock and beat the rattler, smashed it's arrow shaped head.
A giggle escaped his parched throat, and he lifted up the six foot body that still twitched and spasamed in the desert sun.
The man used his thin fingers to rip the partially detached snake head from the body and tossed it away, more fodder for the insects and other creepy crawlies that lived in the almost lifeless landscape.
He pinched the skin of the rattler near the neck and peeled it back in one practiced swoop. It came off in one piece and he dropped it at his feet.
His boots puffed up tiny clouds of fine dirt as he stepped away from the kill site and went back to the wagon. As he walked, he poked a grimy fingernail into the meat of the long thin muscle and drew a line straight down, spreading it apart to spill the slimy guts onto the ground.
When he reached the wagon, panic widened his crusty eyes.
"Oh no," he muttered and circled the wagon.
One of the rear flaps had come untied and fluttered in the arid wind.
He tossed the snake carcass up onto the driver's seat and tied the flap back down, double checking the openings to the interior on both front and back of the wagon.
Satisdied it was as tight as could be, he climbed back into the driver's seat and clucked the horses forward.
The two tired beasts plodded in exhausted trudge toward the far side of the valley.
A narrow range of mountains cut across the horizon, their destination a cut between the rises, seen only as a dark slash as the sun settled toward it.
The driver began humming. He curled the reins around his forearm and picked up the dead snake. Blood and juice ran down his ragged beard as he started chomping on the meat, chewing with worn brown teeth, and giggling as he drove.
An arrow arced out of the sun and slammed into his shoulder.
He screamed and pitched back into the thick canvas of the wagon cover. It held him upright as a second arrow whizzed into his chest.
He slapped the reins and the horses bolted as a group of Indian braves appeared around the wagon racing after them.
It was a short chase that ended near a small green meadow, an oasis in the desert.
The smell of water startled them, and the horse veered toward the grass. It took them into the path of one of the braves who lept from his horse onto the back of one hitched to the wagon. The lithe man drew up on the bridle, hauling the wagon to a stop near a shallow rock cave, hand built to define the spring.
The driver fumbled for a rifle under the seat, but three more arrows arced into his body, and he tumbled from his perch and landed with a splash, one hand near the muddy ground that defined the artesinal spring that bubbled underneath.
The braves ignored his fallen body and went to work on the wagon with practiced precision.
Two unhitched the horses and led them to a shallow puddle to drink. Two more untied the tight flaps and opened the dark interior to the setting sun.
The conestoga was empty but for a coffin.
The party of braves had robbed wagons before, and sometimes the pioneers buried treasures with their dead. It wouldn't be much, and they couldn't return to their village with such a small discovery, but still they had to look.
The two men hauled the box out and pitched it out of the back of the wagon. It flipped over, hit on the corner at an angle and broke open.
The Indian braves yipped in victory, quick sharp noises as they hopped from the wagon and turned the now open coffin over.
A man inside howled as the sun hit his skin.
The dark black suit that covered most of his body protected the unexposed parts, but the drifting bright rays that hit his hands made the flesh bubble and boil.
His eyes flew open, and the Indians screamed. The monster had no pupils, just pure black orbs that scanned the scene, saw the dead body of his most faithful servent and the sun still above the mountains.
The braves fumbled back, trying to notch arrows to their bows, but the creature flew at them.
Long nails lashed out and slashed throats, a trail of smoke the only sign of it's passage.
&nb
sp; Blood fountained out of their still standing bodies, as the braves collapsed. Trickles of crimson rolled across the hard ground and into the pool of water that reached into the narrow cave, barely wide enough for a body.
Occupied now by the creature, the man with long fangs and black eyes, hiding in the shadow.
The skin of his face was burned and melted, his hands a scarred mass of tissue.
But his eyes were clear as he stared at the bodies leaking his sustenance into the water.
As he watched, the puddle turned a shade of pink, and then darker as more blood slowly made it's way into the water.
The horses ran off, all of them. He could hear their hoofbeats pound the earth as they sought to escape the scent of death that permeated the meadow.
The creature bent forward and slurped the bloody water into it's mouth. The burned skin started to heal. He drank more, taking his time to pull handfuls to his lips and sipping as the sun slipped behind the mountains, bathing the valley in twilight.
He pulled himself from the rock cavern and stretched as he sniffed the air.
The bodies of the braves were worthless. His razor sharp claws had cut too deep, their lifeblood drained into the spring.
But his servant still had blood.
The arrows killed, but also plugged the wounds so they crusted over.
He rolled the body and feasted on the grimy man's neck. The man had served him for over a decade in his life, the promise of immortality taunting him to maddness.
The vampire smiled as he slurped blood from the body. The man served him still, even in death.
His eyes caught a glow in the distance as he stood from the drained corpse.
He could make out a campfire, and a cabin, a two room structure on well packed dirt trail, an intersection.
Of course his servant would ride away from the trail to minimize their chances of discovery, but the simple minded fool did not stray too far from it for fear of getting lost.