Tooth and Nail

by Chris Underwood

  I chewed the inside of my cheek and said nothing.

  He took another step closer, a pleading desperation in his eyes. “I’m not asking you to participate in all this. It will be bloody. I don’t deny that. But you can minimize that harm.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Let the investigation fail. Bury the truth about Eventide and One-tusk. Release the goblin, or kill him, or keep him in some hole somewhere far from everyone. And then, when the fighting begins in earnest, you can help protect the innocent. You’re a cunning man. You have spells and potions that can heal the injured. You can help shelter and treat swains whose masters have been killed. You can help them deal with the pain and grief of that broken bond. And when they’ve recovered, you can show them what it means to be free.”

  I sighed deeply, dragging my hand across my face. I wished I’d taken Nolan up on his offer of a chair. I was exhausted.

  I didn’t know what I’d expected when I came here, but it hadn’t been this. I hadn’t expected a debate. I hadn’t expected to be swayed.

  And I was being swayed. Because he was right. Partly right, at least. Until now, I’d been able to live with the idea of swains. The thought of becoming one repulsed me, but it wasn’t my business if anyone else chose to enter a vampire’s service. I’d believed—I’d wanted to believe—that swains served willingly.

  But that was a lie. I knew that now. Maybe I’d always suspected, deep down. Some swains, at least, were trapped against their will. If nothing else, Elaine had made that clear by driving a stake into Lockhart’s chest.

  And that…that I could not tolerate. I couldn’t go on with my life pretending I didn’t know the truth.

  Nolan was right. But I also had to consider the bigger picture. I had to consider One-tusk lying in a coma somewhere, nearly murdered in someone else’s quest for justice. Could I let the truth of all that be buried? Could I let more people die for a lie?

  “Let me talk to Lockhart,” I said.

  Nolan frowned. “What?”

  “If anyone has a solution to all this—a solution that doesn’t end in war—it’s her. She may know some way of freeing unwilling swains, something you haven’t considered.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “Ask her! At least ask her before you burn her alive!”

  Nolan studied me for several seconds. He pulled back his sleeve and checked his watch, then glanced over at the halo of light around the curtains.

  “I’m sorry, Osric. I think it’s already too late. It’s dawn. Lockhart is…”

  He trailed off, frowning, then glanced over at Elaine. She was still sitting in her chair, quietly observing our conversation.

  “Is she…?” Nolan said to her. “Have you felt anything?”

  The elderly swain licked her lips and gave a small shake of her head.

  Nolan hesitated for a beat, the cogs whirring inside his head. Then he hurried to the window and twitched back the curtain a few inches.

  Atwood hissed and recoiled as a beam of soft dawn light entered the sunroom. Through the crack in the curtain I caught a glimpse of the garden outside. I saw what looked like a body wrapped head-to-toe in a heavy blanket.

  And Lilian was dragging that body into the shelter of the trees nearby.

  Nolan spun, stabbing a finger toward me. “Hold him!” he roared at Atwood. His hand reached to the back of his belt.

  Atwood’s hiss became a snarl. Her girl-next-door face deformed as a fang-filled snout stretched forward. With claws extended, she swept toward me.

  I pulled the sunflare from my pocket and hurled it to the floor at my feet. As it shattered, I squeezed my eyes shut and closed my other hand around my truncheon.

  Captured sunlight filled the room, bright enough to burn my retinas even through closed eyes. Atwood’s pained screech filled my ears.

  I opened my eyes, already moving. Atwood had her hands up to shield her face. Her exposed skin was red and blistered. There was a faint smell in the air, like burning pork.

  Even half blind, Atwood sensed me coming. She swiped at me with her claws as she continued to recoil.

  I ducked the blow and threw my shoulder against her. She stumbled over a potted plant and her back hit the wall.

  I raised the truncheon and brought it down with all my strength. The wooden point tore through cloth and punched through flesh and bone until it finally pierced the vampire’s heart.

  Atwood went rigid, her scream frozen in her throat. Eyes wide, she fell to the floor, unable to move.

  I turned, pulling my revolver from my pocket. Nolan and Elaine were both recovering from the flash of light that had temporarily blinded them. Nolan’s attention seemed torn between me and what was happening outside.

  Elaine was more focused.

  The elderly swain had staggered out of her chair when the sunflare exploded. Now she was groping at the underside of the table.

  As I crossed the distance to her, she pulled a revolver of her own from where it had been stashed beneath the table. Squinting, half-blind, she turned the gun toward me.

  The muzzle flashed, the boom of the gunshot filling the room. I felt something whiz by my head.

  I closed in and slammed the butt of my gun square into the old lady’s forehead. Her eyes went out of focus and blood streamed from the wound. The revolver fell from her hand and clattered on the floor.

  Before she could topple to the floor alongside it, I grabbed her under the arms with my free hand.

  Nolan raised his own pistol. I clutched Elaine to me, using her as a human shield. I pressed the muzzle of my revolver to the side of her head.

  “Don’t,” I said, breathless. The sound of the gunshot was ringing in my ears.

  Nolan froze. He glanced at Elaine, then at the gun pointed at her head, then at me.

  “You wouldn’t,” he said.

  “If you shoot me I might.”

  A muffled voice squawked from my pocket. Lilian.

  “I’m okay, Slim,” I said, speaking loud enough to ensure she heard. “Everything is okay. Keep Lockhart covered up.”

  Nolan scowled at me. “We asked you to come alone.”

  “I’ll send you an apology card.”

  “If you allow Lockhart to live, you may as well shoot Elaine in the head right now. It will be a more merciful death than what Lockhart will do to her.”

  “No one’s going to die,” I said. “Not unless you do something stupid.”

  “She’ll kill me too,” Nolan continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “And Carlotta. Maybe even you. You know too much. She’ll know where your heart truly lies.”

  The gun suddenly felt like a lead weight in my hand. Elaine’s dazed, slumped form threatened to drag me down. Maybe I’d already killed her with that blow to the head. Maybe I’d killed us all.

  “Why the hell did you have to do it like this?” I sighed. “Why couldn’t you have played it slow, played it smart?”

  “I told you why,” he said, his gun still pointed at me. “Rachel. Eventide was going to abandon her.”

  I shook my head. “No. No she wasn’t.”

  Nolan’s eyes narrowed. “She was leaving. Without Rachel.”

  “Yes. She was at the potion seller’s stealing glamours for One-tusk. But she’d already put them in the truck by the time your goblin attacked.”

  “What is your point?”

  “She’d gone back into the trailer. She was looking for something else. Something she’d commissioned the potion maker to create for her.”

  “Something?”

  “Severance,” I said. “And transference.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Eventide knew she couldn’t break the bond with Rachel, and she couldn’t bring her along—not without putting their flight at risk. But she thought—hoped, maybe—that she could transfer that bond to another. That was why she’d been visiting Whitworth. She’d hired him to create a spell that could transfer Rachel’s bond to another vampire.”

 
; Nolan’s pistol remained fixed on me. “You’re lying.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “It changes nothing. She would have remained a slave, just with a different vampire holding her leash. Better to be free. Better for all of us to be free.”

  “You’re not exactly giving your fellow swains a choice in the matter. Sounds like Isaac didn’t want to be free.”

  “How are they supposed to make a choice? Their free will was stripped from them!”

  And then it hit me: the answer to everything, as clear and cold as a spring morning.

  A way to free the swains who wanted to be freed, without bringing war down upon Lost Falls. If I was right, if Whitworth really had developed the spell, then maybe there was a way.

  And all it would cost was a single life.

  I glanced down at Atwood’s staked, staring form, then turned back to Nolan.

  “I have an idea,” I began.

  38

  Nolan had arguments. A lot of them. Most had merit.

  Even if this worked, it would only be a temporary solution. A band-aid over the greater problem of the vampire-swain relationship. We couldn’t free all the swains. But maybe we could free the ones who wanted to be free.

  We would have to act quickly, while the vampires were trapped in their homes, fearing the sun. We had less than twelve hours to set everything up, get everything together. Once night fell, we might find ourselves beset by vampires who weren’t so excited about our scheme.

  In the end, though, I convinced Nolan. I convinced him to at least give it a shot.

  He started making calls, feeling out the small network of swains he’d been talking to in preparation for his revolution.

  Lilian went to fetch Whitworth. He didn’t want to come, but Lilian has a way with people. A way that often leaves them quite bruised.

  He didn’t want to talk to me at first. As soon as I started to tell him what I had planned, he knew he’d be risking retaliation from certain parts of the brood.

  Eventually, though, I got confirmation that he had been working on a transference spell for Eventide. She’d been coming to him for weeks, bringing ingredients from the vampires’ storerooms and cash for him to buy more. It had taken a lot of experimentation, but finally he’d been able to come up with a prototype for the spell. Eventide had apparently paid him handsomely to ensure he kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. After her death, he’d decided the best thing to do was keep quiet a little longer.

  When Nolan flashed another wad of cash at him, though, he started to open up.

  I was beginning to understand why the vampires kept Whitworth on staff. When he put his mind to something, he was good at what he did. His work with vampires seemed to have given him a passing understanding of vampiric sorcery. But he also had a careless streak, a casual disregard for who might use his wares, or why. His primary concern—aside from his own ego—was money, which made me wonder why he lived in a shitty trailer. The vampires almost certainly paid him well for his services. I supposed he squirreled all that cash away in his mattress or something. He certainly made it disappear into his sleeve pretty quickly after Nolan handed him the wad of cash.

  He needed ingredients if we were going to scale this up. Some I knew I’d be able to obtain from my own supply, but others were more difficult to come by. So I called Early.

  If selling Nolan on this plan had been a challenge, I figured convincing Early would be nearly impossible. What I was planning was murder, pure and simple. For this to succeed, Carlotta Atwood would have to die.

  Did she deserve it? I didn’t know. When all this had gone down—the murder of Eventide, the attack on One-tusk—Atwood had been little more than Nolan’s slave. A puppet, bound to his will. He was the true mastermind here.

  But I wasn’t willing to absolve Atwood entirely of blame. How long had she kept Nolan a slave? How long had she used him against his will before the tables were turned?

  She was no innocent bystander. The decision to hire the goblin assassin hadn’t been hers, but she was partly responsible nonetheless.

  That was what I argued to Early, anyway. And surprisingly, I didn’t have to argue quite as hard as I’d expected.

  He had objections, of course. Early is no fan of bloodshed. But when I told him what Nolan had told me, his tune began to change.

  Early had his own history with vampires, after all. He knew what it was like to watch someone broken by their addiction to a vampire’s bite.

  And so, even though he wasn’t entirely convinced, he came.

  The old man showed up just after noon with a couple of shopping bags full of magical herbs and arcane ingredients sourced from rare creatures. He looked as exhausted as me. He’d been up all night fighting to save Holdfast’s life. The ogre was finally stable, but Early hadn’t been able to get any shut-eye before I called.

  By the time he arrived, a handful of swains had started to trickle in as well, looking about nervously, like it was all a trap.

  We ended up with eleven of them. Twelve, if you counted Elaine, who was still a little dazed from the bump on the noggin I’d given her. Only a fraction of all the swains in town. But it was enough.

  Twelve swains who wanted freedom. Twelve people who wanted to break the hold their addiction had on them.

  Twelve people who had, until now, been prisoners against their will. All because of one bad choice they’d made a long time ago.

  Most were older, forty or more. A couple were in their thirties or late twenties. Vampires liked to get their swains young, when they’re in peak physical form.

  Vampires didn’t age much—not outwardly at least—but swains did. As they’d grown older, most of the swains here had been relegated to household service, pushed into the background to make room for younger, more beautiful slaves. Maybe it was that neglect that had driven some of them to break away, or maybe it was just like Elaine had said: the need to serve faded with time, the addictive highs never quite reaching the peaks that they used to.

  I knew there were probably other swains we’d missed, swains who were wavering in their loyalty but weren’t brave enough to take this step. Some probably hadn’t even heard what we were doing. Nolan had had to act quickly and quietly, trying to spread the word outward from his small network without raising the ire of more loyal swains who might react violently to what they saw as rebellion.

  Still, twelve men and women free was better than none. It was enough to harden my convictions, and Early’s as well.

  This would shake up vampire society. I knew that. There would be threats—some directed at me. Maybe some would try to act on those threats. From now on, when I went out at night, I’d be sure to keep a sunflare in my pocket.

  If this worked, the freed swains would need to be sheltered as well. First from themselves, and then from any of their former masters who didn’t know how to cut their losses.

  Early called up Bounding Rabbit and managed to secure a promise that the freed swains could stay with the ogres for a time. By sheltering the freed swains, Bounding Rabbit would be able to thumb her nose at the vampires, claiming a moral victory even after calling a halt to the war.

  I just had to make sure the vampires didn’t take that as another reason to reignite tensions.

  Once he was sufficiently paid and appropriately convinced of the righteousness of our cause, Whitworth got to work preparing the potions he’d need to perform the ritual. Potions of blood and spice and captured sunlight.

  Early helped Whitworth work. A long time ago, Early had performed a ritual that wasn’t so different, trying to strip the bond from a newly turned swain. The scale was larger here, the bonds more mature, more tightly wrapped around the swains’ souls. Still, the experience seemed to serve him well.

  While the two old grumps bickered and worked, I went to talk to Lockhart.

  We’d returned her to the couch in her windowless basement, the same couch where Eventide’s body had rested wh
ile Lilian tried to spark her dead brain.

  Lockhart reclined on the couch, looking rather relaxed. She didn’t stand up or greet me as I entered the room. I didn’t take it personally. She still had a wooden stake embedded in her chest, after all.

  Her eyes followed me as I came in, the only part of her that could move. I sat down heavily on the couch opposite her, resting my elbows on my thighs and my head in my hands.

  “I could fall asleep right now,” I said. “Sitting up, like this. You ever feel like that?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes simmered with silent fury.

  “I suppose not,” I said. “You don’t really sleep, do you? Not like humans do. Listen, I’m sorry about not taking the stake out. We just needed to figure some things out. It won’t be much longer now. I promise.”

  I glanced over at the bank of security monitors that hogged one wall of the basement. The cameras pointing out from the mansion’s perimeter showed no sign of life. I’d been half-expecting a band of loyal swains to come charging in here to stop us, but everything was quiet. Either our plan remained a secret, or those who knew about it were willing to let it go ahead. Maybe they just didn’t want to risk their own necks.

  Probably a wise choice.

  Other cameras, the ones pointed inward, showed more. Through a window I could see the gathered swains waiting, talking to each other in hushed voices.

  In the garden where Lockhart had been laid out to burn, Early and the potion maker were preparing a ritual circle. Three, in fact, one inside the other: one of salt, one of dusted ironwood, one of powdered silver. Whitworth had assured me they’d get everything done before dusk. I could only hope he was right.

  “I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now,” I said, “but let me lay it out for you just in case. We’re going to free some swains. Now, I see the look in your eye, but honestly, it’s for the best. I mean, look at the situation you’re in now. You’re wearing that stake because a swain wanted to leave your service but couldn’t. You’ve got enough trouble dealing with vampire politics without having to worry about your own swains stabbing you in the back as well. This way all the disloyal swains can go on their merry way and never trouble you again. And if you still have complaints, too fucking bad. This is happening.”