by C. T. Phipps
“If you believe Minji should be spared then I will support it,” Alex said, surprising her.
“Wait, Minji is in danger?” Bryce asked. “That’s awful. She’s so…so….”
“Hot?” I suggested.
“Yes!” Bryce said.
“I can’t believe you’d even think of killing her, Alex,” I said, shaking my head. I picked up the Sword of Zadkiel and sheathed it. I was starting to like the sword despite how much we disagreed on everything.
“I’ve killed over three hundred sentient beings,” Alex replied. “Humans, vampires, fairies, spirits, criminals, and heroes.”
“Heroes?” I asked.
“One race’s hero is another race’s enemy,” Alex said. “The greater good isn’t always the kindest path.”
“That doesn’t mean you should give in to the Dark Side,” I said, sighing. “Mercy is, something-something, okay pretend I’m quoting the Lord of the Rings. Also, ignore sparing Gollum was a terrible idea since he betrayed them.”
“They wouldn’t have gotten to Mount Doom otherwise,” Alex said, giving a half smile. “But sure.”
Ashura called out. “Okay, we’ve come to a compromise.”
“What kind of compromise?” I called back.
“Arthur staked her!”
Chapter Seventeen
Conversations in an Alleyway
“You staked Minji?” I asked, appalled.
I walked back into the Black Spot and saw the cheerleader was lying on top of the bar like a haunted house prop with a piece of the wooden paneling smashed through her heart. I was about to go ballistic when I noticed Minji was looking up at me, irritated.
“What the hell?” I asked, jumping back from the bar. “Is she still…awake?”
“Stakes don’t kill even young vampires,” the chauffeur said. “It only immobilizes them.”
“Oh, great,” I said, looking at him. “Uh, Mr. Uh—”
“Jones. Mister Jones,” the chauffeur said. “I am Lady Ashura’s attendant.”
“Oh,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Jones.”
“Please do not endanger my lady,” Mr. Jones said. “I have been promised my own city when my term of service reaches a hundred years.”
“Right,” I said, weirded out by that.
Ashura looked upset. “I’m not happy we’re not killing her.”
Tracy glared at Arthur, clearly not any happier with Minji’s present status.
“I made a compromise,” Arthur said, raising his hands in frustration. “She’ll stay immobilized until we can either kill Sophia or bargain for Minji’s release.”
“You should wipe her mind of her family and rewrite her as more loyal!” Ashura snapped.
“She’s my creation,” Arthur said. “And my friend.”
“A friend who betrayed you,” Ashura said.
“Like that matters among vampires,” Arthur replied.
“She’s not evil,” I said.
“Nobody is evil,” Ashura said. “Evil’s just a word that mortals use to make killing other people seem more acceptable. Oh, he wasn’t like us, he was evil. We’re more honest. We just label people we want to kill as people we want to kill. It’s cleaner. No fiddly pretensions.”
“I’m impressed with your superior morality,” I said, sarcastically.
“Everyone should be,” Ashura said. “I swear Arthur, Minji wasn’t that good in bed. She can be replaced.”
I prepared a TK strike.
Arthur glared at me. “Stand down.”
I reluctantly did so. “Fine.”
“This might save her family,” Alex said. “If Sophia believes Tracy has been destroyed, she’s less likely to take revenge.”
“I’m sure that’s a huge comfort to her right now. Are you okay Minji?” I asked, leaning over her body.
“Oil can,” Minji managed to rasp out. “Except…blood can.”
I reached over to remove the stake from her heart, only to have Ashura growl.
Alex, of all people, put his hand to mine. “I’ll put her to sleep. Not in the veterinarian way either.”
“This is fucked up,” Bryce said, looking at her. He leaned over her body and spoke loudly. “I promise to get your family free, Mindy! You have my word as a bounty hunter trainee!”
“Not…deaf.” Mindy somehow looked even more irritated with Bryce than with the jagged piece of wood inside her. “Want to stay away…too. Want to see it coming…when you decide to destroy me.”
“We’re not destroying you. Arthur, if something happens to us, what happens to her?” I turned to my brother. “She stays here staked forever? Or just lays here until someone buys this bar and turns her into a decorative centerpiece?”
“I’ll have her transferred to the Scarlet Woman,” Arthur said. “My people will take care of her.”
“Your people,” I said, still unable to believe he had people. It was like I’d gone to sleep and woken up on Breaking Bad. Except Arthur was Heisenberg and I was Skyler. Wait, no, they were married. That was not where I’d wanted to take that metaphor.
“If we die, then Arthur’s people will almost certainly sell her to Sophia and she’ll go back to being a slave,” Ashura said. “Assuming they don’t cut off her legs and arms so they can milk her for vampire blood to sell on the black market.”
Everyone stared at her.
“So, we had better not let that happen to us,” Ashura said before pointing at the basement door. “Oh, and your vampire hunter friend left out the back. Note, I deserve credit for not killing him.”
“Arthur, are you sure you’re happily married?” Tracy asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “Albeit it helps to have some balance in your life. Balance Ashura hasn’t quite mastered.”
“I can’t blame her for that,” I said, still half-believing my brother was Ashura’s brainwashed vampire bride. “I’m less balanced than clinging-to-the-rope-over-the-lava-pit myself. But I still don’t know what you see in her. Besides the blonde, legs, hips, etc.”
“Keep going,” Ashura said, putting a hand on her hip.
“We should probably talk in private,” Arthur said, gesturing to the back of the bar. “Everyone else can get this place cleaned up of any trace evidence. Then we should get onto the whole Samvrutha Mitra matter.”
“You realize I have super-hearing and can read your mind, right?” Ashura asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “You realize that I’d talk in front of you if I had any criticisms, right?”
“Yes,” Ashura said, nodding. “You always were stupidly brave.”
Arthur walked out the back.
I stood there for a moment, trying to think of something pithy to say before following Arthur out, failed, and so left feeling just a trifle silly. Something about having someone I knew with a chunk of wood through their chest just seemed to outplay anything I might have wanted to say.
Arthur was leaning up against a graffiti-covered wall in a dirty back alley that I presumed Sophie Baron’s getaway car had been located in. He pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it up with a small metal lighter before puffing away.
“I suppose those won’t cause you cancer now,” I said. “That seems to be more Sophia’s thing now anyway.”
“It’s weed,” Arthur said, nonchalantly.
“Oddly, I have less of a problem with that,” I said, looking around.
Arthur shrugged. “I figured we could actually have that tearful brother-sister reunion in the few minutes we have before having to get back to the next life-threatening event. It’s all too easy to fall into old patterns and let the mission dictate things. I understand that was what happened with Alex.”
Wow, how long had he been spying on me? It was amazing how I’d gone from having no brother at all to having one who had apparently been watching me like a creepy stalker for the past ten years. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.
Still, he had a decent question. Why had Alex and I not worked out? I’d deba
ted that question many times. “Alex and I were both…too focused on our own trauma, I guess. When we were able to support each other, it was great. When both of us were hurting, we just crawled into our respective corners and wished the other one was there with us. In the end, we did the latter more than the former.”
Arthur nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that. I always liked Alex.”
“You never met him,” I pointed out. “At least as far as I knew.”
“I met him after your relationship,” Arthur replied. “He’s been trying to do the hero thing and that requires him working with the supernatural community rather than against it. I offered my services and we’ve helped each other.”
“What are you, a crime lord now?” I asked, only half-joking.
“More like a small business owner,” Arthur said. “Well, like forty small businesses. I run what Ashura doesn’t.”
“My brother, the vampire, the pornographer,” I said, shaking my head. “Note I didn’t call you a pimp.”
“Noted. I prefer pornomancer,” Arthur said. “The mancer part makes it sound respectable.”
“It really doesn’t. Not even close. So, you were spying on me. Are you watching Anna as well?”
Arthur took a long drag. “Not anymore.”
“Can you even breath still?” I asked, not liking the implications of his statement. “How does that work?”
“It doesn’t reach the bloodstream but it warms the lungs,” Arthur said. “As for Anna, your guess is as good as mine. I heard she went looking for me but as far as I know, she never contacted me or any of my friends.”
“Were you hard to find?” I asked. “I mean, if I’d looked?”
Arthur frowned. “Probably not. A lot of old traditions die hard, though. Newly turned vampires are supposed to abandon all their previous family ties, friends, and associations. To embrace, no pun intended, a new life. It makes no sense when vampires are living publicly, or maybe it does. After all, you still believe it’s a curse.”
“Anything that makes you see people as food is a curse. Anything that makes killing the occasional person an understandable accident is a curse,” I said, walking up close to him and telekinetically taking his cigarette. “Arthur, they were going to kill Minji in there for betraying them! You take someone off your Christmas card list for that, not murder them!”
Arthur stared at me. “We were both raised to be weapons, Ashley. So was Anna. It’s our destiny. The big difference was that when I became a vampire, I was then a weapon on my own terms.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” Arthur said, looking at me with sad lonely eyes. “We were betrayed by our parents, Ashley. Our grandmother. People who turned us over to the House to be experimented on and brainwashed by the Solomon Academy. Ashura was betrayed by her creations and followers when they cast her down from the position of voivode. The U.S. government wants nothing more than to control or kill all the country’s supernaturals, so we have to have our own law.”
“Minji was a victim,” I insisted.
“I know,” Arthur said, his voice angry. It was one of the few times since our reunion I’d heard him raise his voice. “It’s why I turned her. It’s why I gave her every chance to come clean. It’s why I made excuse after excuse that I was playing her master through her. Right up until the time I sensed what she planned here.”
I looked at him. “What did she plan?”
“She expected you to kill her,” Arthur said. “A part of her wanted it. It was easier than continuing to betray the people she loved.”
“Does she love you?” I asked.
“She loves Tracy,” Arthur said. “I’m more a bestie with benefits that she was blackmailed into and thus it’s horrifyingly gross but we both pretend otherwise despite it being something we would normally do willingly—”
“Stop,” I said, raising a hand. “Please.”
“Alright.”
“Arthur, promise me two things.”
“Go on.”
“The first is, don’t let Minji be killed,” I said, softly. “I want to do one good thing in my life and protecting her might as well be it.”
Funny how I was going out of my way to protect a vampire. Maybe my feelings toward vamps were softening now that I was half-one and my closest relative was a full-blooded (no pun intended) example. Maybe we should book a talk show about how my family overcame its prejudice against soulless abominations. Hmm, it seemed my views hadn’t entirely changed.
“I promise I will not let the traitor who let a mass murderer go free be punished,” Arthur said.
“Jerk,” I muttered.
Arthur shrugged. “And your second request?”
I felt guilty about my next request but said it anyway. “If I get killed in this mess, you won’t make me a vampire. I mean, I might end up that way anyway, and if that happens, I’ll deal with that. But don’t push for it. Don’t make it happen.”
“Do you hate me that much?” Arthur asked.
Clearly, he hadn’t read what I was saying the way I’d wanted him to.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? This has nothing to do with you!”
“You just said that you’d rather be dead than be like me.”
That hit me like a punch to the gut. “Sure, that makes sense! Or I’d rather be dead than like Sophia.”
“Do you want to know why I chose to become a vampire?” Arthur whispered. “What it means to me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Tell me, because, honestly, I don’t understand it. How can you live in a world where people live like this? Killing, feeding on, spying on, and betraying each other at the drop of a hat?”
“That would have been our lives if we’d stayed with the House,” Arthur said.
“But we didn’t,” I said.
“And yet you still jump into violent life and death situations at the drop of a hat,” Arthur said, halfway through his joint.
Dammit. He had me there. “Arthur.”
“Please.” Arthur looked up at the sky while the darkness left his eyes for a moment and he seemed almost human. “I wanted to travel the country with Tiamat’s Fair as a half-groupie/half-roadie. Enjoy all the performances they were giving: vampires, werewolves, fairiekin, witches, and a bunch of human women who were taking advantage of the show’s mystique. I convinced myself it was part of an effort to show regular people we weren’t monsters but truth be told, it was because it was a nonstop party. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll at its finest. You have to be extra terrible not to get laid at every show if you work with the bands.”
“I know this part, Arthur,” I said, rolling my eyes before rubbing the bridge of my nose. “As much as I wish I didn’t know anything about your sex life.”
It’s a perfectly natural part of mortal life, Zadkiel said. Desire is—
You stay out of this, I interrupted my sword. This is a private conversation.
As you wish.
“Just giving some context,” Arthur said. “You were already starting to do your Red Widow thing. I knew how that was going to turn out. You wanted to be a superhero and couldn’t stand not putting your skills to work—”
“It was more complicated than that,” I said, interrupted. “It also ended badly. I could have used your help.”
Arthur didn’t speak for a moment. “Maybe.”
“So, what happened, Arthur? How did you become a vampire?”
“David Treme and I got close during the concert. You remember him, right? The convenience store guy?” Arthur asked. “I’m mostly a steak and potato man but sometimes I eat—”
“I don’t need a metaphor, Arthur,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it turned out some of the locals objected to that,” Arthur said. “More so than being a travelling monster show. Dave got a bump on the head and I was beaten to death.”
A spike of humiliation, terror, and horror happened.
“Beaten to death?” I said, automatically. “What the
—”
Arthur closed his eyes. “It didn’t take. Ashura, still Ashura back then, was the owner of Tiamat’s fair and killed them all. She wasn’t going to let any of her people die at the hands of townie bigots. So, she made me, out of pity.”
“So, you were forced into it.”
“No, I wanted it,” Arthur said. “She could have made me a Blood Servant and I would have healed eventually but I wanted revenge.”
My blood ran cold. “Revenge. Did you?”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “They’re still trying to find those assholes and they never will.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s…”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Nights of Our Lives.”
“I think of our lives as a horror-comedy like Buffy the Vampire Slayers or Return of the Living Dead.”
“And you were such a big fan of Buffy,” Arthur said.
“But is it racist now?” I asked, trying to accept the fact my brother had made an understandable but terrible choice.
“Vampires are always attracted to what can hurt them most. Look at me and Ashura.”
“I’d rather not. So, you did it because you didn’t want to feel powerless anymore.”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. “I managed to eventually find Anna or she found me. Anna almost staked Ashura but she accepted this was what I wanted. Besides, I was already blooming as an undead mastermind. It turned out that being the only one of Ashura’s creations to remain loyal when the shit hit the fan was something that caused her to love me.”
“Does she love you?” I asked.
“I think she loves me as much as she can,” Arthur said. “This life wears on you.”
That I could understand. “And Tracy?”
“It’s complicated,” Arthur said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you ever see Anna again?”
“No,” Arthur said.
“But she’s probably alive?” I asked. “When was this?”
“About six months ago.”
“That’s reassuring. Sort of.”
Arthur looked at me with his cold yet somehow still inviting eyes. “Would you still rather die than be a vampire?”
“I don’t know. I just…don’t want to be afraid of me. Making people afraid of me.”