“Which isn’t going to help prevent a war,” I said, looking at him.
“It might, actually.” My soul paused. “You know, if the Red Room decided to turn you over to them in exchange for peace.”
I stared at him. “Is it wrong knowing that helps relax me? That I won’t be responsible for things going completely to shit?”
“Quite the opposite,” my soul answered. “I know you love peace more than anyone. It’s just you’re not very good at it.”
I closed my eyes and cleared my mind. “We have to handle this one thing at a time. What is the Vampire Nation’s likely response to my actions here?”
“I imagine they’re combing Nassau. The police, local agents, and every blood slave they have will be on the lookout for you. The Bloodsword has the ability to thwart perception and allowed you to move around undisturbed.”
“Like invisibility? It is the One Ring.”
“More like being unnoticed. Which, when you think about it, is superior to invisibility.”
“Well, that’s not an option anymore. I need to continue with my mission and find out what’s in the safety deposit box Christopher lured me here with.”
“Given that I’m you, it’s redundant for me to point out how stupid that is.”
“Someone is trying to manipulate me, and I’m going to find out who.”
“I believe it’s obvious Christopher is behind this. Whatever affection he once had for you is gone. He’s attempting to use you as a weapon against someone. You should count yourself lucky you survived Dracula. You need to return to the Red Room, report your findings, and get a dozen well-qualified exorcists to do an industrial-strength cleansing.”
Tempting as that was, I was sick of following everyone’s lead. I needed to get ahead of this. Reliving my experience with Ashley strengthened my convictions. I’d made a decision that night to never be anyone else’s pawn again, and if Christopher was behind all this, I was going to make him regret it.
“I—”
“I know. There was never any doubt you would choose otherwise. I just held out hope you might surprise me.”
I walked over to the bed and pulled the sheet up over my last victim. I didn’t have much sympathy for vampires as a general rule. I didn’t think they were people. At least, not people who didn’t suffer a need to devour the living and a psychotic break from their conscience. I didn’t know this person, either, but I’d moved past the period where I killed monsters just because they were monsters. I couldn’t say whether she’d deserved to die or whether she’d been a one-in-a-million vampire who gave a shit about others.
Hell, where did I get off judging anyway? What I did know was everyone deserved a dignified death, and this wasn’t anything close to one. Bloody Mary had decided I wanted to kill vampires—or maybe she sensed I had a lot of lingering anger toward them and used that as an excuse to start killing them. Maybe she thought I’d mind less than slicing up a bunch of innocents. She was right, but that didn’t mean I was going to let her hang around my head, giving me advice and occasionally taking over. I needed to figure out a way to stop her and get her out of my body.
“Suggestions?” I asked, knowing my soul would know what I was talking about.
My soul crossed his arms. “She’s enhanced your ability to work sorcery by several orders of magnitude. I wouldn’t be surprised if your gross power output rivals Penny. You can make use of that and other blood magic rituals to drive her away if she makes another appearance.”
“Isn’t that like using laughing gas to fight the Joker?”
My soul gave me a dry look. “Really?”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to keep making references to the One Ring and Sauron.”
“Derek, you’re thirty-two years old and a spy. We need to talk about your obsession with pop culture.”
“I’m pretty much a wizard cyborg dragon James Bond who knows kung fu. Allow me one vice.”
“I allow you about fifty. That includes being an asshole. We’re getting off topic, though.”
“Let’s just focus on the situation,” I said, wondering how else I could oppose Mary. “Are there any other methods we can use to fight her?”
“You realize you’re talking to yourself. Right?”
“I’m in a room that couldn’t be shown in a slasher movie for how much gore is on the walls. I think we’re past the point of me being worried about looking crazy.”
My soul paused, leaning up against the wall. “According to most sources, blood magic draws its power from death and destruction. That’s the theme park version of it, though. Blood magic also draws life from healing and sacrifice. At the risk of blaspheming your old faith, Rabbi Joshua Ben Joseph changed the Roman Empire with his crucifixion.”
“Let’s hold off on comparisons to Jesus, okay?”
“I’m saying love and self-sacrifice fights violence and hate. It’s why kisses break curses and true love can overthrow gods. It’s also why betrayal brings down the wrath of the gods. White magic and black magic are two sides of the same coin.”
“Let’s also avoid fairy tales as guides for fighting demons.”
My soul rolled his eyes. “Fine. Summon Bloody Mary with magic, force her to manifest, and kill her.”
“Now we’re talking!”
My soul sighed and vanished, leaving me alone in the room. Taking in all of the sigils, I sighed. It would be no use leaving all of this mess for the rest of Nassau to find. Worse, I had no idea what sort of DNA or trace evidence I’d left behind for them to track me with.
In normal situations, I’d call the Red Room to clean this up, but they didn’t have any influence on Nassau. The Vampire Nation had claimed it and killed any agent who arrived without strict diplomatic endorsement from three levels above them.
Lifting up my hands, I channeled the Bloodsword. I drew every drop of blood in the room into my body, feeling the power in the walls fade away as it became a part of me. I got a sense of the spells, which were divinatory in nature. Bloody Mary had been using me to cast haruspex or entrails-reading magic.
What had she wanted to find out?
I didn’t have time to find out. In the pristine room, only the bloodless corpse of the vampire remained. I placed my hand on top of her covered form and muttered a spell I’d never had the power to perform before. In an instant, her body crumbled to dust, and I disposed of the remains in a trash bag.
Finding a set of clean clothes in the dresser, I changed into them, and departed into the night.
I had to find my sister.
Chapter Fourteen
Nassau was a beautiful city. Too bad it was a city living under a curse. Founded on New Providence Island by the British, taken over by pirates, and retaken by the British, Nassau had been living with the aftermath of those decisions ever since. Nassau’s population included the descendants of British loyalists resettled there after the Revolutionary War and Africans taken off slave ships when human trafficking was outlawed. It was also the heart of the Vampire Nation.
I was walking down a street filled with tourists milling about, passing under the shadow of several massive hotels and resorts. It was nighttime, so the beaches were closed, but the Vampire Nation made sure there were countless entertainments to be had to keep the transient population out and about. Before they’d taken over Nassau’s tourist industry, the city hadn’t had much nightlife, but now it was one of the most entertaining cities in the world after dark.
Just off Cable Beach was Night Row, where there were nightclubs, casinos, carnivals, restaurants, and more adult entertainments behind the businesses meant for families. All of them were designed as feeding grounds for the undead. They didn’t want to scare off the tourists, so the number of visitors who died was low. No, the Vampire Nation wanted things kept neat and tidy. They drank, instead, from many victims. A tourist was more likely to die from drinking too much alcohol than blood loss. That didn’t keep people from dying, though. Surveying the crowds of tourists debating whethe
r to go to the pirate museum or buy tacky gifts, I thought of the people who got imported here for feeding purposes.
The Red Room kept a count of individuals from Haiti, Cuba, and even the United States who were offered jobs here on Nassau by shady businesspeople. Of them, only a fraction didn’t disappear without a trace. The vampires of Nassau didn’t have to kill in order to feed themselves, but the data spoke of dozens going missing every month. The Red Slave Trade was a means of showing Dracula’s largess. You didn’t have to moderate your feeding habits if he was leader. Just follow the rules of who, what, when, and where to eat. The Red Room considered these victims to be acceptable collateral damage in order to keep the Vampire Nation in check.
Bastards.
I was presently reading a stolen Pantheon e-tablet containing several thousand names. I was attempting to narrow down Penny’s location by going through her favorite aliases (Ann Millions, Molly Gables, Dorothy Liddell, and Alice Gale). I’d tried calling her on a cellphone I’d stolen, but her number had been disconnected. This might have been cause for alarm, but I thought otherwise. Penny had a keen insight for when her phone was being tapped and changed her number on a regular basis.
I could have called other individuals in the House, but there were only a few friendly assets on Nassau and I wasn’t about to compromise them. Instead, I’d gone to a clothing store, bought myself a disguise, worked a little magic so I wouldn’t be recognized, and pretended to be a blood slave. It said everything you needed to know about the Vampire Nation’s level of control that every hotel I’d visited handed over their guest lists once I indicated I worked for the Council of Ancients.
Unfortunately, after four hours of work, I was getting nowhere. She was supposed to be here negotiating with the Vampire Nation, but there was no sign of her. I’d hoped luck and my bond with my twin would give me a lead, but so far, I had nothing. I didn’t even know what was going on between the House and the Vampire Nation. I needed information and couldn’t contact the Red Room. At the very least, they would want to pull me out, which would prevent me from finding out what was really going on.
“I need a new strategy,” I said, sighing.
Looking at a particularly obnoxious-looking tourist who was yelling at his family, an idea came to me. “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.”
Walking by and lifting his cellphone, I cycled through it and dialed the number written on the side of a dark and energetic-looking dance club across the street. The neon graffiti called it “Club Ecstasy,” and something about it just screamed vampire-owned business.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice on the other end asked, techno playing in the background.
“Yeah, I think Derek Hawthorne is in front of the Seven Heavens Hotel and Casino parking lot.”
“Who?”
“Just tell your boss. I work for the Vampire Nation.”
“Um, okay.”
About sixty minutes later, enough time for the club’s owner to contact his master and probably his master to contact his, I saw a plain white van pull up on the sidewalk and six well-muscled individuals get out. They were armed, but their weapons were concealed, avoiding terrifying the tourists around us. It was a pity for them, because if they’d just been willing to do a drive-by or shoot me, they might have ended my threat right there. Which was what I was counting on. If they were professionals, they’d make my snatch and grab look like they were hustling me away. Really, I was surprised they didn’t show up in a cop car.
I’d removed my disguise and dismissed the magic protecting my identity. It was far less powerful than whatever the Bloodsword had been using anyway, so there could be no doubt I was the person they were looking for. The blade was sheathed in a mystical hidden leather compartment woven into my coat, another of Bloody Mary’s gifts, allowing me reasonable certainty they’d fail to find it.
Walking up to me, two of the group grabbed me by the arms, and a third shoved a black bag over my head before zip-tying my hands. I revised my mental opinion of them when the tourists around me screamed, and one of my kidnappers fired a gun in the air to scare the crowds away. These guys were very stupid.
Blinded and bound, I was shoved in the back of the van and felt it pull away. I didn’t expect anyone to respond to the shooting, and I was right. We drove for about forty minutes, stopping numerous times, before the engine was turned off. My captors were silent the entire time, but I could tell they were nervous. They just gave off a vibe I could feel in the air. Capturing one of the Committee was well above these guys’ pay grade, and I suspected they knew something was wrong with how easily I’d gone down.
“So, guys. We here?” I asked, smiling under my bag.
I was rewarded with someone pistol whipping me, which sent me to the floor. Seconds later, the doors to the van were pulled open behind me, and I was dragged off again. I ended up being carried up a flight of stairs and dumped in a metal chair before being handcuffed to it by both wrists. Only then was the bag removed from my head.
The room I was located in had seen better days. It was the former upstairs bathroom of a middle-class house that had seen better days. The bathtub had been ripped out along with the sink, leaving a lot of extra space and a large drain in the floor.
Five of my captors stood around me. Pipes above our heads leaked. There was a single bare bulb, and the windows were boarded over and covered with a faded white curtain, with sound-proofing material between them. The interiors of the bathroom’s walls were lined with it too, and the door had a mattress nailed to it. It looked like they’d knocked out the wall to the next room, giving more space for their torture. In one corner, I saw a shelf filled with bindings and pharmaceuticals while in another, there was a man-sized steel cage.
A tray of surgical equipment stood next to a chair on top of a metal stand. The stand’s second and third layers contained other notable items: a garden hose, a set of pliers, a car battery with copper wire on top, and a couple of objects used for sex but which I suspected my captors used for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” What we in the spy business knew as torture.
It was all amateur-hour stuff, and I hoped this was all for show. Not because I was afraid of anything they could do to me, but because torture was a shit way of getting information. As they explained to us on the first day of training, nothing prevents a person being subjected to torture from lying to his captor. If you don’t know there’s a bomb on a plane, waterboarding the guy who does isn’t going to make him want to tell the truth. He could say the bomb was in the president’s bathroom or nonexistent just as easily. Cash, magic, and forming friendships worked much better. Somehow, I doubted these guys wanted to win me over.
“We should kill him now,” a Caucasian man with a thick red beard and glasses wearing a loud Bahamian shirt said. “If this guy’s the Cleaver, then he let us bring him here.”
Their leader, I presumed, was a black man in cargo pants and a red t-shirt. “Don’t be stupid. If we killed him and he turns out to be the Cleaver, then the Ancients will have our heads.”
“And your families’ heads,” I said, leaning back in his chair. “Probably your girlfriends’, boyfriends’, and pets’, too.”
The leader kicked me in the chest with a big, heavy boot. Were I not prepared for, it would have broken three ribs. “Shut the fuck up, Nat. We drink the blood. We have the power. We’re immune.”
Nat, short for natural, was a derogatory term used by vampire henchmen for people who didn’t drink vampire blood. It was their way of pretending they weren’t human anymore and were somehow more than junkies.
“Great, blood slaves,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I was hoping someone important would be capturing me.”
As I planned, the leader pulled out a Glock 41 and pointed it at my head. “What did you call me, Conchy Joe?”
“Conchy Joe” was Bahamian slang for a white man. I could see the frustrated intelligence behind the man’s eyes. He’d no doubt had
to struggle for everything in his life up until this point, and the height of his achievement so far was to become a vampire’s errand boy. He probably thought he was going to become a vampire himself, but the system didn’t work like that. Blood slaves were rarely turned. Vampire hemoglobin eroded the mind and made you a psychopath after too many uses. People never stopped using it, though, because it gave an amazing rush and cured all but the nastiest wounds. In simple terms, vampires turned people they considered peers and had no respect for their slaves—especially blood addicted slaves.
“I’m about as white as you, chief,” I said, undisturbed by the gun being pointed in my face. These guys weren’t going to kill me without their masters’ say-so. “Mom’s human form was Chinese, and Dad’s mother was a Cayuga Indian. She was a doctor in 1911, you know. Quite the accomplishment. The House is progressive that way. Dad dyes his hair, though, so you can’t tell—”
The leader pulled back on his gun and put a bullet in the chamber. “You just keep talking.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
Those words caused the leader to relax. “Yeah, you’re right. I am the boss. You’re our ticket to the big time, biggity. We gon’ all cross over when we deliver you to Mister Fangs. Each one of us is going to be living forever when you are purged.”
I felt bad for the guy, I did. No matter the fact he was probably mesmerized, high as a kite on vampire blood, and party to no end of crimes—he didn’t deserve what was about to happen to him.
Another Caucasian blood-slave walked in, carrying a cellphone, and shut the door behind him. “Quartermaster, we got order from Mister Fangs. We to put a hex on the biggity, no argie, before he jams things up.”
“Dead book?” the leader asked.
“Double-time,” the other man said.
That was my cue.
The handcuffs popped open, responding to my mental commands in a way my magic had never worked before, and I moved like lightning past the group to the light switch. Turning it off, I grabbed the nearest blood-slave and slammed him into the wall with enough force to liquefy a normal man. Two of the four remaining individuals pulled out guns and started shooting, but I was already on the ground. Then, tackling another, I broke his jaw with a ki-enhanced strike.
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