by Rob Cornell
Or what his master would use him for.
I cleared my throat. “All right, one way to focus magic to get a desired effect involves symbolic materials. The stuff I have here represents what I need in order to tap into the memories of a dead vampire.”
I picked up the baggie of vamp dust. “Is this from the vampire on the other side of the block, like I asked?”
“Yep.”
“Good.” I unzipped the baggie and poured all of the dust into the mortar. Some of it plumed up in a miniature whirling storm cloud. “This is for the…target, for lack of a better word. You need a physical piece of someone when casting something as personal as reading memories or a tracking spell or—”
“A voodoo doll?”
“Yeah. Like that.” I picked up the nail clippers. “Since this is a type of joining spell, I’ll need a piece of myself as well. Back in the old days, everyone was obsessed with blood. Which is way overkill for something like this. No cutting my palm with a sacrificial knife necessary.”
I clipped a piece of my thumbnail over the mortar and let it drop in with the dust.
Odi chuckled. “Cool.”
“The last ingredient.” I picked up the bottle of holy water and peered through it at Odi, the glass and liquid distorting his image. “The weakness.”
I popped the stopper and dumped the water into the mortar. The vamp dust hissed upon contact. A putrid blend of sulfur and swamp water rose from the mixture.
Odi pressed a fist over his mouth and screwed up his face as if he were about to puke. I’d never seen a vampire vomit. I wasn’t sure they could, considering the only thing in their system was blood. Thankfully, Odi swallowed back his gorge before either of us could find out. That was a lesson I preferred he learn on Toft’s watch.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “Smell hit me funny.”
Probably because it was the smell of his own kind’s melting flesh. A lot of people have the same reaction smelling a fellow human’s meat cooking. Some primal trigger in the back of the mind that recognizes the stench for what it is and wishes desperately to reject it.
Odi pointed at the mortar, its contents still steaming. “That’s holy water, right?”
“Yep.”
“You called it ‘the weakness.’ What’s that for?”
I thought for a second how to explain. “I’m attempting to…invade the mind of another being. In order to do that, I need something specific to weaken them.”
“But he’s dead, dude.”
Again, I paused. Some of this stuff got a little too woo-woo even for me. “Okay, yeah. He’s dead. But metaphysically, a part of him remains in the universe.”
“Like a soul?”
“Vampires don’t have souls. Their bodies are hosts to demons.”
He sagged in his chair, slumping his shoulders forward. “Oh.”
“Nevertheless,” I went on, realizing the minefield of harsh realities surrounding vampirism I kept having to tip-toe through. Shouldn’t Toft have explained this stuff to him? Maybe he had, and the kid was still in the denial stage. Made me wonder how he got turned. Seemed pretty obvious he hadn’t volunteered. “All things with a self-aware consciousness, living or undead, leave behind this psychic residue. In the case of mortals, it is a soul. I think there’s another word for it for demons and the like, but I can’t remember right now.”
Odi’s gaze drifted to the table, though it looked like he saw something beyond the items for the spell.
“Let’s talk more about this later,” I said quickly. “I’m going to go ahead and do this.”
If I can do this.
I picked up the pestle and ground the ashes, holy water, and my nail clipping into a black paste. Odi pulled out of his blank stare and watched me work. As the paste thickened, it made a puckering and squishy sound. Odi made a face, but at least this time didn’t look like he was going to hurl.
Once I had the mixture to the desired consistency, I set aside the pestle. Globs of black goo from its end got on the table. See? I knew I was going to make a mess.
I could feel Odi’s intense attention on me while I scooped out a gob of the concoction with two of my fingers, picked up the glasses, and smeared one of the lenses until I had coated it entirely with the black stuff. I repeated the procedure for the other lens. I looked around, holding my messy fingers away from me, and realized I should have requested a rag of some kind. I did my best to scrape my fingers off on the table’s edge and made sure not to lean too close and get any on my shirt.
I held the glasses out in front of me. “You ready?”
I think I was asking myself more than Odi.
“Hell, yeah,” Odi said.
I put the glasses on. The black paste squished around the edges of my eyes and into my eyebrows. I did my best not to think too hard about what the gunk touching my face was made of. I still cringed at the cold feel of it, like a mud mask made from…you know.
I sat straight, took a deep breath through my nose, and drew on my power. I directed the energy up from my heart, through my face, and out toward the glasses, imagining the frames as conductive rods carrying my magic into the coated lenses.
The mixture was thick enough to blind me except for my peripheral vision. I kept the bulk of my focus on the darkness before me, pushing aside my awareness of the light leaking in around the edges. I continued to take regular, deep breaths, sinking into a meditative state.
My power hummed through the frames of the glasses, buzzing against the thin bones of my skull behind my face. I needed to direct just enough power into the lenses to create the visions. Just enough to…
A sudden rush went through my chest, like wind through a hollow reed. All at once my power gushed forth, so much that I trembled down to my bones. The wire frames heated up like toaster wires. I resisted the instinct to whip the glasses off my face. If I didn’t see this spell through, the magic I had already spent on it would taint the ingredients—I wouldn’t get a second chance at this.
From what sounded miles away, I heard Odi ask, “What’s wrong?”
I gritted my teeth, trying to regain control of my power’s flow. Yet the glasses kept feeding on me. I had screwed something up. Hadn’t applied my power with enough precision, or the wrong focus, or I don’t know what, because I didn’t know this kind of magic well enough. All I did know was that what should have been a small spell was now draining my energy faster than any I had cast before.
You should have paid more attention to your dad’s lessons on small magic, asshole.
I could hear him now.
Sebastian, there is no such thing as small magic. Someday, you’ll wish you believed that.
Like he had known this day would come. Well, he had, hadn’t he?
I believe it now, Dad.
I figured I had two choices. I could waste time trying to wrest back control over my power’s flow, or I could use it to complete the spell before the glasses permanently melded with my face.
“Sebastian, dude. You’re freaking me out,” Odi said. I knew he sat beside me, but he still sounded muffled and far away. The ringing in my ears didn’t help.
I returned to my steady breathing, doing my best to ignore—or, rather, accept; there was no ignoring—the torrent of magical energy coming out of me. A frightened voice at the back of my mind kept asking, How much do you have to give? Not as much as before. How long until you run out?
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
In.
Out.
Focused on the black paste blocking my vision.
Called on the vampire’s remains to let me inside, show me what I needed to see.
My ears popped with a static zap. For an instant, my vision went completely dark. The feel of my energy escaping disappeared. The feel of the chair under me vanished. In fact, all feeling went away as if the candle of my consciousness had been blown out.
Then I opened my eyes, though I didn’t remember closing them. Wh
at I saw sent a cold shock up my spine.
I saw myself, pointing a long wooden staff right at me.
Chapter Fourteen
A cold rush went through me, like ice water through my veins. Only they weren’t my veins. They belonged to the vampire whose remains I had smeared on the glasses I was wearing. But those glasses were gone. The whole Black Rose was gone. I hung half in the driver’s side of a black van, watching as a bloom of flame erupted from the staff aimed at me.
I was reliving the last moments of this vampire’s life.
Instinct twitched within the part of me that was still me, the passenger to a vampire’s memories. I tried to leap sideways, out of the fire’s trajectory. I couldn’t. I had no control here. The future was the past, already written.
The gout of fire came at me in slow motion. I was experiencing the effects of vampire adrenaline. I didn’t have a heartbeat, but that cold rush emanated from within my (his) chest. The vampire’s thoughts rattled through his undead mind too quickly for me to make sense of. It sounded like speed metal played on fast-forward, through headphones.
By this point in these stretched seconds, the fire blast had nearly reached me. I could feel its heat in contrast with the wet chill pumping through my system. I remembered how this had gone down. My shot from the staff had started him cooking, but Mom had had to finish him off.
I did not want to vicariously experience that pain on my memory ride along.
I couldn’t jump aside. I could, however, jump backward. In time.
Psychically wading into the vamp’s speed metal consciousness, I grabbed at the first available memory I could decipher. I didn’t care where it took me, so long as it carried me away from fiery agony.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Darkness snapped across my field of view for as long as it took to blink. On the other side of the blink, I found myself in a parking structure, seemingly below ground, only a few cars parked haphazardly nearby, without any regard for the flaking diagonal yellow lines painted on the concrete floor. In my vampire host’s periphery, I made out a few others close to me. But at that moment, the vampire’s attention was held by the pale-skinned teen girl in a blue tube top whom he held draped across his lap.
My host knelt on the concrete. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up, exposing ghost-white skin covered by thick black hair. I could feel the warmth in his belly, the tang of blood on his tongue, and the hunger stimulated by the ragged bite in the woman’s throat. A periodic stream of blood gushed out of the wound in time with her pulse. I could actually feel her heartbeat thrum through her and into my host’s body as if touching a subwoofer playing a heavy bass line.
Before I had a chance to gather my own thoughts, I got caught under a wave of his.
This is fucking beautiful. Never tasted such fresh blood. Where did he get these cows? Enough virgins for all of us. Best fucking day of my life.
Then he lifted the woman (his cow) and pressed his gaping mouth over the bleeding hole in her neck.
My stomach should have churned as I felt hot blood gush down my throat. I should have gagged on its iron taste. Maybe my own body, back in the Black Rose, had those reactions. Not here. Here I experienced the feeding with the physical zeal only a vampire could enjoy. The best correlation I could make—it was like rising toward an orgasm while slaking a two-day thirst and letting a piece of the finest gourmet chocolate melt on my tongue. The ecstasy of all senses.
For a moment, overwhelmed by the sensory explosion, my consciousness slipped deeper into the vampire. The sensation spooked me. Could I get trapped in the memories of a dead vampire forever?
I yanked my consciousness back and focused on catching a memory ride further into the vamp’s past.
While his thoughts still skittered haphazardly under the effect of his ecstasy, his subconscious—or the vampire equivalent—remained calm. Memories were fragile things, not unlike dreams. So many factors could warp them, break them, or obliterate them completely. This made hitching a ride on a valuable memory a difficult trick.
The time frame I was searching for, thankfully, didn’t sit too far into the past. In fact, from what I could gather from my host’s sense of things, this feeding had not taken place too much earlier than their attack. I wished he would look around, give me a better view of his surroundings. He was so consumed by his meal, the only other thing he noticed was the sound of his comrades around him also sucking at the open throats of their own victims.
The sound aroused him. I could feel the tightening below his belt same as he had in the moment.
Yeah, vamps could have sex. Did nothing for procreation. For them, sex was simply another gateway to pleasure. It could also make their prey more pliable, easier to feed on, and prone to coming back for more.
But the woman my host fed on would not make herself available again. She wouldn’t do anything again after that night, as the vamp had every intention of draining her.
I realized this was preparation, on par with eating your Wheaties before tackling the day ahead.
A collection of my own sensations broke through my host’s—clammy skin, sick stomach, searing heat against the sides of my face. I didn’t have long before those feelings became unbearable enough to break my spell. One more chance at finding the right memory. Then I would have to give up.
Didn’t have to go far back. Maybe only far enough to witness the delivery of the victims. How long was that? Thirty minutes? An hour?
I couldn’t get down-to-the-minute precision. Someone more skilled at this kind of magic probably could. I had to depend a little more on intuition than precision.
I focused on where I wanted to go in this vampire’s life. Since I had a sense of where he was now, and I wanted to stay in that place but only further back in time, it made it easier for me to imagine the moment I wanted to see.
I blinked.
All of the vampires stood in a row. My host graciously gave me a survey of his surroundings as he glanced to either side of him, sizing up the dozen vamps he stood with. They had lined up across the lane in the parking structure as if they meant to block any car that attempted to drive through. They all wore matching business suits with the red ties. My host as well. The knot in his tie felt like a stone against his throat. He hated having to wear the damn thing.
I also had a better view of the randomly parked cars off to the right. A silver Jag. A red (of course) Ferrari. A black Corvette, but an older model with a fringe of flaky rust along the body’s bottom edge. On the left, which I hadn’t been able to see in the last memory, a neat row of matching black vans.
My host couldn’t stop his stomach from churning, and it was pissing him off, because he had been expressly instructed not to feed before this meeting.
But who instructed you, damn it?
Sad thing about living through someone’s memories, they did not answer direct questions. I could see why the darker circles of the supernatural world preferred interrogating reanimated corpses. Of course, you couldn’t exactly reanimate a pile of dust. And my magic didn’t run black enough for that kind of shit.
Tripping through memories would have to do.
On top of his restless appetite, the smell of old exhaust and oil trapped in the underground parking structure sickened him. His unsettled stomach stemmed from more than hunger and bad smells, though. He was flat out frightened by the impending arrival of…
I don’t know if I was doing something wrong, or if this vamp was purposefully blocking out the identity of their coming visitor. It was almost as if my host worried even thinking the visitor’s name might insult him somehow.
I couldn’t think of anything that inspired that kind of fear in a vamp outside of religious artifacts and sunlight.
An engine rumbled from the top of the ramp leading to the next floor of the structure. My host turned toward the sound and watched the bright yellow Hummer roll down the ramp toward them. It came to a stop ten yards from the line of dressed-up vamps. Its windshield
was tinted black, no way to see who sat inside.
More than ever, my host wanted to rip his tie loose. It pressed so hard against his neck it might as well have joined the knot in his throat.
I knew what was coming would probably be the best clue I could scrape out of this vamp’s memory. I put all my effort into holding my consciousness in place and blocking out the growing discomfort from my physical body.
Just a little longer, damn it.
The Hummer’s driver’s side door swung open.
I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe some vicious Nosferatu-like monster. But the anticipation in that last moment nearly knocked me out of the vision.
Then the driver swung the door shut to reveal himself.
A cold wash of fear and awe ran through my host.
Logan Goulet, he thought. It’s him. It is really him.
I had a name. I almost pulled out right there. The hot sting around my ears and the sides of my face belonged to me, not this vamp’s memories. I hung on, though, to take the measure of the man this vampire feared so much.
Logan Goulet stood about six feet, maybe a few inches taller. He had long, tightly curled brown hair tied back in a ponytail that hung nearly to his waist. He wore a gray three-piece suit, complete with a pocket watch tucked in his vest pocket, its chain neatly draped between pocket and buttonhole like gold garland.
It made me think of Dad’s old enchanted pocket watch which had saved my life last summer at the expense of losing its bestowed power. I still had the watch. I had tucked it safely inside the gun safe in my closet where I kept my personal assortment of magical curios. The gun safe that now, likely, sat among the collapsed debris in the basement.
Damn these bloodsucking demons and their fancy fucking suits.
I assumed this Goulet dude was the leader of the crew. He clearly liked to dress snappy. Had he instated a dress code for his lackeys?
Goulet tucked his hands in his pleated slacks, with his arms drawing his jacket open. Even through the vest and crisp white dress shirt underneath, I could see the guy probably had a six-pack. As he sauntered forward, his shiny loafers tocking on the concrete, I could sense the strength coiled inside him like a spring just waiting to break loose.