Burned, p.22
Burned, page 22
“You killed them.” Kit Kat breathed in a ragged sigh, reaching out to me as if I could return her wacko sense of outrage. “They run a huge fabric operation, with dyes that never run or bleed together. They employ four hundred people.”
“Not anymore.” I lapped up the blood in my palm and frowned. I wonder if the colors mix inside of me . . .
“Greta—” Evelyn started, but I silenced her with a look.
“Do you have a knife?” Neither woman responded, so I picked my way through to the kitchen and found a set of Shenzhen ceramic knives. Taking the six-inch blade, I rejoined the others. “I found one.”
Cutting barely even hurts properly with a sharp enough blade, like getting a shot when you’re a kid. “Ouch then over,” as Marilyn used to say when she’d take me to get my boosters, vaccinations, and immunizations. Inside me, the blood dye failed, assuming the familiar red of my favorite and only beverage. I flung some of it on Kit Kat, and she flinched.
“Want to be my thrall, Kit Kat?” I dropped the knife. “You might understand me better. My blood’s already on you.”
“How would your dad feel about you forcing—”
“Forcing?” I barked. “I asked. I made an offer.” Red light poured out of my flaring angry eyes, and I wanted to rip open the world and drink it down. “You threaten to tattle on me and lie on me to MY DADDY?”
Evelyn touched my arm. “You just scared her, Greta. She understands now. She won’t tattle.”
“You won’t?” My fangs were out, and I slurred my words, but she understood.
“No.” Kit Kat took a deep breath, looking over the damage. “I misunderstood. I . . . when your father said you’d work with us, I assumed you could help fill part of the role Captain Stacey used to fill before your dad got rid of him.”
“That’s police work.” I tapped her badge. “I’m the sheriff.” I tapped my badge. “When the bad guys ride into town and they’re shooting up the place or harassing the locals, you call me up and I’ll do some real sheriff’n.” I kicked my foot through the room-wide puddle of blood. “The police’n is up to you.”
She nodded. “Understood.”
“Good.” I was all chipper again. “Then I have to go across the street and strangle a priest.”
Cops were chatting on their way up in the elevators, so Evelyn and I took the stairs. When we got to the bottom, there was no sign of Fang.
“Did any of you see what happened to my car?” I asked the uniforms securing the area.
“It drove off,” one of them answered.
I frowned. “I wonder where he went,” I said to no one in particular, then, “Oh well, Dad must have needed him.” Eyes on the prize, I headed across the street for the Episcopal church to finally test my theory.
28
ERIC
SAMURAI SHOWDOWN
Nice sword,” I told Ebon Winter. His grin deepened unpleasantly, no sense of mirth reflected in his eyes—those demonstrated frustration and concern. For half a second, they reminded me of the look I’d seen in the eyes of any number of women I’d dated . . . right after they’d realized I wasn’t just saying that stuff about how I can never love them in order to be dramatic, and that I do truly love Marilyn, and all they are is an enjoyable way to pass the time.
“Does complimenting another man’s sword sound queer to you?” I asked Beatrice.
“You really are a card.” Winter never took his eyes from mine. He made contact, but it wasn’t the mind-to-mind contact of two vampires fighting for supremacy, it was something else, and it contained vital information. I didn’t understand it all, but it definitely seemed vital. “Though the leftover-remnant-from-the-Greatest-Generation bit is wearing a trifle thin. Gornsvalt there”—he nodded to the vampire I still held aloft in one hand—“fought in the Crusades, and you don’t hear him going on and on about it.”
“The Crusades,” I said, lowering Gornsvalt. “Those were like the Dark Ages version of Vietnam, right?”
“Bravo.” Winter tittered. “For a brain-addled simpleton, you are almost charming in a Flowers for Algernon way . . . when you aren’t being odious, arrogant, and disrespectful.”
“I wasn’t aware that anyone in this room deserved my respect. After all, we won the two wars I fought in.”
What was the other thing I was supposed to be doing? Fang. Right. If in trouble, try to summon Fang. Concentrating on seeing the world of the magical brought a display of energy strands into view. Some of them were connected to me. Others were connected to the thralls in the room, but not the vampires, except for wavering ones running between thrall and master.
A red line ran between me and Beatrice, so hard to see that I could barely make it out and then only because I’d caught it at the right angle. Trying to find the one between me and Fang was like being at one of those damn Harry Potter movies and trying to spot the golden whositz. Fang had grown more powerful after Greta and he destroyed my pseudo sire Lisette’s memento mori by essentially feeding the squidlike golden travesty to Fang. Now, when Fang did his equivalent of my über vamp, gold detailing appeared on the car, even on the knockoff hubs.
Fang’s connection to me was also gold. I found it and concentrated on it. Moments later, I felt a sensation as if someone had injected pure adrenaline straight into the old heart box. It shot blood through my veins like a nitro boost.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Fang burn rubber out of downtown, right up the side of a high-rise near the old Episcopal church, and launch into the air. To be honest, when Talbot told me Fang could drive up walls and glide now, I thought he’d been fibbing. Apparently, not so much.
“You stole credit for Lord Phillip’s death,” Winter continued. “I planned for years to execute that fat, twisted mass of fecundity, and you ruined it all.” He gestured at the assembled vampires and their dates. “All of you did. The so-called Vampiric Elite failed to comprehend the marvel of my plan and viewed you as a murderer rather than the mere implement of destruction. You”—he leveled his sword at me—“took credit for the kill and left me with no choice but the rather brutish display I delivered at the Artiste Unknown.”
I ran my thumb across my middle finger and forefinger in imitation of the world’s smallest violin playing the world’s saddest song, “My Heart Bleeds for You,” and ignored Winter.
“You’re being awfully quiet.” Duke Gornsvalt had been in my hand for a while, so I gave him my attention and dropped him unceremoniously. “Are you going to withdraw your whatchamajigger from Handshake or what?”
Gornsvalt looked at Winter. “If there were some other way—”
I grabbed Gornsvalt by the chin. “He ain’t helping you, asshole. He’s whining about how I stole his kill and walked off with his unique drop.”
A surprising number of vampires got that joke. Frick’n World of Warcraft junkies. Duke Gornsvalt wasn’t one of them. “He’s been with me centuries, Eric. Please.”
“I—” Winter’s katana burst through my shoulder at an angle cutting down into my heart. Have I mentioned I heal very quickly? At night it’s even faster. Not that it felt great. I sagged against the duke. “Tell me something. Did that prince wannabe just stab me?”
“Lord Winter?” the duke asked.
“Yep.” My wounds closed around the blade. “That’s the one.”
A heart can’t beat with a blade in it. If my heart’s not beating . . . I’m . . . dead? But a funky little side effect of my condition is: I can’t be dead, only ever-living or undead. I wondered which way my condition was going to deal with this one. I suspected Ebon Winter already knew and had bet on it.
A coil of wrongness twined through me, the enchantment on the blade pulling me down to the edge of unconsciousness. Fang’s engine roared. I felt myself growing cold. Undead. I guessed Winter had arranged this as a little demonstration. Nice. Painful but nice. If all went well, I’d be able to manage the über vamp.
Fangs tore through the roof of my mouth, uppers and lowers sliding jaggedly into place, but not before they rent the inside of my mouth. My eyes flashed red, then purple. My ghosts came along, too, even though I was the only one who could see them.
“The Master/Thrall Social?” Phillip said with a tut-tut in his glare. “You’re shouldn’t have.” He gestured at his dressing gown. “I’m not even dressed for it.”
Roger opened his mouth to say something, but blue light washed him away. I screamed in unison with the phantasms of Lisette and Suzie Hu as the light took them as well.
When it came for Phillip, he responded with a complex gesture that my eyes couldn’t follow. The blue light shattered off him in millions of tiny shards, and when it cleared, he wore a WELCOME TO THE VOID T-shirt and blue jeans under his dressing gown.
“How?” I asked.
“You took a thought from me”—his grin grew to Grinchy proportions—“a quote I knew and you wanted to know. That’s when I realized we weren’t ghosts. When Talbot couldn’t see us but we could touch. I don’t understand. What have you become, my boy?”
“That,” I growled at him mentally, “would be telling!”
“If you can take things from my mind, boy, then I assure you I can read what you’re hiding inside yours.” He grabbed my head in his hands, and I felt like an open book.
“What is Operation Let’s All Get Drunk and Screw?” he snapped.
“As Edmund Burke put it,” I said, stealing another quote as Fang crashed through the glass doors, his tires squealing on the marble, “‘Reading without reflecting is like eating without digestion.’”
I love my car. Fang always seems to know when to show up and what to do. But I guess there always has to be an exception to the rule. As Fang raced across the marble, I expected him to spin out around me and crash into something important, then eat a vampire or two. He didn’t.
Note to self: Sometimes magic vampire convertibles don’t roll with changes in the plan. I don’t know exactly why Fang did what he did. Maybe he was trying to help hide my secret. But as I opened my mouth to shout, “No. No, stupid car,” Fang ran me over, tore the flesh from my bones, and deposited them in his trunk. I heard Phillip say, “Of course.” I hate it when evil asswipes figure things out.
Pain wiped out any reply I might have had. Re-forming is something I’ve done loads of times, but never as an immortal, from just bones, and never after having been eaten by Fang. Blue light washed over my body, coming in from the lines I’d seen all around, and powered my regeneration, converting the energy to matter like a damn Star Trek episode.
Through the trunk, Fang’s radio blared “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” by the Sparks. Cloth moved across my skin. Was Fang dressing me? Could he do that? As if in answer to my question, the trunk sprang open, and an unseen force tossed me out of the back like toast from a toaster, clad in my usual WELCOME TO THE VOID T-shirt and ensemble. The katana stayed in the trunk. I was afraid to mess with it, anyway.
Winter glared at me. “What,” I asked, “you gonna stand out here and not kill me some more?”
“Be as glib as you wish, Eric.” He waved away my comment, then snatched at the air as to grasp more words out of it. “Yet, I’ll remind you of this. I may not have killed Lord Phillip with my own hands, but I arranged his death. Whether you give me credit or not, I marched you down the path and handed you the motive after ensuring that, having already defeated Lisette’s memento mori, Fang would have the power to assist you. It took time, but as a vampire, I have plenty of that particular commodity.”
“And so you’re going to kill me?”
“Oh yes.”
“But you’re not going to kill my daughter or blow up my business or set fire to my movie palace or kill Marilyn or frame me for murder or wipe my brain with magic, right?” I folded my arms across my chest and watched him bristle. “Because all that’s been done already.”
Winter remained silent.
“No.” My voice told those gathered that I couldn’t believe such a thing. “You weren’t planning on staging a repeat and calling it an encore?”
“Of course not.”
I indicated him with both arms like Vanna White showcasing a brand-new car or a trip for eight to Disneyland. “Not Ebon G. D. Winter, artiste of bullshit and treachery and seven shades of I-told-you-so. Not him.”
“I said I wasn’t,” Winter maintained.
“Good.” I turned back to the duke. “Then fuck off, would ya? The big kids are having a dick contest, and we know you don’t like to use yours for anything . . .”
Winter stalked from the room and misted through the shattered glass from Fang’s arrival off into the night. As he left, I couldn’t help but notice that none of the attending vampires shifted to follow his exit. Their attention and their directional disposition were squarely on me. You win again, I thought after him, and they have no idea.
“Beatrice,” I called over the murmur of vampiric congratulations from the suddenly vociferous crowd.
“Yes, Master.” She appeared at my side in a flash from wherever she’d run when Fang barged in.
“What was I talking about?”
“You were explaining to Duke Gornsvalt and those assembled that you hate Vampire Politics and hope that we can move toward a new level of civility.”
“I was?” I raised an eyebrow.
“I could be wrong, Master. I am merely human, but I thought that’s what you were doing.” She batted her lashes at me.
“Wait.” I pulled her close, as if greedily hoarding her warmth, and continued in a stage whisper. “Is this the thing where I was going to wait until someone pissed me off, act like I was playing hardball, and then be magnanimous to prove a point?”
“That is what you talked about in the car.”
I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Well,” I said, looking right at Duke Gornsvalt, “if I was already talking about it in the car . . .”
29
GRETA
LOSING MY RELIGION
(OR THIS PARTICULAR PRIEST, ANYWAY)
Stained-glass images of scenes from the New Testament framed both sides of the church as Evelyn and I walked in. On my right, Jesus fed the five thousand. On my left, He walked on water. Farther down, He turned water to wine, healed the lame, and made Lazarus rise from the dead. I didn’t know what all of them represented, but the ones with Jesus I knew from Sunday school, from a time before foster care and vampire dads.
The pipe organ played, and it was a bigger, better one than Father Ike’s church had before Dad burned it down. I wasn’t going to burn this one down, not unless I had to do it. No, my business was almost certainly restricted to the priest.
Wisps of smoke curled up from my shoes and off my shoulders as the strength of the beliefs of those present and engaging in active worship tried to force me out and destroy me . . . but not Evelyn. Religion is fickle.
“What are we doing here?” Evelyn whispered a step behind and to the right of me.
“I told you,” I whispered back. “I have to strangle a priest and see if I understand why Dad did what he did. Give me your scarf.”
“I’m not letting you strangle a priest with my scarf.” Her voice got louder, and the ushers at the back moved toward us.
“That’s not what I want it for, you goof,” I replied, exasperation clear in my tone. “Just give it to me.”
Reluctantly, Evelyn unwound the scarf, and I draped it around my own neck. The scant flock seemed to take no notice of us as we walked down the center aisle. The building was laid out like a cross, a long central section with pews on either side, then more pews to the right and left of the altar. Behind the altar, a huge stained-glass image of a resurrected Jesus ruling over the cosmos (or I think that’s what He was doing) loomed over the priest and the altar. Atop the altar, a golden cross caught the overhead light shining brightly.
At the podium in front of the altar, a priest in a cassock and purple scarfy thing went through some sort of call-and-response deal with the parishioners. He’d say a long passage, and they would all respond in unison, standing, kneeling, standing, kneeling. It reminded me of an aerobics class, except I think most of it was in Latin.
“Thank you for joining us,” the first usher said. He was a tall, pale-skinned food with blond hair. He blanched when he saw my fangs but kept on with his spiel. “There are plenty of seats in the empty pews . . .” He let the words trail off as he noticed the smoke rising off of me.
“Cool,” I said, snapping his neck, “I see a spot.”
He fell down like they all do, a marionette with cut strings.
“Was that really necessary?” Evelyn hissed. “We can’t just murder people.”
“Maybe you can’t.” I caught the other usher, a bald food with dark skin, and hurled him over my shoulder to where the organist sat amid his controls and pipes. “But I can do whatever I want.”
“What in God’s name?” the priest asked.
“I want to try something with you, Father.” I had to shout to be heard over the commotion near the front. Then Evelyn came at me with a stake, one of those customized jobs that had a combat-knife handle. I spun to the right, grabbing the stake, and she nailed me in the side with a second one I hadn’t spotted. It missed the mark, though, puncturing my lung and not my heart.
“I won’t let you do this,” Evelyn said, struggling to drive the stake farther home, to nick my heart. Her fangs sank into my neck, and I twirled free, letting go of her arm but shoving her through the nearest pew in an explosion of wood.
“Don’t you be a bad deputy, Evelyn,” I chastised her. “I like you, and I don’t want to have to kill you.”
“I told you, Greta.” Evelyn pulled herself up, holding the stake point up, warding me off. “You can’t just keep killing people in front of me. I’m not one of you. I can’t sit back and—”
“Everyone please, remain calm,” the priest was saying, “come this way and get clear of the rogue elephant. If anyone has a cell phone, please dial 911.”
“Rogue elephant.” I laughed. “I don’t think the old Veil ever made anyone think I was a pachyderm. This is awesome!”
