I didn’t wait long, thankfully. Mercy’s directions started to come through in a couple of minutes and I got the bike moving. The Tool Brigade retraced their steps to New Farm and down to the ferry dock.
Another dead end. A true one this time because the whole gang got on a CityCat ferry and from there, could have gone either way along the river, landing on either side.
I sat on the bike, letting it idle while Mercy trooped to where I’d parked.
“What next, ke-mo sah-bee?” she asked.
After I digested the idea of Mercy in war paint and carefully didn’t laugh, I said, “Maybe it’s time we did this the hard way.”
“We?” she snapped, going from cute to crazy in two point four seconds. “I’ve been hard waying this thing all night. Running backwards and forwards while you ride around on your precious bike, ordering me here and there.”
She had the cadence of building momentum toward a spectacular rant, so I just reached over and jammed her pink helmet on her head. “Fine, get on. We’ll do it the even harder way and take a tour of the ferry docks.”
She growled but got on the bike, adjusting the helmet over her wind tangled hair. Phone in one hand, she pulled up a city map and directed me to the next ferry point.
There are seventeen CityCat ferry docks between Apollo Road and St Lucia, ten on the north side, seven on the south. We did the north side ones first. Why? Because that’s the side we were already on, and also because Murphy is a prick and his Law is even prickier.
Nearly three hours later, we pulled into ferry dock number fifteen, at Hawthorn, not that far, as the crow flies, or indeed as the ferry sails, from where we started. We parked and I went with Mercy down to the dock. There were a few people hanging around, waiting for what had to be about the last ferry of the night. We got a few looks, but it wasn’t too bad, not even when Mercy ignored the ‘stay behind this point’ notice and all but hung off the end of the dock, taking big whiffs.
“Here,” she called. “They got off here.”
“Now we’re cooking with gas,” I muttered.
Mercy followed the hints of Tool and I went back to the bike. She waited for me to get going, then took off.
Hawthorne is one of those typical Brisbane suburbs where you find old Queenslander houses next to ultra-modern, rendered square blocks taking up the entire plot, leaving barely enough room around the edges to squeeze the lawnmower down. Mercy led me down several streets, moving us toward an area of predominantly older houses, some of them in decent shape, some not. She buzzed down a side street, then buzzed right back and told me to stop before turning the corner.
I brought the bike to a halt beside her.
“What is it?”
She pointed down the street. “They stopped down there. In an old house.”
“Are they there now?”
“Yup.”
“Is the monkey there?”
“I don’t know. The whole house smells of monkey. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not.”
“But the Tool Brigade is there?”
Mercy rolled her eyes. “There are kids there, yes.”
“Okay. Feel up to some close quarters snooping?”
“Sure.” And she was gone in a blur of reflected moonlight.
I reached and opened the link to let things flow between us without having to force the thoughts. The night as Mercy experienced it came to me in a great rush.
It wasn’t dark anymore, but bright with all the varied colours of the different lights. Silver moonlight; yellow electrical light; the flickering rainbows of TVs; the pale white of those solar-powered lamp things everyone but me seems to have staked out in their yards these days; the ambient glow of the high-rises across the river.
As bright as the day, the world was a mass of shapes and colours and shadows that blurred by as Mercy pounced at vampire speed. Our ears filled with all the rhythms of the night—traffic, TVs, music, the breeze in the leaves, the whispering of insects, the barks of hundreds of dogs, the yowl of a cat either getting lucky or not so lucky. Underneath all that were the sounds that sang to Mercy like a hymn from the angels.
The sounds of humans. Their voices, their movements, their breathing. The beating of their hearts, a background drumbeat that tugged at every thread of Mercy’s being.
She was fed, though, and not hungry. But it was so pretty, that sound, that lovely signal that meant blood pouring through veins. Warm, salty, tasty blood that felt so good sliding over my tongue and down my throat. Thick, beautiful food that filled my empty belly and seeped out into my body, bringing heat and nourishment and life and… and… But it didn’t. It didn’t do all those things. Not when I fed. Not when Matt gave me those plastic bags of wrong tasting blood. It brought nourishment, and heat if he remembered to warm it up first, but not… not life.
With a wrench I pulled away from Mercy’s mind. I felt her pull back as well, leaving a slightly bitter tinge to the connection.
What the hell was that?
Not the thinking I was Mercy bit. That’s happened before and will probably happen again, a risk of opening up the link. But the whole… disappointment at what I fed her. Mercy knew she wasn’t allowed to feed off humans. She’d been happy enough to rely on the bags of expired blood I got from my old pathology lab. She’d never expressed disappointment at them before. In fact, sometimes I got scared at how she eyed them with gleeful predation, usually before I handed them over.
This was… strange.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I promised her down the link.
I got a brain full of her confusion. “Talk about what?”
She wasn’t trying to pull a swiftie. We were so closely linked I could have picked a lie. Mercy honestly didn’t know what I’d felt. Or she felt it and didn’t comprehend it.
Ugh. Between this and the whole missing parts of her head, I was probably going to have to book an appointment with a therapist. Most psychiatrists probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them about my vampire’s suppressed issues, but maybe Dr Angelshire could be reasonable. I mean, he’d had his eyes opened to the world of demons and demon possession a couple months back. I’m sure adding vampires to that wouldn’t hurt too much.
“Why do you need to see a shrink? Again.”
I grimaced. “Stay out of my head and in your own. You’ve got a job to do.”
Mercy snarled at me but her concentration turned to the house she’d pinpointed.
I made sure to just skim her senses, not wanting to get so embroiled in them I forgot where and who I was.
The house was an old bungalow style, on short stumps, with panels of swirlingly patterned, yellow glass in the front room. The yard was mostly neglected, untamed weeds in bare dirt and overhanging branches from the big poinciana tree in the backyard. It was too early for it be flowering. The jacarandas had to give way first, then the fiery red of the poincianas would take over in December.
Mercy stalked around the house, slow and perfectly silent. A couple of the guys sat in the front room, playing some violent video game. In a bedroom, a pair of voices grunted and puffed their way through a fairly obvious activity. Despite my protests, Mercy went and had a look in the window.
I had to give it to Leaf Boy. He had balls… eh, wrong word. He had courage letting Razor get him into that position.
With a few prods, I got Mercy to move on.
Around the back, one of the boys sat on the step, dragging on a cigarette and staring up at the stars, a can of bourbon and Coke beside him. Mercy skirted him easily enough and came up the other side of the house. Another bedroom and more voices. Thankfully talking, or not so, considering who it was.
“—need to go.”
“You went the other week,” Chop snapped at Feeble. “Don’t see that you need it again. I mean, you look fine.”
“But I feel—”
“You’re just lazy. I mean, you couldn’t even walk home with us. Had to catch a fucking bus. I’m not Scary, Feeble, with his mountains of money. I’m not made of cash. You know that, don’t you?”
The derision in his tone boiled through Mercy to me and made us both snarl in response.
“I know that,” Feeble said meekly. “But if Scary were here, he’d take me—”
There was a soft thump and Feeble gasped. The only thing keeping Mercy from breaking in through the window was the fact it hadn’t been flesh on flesh.
“If Scary were here,” Chop ground out. “You know, I’m sick of hearing about how great he is, how fucking amazing it is he got all that money. Scary’s gone. He skipped out, Feeble. Don’t fucking carry on like he’s going to come back and save you.”
There was a small noise, like Feeble sniffing or sobbing.
Chop continued, tone cold and scathing. “I’m glad he’s gone. At least he’s not here sniffing around you anymore. Did he fuck you, Feeble? Is that why you want him back so badly?”
“No,” she said, desperately fast and panicked. “No, he never touched me. He just… Chop, please, I need to go. My legs—”
“My legs hurt, Chop,” he mimicked in a nauseatingly high pitch. “Oh, I’m dizzy. Jesus fucking Christ, girl, I’m not sure you could get even more annoying if you tried.”
Mercy snuck closer during his tirade and peered in the window.
Chop sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, arms stretched out along the top of it. He was shirtless, showing off an impressive torso of muscles and tattoos. Long, jeans-clad legs out straight, crossed at the ankle, he gave off the air of a king on a throne. That impression may have been helped along by Feeble, kneeling on the foot of the bed, head bowed, shoulders slumped.
“You probably caught something off that fucking monkey. I told you to get rid of it.”
Feeble’s head came up. “No. I won’t get rid of Marcel.”
All Chop had to do was tilt his head at her and she backed down.
“Okay.”
“That’s better. It better be gone tomorrow.” He lifted an arm and held his hand out to her. “Come here.”
She hesitated, then scrambled up the bed and lay beside him, much as Mercy and I had sat earlier. Chop curled his arm around her shoulders, stroking her arm, fingers drifting over that horrible bruise.
“See, I can be reasonable,” he said, his tone suddenly sugary and soothing. “You just have to give me something I want and I’ll give you something you want. Right?”
Feeble nodded against his shoulder.
“Good girl.” He kissed the top of her red head. “Now what do you want?”
“I want…” She looked up and for a moment, I thought she saw Mercy’s face at the window, but then she turned her face away. “I want to go—”
“No. Not that. What else do you want?” He paused, then said, “You want it, don’t you. You need it.”
Lips pressed together, Feeble nodded again.
“Okay, go get it.”
Chop waited like a lord while Feeble got off the bed. She had a noticeable limp as she went to a chest of drawers across the room. From the top drawer she took a small box and brought it back to the bed.
Things progressed much as I feared they would, with Chop taking out a syringe, a small packet of brownish powder and a tourniquet.
Again, I pulled Mercy back from the window. And it took every ounce of strength I had to do it. Not because Mercy resisted, but because of my urge to send her in there to beat the absolute snot out of Chop. He was a manipulative, abusive bastard pusher and I wanted very much to feel him trembling in my hands.
With Mercy at safe minimum distance, I left the bike, walked to a bus stop, and proceeded to kick and punch the shit out of it instead of Chop’s fucking face. As a punching bag, it wasn’t that great. My knuckles busted and my jeans tore on the sharp edges, but as an alternative to being dragged in for aggravated assault it did the job.
Relatively satiated, I let Mercy go back to her surveillance. I don’t know what I was thinking we might accomplish with it, but right then I couldn’t force myself to leave Feeble alone with that monster.
Yes, I was aware of the fact Erin was right. I was hanging around for a chance to play the white knight, but I knew for a fact if Erin had been here, she wouldn’t have held back.
Simmering anger kept me awake through the night. I paced a lot and played Shark Dash on the phone and found some messages from Erin. The first one said Kermit had coughed up some information, and that apparently there was some long standing feud between sorcerers and ghouls. The next one wanted to know if I’d found anything and that she’d dropped Dev off at a hotel. The third one said she was going to bed and to call her in the morning.
Fantastic. I was probably going to get an earful from Kermit about sending a sorcerer to him now. It was a bloody wonder he hadn’t already clogged up the towers between him and me with abusive messages and calls.
It was around three a.m. when Mercy signalled movement at the house. I slipped down the link and looked through Mercy’s eyes.
The back door opened and the slight shape of Feeble crept out. She had something in her hands. Going to the poinciana, she stood under it and looked up into the branches.
“Marcel,” she called softly. “Marcel?”
With a series of chirps and skitters, the monkey scrambled down the branches, leaping from one to the next until he dropped down onto her shoulders. Tail curling around her slender neck, he leaned down and grabbed at whatever she held.
Feeble laughed. “Here you go, sweetie. It’s all I could get, sorry. Hope it’s enough.”
The monkey stuffed what looked like a strawberry into its mouth, chewing noisily. Feeble’s face lit up with joy, watching him. She scratched him under his chin and he leaned into it, almost humming. He fed from her hands, greedy and eager for her touch.
“Do you like that?” she asked, stroking him from head to tail. He arched into her pat. “You like that, don’t you. What else do you like? Someone scratching your ears and holding fingers and climbing trees.”
The litany of what the monkey liked went on and on and after a while, I realised she was crying. Silent tears rolling down her cheeks, eyes glistening in the pale light.
“I hope they let you do all the things you like in your new home,” she said. “I think they will because she looks so sweet and pretty.” Feeble turned in a slow circle. “I know you’re there,” she said to the night. “I can feel you watching me.”