CHAPTER 8
After Brian and Altus had gone, Nikki snuggled up next to Reginald on the couch. Maurice lit a cigarette. He dragged deeply on it, exhaled, and repeated. The room waited for someone to speak, but nobody did.
Reginald pulled a coin from his pocket and rolled it across his knuckles. After discovering his surprising new facility with balance, he’d begun looking for other abilities that might arise from better muscle coordination, and card and coin tricks seemed to be among them. Seeing a demonstration earlier, Maurice had said that Reginald would be an excellent pickpocket or card shark.
“We’ll never convince Charles to do anything,” said Reginald.
“And even if he did, the Council wouldn’t listen,” said Maurice. “It’s so inconvenient to think that the world might end.”
“This sweater smells like ham,” said Nikki, as if the thought had just occurred to her.
“This is so strange,” said Maurice.
“I know,” said Nikki, smelling the sweater.
Maurice was tapping the eraser end of a pencil on the desk in front of him, pensive.
“What?” said Reginald.
“Just feel the mood in here,” said Maurice. “I feel like we’re bracing to survive a hopeless war, but all we have is one encounter with one guy who got the best of some of us. I hate to say it, but Charles’s take on this is much more sensible.”
“Maybe. But what if our take is the right one?”
“Our take? Does this mean you’re committing to, ‘A biblical angel is stalking vampire-kind?’”
“I know it sounds stupid, but…”
“But they’re fairy tales,” said Maurice.
Reginald leaned forward. “You want to hear a story, my friend?” he said. “I grew up believing vampires were fairy tales. Shape-shifters and incubi too.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not. You know what it took for me to believe that vampires were real? I had to become one. Put me in a room a year ago with three humans and change this conversation so that we’re talking about you — a guy who can be shot and heal instantly, who burns in the sunlight, who drinks blood and can live forever. We’d all be telling each other that you were wearing body armor, had a skin condition, and were a goth freak obsessed with the occult. You’d sprint around the room and lift a piano, and then as soon as you’d gone, we’d start saying how it must have been a trick of light, or we were hallucinating. Anything but the truth. Logan even said it back at my trial — the main reason humans don’t know we exist is because they refuse to believe it.”
“What are you saying?” said Nikki.
“I’m saying that if it looks like an angel, walks like an angel, and talks like an angel, we should start with believing it’s an angel, not disbelieving it. It’s not unscientific to believe a myth. What’s unscientific is to refuse to believe something that all of the evidence is pointing toward simply because it’s a myth. As you once told me, Maurice, let’s be the first people to see what’s right in front of our faces.”
Maurice was shaking his head slowly, trying to find a way to agree with Reginald.
“The myth says that six renegade angels made a kind of Faustian bargain with God to create two races: vampires and humans. Vampires were given the night. Humans were given the day. Vampires were given speed and strength, but cursed with several mortal weaknesses, such as allergies to silver, wood, and sunlight. Humans were given the ability to protect the places they lived, and vampires couldn’t approach without a deliberate invitation. Another interesting thing I discovered. Maurice, is it true that a human can’t be glamoured into letting a vampire inside their home?”
Maurice laughed. “Yeah. Everyone eventually figures that out. It’s a running joke with new vampires to not tell them and let them figure it out for themselves. Our version of hazing.”
“Think about it. Why would that be? ‘That human won’t let me in? Fine… I’ll force him to!’ But you can’t. It’s too convenient, the way that loophole is closed. It seems to require a conscious choice — something intervening to keep the game fair for humans. It sounds like what Altus said: rules for the sake of rules. Ritual for the sake of ritual.”
“You think it’s a game?” said Nikki.
Reginald nodded. “I think it was a bet. A wager between what humans call God and what you call the Six. The genesis force of each race, pitting its players against each other. One dark and one light, like a giant game of chess.”
Reginald looked at Maurice. “What Balestro did to you, keeping you away from him? That looked to me like the same magic that keeps vampires from entering human homes. Something, say, that his kind might have given to humans when it all began. But if that’s true, it means that you couldn’t touch him unless he allowed it, and I’d say that’s a significant disadvantage in a fight — especially if they deliberately gave us weaknesses and know exactly what those weaknesses are.”
Nikki began biting her fingernails.
“And there’s free will again — humans choosing to let us in. Ritual. Rules. I always thought the things supernatural beings had to abide by seemed so arbitrary. Like the stake through the heart. Why would that hurt an immortal creature? Because once upon a time, someone said so.”
“So what do you think all of this is?” said Maurice. “What did Balestro mean? What would he want?”
“Maybe the game is over,” said Reginald. “Maybe the Six are tipping over their king on the big chessboard.”
“Conceding defeat?” said Nikki.
“Why not? How many vampires are there in the world, Maurice?”
“At last census, around seventy thousand.”
“Worldwide, or US?”
“Worldwide.”
Reginald nodded. “Humans number nearly seven billion. I’d call that a loss for our side, and that despite our superior speed and strength.”
Nikki hugged her arms around herself. “Ugh. I can’t believe I’ve got a date to join the losing team right at the final buzzer. This almost makes me not want to become a vampire. Almost.”
“Look,” said Reginald. “It could be nothing, of course. But I think we should consider the possibility that we’re facing a game-over situation. Maybe the powers that be are preparing to fold up the chess board, put away the black pieces, and let the winning team have the field to themselves.”
“Why?” said Nikki.
“Maybe it was the terms of the bet,” said Reginald. “There’s a lot out there — fragments of myth that never made it down the line, through the aeons, into the version we know today. There are bits that talk about the angels’ names, for instance. One of the Six was named Baelstrom, similar to our word ‘maelstrom.’ Do I need to point out what a maelstrom is, or how similar the name is to our guy? And there are allusions to a final countdown before armageddon, too. Consider it an overtime period, during which the losing side has a chance to continue playing. Sort of like how when you fail out of a video game, sometimes you’ll get ten or twenty seconds to insert another coin and continue.”
“I’ll bet I can guess how long the overtime period was,” said Maurice.
“A convenient way to measure things in the long-ago,” said Reginald, nodding. “One moon. Now, technically, the lunar cycle is 29.53 days, so I guess they rounded up.”
Nikki tapped her chin with a finger. “28 days left.”
“The overtime period,” said Maurice. “You said the losing side has a chance to keep playing?”
Reginald shook his head. “I doubt it. It reads like it’s just more ritual. Technically we’d have a choice, but it sounds like a choice with no correct answer. You heard what he said. The choice isn’t whether to live or die. The choice is whether to die by their hand or our own. It’s a way out of the loophole, nothing more.”
Maurice tapped the pencil eraser on the desk. Reginald made a coin vanish, appear, vanish.
“So is this it?” said Nikki. “You just do nothing and wait?”
“We can hole up. We can run. Or we can try to bargain.”
“Bargain. How?”
Reginald shrugged. “Beg for our lives, maybe.”
Maurice sat up straight. There was a small noise as the cigarette dropped from his fingers and hit the floor.
“Or,” he said, “we could right the game.”
Reginald, surprised to be caught off guard for a change, looked up at Maurice. “How?”
“Have you ever been to France?” he said.