CHAPTER 4
Dinner — if that’s what it was called when four vampires drank blood while another gorged himself on pie — concluded on a mediocre note.
As was Maurice’s tendency, he quickly dismissed the implications of the Council’s new “given away” power and began making jokes. Celeste tried to goad him into an appropriately doomed mood, but nobody had the energy to keep pace with Maurice’s talent for apathy. He’d been alive for over two thousand years, and disinterest had gotten him this far. Nikki told everyone (after a suitable period of exasperation at the Deacon’s juvenile behavior) that maybe Maurice was right, and that their worrying and feeling distraught tonight wasn’t going to make any difference. Maurice, seeing victory, said something about going with the flow. Reginald was tired from eating an entire cheesecake.
So for the remaining time they had, Maurice insulted Charles’s style and haircut and demeanor, all of which were easy targets, and wondered about the whereabouts of the incubus Altus, who’d vanished after it was revealed that he was ten-year-old Claire’s father.
“Eleven-year-old, now,” said Reginald. “She had a birthday last week.”
Even though Reginald wasn’t related to Claire, he had tried very hard to feed on her when they’d first met, and she had saved him from starvation by giving him a bloody steak, and she had been threatened repeatedly by vampires thanks to her association with Reginald, so they’d formed an odd kind of kinship. He really should have visited her before now, and probably should have gotten her a present. He made a mental note to do it as soon as possible. Tomorrow it was really more important to attend the Council meeting — seeing as the world was falling apart and all — but after that, it was Claire time for sure.
Before Reginald and Nikki left, leaving a margin large enough to get home before the sun rose (Maurice kept forgetting they had to drive due to Reginald’s inability to run faster than a ten-minute mile), Nikki asked about her intense thirst.
“Reginald is right,” said Maurice. “It’s probably blood ties. Some vampires feel it more than others.”
“But Reginald doesn’t have blood lust. He only has lust for taquitos. And you don’t seem to have much blood lust, either.”
“Well,” said Maurice, “My age plus the fact that I’m your maker’s maker gives you a deep well of vampire history to draw from. You could be getting your hunger from any of those who are related to me. Blood isn’t just about proximity on the family tree. It’s kind of like the random toss that happens with genes, so you never know who your blood will end up being close to. You might feel my maker’s maker in your blood at the same strength as you’d feel Reginald… who you’ll always feel in your blood, by the way, because he is your maker.”
“I will also permit you to feel me directly,” Reginald told Nikki, tossing his head seductively.
“I have a lot of brothers and sisters,” said Maurice, and they all have progeny. Right now, most of those vampires are probably killing several humans a day, drinking them dry, fun stuff like that.”
Nikki gave her head a slow, exasperated shake.
“You don’t have to give in to the thirst, Nikki. You don’t need more blood. It’s not unlike being influenced by your mother’s opinion of what you do with your life. You can feel those impulses, and you can be driven to thirst by them, but whether or not you indulge them is always up to you.”
Nikki sighed. “I thought I was done with willpower and dieting.”
“Or you can drink as you’ve been drinking, and nobody will judge you,” Maurice added. “Believe me, sentiment has changed a lot over the years. For a while in my youth, it was considered normal and fashionable to chain humans up and farm them for blood. It seems horrid now, but at the time, it was simply considered normal, not unlike keeping a cow for its milk.”
But Nikki wouldn’t want to hear about giving in. Now that Maurice had told her that she could choose to accept or ignore her thirst, she’d fight tooth and nail against it. Nikki sought out difficult and counterculture things to do, just to do them. As a human, Nikki had never taken her needs as gospel. She disliked the idea that she was a slave to her body’s need for sleep and food, so she routinely denied herself one or the other or both for extended periods of time, just to show her body and the world who was boss, and who was in control.
They went home and slept, and throughout the next early evening, Reginald watched as Nikki fought what seemed to be an unfathomable thirst.
“Jesus, Nikki,” said Reginald. “This is hard to watch. Let me order you a pizza girl or something.” He picked up the phone, but Nikki waved him away.
“Put that phone down.”
“You’re so clearly uncomfortable,” he said. “A snack won’t hurt.”
Nikki had been pacing the room. She became a blur and appeared in front of Reginald, holding his shirt by the collar.
“Stop. Enabling. It,” she said.
Then, as if snapping out of a trance, she blinked, gave her head a small shake, and let go of Reginald’s collar as if she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and resumed pacing.
Reginald wanted to tell her that what she’d just done proved just how on edge she was and argue that she should at least top herself off, but she would almost certainly take it the wrong way. As much as she loved Reginald, she hated his lack of restraint. “Just one more won’t hurt” could have been carved on Reginald’s tombstone, back when he might someday have needed one.
“If I give in, I’ll just be feeding it,” she said. “If I hold out, I can break it. Like a fast. After you fast for a while, you stop being hungry as you begin to master your body.”
And that’s why she did the things she did, he knew. Control.
Nikki had lived a life in which she’d had very little control. Her parents had both committed suicide, she’d been raised by a somewhat disinterested extended family, and she’d fallen into a directionless existence before finding Maurice in her teens. Her whole life, up into her twenties, had been spent in a tailspin. The main reason she’d dedicated years to vampire training had probably been because she wanted to know what it felt like to finally hold the reins. Fasting and sleep deprivation were just two more ways in which she proved that she wasn’t willing to be at the unquestioned will of anything for long.
Reginald shrugged and opened a bag of Cheetos. Then he proposed a game of chess to give Nikki something to focus on other than her thirst, and she goaded him the whole time about how he’d rather play chess with his hot girlfriend than have sex with her. So he proposed having sex, and she laughed at him because he actually said “propose,” and then the idea got lost and so they played chess, and Reginald let her win, as he did about a quarter of the time.
Before they knew it, it was time to head to their scheduled rendezvous with the Vampire Council Escorts. Maurice arrived at Reginald’s house, and all three piled into Reginald’s car for the trip.
The pickup spot was on the Ohio State University campus, behind a defunct bagel deli. Nikki couldn’t stop talking, so she repeatedly expressed her reservations about putting herself in the hands of the Council, seeing as it was standard to be blindfolded and bound when in transit.
“You’ve just become powerless,” she said to Maurice. “They can kill you the minute we arrive, because they all hate you and have hated you for forever, and because it no longer matters anymore who succeeds you as Deacon. Or they might kill us,” she said, gesturing at herself and Reginald. “Maybe now, they can do it openly, because Fangbook said it was so.”
“There’s been no new legislation, and nothing more ominous than usual on Fangbook,” said Reginald.
He’d stayed up and read the past six months of Council proceedings several times during the last day, and he’d spent hours analyzing traffic and sentiment across all areas of Fangbook having anything whatsoever with the Council, with the Ring of Fire, or with Deacon Toussant and his fat sidekick. He’d studied with an angry scowl on his face. The way the net had been cast over Maurice made Reginald feel like he’d failed, which of course he had. He had the best strategic mind in recent vampire history, but that hadn’t stopped the Council from driving right through his blind spot.
“They’ll kill us,” said Nikki, pacing the small alley. The wall on one side was a solid red, with a huge black swath curling through its middle. It reminded Reginald of blood and doom.
“They’re not going to kill us,” said Reginald.
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said quietly.
Maurice pulled his phone from his pocket, then looked around furtively. He looked very nervous.
“It’s 12:02,” he said.
Reginald stopped watching Nikki. His head snapped toward Maurice, then jerked around the small alley as if he thought he might simply have missed a huge black Council Escort SUV that had been there all along. All he saw were dumpsters and a battered Ford Tempo in a small alcove off of the alley, parked in front of a fire escape. He reached into his pocket and fished out his own phone. 12:02.
“You’re sure the window was midnight?” said Maurice.
Reginald tapped his head, which was essentially the same as tapping a notarized copy of the official Council notice.
Maurice blurred from one end of the alley to the other. He appeared on the roof of the red-walled building and ran its perimeter, looking down. Then he appeared next to Reginald again and said, “Nothing. The streets are reasonably quiet. Where would they be coming from?”
“North,” said Reginald, and gave Maurice the route the SUV would take. Maurice vanished in a cloud of dust and leaves, then reappeared thirty seconds later. “Nothing. The Escort is not coming.”
Nikki sat heavily onto a discarded crate. Above her, hanging in the overhead electrical wires, was what looked like the skeleton of an annihilated corded wall phone. She looked paler than normal.
“What does it mean?” said Maurice.
Reginald felt a strange sensation of role-reversal. Maurice had been around since the day B.C. had become A.D. He was supposed to be the authority on vampires and vampire culture in this group — mentor to both his progeny, Reginald, and his progeny, Nikki. And here he was, asking Reginald what to do. The notion gave Reginald as much of a chill as the absence of the Council Escorts.
“I don’t know,” said Reginald.
They sat in silence, all of them waiting and hoping for the arrival of the vehicle they had been dreading moments earlier. Council Escorts were never late. Never. The entire American Vampire Nation’s leadership ran like a giant, perfect clock. A master coded algorithm chose a new location for the Council every ten days, and then coordinated the relocation with scores of what were essentially vampire roadies. The Council was disassembled, moved, and reassembled, its parts shipped via dozens of different routes through dozens of different hands. Those coming into the Council were shuffled through multiple pairs of Escorts, none of which knew the whole of the route and all of which were wired with failsafe devices that triggered and killed them automatically if GPS tracking suggested that they’d gone rogue. Only the algorithm knew it all, and the algorithm was perfect. When you received word that your pickup window was between midnight and 12:30am, you could set your watch by the arrival of the Escort vehicle. The idea that it hadn’t arrived and didn’t seem likely to — not within the window, anyway — was disturbing beyond words. Paranoia was the one thing that the Council could be counted on to maintain even while everything else crumbled. What did cracks in the perfection of paranoia mean?
“What do we do now?” said Nikki.
She and Reginald looked at Maurice, but Maurice was already looking at Reginald, waiting for him to answer. Nikki turned to look at Reginald, waiting.
“How should I know?” said Reginald.
“You’re the chess player,” said Nikki. Something in her face said that she knew that she’d been allowed to win the games she’d won against Reginald.
“I don’t know. We could go to the Council directly, instead of going through the Escorts.”
Maurice’s lip curled. Nobody was supposed to know where the Council was located at any given time — and as far as the Council knew, nobody did. But Reginald had cracked the algorithm almost a year ago, and could not only pinpoint the Council whenever he wanted, but could also roll its position back and forth through time as needed.
“You want to show your hand?” said Maurice. “You want to let them know you’ve cracked the algorithm?”
“I want to go to the Council,” said Reginald. “Now more than ever. This bothers me. It’s like the center is disintegrating.”
“That’s bad?” said Nikki.
“The farce of government is all that’s keeping the Nation from outright chaos,” said Reginald. “Remove that, and tens of thousands of terrified vampires will no longer have anyone to tell them how to react to things like the Ring of Fire. Most of them have already decided that what Balestro wanted was for them to kill and turn until half of the planet or more was vampire.”
“That’s bad,” said Nikki.
“Where is the Council now?” said Maurice.
Reginald’s eyes rolled up for a half-second. Nowadays, he didn’t need to go to and read the algorithm as needed. He’d started carrying it around in his head.
“Outside of Polaris. North of 270.” And he gave them an address.
Twenty minutes later, they piled out of Reginald’s car. Nikki and Maurice sprinted in twin blurs toward the back door of a warehouse with a large FOR RENT sign out front. Finding the door chained from the outside, they circled the building, Nikki moving clockwise and Maurice moving counterclockwise. Reginald hadn’t yet reached the building. He’d tried to sprint with Nikki and Maurice, had immediately started to run out of breath, and had tripped on a brick anchored at the head of a parking space.
“All doors are chained from the outside,” said Maurice, joining the others.
“There must be another entrance. They wouldn’t chain themselves in,” said Reginald.
“Where?”
“Does it matter?” Nikki returned to the nondescript back door, placed a hand on the push bars of both doors, and gave a small shove. The door shuddered in its frame, then both doors wrenched completely free of their hinges with a sound like an explosion. The metal doors fell inward and clanged onto a dark concrete floor. Ironically, the chain between the doors held.
“Those are pull bars, not push bars,” said Reginald.
“Oops,” said Nikki, stepping over the felled doors and into the dark warehouse lobby.
“Totally dark,” said Maurice. He vanished in a blur, and Nikki did the same. Reginald sat down on a box near the door and wiped blood off of his knee. He’d taken off a lot of skin when he’d tripped in the parking lot, and although the wound had healed instantly, there was a lot of blood. Reginald found that the sight of blood still made him queasy — a significant challenge to his new lifestyle.
Nikki appeared behind him, her ass barely on the tiny remaining amount of box that Reginald’s formidable ass wasn’t occupying. Several pieces of paper, caught in her slipstream, fluttered toward them. Reginald caught one. It said that the building’s rent came with utilities paid and that the price had just been reduced. There was a photo in the corner of a very unattractive realtor whose name was apparently Floyd.
“The Council is not here,” said Nikki. “You must have read it wrong.”
“No,” said Reginald patiently, “I didn’t. Math is black and white. Right now, the algorithm places the Council here. Maybe there’s a basement.”
“They’d be up here,” said Nikki.
Maurice appeared beside her. “Agreed. They’d use the main space. There aren’t any basements in this industrial park, anyway. It’s too near lowlands.”
Reginald felt troubled. The Council, like its Guards and Escorts, was supposed to operate like clockwork. They couldn’t have changed the algorithm. Nobody understood it well enough to change it. All they could do would be to restart it, and the logistics of doing so were bafflingly complex. Besides, he’d gotten the notice about their pick-up time window with the Escorts, so as of a few hours ago, everything was on track. Yet the Escorts hadn’t arrived and Council was missing. What was going on? The only thing that bothered Reginald more than a secure, efficient Vampire Council was a sloppy or a missing one.
“What now?” said Maurice. Again deferring to Reginald as if he were senior. Reginald didn’t like that, either.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Reginald. What now?”
He shrugged. “All I know to try is to go to where it was last. Although I don’t know if I’ll be happy or terrified if I find it destroyed.” He was thinking of the two disasters at Council that had preceded their trip to Europe, to meet Balestro the angel at the stone altar in Germany. One of those times, the roof had been blown off of the Council and hundreds had died, the rest buried in rubble through the daylight hours. And even then, the Council had survived and moved on. The idea that another disaster might have occurred filled Reginald with foreboding.
“It’s not destroyed unless it happened very recently,” said Nikki.
“How do you know?” said Maurice.
“Fangbook.”
“You’re on Fangbook?”
“You’re the only one who’s not on Fangbook, Maurice,” she said. “I even joined a group on out-of-control thirst. Some very good support to be had in there. But to answer your question, there would have been buzz if something had happened, but there hasn’t. I even saw a status update from Charles.”
“ ‘CHARLES BARKLEY… is being a dickbag,’ “ Maurice read off of an imaginary Fangbook status update.
Reginald shook his head.
“Contact the Council,” said Maurice. “Tell them the Escorts didn’t show. Ask for a new window.”
Reginald was still shaking his head. “I don’t like it. It’s not by the book, and ‘by the book’ is all the Council knows.”
Reginald stood up, picking at his shredded and bloody pantleg, and began walking back toward the car. Nikki and Maurice followed. Reginald climbed into the drivers’ seat, then made an annoyed noise and moved the seat all the way back, to switch from Maurice-driving mode to Reginald-driving mode. In the back seat, Maurice moved to the opposite side, sitting behind Nikki.
“Where are we going?” said Maurice.
“Back to campus, where we just were,” said Reginald. “And when we get there, if we find what I think we’ll find, I’m going to punch the Council members in the face.”
“Why?”
“Because I get terrible gas mileage on this car, and someone owes me gas money,” said Reginald.
He shoved the transmission into gear and the car lurched forward, back past Polaris and toward the expressway.