CHAPTER 6
Claire came out of the church she went to after school to find Reginald balancing on a fencepost on one leg, his other leg up, and his arms over his head in a crane kick posture. Reginald was glad she came out when she did, because the fencepost was starting to buckle. The fence itself was chain link, but Reginald didn’t know if the fenceposts for chain link fences were sunk in concrete or not.
Claire took one sidelong glance at Reginald and kept walking. It was ten o’clock, and the streetlights had been on for a while. She made it all the way into the cone of light beneath one of them before turning back around to let Reginald, who thought she’d missed him, off the hook.
“I saw you,” she told Reginald. “I was just ignoring you.”
Reginald hopped down and scampered over to her. “Thank God. You commit to a joke like that, and you end up in character forever. I’ve been balancing on that post for like ten minutes.”
“Good thing you’re a vampire and don’t feel pain.”
“I heal,” he said. “But I still feel pain.”
They walked a bit further along the sidewalk, content.
“That was Daniel-san from The Karate Kid. The famous crane kick move,” said Reginald, gesturing back at the fence.
“It’s cute, your balance ability,” she said. “But is it at all useful? Like in a fight?”
“Sure it is. I can crane kick my opponents.”
Claire giggled.
“Then I can do wax on and wax off.” He put his palms out in front of himself and made circles in the air as if he were waxing a car. The rhythmic motion made his gut jiggle.
Claire giggled again, then pulled gloves from her pockets and put them on. Her hood was already up. She said, “Seriously.”
“Seriously, it’s useless,” he said. “But you just wait a thousand years, when I finally get some vampire speed and strength. Then I’ll be able to dodge bullets like in The Matrix. I’ll be able to walk on my hands along tiny ledges and run across tightropes. I’ll be like Fat Spiderman.”
This time, she didn’t laugh.
They were nearing Claire’s house. If Claire’s mother Victoria was home, Claire would invite Reginald inside, and he and Claire would sit on the couch while Victoria brought them Rice Krispie treats. Reginald had no idea why it was always Rice Krispie treats, because he hadn’t implanted any such suggestion in Victoria when he’d perma-glamoured her into forever believing that Reginald was her brother. Nikki said that maybe it was some kind of buried motherly instinct, like from the caveman days. Reginald said that cavemen didn’t have Rice Krispies, and Maurice, for his part, said that it was all crap because there was no such thing as perma-glamouring. But Victoria brought him treats and tried to invite him to family reunions, so what did Maurice know?
“Hey,” said Reginald, nudging Claire with his elbow. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“I got you a present.” He handed her a small wrapped package that was about the size of a box of wooden kitchen matches. It was wrapped in pink paper and tied with a red bow. Claire stopped under a streetlight to unwrap it and then smiled a genuine, little-girl smile at what she found. She removed the contents of the box and shoved it into her mouth, then tucked the box into the pocket of her coat.
“Thanth, Wegi-ald,” she said, grinning at him with gigantic, ivory white fangs.
“They’re for adults,” he said. “You may need to grow into them. Honestly, I counted myself lucky to find porcelain fangs at all, but the plastic ones are crap. Just ask Nikki.”
“Doww I feew vihthus,” said Claire. Then she pulled the fangs from her mouth, returned them to the box, and slid the box into her pocket. “I need to work on my enunciation,” she explained.
“Wear them in good health,” said Reginald. They continued walking in silence until they reached her front door. She opened it, walked inside, and closed the door.
Reginald, still outside, knocked. When Claire opened the door, she found that he had turned so that his back was facing into the house. He said, “Have you seen my awesome moonwalk?” and began taking steps backward. An invisible wall of force pushed back, making him walk in place.
“Sorry,” said Claire. “Come in.”
Unsupported once the spell broke, Reginald fell into the foyer. When he got up, he found that Claire had walked into the kitchen. He closed the front door and walked down the hall to join her. There was an island in the middle of the kitchen, and tall stools stood around the island. Reginald sat in one, his ass spilling over all of its edges. Claire was making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Do you know that it’s coming up on a year since I first tried to kill you?” he said.
“You don’t have it in you to kill anyone,” said Claire. The way she said it, it was as if there was a double-meaning, but Reginald wasn’t catching it. He could read adults well, but kids were hard. Probably because so little of what kids did made rational sense, or possibly because everything they did made much more sense than the things that adults did.
“Since I tried to drink your blood, then.”
Claire half smiled. “Looking back, now that you’ve had real blood, how bad was the steak I gave you?”
“Well,” said Reginald. “It was no Cheesecake Factory turtle cheesecake.”
Claire looked at where Reginald was looking, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s subtle. Would you like me to offer you a piece?” She pulled the door of the refrigerator back open.
“That’d be fantastic if you offered me a piece.”
“Would you like a piece?”
“That’d be fantastic.” And he patted the place in front of him on the island, licking his lips. Then, after she’d placed a small plate in front of him, laden with two pieces of cheesecake, he asked if her mother was home.
Claire looked at the clock. “Should be soon. She had a thing that ended at ten, just a few miles away.”
Reginald watched Claire while he ate his cheesecake, while she ate her sandwich.
“What’s up, Claire?”
“Hmm?”
“You didn’t laugh at Daniel-san on the fencepost or any of my other hilarious jokes. You seem distracted. Old age getting to you?”
Claire took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled. “If I ask you a question, you’ll be straight with me, won’t you?”
Reginald nodded slowly.
“All this stuff that’s happening on the news. It’s vampires, isn’t it?”
Well, he’d promised. “Yes.”
Claire shook her head.
“You’ve got an order of protection,” said Reginald. “You and your mom both.” But something felt wrong in his throat as he said it. It felt like lying, and then he realized that it was, in a way. The Council was ignoring its simplest mandates. The Council was allowing wanton creation of new vampires, which was the very charge that Reginald had almost been executed for. What were the chances that anyone would obey an order of protection that had been issued by the Deacon they’d just made irrelevant?
“This is it, though, isn’t it?” said Claire.
Reginald almost laughed. It was essentially the question he’d come here to ask.
“The what?”
“The war.”
“The one you predicted?”
Claire rolled her eyes. They’d had this conversation before. When Balestro had threatened to destroy all of the world’s vampires, Reginald had revealed his ace-in-the-hole: Claire, whose absentee father turned out to be Altus the incubus. The only other known incubus-human hybrid had been a powerful wizard named Merlin, but Claire, who bluffed her way through the Balestro encounter, maintained that she had no prescience whatsoever.
“My dad was a trucker. Not an incubus,” said Claire.
“Altus is your father. I’m sorry, kiddo, but it’s true. Balestro knew it was true.”
“Then why don’t I know anything? Why don’t I have any powers? Why can’t I shoot lightning and give fortunes? I’m just a normal girl! A sub-normal girl, who gets picked on because she’s small and poor!”
Reginald made a face, ready to protest, but Claire waved it away. Slowly, she got herself under control and then said, “What about you, huh? Anything come of that lightning bolt he hit you with?”
“Maybe it was a warning,” said Reginald, shrugging.
“You told me afterward that he’d ‘given you something.’”
“Maybe he ‘gave me’ a cold,” said Reginald.
Claire punched his arm.
“Seriously, I don’t know!” said Reginald, feigning injury and rubbing his arm. “If you can be a wizard who doesn’t know her powers, I can be a vampire an angel hit with a lightning bolt who has no idea what he’s received. I don’t feel any different. I don’t have any new powers. At the time, all I had was a headache, and now that’s gone.”
“Maybe our secret powers will show up when we both hit puberty,” said Claire.
Reginald ate his cheesecake. Claire ate her sandwich. The kitchen was almost too quiet, but Claire’s house was always quieter than it seemed like it should be. The houses on both sides were now vacant, and Claire’s mother was bewitched into quiet submission whenever Reginald was around.
When the food was finished, Claire smiled a tight-lipped smile at Reginald and shrugged. The gesture said, What now?
“I got you another present,” said Reginald. He was wearing a small shoulder bag. He pulled a rectangular package out of it and handed it to Claire. She unwrapped it and gushed.
“Columbo on DVD!” she hooted. Reginald couldn’t help but feel her contagious enthusiasm. Neither Reginald nor Claire would have had any use for Columbo if he’d never tried to feed on her, but ever since they’d met and Claire had become a kind of surrogate child to Reginald, Columbo had been something they shared.
Claire slid the first disc into the player and pressed Play.
“Claire, I’d like you to try to stay inside after dark from now on, okay?” he said. “Your mom too. Seeing as you’re the daughter of an incubus and all, I won’t try to lie to you…” He made mystical gestures around her head, but she didn’t smile. “… but there’s been a lot of upset at the Council. The upshot is that I don’t know that you can count on that order of protection.”
“They won’t kill me,” said Claire. “I’m Merlin.”
“Just the same,” said Reginald.
Five minutes passed.
“You really are, you know,” he said.
The intervening five minutes made the comment totally out of place. Claire looked over at him as if he had two heads.
“You really are something like Merlin, I mean. Your mother is human. Your father is an incubus. You may not know that you can see the future, but I’ll bet you can.”
Claire looked over, then paused the DVD. She studied Reginald and then, quite suddenly, a knowing smile exploded onto her face. Reginald knew he was about to be mocked, but that was okay because she looked genuinely happy.
“You came here to ask me something!” she said. “You did, you did!” She swapped her giddy expression for a serious one, then bowed her head reverently and put her hands together as if in prayer. “What can the master assist you with, my son?”
“Play the DVD,” said Reginald.
“Come on, champ!” she said. “You’re trying to be all cool now because I’ve already told you I can’t see anything, but you came here to ask my advice. Ha! I’m eleven. You guys are hundreds or thousands of years old and all-powerful, and you want me to tell you what to do!”
“I’m thirty-eight,” said Reginald.
“What’s the issue? Come on. Give.”
So Reginald sighed, prepared for mockery, and explained the changes at Council to Claire. She’d already been through two major vampire crises, so he went ahead and told her everything: the changes in the law that made Maurice irrelevant and powerless, the crumbling of the Council, the lawlessness and threat of chaos and the human decimation it would probably bring with it, and the promise of a democratically elected president in Sir Charles.
“Oh, it won’t be that knob,” said Claire. Then the dismissive smile vanished from her face and she looked shocked.
“Really?”
“I was just saying. Nobody would vote for that guy.”
Now Reginald was the one who was smiling. “No, that’s not what you were saying at all. You just blurted that out. Do it again.”
“You think I’m predicting the future?”
“I kind of do. When I was learning to read like a vampire, it felt like it was taking me hours to read books that I’d actually read in seconds. Then, when Maurice asked me about what I’d read — like really detailed, minutia-type questions — I didn’t think I knew the answers… but then I did. Maurice said it was like using a muscle on a limb you didn’t know you had. Just now, you surprised yourself with that answer. I’ll bet I showed the same surprise at first.”
But Claire shook her head and, no matter how much Reginald goaded her, wouldn’t say more.
Reginald looked at the clock. Claire saw where he was looking, and her eyes went to the front door. She said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Reginald, what?”
“Just… no worries, okay? But when did you say your mom was supposed to be home?”
“Maybe a few minutes after ten.” Her eyes went back to the clock. It was twenty after. She looked at Reginald, the door, the clock. Her mouth made an O.
“I’m sure she’s just running late,” he said.
“It’s a work thing. She would’t stay a minute longer than she had to.”
“Then they held her up. Or she stopped to chat.”
But Claire already looked panicked. There was almost certainly nothing to it, but she was worked up because he’d just told her about the recent lawlessness he’d seen downtown. And sure, vampires were killing, draining, and turning humans more and more in recent days, but just because Victoria walked alone in a neighborhood where even the police weren’t surprised when people ended up missing didn’t mean that…
“Okay, I’ll check,” he said. Then, because he felt as if he was essentially Claire’s adopted father, added, “But only to set your mind at ease, because I’ve got to be going.”
He stood up and trotted heavily toward the door. Claire was on his heels. When he reached the door, he turned around and told her that he’d be right back.
“I’m coming with you,” said Claire.
“Like hell you are. Not that there’s anything to be afraid of, of course, but because this neighborhood isn’t a place you should be walking around after dark.” God, he was bad at this. Not only was he making it sound like Victoria might actually be in trouble, but Claire had just walked home in the dark, and would have done so alone if Reginald hadn’t showed up.
Claire was ignoring him, already pulling on her coat. It was the same coat she’d been wearing when he’d first met her, with the giant anorak hood. It didn’t seem nearly as oversized on her anymore.
Reginald squatted down. “I’ll make this simple. Either I go alone or we’ll sit back down and watch TV. You are flat-out not going with me. Are we clear?”
Claire apparently wasn’t used to receiving parental orders. Until recently, Victoria had been a perpetual no-show thanks to her jobs combined with Altus’s influence, so Claire was used to doing pretty much what she wanted, when she wanted. Reginald’s ultimatum seemed to shock her. Her face registered something that was almost hurt, but then she took the coat off and hung it back up.
“Stay inside,” said Reginald.
Then, after he was halfway out the door, he turned and looked Claire in the eye and added, “And not that there’s anything to worry about… but be sure to lock the door behind me.”