CHAPTER 11
There was only one way to fight, and it was to not fight at all.
Reginald had engaged in philosophical debate with Timken when Timken had told Reginald his plans, but Ophelia and Claude were not Timken. Nobody in the entire VWC compound was Timken. Reginald had made a mistake in vastly underestimating the depth of his foes’ ruthlessness. Timken was just the tip of the iceberg. His fantasies that the codex would reveal a simple Timken-related solution (expose him, assassinate him) were gone, and a more complex problem had fallen into place. Now he was facing psychopaths. Psychopaths who wanted his help to become better psychopaths.
He’d also realized something terrible in the minutes following the V-Crew display: Ophelia (and, by extension, Claude) hadn’t shown him the extermination in order to shock or intimidate him. They’d done it to impress him.
And that, in the end, might be the only way out.
“Get out” had moved in front of “find the codex” on Reginald’s to-do list. He was doing more harm by staying at VWC than the piddling amount of good the codex could still provide even if he found it. Besides: if he could get out, he might still find the codex. He wasn’t sure how that would happen, but if predestination was in play, then the details would handle themselves. He reminded himself that nothing was an accident. His trip to VWC hadn’t been wasted even if he learned nothing; there was a reason he’d come. But was that reason to learn information, or was it something more sinister? Was he destined to help Claude and Ophelia win the war whether he wanted to or not? Could they twist him into an unwitting weapon of mass destruction?
He wouldn’t let that happen. And with that simple conviction, he reminded himself that the fact that Claude and Ophelia thought he might be impressed by the V-Crew attack could be a weakness. It meant he might have one last chance to play into the arrogance of the hunters — to get what he wanted by letting his opponents think they were getting what they wanted.
So following the V-Crew display, he’d stuffed down his disgust and acted impressed.
Before they’d left the dark room, Reginald had watched the soldiers clean up body parts and pile them into what looked like a collapsable dumpster that Ophelia had explained was another piece of equipment piggybacked on stolen human technology. It was a kind of compactor, and would press the blood from the scraps for later consumption. There were several processing steps afterward, she explained, because the human body contained many liquids other than blood. She’d asked if they wanted to see the processing facility. Reginald had declined, but made a comment about how efficient and impressive it all was (throwing warning glances at Nikki not to contradict him) whenever the others’ backs were turned.
Claude had seemed guardedly pleased. Ophelia was almost post-orgasmic, her earlier anger dissipated by the thrill of murder.
They showed Reginald and Nikki to a small, comfortable apartment where, apparently, they would be expected to live. Reginald forced himself to smile and interrupted Nikki’s every protest. Then, after a few hours of rest and recovery, Claude showed back up at the door. He led them back to Ophelia to talk through any recommendations that Reginald’s strategic brain — a brain that surely saw the handwriting on the wall and wanted to make things easiest on everyone now that he’d had some time to think — had in mind to improve what the VWC was doing.
Reginald didn’t want to make recommendations. He wanted to get the fuck out. Whether the codex materialized or not barely mattered. Humanity was a sinking ship; Ophelia told them that their estimates pegged the population as down by fifty-six percent. She said they expected that figure to quickly rise to sixty percent now that V-Crews were working at full capacity following the official onset of war, but that it would take as long as a month to knock off another twelve due to the clusters that would fight back with new fervor. The remaining twenty-eight percent of humanity would be much harder to eliminate or contain, she said, because all of the simulations predicted that by that point, humans would form fortified communities protected by armed, knowledgeable groups like the AVT. At around the two billion mark, humans should have gotten most of the bugs out of their defense systems.
“In essence,” Ophelia explained, “they will get smarter.” She looked at Reginald and, unbelievably, at Nikki. It was as if there had never been any tension between them, and that they were all on the same side, interested in the same goals. “We’re doing them a favor, you know. Humankind has become bloated. What’s left at around two, one and a half billion will be much more adapted to us. Like instant evolution. If we were to back off at that point and let them live, they would grow into a much stronger civilization than one they had a few months ago. Hunger and overpopulation would be solved. They’d have kept most of their best and brightest, and lost their least fit.” She pointed a lecturing finger at Reginald. “The blade needs the stone to be sharpened, Reginald. You know that.”
“But you won’t back off,” said Nikki.
“Of course not,” Claude interjected. “As they get smarter, they also get more dangerous. Again, this is all up in the air, but the simulations predict that the curve flattens significantly at that point. But we are faster and stronger and smarter. We estimate it will take six full months to reduce the human population to five hundred million. Maybe another six months, employing human armaments that should become available as they depopulate, to knock them down to ten million.”
Reginald felt like he was going to pass out. He re-ran his own scenarios while Claude was talking, nodding outwardly, trying to act complicit. There was no way they’d let him leave. Protesting and making a stand would do little other than enrage them, and enraging them wouldn’t be a good idea. He couldn’t win an argument against insane people, and insane people similarly wouldn’t consider moderation. All that was left was to sell out now, then try to find a way out — when their guards eventually dropped — later.
“General,” he said. “I have a question.”
Ophelia had been looking off into some imagined distance. She turned her head, seemingly pleased that Reginald was willing to enter the conversation, which she and Claude had been monopolizing.
“What is it?”
“What if you’re wrong?”
The pleased expression left her face. Claude slid between them, breaking the tense moment.
“Wrong how?” he said.
“Wrong in your tactics. Wrong in your simulations.” He reached into his mind, searching for something appropriately convoluted to say. He needed just enough jargon to knock them off kilter and sound ominous while still totally speaking out his ass. So as Claude’s big eyebrows furrowed, he added, “I’m not saying you will be wrong, or that you should change your tactics. Just that knowing all of the possibilities within a logical puzzle, even if you don’t plan to pursue them, will throw new light on your planned course of action. Basically: you need to find out not only what you don’t know, but what you don’t know you don’t know.”
There. Let them make sense of that.
Ophelia turned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
At least she was honest.
“I’ve heard of an alternate plan,” Reginald said, treading carefully now that the crux of the matter was at hand. “It will sound like a legend, but it still might be relevant — and I say that as a strategist who needs every piece of the puzzle in order to make the best predictions, no matter how obscure the data. See, even though the plan I heard of is just a legend, there are fanatics who believe in it. These fanatics believe there is a predestined end to this conflict, and those fanatics, however misguided, might interfere by…”
Ophelia interrupted him, nodding. “You’re talking about the vampire codex.”
Reginald suppressed his surprise, unable to believe she’d laid it so plainly in front of him. It was tricky to ask for something without appearing to ask, and to introduce a far-flung ancient legend into a military discussion without sounding like a superstitious idiot. But apparently he was a better manipulator than he’d thought, because Ophelia looked like she’d expected it to come up. Claude, on the other hand, was already waving a hand dismissively.
“That’s it,” said Reginald, ignoring Claude. “But I only found out about it, not what might be in it. But if you’re the World Command and have all the power and reach you seem to have, I thought you might know more.”
Ophelia appeared flattered. She said, “We have a seer.”
“A seer,” said Nikki. She said it flatly, and Reginald couldn’t help but feel proud of her. She’d read what he was doing perfectly, and knew that the best way to get knowledge of the codex without suspicion would be to act skeptical about anything having to do with it.
Beside them, Claude picked up Nikki’s cue and began rolling his eyes.
“We don’t call him that; he calls himself that,” Ophelia said quickly. “His name is Malcolm. We don’t consider him a mystic, and we certainly don’t consider him a source of objective information. But bloodsense is a real thing, of course, and everyone receives different vampiric gifts. Bloodsense is Malcolm’s gift, so we wanted to at least hear what he had to say. In the interest of historical background, you understand.”
Reginald had brought the issue up, but now it was Ophelia who was on the defensive. Good. She just needed another push. Claude, his expression neutral, watched Reginald give it to her.
“I see,” said Reginald. “What did he tell you?”
“He said he could feel through the blood to his maker, who saw the codex.”
“So he’s interpreting a vague feeling of someone else’s impression about some rumored document,” said Nikki. She nodded. “Well, there’s no way that could be misinterpreted, with such an excellent and totally ‘non-telephone-game’ chain of communication.” She turned to Reginald. “Hey, Reginald. Purple monkey dishwasher.”
“Purple monkey dishwasher?”
“Oh, is that what you heard? I actually said that these people are shit out of their minds.”
Olivia scowled.
Reginald held up a hand. “Forgive Nikki,” he said, glancing over and silently telling her to tone it down a notch. “Bloodsense isn’t one of her abilities. I believe your seer.” But he didn’t. Not at all. There had been many accounts of seers in the records he’d read over the years, and all of them sounded like tarot readers. Some were surprisingly accurate, but all were relying on intuition and feeling. There was nothing objective about reading blood for most vampires. He himself was the only vampire he’d heard of who could actually step into the minds of those he was related to — and even for Reginald, the experience could be a crapshoot. If the VWC’s seer had been relying on the vague sense his maker had of an ancient mythical object, he didn’t trust him even a little bit. But so far, it was the best lead they had.
“Do you know if the codex is real?” he asked. Claude gave him a look, so he continued: “Because if you set the mystical considerations aside, it would contain a lot of historical data.”
“It’s real. At least according to Malcolm.”
Reginald’s pulse quickened. “Does he know what’s in it?”
“No.”
“Does he know where it is?”
Ophelia looked at Reginald for a long time. Then she said, “It’s gone. Nobody knows where it is.”
“But the seer’s maker…”
“He’s dead,” Ophelia said with a dismissive wave. “There was an overthrow around the time of the Renaissance. Human minds turned away from superstition and toward science — and so, therefore, did ours. According to Malcolm, a contingent of vampires assassinated the keepers of the codex. His maker was one of the keepers. Now they are all gone, and so is their knowledge of what was in it.”
Reginald sighed. Seeing the sigh, something strange entered Claude’s expression.
“Ah,” said Reginald, catching Claude’s odd look. “Well, no big deal.” Then the conversation moved on to other matters, and Claude’s expression returned to normal.
Below his composed facade, Reginald fumed. If the seer was telling the truth, his direct blood relative had seen the document they were looking for. The maker was gone, but if he were Reginald’s maker, Reginald would be able to go into the old vampire’s mind and literally see what he’d seen as if with his own eyes. But the seer — surely just another fortune teller with delusions of mystical grandeur — wouldn’t be able to do the same. That knowledge might be gone forever.
Now that Reginald knew the information he wanted was here after all, he wouldn’t be able to leave until he found it. But now there was another problem. The only way to learn more was to visit the seer, and he couldn’t ask to visit the seer. If he did, he’d be letting Claude and Ophelia know just how much the obscure old artifact mattered. He had a fine line to walk; he’d told them that the codex might matter, but he’d also seen the way Claude’s eyes had focused when Reginald had kept pushing. Claude, Reginald knew, might already suspect that Reginald knew more than he was saying. He couldn’t keep prying. He was dealing with a man who’d been plotting the murder of a planet for thousands of years… and allowing such a man to see that a double-cross was in the making would be an extraordinarily bad idea.
Reginald filed the codex in his mind as a taboo topic. Like it or not, whatever else he uncovered would need to be uncovered on his own.
They settled into a familiar rhythm over the next few days, as Reginald sought to use servility to dilute any suspicions the others had of him. Ophelia or one of the other generals would come to Reginald, drag him into the situation room, and explain the latest developments on the warfront. He would then make complicated-sounding suggestions and predictions that were vague enough to be totally unhelpful. He would pretend to be interested in the progress against the humans. Then he would be dismissed, would return to his room with Nikki, and would worry.
He watched his phone. He stared at it, willing it to ring. But it didn’t ring, and he had no way to call Maurice and Claire from his end. He wished they would call. Right now, he needed counsel. He needed help. He needed another few ears and another few brains. He also needed (and this was something he couldn’t admit to Nikki, lest it worry her) a reason to believe that the others were even still alive. They hadn’t heard anything from Maurice and Claire in over a week, since the day Claire had let them through the VWC’s back door. Reginald could see things going either way for the crew back in America. Maurice and Brian were strong, but they were also harboring humans at a time when humans were public enemy number one. Would the vampire armies know about Claire, her mother, Jackie, and the others? Would V-Crews be at work in the area? Reginald just wanted to know one way or the other — and no news, in this case, was definitely not good news.
But the phone remained silent.
“We have to get out,” Nikki told him. “That’s all I really care about. I don’t care about the codex. And I didn’t think you did, either.”
“It’s all I have,” he replied. It was a vague thing to say, but she knew what he meant. The world was dying — not just the humans, but the world itself. It was becoming a mass grave, and all the two of them had been able to do during their quest to save it was to watch more and more people die. They couldn’t fight the vampires. They couldn’t help the humans. They didn’t even know which side they were supposed to be on. If they did get out, should they form a resistance? Or should they just run and hide? The question wasn’t which side to fight for; the question was where to plant your flag and live out your post-apocalyptic life. He wanted to help, but he’d settle for continuing to exist. It was stupid to aid a cause that had no chance, that was doomed from the start.
He needed to see the codex. Right, wrong, blood, or salvation, he needed to at least see it. And then, if necessary, he would allow himself to die.
“Let’s just ask them to let you talk to that Malcolm guy,” Nikki said. “Go ahead and tell Claude that the codex matters. Get him to let us go so that we can find it, even. You can bamboozle him, can’t you?”
“He knows I can glamour him because I’ve done it before. He’ll have a wall up, and I won’t be able to fight him if he does.”
“Then tell him it’s Chosen One stuff. Tell him you know things he can’t possible know.”
Reginald shook his head. “I don’t think they believe I’m the Chosen One.” Then he sighed. “Hell, I don’t even think there is a Chosen One.”
“Claire says you’re important. You stopped the vampire apocalypse the first time by giving the angels her — as another kind of Chosen One.”
It was almost true, and with that realization, Reginald found himself feeling guilty. Was all of this his fault? He had been the one to prop Claire up for the angels, and doing so had stopped the angels from destroying vampirekind with the Ring of Fire. But had that been a mistake? If the angels had carried out their original plan, he and Nikki would be dead, yes — but so would all of the others. Everyone at Vampire World Command would be dead. There would be no Kill Squads, no Sedition Army, no goddamn V-Crews. The humans would still be alive, still seven billion strong.
The issue went around and around in his head like a wheel. He remembered what Ophelia had said, about humanity becoming bloated and about vampires forcing them to evolve and adapt. Was that true? Were vampires the sharpening stone that humanity needed? Was that the proper, glass-is-half-full way to look at the situation: find a way to stop the killing now and it becomes a net gain, because humanity would benefit?
But it was self-serving bullshit and he knew it. But even if he believed it (which he didn’t), the point was moot. The killing wouldn’t stop now. The days of humanity were almost over. The new vampire overlords would turn some of those who remained and leave some as blood slaves, but the final curtain had almost hit the stage’s floor. The earth would soon go back to nature. Ivy would climb skyscrapers as a mere ten million souls spread out across a planet that had once been home to seven billion.
“Claire had a pedigree as a Chosen One,” said Reginald.
“So do you,” said Nikki.
He shook his head.
“You do, Reginald. The things you can do with your mind…”
But he didn’t want to hear it. He was a man trapped inside his own head. What good was it to be intelligent in a world where he couldn’t run, couldn’t fight, couldn’t defend those who mattered to him? What use was the ability to read fast in the world that was fast approaching? Earth was going to become a survivalist state for human remainders and vampires outcasts alike, and Reginald couldn’t even feed himself without help.
Day after day passed in the same routine as the kill total mounted: Situation room. Vague predictions. Go back home to Nikki. Worry.
He stared at his cell phone, long dead and drained of battery, and willed it to ring. He hadn’t heard from Claire for weeks. She had to be dead. They all had to be dead.
Claire.
Maurice.
Jackie.
Victoria.
Celeste.
Brian.
Talia.
And all of the others.
He couldn’t call Claire to find out the truth, even if he’d had a cell signal. Claire could only call him. It was Claire’s mind voodoo (which was far more useful than Reginald’s super-mind; he couldn’t analyze or time-stop or read or balance his way out of here) that made the cell phone work without power and without service. He’d made that possible. He’d catalyzed that change in Claire, by revealing Altus the incubus as her father. He had created the oracle. He had saved vampirekind.
And now she was dead. The vampires he’d saved had killed her, just as they’d killed everyone else. It was his fault. He’d opened Pandora’s box; he’d let the tempest out of its bottle.
He began to stalk the compound, feeling more depressed and self-loathing than he ever had as a human. He’d merely been a useless fat waste of space back then. Today, he was the cause of armageddon. Nikki wanted to call him a Chosen One? Perfect. It was apt. He was a Chosen One — “chosen” to the benefit of the bad guys. He’d started the gears turning, upsetting the careful equilibrium that had percolated along so nicely before he’d shown up. Vampires had been pompous and pretty and strong and fast before the rise of Reginald the Great, and they’d been bigots who wouldn’t accept those like him. Reginald had forced them to take him seriously — and, by extension, anyone like him. Doubt had percolated. The power systems had shifted; Maurice, an imperfect but ancient vampire, had taken the reins. Then Balestro had come, and then the rest of the chain had followed tidily along afterward. Had it merely been a sequence of random events? Or had it been cause and effect?
He thought again of Claire, and a revelation hit him like a bolt of lightning:
I am supposed to find the codex.
Was he a Chosen One? Did he have an integral role to play? Sure he did, because everyone had a role to play. Claire, when glamoured, having absorbed seemingly all of the information the world had to offer, had portrayed history as a sequence of dominoes that had been set up to fall in a specific way. In the beginning, God had tipped the first domino, and from then on it was only a matter of watching events unfold.
Yes, Reginald had put Claire in front of Balestro, and yes, his doing so had started a sort of relentless machine. But Claire had also said that Reginald was supposed to find the codex, which meant that he still had a purpose — that there was no way he couldn’t find it. And that meant that despite the way things looked, maybe he could stop the machine again after all.
He didn’t have to despair. He didn’t have to worry about how he was going to find it. He was supposed to find it. Fact was fact was fact. It was just one more domino in the chain, and it had been set up from the beginning to fall at the right time.
He was going to find it. It was only a matter of time.
He paced the stark, industrial hallways of the underground compound, dreaming of the black sky outside. All he had to do was to get past the doors. There was no sun; that’s why VWC was located where it was this time of year. He and Nikki could re-trace their steps. Would the Vagabond still be where they’d left it? Of course it would — and if it wasn’t, a suitable alternative would present itself. Reginald was going to find the codex. Plotting didn’t matter. Scheming didn’t matter. He just had to keep moving forward.
The codex wasn’t here. Reginald was fated to find the codex. Ergo, he would be able to leave. The notion was so simple that he’d missed it.
So Reginald played his part. He made himself almost useful amongst the murderers. He did what he was told. And as security around him became less vigilant — because really, where was he going to go? — Reginald started to explore, to see where intuition took him. And then one day while lapping the compound, he passed one of the generals — a woman bearing a nametag that read BELLO who he’d never seen up close before. Her proximity made his blood prickle. He almost wanted to reach out to her; she felt so familiar. She felt, in fact, like Claude had felt before Claude had learned what tricks Reginald had up his sleeves. But despite the compulsion, Reginald said nothing to General Bello. He smiled, and he walked on.
He knew that this was it — not what “it” was, precisely; he only knew that he needed to be ready for whatever fate might be preparing to deal him. So he and Nikki both packed the scant few belongings they had and raided several weeks’ worth of blood from what seemed to be a titanic blood supply in the commissary storage freezer. And they waited.
But they could only wait for so long, because the antarctic night wouldn’t last forever. In another few weeks, day would come to the south pole and he’d be trapped. So with every day Reginald waited, he felt more and more restless. He needed to act, to slot one more piece into the puzzle. So over the next few days, he played good-little-savant by day in the situation room and stalked the corridors of the compound by night. Feeling insane and reckless, he knocked on doors he shouldn’t knock on. He asked questions he shouldn’t ask. He raised suspicions. But it didn’t matter anymore; time was running out if it hadn’t run dry already, and one way or another, this had to end.
After he’d knocked on enough doors, he found himself facing a nondescript vampire with brown hair and strong shoulders, and as Reginald looked at the man, he could feel a fog surrounding him.
It was Malcolm the seer.
Malcolm didn’t know who Reginald was and was immediately suspicious when Reginald asked about his maker and what he’d seen during his time as a keeper. Reginald’s line of questions was reckless. Malcolm’s hackles went up. He said he wanted to call one of the generals and inquire about this strange fat man who it turned out he’d heard was asking around about him. Reginald pressed him harder. Malcolm picked up an internal compound phone. He dialed. He spoke to someone, and Reginald heard Malcolm describe him. The clock was ticking. Nothing mattered. So Reginald pushed, this time using his mind and blood, careless of what the man might do after this little bit of violation was finished.
Malcolm fought him, trying to raise a mental wall. But he hadn’t known what was coming and hadn’t had time to prepare, and Reginald’s mind — using that same unexplained connection he’d felt with Karl’s blood back in Paris — slipped through a gap.
He saw the seer’s blood memories as a fog of colorful emotions. There were limits to what Malcolm could interpret in the fog, but Reginald did not have the same limits. Still, he could only work within the seer’s interpretations at first, and Malcolm’s sense of his maker’s blood was vague. He could feel the maker’s anger as he’d died. He could feel the maker’s desperation at the idea that nobody would know the truth about the codex. Malcolm struggled harder. With Malcolm fighting him, Reginald couldn’t reach an actual visual record of anything. It was a riddle within a riddle within a riddle. Reginald couldn’t solve it, but this was his last chance. So he reached deep like a hand inside a long glove, careless of what he might disturb or break.
The fog lifted slightly. There wasn’t much more inside the protesting seer’s mind and blood… but there was something. A small thing. Reginald saw a river from above — a shape he recognized — and a statue of an angel with fangs. In all the art he’d studied, he’d never, ever heard of a sculpture of an angel with fangs.
Complete, he pushed down even harder on Malcolm’s blood. He grabbed one memory and twisted it against others, tying Malcolm’s native memories into a knot with his maker’s. When Reginald returned to reality, Malcolm was unconscious on the floor of his apartment, one leg and one arm stretched out like a dance. The damage wouldn’t be permanent; Reginald had bought himself a few hours at most. Malcolm’s mind would soon untie the knot, and then he’d raise questions with the generals that Reginald wouldn’t want to answer.
He ran. He found Nikki. Together they grabbed their bags and their gear and ran again, this time toward the corridor through which they’d first entered, toward the back door Claire had originally opened for them. Then they reached the double swinging doors in the seldom-used hallway and stopped, both of them realizing the same thing at the same time: that the door was secured with a keypad, that they didn’t know the code, and that without Claire to operate the lock from half a world away, they were two red-handed criminals without an escape route.
Reginald turned to Nikki. Nikki turned to Reginald. And Nikki said, “Shit.”
Then there was a loud, angry voice behind them, yelling for them to stop, to hold it right there. Reginald turned. Nikki turned. And they found themselves staring into the flushed, militant face of General Bello.
It was just like the first time he’d glamoured Claude, before Claude had learned to stop him. But General Bello had probably never heard of a vampire who could glamour vampires, and Reginald imagined his hand sinking into the grey flesh of her brain, his own mind lining up inside her head like a double-exposure.
“Go ahead and open this door for me,” said Reginald.
“Okay,” said Bello, her eyes vacant.
“And after you’ve let us out and locked the door behind us, you will forget you saw us, or that any of this happened.
“Okay,” she repeated. Then, as Reginald pulled back, Bello moved to the number pad. Keys lit. The door opened. And they were outside.
They stood on the ice in the dark, months-long night. There were no alarms, nothing at all to indicate anyone knew of their departure.
Nikki met Reginald’s eye and said, “Well, that was lucky.”
But Reginald shook his head and said that there was no such thing anymore.
They donned their arctic gear and ran. Nikki’s crampons dug a rut in the ice. They crossed the continent in days, pausing when she needed rest and blood from their stores. They used the same tent from the southbound trip, finding its constant, violent flapping frightening in the katabatic wind that streamed ceaselessly from the continent down toward the ocean. The tent beat around them, giving them the thinnest of shelter. Night and day and night and day passed, if night or day meant anything in the land of no sun.
They reached the coast as the first true morning was threatening to dawn. Over the past few days, the sun’s zenith had come dangerously close to rolling over the horizon, and Reginald realized that they’d wasted over a month and that up north, fall was beginning.
Soon, he imagined, Vampire World Command would begin its relocation to the arctic ice up north.
But they’d do so without their strategist, who had other plans.