Chapter One

“So how’s being the vampire Judge Dredd working out for you?” My friend David Treme said as he read a copy of Sexy Supernatural Hotties (SSH).

The two of us were behind the counter of the Qwik and Shop, a knock-off of 7-Eleven that existed off the highway leading up to New Detroit. It was a ridiculous job to have when you were a vampire and a zombie, but we lived in a world where the supernatural had been revealed to mundanes. After ten years of the oogie boogie being everywhere you turned around, two monsters serving Slurpees wasn’t that impressive anymore.

David had long blond hair, a baseball cap on his head, a baggy Metallica t-shirt, blue jeans, and a look that spoke to a lifelong refusal to admit the nineties were over. The only things that marked him as a zombie were death-like pallor and a stitched over throat from where he’d had it slit.

“My other job is terrible,” I said, returning a credit card to a woman who’d just realized she was being served by monsters. “It has no salary, all the other enforcers are jackasses, my bosses give Stalin a run for his money, and I’m constantly surrounded by things that want to kill me.”

“So, it’s exactly like being the vampire Judge Dredd,” David said.

“Yeah.”

Thanks to a misadventure awhile back, I was now New Detroit’s bellidix, which amounted to being sheriff for Michigan’s vampires. I answered to the voivode and City Council that enforced the laws of the undead. Whenever they asked me to jump, I had to ask how high, and that was high since I had the power to fly.

The woman picked up her card as if it had been contaminated by my touch, made a cross over her chest and exited out the door.

“Thank you, come again,” I said, waving goodbye. “I hate this job so very much.”

“Then why don’t you quit?” David said, showing his usual level of sympathy. “It’s not like this world is going to end if you don’t deal with all the dumbass customers stopping by for candy bars or booze. They’re all on their way to gamble and get their photos taken with the undead. Even the bigots. Especially the bigots.”

New Detroit was the Mecca, Dubai, and Las Vegas for the undead. Ever since the Bailout, the event where the vampires of the world had revealed themselves to the public while rescuing the United States from bankruptcy, they’d been re-developing America’s Rust Belt into a place supernaturals could live openly among humans.

It was an experiment with mixed results since most older vampires had difficulty adjusting to the idea humans were not just food and/or sex toys. The fact that the United States was the most religious country in the Western World, and we reacted to crosses like someone shoving a torch in our faces hadn’t helped matters. Personally, I would have set up vampire HQ in Canada. It’s not like the cold ever bothered me anyway.

“Quitting isn’t an option,” I said, walking back to the Slurpee machine. “I still have bills to pay and even being your roommate means we can barely afford our trailer. Worse, there aren’t a lot of jobs where the owner doesn’t give a crap if I take three or four nights off to kill some rabid fangbros eating tourists.”

I had other expenditures too, things I didn’t like to talk about with David but weighed heavily on my mind. Things like taking care of my dementia-suffering mother. You’d think the fact the upper crust of vampires, a.k.a. the 1% of the 1%, who ruled the world behind the scenes, could have bothered to share some of that wealth. Then again, you didn’t get to become a trillionaire by being charitable unless you were Bill Gates and he wasn’t a centuries-old vampire.

David shrugged. “Our boss doesn’t care because he’s on a combination of meth and a pharmacy of prescription drugs. I doubt he noticed you were gone.”

“True. Steve being a werewolf is probably the only reason he’s still alive,” I said, jiggling the Slurpee machine to make it work. “But it just proves my point.”

I’d learned my boss, Steve Emerson, was a cousin of werewolf royalty in a town called Bright Falls. The town was about thirty minutes away and filled to the brim with shifters. The shifter part was an argument right there for never going anywhere near it. Vampires and werewolves were related, one could even spawn the other, but it was a Cain and Abel sort of relationship. Personally, I’d lost all respect for them as monsters when I’d heard there was a weredeer branch of their race. I mean, seriously?

“Can’t you just ask Thoth for money? He’s the vampire king now, isn’t he?” David asked.

Thoth was my creator and probably the second most powerful vampire in New Detroit, especially after marrying the voivode Ashura. They lived the kind of glamorous unlife closer to what I’d expected upon being created. Their existence was a whirl of constant orgies, parties, and plots to rule the world. They could easily drop a million bucks on an A-list celebrity to donate a combination of blood and sex to their nightly entertainment.

And did.

“Thoth still thinks I need to be my own man,” I grumbled.

“Didn’t you save the whole damn city?” David asked.

“You were there,” I pointed out.

“Still kind of blurry about that night given it got me killed and all,” David said. “What a world.”

Ain’t no rest for the Wicked isn’t just a song by Cage the Elephant.” I picked up an empty Slurpee cup and put it beside the full one. Sticking my straw in my Red Cherry SuperBombTM, I slurped my drink then spit it out into the other cup. I didn’t have the capacity to swallow anything but blood anymore, but I still liked the taste of sugar.

“That’s really disgusting,” David said, grimacing. “I never noticed that while I was high on your blood.”

David used to be my human servant; my Bloodsworn. “How’s being a zombie anyway? Finally got adjusted to it? I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to ask about it these past few months.”

Honestly, I hadn’t wanted to ask about it. David had been pestering me for the entirety of our master-servant relationship to turn him into a vampire. I hadn’t because: one, I had spent five years as a Bloodsworn before Thoth turned me and two, vampires were very picky about population control these days. In the end, fate had made my choice for me, and Thoth had been forced to raise him as a different kind of undead. A decidedly far less sexy and well-respected form of monster. At least he was the Haitian voodoo kind of zombie instead of the George Romero kind.

Supposedly.

David shrugged. “I don’t have to use the bathroom, I don’t have to eat, I don’t sleep, and I need to take baths twice a day in order to keep my body moist enough that I don’t become all stiff.”

“No need for brains? The flesh of the living?” I asked, less than delicately.

“Not that I can tell,” David said, stretching his neck with a slight cracking noise. “There’s one big downside, though.”

“Which is?”

“I was watching IZombie today and saw both Rose McIver and Rahul Kohli in swimwear for their latest case.”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing,” David said, sighing.

“Nothing?” I asked. “Not a thing? You can’t…uh, respond anymore?”

“Nope,” David said. “It’s as dead down there as the rest of me.”

“I’m so sorry, man,” I said, before blinking. “Wait a minute, then why continue to read the men’s magazines?”

“I still maintain a purely aesthetic appreciation for the human form.”

“So, you’re asexual instead of bisexual now?”

David glared. “Hey, hey, I decide how to identify my sexuality.”

I raised my hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, pal.”

Everyone had gotten extra sensitive since the Bailout, now more commonly called the Reveal. Personally, it was enough to drive me off the internet as everyone was always calling me either a crypto-fascist or a species traitor depending on what forums I was posting on. I mean, couldn’t a guy just hope Wesley Snipes did another Blade movie without making it a big deal? Why did it have to be controversial that he was slaying vampires when they were a real minority? Dude still looked badass doing it.

“Thank you,” David said, smirking. “Besides, zombie or not, living forever is still pretty sweet. It’s not like I’m getting any less sex than I was before. Well, with other people. I can still do the other kind.”

“Way too much information, David. Actually, no, wait, I hate to ask this but uh...just to make sure...there’s no, um, rotting?”

“This is getting a bit personal.”

“We use the same bathroom, so I think it’s a relevant question.”

“No rotting,” David said.

I nodded. “Good.”

“As far as I can tell.”

I owed Thoth big time for what he’d done, more than he could ever have repaid in money. His restoring my best friend to life was a gift that made unlife bearable. Of course, it was kind of unnerving to find out your creator could raise the dead, but I wasn’t exactly going to complain either. I wish he’d had this power eight years ago when my brother passed on.

Steve Emerson arrived, somehow looking both stoned and wired at the same time. He was wearing leather pants, a leather vest with no undershirt, and a dog collar. It made him look like a BDSM slave at the world’s crappiest bondage club. I also noticed a couple of new tattoos, and I wondered when he’d found time for that given he was usually passed out in his office or at home. Did I mention he was a millionaire? His cousins, the O’Henrys, owned all of rural Michigan. The world was not fair.

“How was your visit to Bright Falls?” I asked.

“Too many other shifters. Gerald Pasteur says hello.”

I nodded. He’d been a friend of mine before he’d gotten himself banished. The only vampire among the shifters. It was a fate worse than death, truly. “Tell him to make sure he flosses after he feeds. You never know how much hair is going to get stuck there.”

“Cute,” Steve said, going to the back and returning. He was carrying a mop in his right hand. “I’ve got a job for you in the men’s bathroom.”

Right, don’t make fun of the werewolves. “Great.”

“Someone created another vampire?” David asked. He was making a reference to last year when I’d found someone had left an abandoned newborn in the can. I’d thought Melissa and I had something special, but we hadn’t spoken in months.

“No, someone just had too many tacos,” Steve said, sniffing through his left nostril. “It’s a real mess in there.”

I sighed and looked over at David. “I don’t suppose you’re willing to do this for me, my faithful servant?”

“Sorry, I’m Thoth’s zombie now,” David said. “But if it’s any consolation, nothing is stopping you from getting another Bloodslave.”

“I can’t afford you,” I said, noting finances were getting thin. Thoth had been kind enough to give me almost 50K in cash for saving the city last year. I’d ended up using almost all of it looking after my mom, and got her transferred to an assisted living facility that wasn’t ass. Apparently, the fact I was a creature of the night who could rip their throats out without consequence didn’t get me a discount. And people call us leeches.

David shrugged. “We’ll work on that. Make it a hot chick or a hot dude. I’m not picky. Hotter than you. Ooo, let’s make someone rich into our servant so we can mooch off them. See if Taylor Swift wants the job. Maybe Rihanna.”

“Pfft, I’d make Rihanna a vampire…and then she’d dump me for a better quality of vampire.” I rolled my eyes and walked around the counter to take the mop. “Seriously, David, do this for me. What would you be if not for me?”

“Alive?” David suggested.

I paused. “Fair enough.”

Steve handed me the mop. He’d been standing there the whole time, looking at us as if he were statues. “If you two yokels are done bantering, I’ve got heroin to shoot.”

“Right,” I said, sighing.

Heading back to the men’s bathroom, I heard Steve call, “Oh, hey, your vampire hunter turned vampire girlfriend called.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Melissa? Melissa Morris?”

“You have another vampire hunter turned vampire girlfriend?” Steve asked.

“When was this?”

Steve said, “I dunno, it was left on my machine in the office. I listened to it four or five hours ago when I got back into town. She said she was coming into town and wanted to know if you wanted to meet up.”

I checked my cell phone and saw it had died. Dammit. I’d been ignoring it since every time someone called me, it was to intimidate some newborn vampire into behaving around the tourists. “You didn’t think to tell me this?”

“Of course I did, as soon as I remembered,” Steve said. “Which was now because I don’t care about your love life.”

“You should call her back,” David called to me. If I was inclined to eat the brains or other parts of anyone, I would eat her. Her or Jason Momoa. Mmm Khal Aquaman of Cimmeria. Just the thought of tearing into his gooey fleshy bits and devouring the gristle…”

I gave him a sideways glance. “Uh huh.”

“But I’m not inclined to eat anything on anyone,” David said quickly, like he was snapping out of a daze. “Wait, I do kind of have a craving for raw meat. Maybe I should call Thoth and ask what a zombie’s diet is.”

“Maybe you should. I’m going to go clean the bathroom and pretend that conversation never happened.” I headed to the bathroom door, which now had a big ‘Out of Order’ sign on it. I was grateful to have a distraction now as the subject of Melissa wasn’t one I was really interested in discussing even with my best friend, let alone him and my boss.

Media had perhaps exaggerated the romantic and sexual power of vampires. Well, at least for me. Sure, there were plenty of vampires who did have an irresistible lure toward the opposite sex (and the same, now that I thought about it), but that didn’t do much for a long-term romance. The Bite could give orgasmic sexual bliss to any human or vampire it touched, but that was only one common problem it solved. Hell, it created its own since you had to give it to a bunch of people to stay fed.

Opening the bathroom door and heading on in, I was immediately overwhelmed with a catastrophic sight and series of smells that looked far and beyond anything something a normal human being could do. Looking around for the janitor’s bucket, I almost quit then and there when I noticed the lock on the door automatically close.

Ah hell.

The sight of poop on every nook and cranny of the bathroom disappeared along with the smell even as I saw someone had drawn a “Silence” ward on the bathroom mirror in spray-paint. It was cheap arcane magic. You could buy a stencil in New Detroit for fifteen bucks from a novelty shop. The illusion was slightly more impressive as it not only had created an image and smell good enough to fool a werewolf (albeit one who composed a good 1% of the state’s drug problem) but also had concealed the thick coat-wearing, bald, pallid demonkin in the room with me. He had unnaturally elongated ears, sharpened teeth, and predatory yellow eyes. His hands, too, had been altered with long steel claws where his fingernails should be. Worse, I saw his fingers were covered in a dozen magical rings ($200-$5000 depending on what jewelry store you got them from) and there was an inverted anti-vampire ankh amulet around his neck.

“Man, the things people waste their money on,” I muttered. At least I wasn’t going to have to clean up crap.

Demonkin were a kind of a joke among vampires because they were the children of possessed mortals. Ever since the supernatural had “come out of the coffin” (thank you, Sookie Stackhouse), there were no end of numbnuts who wanted to summon demons to grant their wishes. Having had more than a few encounters with said creatures, this inevitably resulted in the humans being ridden hard and left for dead with usually a few damned abominations left in their wake. Some were unnaturally beautiful, most weren’t, like this asshole. He looked like he was wearing a Halloween costume and not a particularly good one at that. In fact, there were signs his deformities weren’t natural like the extra fingers or third eyes that came with most demonkin. They looked fake, or at least the result of bad plastic surgery. Was I being Punked? Was Ashton Kutcher hiding out in one of the stalls? Was that show still on, even in reruns?

“Foolish, Stone,” the demonkin hissed with a mouth full of saliva. “You should have taken better care to hide your nighttime resting place!”

Okay, now I wished I was being Punked. I moved my hand in front of my face to guard it against spittle. That was what you got when you talked with fangs. Every vampire knew this, and wannabe here had apparently gotten himself expensive dental work without knowing it (or caring). “Okay, first, dumbass, you’re supposed to look for my daytime resting place. That’s when vampires are vulnerable. Second, it’s not a secret, I’m in the damn phone book and on Google. I’ve been looking for a second job where I can work from home since I developed the ability to be up during the day. Third, please tell me you were born that way and didn’t actually alter yourself to look like an orc from the Lord of the Rings.”

The demonkin looked defensive. “Body-modification is a perfectly valid practice for sorcerers.”

Jesus Christ. I had fought an actual honest-to-Devil thousand-year-old vampire knight once and this guy thought he had my number?

I wanted to shake the guy then and there. “You’re a fucking demon’s descendant! That comes with supernatural beauty and the ability to make women (or men) swoon! Why would you give that up?”

This clearly wasn’t how the demonkin, if he was a demonkin, had expected our meeting to go. “I’ll have you know many women enjoy the look of one of Tolkien’s orcs. Freaky chicks. Ones with lots of piercings who didn’t like the white bread suburbanite look I was cursed with. It doesn’t matter, though, because you’re going to die now. I will feast upon your blood and channel that power to make me the most powerful sorcerer in Detroit.”

I raised a hand. “Uh, why?”

“I thought I just explained that.”

“No, I mean, why do you want to be the most powerful sorcerer in Detroit. I mean, do you intend to use it to get rich, get laid, become immortal, what? Also, why me?”

“Well, all of the above, obviously,” the demonkin said. “As for you, you’re the most powerful Youngblood vampire in the world and thus the easiest to kill. It’s nothing personal.”

“I hate that saying,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Killing me is personal.”

“To me, it’s not personal,” the demonkin said. “Also, I may like this whole snark-versus-snark portion of the conversation, but I can cause people to throw up their own eyes. So, go ahead and try resisting, it’s not going to work. I’m fully warded against any and all vampiric powers you may use.”

“Right,” I said. “Just checking.”

The demonkin began casting a spell. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten the most basic rule of Dungeons and Dragons: don’t be a squishy wizard unless you’ve got some NFL linebacker looking backup. I pulled out a Desert Eagle .50 from the back of my pants hidden under my hoodie and shot him in the throat. I then leapt at the wound as my natural bloodlust overcame my aversion to the ward around his neck (which he clearly hadn’t paid enough for) and I slurped out the gushing juice from his throat.

Yeah, well, if this was a prank then at least I got a free meal out of it.