“Jackson,” I muttered, shaking my head. “It all comes around doesn’t it?”
I was disgusted with myself for how much I wanted to kill him. I’d had years to reflect on the deaths I’d caused and how unjust my entire quest had been. You know what had changed? Not a goddamn thing. I was still every bit as eager to rip that mangy mutt turned vampire apart as I was years ago. It kind of frightened me how much I was looking forward to it, in fact. Maybe it was because my brother’s death was one of the last things about mortality that still made me feel.
“Eventually, yes,” Thoth said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “He’s a viable suspect.”
“Why the hell would he kill her?” I said, actually interested in doing my job as bellidix rather than just jumping to conclusions. As tempting as those conclusions might be. “I mean, really, just over a book?”
“Jackson lost a lot of money with his chance of becoming famous. Not just from royalties meant for the Council of Ancients and the voivode of Texas but also from cross-promotion. He runs a music business now. That’s in addition to the businesses he owns throughout the city that paid for it.”
“Really? He’s gone Jay Z, huh?”
That made me even more irritated. I’d done my best to ignore the fact he still lived in my city, but I’d known he’d gone from being a penny ante gang boss to a man living in style. Jackson had driven out poor people from residential areas to build homes for the people who worked for the undead as well as services that catered to tourists. He wasn’t Thoth rich, anywhere near that really, but he was damn rich—certainly by my standards.
“Nowhere near as successful as Shawn Corey Carter but close enough. Jackson is unafraid of the spotlight and that allowed him to appeal to certain segments of society that are eager for any form of vampire media. There’s also the fact Rebecca Plum and he were briefly involved during her first visit to New Detroit,” Thoth said, frowning. “Back when she was still a human rather than a serial killer.”
I stared at him. “The vampire-porn writing housewife and the hybrid gangbanger?”
“Far from the strangest union I’ve encountered,” Thoth said, noncommittal. “He has the strength to have killed her that way. The Second Eldest’s bloodline has always produced incredibly powerful soldiers and his werewolf strength passed over to his undead state. Romance is also as good enough a reason to kill as any. Believe me, I know.”
I paused, thinking about it. As much as it disgusted me, I didn’t believe he’d sneak into the penthouse to kill her. Mostly, because I’m sure he would have killed me if he’d found me. “It doesn’t feel right. You have no idea how hard it is saying that, either.”
I didn’t want to be reasonable, though. I wanted to track Jackson down, shoot him repeatedly, and then leave him staked through the heart with a metal rod for the sun. A part of me wanted to engage in cannibalism too, drinking his dry blood to take a portion of his power for myself.
Thoth gave my shoulder a squeeze. “It’s about the only lead we’ve got, though, and I’d rather sacrifice Carl than you if worse comes to worse.”
“Love is knowing you’ll frame a poor bastard for a crime he didn’t commit than let someone you care about go down for it. Is that it?” I now realized what Thoth was doing. It wasn’t about whether or not Jackson was guilty, it was about whether or not it was me or some other vampire. I could get behind that.
“Something like that,” Thoth said, removing his hand. “Enil is not so attached to Carl it would be a problem. Not anymore at least. He served his purpose in getting Detroit set up. Now he is just another face in the crowd.
Yeah, some vampires treated their creations like family while others treated them like employees. Temps even. This was an opportunity to save my ass as well as take down Jackson. I was impressed. “You are evil, Thoth.”
“Thank you.”
“What is Jackson up to anyway?” I asked, not really caring about who killed Rebecca Plum. I hoped they lived a long and happy unlife—as long as Yukie was alright, at least. Maybe it was just the fact I hadn’t had sex in months, but I was feeling pretty well disposed to her.
“Isn’t it your job as bellidix to keep track of vampires’ movements?”
“Yes, well, I also work nights at a gas station for crap money. Which I wouldn’t have to if I had a five-figure salary.”
“Which you’re not getting since your charge died.”
Dammit.
Thoth chuckled. “Carl Jackson has rebuilt Lincoln Park Heights as his own personal fiefdom. It has gone from being a war zone to be an upscale neighborhood for rich Detroit families. Mostly the families of Carl’s lieutenants and creations.”
“I bet the ex-bangers are just wonderful neighbors to the upscale white folk.”
“Perhaps,” Thoth said. “You need to bring him in alive.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely confused. “Won’t his corpse work?”
“No, we need a confession.”
“How will…” I started to say before I realized it wasn’t that difficult to extract one. Torture was lousy for interrogation but great for confessions. “Gotcha.”
Surprisingly, I wasn’t all that down with torturing Jackson into saying he was responsible. Killing the guy? Yeah, sure, that was justice. Framing the guy? I was even okay with that since it was my ass on the line. Torturing the guy until he signed a piece of paper? That was too close to what happened to a lot of guys in my neighborhood. I wasn’t about to bring that up, though.
“Good. I’ll continue following up leads from here. The Westies will undoubtedly send some of their own men to investigate, and it’s very likely they’ll be less than cordial when seeking out Rebecca’s killer.”
“How do they even know she’s dead?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine Ashura was eager to get on the phone and tell the Texan vampires how much we’d fucked up looking after their white elephant.
“Voivode Forsyth created her. Despite his many, many character flaws, he loved Rebecca as both a daughter as well as a lover. As soon as he sensed her death, which would be instantaneous given their connection, he made arrangements to send a bogatyr pack here. They’ll come back with someone to punish or die in the attempt.”
“Huh, it goes to show even evil has loved ones.”
“Evil?” Thoth said, looking at me strangely. “Evil is a very nebulous concept.”
“Has always been pretty straightforward to me even if I don’t judge as many people as I used to.”
“For me, I don’t bother trying to judge morality period,” Thoth said, offended. “I have those I care for and those I don’t. Good, evil, or indifferent matters little compared to this fundamental truth: I look after my own.”
“Makes sense,” I said, knowing it was a better morality than some. “Still, I’m going to try to avoid eating babies for the time being.”
Thoth frowned. “That goes without saying.”
“Yeah,” I said, chuckling.
“They’re not a meal,” Thoth said.
I stared at him.
“That was a joke, Peter.”
“Right,” I said, not laughing. “I don’t suppose you could lend me an army to take with me?”
“I’m a bit busy cleaning up this mess, but you should take David and Sam with you. David is far stronger than he used to be and will heal anything short of decapitation. Sam is a supremely capable witch and one of the most survival-orientated women I have ever met. You would do well to put your life in her hands.”
The melody to “Funky Town” started playing nearby, and I turned to find Sam answering her cellphone. “Yes, Tina? You wanted to call about whether I’d need you to babysit for the rest of the night? Yes, yes, I would. No, Becky, they can’t watch Friday the Thirteenth. They’re not even in kindergarten! Yes, I’m aware they’re able to do Advanced Calculus and drink blood. It’s Disney or nothing!” Sam paused. “Okay, maybe The Nightmare Before Christmas. That’s okay. No Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, though. That movie me fucked me up as a child. I think the Tim Burton version is actually less upsetting.”
“Oh yes, I can totally see the unstoppable badassitude she possesses,” I said, nodding my head. “A regular Sarah Connor.”
“She’s alright,” Thoth said. “Despite appearances, she’s a super freak.”
Of course Thoth would be a Rick James fan. Dude had taste.
“I’ll return her in good working condition,” I said, about to move. “Oh, and before I go, I have a kind of weird question.”
“Does it relate to you having sex with my wife’s granddaughter?” Thoth asked.
Oh shit, I hadn’t even thought of that. “Uh, no.”
“Then ask away,” Thoth said, gesturing.
Yeah, because that didn’t make all conversations we would have from now on awkward. “Well, it’s about David.”
“You want to have sex with David?”
“No!” I said, knowing he was fucking with me but still upset.
“Good because that’s not possible,” Thoth said, sighing. “Zombies are ill-equipped. Also, their blood is completely non-nutritious. It’s sad, really.”
I wondered how he’d come by that knowledge. “Actually, it’s just to confirm that zombies don’t actually need to, uh, eat people, do they?”
“No,” Thoth said.
“Oh thank God,” I said, nodding.
Thoth winced at that statement. “I can assure you God had nothing to do with it. Yes, the only reason he might need to replenish himself with the life-substance of the living would be he was exceeding the normal parameters of what was possible for a human being. It’d be a byproduct of the fact I used vampire blood to make him a zombie, though.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked, wondering why Thoth had decided to play Doctor Frankenstein while resurrecting my friend. Wait, I suppose that would be playing Doctor Frankenstein, regardless.
“It was an experiment to make him more than a mindless rotting corpse.”
“Ah.” I paused to think about my next words. “About that exceeding normal parameters thing, would that include, say running sixty miles an hour to work every day without stopping for breath? Not that he takes any.”
“Yes, like that,” Thoth said.
“Or showing how he can lift a car to impress people?”
“Very much so.”
“Or trying to jump over buildings and usually just getting to the roof?” I threw in as a last bit.
“Exactly.”
I paused. “So, uh, where would, hypothetically, David get human flesh in a non-monstrously evil fashion?”
Thoth felt his face.
“Tell us about these things!” I complained. “You can’t find this on the internet.”
“It is on the internet!” Thoth said.
“Then pay our internet bill!” I said. “It was a choice between it and HBO. I am not missing my fantasy series!”
“You can watch television on the internet.” Thoth had the audacity of lecturing me on the modern world.
I was about to argue when Sam walked up beside us. “Hey guys, I don’t mean to interrupt your Daddy Vampire-Baby Vampire bonding time—”
“Do not call a black man a baby vampire,” I said.
“Yes, the proper term is Youngblood,” Thoth replied. “Or childer.”
I rolled my eyes.
“But Rebecca Plum’s ghost is absent,” Sam said. “Usually, those who were involved in a lot of deaths become ghosts, which is part of the reason they’re almost all psychopaths, but Rebecca was also murdered that means she was destined to hang around for a few days. There’s no sign of her, though.”
“Maybe hell opened up and swallowed her ass,” I said, not entirely joking.
“Possible,” Sam said, surprising me. “However, I think it’s more likely Mrs. Plum’s spirit was taken by her killer. Otherwise, I would have been able to summon her and ask her who killed her.”
“Not legally admissible,” I said, remembering how the United States had banned the testimony of ghosts this year. “But it’s not like we follow the law.”
“You are the law,” Sam said, missing a golden opportunity to do the Judge Dredd voice.
“I am the law,” I said, coming somewhere between Stallone and Karl Urban.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Thoth said. “No ghost implies our killer is not only a vampire but possessed of magical ability as well.”
“Which is like you and a handful of other guys,” I said. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Thoth replied. “Thankfully, we have the fact New Detroit is the mecca of bought and sold magic. Jackson could have easily picked up an item that could capture her spirit. It does mark our enemy as more intelligent than the slaughter around us suggests.”
“Yeah, Jackson might have bought a six-demon bag,” I muttered, not believing it for a second.
“Ooo, I love Big Trouble in Little China,” Sam said, cheerfully. “It took me years to realize Kurt Russel wasn’t actually the star.”
“Yeah, he was the ethnic comic relief and wow that movie is coming up a lot this week,” I said, not at all happy about leaving on this note. I wanted to talk to Thoth about Yukie some more. She deserved to know she had a family. I wasn’t going to pass on an opportunity for revenge, though. “Let’s get going. Is David anywhere nearby?”
“In the casino below,” Thoth said. “I gave him a thousand dollars in chips to amuse himself.”
I grimaced and wished I could strangle my mentor. “That’s…going to last him about ten minutes.”
“Probably,” Thoth said, amused. “Fare ye well, Peter.”
I closed my eyes and started walking out, accidentally stepping in a puddle of blood. That’s when my time powers kicked in. They were my other ability than flight, talking to animals, and becoming a cute little dog. One second, I was standing in the apartment being cleaned up by the police to prevent the murder from being solved, and the next I was standing in the middle of the daylight as the sun had just risen above the balcony. I had gone back in time a good twelve or fifteen hours to the point of Rebecca’s murder.
“Oh crap,” I said, staring up at the glowing orb hanging over New Detroit. I couldn’t help but stare right at it, half expecting my eyes to explode out the back of my skull. I didn’t, though, because this was just a mental projection of consciousness back in time rather than an actual transportation.
No Marty McFly time-shenanigans here, just visions of what had been. Even so, the sight of the sun was as clear as if I was there and I could feel its light against my skin. I was strong enough to endure the sun now, endure hours of it if I wanted to, but I’d never done it. I was so used to thinking of the sun as a hateful enemy that could kill me at any moment, I couldn’t overcome the mental block I had against going out into its rays.
Weirdly, at that exact moment, I heard Roger Daltrey’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” starting to play on the radio nearby. It would have been a staggering coincidence if not for the fact it had been featured in The Lost Boys and the local radio stations, predictably, had a giant vampire fetish.
I could have taken advantage of this moment to go investigate Rebecca Plum’s death, discover what had happened to her, but I instead stretched out my arms and let myself experience the warmth of Helios’ rays. It was said in the Necronomicon, the real one, not the Lovecraft book, that being accursed from the light was one of the punishments given by the Gods of Earth for the first vampires’ loyalty to the Elder Gods. Given vampires had rebelled against the Elder Gods and were the biggest force trying to keep the scary eldritch abominations asleep, it felt like they should have lifted that curse.
Still, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I felt warm in a way I hadn’t felt in years, and I just stretched out my arms. The light should have lost its novelty after the first fifteen minutes, but I just let it fill and pass through me. It was a reminder just what I’d given up for a lifetime in darkness. Wow, that sounded pretentious.
Unfortunately, life didn’t really agree with my decision as there was the sound of Rebecca Plum stumbling out of the bedroom behind me. Turning my head, almost reluctantly, I saw the white-skinned hungover-looking serial killer growling as she emerged from her drugged stupor. It must have been a powerful set of drugs Yukie had slipped her to not only knock her out but also overcome her system to the point she’d recovered in the daytime.
Man, did she look pissed.
It occurred to me that Yukie’s actions regarding her might have been ill-advised. Rebecca was a psychopath, we knew that, and was awake now while we were in the other room post-coitus. Looking at the expression on her face and seeing her fingernails elongate, I imagined her going into our room and tearing us to pieces. In that case, Yukie, as a person who didn’t sleep during the day, could have easily killed her and left for understandable reasons.
My theory was quickly dispelled.
The sunlight was blocked out by a literal flock of bats. Do you call a bunch of bats a flock? You call ravens a murder? Whatever, a lot of bats descend from the sky before smashing through the balcony door. Rebecca didn’t even have time to scream as the bats merged into a single hairless figure in black who slammed her up against the sides of the room repeatedly, rending her with clawed hands and throwing the pieces of her body left and right. I couldn’t make out his features because he was protected by a shield of darkness that clung to him like a suit of armor. Thoth could do something similar with blood, and it was damn weird. Deflector shields were not something you normally associated with vampires.
It moved around faster than my eyes could follow before finally dumping her headless torso on the ground. I was no stranger to violence but, damn, that was brutal. For a second, I also saw the briefest flash of something resembling a person’s ghostly outline emerge from the corpse’s bits. That was promptly ripped to shreds by the monster as well. I wasn’t aware, until that moment, you could destroy a soul, but if you could, then our murderer had surely done it. Either that or Rebecca Plum was going to be putting herself back together in hell.
I ran into the room in hopes of getting a better look at the attacker, only to see a gigantic six-foot-long silver-white fox leap through the air before slamming into Rebecca’s attacker. The figure summoned all the shadows into the room into a blacked suit of tendril-covered armor before they lashed out at her like an anime. Yeah, some vampires could do that. I just thought physical shadows were something Francis Ford Coppola invented for Bram Stoker’s Dracula to look cool.
Yukie slashed, clawed, and bit at the shadows before they knocked her against the side of the wall. She assumed her human form, drew an oversized No-Dachi katana plated in silver before slashing through even more of the tendrils. Rather than stay and fight, the attacker transformed back into a colony of bats. Yes, that’s what it’s called! A colony! The colony of bats flew out the balcony door, and Yukie ran after them. She leaped over the balcony and started to fly after them.
Huh, I didn’t know werefoxes could do that.
I mean, I could.
Badly.
But I could.
Preparing to fly after her and follow her to wherever she was going, I suddenly found myself back in the present. Time had clearly passed since Thoth and Sam were by my side looking at me strangely. Also, more importantly, the police were finishing up their clean-up of the apartment.
“Are you sure he’s alright?” Sam asked. “It seems pretty dangerous for him to zone out like this.”
“Every power has its drawback,” Thoth said, shrugging. “Albeit, Time Manipulation is an ability that has a mind of its own.”
I looked between them. “I just visited the future. It turns out we’re going to form a band that brings peace and justice to the whole of the world. Quick, we need to find Keanu Reeves, and that blond vampire killed first in The Lost Boys.”
“Alex Winter,” Thoth said. “What did you actually see?”
I frowned. “I don’t know who killed Rebecca Plum, but it was an Ancient. I hate being right because that means someone with a lot more juice than you, Thoth, is behind this. Possibly one of the Council.”
Ancients were the heavy hitters of the vampire world. Every one of them was over a thousand years old, and most of them looked like Count Orlok or Medusa. Just like Old Ones were vampires who couldn’t be killed by anything other than another vampire, Ancients were another metamorphosis in our undead life journey. Supposedly, Hitler had sent a thousand Waffen-SS tanks to wipe out the Ancients’ gathering place on Moldoveanu Peak. The Ancients had held a contest to see who could kill the most Nazis. Enil the Second Eldest had won at seventy-five.
“It gets worse,” I admitted.
“How could it get worse?” Sam asked, tempting fate.
“Yukie went after it,” I said, knowing this was going to hit him like a speeding car.
Thoth exchanged a look with Sam as the implications of what I said sunk in.
“Well shit,” Thoth said.