Carl Jackson’s mansion was a living testament to the fact shit floats. The place was newly constructed but looked like one of those ivy-covered mansions from The Great Gatsby or, as I would have described it, “Uncle Phil’s place.” It was a three-story building with a massive yard, brick fence, and guys carrying legal-only-in-Michigan assault rifles as they patrolled the place with their blooddogs.
The other vampire homes I knew weren’t nearly as well-defended, and if you were describing a vampire Fort Knox then, well, that would literally be what this place was. About the only good thing I could say about it was everyone here was from Detroit, and the residents were all people of color. Even that enjoyable factoid was ruined by the fact they were primarily the kind of people like Jackson, parasites who had fed on the good hardworking people of my city until they’d risen to the top. Note: this is a vampire calling them parasites.
“How did that asshole get to be so damn rich?” David said, expressing the same sentiment I had. “I knew him in high school, and he was a jumped-up thug then.”
“You knew him in high school?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” David said. “He used to beat me up for being gay every Thursday. I don’t think he understood the whole distinction between bi and gay.”
Sam looked back. “Because it would have been better if he’d just beaten up the gay students?”
“In the sense it wouldn’t have been me, yes,” David replied. “Thankfully, he was two years older than me, and I only had to deal with his crew afterward. The ones who didn’t become Knives, at least.”
That was a familiar story. “Apparently, crime does pay and so does selling teenagers song downloads about how hard life is as one of the undead in Detroit. Or how awesome it is, I guess. Depends on the rapper.”
“Like Kayne’s Can’t Tell Vampires Nothing, right? I love that song,” Sam said, cheerily.
I closed my eyes. Why did you have to sell out when you changed, Kayne? “Yeah, stuff like that. When everything was legalized, he had a big chunk of legitimate businesses that he parlayed into all his. At the end of the day, though, he’s just a wannabe.”
“A richer than god wannabe with a private army,” David said.
I grimaced. “Yes, but a wannabe. A soon-to-be-dead wannabe.”
The problem was I had no idea how the hell I was going to pull that off. I mean, I could fly up to his room, grab him and drag him away but that was relying a lot on him being in a room with windows. Also, not getting shot while I was in the air. Oh, and me actually being able to fly without crashing. With my time powers, erratic as they might be, I could go all John Woo bullet time on these assholes. However, even if I did manage to kill them all, I’d still have to take care of Jackson. Plus, I didn’t necessarily want to kill fifteen other brothers just to look badass. I tried that method before, and it had just left me feeling sick and dirty. I could stop time, run in, throw the grenade and run back but that wouldn’t get him to Thoth alive.
Dammit.
“Why don’t you go inside, ask him to come to the Apophis casino, and then take him there,” Sam suggested.
“That’s a crap plan,” David said. “Anyone else think that’s a crap plan?”
“I don’t, actually,” I said, blinking. “Worst thing he can do is say no, and that still gets me close to him.”
“Really, Peter?” David asked, betrayed.
“If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears,” I muttered, unbuckling my seatbelt. “Besides, I’m the bellidix. He has to cooperate with me.”
“Because he’s cooperated with cops so well in the past,” David said.
“Vampire ones, yeah,” I said, thinking about what else I’d heard. “Also, I’m willing to drag him out.”
“Which is an even worse plan,” David said.
“Guys,” I started to say, stepping out of the car. “Here’s how it’s going to be—”
Sam was already talking to the guards at the front gate, though. “You will take me to Jackson now.”
“What?” One of them said.
Sam waved her hand. “You serve your master well, you will be rewarded.”
“Are you quoting Return of the Jedi?” One of the guards said.
Sam waved her hand again. “No.”
Both of them exchanged a look.
“We will take you to Jackson now,” they said in unison.
My eyes widened, and I looked at her sideways. “What did you just do?”
“Magic,” Sam said, shrugging. “Are you coming or not?”
Well, I suppose we could do it this way. Saves on the murder, I suppose. Dammit, I really needed to see a therapist or something about these compulsions of mine.
Walking behind Sam with David at my side, I took a second to take in how easily Jackson’s security was breached. He had a lot of guns and weapons, but it was clear he didn’t know much about mystical defenses. Someone had tried to pull this shit at the Apophis, or one of the Old Ones’ homes and they would have been greeting the sun the next day.
“Nice job, Sam,” I said, privately cursing the fact I was going to have to keep things nonviolent.
Your brother made his own decisions, Thoth said in my mind. You need to learn to respect that.
You can hear me all the way across town? I asked, projecting my thoughts back.
I was trying to contact you, Thoth said. The Texan bogatyr have arrived.
What are they like? I asked, ignoring his earlier statement.
Like they saw a dozen supernatural action films and decided to make a lifestyle from them, Thoth said. Murderers and scum who have been told to raise as much hell as possible until they have someone to blame for this. Their leader, Wyatt, has already stated how much he’d love to carve my face off with his Bowie knife.
So, not the cuddliest bunch ever.
Wyatt is a close friend, actually. We were friends in Tombstone.
Wait, I asked. Is he Wyatt Ea—
They have orders to bring you in, I’m sure, Thoth cut me off. You need to bring in Carl immediately as a peace offering.
Easier said than done, Chief. He’s got a small army of thugs here, and they’re armed like it’s the Green Zone. I don’t want to turn this nice neighborhood into a bloodbath with my friends along.
They’re there to make sure you don’t, Thoth said, irritating me. You need to use subtler methods of persuasion to get him to follow.
I’m fresh out of those.
Work on it, then, Thoth said. Also, there’s something else you should know.
Yeah, I thought back, clenching my fists.
Your brother’s death wasn’t your fault either.
I cut Thoth off, blocking him from saying anything else. Instead, I focused on my surroundings. The guards led us past the rest of their fellows, and I got a look at the interior of Casa De Jackson. I hadn’t known what to expect on the other side of the doors, maybe something equivalent to a rap video, but it was remarkably subdued. There were a lot of children present and their well-dressed mothers as well as fathers around.
“Jesus, is he feeding off the kids?” I asked, ready to kill every single person in this place over the age of fifteen.
One of the guards, instead, spoke, slurring his speech. “Jackson has put the families of all his men under his protection. If they die in his service, then they will be provided for from childhood to college by the Jackson Entertainment Group. He is a good leader.”
I narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, he gets their fathers killed and then starts training their kids as replacements. He’s got a regular little Afghan Warlord thing going on here.”
The guard started to twitch, and Sam put her hand on his shoulder. “Easy, just keep going.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard muttered.
Sam shot me a glare that said, “Do not fuck with my mind-whammy.” I gave her a helpless shrug. It wasn’t my fault that everything I was seeing seemed designed to piss me off. About the time I started to see framed photos of him with Snoop Vamp, I was officially ready to burn this place to the ground. Carl Jackson was the Houdini of karma and was sitting here in his little fortress of smug while too many good Detroit kids were in the ground.
I wanted him to pay for it.
David, thankfully, put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s okay, Peter. It is.”
“No, it’s not man. It’s really not.”
“Just think of all these people as Damien. People who have escaped the life. Remember, your brother was my friend too. Focus your anger on Jackson and Jackson alone. You know, versus all these walking slabs of tenderloin walking around looking delicious.”
I gave him a side-eye. “Dude, we need to get you to a butcher shop, stat.”
“Brains...” David muttered. “Which actually seem like the least appetizing part of the body by the way. I mean, I’m totally thinking about calves, muscle, hearts, and marrow right now.”
I slowly removed David’s hand from my shoulder. “The sad fact is your advice is pretty damn good. Now try to think of something else. Something innocent. Cartoons or something.”
“I tried thinking of Scooby Doo but now I just want to eat Daphne.”
“Poor Velma,” Sam said, sighing. “Never got much in the way of love. She was the first mainstream lesbian character on television.”
I tried to think of a response to that but just shook my head, following up the guards to the upstairs where another pair of guys decked out in body armor with assault rifles were standing. Sam clasped her hands together and started praying to some Celtic gods.
The guards, instead, aimed their guns at us.
It caused the two guards we’d mind-whammied to shake out of their fugue, draw their guns and turn on us.
“We’re werewolves,” the right of the two new guards said. “We don’t fall for mind tricks.”
“You weak-minded fools,” the left one shouted, slapping one of our accompanying guards before growling at the other.
“Seriously? Is quoting Star Wars just a thing in the supernatural world?” I said, staring at them.
“Really, Peter?” David said. “You’re saying that?”
“I thought it was my thing.”
The right of the two new guards shoved his gun in my face. “Give me one good reason not to blow your heads clean—”
I stared at him. “I’m Peter Stone, I could kill this entire mansion before you pulled that trigger. You could kill me, maybe, if you got lucky, then the Vampire Nation would know you killed the man who took down Renaud. That you killed the Sheriff in this town. They’d kill you, your family, your dog, and your best friend from high school plus the girl he took to prom.”
“Fuck it, it is Stone,” the left guard said. “Put your guns down.”
“Are you fucking serious?” the guards we’d mind-zapped said.
The left guard said. “Remember, Jackson isn’t the boss anymore.”
Interesting.
Reluctantly, they all parted ways.
“Huh,” I said. “That was easy.”
Sam stared at him. “Yeah, threatening their families was really manly of you.”
“I wasn’t going to do it,” I said, shrugging. “That’s just how the game is played.”
“Yeah, well the game sucks,” Sam said.
“No argument there,” I said, feeling ashamed I’d said it. The fact was I wanted a fight, and that was going to make things awkward here.
What had Thoth been thinking sending me here? Oh right, that I needed some asshole to die in my place.
Fair enough.
“He’s down the hall with a concubine,” the right guard said. “We’ll tell the others not to interfere.”
The guard who’d earlier extolled Jackson’s virtues looked furious, but I could tell his opinion on the subject wasn’t shared by any of the others. Indeed, the two werewolves looked more than okay with this outcome. While Jackson was one of their kind, he was also a hybrid, and the majority of shapechangers had a low opinion of the undead unless it was one of their direct relatives. I’d never understood why some shapechangers loved the undead, and others loathed them but Thoth telling me we were fundamentally all branches of the same family made it all clear.
Relatives got a special kind of hate.
The three of us headed down the hall past a number of bedrooms, some of them containing Black vampires feeding on men and women. I figured these to be the undead Jackson had been allowed to turn as part of his service to the Vampire Nation.
None of them felt particularly powerful, and there had been a brief boom in creation following the Bailout before the Council of Ancients had made a serious crackdown on spreading our numbers. There were some two hundred and fifty thousand vampires in the world and most believed it would be better for there to be closer to a hundred thousand or even half of that. Needless to say, it was usually the Old Ones arguing this, and they rarely said it should be one of them on the chopping block.
My own opinion was most vampires in the world were assholes. The few who weren’t tended to be the ones created in the last century. I’d met a total of five or maybe six Old Ones who weren’t complete wastes of space, and it galled me I was on their side during this whole generational conflict. Then again, Rebecca Plum was probably the worst vampire I’d ever met aside from Renaud and she was created a year ago, so maybe it really was just natural selection at work. The best and worst of vampiredom couldn’t survive for centuries; only those who lay squarely in the middle had a chance.
I wonder what that said about me and my chances.
We arrived at Jackson’s office just a few moments later, and it was a glass room with purple carpet, the Knives’ color, and purple walls covered in framed platinum records. The desk was made of glass, but Jackson wasn’t sitting at it. Instead, he was sitting on a couch, drinking from the shoulder of a shirtless black man about my brother’s age. Jackson, himself, was wearing a fine purple suit with a white handkerchief in his left pocket. Jackson looked like he was drinking too deep and I could hear the man’s heart slowing from across the room.
“Oh, you hypocritical son of a bitch,” David muttered, looking down at him.
Jackson looked up, growling, his fangs stained with blood before his eyes widened at my presence.
I punched my fist. “Long time no see, Jackson.”
That was when Jackson threw himself down at my feet. “I’m so sorry, forgive me for not coming to see you directly.”
What the hell?