I spun the car around and drove toward the Fisher Building. It was one of the few buildings left from Old Detroit in the heart of the new city. It was an ornate building of the old Art Deco style and a place every Motor City citizen knew by heart. Even it had changed. The former home of the city’s public-school administration had been replaced by the Vampire National Assembly, that was the organization that handled all the undead’s media and social networking. Dead Debbie had been their star attraction.
“Peter, I’m—” Yukie started to say.
“This is a setup,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not about trying to take over New Detroit or making humanity turn against vampires, though.”
“You don’t think?” Sam asked, confused.
“No,” I said, trying to use my brain. “If someone wanted to turn humans against vampires, they could just have Enil go into a Pistons game and massacre the audience on live television. They’d be rounding us all and putting us in camps tomorrow—much worse places than the tropical islands they want to send us to now.”
“I don’t know, there’s a lot of sun there,” David said. “Maybe it’s a covert plan to eliminate you.”
I rolled my eyes. “As for taking over New Detroit, yeah, they could just take the city on Enil’s word. Ashura and the City Council will never have a hundredth of the influence Enil does as the ancestor of half the vampire race.”
“So what is it?” Yukie asked. “Who is?”
I pulled us to a stop at a red light, cursing New Detroit traffic. “This is personal, and I know the reason.”
“You do?” Sam asked, even more confused now. “How? What?”
I tried to articulate the sense I knew the answer but couldn’t explain it. “It’s weird. The answer is there, but I can’t tell you how or why.”
“You’ve been mesmerized,” Sam said, jumping to conclusions.
“Vampires can’t be mesmerized.”
“They can be by their creators,” Yukie said, looking at me. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so trusting of this Thoth character.”
I stared at her. “Lady, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thoth is more trustworthy than any human.”
“That’s a big claim to make,” Yukie said, glaring at me. “At the end of the day, he’s still a vampire.”
“Ouch, I guess you weren’t that good,” David said, smirking as he pulled out his cell phone to listen to some more tunes.
I grabbed it, rolled down the window, and tossed it out.
“Hey!” David said.
I put the car in park despite there being cars behind us and turned on the emergency lights. “Apparently Enil had enough juice to just fly up to Dead Debbie’s and kill her. That means he’s not badly injured and he had a whole action movie’s worth of bullets put into him. That means we’re out of our depth here. We have to be smarter than our enemies, not stronger.”
“Our enemies are smarter and stronger than us, that’s the problem,” David said, opening the door and getting out to get his cellphone.
“I really don’t know why you put up with him,” Yukie said.
“Karma for all the horrible actions in my past,” I said, sighing. “Listen, this is going to sound crazy but is there anything you can do to shake repressed memories loose?”
“You mean like hypnosis?” Sam asked, blinking.
“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “We aren’t going to know what we’re doing here until I know what I know.”
“No,” Sam said, shaking her head. “Whatever I can do to the minds of mortals can’t be done to the minds of vampires.”
Dammit.
Yukie looked out the window. “There might be something I can do.”
I looked at her. “What was that, Ms. I’m prejudiced against vampires but not so much I’m not willing to sleep with them?”
Yukie looked back at me. “That’s not my nickname.”
“It is now because I’m nicknaming you,” I snapped at her. I thumped a fist against my heart. “It hurts me right here. Like a stake.”
“Wait, you two slept together?” Sam asked.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, looking at her and ignoring the fact we should have been on our way to Dead Debbie’s. Honestly, I wasn’t in a big hurry to get there since I suspected whatever had happened was already over. Her radio station was off the air, decisively, and there was only a ‘please stand by’ being played.
I also didn’t want to get any of my friends killed on the off chance Enil was still there too. The encounter with Enil at Jackson’s showed we were completely out of our depth fighting him. We needed some heavy hitters to go after him, and I was not the guy you wanted to talk to if you needed some of those.
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” Sam asked.
“Not the point now,” I said, muttering.
Yukie looked at me, shocked.
“Oh please,” I snapped at her. “You were all over me like a corgi in heat.”
“What an odd metaphor,” Sam said.
Yukie’s eyes turned predatory, and she lifted her fingers, her fingernails growing like claws. “What?”
“I found my cellphone!” David said, stepping back into the car with his device in hand. He was starting to look a little corpse-like, paler and sickly with his skin hanging down. I wondered if the rot we were worried about was finally settling it.
Sam looked at Yukie. “I know Peter is rude as hell, but he’s reliable. What were you saying?”
Yukie, who had finally regenerated from her earlier wounds, grit her teeth then slowly returned to her normal appearance. “Alright, we have bigger things to worry about than my bruised ego. If I’m ever to get back into the business of being a mercenary for the vampires, then I’m going to have to defeat Enil.”
I felt tempted to point out if she did kill Enil then they’d probably track her to the ends of the Earth. None of the Council of Ancients would care about the fact he murdered New Detroit’s City Council. They were as expendable to them as Youngbloods were to Ashura. “Isn’t this all just a means to an end of avenging your mommy and sister?”
“Yes,” Yukie said, slowly. “Vampires have resources I don’t, both in the material and occult worlds. I may have my issues with vampires—”
“Why is that?” David asked, interrupting.
“I know them,” Yukie said as if that explained everything.
And it did. “Go on.”
“But they are the undisputed masters of the supernatural world. If anyone can tell me how to find Magog or summon him, then they are the ones to contact.”
I closed my eyes then grabbed the steering wheel. “Listen, this may not be the right time to tell you this, but I don’t think it’s right to hide it from you.”
Sam looked at me then Yukie. “Peter, maybe you should tell this to her after we find out how she can help you remember.”
I shook my head. “No, this is important.”
Yukie blinked. “What is it?”
I sucked in a useless breath to my dead and decaying lungs. “Your mother and sister have already been avenged. Magog is dead. Not like banished to hell, dead, but dead as in not ever coming back. Ever.”
Yukie stared at me, opened her mouth, then closed it. The fury returned to her eyes. “You’re lying.”
“No,” I said, frowning. “Thoth said he and Lucinda did it about a month ago. They managed to destroy the demon then bind its soul to a head that they buried under a thousand tons of concrete.”
Yukie looked like I’d run over her dog. “Then it’s all been for nothing. How could they do that to me?”
“There’s more—” I started to say.
“Peter, these aren’t your secrets to tell,” Sam said, looking very much like she would like to flee the car.
“Silence witch,” Yukie said, snapping at her. “Tell me, Peter, please.”
I looked between them.
Sam narrowed her eyes at Yukie as if she wasn’t afraid of the werefox in the slightest. “Fine, tell her.”
I shrugged. “You see, Yukie, uh, Lucinda is your grandmother. Thoth is her husband, and that makes you related in that kind of Spaceballs not-really-related-at-all sort of way.”
“Polygamy is a vampire thing,” David interjected. “Also Mormon.”
“Not really,” Sam said. “I’m Mormon.”
David looked at her like she’d grown a third head.
“What?” Sam asked.
“But you’re—” David started to say.
“Yes, a witch,” Sam said. “You can be both. Albeit, not without complications.”
“No, I meant you’re—” David started to point out her ethnicity.
“Leave it alone,” I said.
I wouldn’t have thought Yukie could look more depressed, but she somehow managed it. “Yet they never told me.”
“I guess they didn’t want you messed up in vampire politics and revenge schemes,” I said, giving a weak defense.
“Lucinda and Thoth knew I was an assassin for the Yakuza,” Yukie said, her voice quaking with rage as her canines elongated. “That I was hunting for Magog across a dozen vampire courts, shifter sects, penthouses, and back alleys. This is a joke at my experience.”
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said, just guessing about how they must feel. “I think they saw what you were doing, saw they’d lost your sister, and they decided to do this as a gift to you. Were there not this crazy thing going on, I think they both would have told you about it.”
“Yes, because that’s what vampires are known for,” Yukie said, staring down at her lap. She looked on the verge of either crying or laughing, I couldn’t tell which. “Their honesty. There’s no point to doing this anymore. Let Enil kill the rest of the City Council. This is no longer my fight.”
“Yukie,” I started to say.
Yukie, however, opened the side door and turned into a fox before running out the side. A car swerved not to hit her and smacked into a nearby telephone pole. It left me alone in the front seat, David and Sam staring at the back of my head.
“Great job, Peter,” David said, finally. “That totally helped our situation.”
“Do you want me to crush your cell phone?” I asked. “Because I can.”
My hands had mostly healed from where I’d had my hands shot to pieces by Jackson. It bothered me to no end I’d saved that assholes’ life. I mean, I’d only done it so I could place the blame for this mess on him, but it was still galling that vampire was still running around breathing. I only hoped Enil tracked his creation down and finished him before he moved on to any other, less deserving victims. I wasn’t too broken up about Dead Debbie dying because, well, she was one of those homicidal psychopaths I listed among my ex-girlfriends. Her, Elisha, and Gina Gentle were the worst of the six women I’d been with. Melissa and Yukie were still murderers, but at least I suspected they would only kill me for something I deserved.
Like, say, cheating.
Ah, dammit.
“We need whatever you think you know, Peter,” Sam said.
“Assuming you know anything,” David said.
I took a deep breath. “I’ll fix this.”
“Are you sure? Because she seems like a liability,” Sam said. “Even if she did actually wound Enil.”
“That seems less a liability and more, how the hell did she do that?” David suggested.
Sam patted David on the leg. “I like you, you’re my second favorite zombie after Rose McIver.”
David smirked. “You’re my second favorite soccer mom witch.”
“I said I’ll fix this,” I said, stepping out of the car and barely avoiding being run down by a Hummer with two young women in the front.
“Dammit, I can’t believe those things made a comeback,” I muttered before chasing after Yukie. I passed the car that had bent its fender and walked into the back of a gas station where Yukie had resumed her human form. She was leaning up against the side of a concrete wall, a sour expression on her face.
I got the impression Yukie had never really had much of what we might call a quote-unquote mortal life. From the way her life had been described to me, she had been supernaturally talented at birth with none of the buffer period most of us had of high school or a depressing dead-end job. No, instead, she’d had a movie star’s life of being adopted by the Yakuza after her mother had been killed by a demon. Really, they could have made an anime out of her existence, and I would have watched it in my nerdy cartoon-loving years. I had the suspicion that while she was killing people for the Japanese mob, she hadn’t had time to develop a healthy way of dealing with her feelings.
For whatever that was worth.
“Yeah, uh,” I said, trying to think of what to say. “I’m saying you didn’t get the chance to murder the demon who killed your mother.”
“My father,” Yukie said.
“Yeah, fuck that guy,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m sure he’s suffering a lot while being buried alive in whatever bridge of mini-mall he’s now part of the construction of.”
That brought a smile to Yukie’s face. “I know you want to protect your creator, Peter. That surprises me, though. Not many vampires are loyal to those who brought them over to their dark life.”
“Thoth is good people,” I said before frowning. “Okay, not really. He’s kind of evil. However, he’s evil to evil people, so I suppose that makes him good? The people he kills usually have it coming. Rapists, serial killers, and Neo-Nazis. I mean, he sometimes helps other vampires who do kill innocents because he thinks human lives are less valuable, okay wait, let me restart. He keeps the number of innocent human deaths in New Detroit way down. Yes, mostly because it’s bad for business—”
“Wow, you are not good at this,” Yukie said.
I grimaced. “Okay, he’s an Old One. They’re all sons of bitches but he’s my son of a bitch, and I’m worried about him. What if he’s next on Enil’s hit list?”
“Then he’s fucked,” Yukie said.
Probably. “I’d like your help in preventing that, if at all possible.”
Yukie pulled out her sword, and I got a good look at it for the first time. It was made of something other than steel, something that seemed to catch the moonlight. “You know he made me this for my sixteenth birthday. It’s made of moonsilver, meteorite iron, and the remains of a Muramasa katana destroyed in World War 2. It grows stronger with every person it kills. Supposedly, it can cut gods.”
“Uh, good job. I got a wrench for my sixteenth birthday.”
“A wrench?” Yukie said.
“It was my mom’s way of saying I needed to get a job.”
Yukie finally lost the look of betrayal on her face. “Lucinda paid for the Yakuza to take care of me and handled my last few years of lessons. She taught me how to kill every single kind of supernatural under the sunset as well as seven different forms of magic. It makes sense she was my relative. I just don’t know why she didn’t take me to live with her.”
“I get the impression neither Thoth nor Lucinda are the kind of people who think a vampire’s domain is the kind of place to raise a child.”
“Neither was the Yamaguchi-Gumi.”
I was going to assume that was a Yakuza group name. Thoth would probably be angry at me for not knowing it, but I couldn’t tell the Italian mob from the Sicilian from guys doing a bad Joe Pesci impression. “Listen, it may not be a comfort now, but you have a chance to save some of your family. Let it be a comfort.”
“A comfort would be if they’d brought my mother or sister back from the dead like David.”
“Yeah, I got no answers to that,” I admitted. “Still, I get the impression that’s not something Thoth can do casually, or he would have brought back a lot of people.”
Like my brother.
I’d asked him to.
He said he couldn’t.
“Alright,” Yukie said, cutting her hand on her sword before sheathing it. Thoth did the same with his swords, believing they should taste blood before being put away—like their master. “I’ll do this for you, Peter, but you’re going to owe me. Note: I always collect on my debts as well. A promise is a promise to me.”
“I will show you something so awful about me that you will be able to blackmail me for all eternity for knowing it.”
“Oh?”
I nodded and turned into a corgi.