An Unattractive Vampire (28 page)

“Remember how you told me to keep an eye on the airports for anything unusual?” Berwyn said.

“No,” replied the Doctor.

“Oh.” Berwyn tried again. “Well, remember how you told Cassan to keep an eye on the airports for anything unusual?”

“Yes,” the Doctor answered.

“Well, with Cassan being a bit . . .” Berwyn searched for the right words.

“Preoccupied,” said Phantom.

“Preoccupied, yes.” Berwyn continued, “I kept my eye on the airports and—”

“Why is Cassan not seeing to the task I gave him?” the Doctor asked tersely. He did not like to think himself a tyrant. In many respects, he was as laid-back as you could hope a twohundred-year-old Victorian gentleman to be. Why, just last year, he had instituted a casual-dress day. Still, when he gave an order as important as “Watch for an enemy bent on destroying us all,” he expected it to be followed.

“Well,” Phantom said finally, “he’s in mourning.”

“Still?”

“It’s only been a few months, Doctor,” said Berwyn.

“Exactly.” The two younger vampires shared a sideways glance. Talby sighed. There were times when The Doctor Lord Talby regretted focusing on the outcast demographic for this experiment of his. Granted, there was no limit to what an outsider would do for the promise of “love,” but they were all so sensitive about it. Say what you will about the rich and beautiful, but at least they got over it.

“Tell Cassan that Victoria will be avenged. Scratch that, don’t say her name. Say ‘his love’ shall be avenged, but that it can only happen with his help. Otherwise, the monster goes free and her soul will be lost to . . . etcetera. Have one of the new writers pad it for you, but get Cassan back to his post.”

“But that’s just it, Doctor. I don’t think he’s needed there anymore,” Berwyn said, again cutting across his master. “I think—I think they’re here.”

The Doctor’s heart had been skipping its beats for over a hundred years. Even so, it skipped a skip. “Do you?” he asked, trying with difficulty to stay calm.

“Amanda’s brother just flew into LAX with another woman. They . . .” Berwyn steadied himself. “They had six caskets with them.”

“Six?” uttered the Doctor in a state of shock.

“Is that all?” Phantom jeered.

“Six?” Talby repeated more frantically.

“Uh, yeah. Yes.” Berwyn consulted the printout he’d charmed off the handsome customs official. “The woman said they were her brothers, who’d died in a mountaineering accident, but . . . that’s just what she said.”

“What’s the big deal?” Phantom questioned, a little nervous at his mentor’s reaction. “We have at least twenty vampires here in the building.”

Talby was not listening.

He’d known they were out there, the old vampires. Cosimo had told him so. He’d always suspected they might rise eventually, and they’d have to be dealt with, but that day had always been far off, in the future. And with every decade that passed Old One–free, he could delude himself into thinking that maybe it would never come. Now the day was here, and rather than facing a single vampire, or two or three, which he could just dispose of and then go back to his business, a half dozen. All much stronger, all more powerful, all infinitely more clever than any modern vampire.

Except myself,
thought The Doctor Lord Talby.
You have planned for this. It will work. Let them come.

His doubt continued to shout inside his psyche, but the Doctor’s ego had taken hold once more. Confidence and self-assurance flooded back into him, and suddenly, everything was much easier to see.

“When did they get in?” he asked, his voice returning to calm.

“An hour ago,” replied Berwyn from behind him.

“Gentlemen, company will be arriving shortly.” Talby turned back to the pair standing before his desk. Upon seeing the knowing smile on his lips, both visibly breathed a sigh of relief, as he’d known they would.

“We’ll need Nora and our guest to return,” he continued.

“I’ll call her,” Phantom offered.

“No, I had better do it,” said the Doctor. “A call from you might be ‘accidentally’ missed. It’s important she knows how serious this is. Berwyn, if you could talk to Cassan. We’ll need him, as well.”

Berwyn nodded and ran from the room.

“What about me?” asked Phantom, miffed that the Doctor knew that Nora was ignoring his calls.

“You, Phantom, have the most important job of all,” the Doctor told him, soothing the young man’s pride. “I need you to get a hold of every coven in Los Angeles. We need them here right away.”

“What about San Francisco?” Phantom suggested. “There are a half-dozen covens there we could use.”

“No time,” answered the Doctor. “No, Los Angeles will have to do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Phantom, his spirit renewed. “Then what?”

We use them as cannon fodder,
thought the Doctor. What he said was much more judicious. “You delay the monsters.”

“Delay them?” Phantom repeated incredulously.

“As best you can,” said the Doctor. Seeing the look on Phantom’s face, halfway between insulted and fearful, he added, “It’s all part of the plan.”

The young vampire didn’t understand but, like a good soldier, nodded as if he did.

“Go now,” the Doctor commanded. Phantom obeyed, leaving The Doctor Lord Talby alone to prepare for the fight of his existence. He picked up his phone and dialed.

“Hello, Legal? It’s The Doctor Lord Talby. I require seven copies of form 27C.”

“Here, take a look,” said Simon, offering his binoculars.

“I can see perfectly well without those,” replied Yulric.

“Even with the new—” began Simon.

“Yes, even with the new,” Yulric cut him off. He’d recently found out his left eyeball had something called astigmatism, and he could be a bit testy about it. Also, people would not stop calling it
cute
.

“Suit yourself,” said Simon, who had no sympathy for those too proud to help themselves. He went back to peering through his binoculars. They were a homemade set. Because he was a child, they were made from used toilet-paper rolls. Because he was Simon, he’d ground his own lenses.

A sound best described as scuttling made both boy and vampire turn. A score of rat-sized spiders was scurrying out of the underbrush where they’d hunkered down to keep watch. Before their three mortal and one vampiric eyes, the giant arachnids piled on top of each other, bending and fusing, to form odd, almost humanlike shapes. In no time at all, the spiders were gone and Arru of Akkad crouched beside them.

“There are fifty patrolling the outside of the fortress,” she said. The vampires were either unable to grasp the term
studio
or just found it highly undignified to be storming one.

The shadows lengthened and shifted, and, rising out of them, as if they were water, came Tezcatlipoca. He said something in Nahuatl.

“Sixty-seven inside, including he who you seek,” Cebrian translated.

“You do not say,” Yulric replied with a slight smirk. He’d been slowly deciphering the Aztec’s language, but wasn’t in a rush to let on. Knowledge, after all, was power.

A loud thud from behind alerted them of another arrival.

“I found none transformed,” reported Yu Mei in Cantonese.

“Not as animals, mist, nor shadow.”

“I told you they would not be,” he shot back at her.

“But now we know for sure,” she said sullenly. Being pale green and able to move only by hopping, she had naturally been left out of the reconnaissance assignments. She’d gone off anyway, if only to prove she, too, could be covert when the need arose.
⁶²

Finally, a small lightning bug floated gently out of the sky, the glow of its thorax rhythmically pulsing. Just as it reached their position, the light flashed and the hunched figure of the Adze took its place.

“The girl is there,” said Adze, joining the squatting figures.

“In the tallest tower?” asked Cebrian.

“Chained in a dungeon?” asked Arru.

“On the sacrificial wheel of time, ready to plunge the world into infinite darkness?” asked Tezcatlipoca after much translation.

Everyone stared at him, mostly because it had been an awfully specific question. Simon, Yulric, and Cebrian, however, had all noticed that the former Aztec god had understood what Adze had said.

“Actually,” answered Adze, “I think she’s in a guest room.”

The vampires all gave a disappointed sigh. There were mutterings in half a dozen languages, which all roughly translated to “no sense of tradition.”

“How many guards?” asked Simon, looking back into his binoculars.

“Two,” Adze told him. “The black man and white woman with blond hair from the show. They were arguing.”

“Excellent.” Simon smiled. He looked up to find the angry face of Yulric Bile an inch away from him. Anyone else would have flinched at the sight. Anyone else would have moved back from an invasion of space. Anyone else would not be Simon.

“What?” asked the small boy, meeting the vampire’s gaze.

“That is Cassan and Nora,” said Yulric.

“It’s likely, yes.”

“You cannot kill them,” said Yulric.

“Can’t I?” said Simon, his eyebrow raised. It was more of a challenge than a question.

“No, you cannot,” hissed Yulric. Simon had already killed half the cast of
The Phantom Vampire Mysteries
. He’d be saved if he was going to let the boy destroy the rest of the show.

“Very well,” said the boy, bowing his head slightly. “I promise not to kill Cassan and Nora, except as a last resort.”

“And to make sure it truly is a last resort, she is going with you.” Yulric pointed at their rental bus, where Catherine was sitting, reading. Simon’s eyes grew squinty and shrewd and very “eight-year-old who hasn’t gotten his way.”

“Is that why you brought her along?” asked the boy. Yulric just smiled. The truth was, he wasn’t quite sure why she was still there. She had played her part. And while, annoyingly, the boy had taught her enough tricks that he was unable to retrieve his eye from her, she was free to leave now that their bargain had been fulfilled. But she didn’t. She insisted on staying. And he had not said no.

“Very well.” Simon sneered. He took up a stick and began drawing in the dirt. “You all will go through the front, distracting the vampire guards. I will”—he shot an annoyed look at Catherine on the bus—“
we
will sneak around the side and release my sister.”

Yulric cleared his throat.

Simon rolled his eyes. “And we’ll do it without killing Cassan and Nora.” The boy continued, “Everyone will converge in the lobby. Once your group has cleared the way, mine will make our escape. After that, you are free to do what you like. But not before.
Is that understood?
”

The small boy looked around the circle at the angry, defiant, and terrible faces of the assembled vampires: the Saxon sorcerer, the Akkadian curse, the African plague-bringer, the Chinese life-drinker, the Spanish inquisitor, and the Aztec god. None of them said a word.

“Good,” Simon said. He took out a pocket watch. “Give us ten minutes to get in position.” He went to get Catherine. The elder vampires followed him with their eyes and then turned aside, pretending they hadn’t just been told what to do by a small child. All, save Yulric.

Vampires don’t believe in reincarnation. As a rule, they try not to think about any sort of afterlife too much. That being said, when you live for hundreds of years, you can’t help but notice that you keep running into the same people over and over again, following you across the centuries, haunting your steps.

Yulric Bile may have
watched
Simon Linske leave, but who he
saw
was Erasmus Martin.

A bus pulled up outside the Phantom Studios lot. The vampires on guard paid it no mind. Living in LA, they knew the only creature on this earth more pathetic than a tourist was a lost tourist. And the only thing more pathetic than a lost tourist was a tourist who had to be told that the attraction they’d come to see was closed. None of them wanted to deal with that, and all but one didn’t have to.

Gwendolyn the Black (née Jenny Svenson) had unfortunately drawn the short straw and been given the job of official guard duty. She had to wear a uniform (one very unflattering to her figure by the way), man the entrance checkpoint (a phrase she found immensely sexist and decided to change to
woman
the entrance checkpoint), and keep up the appearance that this was just your average television studio. Of course, she had asked the Doctor why the mortals who usually
womanned
the checkpoint could not do the job.

“They have a union,” he’d said, “and slaughter by vampires is not covered by their insurance.”

So here she was, Gwendolyn the Black, sitting in a tiny little box, watching a tiny little TV that didn’t have cable, and wearing a security-guard costume that wasn’t tiny or little enough to be sexy. Now, to make matters even worse, she actually had to do her job.

Gwendolyn slid the window open. “We’re closed,” she yelled at the bus. The driver didn’t open the window. Gwendolyn leaned over and tapped on the glass. “Hey. Hey, we’re not open.”

The bus did not move. The shape of the driver did not move. The door on the other side did move. It opened.

“For the love of . . . ,” Gwendolyn muttered as she stepped out of the guardhouse. She continued muttering to herself all the way around to the front of the bus, until she reached the door. “We’re closed,” she repeated.

“And we were so hoping to see some vampires.” The darkened bus was abruptly illuminated by an eerie light. Gwendolyn’s eyes went wide as they met the gaze of a hideous female corpse with empty eye sockets. In the crone’s right hand burned a fire of deepest black.

Gwendolyn managed a quiet gasp of “crap” before her entire head was engulfed by the dark flames.

• •

“I don’t see why I can’t guard her!” Nora shouted. Her hands were on her hips. Anyone who knew Nora knew that hands on hips would likely be hands punching your face in very short order.

“Because when you watch her, she gets out,” Cassan retorted. He did know Nora, but he was in a bad way right now, almost beyond the ability to function. He couldn’t eat.