Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (37 page)

“So?”

“So what I’m saying is, maybe it’s not you. Maybe you’re feeling anti-human sentiment that’s coming from others, through your blood.”
 

“But
you’re
my maker! And
Maurice
is yours! Neither of you feel that way about humans.”
 

Reginald shrugged. “Maybe you’re reaching back farther. Maybe you’re… particularly
good
at blood memory, or something.”
 

“It’s like I’m not in control. I feel like werewolves must feel. Part of me wants you to chain me up, for my own good.”

“Hot.”
 

“I’m serious,” she said.
 

“I’m going to Maurice’s tomorrow night” said Reginald. “Come with me. Maybe he has thoughts.”
 

“Are you going there for Council business?” she asked.

Nikki missed Maurice and kept asking Reginald what, if anything, he was up to. He hadn’t been at the office for more than two weeks, so she’d seen very little of him. Of course, Maurice didn’t
need
to work because thousands of years plus some basic investments had made him very rich, but he seemed to enjoy the monotony of playing human, and it was time that they all had to be together.

“There are some Council matters we need to discuss, yes. It almost sounds like good news from the Nation if you don’t look closely enough. For instance: Did you know that restrictions on wanton creation have been removed?”
 

“
Wonton
creation?”
 

“Don’t I wish. No:
wanton
. It’s what they tried me for, but now nobody is trying or punishing anyone for making new vampires without getting approval first.”

“That’s good.”
 

“It looks that way, but this it isn’t an equality move. It’s an accelerant, to create more vampires quickly. Somehow, all of the fat, old, and disabled new recruits are meeting with suspicious accidents.”
 

Nikki sighed. There was so much to be revolted by that she didn’t know where to start.
 

“Chin up,” said Reginald. “At least you got felt up by a pizza girl tonight.”
 

P
IMPING
AND
S
UBTERFUGE

REGINALD KNEW NOTHING ABOUT WHERE Maurice lived except that it was close to the office, so he’d formed a mental picture based on the kinds of places that were nearby: Maurice would live in an aging, smallish two-story colonial with chronically peeling paint at its corners, like the house that Reginald lived in.
 

But he was wrong. Maurice didn’t live close to the office at all. Reginald had decided that he did before he knew Maurice was a vampire, and hence before he realized that “Maurice comes to work on foot” didn’t equate to “Maurice lives nearby.”
 

It took Reginald and Nikki nearly a half hour to reach their destination the following night, and what they found when they arrived wasn’t an aging colonial with peeling paint. The houses in Maurice’s neighborhood were huge — and even amongst the houses in Maurice’s neighborhood, Maurice’s house was massive. It was a giant white palace with sprawling grounds pocked by Grecian statues that Reginald felt were probably authentic and definitely excessive. (Nikki wondered aloud if Maurice even knew that all of the statues were even there, considering that he never saw them during the daytime.) There were complicated hedges. There were tiered planters. The house itself was all pillars and parapets.
 

“He’s rich,” said Nikki.
 

“Yet he works with us,” said Reginald.
 

“He’s two thousand years old. I’ll bet you run out of things to do when you’re that old. He must work because he’s bored. How much wealth can you create simply by existing longer than everyone else? How many fancy hedges can you plant and trim? How many novels can you write? How many paintings can you paint?”
 

“So what you’re telling me,” Reginald said, “is that given enough time to live and create and grow, we all default to selling treadmills in the end.”
 

But Nikki didn’t hear him. She’d walked up to a massive, grooved pillar and was stroking it, running her fingers along the stone. She jumped a little when Maurice appeared behind them, holding a sword in his hand. It took Reginald a moment to realize that it was the sword he carried all the time, including at the office.
 

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry. I was trimming the hedges.” He sheathed the sword, then walked between them and pulled the front door open, gesturing them inside. “Welcome to my humble abode.”
 

The foyer was classic marble, but Maurice seemed to have added his own touches to make the rest of the decor less classic. There were beautiful iron sconces along the walls, but each had been draped with a blood red cloth, which gave the room a foreboding feel. There was a small fountain in the middle of the foyer (Reginald couldn’t resist tossing a penny into it), but someone had done something to the water in it to turn it as black and opaque as ink. There were paintings on the walls in elaborate frames, but they were all black velvet and, Reginald thought, fairly tasteless. Gold was everywhere — accenting upholstered chairs that seemed to have no function, on lamps and scattered knickknacks, and gilding a massive mirror that was easily one and a half Reginalds tall.
 

Reginald walked over to the mirror and stood in front of it. The legend about vampires not casting reflections wasn’t true — something Reginald gave thanks for every time he combed his hair, and something Nikki had given thanks for on the day she’d won an argument involving putting a mirror on the ceiling in the bedroom. Nikki thought the ceiling mirror was hot. Reginald thought it was traumatizing. He kept waking up and scaring himself into palpitations that, because he was a vampire, were merely painful and inconvenient.
 

In Maurice’s massive mirror, Reginald didn’t have a reflection.
 

“I can’t see myself,” he said.
 

“It’s ancient glass,” said Maurice, walking up to stand next to Reginald and gesturing at the still-empty reflection. “Back in the day, vampires really
couldn’t
be seen in mirrors, just like the legends say. Our modern mirrors have changed that, designed in conjunction with vampire scientists in order to…”
 

A woman appeared deep in the mirror, smiled, waved, and started walking toward them. She said, “Maurice, you didn’t tell me our guests were here!”
 

Maurice sighed dramatically and hung his head.
 

The woman became a blur and immediately appeared in front of Reginald, setting her hand affectionately on Maurice’s arm. She was short, round, and unremarkable-looking. She was wearing a 1950s style dress and red heels, her reddish hair piled on top of her head.
 

She looked at Maurice’s face and said, “What?”
 

“I was doing my mirror bit. And he was totally buying it.”

Reginald walked forward and placed his hand on the mirror. Except that there was nothing there. He looked forward, then back over his shoulder. The views in each direction were identical, right down to the paintings on the walls and the trivial items placed on tables and other furniture. He looked at Maurice.
 

“You get bored,” said Maurice. “One day in the 1700s, I said, ‘What would it be like to have a corridor that was a mirror image of itself?’ That’s the problem with being immortal. Humans dismiss stupid thoughts like that, but I had nothing but time and money and was currently between jobs, so I had a new wing built and spent fifty years creating the little joke that my wife has just ruined.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Maurice’s wife.

“And you’re the first guests we’ve had in forever. Most of the time, I have to face the possibility that the fifty years I spent making my house into a mirror reflection of itself might have been a waste of time.”

“I’m Celeste,” said the woman, extending her hand, “since Maurice is too obsessed with his dumb optical illusion to introduce us.”
 

Reginald shook Celeste’s hand and introduced himself, then introduced Nikki. Nikki was still looking around the room with her mouth open. Nikki asked Celeste if she could have a tour. Maurice started to say something, but Celeste interrupted him and said that she’d be happy to.
 

It took almost an hour to tour the house, and Reginald still felt like they were rushing. The marble palace had three stories, and there was no coherent theme between stories or rooms, or even between different corners of any given room. Everything was ostentatious and looked like it cost a fortune, but most of it still somehow managed to be over the top and tacky. Reginald noted Warhol paintings next to Renaissance masterpieces (in a haphazard stack, leaning against a wall) next to ancient hulks that looked like they may have been the creations of inventors trying to build the first flying machines. Parts of the house looked like a Trump hotel, parts looked like a rap star’s blinged-out pimp palace, and parts looked like a museum.
 

“It’s not hard to create a lot of wealth when you’ve had as much time as I’ve had,” Maurice explained. “Back in the day, we didn’t have mortgages and cars and flat-screen TVs, so those of us who didn’t have to pay for food or medical care or any of the usual things just kind of socked away whatever money we had. Do you have any idea what an 1800 dollar is worth today? I had a lot of them, and they just kept piling up because I was bored, and therefore got jobs to pass the time. Then, when companies started selling stock, I bought a lot of it because I had no better way to spend what I had. Who knew Coca Cola would take off? And Ford, and GE, and Apple, and Microsoft?”
 

Maurice said that he would have been content to live somewhere dark and simple like a crypt, but that Celeste, who was half his age (and who Maurice saved from death by turning her, as he’d done with Reginald) had changed all of that. She wanted a roof. She wanted a garden, which she’d tend under the moonlight.
 

“I buy nice things,” she said. “Maurice tries to do the same, but he has such terrible taste. Witness Exhibits A through D.” She indicated three black velvet Elvis paintings and a life-size set of KISS costumes. “Upstairs, there’s an army of stormtroopers and one of the original Darth Vader outfits. He’s arranged them in a diorama, like life-size dolls.”
 

Reginald started toward the stairs, but Nikki held his arm.
 

Celeste put her hand on Maurice’s shoulder and rubbed it, smiling. They made an odd couple. Even though Maurice was much older, he looked much younger. If they were human, Reginald would have guessed Celeste would be in her late thirties, whereas Maurice was permanently nineteen. He was dark and goth, sporting black clothes, black fingernail polish, and a black shock of hair that was always over his face. She looked like a red-haired Donna Reed. Nikki and Reginald towered over both of them. It was like being hosted by dwarves — rich dwarves, with Mike Tyson’s style sense.
 

Celeste gave Maurice’s shoulder a squeeze and excused herself, explaining that she had a cake in the oven she needed to attend to.

When she was gone, Reginald said, “Cake?”
 

“She just makes them and throws them away,” Maurice explained. “Neither of us has any taste for human food, but she likes to cook and bake. For a while, we tried to give her food away, but who donates fois gras to a homeless shelter? Rack of lamb? Pheasant under glass? Canapes and cannoli and souflees? The homeless people got really excited the first few times when we showed up, but then the organizers started to get curious. Who was this couple who had nothing better to do but to prepare extravagant food and never eat it? So we stopped. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s never a good idea to invite curiosity if you’re a vampire. It’s always better to fade into the background.”
 

Reginald was thinking that he could find a home for all of that food.
 

“I know what you’re thinking, Reginald, but you don’t need more encouragement. Your system will tolerate human food less and less as time goes on.”

“Maybe I can keep my system used to it,” said Reginald. “Like staying in shape by running every day.”
 

“You could try that theory with… say… running every day,” said Maurice.

“I have been,” said Reginald. “Watch this.” He ran as fast as he could to the end of the long faux-mirror corridor, then turned and sprinted back. When he was finished, his head was spinning. He bent forward at the waist and put his hands on his knees, panting.
 

“Impressive,” said Maurice. “You might now be able to outrun a small human child. Like, under two, while their legs are still short.”
 

Nikki rubbed Reginald’s back. Reginald could feel his shirt sticking to him and cringed at how gross it must feel against Nikki’s palm.
 

“I need to sit down,” he said. “Someone get me cake.”
 

Maurice shrugged and began walking down the mirror hallway in the direction Celeste had gone. He was strolling casually, allowing Reginald to decide whether to follow him or not. With great effort, Reginald did. Nikki held his hand to steady him. At first Reginald found it cute, since she was well under half his weight. But then he remembered that she was no longer a fragile human, and was many times stronger than he was.
 

When they got to Maurice and Celeste’s dining room, Maurice sat at one end of a polished wood table and Reginald sat at the other. Nikki and Celeste sat on the sides. Everyone had a cup of warm blood (“We have a group of donors playing foosball in the basement,” Celeste explained), and they sat and sipped as they talked.
 

Celeste, Nikki, and Reginald were drinking from gold cups that Reginald suspected might actually be gilded with real gold. Maurice’s cup was an enormous bejeweled chalice with MAURICE spelled out in diamonds on one side and MOTHERFUCKER spelled out on the other side. When Nikki asked him about it, Maurice explained that the chalice had belonged to a famous rap star who’d gone bankrupt. Maurice had had the word RHYMING changed to MAURICE by a jeweler, but then one of the rap star’s rivals had killed the jeweler and Maurice had never gotten around to having the cup finished.