Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (41 page)

“There,” said Reginald, pointing. “Council will be downstairs, through that door. There
should
be at least two uniformed Guard at the top of the staircase, then more at the bottom. The door should, of course, be latched and locked, and it should open on a thumbprint. But look: it’s as secure as Grandma’s broken screen door.”
 

Reginald, at the head of the trio, walked over and pulled the door open. Without the closer attached, the door swung wide with no resistance and banged against the facing wall. Then it stayed that way, hanging open like a yokel’s slack jaw. From the stairwell came the sounds of a large gathering, maybe even a party.
 

Reginald looked at Maurice, whose face bore an expression somewhere between trepidation and fury. His fangs had descended, and his nineteen-year-old’s eyes looked as steely as a demon’s. He was embarrassed to be a vampire if this was what it meant to be one, and he wanted to make someone pay for that feeling.
 

Reginald patted the air to tell Maurice to calm down, then did the same to Nikki. Losing control would only make a bad situation worse. But it was hard; Reginald himself felt his ire rising. There was no love lost between Reginald, Maurice, Nikki, and the Vampire Council, but until now, their acrimonious relationship had at least held a kind of professional courtesy.

“Before we go further,” he said, “before you let things get ugly, remember that this is still the Vampire Council, and that you are still its Deacon.”
 

Maurice forced his mouth closed, but Reginald could tell from the fullness of his upper lip that his fangs hadn’t retracted. When he spoke, they got in his way like a pair of dime store fakes.
 

“I am nothing,” said Maurice. “You said it yourself.”
 

“You still hold some sway, even if it’s just symbolic,” said Reginald.
 

“I could kill them all.”
 

“Okay,” said Reginald. He took a step forward and patted his maker on the back. “Let’s call that Plan B. Come on.”
 

Reginald allowed Maurice to take the lead as they walked down the steps and into the basement. He had no idea what to expect, and Maurice was stronger than he was by several orders of magnitude. Nikki took up the rear, and Reginald was sandwiched in the middle. The party sounds increased as they descended. Reginald heard howls, hoots, and music. It was like walking into a biker bar. And maybe that’s what they were doing, he thought… except that there was a drunk vampire upstairs, and several dead humans in a closet.
 

What they found at the bottom of the basement steps was closer to Council than a biker bar, but not by much.
 

Once inside the Council complex — which was disassembled and reassembled each time the location changed — individual Councils were supposed to be indistinguishable from each other. The walls were always white. There was always an entrance corridor, then a foyer area with several pure white holding cells. Beyond the cells was supposed to be a short corridor into a packed dirt arena surrounded by rows of seats. Inside of this arena, the Council box was always to the left. The Deacon’s box was always higher, always more or less in the center. There were, ever since the first Council catastrophe, always a ring of sniper windows at the top edge of the arena room from which Guards could fire wooden bullets, and the room itself always had a high roof, which limited the locations in which the complex could be assembled. To the far left side of the arena was a door that opened into a silo-like room. The roof of this room that could be opened to the sun for executions. The current meetingplace was underground, so the sun would be indirect (reflected from the surface via several large mirrors), but the room was always there, and the ceiling always retracted to let in the sun.
 

What they found when they reached the complex at the foot of the stairs was roughly correct. There was an entrance hall, a foyer with cells, and an arena. But beyond those basics, the Council was a mess. The arena, formed by composite walls made to resemble stone, looked battered and beaten. There were large gaps in the walls through which Reginald could see the rock of the underground cavern beyond. Vampires were milling everywhere, as if the place were a vast open market. The activity in itself was odd. Council was normally quiet at night, because meetings occurred during the day. Yet here they were, hours before dawn, still awake and at full throttle.
 

As Reginald, Nikki, and Maurice made their way through the crowd, Reginald realized that many of those they passed were humans, not vampires. He could smell them. Humans, unlike vampires, had a coppery odor, like blood. Their musk traveled into his nose, down the back of his throat, and landed on his tongue, like a penny.
 

Most of the humans were complicit, moving docilely under the guidance of their vampire escorts. Others were clearly glamoured — slim businessmen in their suits, their throats red and sore, women who looked bedraggled and bruised. An ad-hoc corral even seemed to have been erected in the corner of the arena out of boxes. Glamoured humans milled in the small, triangular area. Despite the fog of glamour, Reginald could still see fear in many of their eyes — an uncertain, stupid kind of fear, like an animal’s — and Reginald reminded himself that not every vampire was as talented at mental manipulation as he was.
 

They found the massive figure of Brian Nickerson in the Council chamber. Brian rose to greet them with his arms out and a smile on his face. He wrapped his arms around all three of them in a giant bear hug. Then, after a squeeze, he stepped back and put his hands on his hips.
 

“Well!” he said, looking each of them over in turn. “It’s been a while. How have you been? Nikki! Vampirism looks great on you. It’s like you were made for this.”
 

Brian had met Nikki before, but hadn’t seen her since she’d become a vampire. Nikki the vampire had a totally different bearing than Nikki the human. She was still the same person, but she looked as if she’d been run through several sharpening filters. She was tighter and harder in appearance and manner. She was one of those people who really had become Herself 2.0 when she was turned.
 

Brian was still smiling, his hands still on his hips. He looked like he was greeting his kid back home after a long first year in college.
 

“Brian?” said Maurice. He was looking at Brian as if he had three heads.
 

“Yessir.”

“What’s happened here?”
 

Brian flapped a hand as big as a ham. “Oh, it’s a slippery slope around here lately. I just try to ignore these assholes. I mostly read and surf the internet. Wired internet, of course, and only on the protected network. You still can’t get a cellular or GPS signal in here. You have to go up top for that, onto High Street.”
 

Reginald felt a headache beginning. The reason cellular signals were jammed in Council was because nobody on the inside was supposed to be able to ascertain their location. The Council was intended to be a black box — you were brought in blindfolded via a series of Escorts, and once in the compound, you couldn’t leave until you were sent out blindfolded via a series of Escorts. The fact that the Council structure was always exactly the same meant that whether the Council was located at the top of a mountain or under a river, the experience was always identical. But this casual location awareness? This casual coming and going? The fact that the Escorts hadn’t shown had really only been the tip of the iceberg. The breaches of security Reginald was seeing were indicative of a system-wide breakdown.
 

“When did your Escort bring you in?” asked Brian.
 

“They didn’t,” said Maurice. “The Escort didn’t show, so we went to where Council was supposed to be — something Reginald has been able to figure out for months. When it wasn’t there, he looked back in time to where you were supposed to be last. We walked in past a drunk lookout and through an open door, into the complex. We didn’t see any Escorts. Or, for that matter, any Guard.
 

“You saw them,” said Brian, apparently nonplussed by the fact that Reginald had broken the Council algorithm. “They’re just never where they’re supposed to be anymore, and they don’t usually wear their helmets. They kind of do what they want, when they want, and beat people when it suits them.” He leaned against one of the prefab walls, which wasn’t properly anchored and buckled under his weight.

“Why didn’t you tell us that this was happening?” said Maurice.
 

“I sent you a Fangbook message,” said Brian.
 

“I don’t use Fangbook,” said Maurice.
 

“Ah,” said Brian, as if the whole thing was just a minor inconvenience. “Well, everyone has an account whether they use it or not. I didn’t realize. Don’t worry; I would have figured out after a while that you didn’t get it. But most of this —” He waved his hand in an all-encompassing gesture “— has happened since the last time we were supposed to move. What was that… a week ago?”
 

“Two days.”
 

“Ah. Well, time flies.”
 

Maurice walked up to stand very close to Brian. Brian absolutely dwarfed Maurice, but Maurice radiated some of his millennia of age and his superior strength as he said, “More slowly this time, Brian…
what happened here?”
 

“The people who don’t like you realized that the emperor has no clothes,” said Brian. He began to pick his teeth with a fingernail. Brian was on their side, but he was also infuriatingly unperturbable. He tended to go with the flow even when the flow was going somewhere intensely stupid.
 

“Fangbook,” said Nikki, as if the word were an obscenity.
 

Brian nodded. “Yeah, it’s a bitch when public opinion is so obviously, visibly, unanimously against you. Charles gave a big speech once that last measure passed — the
last
big speech; can’t believe it was as recent as it must’ve been — and said that the Vampire Nation was finally out from under the thumb of oppression, as if you’d been Stalin. He didn’t mention how your ‘thumb’ and your ‘oppression’ was a significant reprieve from two hundred years under Logan. It was quite an intelligent speech, for Charles. I remember wondering if he’d had a speechwriter. He talked about returning power to the people… democracy and all of that. It went over very well. You should see the video on his Fangbook page. It’s got like a gazillion Likes. But the thing is, it’s not as if anything you see
here
— with all of the stupidity out in the arena and the Guards dicking off and whatnot — was open to a vote. It just kind of happened. People started saying, ‘Let’s try something and see if anyone stops us.’ The first people to do it were the Guards, who’ve hated serving you since day one, and nobody was going to stop them, because who’s going to guard the Guards? And when nothing happened and the Guards just kind of got away with ignoring their duties, other people began to try things. Fast forward a few days, and…” Brian shrugged.
 

“And the Council’s missed relocation?” said Reginald.
 

“Another set of orders that nobody felt like obeying all of a sudden, in our newly democratized paradise. Once the perimeter was breached and they realized that they were below a bar, they started bringing down liquor, just out of human habit. When the liquor didn’t get them drunk, they started harvesting humans and bringing them down here to get
them
drunk. That’s how it’s been since. If the humans catch on before feeding-slash-getting-drunk time, someone glamours them or kills them. There’s a subbasement below this one. Don’t go down there if you find it. It’s filled with empties.”
 

“Bottles?” said Nikki.
 

“Bodies,” said Brian.
 

Maurice’s face was twisting, contorting, becoming ugly. Suddenly something snapped and he thrust both of his hands into Brian’s massive chest. Brian was four times Maurice’s size, but he went through the wall as if he were a stone and the wall were a brittle window. He annihilated the partitions and the metal reinforcements behind them as he went, then broke a star shape into the basement’s rock wall. Dust puffed from around Brian as he came to a stop.

Brian’s hand went to the back of his head and came away with a pool of blood on the palm. He shook the blood off, wiped his red hand on his pants, and probed the back of his head to make sure the wound had knitted before brushing himself off and standing up.
 

“Damn, Maurice.” Still unperturbed. His fangs weren’t even out, but Maurice’s were, and he was walking forward, through the hole, toward Brian.

“How could you let this happen?” Maurice growled.
 

“How could
you
let this happen?”
 

The expression fell off of Maurice’s face as if it were hot. His fangs vanished.
 

“This is all legal, Maurice. There’s no law requiring Escorts and Guards to maintain Council security. It’s protocol, but it’s not law. And as for abducting humans? Legal.
Killing
humans? Legal. Fraternizing? Legal. And if you, as Deacon, had something to say about all of it? Well, it’s now totally legal to ignore you, and to put whatever stupid idea they have up to a public vote. So if you were so goddamn concerned about the way Council was conducting itself, maybe you should have attended a meeting or two instead of sending your idiot proxy every damn time and ignoring us.”
 

Brian, finally perturbed, brushed the last of the basement dust off of his pants and squeezed through the hole, back into the Council chamber. Once inside, he looked at the hole in the otherwise pristine wall, frowned, and then walked across the room to fetch a large bookcase to place in front of it. He gave it an approving nod and said, “Better.”