Vampires Save the Night, page 2
“He told them that God works in mysterious ways, and brought him back all right … but ….”
“But?”
“He’s aware,” Grainne replied on a sigh. “But his skin is gray. He hungers for human flesh. And they’re … trying to keep him fed.”
I ground my teeth. Children were not supposed to be subjected to necromancy. They aren’t old enough to consent to something that will change their lives — or unlives — forever. “He’s a ghoul?”
“One step up from a zombie,” she acknowledged.
I had a ghoul on staff at the agency, as it happened. Manny Alvarez would be pissed to hear about this. “So you want your locket back, so that you can’t be compelled?”
“That, and I’d love to bring him up on charges of unlicensed necromancy, but the police won’t touch him. He’s too big a target.”
“You’ve tried to reach out to them?”
She started to reply, then stopped. I started to get the real picture right around then. “Aha. You’re being compelled right now, aren’t you?”
Her green eyes were huge and weary, but she didn’t — couldn’t — reply.
“The evangelist have a name?” When I was alive, I’d been Jewish. I was fairly sure I wasn’t, anymore, but I’d never exactly followed evangelical circles.
“He goes by Brother Noel.” That, she was permitted to say.
Another soundless whistle from me. Brother Noel had a megachurch so big that even I’d heard of it. His in-person congregation was around 15,000; his television and web presence brought in thousands more. A shot in the dark now: “So what’s he want with me?”
Grainne’s lips parted, then closed. A reluctant smile crossed her face, then a frown.
I pulled on my jacket, feeling like it was armor, and then leaned back against the pillows. “Was any of tonight for real?”
“All of it. He doesn’t care how I get you to agree, so long as you do.” Those words sounded as if they’d been forced out of her, but I wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t go insubstantial, so she must have craved the contact as much as I did. “As far as he’s concerned, I’m already one of the damned, I just haven’t had the courtesy to stay dead.”
“And he reconciles being a necromancer with being a man of god how, exactly?”
“He reckons that his god gave him his power over the undead for a reason. To turn us into puppets for the betterment of humanity.”
“So, he’s heard of my tiny firm, and wants to make an example of me — must have been the Herrera case.” I leaned my head against hers, keeping my voice low. “That got us in the papers, some low-key online attention, too.” It had been a hell of a case, involving a conquistador’s ghost, an Aztec skull, and signs from gods we’d all thought safely dead for centuries. “So he wants to put me out of business?”
She shook her head against my shoulder. “Don’t underestimate him,” Grainne managed with some effort. “He’s more than he seems.” Then her lips sealed shut, and she gave me an agonized look.
I tipped her head up so we could meet each other’s gaze once more. “You may not have been around for it, but the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. Him using your locket to control you? Just another type of slavery.”
“To him, we’re not even people.” Her voice sounded limp now. “We’re corpses that haven’t had the courtesy to stay properly dead.”
“We’re going to get him, and we’re going to nail him. For both you and your young relative. Does the kid have a name?”
“Ronan.”
“Nice name. How old is — was he?”
“Six.” She sounded completely exhausted now.
I restrained the impulse to swear. The god I’d have invoked wasn’t much listening to his world these days anyway. If he was, creatures like me wouldn’t have existed.
“In the old days, I’d have keened for his death, and people would have mourned, but children died so young back then, and so often. They wouldn’t have risked their souls to bring him back. They’d have known that no man of god would make such an offer.” She sounded bewildered, and sat up, taking one of the college textbooks from the shelf beside the bed. “I’ve been putting myself through school since my return,” Grainne said, and looked at me directly. “How can a world so rich in knowledge be so foolish?”
“I don’t know.” I sat up, taking one of her hands loosely in mine. “I need to know everything you can tell me about Brother Noel.”
She hesitated. “There are things I am bound not to tell you,” Grainne admitted. “Things I’ve been told to lie about.”
“And for so long as he holds the locket that you’re bound to, he can enforce those lies and omissions?”
“He has power over such as us,” she replied, obliquely.
I smiled faintly. “Yes, but he clearly hasn’t done his research.”
“Oh?”
“If I told you what I have in mind, would you be required to tell him everything that I said?”
She sighed, her shoulders slumping.
“Do you want to make this official, with paying me a retainer on the case, or do you want to keep this unofficial?”
“Official offers you protections,” she managed in a whisper, looking down and away. “Even if there’s a potential for conflict of interest, now.”
“I have a better idea,” I offered. “Come work for me.”
She pulled away, giving me a skeptical glance. “No, really,” I went on, working the idea out as I spoke. It was the whim of a moment, but I’d managed to put together a hell of an investigative firm out of an incubus, a ghoul, a werewolf, a werelion, and a night-hag secretary. “Your ability to sense death before it happens will help us find work, if nothing else. Maybe even prevent it, if we’re hired as bodyguards at the right time.”
She hesitated. “Death is rarely so … easily diverted.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try.” I squeezed her shoulder lightly. “No, don’t give me an answer now. Wait till after you’ve got your locket back, and you’ve got free will again.”
I sprang up from the rumpled bed, collected my laptop, and gave her a little half-bow of my head. “I’ll be in touch, ah, Ms. O’Malley.”
“I think you can call me Grainne, all things considered.” An ironic glance down at the bed.
“I like to keep things respectful whenever I can,” I returned, as smoothly as I could. Of course, her eyes saw right through me. “We’ll be in touch with you with regards to your case. Which we’ll be taking pro bono.”
Damn, I had it bad.
But, it seemed like Brother Noel was taking aim at me and mine, and he’d launched Grainne at me to get my attention. Which he had. Some of the damsel in distress was probably real, and some of it was probably an act.
What percentages of it were which was up for debate. But the possibility that she literally was enslaved by a necromancer posing as an evangelical healer was too much to ignore.
My steps slowed as my Uber driver arrived, taking me through the late-night Houston streets back to my house in the Woodlands. The lights on 45 and 59 — I’d never get around to calling it I-69 — blurred into lines for me as I thought, listening to the driver’s salsa and reggae music, not talking out loud. A necromancer who had access to all the paraphernalia of the holy man. That meant silver, holy water, and crosses, most of which didn’t concern me much — again, I’d been Jewish from birth until death. Maybe if the guy read from a rabbinical commentary on the Torah it might put me to sleep, but then, that had worked when I was alive, too.
Silver, yeah. That was a bother. And the potential to be commanded by the necromancer … that was a problem. I like to think I have willpower in spades, but that might not be enough when dealing with magic. And she’d warned me not to underestimate him.
I stayed up half the day in my office with the blinds and curtains drawn, working out the first legal salvos against Brother Noel. I’d try to get him through the courts first and foremost. Illegal possession of a magical artifact that belonged to Grainne O’Malley to start with — that was easy to prove. Her family might have given it to him, but they’d done so as a point of sale — selling her to him in exchange for raising their son. The courts were leery of giving the undead the same rights as the living, wary of setting precedents that would overturn centuries of inheritance law, for example, but slavery was slavery. A necromancer raising zombies to do his or her bidding was just another form of human trafficking. That had been clearly established in Magnian v. Montescue, 2022.
Of course … my hands faltered over the keyboard. That would require the family to testify. With a six-year-old ghoul in their house, equally illegally, they would probably be hostile witnesses at best. It would require Grainne to testify, and while she might we willing, she might not be able to, given Noel’s grip on her. No, a different tack would be needed.
Maybe a class action law suit? He had to have done things like this before. Grainne and the Connors wouldn’t have been the first people affected by his necromantic powers. And that way, as people signed on, they could do so in safety and relative anonymity. Of course, that took things into the personal injury side of law. I’d been a prosecutor, however. This was going to take some research.
So I gathered my people together for the early-evening meeting at just past 6 pm, which is when my offices really came alive. Manuel — Manny — Alvarez and Devon Bamford could and did manage the day shift, serving warrants and divorce papers and all manner of other things. Both were former police officers. Manny had the gray skin and piercing red eyes of a ghoul, of course. Devon was a six-foot-six version of Idris Elba. He was built like a linebacker, but when he opened his mouth, his words came out as a pure working class London accent. In fact, he called me guv.
I tended to let that go. Devon was also a werelion — lycanthropy is genetic, not contagious — and he could probably have torn a man in half with his bare hands.
Manny handled Hispanic and undead contacts as best he could. While his Spanish was fluent and native-perfect, tinged with a hint of his upbringing in Peru, many people in Hispanic neighborhoods pulled back from him. They were largely Catholic, after all, and the Pope had decreed that the undead were anathema. Not to be talked to, associated with, and so on. Make the sign of the cross, close the door, and call for a priest.
Business was booming at the dioceses since the Return of magic; people were scrambling to attend seminaries these days. A matter of self-protection, self-preservation.
If only they understood that not every monster was inhuman.
Devon handled contacts that wouldn’t talk to Manny — of which there were many. But at least they could both go out in daylight. Not all of my people could.
Marcus, for instance, was an incubus. You may think there’s little difference between him and a bog-standard vampire. There’s plenty. He can only subsist on death itself — lifestuff taken in the moment of a passionate embrace. He has lunch ‘dates’ with people who have signed informed consent documents that I’ve written for their safety, and also some non-disclosure language for his safety. He gets along on dribs and drabs of lifestuff between visits to old folks’ homes and cancer wards where he’s known to the staff as the Angel of Death. He eases people out of existence. And every time he does, he comes to work the next day a little darker. A little more bereft.
And then there was Dana, my night-hag receptionist. She looks like a kindly grandmother in her sixties. She knits a fair bit during the day, which is fine — we’re often pretty slow. At night, she heads to her second job at a sleep lab, helping people with nightmares that she can enter and feed on.
I was lucky to have her this evening, as I convened our little brain trust and I explained the case at hand.
“We’re doing this pro bono?” Devon asked dubiously.
“I’m making a bet that taking the guy down will pay off in publicity.”
“And death threats,” Manny slid in.
I shrugged. “We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t piss people off.”
A wave of answering shrugs around the room. “How do you want us to proceed?” Marcus asked.
“Try to find people who’ve left the flock, who’re willing to talk,” I replied. “It’s going to be tough. People who leave cults of any sort tend to want to disappear so that they can’t be found again. But start with Brother Noel’s most vocal, most outspoken opponents, and backtrack from there. I think the best option is a class action lawsuit, but I’m open to other ideas.”
I rubbed at my eyes. Inhuman constitution or not, I hadn’t actually rested since the night before last. I’d pushed myself to stay awake all day, some part of me alert to the notion of danger. That we could be attacked during daylight hours, and the only people I had who could stand up to a necromancer’s commands were a werelion former cop, a Deaf werewolf forensic accountant named Belle, and maybe Marcus. But incubus or not, he wasn’t muscle. All the gifts that death and night had given him were … ephemeral. Mental. He couldn’t tear a man in half with his bare hands or anything like that.
Chances are, I could, but I’d never tried. I also, for reasons of public safety and basic humanity, never drank more than one unit of blood a week. A vampire’s strength, or so I was told, had to do with how much blood they’d recently consumed. I would place my strength as slightly above that of a regular human’s, but ….
On the wall behind Dana’s desk there’s a white board. Once a week, I write there, “You have a choice, every day, to be human, or to be a monster. Make the right choice today.”
It’s something I believe. Something my people believe, too.
And now, we’re facing up against someone who believes we’re not people at all.
It took a week, but Devon turned up hits with people who’d left the congregation in anger, but who’d been forced to sign NDAs before being permitted to leave. Their hints and careful words led him to a number of families with ghouls in their basements — all kids.
Manny Alvarez was pissed. “Let me go after him, boss,” he said, showing fangs in a mouth slightly darker gray than the rest of his skin. “I’ll eat him fucking alive for what he’s done to those kids.”
“We’re keeping this strictly by the book, I’m afraid,” I told him. “But if I could, I’d hold him down while you ate his intestines.”
Belle in Accounting sent some emails to a friend at the Treasury Department — it looked like Brother Noel was under investigation for tax evasion.
It was all coming together very neatly.
Which, of course, meant that everything went to hell when Brother Noel, Grainne, and some of his parishioners showed up at our door, mid-afternoon. The scream from Dana at her desk is what woke me where I dozed in my office. I’d been nursing a pint of blood from the blood bank, so I was freshly topped off, skin pink and rosy, as I emerged from my office to see Dana’s white hair stained with blood as she reeled back from a punch thrown by a parishioner. Said parishioners were carrying stakes and crosses — obviously intended for me.
I caught Dana’s limp form and deposited her gently in her chair. A glance at her vacant eyes told me that she’d already left her body — not dead, but dream-walking. People who were conscious were safe enough from her, but anyone who slipped unconscious nearby was in for an unpleasant time. “So,” I said, straightening up and adjusting my tie. “You get your kicks beating up old women, do you, Brother Noel?”
He laughed, but one of his men twitched a little. I’d struck a nerve. Which was when Manny and Belle shouldered through the door, and Marcus flowed in behind them as a drift of mist. I’d left standing instructions for Devon to stay way the hell out of anything that involved Grainne.
We were about to see if that particular gamble paid off. I’d put a fair bit of our muscle out of action — again, Devon was a werelion. He made Belle, a werewolf, look like a Sunday outing in the park.
“Put them down!” Brother Noel said in the controlled, rolling syllables he probably used at the pulpit. “God commands it!”
Grainne stood as still as a gravestone at his side, but I could see her eyes flicking from person to person. “Don’t hurt them!” she called across the room to us. “Each of them has a relative that he’s … brought back.”
“Ah, extortion to add to his crimes on top of slavery, necromancy, and, currently, conspiracy to commit murder,” I said, lightly stepping out of the way of a man with a cross as he wildly tried to stick the wooden stake in my heart. I was freshly fed — they all looked painfully slow to me, and the crosses were meaningless, other than the fact that they were made of silver. That would probably burn.
“Stand still!” the hapless man snarled at me, and tried again to stake me.
“Murder?” Brother Noel actually laughed. “How can you murder that which is already dead?”
“The courts are slowly working on the definition of the differently alive, thank you,” I replied, dodging again. I’d been practicing martial arts with Manny and Devon for the past year. I could probably have broken the man’s arm in three places by now, but I didn’t really want to. He wasn’t a danger to me — just an annoyance. And my first weapon had always been my words.
“Stop playing with him, boss,” Manny told me from across the room. His ghoul teeth flashed in the fluorescent lights overhead as he bared his teeth in a snarl, and, with brutal efficiency, broke one man’s arm, forcing the silver-edged knife in his hand out of his fingers.
“Don’t hurt them!” Grainne cried out. “They have no choice!”
“We all have choices,” I replied as Marcus coalesced into full solidity in the center of the room. “We have the choice every day to be a person, or a monster. Marcus?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Tell them to stop fighting us.”
He took off his mirrored sunglasses. I quickly looked away. The level of compulsion an incubus lays down is something far, far beyond what I can do on a single pint of blood. Maybe if I ever drank my fill … but no.
“I think it’s time for you all to sleep,” he said softly, beguilingly. “Just … sleep. Dana’s waiting for you there,” he added, glancing sidelong at my unconscious secretary’s still form. “She’ll want to talk with you.”
