Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (18 page)

“I could kill you right here and right now,” Maurice told him. “And I think I might, for the disrespect you’re showing the Deacon’s office…
and
my Deputy.”
 

“We were just having fun,” said the old man.
 

The man made a neck-cracking motion, then stood up straight. The change in posture — and somehow in manner — made him look twenty years younger. Then his white, blood-matted hair became dark blonde and grew longer. His stooped frame elongated and filled out. Even his clothes changed, from a sober, tan suit to a black shirt with a scooped collar and a long black coat. The fancy cane retracted into his hand as if the hand were absorbing it. The hand became larger, as if swollen, and then the swelling dissipated up his arm and vanished.
 

“I’m sorry,” said Reginald, standing and looking at the new man with the dark blonde hair. “I’m afraid I don’t know what just happened.”
 

“You lost the sale,” said the man, brushing at his long black coat. The voice coming out of his mouth was that of Phil Berger. It was the voice that had commanded Reginald, over the phone, to meet with a mysterious new customer despite the late hour.
 

Maurice looked at Reginald. “Reginald, meet Altus,” he said with disdain in his voice.

“Charmed,” said Altus.
 

“Altus is an incubus. They’re known for sneaking up on women in the middle of the night and having sex with them. One of their talents — not that they have many — is shape-shifting.”
 

To demonstrate, Altus became Gary Coleman. He said, “What choo talkin’ bout, Maurice?”
 

“Did you not notice how cold it was in here?” Maurice asked Reginald. “It’s late May in Ohio. It doesn’t get this cold in the dead of winter.”
 

“I’m not seeing the connection,” said Reginald, who was somewhat immune to cold and hadn’t noticed.

When Maurice replied, it sounded like he was quoting something. “‘You can identify an incubus by its unnaturally cold penis,’” he said. “You’d think that would be a useless bit of trivia unless you wanted to go around feeling crotches, but Wikipedia understates it a little. The things are like a brick of absolute zero. They suck all of the heat out of a room.”
 

“Brick is right,” said Gary Coleman, patting his groin.
 

“They’re wastes. Pests.
Demons
, if you believe in that crap.”

“It’s not crap,” said Gary Coleman.

“Rapists,” Maurice continued.

“Hey!” said Altus, transforming back into the tall man with the dark blonde hair. “I haven’t had to resort to rape in decades. These modern days, everyone wants to fuck a demon. The girls are all like, ‘Your dick is so cold!’ and I’m like, ‘I’m an incubus, baby,’ and they’re like, ‘Ooh, put it to me, bad boy!’”
 

Maurice gave Altus a look filled with loathing, but Altus seemed not to notice. He was busy fussing with his shoulder-length blonde hair. He stood several inches taller than Maurice and looked older, but that was unlikely seeing as Maurice was over two thousand years old.
 

“What do you want?” said Maurice.
 

“To pay my respects to the new vampire Deacon,” he said. “And, of course, his dignified right-hand man, about whom we’ve all heard
so very much
.” He made a rolling motion with his arm and bowed toward Reginald.
 

“I could pull your spine out through your mouth,” said Maurice.
 

“But you won’t,” said Altus, straightening up, his expression suddenly serious. “Because even if I couldn’t recycle and be right back here in a week, I know you and your curiosity. Right now, you’re
dying
to hear why I came all the way down here, and what I must have to say.”

“You’ve said it.”
 

“Hardly. At the risk of being punched again, I could give a shit about paying my respects,” said Altus. “The reason I’m here is because I know about the incident at the last Council meeting.”
 

“Good for you.”
 

“You don’t want to know how I know?”
 

“Everyone knows,” said Maurice.
 

And it was true; everyone did. At the May 15
th
Vampire Council meeting — which Maurice and Reginald had studiously and fortunately avoided — the roof of the main arena had inexplicably blown entirely off. It had come off in one giant piece, like the top coming off of a pickle jar. And that was bad, but what made it worse was that Council meetings were held during the day to permit sunlight executions. When the roof came off, the sun came in. Three hundred and sixty two vampires had been blown into dust, and the third that remained were found later that night, after the sun had set, hiding in the halls and buried under rubble.
 

“What if I said I know who was behind it?” said the incubus.

“It was a gas explosion,” said Maurice.

“
Really
,” said Altus.
 

“Really.”
 

“You use a lot of gas at the Council?”
 

“I wouldn’t know,” said Maurice. “Something in the building the Council was using. Doesn’t need to be
our
gas.”
 

The incubus gave Maurice a knowing look. “What happened two weeks ago was a warning. A ritualistic, by-the-book, prior-to-a-formal-warning…
warning
.”
 

“Really.”
 

“Yes. And at the next meeting — which you’ll need to attend in person now that your proxy is dead — I’d bet you’ll get the
second
warning. The formal one.”
 

“This sounds very prophetic,” said Maurice. There was a blur, and suddenly Maurice’s hand was at the blonde man’s throat. “Let’s say that this
was
someone’s fault and not some kind of an accident. Is it smart of you to come here with ‘information’ that sounds like a threat?”
 

Altus seemed unperturbed by Maurice’s clawed hand on his neck. “You could see it as a threat,” he said. “Or you could consider the possibility that maybe you don’t know every damn thing, and that there are topics about which you are ignorant.”
 

His head pinned by Maurice’s hand, Altus’s eyes swiveled to look into Maurice’s eyes.
 

“Some groups — let’s say
demons,
for instance — might have insight into certain areas about which vampires are largely ignorant — perhaps because the proud and mighty Vampire Nation doesn’t usually pay much attention to things that it feels are…“ Altus’s eyes flicked to Reginald. “…
beneath
it
.”
 

Maurice slowly removed his hand from Altus’s neck and stepped back.

“All right,” said Maurice, rolling his eyes. “Lay some wisdom on us. What’s the big insight we in our incredible arrogance are missing? What do you know? Who’s out to… to
get
us?”
 

Altus pulled at the collar of his long black coat, straightening the area Maurice had wrinkled.

“Angels,” he said.
 

G
OTH

“ANGELS,” SAID REGINALD, SOME TIME after Maurice had unceremoniously thrown Altus through a window. Altus had begun quizzing them about religious mythology. Then he’d turned into Alex Trebek and had started requiring Maurice and Reginald to give their responses in the form of questions. Then he’d suddenly found himself in the dumpster across the parking lot.
 

Reginald had said that Berger might notice the broken window.

Maurice replied that he’d glamour Berger into believing that a hawk had hit the window and had broken it. Then the hawk had apparently destroyed a treadmill. Damn vandalizing hawks.

Maurice lit a cigarette — his one remaining human habit, for which he refused to apologize — and rolled his eyes. “Fanatics,” he said.

“So I take it you don’t believe in angels?” said Reginald, opening a bag of pork rinds.

“Do you?”
 

“I didn’t used to believe in vampires or incubuses. My standards have come down a lot this year.”
 

“
Incubi
,” corrected Maurice. Then he picked up a newspaper and began reading, the discussion apparently closed.

They were sitting in the break room. Reginald had changed into his emergency shirt. He was glad that Maurice, who had a high tolerance for the absurd, was the only other person around to see the shirt now that perfect-chin, perfect-teeth Todd Walker had gone for the night and Nikki was still in Paris visiting family. Reginald had thought that it was a plain black tee when he’d put it in the drawer, but it turned out to be a gag shirt he’d gotten for free with a toaster at a garage sale in downtown Columbus. It was black with white lettering and read, I THE JIGGY MOTHERFUCKER. It was huge, but was still at least a size too small on Reginald. The woman running the sale had said that Reginald could have it because it had been part of a set, and some other JIGGY MOTHERFUCKER had already bought its twin.
 

Bizarre explanations aside, jiggyness aside, Reginald didn’t understand why Maurice was so blasé about what had happened at Council.

After the catastrophe on May 15
th
, Reginald had reviewed the tapes from the Council camera system. What he saw was bizarre. The roof had simply
lifted
off. The arena was dark, and then suddenly there was a noise of rending concrete and steel and it became very bright. There hadn’t been an explosion; the event had simply
occurred
. The idea that Maurice wasn’t at least interested in hearing possible explanations was bizarre.
 

But then again, Maurice loathed the Council. What the Council called “catastrophe,” Maurice called “awesome.”

Five months earlier, Maurice had seized control of the Vampire Council by assassinating the prior Deacon in order to save his, Reginald’s, and Nikki’s lives. When the dust settled, Maurice was the new Deacon… but Maurice didn’t
want
to be Deacon. The job was demanding. The entire Council loathed him. And what was worse, Deacons lived with the constant threat of assassination. So he’d asked Reginald to find him a way out of the burdens of Deaconship, and Reginald, who possessed the most vampirism-enhanced intelligence in recent history, had delivered.
 

After a bit of research, Reginald found an obscure legal provision that allowed the Deacon to nominate a by-proxy representative to take his place at meetings of the Council. The law was intended to allow a Deacon to govern if he was mortally injured or detained, but the law also had no time limit, so Maurice had by-proxied every meeting other than his very first as Deacon.
 

There was a side benefit as well: Succession-by-assassination only worked when the assassination occurred at a meeting of the Council, and because Maurice never attended, he could never be usurped by an assassin. If a Deacon died outside of Council, the Vice Deacon would take over. Vice Deacon was currently held by Gregor Wellings, who was schizophrenic.
 

So Maurice hung out at home and went to work, smoking his cigarettes and giving the finger to the council, freed from responsibility and more or less untouchable.
 

“We should really talk about what happened at the Council,” said Reginald. “It wasn’t angels, but it wasn’t a gas explosion either.”
 

“What it was, was awesome,” said Maurice, not looking up.
 

“You’re going to have to attend the next meeting. I still haven’t found you a new proxy that won’t attempt a coup, now that Nicholas is dead.”

“Pfft,” said Maurice. “Let them coup. I don’t care.”
 

“Yes you do.”
 

“No I don’t.”
 

Reginald grabbed the top edge of Maurice’s newspaper, pushed it down, and made a serious face at his two-thousand-year-old maker.
 

“I don’t mean to get all ‘civic responsibilities’ on you,” he said, “but let’s keep in mind that the Deacon alone has veto rights over new laws. Your presence or that of a trusted proxy are all that’s keeping all kinds of stupid new crap from being passed.”
 

“Oh, it’s just politics as usual.”
 

“No, it’s not. Logan was a son of a bitch, but at least the Council and the Nation obeyed him. They’ve been reacting to
you
like an inflammation. Now that Logan is gone, the new proposals just keep getting dumber and dumber. It’s like they’re determined to prove that you’re not the boss of them.”

“Yet, I am.”
 

“Only as long as you’re present.”
 

Maurice sighed and put down the paper. “Fine. I’ll go. But I’m not happy about it.”
 

The kitchen door swung open. What came in was dark and gloomy and of questionable gender. It seemed to be wearing a garment that could only be described as a cape with wizard symbols on it.
 

“Hey Frank,” said Maurice.
 

“Hey,” said Frank.
 

“You here for lunch?”
 

“Yeah,” said Frank. He pulled up a chair and sat on it facing Reginald. He bent his neck to the side and raked away the cape’s ties, then slapped his neck twice with two fingers.
 

Maurice looked at Reginald. “You’re not feeding on Walker anymore?”
 

“Walker’s getting anemic. I’ve fed on him every third day for a month. I swear last night I heard that gargling sound you get when you hit the bottom of a cup with your straw. The other day I saw him stumble into the copier in the hall twice.”
 

“That’s hilarious.” Then he added, seriously, “Don’t kill him, though. We can glamour Berger into believing a hawk destroyed a treadmill, but police investigations are a lot harder to squash.”
 

“I don’t want to kill Walker,” Reginald assured him.