Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (46 page)

“Ow, hell!” he yelled.
 

“Sorry. I wanted to see if you were still impervious to pain. Apparently you’re not. But last night, you kept telling me to kick you in the balls, and you just kept laughing all the while. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” It had seemed hilarious at the time, but he’d been in no condition to judge hilarity when he’d come home. He’d been half dead, which was saying something for a person who was already mostly dead even when fully functional.

Nikki seemed unsure what to say next, so she again held up the phone. “Anyway, she’s at Mercy. Apparently an ambulance showed up and found her where your buddies described. They’re saying she was stabbed.”
 

“Stabbed?”
 

Nikki nodded. “Then, I told them I was Victoria’s sister and asked what they were doing for her. The man I talked to didn’t want to tell me, but I cry well on cue. He looked some stuff up and said that they gave her a bunch of blood and stitched up her wounds, and that she should be fine. But from what he said, it’s good that you showed up when you did. Those vampires weren’t going to sip and ship. They were going to drink until she was dry.”

“It wasn’t me. Thank that gang of rednecks.”
 

Nikki snorted.
 

“And you talked to Claire?”
 

Nikki pursed her lips. Reginald sat up. “What?”
 

“She was there. I guess they’re going to let her sleep there tonight, even. But she wouldn’t come to the phone.”
 

“Did she know it was you?”
 

Nikki nodded. “I told the guy to tell her it was Aunt Nikki and Uncle Reginald. She didn’t want to talk.”
 

“Upset,” said Reginald. But he wondered if there was more he was forgetting, or more that he was failing to work out.
 

“Any news on the posse?”
 

“I suppose Claire would have been able to tell me if she heard shots, but the guy I talked to knew nothing, or was disclosing nothing.”
 

Reginald sighed. It was all falling apart. Vampires were openly killing humans. Humans were starting to believe that there were real monsters in the world. The other night, he’d even seen a news report featuring eyewitnesses who said they’d watched several “creatures” flee the site of brutal killings by leaping up onto the tops of buildings and “vanishing in blurs.” There was only so much stubborn disbelief to go around.
 

Reginald stood from the couch and stumbled toward the bathroom. Nikki followed him, asking when he last ate. Reginald told her he’d eaten Cheetos before falling asleep, and Nikki said that wasn’t what she meant.
 

“You need blood,” said Nikki.
 

“Blood is disgusting,” said Reginald.
 

“Let me order a pizza man,” said Nikki.
 

“Make sure it comes with a pizza,” said Reginald.
 

S
TRESS

AFTER HIS PIZZA MAN AND his pizza, Reginald announced that he was going to take a shower because it was almost time to go to work.
 

Nikki’s jaw dropped. She threw her hands into the air and asked how
going to work
— given all that had happened and was happening — could possibly be on his mind. Reginald asked her how she was planning to pay her rent without working. Nikki said that Maurice would give them both money, because he already had way, way too much. Reginald said that he refused to be a charity case. Nikki said that Reginald could long ago have glamoured his bosses and sat home forever, collecting checks for doing nothing.
 

Reginald said that he’d once asked Maurice why
he
worked, given that he had a whole immortal, wealthy existence in front of him. Maurice had replied that sometimes, it was nice to be a mindless idiot. Reginald said that at the time, he didn’t understand why Maurice would say such a ridiculous thing… but that now, he did.
 

Nikki had nothing to say to that.

Reginald rose from the couch and walked to the bathroom, then stepped into the shower and let the hot water begin to dissolve the crud in his hair. He bent his head forward, watching the drain as the water flowed red and brown around his feet. Eventually the water became more or less clear, and he turned his face toward the spray.

Reginald — like his maker — insisted on keeping feet in both the human and vampire worlds. Most would have seen it as a step in the wrong direction, but for Reginald, having a double life functioned as a safety valve. Vampires were usually powerful, strong, and above laws and morality, making vampire life an ideal escape from the drudgery of human existence. For Reginald, however, who had a vampire life filled with inadequacy and disintegration and decay,
human
life was his escape. When things got bad, he sometimes stayed up until all hours of the day, watching talk shows and eating junk food. At those times, he
relished
going to work. He
reveled
in the abuse of his annoying co-workers and bosses. He supposed he was as goth inside as Maurice looked on the outside. He longed for the pain of humanity so that he could feel alive for a while — instead of undead, surrounded by failed responsibility and chaos.
 

And there was so much chaos lately.

Every night, on the news, there were more and more gruesome murders. The networks had to be loving it. They’d been blessed with a neverending supply of blood-spattered walls and gore-strewn rooms to photograph. The police shooed the news crews away over and over again, but all they had to do was to go down the street, where there was always another gathering, another person dead, another report of carnage and destruction… and, more and more often, another report of inhuman creatures that managed incredible feats.

What made it worse was that everyone Reginald trusted and believed in seemed to be looking to
him
for answers. As if he knew more than they did. As if memory and deduction meant anything now that so many butterfly wings were stirring distant hurricanes. Reginald wanted someone to give
him
the answers, but nobody had answers to give. Instead, they asked. And asked. And asked. And Reginald did his best to help where he could, but so often, he came up empty.

Even the Europeans were no help. He’d spoken to Karl, head of the European Vampire Council, a few times via Skype. News from Luxembourg was that the angel Santos seemed to have finally kicked his earthly addiction and had vanished without a trace. Most of the European and Asian vampires watched the news out of America and were active on Fangbook. Karl didn’t want to come right out and say it because he was proud, but as went America, so went the world. He said that the EU Council had held together, but that vigilante gangs were proliferating there as they were in the US.
They’re terrified
, Karl told Reginald and Maurice,
and murder is all they know to do well.
 

Maurice and Reginald couldn’t reason with murderers. Their position was untenable. They wanted the killing and reckless creation to end. And in its place, they wanted the frightened vampire population to do…
what
, exactly? At the Ring of Fire, Balestro had spoken of evolution, but evolution was vague and open to interpretation. Evolution took time. Nobody wanted to analyze and soul-search and wait. They wanted a fix, and they wanted it
now
.
 

And what was worse, Reginald was beginning to think that maybe he and Maurice were the crazy ones. Maybe what was happening in the world and on the news
was
what the angels wanted. Vampires were the descendants of Cain and the servants of darkness, after all. Was it really that insane to imagine that chaos and murder and rape and death were what the darkness wanted?
 

The hot water ran over Reginald’s skull. He willed it to wash away his worries. It was all too much.

Claire’s mother.
 

Claire’s cold shoulder.
 

Guns and blood and defied orders of protection.
 

His odd new abilities, which he didn’t understand: the way his mind could stop time to think, and his (apparently temporary) ability to turn off pain, right when he needed it most.
 

Was this what Balestro had given him, that night on the hilltop? And if it was,
why
had Balestro given it to him? Did the fact that Balestro had given him something mean that Balestro wanted Reginald to win the battle that was raging? Was Reginald on the angels’ side, or was he against them?
 

But of all the questions and doubts circling in his mind, what bothered Reginald most of all was a troubling certainty that he might simply be too weak to face what was coming. When Nikki had her epiphany about blood ties and thirst, she had simply stopped feeding more than was strictly necessary. She’d seen what needed to be done and had the will to do it, but Reginald had never developed that kind of will power and fortitude.
 

How can I promote evolution in the Nation if I can’t evolve myself?
he’d asked her. And she’d had no answer.

It was too much. Being human had been so much easier.
 

Reginald dried off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked out to get his clothes before remembering that he’d spent the day at Nikki’s apartment and had none. So once the sun had set, she ran back to his house and was back in seconds with clean underwear, slacks, a shirt, and shoes. Reginald used Nikki’s deodorant and brushed his teeth with his finger. He noticed that his fangs never got brushed, because he never brushed his teeth when he was angry, hungry, or horny. Then he wondered why he brushed his teeth at all. It wasn’t like they’d ever decay or fall out. He supposed the ritual comforted him, just like junk food and TV comforted him.
 

Old habits simply died hard, like so many people did these days.
 

Reginald walked out of the bathroom to find Nikki standing in the hallway stark naked, a come-hither expression on her face.
 

“We don’t have to leave for a half hour,” she said. “And I’d like to prescribe some much-needed stress relief for you.”
 

“I’m a monster,” he said vacantly.
 

“
I
think you’re still human,” she said, walking toward him and running his shirt collar between her fingers, “but let’s check, just to be sure.”
 

B
LOODBATH

WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE office an hour later, they found the front door ajar. The sight of it made foreboding rise in Reginald’s gut.
 

There was no good reason for foreboding. The day shift would all be gone by now, and Walker and the custodians would be in the building alone unless someone had decided to work late. Any one of the departing day shift workers could have broken the closer on their way out, and nobody in the company would care enough to close the door when it failed to close on its own. In fact, Reginald would have thought things were more out of place if the closer were broken and someone
had
closed the door. Courtesy, in Reginald’s workplace, was suspicious in and of itself.
 

But still, when he noticed the box above the door hanging from its broken mounting, he raised an arm to stop Nikki from going any farther. Something about it bothered him, especially with the hangover from his earlier dark thoughts still swimming in his mind. It reminded him of the door at the top of the Asbury’s basement staircase — also ajar, also dangling an arm from a broken pneumatic closer. The door in that club had said so many troubling things. It said that order and security had ceased to matter. It said that entropy had become a stronger force than paranoia — and according to Maurice, paranoia had been the Council’s hallmark for centuries. The ajar door at the Asbury had symbolized everything within the Nation that was falling apart.
 

And now here was another ajar door. It was stupid to back away from it, but he did it anyway.

“The door is open,” said Reginald when Nikki gave him a questioning look.

“Yeah?”
 

“It reminds me of the door at the Council.”
 

Nikki pushed his hand down gently. The small gesture said that she understood, but that Reginald had been on edge lately and might not be the best judge of what was worth fretting about.
 

“Many doors are similar,” she said.
 

Reginald felt a breeze at his back. A second later, Maurice appeared on his other side.
 

“Are we having a standoff?” he said.
 

“You came to work!” said Nikki. Maurice hadn’t been bothering with work lately, but he looked as haggard as Reginald felt. Apparently, they felt the same way about the redeeming powers of bureaucracy and pointless paperwork.
 

“I needed monotony,” said Maurice. “I wanted to spend some time doing something that has utterly no meaning whatsoever. I needed to be somewhere where if I make a huge error, nobody even notices.”
 

“Something is wrong,” said Reginald, eyeing the door.
 

He hadn’t put Nikki’s keys into his pocket. She had a tiny Swiss Army knife on the chain — not a very ladylike accessory, he’d always thought. Reginald was holding it as if he planned to open it and do battle. The entire knife was two inches long. Whatever threat he sensed was in for a serious miniature nail-filing.
 

“See you inside,” said Maurice, slapping Reginald on the back and walking forward. “I feel like having a cup of coffee out of a mug that expresses my dislike for Mondays.”
 

Nikki rubbed the back of Reginald’s neck and looked into his eyes. “Come on,” she said.
 

Reginald ignored her, still staring at the office door across the parking lot.