Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (63 page)

The banquet fare consisted of dozens of sushi girls and guys. The one departure from normal sushi served off of a person was that instead of lying naked on the tables covered in sushi, these appetizers laid on the tables without any sushi covering them, completely naked. And because there wasn’t enough room on the table for dozens of naked donors unless they were stacked tall like poker chips (an arrangement that Karl considered aesthetically displeasing), most of them roamed the room like nude waiters, carrying trays of garnishes (wine, strawberries, and flavored skin lotions, all of which went well with blood and were recently in vogue at high-end vampire bloodspots) and bending their necks for whoever wanted a taste. The gathering was an odd mishmash of nude humans and posh, formal vampires. It was as if a party planner had decided to split-test two very different dress codes at once.
 

Reginald’s finery consisted of a twenty year-old Izod golf shirt that had made its way into his luggage by mistake. It was too small, but he’d squeezed himself into it like sausage into a casing. Nikki had done much better. She hadn’t packed any dress clothes from home either, but she’d visited a chic boutique on a weekend trip to Paris and had spent a used Volkswagen’s worth of Euros on a dress that made her look a hot cartoon character. It was jet black, with wonderful boost and exposure at her cleavage, widest at the hips and pixie-thin toward her feet so that she had to shuffle when she walked. She looked fantastic when she was standing still. The effect was magnified if she held something seductively out at her side with her palm up, and she’d expressed regret while dressing that she didn’t buy a cigarette holder to use as a prop. Reginald gave her one of the shish kebabs that were out for the Chateau’s human guests and for a while she’d held that, but she abandoned it when several of the human guests (mostly Reginald’s mother) walked over to Nikki, thanked her, and took an item off of the end of the shish kebab to eat. So Nikki had traded the shish kebab in for a simpler prop — a full-bodied wineglass filled with some of Karl’s vintage O positive. She didn’t trust herself to walk around with the glass and made Reginald hold it when she wanted to mingle. This was wise. She fell repeatedly.
 

Karl, true to Karl form, wore a fantastic robe that looked both a thousand years old and priceless. It was Asian, with a high collar that stood up very high around his neck. Maurice commented that it looked like he was wearing a halo so that he wouldn’t chew at his stitches when he came home from the veterinarian’s office. Karl scoffed and said something insulting about Maurice having lived in America for too long.
 

A very large screen had been hung on the side wall of the room. On the screen was the Vampire News Network feed, currently showing muted pre-election coverage. From time to time, the screen would flash the faces of the candidates: Timken, Charles, and Maurice. Maurice thought this was absurd. His base of support was ridiculously small, and he wouldn’t be giving a speech both because he was in Europe and because he didn’t want to be on the ballot. But the network seemed to enjoy the idea of a three-party race despite the obviousness of the outcome, so it cycled through the backstories of all of them. The screen showed Timken shaking hands with well-known vampire businessmen, then the famous footage of Timken standing on a chair during the coup. It showed footage of Charles’s free-for-all Council days and his one dramatic speech slamming “the old regime.” The last piece of video in the rotation was a flattering clip of Maurice giving a speech at Council. Maurice looked good, which was unusual. Normally he looked ridiculous in the Deacon’s box, as if someone’s teenager had sneaked into it to shout stupid things at the assembly — things like “Baba Booey.”
 

Reginald milled the party, feeling awkward. He’d never been good at things like this. Even with a beautiful woman on his arm it was difficult. And to make matters worse, said beautiful woman kept tripping over her dress and falling down, which drew everyone’s attention. Not that anyone cared. Halfway through the gathering, Nikki spilled a giant punchbowl filled with a blood-and-fruit concoction, and when she did, several of the intoxicated partygoers fell to the floor and started licking at it, their movements filling with more and more sexual innuendo until they started biting each other and having sex on the floor. Those who were interested watched and clapped and reached down to touch. The rest ignored them and continued to mill as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
 

Eventually Karl called for order. The room slowly quieted and all eyes looked toward the tall man in the extravagant robe. The vampires writhing in the blood and fruit on the floor didn’t stop, but did courteously decrease the volume of their sex and biting.

Karl raised his hands. It looked like he might make a grand proclamation, but instead he said, “Let us watch the Americans make the bullshit” and gave a nod to someone across the room. The news feed was unmuted. A reporter onscreen (Reginald assumed she was a vampire, but there was no way to tell) finished a prepared bit about free elections for the first time ever, then took a moment to mention the world’s appreciation of Timken for his help in investigating the TGV attacks. She didn’t outright say that Timken had saved the American Vampire Nation (and, she implied, the entire vampire world) from Charles Barkley’s gaping asshole, but it wasn’t hard to read between the lines.
 

The reporter then concluded by saying that two of the candidates would be speaking shortly but that the third to meet the five percent prediction minimum, Deacon Maurice Toussant, was not in attendance and would not be speaking tonight.

“I’d rather eat the food Reginald eats,” said Maurice. He was standing behind Reginald, squeezed into what looked like a cheap prom tux from a Tuxedo Junction in a mall. He even had a pocket square. His hair looked oily, but for a change, his face didn’t.
 

“Me too,” said Reginald.
 

While the group in the Chateau watched, Charles Barkley took the stage. He looked like someone who’d gotten cleaned up but couldn’t hide how gross he was at the core. Once upon a time, Charles had been incredibly handsome, as were all vampires in the decades preceding Reginald. But now, something had changed. Even Reginald, with his mind regaining its razor’s edge, couldn’t tell what. Charles was, of course, incapable of actual
physical
change. He couldn’t have lost or gained weight; he couldn’t have had any plastic surgery. But the change also didn’t seem to be the presence of or absence of makeup. It didn’t seem to be his hair; it didn’t seem to be his clothes; it didn’t seem to be the lighting in the room. Against all logic, Reginald finally decided that what he was seeing on Charles was the stink of evil. The whole world knew what a son of a bitch he was, how lazy and power-hungry he was, and where the Nation would go under his leadership. Now that Timken had restored order, the Nation’s time spent under Charles stood out like a bloody and pulverized thumb.
 

Charles’s speech was about desperate times calling for desperate measures. He talked a lot about the need to be afraid during these “days of trial.” This made both Karl and Maurice roll their eyes and hurl insults at the screen. Nikki and Reginald, by contrast, simply watched, wondering between them if it was working, if any of the audience was being scared over to Charles’s side. And the answer was: almost certainly.

But when Timken took the stage, Reginald’s concerns about Charles’s ability to control the Nation with fear vanished. Timken’s speech was
all about
fear, but instead of telling the viewers that they should be afraid, he told them how frightened he himself had been when he’d seen that ominous Ring of Fire form in front of his eyes. The mental picture he painted was brilliantly moving. Reginald found himself returning to that night on the hilltop, feeling his own fear. He’d experienced that terror. He’d experienced that helplessness. But at least Reginald had been there with Balestro as he’d created the Ring, and had felt some modicum of control. At least Reginald, at the time, had had a plan. The vampires of the world hadn’t had any of that. They’d simply stared onrushing death in its unblinking eye and had held their breath, waiting to die.
 

The vampires in the Chateau, listening, had gone still. All eyes were on the screen — or, perhaps more accurately, all eyes were looking back to the day that they’d seen that Ring. The day they’d realized that it could all be over in a second, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
 

Then, Timken talked about the anarchy that had ruled the Nation for the past few months. He talked about his opponent, taking the high road and being careful not to malign Charles so as to allow viewers to malign him in their own minds. He explained that chaos and mayhem were one way they could react to a threat, but that it was the easy way out… and as usual, the
easy
way wasn’t the
right
way.
 

“Are we insects?” he said, his voice high and strong, power and pride radiating from him as it had the day he’d stood on that chair during his coup, holding an ordinary human firearm high as a symbol. “Or are we predators? Will we cower, or will we rise up? The future is coming. The judgment of our creators is coming. We will face trials and tribulations and harsh decisions. The next years may not be easy. They may be very, very difficult. They may test our cores as beings. But will we face those hard times as frightened animals with our backs curled around our middles, our faces hidden, our spines exposed for the taking? Or will we stand tall and face them as one, unified, our shoulders back and our fangs out?” His fangs descended. His eyes seemed to redden. His voice rose, tremulous and hectoring as he finished with a fist held high, shouting with defiant pride: “ARE WE COWARDS?
OR ARE WE VAMPIRES?”

The entire council chamber erupted into cheers. Even Reginald’s mother raised a fist. Reginald liked to think that she was doing it in solidarity for her son, but he suspected that right now, for this one and only moment in time, she was probably wishing to be turned so that she could develop vampire-enhanced powers of passive aggressiveness.
 

“Check this out,” said Nikki, holding out an arm. “I got goosebumps. Literal
goosebumps
. I never got them as a human and figured I’d missed my chance.”
 

Onscreen, Timken was raising both hands, pumping both fists in the air with a stern, unamused expression on his face. He looked singlemindedly determined, unfazed by the applause that had erupted. Then the shot switched to the reporter again, whose face had flushed and who did a poor job of pretending to be impartial. She commented on how “lively” tonight’s speeches were. She said that it was shaping up to be “quite a race.”
 

“Don’t judge me,” Maurice was saying to Karl, “but I kind of feel like punching through a wall.”

“Refrain,” said Karl, his face still stoic and unimpressed, “or you’ll collapse the cave and kill us all.”
 

When Karl was gone, Maurice smiled to Nikki and Reginald. “He just doesn’t want me to mess up his pretty tapestries. We wouldn’t die if this room collapsed.”
 

Reginald, thinking of being trapped in the TGV wreckage, said nothing.
 

“I think he’ll be good for us,” said Maurice. “You know, better than me. Better than Charles. Better than Logan.”
 

“Better than nothing,” said Reginald.
 

“Yeah, right.”
 

“But the one thing Charles had going for him tonight,” said Reginald, “is that he described what he wanted to do about the Ring of Fire issue.”
 

“Yeah,” said Maurice. “Kill and turn. Probably lead us into outright war with humans. That plan sounds great.”
 

“Oh, yeah, it’s a terrible plan,” said Reginald.
 

Maurice stopped grinning and looked at Reginald. Reginald’s eyes were still on the screen.
 
A male voice was explaining that just as in the American human system, the new Deaconship structure called for a true Vice Deacon to share responsibility for governing and as a check on power, and added that the candidates would be announcing their Vice picks shortly.
 

“But?” said Maurice.
 

“But Timken didn’t give any specifics about his plan at all,” Nikki answered for Reginald.
 

“I guess he was going more for hearts and minds,” said Maurice.
 

Reginald, saying nothing and still watching the screen, nodded slowly.

Maurice started to reply, but then he stopped. His mouth hung open. He stared with eyes like saucers. Charles was back on the screen. He’d just announced his running mate — the vampire who would become his Vice Deacon if he were to win.
 

It was Todd Walker.
 

“No,” said Maurice.
 

They had only seen about an hour of Walker as a vampire. It had happened back when Walker had first been turned, back at their old office building after a group of vampires had killed off most of Reginald, Maurice, and Nikki’s co-workers. But the assailants hadn’t done all of the killing. A good number of the dead had been murdered by Walker himself. And on that first night, he’d shown them how dangerous he would be as a vampire — and how potentially deadly he’d be as he grew older and stronger.
 

Reginald, who’d seen this coming, kept nodding.
 

“We should have killed him,” said Maurice, eyeing Nikki. Maurice had
wanted
to kill him. He’d actually had his hands on the sides of Walker’s head, ready to twist it off, when Nikki had stopped him.
 

Nikki didn’t fire back at Maurice. They’d had this debate many times before.
 

“Charles isn’t going to win,” she said.

“So?” Maurice blurted.