The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (33 page)

Then I got hungry, so I went to take a walk.

A while later I got home, and Harry was nowhere to be seen (probably at Mr. Levitt’s house, AKA The Lake Woebegotten Death House, not that such a lurid name would ever catch on around here), but Edwin was there, pacing in my room. “Darling,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“We couldn’t restrain Hermet,” Edwin said, collapsing onto my bed and staring up at the ceiling. “To be fair, only about half of us even
wanted
to. So… we set him free.”

I sat on the bed and took his hand. “Is he going after that horrible man?”

Edwin nodded. “Mr. Levitt will be dead by… possibly by now. I just hope Hermet doesn’t have to hurt too many innocent people in the process. Our kind can be stealthy, and we hope he managed to sneak into the Drizzle County house of detention to find Mr. Levitt’s cell unobserved, but Hermet is not, ah, the most subtle of us.” He squeezed my hand. “We can’t risk Mr. Levitt telling other humans about us, of course. It’s unlikely anyone would believe him, but we have to be safe.”

“Oh,” I said. “So it’s not revenge, then.”

“Of course it’s revenge.” Edwin’s voice was soft and full of, what’s the word, regret? “But we’ve tried so hard, my family, to be above such things, to be
better
than that. But Mr. Levitt killed someone we love. We think he tried to kill
you
. There was no way Hermet could allow him to live.”

Delicious. Both Rosemarie and Mr. Levitt dead, and no blame accruing to me at all—I was even hailed as a fellow victim. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. “When will Hermet be back?”

The silence was so sharp and crystalline that I knew right away I’d said the wrong thing.

“He
won’t
be,” Edwin said a moment later. “He’s not going to, to make it look like an
accident
. He’s going to break into a jail cell and tear a man apart—the man who killed his wife. And when he sees that man’s blood, he won’t be able to resist the urge to feed. None of us could, except possibly Argyle. It’s dangerous, letting us have a taste of human blood, Bonnie. It changes us, makes us lose our focus, our determination, our will to overcome our baser natures. Like with alcoholics—sometimes a single sip is enough to lead inexorably to a three-week bender. Only my worry for your safety kept me from losing control when I tasted
your
blood. We understand why Hermet has to do this, but… he won’t be welcome with us anymore.”

I was stunned.
They’re like religious fundamentalists
, I thought.
Violate one of their silly rules and that’s it, you’re out, no appeals process
. But I said, “I guess that makes sense.”

“He won’t want to see us anyway. We’ll remind him too much of Rosemarie.”

“I’m sorry she’s gone,” I said. “I’d really hoped we could become friends. Become sisters.”

“I know,” Edwin said, and began sobbing blood-tinged tears into my pillow.

God, vampire boys can be so damn emo.

My only regret, and it’s a big one, is that I couldn’t have one last conversation with Mr. Levitt. Not that he exactly rose to the level of my nemesis, and anyway, this is a love story, not the kind of story where a heroine needs to square off against her adversary with snappy banter, but still, for all that I had to kill him and he tried to kill me, he really understood me. We were a lot alike. Not that I enjoy chopping up hitchhikers and burying them in the basement (so gauche), but our differences were only differences of methodology—differences of degree, not kind, I think is the expression. I didn’t admire him, but he made sense to me. We both know the world is empty of meaning, except the meaning we make: true love, adventure, hunting, whatever. You have to make your own fun. His kind of fun was just more overt and unsubtle and crass than mine.

Which was why I was surprised he made that one last move against me, from beyond the grave. It was a very Bonnie Grayduck kind of move to make, and you know, it really
did
cost me something. You only get one dad, and Mr. Levitt took mine from me. The old fucker got me. A little.

I was out in the front yard in a chaise longue, enjoying the sun when the other shoe dropped. (I don’t understand that expression. What shoe? Whose shoe? Dropping from where? Anyway.) Sure, it was somewhere around zero degrees, but it’s not like the cold bothered me. I almost wore a bikini, but I wasn’t entirely sure vampires could tan, so I settled for jeans and a flannel shirt. The snow all around was blinding white in the sunlight. The Scullens and Scales hid from the sun, lest someone notice how they smelled really good, but I couldn’t see the point, honestly. Sure, it could be annoying to get mobbed at school, but in my front yard, what was the harm?

Harry’s car pulled in. He was in a bad way lately, really overworked and stressed and, ha, harried, what with all the media heat about the town’s serial killer—who’d been found completely dismembered inside his
locked
jail cell, which was pretty embarrassing for the state cops, and it was a lucky thing he hadn’t been in Harry’s jail at the time, at least. All that mess was stressing him out, and on top of that, he’d had to investigate a few mysterious disappearances. Not just Gunther, but a few other really marginal types around town had gone missing—a crazy Satanist (or maybe just a pagan, these people couldn’t tell the difference) named Gothic Jim had vanished, along with that weird old man who usually wandered around wearing a bow tie and red suspenders and talking to himself, and a couple of other nobodies. To make matters worse, Harry’s only help, part-time deputy Stevie Ray, had apparently lit out for parts unknown. And Mom was calling him all the time, screaming about how he’d let his daughter go to a school run by a serial killer, wasn’t he supposed to be a
cop
for god’s sake, she’d sent me to Lake Woebegotten so my senior year could be quiet, and on and on.

You really had to feel bad for the guy. Well, I mean,
I
didn’t, particularly, but I could see how people would.

Harry walked over to my chair, plodding the way he did lately. He had a fat manila envelope in his hand. “Bonnie,” he said. “I got this in the mail today. It’s, ah… from Mr. Levitt.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He must have mailed it before, you know… we caught him. I should have handed it over to the lab boys in the state police, but ah, it’s not a confession, or, or anything. It’s… about
you
. A letter from the principal at your old school, and a note Mr. Levitt wrote, with some… speculations. I didn’t believe it, but I made some calls, and… Bonnie, your mom said you’d had a bad time of things, that a couple of your friends had passed away, but she didn’t say anything about… about
hacking
, about sending fake e-mails, about this car crash, apparently there are some serious questions, and…” He trailed off, sniffing the air. “Bonnie, why do you smell like doughnuts?”

I stood up and ran into the woods. Not the most elegant solution to the problem, I know, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Mom was, for all her many faults, the possessor of some great virtues: she was stupid, and credulous, and easily convinced. She might have some nagging deep-down doubts about me, but I’d convinced her it was all a misunderstanding, that I’d been framed, maligned, done wrong. Harry was nowhere
near
that stupid. And while I knew he loved me, did he love me
enough
? Enough to hide the evidence, enough to not tell
anyone
? If word got back to Edwin about the things I’d done in Santa Cruz, what would he do to me? What would his family do? Would I be cast out like Hermet?

I had some thinking to do, and I did it in the woods, and I have a hard time thinking on an empty stomach.

SLAYERS DISASSEMBLED

NARRATOR

B
onnie didn’t know what happened to Stevie Ray, but I do (of course) and thought you might be interested, so here goes:

Stevie Ray was shoved roughly to his knees in the dark basement. Figures stood around him, shadowed, but he could see the red glint of their eyes. He’d met all the Scullens and the Scales over the years, but this wasn’t
all
of them, and that was kind of the point. Garnett was behind him—he’d been sent to fetch Stevie Ray, and he’d done so with a minimum of kindness, dragging him out of bed in the middle of the night. Argyle stepped forward, flanked by Ellen and Pleasance, with Edwin hanging back, seemingly uncomfortable with the whole thing, which gave Stevie Ray a flash of hope… but Edwin was weak and soppy, so it wasn’t realistic to think he’d be any help.

Argyle spoke. “You served us, loyally, for over a year. What made you betray us?”

Stevie Ray swallowed. “I didn’t—I don’t—”

Garnett cuffed him upside the head, hard enough to make Stevie Ray’s ears ring like a gong. Once he struggled back up to his knees, Argyle repeated himself: “What made you betray us?”

“I was afraid,” Stevie Ray whispered. “I’m just a small-town cop. I didn’t want to learn about were-bears and vampires. I didn’t mean any harm. I just… I wasn’t even worried about
you
, but those other vampires came, they killed Gunther Montcrief, the tribal elders said they couldn’t promise to protect the town, they had to protect the reservation, so….”

“So you recruited vampire hunters,” Ellen said. Her earth-mama mellowness was utterly absent from her voice now; she spoke like a predator. “You told humans about us. And one of those humans killed my daughter. Isn’t that right?”

Stevie Ray closed his eyes. “None of us knew what Mr. Levitt
was
, the kind of man he was, we didn’t know he would kill your daughter, we didn’t
mean
for this to happen.”

“We chose you because we thought you might understand,” Argyle said. “One of the only black men for miles and miles, often an outsider, an other, but friendly, popular among the townspeople, clearly adept at moving between worlds, you seemed a perfect liaison. But you have betrayed us.” Argyle took a step forward, and Stevie Ray couldn’t help it: his bladder let go, and he whimpered.

“Name names,” Garnett said behind him. “Tell us everyone involved in your little vampire squad.”

“I won’t,” he whispered. “So you can kill them, like you did Mr. Levitt? Not that he didn’t
deserve
to die, but the others, they don’t, they never did you any wrong, they—”

“Stupid human,” Argyle said. “We won’t kill them. We don’t kill humans, that’s the whole point. Mr. Levitt was… a different situation. Wrongs had to be redressed—some wrongs you don’t even know about. But we can’t allow humans to know about us.”

He opened his eyes. “Then what?”

“Think of your mother,” Garnett said, and Stevie Ray said, “What?” but of course he
did
, because when someone tells you to think about something (or even not to think about something) you usually do, however briefly. Her face, her voice, appeared in his mind, and then Garnett reached out and touched his head and her image dissolved like smoke.

He whimpered. “What—what did you—”

“What’s your mother’s name?” Garnett said.

Stevie Ray opened his mouth, but he couldn’t come up with the name. He knew he
had
a mother, he must, he’d been born, after all, but he couldn’t come up with any memory about her at all. “I don’t know. What did you do to me?”

“Garnett can remove memories,” Argyle said. “Some of us have little powers, you know. That’s his. He can make people forget. Well, not
people
—humans, I mean. Very useful for us.”

“You should have let me erase Bonnie’s memory,” Garnett said, apparently to Edwin. “Then we wouldn’t have had to come back here, and Rosemarie would still be alive.”

Edwin’s face twisted up in agony. “I didn’t want her to forget me, I wanted to know she loved me as much as I loved her, that if I was alone and suffering, so was she—”

“Now is not the time,” Argyle said mildly. “Stevie Ray, tell us who your co-conspirators were, and Garnett will simply cleanse their memories. No one else needs to die, unless you give us no choice.”

Stevie Ray swallowed. “All right. I guess… okay. But can you give me my mother’s name back? My memories of her?”

Garnett laughed. “If I could put ideas in people’s heads, Renfield, I would, but that’s not how my powers work. I just take them out. Now start talking before we take a lot
more
.”

Stevie Ray talked. And when he was done, Garnett emptied out his head of every personal memory he had, and they dumped him on skid row in Minneapolis, and you don’t really want to know what happened to him after that.

They were gentler with the rest of the Interfaith Vampire Hunters, you might be pleased to know, just scooped out all their vampire-related memories. With Stevie Ray, they felt betrayed, I guess. Well, I don’t guess. I know they did. But they didn’t know who’d really betrayed them.

Not their fault. Not everyone gets to know everything like I do.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

W
e didn’t do the wedding and the funeral on the same day or even in the same week, because that would have been super tacky. Mom was in town sobbing and weeping and wailing all over the place, and mom’s half-jock boyfriend Dwayne was there too, lurking uncomfortably in the corners of his dead predecessor’s house. Everyone in town, it seemed, came by to offer condolences, including the mayor and his wife, and counselor Inkfist, and some Catholic priest, and the blonde woman who runs the diner, and the dorky old guy who runs the grocery store, and all the classmates I’d ever spoken to and a bunch of people I hadn’t, and of course the Scullens, who were starting to look kind of shell-shocked, and who can blame them? It’s a lot to have happen.

I was the one who discovered Harry’s body, so I got lots of extra sympathy. No suicide note, but he didn’t really need one, because I told everyone how he’d been really upset about Mr. Levitt’s murders and the disappearances, how he felt like it was all his fault, that he’d failed the town, he was depressed and ashamed and in increasingly black moods, yadda yadda. Nobody doubted me for a minute.

The funny thing is, I didn’t even have to shoot Harry myself. See, I found my power—my special
vampire
power. I can manipulate people. I always could, of course… but now I can manipulate them almost like a puppeteer manipulates a marionette. Okay, I don’t take control of their bodies, but I can make… suggestions… and they get followed. After an hour of me telling Harry his life wasn’t really worth living, that his own daughter was a criminal, and that he’d totally failed both as a cop and as a parent, he actually believed me. I’d been in town, pretending to have a cup of coffee (which had gone from my favorite thing to disgusting swill) at Cafe Lo, when Harry killed himself. Perfect alibi. (And a good thing. I don’t know if I could have avoided drinking Harry’s spilled blood if I’d been there when it was fresh.) The envelope from Mr. Levitt was just ashes, buried in a hole. No dad, which was sad—Harry was an okay guy, and he gave me Marmon, which I’ll always appreciate—but also no loose ends or threats, which was more important. I mean, Mom still knew about the allegations against me, but she was in such deep denial she’d never say anything to anybody. I should probably head back to Santa Cruz sometime and get rid of her and my old principal and maybe a few other people, just to be safe, but I was in no immediate danger of discovery.