Undead to the World (25 page)

“He’s in there,” she says “Terrance, I mean. In the cell right next to Neil.”

I turn in my seat to face her. “How’d it go?”

She looks troubled, but better than I hoped. “About how you guessed. Stoker was a
real hardass at first, but halfway through my meltdown he started to reconsider. I
saved Uncle Leo for the closer, and he went for it.”

“What about Neil?”

“He’s … he’s with us.” Now she looks more sad than anything. “Except he’s not really
him
anymore, is he?”

“No,” I say. “He’s not.”

Who he
is,
though, I’m not exactly sure. Someone from my past—but an ally or an enemy? Alexis
showed Charlie some pictures, but he didn’t recognize Neil from them. I guess we’ll
find out, though.…

Stoker’s down a man and his station has been damaged. That gives us an edge, though
not much of one. The main thing is that he can’t be in two places at the same time,
and he can’t secure his building very well while he’s gone.

Charlie sighs. Again. “Damn shame about the car, though.”

“It’s sacrificing itself for a noble cause.” I rigged a simple bomb in Charlie’s car
by lugging a propane cylinder from a barbecue into the back seat, opening the valve
all the way, then tossing a kitchen timer wired to an electric lighter in the front.
The interior fills up with gas, the timer runs down, the lighter sparks, and
KABOOM!
Stoker should easily be able to hear the explosion from the station.

I check my watch. “Here we go.…” The timer’s only about thirty seconds off, and the
boom!
is satisfyingly loud. A cloud of black smoke blooms into the sky, and a moment later
Stoker steps outside to shade his eyes against the sun and study it. He goes back
in again, but only for a minute; when he returns, he locks the door behind him, strides
down the steps, gets into his car and drives off.

“You’re sure nobody else will get hurt?” Alexis asks.

“We parked it in a field at the edge of town,” I answer. “And anyway, how many people
have you seen on the street this morning?”

Alexis glances around. “None. All the businesses are closed, too. It’s creepy.”

It is, but I’ll take deserted over filled with bloodthirsty supernatural beings any
day of the week.

“Let’s go,” Charlie says.

We don’t have time for subtlety. Charlie pulls up on the sidewalk, and I leap out
with the tow chain we scrounged from his garage. One end gets hooked to the recently
repaired station doors, the other to the front of the Toyota’s chassis. Then I get
back in, Charlie throws the car in reverse, and we yank the plywood out by the nails.

I look around as we all get out of the car, but nobody so much as peers out a window.
Not that I can see, anyway.

I unhook the tow chain from the car, and all three of us dash inside. There’s another
locked door between us and the cells, but that’s operated by a buzzer under the front
desk. We get into the holding cell area and peer through the small, wire-reinforced
glass windows set into each door. Terrance is in the first cell, Neil in the second.
Even though Neil apparently just woke up, he’s still wearing sunglasses and a leather
jacket. He’d look incredibly cool if it weren’t for his hair, which seems crazy enough
to require a straitjacket. Even vampire musicians need combs, I guess.

“Morning, sunshine,” I say.

“I’m not mourning anything, actually,” he says with a smile. He seems to have acquired
a British accent along with his fangs. “I just woke up from the most
amazing
dream. Very educational, among other things.”

“Terrific,” I mutter. All about how I killed your pet bat and you swore undying revenge
on me, right? “We’ll have you out in a minute, okay?”

I don’t wait for his reply, moving on to Terrance’s cell instead. He’s already at
the little window, staring at me. “Jace,” he says. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Checkout time,” I say. “You could sleep for another hour, but then you’d be charged
for an extra day. Or, you know, murder.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!”

“You did where I come from,” I say under my breath. “Take it easy, all right? We’re
getting you out of there.”

“How?”

“Like this,” I say, holding up the shotgun. “Better stand to the side, away from the
lock.”

I’ve replaced the special loads I built with standard buckshot, and it pretty much
destroys the lock at close range. The door swings open and Terrance steps out, looking
a little wary. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but why exactly are you breaking me
out of jail?”

“I’ll explain once we’re someplace else. Hold on.”

I tap on the glass to Neil’s cell and let him know what I’m about to do. He doesn’t
bother getting out of the way; the second after I blast the door he strolls out of
the cell with a friendly nod. “Cheers.”

“Don’t try anything,” I tell him, and motion toward Charlie. “
His
gun isn’t loaded with buckshot.”

Neil nods at Charlie, too. He looks like he’s enjoying himself. “You have a plan for
getting me out of here unsinged, I hope?”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to like it,” I say. Alexis steps forward with a large
canvas duffle bag we found in Charlie’s garage. “You’re getting in that. We’re going
to carry you out and stuff you in the trunk until we can get you indoors again.”

“I see. Well, not exactly first-class accomodation, but the devil drives when needs
must.” He climbs in with Alexis’s help. She looks a little sick.

“I hope you’re not planning on stuffing
me
in a sack,” Terrance growls.

“No, but you can help carry him,” I say. I switch guns with Charlie, and he grabs
one strap of the duffel. After a second, Terrance grabs the other and we hustle back
out toward the car.

We stash our cargo, get in, and take off. Our destination isn’t far: the church. With
Father Stone and Maureen Selkirk dead it’ll be empty, and it’s a good place to hole
up with a vampire I don’t trust. Lots of windows means lots of sunlight, too—I plan
on keeping Neil in that bag as long as I can. It’s not like he’s going to suffocate.

We get to the church without any problems. We get inside the foyer—Charlie and Terrance
carrying Neil again—without a hitch; it’s not even locked. I send Alexis to hide the
car and tell her I’ll call her when it’s safe to come back.

Then we haul Neil through the inner doors, and I notice a slight flaw in our plans.

The stained-glass windows have all been covered by heavy black curtains. The large
cross behind the pulpit is upside down. And lashed to it with heavy-duty wire is Jimmy
Zhang, red eyes glaring at us, fanged mouth gagged with what looks like a large chunk
of wood.

“How about that,” Charlie says. “Two for the price of one.” He and Terrance drop the
sack to the floor and step up beside me.

“What’s he trying to say?” Terrance asks. He moves a little closer, trying to hear.

There’s a sharp
thrum,
and an arrow appears in the center of Zhang’s chest. He bursts into flames with a
sharp crackle, like ripping cloth.

Then I hear a polite cough behind me, and I realize that no, that actually
was
ripping cloth. Canvas, to be exact.

We all turn. Neil grins at us with very sharp teeth, his no doubt very red eyes hidden
behind his shades. “I think he’s trying to say
look out for that tripwire.
Pity—but all the more for me, I suppose…”

SIXTEEN

“You’re going to
eat
us?” I say.

“Drink, actually…”

“After we broke you out of jail?”

Neil shrugs. “It’s awkward, I know. But I’m not really who you think I am.”

Charlie brings his shotgun up. “An impending homicide victim?”

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie … first of all, technically I’m already dead, or at least
not living. You can’t kill a corpse. Second of—”

And then he’s gone.

One of the things I’ve apparently forgotten is just how fast pires can move. Neil
hasn’t. In fact, his assured tone of voice seems to indicate that he’s adapted rather
quickly to his new circumstances.

“—all, I’m rather quick,” Neil continues. His voice is coming from somewhere in the
pews, but I can’t see him, and the echoey acoustics make it hard to pinpoint the sound.
“Third, I’m more than simply undead; I know a little about magic, too.”

I look around. The trap that killed Zhang was most likely a crossbow, and the direction
it came from means it must be in the upstairs gallery. The cross is throwing orange
light and flickering shadows across the pews, but the fire doesn’t seem to be spreading.
“Terrance,” I whisper. “Get upstairs. We’re going to need all the weapons we can get.”
I hope he doesn’t just bolt, but I’ll have to take the chance.

“I won’t have to worry about competition now, in either category,” Neil says. “In
the instant before Jimmy died, I could tell he was once a reasonably competent shaman;
whoever brought us here must have blocked that knowledge from his brain, of course.
I can tell my memory’s been tampered with, too.” I think he’s moved since the last
time he spoke, ducked down between the pews. “But the kind of sorcery I practice has
always had very porous borders—harder to quantify than many kinds of magic. Oneironmancy
tends to shift and flow, depending on the situation and the one dreaming it.…”

A shaman. Oh, this just keeps getting better and better—the word
better
in this context meaning “well and truly screwed.” But he hasn’t actually tried to
kill me yet, so that’s something.…

“Uh, Neil?” I say, moving toward the windows on my right. “You seem fairly rational …
this doesn’t have to be confrontational. We’re all stuck in the same situation and
trying to figure a way out of it, right?”

Charlie sees what I have in mind and edges toward the other side of the church.

“Absolutely,” Neil says. “Tell you what: both of you go stand in the center aisle,
away from the curtains covering the windows, and I’ll take that as an indication of
good faith.”

I freeze. So does Charlie. After a second, I walk back toward the middle of the room
and a little way down the aisle. Charlie shakes his head but joins me—I can always
count on him to back my play.

“Excellent. I just needed a minute to finish the conversation I was having with the
floorboards of this church.…”

I’m remembering how shamans do magic. They talk to the spirits that live in everything,
from inanimate objects to rivers to weather systems, and convince them to act in a
particular way. From the creaking and groaning all around the room, it seems Neil
is very persuasive.

The wood of the floorboards underneath the windows sprout rapidly thickening stalks.
They grow within seconds into tall, straight shafts, sending out branches to the sides
that link to one another and turn the whole thing into a grid. Every curtained window
is now trapped behind a thick-barred wooden mesh.

“A little insurance,” Neil says.

“Understandable,” I say. “And impressive.” For a pire to get wood to listen to him,
he must be pretty damn powerful.

His chuckle echoes around the room. “Oh, it’s not as difficult as all that. Buildings
dream, too, you know. Especially ones that have had ritual magic performed in them.”

Ritual magic. I remember what Stoker told me, that Father Stone and Maureen Selkirk
spent a lot of time with Old Man Longinus. They were also the first three murder victims;
I’ve assumed Stone and Selkirk were part of the cult ever since, and this seems to
confirm it. But Longinus’s basement was clearly used for ritual purposes—why two locations?

Maybe because this one has a lot more room.

“So this is the headquarters of the cult, huh?” I say. “Yeah, I know about that. Funny,
I could have sworn I heard actual hymns being sung here on Sunday mornings—well, that
one Sunday morning I got up before noon to walk Galahad.”

“Oh, that was real.” I realize he’s standing behind the pulpit, the burning upside
down cross behind him. “This place is fully consecrated. Before this cross was turned
into a funeral pyre, it was mounted in the standard position. The heavy black curtains
covering the windows, now … well, I can’t say for certain without interrogating them
directly, but I believe they’re a fairly recent addition. Seems someone was anticipating
some changes around here.”

Could that be it? Was Stone prepping his church for a new congregation, one that consisted
of pires instead of cultists? Was that why Ahaseurus was murdered—because Stone was
planning some sort of takeover? It almost makes sense.…

I wonder if Terrance has made it upstairs, or if he’s just taken off. I realize now
the crossbow won’t do much good, not unless there’s a handy cache of arrows right
next to it.

Neil vaults over the pulpit. He’s going for Charlie, who lets off a blast from the
shotgun but misses; guns aren’t his strong suit. Neil clocks him with an uppercut
that lifts Charlie off his feet, and he comes down in a boneless heap.

“Charlie!” I yell, and bolt toward him. He’s not far away, only the width of the aisle,
but Neil manages to get between us before I reach him.

“Sorry,” he says, picks me up like a doll and tosses me down the aisle.

I slam into Terrance going backward. My skull hits his and the world explodes in an
instant fireworks display of pain—then everything gets very dark before I have a chance
to applaud. Good night, brain.…

*   *   *

I hate the disconnect that happens when you get knocked out. The first thing you say—the
first thing
everyone
says—when you wake up is “How long was I out?” It’s as if everyone has the same secret
fear, that they’ve slipped into a coma and missed the last fifty years.

Not me, though. First, there are things that scare me way more than that; and B, I
hate being predictable. So—considering how often I seem to get my lights turned out—I
decided a while back I wasn’t going to utter that particular phrase ever again.