Chapter One
Everyone thinks the Great Battle against the Forces of Darkness is all about silver bullets, holy water, and consecrated crossbows. Mystical martial arts passed down through arcane academies. Profane prophecies and secret societies bestowing ancient wisdom, sacred weapons, and kickass tattoos.
Nobody ever talks about picking up the dry cleaning, doing the dishes, or mowing the lawn.
Actually, I’m not going to talk about them, either. Other than to say I hadn’t done any of those things for a number of months.
Instead, I’m going to say a few words about meeting with the accountant. As humdrum tasks go, it would seem to belong on the Mundane List. Along with doing the laundry, taking out the trash, the brushing of teeth, and regular showers.
None of which I had done within recent memory either.
Meeting with the accountant was different for three distinct reasons.
One: I was pretty sure that mine wasn’t really human . . . not that I had any room to be judgmental about that sort of thing.
Two: It was absolutely required on a monthly basis and I had to drive to the Louisiana–Texas border to do it.
And, three: It got me killed . . . again.
It’s a two-hour drive across northern Louisiana from Monroe to just beyond Shreveport and back. Round-trip: just over four hours. Between sunset and sunrise: little wiggle room around the summer solstice. It’s a huge inconvenience, potentially fatal even without complications, and had made me grumpy even before I’d turned into a reclusive misanthrope.
With hygiene issues. To say I was in a “funk” these days went beyond the metaphorical turn of phrase. The requirement to take the trip every thirty days—and, therefore, shower and wear moderately clean clothes—was probably the only thing keeping me from turning into a walking Petri dish.
If I were a normal guy with a normal financial portfolio I could have just used some kind of spreadsheet software like QuickBooks or a TurboTax clone. More importantly, I could avoid the Herculean tasks of standing under a showerhead and figuring out which pile of clothes on the floor were, well, the least repellent. It’s amazing what a little Febreze can accomplish with the right permanent-press ensemble. Still, I was fast approaching the point where the only things that distinguished me from vagrants and homeless mental patients were my apparent lack of a rag, a squeegee, and a purloined shopping cart.
See, here’s what people who have never been clinically depressed don’t understand: They assume it’s all about “feeling sad.” But “sad” is just the leading boxcar on the Freight Train of Grief: The next ninety-nine are mostly about “boredom.” Ennui. Feeling tired. With a capital T.
No sadness, no weepies, no “woe is me.” No—. . . thing. Nothing. Just an intense, profound weariness. It’s not long before such things as dressing or undressing—or even eating and sleeping, for that matter—seem terribly unimportant and require huge efforts of will and taxing amounts of energy to accomplish. And to what purpose? Sooner or later, you just have to do them all over again.
Life’s a bitch when you’re no longer human, everyone you love has been sucked into an alternate dimension, and you’re hunted by things that think a bloodbath is the same thing as a food fight.
Trust me: that last sentence is neither allegory nor hyperbole.
But as much as it annoyed me to leave the house—much less drive two hours each way—meeting with the accountant made it possible to keep buying those silver bullets, vials of holy water, and sacred weapons.
Kickass tattoos are worth diddly-squat when the Minions of Darkness are coming at you and you are fresh out of consecrated ammo.
So, once again, I ran the clippers over my beard until my face emerged with that stubble effect that looks so crappy or pretentious on anyone but an upscale male model. Come to think of it . . . no, don’t get me started . . .
The follow-up with a blade was exceedingly unpleasant until I remembered that shaving cream was part of the equation. I finished with only half of my face resembling Freddy Krueger’s. I dutifully used both soap and shampoo in the shower—though cream rinse seemed beyond my best efforts to care. Finally: deodorant and some flavor of body spray that was supposed to induce amorous assaults by roving gangs of supermodels.
And I was done. For another month, anyway. By then I would have to decide whether I wanted to do a load of laundry or order more clothes over the internet.
Up until the first time I died I hadn’t needed professional accounting services. Now I required a financial consigliere capable of keeping me off of the NSA watchlists: not easy when you have a dozen different identities, most of which shot the human actuarial tables all to hell. Being rich is a lot more complicated when your investments are linked to accounts that predate your birth by several centuries. Try explaining funds deeded to you by a Carpathian madman who is still hunted by the Vatican, not to mention certain factions that are barely hinted at in ancient nursery rhymes or the fevered imaginings of Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro and the Brothers Grimm.
So, once again, I executed all of the security protocols, adding an extra thirty minutes and eighteen miles to the drive to ensure I wasn’t being tailed. I wondered what I would do if my enemies ever realized that drone technology was now accessible through their local toy stores.
For now I only had to contend with threats that fell toward the other end of the tech spectrum. For example: The light patina of zombie “juice” still splattered across the hood and windshield from last month’s trip tinting the glare of oncoming headlights so that they glowed like strands of greenish, radioactive pearls.
One of these nights I would have to take the time to find a twenty-four-hour car wash.
But not tonight. I hated anything that interfered with my carefully timed routine. So you may imagine my ire when I arrived only to discover that my money magician had stood me up.
I was annoyed for all of five minutes.
Our monthly assignations were set in stone: Diggs totally understood my need to make it home before dawn and that any wiggle room couldn’t be imparted to the front end of my journey. So she was never late. In fact, Marsha was so unerringly punctual that I was pretty sure the U.S. Naval Observatory clock set itself to her cell phone and tablet.
I killed a half hour waiting in her driveway dialing her numbers: home, office, cellular, sat-phone, ex-husbands, a peculiar little cross-species tavern in the back of a defunct auto repair shop. Nada. I sat in my car mulling the repercussions of her disappearance while Stephen Hawking was on the radio explaining how our attempts to recreate the Higgs boson “God particle” could result in the annihilation of the entire universe.
And maybe seriously damage a couple of adjacent ones . . .
That didn’t get me too excited. My last two therapists had claimed that I had a “personal death wish” but I’d learned not to invest too much hope in doomsday scenarios by now.
If anything about the interview gave me pause, it was the impression that they were presenting the conversation as if the renowned physicist were still alive. Hawking had passed away a couple of years ago—at least I was pretty sure that he had. But then, I had started to question my own memory of late, so . . .
I shook my head and turned off the radio: I had matters of greater import to attend to right now.
I spent the second half hour breaking in and creeping Diggs’s house: lights off, no one home, everything neat as a pin—no signs of struggle or rapid departure. No notes, either: front door, back door, refrigerator door. Her car was in the carport. If she had a second vehicle, I didn’t know about it. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood up like a mob of meerkats on Ritalin: time to leave.
Marsha Diggs was only the latest demi-human to go missing from the covert section of my contacts folder. There had been discrete inquiries as to the whereabouts of Stefan Pagelovitch in Seattle and Dennis Smirl in Chicago in recent weeks.
I was honestly—but tactfully—unhelpful in my responses to both demesnes. I really didn’t know anything. As usual. But, even if I had, I wasn’t going to point the way for the kinds of busybodies that might be hunting a master vampire, or a shapeshifting um—well—“Enforcer.” And if something had already happened to either of those bad boys, it was likely to be way out of my league. As just about anything from the shadowlands usually turned out to be.
So, I wiped all the surfaces I remembered touching, deleted all of my messages from her antiquated answering machine, and slipped back into my SUV like a bead of mercury navigating the inclines of a gravity tilt switch. Turning the key in the ignition, I felt the necrophagic virus start to stir. Although this was not officially a fight-or-flight situation the shadow that now inhabited my limbic system picked up on my rising stressors—my annoyance from the long drive and my growing disquiet over Diggs’s disappearance—and defaulted to its preferred response setting: I was suddenly hungry.
Or, rather, more aware of how hungry I always was now.
I pulled out of the drive and circled the block twice, then drove a set of random figure eights on my way back to the highway to see if anyone was trying to follow. The fact that no one did was more irritating than if I’d picked up a tail of sinister black sedans with helicopters hovering overhead in stealth mode. I didn’t know whether to be angry or frightened that Marsha was AWOL. I split the difference by deciding to stop off for a late-night snack.
That’s the other thing about depression: It makes you stupid.