Chapter Five
I thought Deino was old and hideous but she was practically Cinderella compared to the three old women trying to get into my room.
Talk about ugly stepsisters: All three wore wraps that looked like a cross between a dress and a toga: red, green, and grey, respectively. Once upon a time, all three appeared to have started out as “white” and achieved their current colors through an undercoat of rot with Jackson Pollack–like dousings of gore, phlegm, and excrement. All three wore giant, AARP-approved sunglasses but, thanks to the harsh fluorescent lighting, their eyewear did little to conceal their frightful countenances and the fact that their shriveled eye sockets were as dark and empty as craters on the far side of the moon.
And I say “trying to get into my room” because they were jammed together into the door frame having tried to all come in at the same time like an old Three Stooges routine.
Aggravating the situation were their three seeing-eye dogs. German shepherds would have been bad enough but the creatures straining against their guide harnesses made Rottweilers look like shaved Pekingese. Rather than cooperate in trying to untangle the jam, they snarled and snapped at one another like rabid beasts.
As did their service dogs.
“Okay,” I murmured to the candy striper, “if that’s Deino . . . and her sisters Enyo and Pemphredo are here . . . we’ve got one extra.”
“Perso,” she answered, trying to untangle my spam-in-a-frame leg from the two slings keeping it elevated.
“Haven’t heard of her. All of the Greek myths name just three.”
“Hyginus references a fourth. Called her Persis or Perso.”
I felt my eyebrows rise—one of them, anyway. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot going on on the right side of my face. “Gaius Julius Hyginus? Really? No one takes his Fabulae seriously. The only thing they’re good for is suggesting older, lost material from the serious authors.” I stopped and shook my head. It had to be the drugs. I should be focusing on the immediate threat—not discussing Roman revisionism of Greek mythology with a high school hospital volunteer.
Come to think of it, the idea that I was being accosted by the Stygian witch-sisters known as the Graeae suggested that I was still brain-deep in some hallucinatory fugue induced by trauma and industrial-strength narcotics.
Maybe I should just relax and go along for the ride.
Except . . .
Except that I had spent the last decade or so learning that my imagination—drug-addled or otherwise—was no match for the actual weirdness that was usually drawn to me like kamikaze moths to a bonfire.
Head back in the game, Cséjthe!
“Let’s recap,” I told the crones. “I’ve got your eye. You’re blind. You want your eye. I want you to tell me what you want and then go away.”
“You are in no position to bargain, protathlitis,” rasped the “lady” in red. I was guessing Enyo.
“How about in the country of the blind, the guy holding the one eye is king,” I offered.
They were through the door, now, and spreading out. The Interpol agent retreated toward my bed, her gun moving back and forth on a track to cover all four while her other hand rested on something just below her shoulder rig.
Candy Stripe was muttering under her breath and the “dogs” began to whine.
“What is it?” Green Gown asked. Pemphredo or Perso . . . I didn’t know.
“Witch,” Deino hissed.
“You’re one to talk,” I muttered.
The hellhounds yawned noisily. One lay down. The other two followed in short order and the crones had to release their harnesses or be pulled down with them.
“Who’s there?” Enyo demanded. She was the aggressive one. Which was sort of like saying “the rabid one” in an attacking mob of pit bulls.
“Annwn, I thought,” Deino answered, pronouncing it An’oon, “but too young.”
“Daughter?”
“More like granddaughter.”
“Great-granddaughter,” Candy Stripe said.
Enyo smiled. She had one tooth. It looked like it had been filed to a point. “Two birds! Two baby birds!”
Grey Dress chimed in: “One stone . . .” She stepped forward. And tripped over her sleeping dog.
I meant to snicker; it came out as a giggle. Damned drugs. I cleared my throat. “Four to three,” I told them. “Hardly overwhelming odds. We’re a lot younger, have a gun. You’re elderly, unarmed. And—oh yeah—blind!”
In response, each one produced a “cricket” from a fold in their garments. The folded metal toys made click-clacking sounds as they pressed and released the ends. Heads cocked, they began to move around, letting their sleeping dogs lie.
“What are they doing?” Interpol wanted to know.
“They’re using echolocation,” I said. “Sort of gives new meaning to the phrase ‘old bats.’”
“Stop,” she said, “or I’ll shoot!”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Candy Stripe said. “You might make them mad.” There was a crash cart next to my bed and she handed me the paddles from the defibrillator unit.
My hospital gown had a seemingly useless and tiny pocket over my left breast that was surprisingly perfect for holding a four-thousand-year-old eyeball: I pocketed the occultic orb and took a firm grasp of the insulated handles as she flipped a switch. There was a quiet whine as the charge began to build up.
“Give me the eye,” Deino hissed as she approached the bed.
“No, me!” Enyo growled. Deino was closer but the Gray Sister known as The Waster of Cities was working hard to close the gap.
“It’s my turn!” whined the one in the snot-colored dress.
It was nice to know that some things didn’t change. Even after four thousand years.
According to Greek mythology, the hero Perseus had snatched their one, working eye and had held it ransom until the Graeae gave him the information he needed to complete his quest. They had fought over it then just as they were fighting over it now and Perseus slipped away to achieve greater fame and glory.
If it worked for him there was no reason it shouldn’t work for me.
Except for, of course, my shattered leg.
And the fact that the Grey Witches hadn’t shown up on Perseus’ doorstep with a big-ass syringe, three hellhounds, and premeditated murder on their minds.
“I’ll give you the eye,” I told them, “if you’ll tell me who sent you and let me leave.” I caught the Interpol agent’s eye and jerked my head at the wheelchair, folded and stashed behind a visitor chair on the other side of the room.
Deino reached my bed first and I almost used the defibrillator paddles on her but Enyo and the others were closing in fast. I scooted back against the far railing and ran the numbers through my head.
“Wait!” rasped the crone in the rotting shroud at the rear. “I’ll tell you who sent us if you give me the eye!”
“I want safe passage,” I reiterated.
“Your fate is sealed, mortal,” Enyo snarled. “And we shall take Annwn’s spawn to draw her out of the shadows. But give me the eye and I shall answer your question.”
“You first,” I snarled back as Interpol circled around the room to the wheelchair. If it made any noise as she unfolded and locked it into position, it was drowned out in the chorus of protests from the rest of the sightless mob.
“Nix!” Deino shrieked. “Nix! Give it to me!”
“That’s not an answer,” I said as the others lined up and grabbed onto the bedrail like a row of old crows.
“Maybe it is,” Candy Stripe mused as I scooted toward my ancient assailants.
“Clear,” I advised her as I checked myself to see that I was away from any part of the metal frame. I brought the paddles down on the metal railing where the clutch of their claw-like hands left enough room.
And I pressed the button.
Assuming Candy Stripe had turned the settings up all the way, I sent a jolt of some seventeen hundred volts through the railing.
It was like pulling the pin on a hag-grenade: Old women exploded across the room, two impacting the far wall with enough force to leave large dents. One smashed through a window and kept going. The last went headfirst into the television, adding some snap, crackle, and pop to the surreal scene.
“Quick! Into the chair!” Candy Stripe urged. Interpol positioned the wheelchair so that I could slither down off the bed and seat myself.
But not without a series of obscene displays aided and abetted by my uncooperative hospital gown. “What now?” I asked as I squirmed and re-tucked for modesty as much as for comfort.
“To the elevators!” Candy Stripe ordered Interpol. “And don’t spare the horses!”
Getting out of the hospital was a bit of a blur.
Once I was out of immediate peril the adrenaline gave way to pain and the residual haze from the narcotics still in my system. And my head was spinning with a cacophony of questions. Who was behind these latest attempts to kill me? Vampires and werewolves were one thing. Siccing the Feds on me and hiring immortal Greek witches as assassins took the game to a whole new level.
At least with the Great Old Ones it wasn’t personal.
After breaching the initial barrier of stunned hospital employees we bullied our way to the visitor’s entrance using velocity and frequent badge and gun flashing to clear a path.
Outside, there was a Volkswagen microbus idling at the curb. Painted in garish, psychedelic colors, it looked like a pristine, Grateful Dead concert bus that had been parked in a collector’s vault since 1967.
The side cargo doors opened, propelled by arms from within.
Candy Stripe joined Interpol in getting my chair over the curb and pointed toward the magical mystery tour bus. “Help me get him inside!”
The bump down to the tarmac jarred my leg and the steel fixator frame seemed to send its metal skewers even deeper into my flesh and bone. My adrenaline was exhausted, now, and a fresh wall of pain was rushing toward my head like a sizzling tsunami of angry hornets.
“Far out, man!” I whispered. And tripped out into merciful unconsciousness.
At some point I found myself riding along in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, seeming inked with overly vibrant colors. It was like being immersed under actinic lights in a marine aquarium and watching the hues blaze and bleed as we drove along in the Scooby gang’s Mystery Machine. Fred was in the front seat, driving as usual. Scooby-Doo was riding shotgun. Velma and Daphne were in the back with me. Did that mean that I was Shaggy? Zoinks!
The blond and the Great Dane were discussing some sort of haunted house and I wanted to tell them that it was really old man Withers or Smithers or something, wearing some kind of glow-in-the-dark mask to scare everyone off so he could . . . what? . . . steal the treasure or find the map or get the land dirt cheap or something . . .
If there were any other variations on the cartoon plot tropes, they didn’t immediately spring to mind. I thought about trying to make my mouth work again but decided it was victory enough that I wasn’t drooling on myself for the moment.
Velma was wearing a candy striper uniform and fiddling with the metal bear trap that had snapped shut on my right leg while Daphne fiddled with her cell phone. I wasn’t sure of her decision to dye her auburn mane platinum blonde. It made her look more severe.
She looked even more severe as Velma asked, “Is there some place we can drop you, Agent North?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You seem to be forgetting, Ms. Harkwynde. Mr. Cséjthe is in my custody. Where he goes, I go. And vice versa.”
Velma had gone blonde, too, though the golden tones were a better choice in her case. Dropping the baggy sweater and eyeglasses had improved her appearance, too, though she looked nearly as intimidating as Daphne as she returned the focused stare. “Leaving aside the question of jurisdiction for the moment, what is Interpol’s interest here?”
Daphne seemed to weigh her response. “Interpol has been tracking a person of interest for a number of years, now. His file is . . . old. Very old. He has been known to go to ground for years at a time, disappearing in one country only to resurface a decade later halfway around the world. His most recent appearances have connected him to Mr. Cséjthe, here.”
“But Mr. Cséjthe’s not accused of any crime?”
“Not as far as the international police are concerned, not yet.”
“Then why handcuff him to his hospital bed?”
“Think of it as protective custody.”
“Protection from whom?”
Daphne smiled one of those “that’s-for-me-to-know-and-you-to-find-out” smiles. “Classified,” she said.
“Really? Who is this person of interest?”
She shook her head slowly, her smile just as lazy. “Classified.”
“What is his name?”
Daphne looked a little irked now. “Classified.”
“And three times,” Velma persisted, “speak his name to me.”
Daphne shuddered. “Bassarab,” she blurted. “Vlad Bassarab. Damn you, witch!”
“Vladimir Drakul Bassarab the Fifth?” Velma muttered. “Yes, the file on him would be very old.”
“You are acquainted with The Impaler?” Scooby-Doo asked from the front seat. He didn’t sound like the cartoon dog but his voice was surprisingly familiar. Yet still inhuman.
“Know of him,” Velma answered, still staring at platinum blonde Daphne. “Got quite the family history. The Bassarabs were a great dynasty of the Vlachs. During their rule of Walachia they fought off invasions by the Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Four of their princes ruled under the names Vlad: First through the Fourth. One was known as Vlad Drakul—which means Vlad the Dragon or Vlad the Devil. His successors, according to legend, were as bad or worse: Vlad Tepes is known to this day as Vlad the Impaler and Vlad Tsepesh was called the Son of the Devil—Drakul, with the diminutive ‘a’ added to the end.”
“Dracula,” Fred growled in a voice that was nothing like the cartoon character’s but somehow vaguely familiar.
“Yes,” Daphne answered reluctantly. “And Mr. Cséjthe gave him the gift of life when he was about to die the second death.”
“So Count Dracula owes him?”
“Prince,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Prince . . . never Count . . .” I slurred.
“He looks more alert,” Daphne said.
“He won’t be for long if he doesn’t get more blood in him,” Velma said.
“Ice chest in the back,” not-Fred said, swinging the van around a semi to pass.
“So . . .” the Great Dane in the front seat that was apparently not a dog after all, growled. “He is one of Dracula’s minions?”
There was a long silence while we all contemplated that question. Well, they contemplated the question; I just wobbled around the edge of attentiveness.
“He wasn’t bitten,” Daphne said. “He was a donor by blood transfusion. There were—ah—anomalous side effects.”
“Soooo . . . minion!”
“Didn’t . . . volunteer . . .” I said, rousing and trying not to drool in the process. I glanced down at my chest. An eyeball stared back up at me from the pocket of my hospital johnny. “Eep!” I said.
“I’ll take that.” Candy Stripe Velma relieved me of my unsightly trophy and rummaged around in the Styrofoam box. She produced a couple of IV packets of blood. “Interpol seems to have a lot of unnatural intel on our boy, here.” Producing a buck knife she shortened the tubing so I could drink out of the plastic pouches like squeezable sippy cups. I fumbled the first one and Daphne scooted over to help me. I don’t know which surprised me more: that she seemed unfazed about my preference in beverages or the fact that Daphne was packing heat.
“Historically speaking,” she said, “it is considered more effective to drink the blood of one’s enemies than that of anonymous donors.”
“Guess the gun’s not so surprising after all,” I mumbled.
She gave me a look and asked, “Where are we going?”
“His place, first,” Candy Stripe answered. “He might want to pack a bag.”
Back in 1726, Daniel Defoe wrote in The Political History of the Devil, “Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.” More widely quoted is a line in Benjamin Franklin’s letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Both were wrong. Defoe and Franklin, that is.
Death—not really so much of a sure thing. I had already died once. Well, twice, actually. Possibly three times, in fact; and my numerous undead assailants? Not exactly alive before I gave them their final dusting, either. So: Death, a slippery concept with more than a couple of loopholes.
Taxes? Not so much.
This is what I was thinking as I considered the notice of federal lien nailed to my front door. The red-gold light from the setting sun illuminated the crime scene tape and US Treasury seals, adding a festive effect to the proclamations that this was no longer my property.
I’d lost respect for the Grim Reaper in recent years. Truth be told, I considered him a bit of a bumbler. Even Blue Oyster Cult said, “Don’t fear The Reaper.” (Though they could have said it with more cowbell.) No, the Beatles told us who to fear with the first cut on their Revolver album back in ’66. Don’t fear The Reaper but you gotta show some respect to the Taxman because, sooner or later, he’s gonna nail your ass. Even the most notorious gangster of the last century was powerless before the purposeful audit. Public Enemy Number One, Al Capone, eluded the Feds on every conceivable criminal charge—racketeering, robbery, extortion, vice, murder—but was finally tried and convicted of income tax evasion. The best army of lawyers and accountants that money could buy couldn’t save Capone.
I didn’t have an army and Diggs had gone missing. Even if I could prove that I had a legal and legitimate need for all of my different identities and convoluted bookkeeping, I could be sure that all of my accounts would be frozen and my assets seized for the many, many years it would take my appeals to wend through the legal system. In the meantime, I would need to find a job and relocate.
Not to mention avoid being taken into custody.
Which could be tricky as Daphne had turned back into Special Agent North of Interpol and was standing right behind me.
“Well,” she said, “are you to commit the entire document to memory or are we going to go inside?”
“I don’t have my key,” I mumbled, sullenly conscious of the fact that, in addition to losing my home, my possessions, my finances, and my freedom, I was still wearing my hospital gown and it was gaping down the back.
The front door suddenly opened, popping the Treasury seals, and a dead woman was staring at me. I stumbled backward into North and felt myself headed south as my legs gave way beneath me.
My last encounter with Elizabeth Bachman was in the basement of a condemned and abandoned hospital in Pittsburg, Kansas.
Some years back an ancient Egyptian necromancer had reanimated the corpses of my wife and daughter. Bachman was desperately playing the minion card for him when I showed up to object. My last memories of her were of her pale, beautiful face twisted by the cross-shaped cicatrix of hideously burned flesh where I had pressed a makeshift crucifix into her cheek. Before she could sink her fangs into my throat a gunshot had removed the top of her skull, turning the rest of her undead flesh into the contents of a knocked-over dustbin.
And now here she was, back in the flesh, looking all too human, and blocking my view of my living room ceiling. And, oh looky: another dead person had joined her!
Luis Garou.
Lupé’s long dead brother.
While I didn’t personally witness his death, it was described to me in stomach-churning detail by those who did. It isn’t easy to kill a lycanthrope but Kadeth Bey had done it with his bare hands.
More than a decade in the past.
A discorporate vampire and a dismembered werewolf.
Looking down at me as if they hadn’t suffered so much as a hangnail between them.
“So,” Bachman sneered, giving me a quick looking over, “this is what we’re going to all of this trouble for? He’s not even a Practitioner.”
“And we’re needing Muscle, not Feeble,” the barrel-chested man growled.
“Geez,” I said, “I don’t know whether to be hopeful that the hospital meds are this good . . . or depressed that my chemically altered consciousness chose to clean out the litterbox in my hindbrain.”
Candy Stripe (who was apparently Annie Harkwynde and not a cartoon character named Velma) joined them in peering down at me and the hirsute man looked at her. “What is he talking about?”
“He doesn’t know,” she told him. “And neither do you. We’ll catch everyone up later; right now we need to get the bus reloaded and reset for the next border.” She turned to Bachman: “How far out did you set the wards?”
“I didn’t have time. I had some trouble along the way. By the time I got here, disabled the alarm system and jimmied the back window open, you were pulling up the drive. What are you going to do about Stilts, here?”
I assumed that she was asking about Agent North (who wasn’t really Daphne, either).
“Never mind her. Take the demon and do a full sweep. If we’re not ready to go by the time you’re finished, get eyes on the access road and report anything, anything that even hesitates at the turnoff.”
The dead people disappeared and only the teenaged girl was left in my field of vision. “Can I help you up, Mr. Cséjthe? We’re on a bit of a tight schedule here.”
I sat up with a bit of an assist. The girl was deceptively strong but she had to have had some help in lugging my semiconscious bulk into the house and depositing me on my couch. I eyed Agent North who stepped in and handed me my crutches. Naw. Probably “Fred” and “Scooby” did the heavy lifting . . .
I hoisted myself up and tried a few uncertain steps. My right leg was no longer swollen, purple, nor painful but it itched something fierce. I still didn’t trust it. Plus, the fixator cage kept banging against my left leg. Any moment I expected to fall on my face. Maybe Agent North expected me to as well. She shadowed me as I gimped to the front window.
Outside, the Mystery Machine van of cartoon fame had turned back into the VW bus—although it seemed to be sporting a different color scheme than the one I remembered: lime green with a white roofline.
Luis Garou was repacking the roof carrier and Elizabeth Bachman was walking into the woods with something that was neither human nor anything resembling a talking Great Dane: My Scooby-Doo hallucinations had pretty much evaporated now and I was left to wonder—among many things—how I was going to tell Lupé that reports of her brother’s demise were somewhat exaggerated.
I turned and crutched my way down to my bedroom, trying to put my growing list of questions into some sort of organized sequence.
The teenybopper had suitcases on my bed and open by the time I got there and was already packing the basics. I dictated a short list with locations for additional items, cash, and a portable arsenal. No one seemed to take exception to the excessive weaponry: A quartet of old, blind ladies who can kick your ass revises your perspective on “loading for bear.”
The Feds had already been through the house once, bagging and tagging, removing everything that might have some evidentiary value. What they hadn’t taken had been carelessly scattered in wanton disarray across floors, furniture, and any other horizontal surface to be had. Fortunately, they missed the hidden safe room where the real valuables were kept: data drives, IDs, passports, shrink-wrapped blocks of cash, go bags, emergency kits, portable coolers, and the serious firearms. And an extra fridge with a month’s supply of whole blood.
I pulled two pocket protectors out of a drawer and started loading them with a fresh set of tools: two more green laser pointers, two more colloidal-silver atomizers, and a pepper-spray pen for any ordinary threats. Next to it I laid out what appeared to be two sets of brass knuckles with spring-loaded tactical knives modeled on the silhouette of the World War I M1918 trench knife. They retained the knuckleduster grips with the “skull crusher” cap extension while the spring-loaded blades were tucked inside the palm grips to conceal the double threat. I had picked up a dozen at a military surplus sale and arranged to have the blades and the finger rings heavily silvered.
Finally, I pulled out a shoulder rig and holstered a Springfield Armory 1911-A1 Government with a Rowland .460 conversion and filled the ammo pouches with silver frag-load magazines. While the Glock had seemed adequate for run-of-the-mill undead, it seemed I was deeper into unknown territory than I had ever been before. If the threat was bigger, I wanted to be able to blow a bigger hole in it.
At least that was my working strategy.
“Well, you’re certainly prepared,” my underaged rescuer said as she took in the contents of the room-sized safe. “This is a survivalist’s wet dream.” She was polite enough to not say undead survivalist.
“I learned the value of being prepared a long while back.” I didn’t feel as confident as I sounded: Even my experience and overactive imagination is helpless in the face of the weirdness that the universe conspires to throw my way.
“So,” I said conversationally as I sat on the bed next to a cooler and began loading it with the four major food groups: A, B, AB, and O. “You didn’t seem to be too amazed by a quartet of ancient Stygian witches from Greek mythology back in my hospital room . . .”
She smiled as she helped me rearrange the blood packets to make room for more. “An occupational hazard, Mr. Cséjthe, though I didn’t expect them so soon.”
I resisted the impulse to start frantically babbling a barrage of panicked questions. “If I understood correctly, one of them called you a witch,” I continued with a studied air of nonchalance.
“Professional courtesy,” she answered, her smile deflective. “You know, Mr. Cséjthe, if you’re going to grab a shower, you might want to get started. We’re kind of on a short timetable here.”
“They seemed to know your grandmother,” I persisted. If time was of the essence, maybe she would be more forthcoming if it would hurry me along.
“Great-grandmother.” She stopped packing and turned her large, grey eyes on me. “The things that hunt you are hunting her, as well. And that is all that I am going to tell you until you are changed and ready to go.”
Okay. Even arguing with a sixteen-year-old girl who isn’t a witch is usually a pointless endeavor, so I retreated to the bathroom to regroup and lick my wounds.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
As I eased out of my hospital johnny I became aware of an odd sensation. It took a few moments to place it as I hadn’t experienced it in such a long time.
Excitement?
No, that was too strong a term.
Intrigue.
Yeah, that was the one.
I’d basically been limited to two emotional settings these past few years: “angry” and “who-gives-a-crap.” Mainly the latter and “angry” was only a temporary distraction from the bone-numbing tedium. Maybe I didn’t want all of the answers yet: Once the movie ends, the book is finished, the mystery solved, then The Boredom returns and The Rule seems less and less important in the grand scheme of things. This was the most alive I’d felt since the hairsbreadth Apocalypse in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the pressing of the reset button on Eternity’s Stopwatch.
I ducked into the shower, planning on a quick rinse but stayed a good twenty minutes as the hot water felt great on my stiff and aching (and too cool) body. I didn’t have to worry about getting a plaster cast wet as the fixator was all stainless steel. Still, it made strange, squeaky noises as I stepped out of the shower to dry off.
My surgical bandages were soaked through so I sat on the toilet lid and carefully peeled each off, mindful of incisions and adhesions. The ones that wrapped around my head and covered my right eye were the worst. My hair would grow out and cover most of them.
My eye, however, was gone.
Based on the scars that parted my eyebrow and intersected just short of my cheekbone, it hadn’t gone easy. I should have asked Deino where she shopped for eye patches when I had the chance.
Underneath the other bandages I found cuts and abrasions but no serious scars or wounds and no evidence of stitches. Surgical glue? The fixator continued to squeak and now it began to rattle.
I looked down. The long screws were turning slowly as if invisible hands were making a myriad of adjustments. I expected discomfort but it quickly became apparent that the screws were loosening instead of tightening. I dried the rest of me slowly as I watched, fascinated.
When the first screw exited my leg the entry wound seemed to fizz with tiny black bubbles. Then they subsided and a tiny grey scab formed that quickly turned red then pink. And then another screw was pushed out.
It took another ten minutes for the last of the screws and stabilizing pins to be ejected and the frame became a useless metal cage around a pinker and stronger looking limb. I pulled the device off and gingerly tested my weight on my right leg. It took the strain, but ached enough that I was probably better off sticking to the crutches for a while longer.
By the time I was fully dressed and shaved and had made one last pass through my soon-to-be-former residence, it was fully dark outside. I leaned on my crutches in the middle of the room, shifted around and contemplated the furniture. My leg grumbled about remaining upright but my glutes were tired of being sat on for so long. Forget people: I couldn’t even take a position that made all of my body happy.
And now what? I turned to gaze out of the large picture overlooking the front lawn. Six feet wide and four feet tall, it was one of the few windows in my home-sweet-bunker whose view wasn’t obscured by a latticework of steel bars. The inch-thick layering of glass-clad polycarbonate could stop M16 or AK-47 ammo as well as small explosives so I’d almost learned to stop flinching when the occasional bird kamikazied against its deceptively transparent surface.
I couldn’t stay here—despite all I had done to dig in and harden my fortifications over the past couple of years. The Feds would be back in a matter of days. Or even hours. So I had systematically and mindlessly packed for a trip as if I had somewhere to go.
But I didn’t.
Unlike Vlad Drakul Bassarab, I hadn’t had centuries to establish a network of safe houses. Hell, I didn’t even have a timeshare near the beach. All of my friends and family were gone with the exception of Mama Samm D’Arbonne. And between her discomfort over that little “pheromone incident” and her exotic travels to get her mojo back, she had been pretty much absent these past few years. Besides: the trouble I was in? Not about to show up on someone else’s doorstep with that kind of karma in tow.
Maybe it was time to go back to New York City, brace The Fangs once and for all, and go down in a blaze of glory! Screw Mikey and his not-your-allotted-time shtick. I wasn’t going to last in federal custody. Never mind shivs in the showers or supernatural assassins: The first time they made me walk out under the sun . . .
And then it hit me: The sun had just gone down.
I had escaped the hospital in broad daylight.
My hospital room had windows and I had spent days—possibly weeks—exposed to killing doses of sunshine, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day . . .
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “They’re back.”
“Who’s back?” Candy Stripe asked from the doorway.
Only she wasn’t Candy Stripe anymore. She’d said her name was Annie and I was pretty sure that she was a witch.
Not that there were any such things.
Along with vampires.
And creatures out of Greek Mythology 101.
She had changed out of the peppermint uniform and into a pair of jeans and a maroon T that said something about the Spanish Inquisition and how it wasn’t expected by anybody since 1970.
I wasn’t particularly up for explaining how I had become infected with Nazi-designed nanites by Dr. Mengele’s clones. “Long story,” I said. “What now?”
She walked over to sit on the living room sofa and patted the cushion next to her. “I want to hire you.”
“Really?” I moved to lean my crutches against the wall and picked up a large soup mug of gently warmed whole blood. Hobbling over to one of the easy chairs, I asked, “For what? Human pincushion? Senior center punching bag? Backless gown model?”
“Bodyguard.”
“Yeah, right.” I knocked back the contents of the mug like a man dying of thirst. Rebuilding a shattered leg and God knows what else required additional energy and more raw material than my bone marrow seemed equipped to keep up with.
She wasn’t dissuaded.
“You’ve just reinforced the argument as to why you should take this job,” she said. “You say you’re recovering from major trauma? Of course you are. And it would have killed anyone else ten times over. But here you are and your body is healing so fast that it has already rejected the metal brace on your leg. Then there’s the fact that you are a fugitive. I doubt you have any formed plans as to where to go and you certainly can’t stay here. But if you come with me, I can provide you with all that you need for the time being—certain amenities, food, shelter, anonymity, and forms of protection that you cannot provide for yourself. And, as for some of those things that are chasing you? Well, that’s going to bear a little more discussing but I know what I’m getting into. Better than you, in fact. I’m really making you an offer you can’t refuse.” She extended her arm, a scrap of black cloth resting on her open palm. “I’ll even throw in the eye patch for free.” She tossed it to me and I caught the piratical accessory one-handed.
It was all very nicely vague but I still didn’t know what was in it for her.
“So, these . . . things . . . chasing me. You’re going to help me run away from them?” I asked as I tied the eye patch in place and adjusted it.
Her lips curved slightly upwards and she shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m going to be running toward them. I need someone with experience. Someone who isn’t afraid to run at them with me.” She turned up the wattage on her smile as if she had just promised me a steak dinner.
My smile was nowhere near as encouraging. “You have the damnedest recruiting approach.”
If anything, her smile grew in intensity. “Well, your audition and interview were better than anything that I had been led to believe. I need—for my grandmother, that is—a bodyguard.”
“Grandmother or great-grandmother?”
“Sure.”
“You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack, Mr. Cséjthe.”
“Good God, I hope not! Because if you are, you’re either mad or have the worst case of attention deficit disorder that I’ve ever seen! I mean, I’ve just barely survived a near-fatal crash, can hardly walk, and nearly got my clock cleaned by a quartet of visually impaired old biddies. I’m the one who needs a bodyguard!”
“We’re all going to need bodyguards,” said a familiar voice from the doorway.