CHAPTER TWELVE
I rolled the twice dead vampire onto its back. The angry red light in its eyes slowly dimmed, until only a faint pinprick of crimson remained. I looked at Bethany.
“Took you long enough,” I said.
“A rogue is never late. She backstabs precisely when she means to backstab.”
“Well, next time, maybe let us know when you’re going to disappear on us.”
“What’s the fun in that, John?” she said with a laugh.
“Will the two of you stop joking around!” Chesa yelled. “Our escort’s in pretty bad shape.”
All eyes pivoted to where Adelaide had fallen. She lay in a heap just inside the door to the kitchens. I used the vampire’s tunic to wipe the black gunk off my sword, then sheathed it and shouldered my shield on my way to the fallen gunslinger. Chesa got there first. She rolled Addie over on her back. The gunslinger’s arm flopped lifelessly across her chest.
“She’s lost a lot of blood. Addie, can you hear me?” Chesa bent over her. “Don’t just stand there, Rast. Get the doc!”
“Didn’t we bring a healer?” I asked, then turned to Saint Matthew. “You wanna lay some hands on, big guy?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” He dropped the featureless ceramic mask that he always wore on adventures over his face, then knelt beside Adelaide. “Might wanna cover up.”
There was a brilliance to Matthew’s work. Like, literal brilliance. When he was topped up, his skin glowed and his eyes burned with holy fire. I turned away, squinting to protect my eyes and holding one arm over my face. Didn’t want a holy sunburn, after all.
Seconds passed. Nearly a minute. I cleared my throat.
“How’s that healing going, Saint?” I asked.
“Uh. Yeah. Not great.” I looked back. Matthew was massaging the bite wound. His fingers were tipped with blood, but the wound didn’t seem to be improving. “Can’t get any traction on it. Might want to call the doctor, before we lose her.”
I bolted for the door.
The Good Doctor sat behind the counter in the main room, his hands sticky with mashed-up pancakes, which he was feeding through a hole in his mask and humming quietly to himself. Not what I expect of a healer in the middle of battle. I stormed into the room and gesticulated wildly with my sword.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted. He looked up at me, the smooth glass eyes of his mask utterly expressionless. “We’ve had a vampire incident!”
To his credit, The Good Doctor hopped to his feet, shaking pancake off his fingers as he waddled past me. He croaked an apology.
“That’s more like it.” I escorted him into the back room, which in the glaring light of Chesa’s flare looked like a cross between a bakery and an operating theater. Flour mixed with splattered blood from Addie and the thick, viscous oil that had erupted from the vampire, creating a Pollock-like spatter pattern across the floor. Addie lay in the middle of the room, surrounded by a pool of her own blood. Bethany and Chesa sat over by the ovens, tending a nasty wound on Gregory’s head. Saint Matthew continued his ineffective ministrations on the fallen gunslinger.
The Good Doctor went to one knee beside Adelaide, peeling open her lips and peering at her gums, then sticking his fingers into her ears and wiggling her head around. Not the sort of medical examination I was used to. He chittered at Matthew, who sat up.
“I didn’t try that,” Matthew said. “Whatever’s wrong with her, it ain’t magic.”
“Forty percent dead. Everything fine,” The Good Doctor chirped. He rummaged around in one of his pockets and produced an empty syringe, which he inserted into Addie’s neck, next to the wound. When he pulled the plunger, the syringe filled up with a thick, viscous fluid the color of radioactive mucous. Addie took a deep, sudden breath, and her eyes flew open. Coughing, she pushed The Good Doctor away.
“I’m fine,” Addie said between jagged gasps. “What happened to the vampire?”
“Bee ganked it,” Gregory said. He clambered to his feet, pushing away Chesa, who tried to dab delicately at the blood on his forehead. “Enough. I have faced graver injuries than this.”
“Yes, but your face is . . .” Chesa fumbled to a halt. “It might scar.”
“I mean, hopefully,” Bethany said. “You could use a little grimdark in your life.”
“Once I return to the Chapel of Eternal Vigilance, the waters of the Shimmering Pool will cleanse my flesh of all impurity,” he said confidently, standing over the brass engine that had fallen off the vampire’s back. “Now. What is this work of devilry?”
“Looks like some kind of bug,” Bethany said. “One of those Egyptian things.”
“A scarab.” I turned the device over. The arms clattered loudly against the floor. Bethany was right. The twin vials on the back of the device looked like folded wings, and the overall shape definitely looked like the scarab statues I had seen in many museums. “Weird thing to find on a vampire.”
“The scarab was a symbol of rebirth and resurrection in ancient Egypt,” Tembo said. “And the Victorians were obsessed with Egyptology.”
“The thing was burrowed into its body,” I said. “As soon as Bee knocked it off, the vampire dropped like a stone.”
“Very odd.” Tembo glanced back at the dead vampire, and his eyebrows shot up. “And look, the beast is changing.”
The former vampire was melting away. The stark black veins in its face disappeared, and its pale flesh regained the rosy bloom of youth. Its once red eyes were now baby blue, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Blood blossomed from the dozen cuts Gregory and I had given it, though without a beating heart, they did little more than spot its tunic. The bright steel of its jaws crumbled to dust.
“So we’re looking at some kind of ersatz vampire?” Gregory asked.
“Such a thing has happened before,” Addie said. “We have Jekylls hiding all over the Gestalt. Mad scientists trying to improve themselves, with horrific results.”
“This looks more like something that was done to him,” I said. “The short guy had one, too. Where’d he go?”
We found the other baker hiding beneath an empty rack, hands over his head, sniffling. Chesa coaxed him out, and Saint Matthew comforted him. He didn’t have the metal jaws or glowing eyes, but the device at the base of his skull certainly looked similar. We led him into the light, but he shied away from the vampire’s corpse. By now, the effects of the scarab engine had faded completely. The corpse, though pale, looked like a child.
“Not a monster at all,” I said. “He’s so young. Barely even a man.”
“He was a beautiful young man. Such delicate fingers,” Pierre said. Reluctantly, he knelt beside the corpse. “All he wanted to do was bake beautiful bread. He had a gift for the croissant.”
The Good Doctor chittered sadly. Matthew put a hand on Pierre’s shoulder, but the baker flinched, as though the Saint’s touch was painful.
“Hey, Pierre. Can you tell us what happened?” I asked. The small baker sniffed and looked around, his eyes glassy. “What do you remember?”
“Souviens pas,” the tiny man said. “Je faisais du pain pour le matin, et—”
“Um.” I held up a hand, dredging my memory for my high school French. “Je . . . je puh parl un petite poo day . . .”
“I beg you, sir, this has been a difficult day.” Pierre pressed his face into his hands. “Do not torture me further with that sorry excuse for French.”
“I was just trying to be nice. Geez.” I squatted next to him. “Try it again. English, so neither of us have to live through tenth grade again, ok?”
“I have no memory. I was making bread. I went to put the morning’s loaves in the front, and noticed it was brumeux . . . eh . . . foggy? More than usual. When I came back to the ovens, the back door was open. I went to check, and . . .” He gestured hopelessly. “Next thing I remember, you were beating me very rudely sur la tête with your stupid sword.”
“So is he a vampire now?” Bethany asked. “Do we need to . . . ?” She mimed staking him in the heart, much to Pierre’s distress.
“Let’s see if we can get this thing off him first.” I turned Pierre’s head to the side. The brass scarab glittered brightly in the light of Chesa’s flarrow. “Doc, you wanna take a crack at this thing?”
The Good Doctor and Matthew hummed and tutted at the device for a few minutes. Doc tapped at it with various syringes, until finally Matthew cupped his hands over it and hummed the theme song to an obscure ’80s sitcom. The beetle clattered to the ground.
“That seems to have done it.” I lifted the baker’s chin. His skin was warm to the touch, and the twin puncture wounds in his neck had healed almost completely. “How are you feeling?”
“What is that smell?” Pierre wrinkled his nose, looking around. “Where is all my bread?”
“You seem to have gone through a pancake phase,” Matthew said.
“Pan . . . cakes? Oh, non, pas les crêpes!” He rushed out of the kitchen. From the other room, we heard several loud exclamations in tortured French, then the wholesale evacuation of damp dough from the shelves.
“So we’ve got nothing. Pierre doesn’t know who attacked him and the vampire is just a weird beetle thing.” Chesa sighed and looked out the window. “At least the fog is lifting. Looks like the Gestalt is back in place.”
“We have the devices,” Gregory said. “Maybe Tesla will be able to make some sense of them.”
“Good thought. Let’s get those bagged up,” I said. “Hopefully Pierre is on his way to recovery. What should we do with the body?”
“We can figure that out later. For now, we need to get back to the Silverhawk.” Addie sat up a little more. The color drained from her face, and she tottered back and forth. The Good Doctor grabbed at her elbow, but she pushed him aside. “Where’s my gun?”
“About that. Um . . .” I looked around awkwardly. “Before you freak out, this is how we found it.”
“What? What do you mean? What’d you do to my gun?”
I produced the weapon. Or, at least, the pieces of the weapon I’d been able to find, collected in a muffin tray according to size. Addie snarled at me and snatched the tray out of my hands, then started sorting out the pieces, discarding about half of them with disdain.
“I told you we have a negative effect on modern technology. Be glad that most of those pieces at least resemble your pistol.”
“This is a spoon! And a thimble! And these are . . . dice? Why are all my bullets dice?”
“Ooo, d12s. Big damage.” I took the dice and rolled them around in my hand. They were a mix of lead and brass, and clunked together in a very satisfying manner. “If you can’t get them back to their original form, I’d be happy to take these off your hands. Left most of mine back home, and my mom threw—”
Addie snatched the dice from me and tucked them into her pocket. “This is the kind of thing Nik was talking about. Our magic systems interfere with each other. Most of the time everything will work as you expect it to then, suddenly, bang, your longsword is a grandfather clock and my revolver turns into nerd jewelry.” She shuffled the broken pistol around on the table for a second before sighing heavily. “I’d like to get out of this magical backwater before something else breaks.”
“Sure thing. Soon as the doc is done with you.”
The Good Doctor hummed happily, producing another syringe, this one the size of his forearm. She tried to push him away, but her weakened protests amounted to little more than the flapping of hands and a long string of precise profanity. He shoved the needle into her arm and lowered the plunger. Addie turned green.
“You know, I’m starting to appreciate the Saint,” I muttered to Gregory. “A couple cookies, a joke about missing sheep, and you’re healed.” I glanced over at him. He was staring at the needle, and had turned about the same shade of green as Addie. I quickly backtracked. “Hey, I’m sure he’ll have something other than a needle for that head. A poultice or something.”
Turns out needles were The Good Doctor’s thing—needles, gasses, and glass vials filled with various chemicals that smelled like a collection of urine samples. He used all of these things in healing Gregory of his wounds. I retreated to the front room, happy that I had escaped with minimal scrapes, deciding to not point out the cut on my wrist. Not that I’m scared of needles. I just have a healthy mistrust of them, bordering on fear.
Pierre had managed to clear out the display cases. He retreated back to the kitchens with an armload of flour and a determined look on his face. It wasn’t long before the smell of baking bread wafted through the air. I glanced up at the ceiling.
Instead of cherubs and laureled women, the scene was a pastoral setting that seemed to focus once again on scantily-clothed women and the stunning appearance of baked goods. The center of the ceiling was the sky of gilt gold. Chesa’s flarrow stuck in the middle of the sun, and was glittering brilliantly off the gold leaf.
“Huh. That’s weird. I wonder—”
I heard the footsteps a moment too late. Assuming it was Chesa coming to taunt me, or Bethany practicing her stealth rolls, I glanced over my shoulder, ready to make a joke.
A vampire stood in the middle of the room. Not a baker dressed as a vampire, but an actual vampire—black cloak, bloodred eyes, gray skin, dressed like a Bauhaus song come to life. Pearly white fangs puckered the edge of black, cracked lips.
“What the—” I started to turn toward him. He hissed, then leapt at me, claws extended.
I fumbled my shield off my shoulder, barely getting it between us before he barreled into it. Falling backward, I grabbed at his outstretched arm. Razor-sharp claws scraped across my vambraces before slicing into my cheek. I let out a startled yelp and hit the ground, banging my head off the floor. Dazed, I rolled over onto my belly, putting the shield between us. The vampire stood in the doorframe, backlit by the diffuse light from outside, glaring down at me.
“He is coming for you, mortal. The Iron Lich will be content with nothing less than the destruction of the Gestalt,” the vampire purred. Then he swept his cloak over his head and bolted outside. “Be warned!”
A tinny bell sounded as the vampire bolted through the door, disappearing into the foggy street beyond. I stared numbly after him.
“Who the hell is the Iron Lich?” I muttered.