Charming (12 page)

Choo was talking about potpourri when I tuned all the way back in. “You just put rosemary, sage, cedarwood, and fennel in a bowl,” he said. “Evil spirits can’t stand the smell.”

“Can living people?” I asked.

He brayed that loud horselike laugh which apparently hadn’t been an accident the first time. “It’s just nature, man,” he said. “It smells like being in the woods.”

“Huhn,” I grunted noncommittally. That was the sort of thing that people who haven’t spent a lot of time in the woods say. Then I made the mistake of turning around and talking to Sig and Dvornik. “That apartment building you visited this morning… was it around here too?”

“It was a government assisted living complex on the other side of town,” Sig answered tensely. “Why?”

“I was just wondering if all the vampires in that alley knew each other before they were turned,” I said. “It might explain why they were backing Ellison instead of reining him in. The guy was reckless.”

“Look who’s talking,” Dvornik sneered. “The cowboy who had to get his ass saved by Sig.”

“I get a little impulsive this close to a full moon,” I admitted.

Sig snorted, but Dvornik was undeterred. “You sound like a woman blaming her lack of control on her period.”

“It’s not the fear for my immortal soul, or being hunted by professional killers, or the anger-management issues that I mind so much,” I said. “It’s the bloating.”

Choo chuckled and Sig smiled politely, but Dvornik wasn’t giving up that easily. “Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?
God only knows how old you are, and you act like a teenager. You even dress like a twelve-year-old. It’s pathetic.”

I was actually now wearing plain white coveralls over my Spider-Man T-shirt. We were all wearing coveralls. We also had those fabric mask filters that doctors and nurses wear hanging around our necks. One thing most people don’t get is that it’s their breath that animals smell first because their breath is airborne. Keeping your scent from being forcibly expelled on air particles in front of you isn’t that big a defense—it might add a few seconds to the amount of time it takes a vampire to sniff you—but when you’re hunting a creature with preternaturally fast reflexes, seconds matter. If you wind up in a situation where you’re stationary and hiding, not announcing your location by generating your own private wind makes a small difference. It was also good that we were all wearing uniforms that had been freshly washed in the same load of laundry. The overpowering detergent smells would be the same, and there’s no point making it easy for a vampire you’re hunting to identify how many of you there are with a nose count.

“I dress the way a twentysomething American bartender would dress,” I said mildly, turning around to face them again. “If I want to dress like some grumpy-ass refugee from the old country, I’ll turn to you for fashion advice.”

“Come on, you two.” Sig had her hand on Dvornik’s forearm but was looking at me when she said this.

“Letting things slide doesn’t seem to be working,” I said, meeting her gaze.

“I don’t care if—” Dvornik began angrily.

“Stanislav is dealing with things you’ve never—” Sig started to say.

Dvornik turned on her and roared, “YOU DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR ME TO THIS FREAK!”

Sig turned angrily on him. “IF HE’S A FREAK, I’M A FREAK!”

“BULLSHIT!” Dvornik barked. “Your ancestors healed fallen warriors! He turns into a filthy animal!”

Actually I didn’t, but it didn’t seem like the right time to bring that up.

“Oh, right,” Sig said sarcastically. “That doesn’t sound like irrational prejudice at all! What about Kasia? How is he any different from her?”

Dvornik’s face had gone beet-red at the mention of “Kasia,” whoever or whatever that was. Sig must have scored a hell of a point, because he didn’t pursue it. “
You
are not the enemy,” he said quietly.

“Then neither is he,” Sig retorted. “Have I ever been wrong about something like that before? Ever? Give me one example. Just one.”

Dvornik glared at her and worked his jaw. “He doesn’t need you to protect him, and I don’t need you to protect me,” he said finally. “Stay out of it.”

“Fine!” Sig said angrily. “To hell with both of you infants!”

“We’re here,” Choo announced. He turned his head as if looking out the side window and added, so quietly that no one but me could possibly have heard him. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Steve Ellison’s neighborhood was poor and mostly white, although a lot of the kids running around—and there were more kids outside than there would have been in a presumably safer middle-class area—were interracial. There were no women walking their retrievers here, though I did see a woman mowing her lawn with a push mower, watched by a few elderly neighbors sitting on their stoops. The houses almost all needed some routine maintenance, but the cars went to extremes: they were either flashier and more expensive than you’d see in the
burbs, or they were much older. There were as many vans as SUVs, and pit bulls behind fences were more common than terriers or retrievers. Mutts, of course, are everywhere. Go team.

According to the plan, Dvornik was going to go into a meditative trance so that his spirit—technically his astral projection—could step out of his body and go check the house for hostiles. His spirit form was the presence I had sensed on the rooftops the other night.

For my part, I was going to sniff around the outside of the house for any vampire scents. If we determined that the house was teeming with undead, Choo and the nephews were going to set up a rubber tent around the house while the sun was still shining and fumigate it with a fog made of compressed holy water.

Still on edge, I exited the van. It wasn’t as if my presence were helping Dvornik relax. I walked around to the rear doors and removed a plain white canvas bag from the back.

Sig got out of the van before I closed it back up and joined me wordlessly. I looked at her standing there tight-lipped and white-knuckled.

“Does this mean you really care?” I asked, perhaps unwisely.

“This means I really feel like killing something right now,” she muttered, taking out her own canvas bag.

Fair enough.

Ellison’s one-story house was a peeling gray porchless affair. All of the window shades were down, and every window had one. The front yard was fenced in, but there was a side door by the driveway that probably let into a kitchen. There were no cars in the driveway. I ignored both entrances and began walking around the house. Sig followed me wordlessly.

The back of the house opened up into a large common
area—at least two hundred feet by eight hundred—that formed one giant backyard for all the houses on the block. A rusting swing set from kinder times was set in the middle of the space, but no one had mowed the entire grounds, and the pathetic little playground was surrounded by shin-high grass. It would probably be waist-high by summer.

About twelve feet from the swing set was a massive pile of dirt. I indicated it to Sig.

“What?” she asked impatiently.

“Get your head out of your ass or go back to the van!” I snapped back. “I’d rather be alone than with someone who’s missing things because she’s pissed off.”

Oddly enough, this didn’t make Sig angrier. It seemed to have a calming effect on her, if anything. “What am I missing?” she asked quietly.

“Look at that dirt,” I said. “It’s not the same color as the rest of the dirt around it. It’s pale.”

She reexamined the pile more thoughtfully, then slowly turned around and looked at the plywood access panel built into the concrete foundations of Steve Ellison’s house. It was the reason I’d come around to the back in the first place. Then she looked at me. “You think someone’s been excavating at night?”

“Don’t you?” I asked.

She nodded, relaxing a little bit. “It’s pretty careless of them, though. Anywhere else in Clayburg, an ugly pile of dirt appearing from nowhere would have drawn attention from some homeowner or real estate agent worried about property values.”

“Well, you know the first rule of real estate,” I said.

“Location, location, location,” she answered softly.

We walked toward the foundation of the house, more comfortably united in purpose now. When you’re checking out a house that you suspect is a vampire lair, it’s best to work from
the bottom up if you have a choice. Otherwise you’re likely to get grabbed by supernaturally strong hands breaking through the floor beneath your feet.

We dropped our canvas bags on the ground. Sig dug inside hers and came out with a large rectangular flashlight roughly the size of a football. This particular flashlight had a UV bulb.

I slid my right hand into my canvas bag, careful not to let everyone in the neighborhood see inside it, and grabbed the hilt of a wakizashi, a shorter version of a katana. Japanese long swords were not made for waving around in confined spaces.

My left hand carefully hovered over the wood surface of the access panel before settling down on it gently. For a moment I thought about that game where you put your palms on the top of someone else’s, and they try to flip their hands over and slap the top of your hands before you can move. If a vampire hand was going to try to grab me and drag me into a dark hole, this would be the moment. I couldn’t hear anything or sense any vibrations, and the only smells I was picking up were sour and old. I went ahead and removed the panel.

At first, outside air rushed past me into the opening, but then the smell of blood, shit, pus, gangrene, fear, and undead stink washed over me. I let go of the wakizashi so that it stayed in the canvas bag and rolled away from the opening, choking and gagging. Turning, I rested my back flat against the concrete wall. To anyone watching from inside the house, I would be in an invisible spot between two windows.

“What is it?” Sig asked.

“Dead bodies,” I gasped, settling down on the ground. “Lots of them.”

10

S
ig swore and set her flashlight down so that it shone directly into the hole; then she removed a pocket mirror from her coveralls, snapped it open, and angled it so that she could peer into the opening from the side.

There are a lot of misconceptions around the relationship between vampires and mirrors. The most common belief is that vampires don’t cast reflections, but this is a distortion of the truth.

The first mirrors were pools of water, and the next were made of polished volcanic rock, but then there was a long period of time where mirrors were made of polished metal, and the most valued of these mirrors were silver. Even after metal mirrors were replaced by glass, silver still came into play when a German chemist named Justin von Liebig created silvered glass by coating the surface of mirrors with silver nitrate. And one of the odd things about silver is that it does not reflect magical glamours. That’s how the legend about vampires and mirrors got started—it’s not that vampires don’t show up at all; it’s just that
for a long time, people looking at vampires in mirrors would often see their true forms rather than the attractive forms that they were mentally broadcasting, so vampires learned to avoid mirrors altogether.

After a moment Sig came over and sat next to me. She was always pale, but now she looked deathly.

“Can you smell it too?” I asked.

She shook her head mutely, then added, “I mean, yes, a little, but that’s not it.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“They’ve turned the crawl space into a cellar at least eight feet deep,” she said. “It’s full of ghosts.”

I absorbed this news unenthusiastically. “Can you talk to them?”

Sig shivered. “Not the severely traumatized ones. Not as such.”

“OK then,” I said, and inhaled deeply through my nose, trying to adjust to the stench that remained as the crawl space aired out.

“The hive isn’t finished, Sig,” I told her. “It’s a little hard to tell with all the different odors, but I’m picking up at least three vampire smells that I’ve never smelled before.”

“Wonderful,” she said.

We sat there for a time, waiting for Dvornik to send word that it was OK to go in the house.

“I’m not going to be able to stay in Clayburg after we deal with this hive, Sig. You know that, right? It would be too dangerous for all of us.”