Then she felt every hair under her hand stand to attention and Tom made an odd sound and power swept through her from him—all the magic Kouros had sent—and it filled her well to overflowing.
And she could see. For the first time since she’d been thirteen she could see.
She stood up, shedding broken pieces of sunglasses to the ground. The wolf beside her was huge, chocolate-brown, and easily tall enough to leave her hand on his shoulder as she came to her feet. A silvery scar curled around his snarling muzzle. His eyes were yellow-brown and cold. A sweeping glance showed her two dead bodies, one burnt the other savaged; a very dirty, hairy man tied to a post with his hands behind his back, who could only be Tom’s brother Jon.
And her father, looking much younger than she remembered him. No wonder he went for teens to populate his coven—he was stealing their youth as well as their magic. A coven should be a meeting of equals, not a feeding trough for a single greedy witch.
She looked at him and saw that he was afraid. He should be. The werewolf had frightened him, too, no matter how calm he’d sounded. He’d used all of his magic to power his spell—he’d left himself defenseless. And now he was afraid of her.
Just as she had dreamed. She pulled the stone out of her pocket—and it seemed to her that she had all the time in the world to use it—and cut her right hand open. Then she pointed it, her bloody hand of power at him.
“By the blood we share,” she whispered and felt the magic gather. “Blood follows blood.”
“You’ll die, too,” Kouros said frantically as if she didn’t know.
Before she spoke the last word she lifted her other hand from Tom’s soft fur that none of this magic should fall to him. And as soon as she did, she could no longer see. But she wouldn’t be blind for long.
Tom started moving before her fingers left him, knocking into her with his hip and spoiling her aim. Her magic flooded through him, hitting him instead of the one she’d aimed all that power at. The wolf let it sizzle through his bones and returned it to her, clean.
Pleasant as that was, he didn’t let it distract him from his goal. He was moving so fast that the man was still looking at Moira when the wolf landed on him.
Die, he thought as he buried his fangs in Kouros’s throat, drinking his blood and his death in one delicious mouthful of flesh. This one had moved against the wolf’s family, against the wolf’s witch. Satisfaction made the meat even sweeter.
“Tom?” Moira sounded lost.
“Tom’s fine,” answered his brother’s rusty voice, he’d talked himself hoarse. “You just sit there until he calms down a little. You all right, lady?”
Tom lifted his head and looked at his witch. She was huddled on the ground looking small and lost, her scarred face bared for all the world to see. She looked fragile, but Tom knew better and Jon would learn.
As the dead man under his claws had learned. Kouros died knowing she would have killed him.
He had been willing to give her that kill—but not if it meant her death. So Tom had the double satisfaction of saving her and killing the man. He went back to his meal.
“Tom, stop that,” Jon said. “Ick. I know you aren’t hungry. Stop it now.”
“Is Kouros dead?” His witch sounded shaken up.
“As dead as anyone I’ve seen,” said Jon. “Look, Tom. I appreciate the sentiment, I’ve wanted to do that anytime this last day. But I’d like to get out of here before some of those kids decide to come back while I’m still tied up.” He paused. “Your lady needs to get out of here.”
Tom hesitated, but Jon was right. He wasn’t hungry anymore and it was time to take his family home.
Bruce McAllister
“If life is a ‘divine comedy,’ as many insist it is, who has the last laugh?”
I’m given the assignment by an angel—I mean that, an angel—one wearing a high-end Armani suit with an Ermenegildo Zegna tie. A loud red one. Why red? To project confidence? Hell, I don’t know. I’m having lunch at Parlami’s, a mediocre bistro on Melrose where I met my first ex, when in he walks with what looks like a musical instrument case—French horn or tiny tuba, I’m thinking—and sits down. We do the usual disbelief dialogue from the movies: He announces he’s an angel. I say, “You’re kidding.” He says, “No. Really.” I ask for proof. He says, “Look at my eyes,” and I do. His pupils are missing. “So?” I say. “That’s easy with contacts.” So he makes the butter melt on the plate just by looking at it, and I say, “Any demon could do that.” He says, “Sure, but let’s cut the bullshit, Anthony. God’s got something He wants you to do, and if you’ll take the job, He’ll forgive everything.” I shrug and tell him, “Okay, okay. I believe. Now what?” Everyone wants to be forgiven, and it’s already sounding like any other contract.
He reaches for the case, opens it right there (no one’s watching—not even the two undercover narcs—the angel makes sure of that) and hands it to me. It’s got a brand-new crossbow in it. Then he tells me what I need to do to be forgiven.
“God wants you to kill the oldest vampire.”
“Why?” I ask and can see him fight to keep those pupilless eyes from rolling. Even angels feel boredom, contempt, things like that, I’m thinking, and that makes it all that more convincing.
“Because He can’t do it.”
“And why is that?” I’m getting braver. Maybe they do need me. I’m good—one of the three best repairmen west of Vegas, just like my sainted dad was—and maybe guys who say yes to things like this aren’t all that common.
“Because the fellow—the oldest bloodsucker—is the son of…well, you know…”
“No, I don’t.”
“Does ‘The Prince of Lies’ ring a bell?”
“Oh.” I’m quiet for a second. Then I get it. It’s like the mob and the police back in my uncle’s day in Jersey. You don’t take out the don because then maybe they take out your chief.
I ask him if this is the reasoning.
The contempt drops a notch, but holds. “No, but close enough.”
“And where do I do it?”
“The Vatican.”
“The Holy City?”
“Yes.”
“Big place, but doesn’t have to be tricky.” I’d killed men with a wide range of appliance—the angel knew that—and suddenly this wasn’t sounding any trickier. Crossbow. Composite frame, wooden arrows—darts—whatever they’re called. One to the heart. I’d seen enough movies and TV.
“Well,” he says, “maybe. But most of the Jesuits there are vampires too.”
“Oh.”
“That’s the bad news. The good news is they’re pissed at him—the oldest vampire, I mean. They think he wants to turn mortal. He’s taken up with some twenty-eight-year-old bambina who knows almost as many languages as he does—a Vatican interpreter—and they’ve got this place in Siena—Tuscany, no less—and he hasn’t bitten her, and it’s been making the Brothers, his great-great-great-grandchildren, nervous for about a month now. Handle it right and she just might help you even if they don’t.”
“You serious?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she wants to be one, too—she’s very Euro-goth—you know the type—and he just won’t bite her.”
No, I don’t know the type, but I say, “She’s that vindictive?”
“What woman isn’t?”
This sounds awfully sexist for an angel, but I don’t argue. Maybe angels get dumped too.
“Does he really?” I ask.
“Does he really what?”
“Want to be mortal again.”
“He never was mortal.”
“He was born that way?”
The eyes—which suddenly have pupils now, majorly dark blue ones—are starting to roll again. “What do you think? Son of You-Know-Who—who’s not exactly happy with the traditional wine and wafer thing, but likes the idea of blood and immortality.”
“Makes sense,” I say, eyeing the narcs,
who are eyeing two Fairfax High girls, “but why does God need someone to kill him if he wants to flip?”
He takes a breath. What an idiot, the pupils say. “Remember when China tried to give Taiwan a pair of pandas?”
I’m impressed. This guy’s up on earthly news. “No.”
“Taiwan couldn’t take them.”
“Why not?”
He takes another breath and I hear him counting to ten.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “I get it. If they took the pandas, they were in bed with China. They’d have to make nice with them. You accept cute cuddly creatures from someone and it looks like love, right?”
“Basically.”
“If You-Know-Who’s son flips—goes mortal—God has to accept him.” “Right.”
“And that throws everything off. No balance. No order. Chaos and eventually, well, Hell?”
The angel nods, grateful, I can tell, that I’m no stupider than I am.
I think for a moment.
“How many arrows do I get?”
I think he’ll laugh, but he doesn’t.
“Three.”
“Three?” I don’t like the feeling suddenly. It’s like some Bible story where the guy gets screwed so that God can make some point about fatherly love or other form of sacrifice. Nice for God’s message. Bad for the guy.
“It’s a holy number,” he adds.
“I get that,” I say, “but I don’t think so. Not three.”
“That’s all you get.”
“What makes you think three will do it—even if they’re all heart shots?” “You only need one.”
The bad feeling jumps a notch.
“Why?”
He looks at me and blinks. Then nods. “Well, each has a point made from a piece of the Cross, Mr. Pagano. We were lucky to get even that much. It’s hidden under three floors and four tons of tiles in Jerusalem, you know.”
“What is?”
“The Cross. You know which one.”
I blink. “Right. That’s the last thing he needs in the heart.”
“Right.”
“So all I’ve got to do is hit the right spot.”
“Yes.”
“Which means I need practice. How much time do I have?”
“A week.”
I take a breath. “I’m assuming you—and He—know a few good crossbow schools, ones with weekly rates.”
“We’ve got special tutors for that.”
I’m afraid to ask. “And what do these tutors usually do?”
“Kill vampires.”
“And you need me when you’ve got a team of them?”
“He’d spot them a mile away. They’re his kids, you might say. He’s been around 2000 years and he’s had kids and his kids have had kids—in the way that they have them—you know, the biting and sucking thing—and they can sense each other a mile away. These kids—the ones working for us—are ones who’ve come over. Know what I mean?”
“And they weren’t enough to throw off the—the ‘balance.’”
Now he laughs. “No, they’re little fish. Know what I mean?”
I don’t really, but I nod. He’s beginning to sound like my other uncle—Gian Felice—the one from Teaneck, the one with adenoids. Know what I mean?
I go home to my overpriced stucco shack in Sherman Oaks and to my girlfriend, who’s got cheekbones like a runway model and lips that make men beg, but wears enough lipstick to stop a truck, and in any case is sick and tired of what I do for a living and probably has a right to be. I should know something besides killing people, even if they’re people the police don’t mind having dead and I’m as good at it as my father wanted me to be. It’s too easy making excuses. Like a pool hustler who never leaves the back room. You start to think it’s the whole world.
She can tell from my face that I’ve had one of those meetings. She shakes her head and says, “How much?”
“I’m doing it for free.”
‘No, Anthony, you’re not.”
“I am.”
“Are you trying to get me to go to bed with your brother? He’d like that. Or Aaron, that guy at the gym? Or do you just want me to go live with my sister?”
She can be a real harpy.
“No,” I tell her, and mean it.
“You must really hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Mandy. I wouldn’t put up with your temper tantrums if I hated you.” The words are starting to hurt—the ones she’s using and the ones I’m using. I do love her, I’m telling myself. I wouldn’t live with her if I didn’t love her, would I?
“And I live on what while you’re away, Anthony?”
“I’ll sell the XKE?”
“To who?”
“My cousin. He wants it. He’s wanted it for years.”
She looks at me for a moment and I see a flicker of—kindness. “You in trouble?”
“No.”
“Then you’re lying or you’re crazy but anyway it comes down to the same thing: You don’t love me. If you did, you’d take care of me. I’m moving out tomorrow, Anthony Pagano, and I’m taking the Jag.”
“Please….”
“If you’ll charge.”
“I can’t.”
“You are in trouble.”
“No.”
How do you tell her you’ve got to kill a man who isn’t really a man but wants to be one, and that if you do God will forgive you all the other killings?
She heads to the bedroom to start packing.
I get the case out, open it, touch the marbleized surface of the thing, and hope to hell that God wants a horny assassin because I’m certainly not seeing any action this night or any other before I leave for Rome, and action does help steady my finger. Which Mandy knows. Which every woman I’ve ever been with knows.
When I get up the next morning, she’s gone. The note on the bathroom mirror, in slashes of that lipstick of hers, says, “I hope you miss my body so bad you can’t walk or shoot straight, Anthony.”
We do the instruction at a dead-grass firing range in Topanga Canyon. My tutor is a no-nonsense kid—maybe twenty—with Chinese characters tattooed around his neck like a dog collar, naked eyebrows, pierced tongue, nose, lower lip. He’s serious and strict, but seems happy enough for a vampire killer. He picks me up in his Tundra and on the way to the canyon, three manikins (that holy number) bouncing in the truck bed, he says, “Yeah, I like it—even if it’s not what you’d think from a Buffy rerun or a John Carpenter flick—you know, like that one shot in Mexico. More like CSI—not the Bruckheimer, but the Discovery Channel. Same way that being an investigative journalist isn’t as much fun as you think it’ll be—at least that’s what I hear. All those hours Googling the public record. In my line of work, it’s the tracking and casing and light-weapons prep. But you know more about that than I do, Mr. Pagano. Wasn’t your dad—”
“Sounds like you’ve been to college, Kurt,” I say.
“A year at a community college—that’s it. But I’m a reader. Always have been.”
How do you answer that? I’ve read maybe a dozen books in my life, all of them short and necessary, and I’m sitting with this kid who reads probably three fat ones a week. Not only is he more literate than I am, he’s going to teach me how to kill—something I really thought I knew how to do.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You’ll pick it up. Your—shall we say ‘previous training and experience’—should make up for your age, slower reflexes, you know.”
What can I say? I’ve got fifteen years on him and we both know it. My reflexes are slower than his.
As we hit the Ventura Freeway, he tells me what I’m packing. “In the case beside you, Mr. Pagano, you’ve got a Horton Legend HD with a Talon Ultra-Light trigger, DP2 CamoTuff limbs, SpeedMax riser, alloy cams, Microflight arrow groove, and Dial-a-Range trajectory compensator—with LS MX aluminum arrows and Hunter Elite 3-arrow quivers. How does that make you feel?”
“Just wonderful,” I tell him.
The firing range is upscale and very hip. There are dozens of trophy wives and starlets wearing $300 Scala baseball caps, newsboy caps, and sun visors. There are almost as many very metro guys wearing $600 aviator shades and designer jungle cammies. And all of them are learning Personal Protection under the tutelage of guys who are about as savvy about what they’re doing as the ordinary gym trainer. They’re all trying their best to hit fancy bull’s-eye, GAG, PMT, and other tactical targets made for pros, but I’m looking like an even bigger idiot trying to hit, with my handfuls of little crossbow darts, the manikins the kid has lined up for me at fifty yards. The other shooters keep rubbernecking to get a look at us. The kid stares them down and they look away. If they only knew.
“Do the arrows made from the other material—” I begin. “Do they—uh—act…?” I ask.
“Arrows with wood made from the Cross act the same,” the kid says, very professional. “We balance them the way we’d balance any arrow.”
“When it hits—”
“When it hits a vampire, I’m sure it doesn’t feel like ordinary wood. I’ve never taken one myself.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Actually, someone did try an arrow once. Deer bow. Two inches off the mark. I’ve got a scar. Want to see it?”
“Not really. How would it feel to us?”
“You mean mortals?”
“Right.”
“It would probably hurt like hell, and if you happened to die I doubt it would get you a free pass to Heaven.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Isn’t it.”
When I’ve filled the manikins with ten quivers’ worth of arrows and my heart-shot rate is a sad 10 percent, we quit for the day. It’s getting close to sunset, one of those gorgeous smoggy ones. The other shooters have hit the road in their Escalades, H3s, and Land Sharks, and the kid is acting distracted.
“Date?”
“What?”
“You know. Two people. Dinner and a movie. Clubbing. Whatever.”
“You could say that. But it’s a threesome. Can’t stand the guy—he’s a Red-State crewcut ex-Delta-Forcer—but the girl, she’s so hot she’ll melt your belt buckle.”