Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (24 page)

Then, as Reginald watched, Maurice leapt up in a blur and ran at Balestro. Balestro watched him with boredom on his face. Maurice hit an invisible wall and flew back again, landing in roughly the same spot as before. Then, undeterred, he got back up and walked forward. He stopped a few feet from Balestro, but his toes continued to push into the dirt without actually moving him closer. It was as if he were being held at a distance by an invisible hand.
 

Reginald recognized the phenomenon. He’d experienced it himself when he first met Claire, when he tried to enter her house without her permission.
 

“What is this?” said Maurice.

“Checks and balances,” said Balestro. “We had to give the humans something.”
 

Maurice stepped back. From where Reginald stood, Maurice didn’t look like the two-thousand year old Deacon of the Vampire Council. He looked like the teenager he must’ve once been, millennia ago.

“You have gotten used to the idea that you are on top,” said Balestro, addressing the crowd. “But you are not.”
 

Balestro’s form flinched as if a tiny shiver had run through him. In the same instant, the heads of the entire front row of spectators became detached from their shoulders, and then, seconds later, both heads and torsos exploded into ash. Balestro was scratching at the side of his face before the last head hit the floor. Someone screamed. It was chilling to hear a vampire scream.
 

Balestro hadn’t moved, and hence hadn’t killed those vampires. And yet, he had.
 

“You have thirty days to quail in fear and decide whether you choose to die by our hand or your own,” said Balestro.
 

“What do you…?” Maurice began.

“At midnight on the thirtieth day,” said Balestro, interrupting him. Then he winked at Reginald. “
You‘ll
know where to find me.”
 

Balestro crouched and exploded upward, propelled like a rocket toward the arena’s metal ceiling. When he broke through it and into the bright mid-afternoon sun, the roof made an undramatic
foomp
sound. Then there was no Balestro, and there was only a shaft of sunlight spearing the pile of silver chains like a starlet in the spotlight. Maurice took a quick step back, away from the sun, and the spectators started to scream.
 

The rest of the meeting, including Charles’s new legislation, was shelved for the time being.

M
YTHS

IT FELT ODDLY NORMAL, AFTER a day of such incredible abnormality, to be at the office.
 

Maurice and Reginald were tired. They’d barely slept after a few hours of detention at the Council, four rides in blacked-out SUVs, and an insomniac day of indecision spent on and off the phone with Brian Nickerson, who’d stayed at the Council following what Reginald was already calling “the Balestro affair.”
 

Nikki had arrived on a flight from New York a few hours earlier. She’d taken the whole week off and wasn’t supposed to return to work until Monday, but she came in Friday night anyway because she missed Reginald and Maurice — and, as she’d explained months ago, she “had few friends among the living anymore.” Nikki had almost been approved to become a vampire before Reginald’s trial, and the coup had slowed things down enough that she was just now almost approved again. For six months, she’d been on the brink of leaving daylight forever, and had severed most of her daytime relationships accordingly.
 

Reginald was glad to have Nikki back. He wasn’t used to having a girlfriend, and he’d missed her. He certainly wasn’t used to having a
super-hot
girlfriend. He kept pinching himself. Then he’d pinch her. Then she’d pinch him. Then she’d try to get him, yet again, to have sex, because as she explained, “a girl has needs.” But for six months, Reginald had demurred. It was hard to get his mind past the many years of rejection, he said. And so, reluctantly, she’d given him time to face whatever internal demons he still faced.
 

The atmosphere of the office was comforting, despite the fact that the day shift was having its annual customer appreciation event out in the main office space. Reginald, Maurice, and Nikki, who worked the night shift, hadn’t been invited. This was fine with all three of them. Reginald loathed the day shift except for the three other misfits he never saw anymore — Sarah, Noel, and Scott, who of course wanted nothing to do with the annual customer appreciation event and had stayed home. Maurice didn’t particularly like the day shift. Nikki was constantly warding off sleazy come-ons from the day shift.
 

And as far as the day shift was concerned, the trio represented another race, from another planet. The night shift workers, officially uninvited, would simply keep working while the event was going on. But it was Friday night, and most of the gym buyers were exactly like Walker, who was exactly like Berger, who was exactly like everyone else on the sales staff. So the party got drunk. And then it got loud. And then it spilled out of the conference room and across the cubicles, and Reginald, Nikki, and Maurice retired to the mail room, which seemed relatively safe.
 

Yet the presence of humans felt good, even though neither Maurice nor Reginald felt the need to feed at the moment. Humans were so normal. So harmless. What could a human do to you, compared to the awesome power that Balestro wielded?
 

Nothing, if you wore chain mail.
 

“You really are a genius, Reginald,” said Maurice, admiring Reginald’s chain mail shirt.

“No I’m not,” said Reginald. “The rest of you are stupid. Think about it. Only three things will kill a vampire. Humans aren’t able to pull off heads and sunlight doesn’t come out at night. That leaves wooden stakes through the heart. Yet you never hear of vampires wearing simple chain mail shirts. You can’t get a stake through chain mail. Hell, wooden bullets wouldn’t even penetrate it. I can’t believe nobody thinks of it.”
 

The idea had seemed obvious to Reginald from the beginning, but the challenge turned out to be actually finding the chain mail. He’d looked at Army stores, speciality stores, hardware stores, and online, where he’d found only flimsy costume chain mail. Eventually he’d located the real thing, but the chain mail he discovered was the size of an XL shirt. When Reginald asked about size 4XL chain mail, the man on the other end of the phone told him that there hadn’t been any fat knights. Reginald snapped back that he’d never heard of a fat vampire either, then hung up before the man could reply.
 

Eventually he’d ordered four chain mail shirts. He took two of them to a historical village and paid a blacksmith to have them combined into a giant chain mail parka big enough for — in the blacksmith’s words — “Lancelot the Hut.” The other two were in gift bags on the table.
 

“Yours is for later,” Reginald told Nikki. “You know… for after you’re turned.”
 

“Can we do that tonight?” said Nikki, running a finger up Reginald’s arm.
 

“Your re-authorization should come any day now. Let’s wait and do it by the book, so that Maurice doesn’t have to pardon you again.”
 

“Good idea,” said Nikki.

“Being executed would suck,” said Reginald.

“
Suck
,” Nikki repeated, removing her finger from Reginald’s arm and placing it seductively between her lips.
 

“Dammit, Nikki, knock it off,” said Maurice. Then, turning his attention to the remaining gift bag, he removed the chain mail and held it up to admire it. He pulled his shirt off, exposing a nineteen-year old, pimple-strewn, sunken chest. Then he pulled on the chain mail and put his shirt on over it.
 

Nikki had pulled off her own shirt and was standing next to them in a white bra that seemed very bright against her tan skin. She wiggled into the chain mail. Reginald told her that there was no point for her to wear it yet and tried to grab at it, but she smacked his hand away. Then she asked him if he’d seriously never worn a Halloween costume around the house before Halloween just because it was awesome.

When her shirt was back on, she bounced lightly on her toes and said, “This shirt is heavy.”
 

“Take it off, then,” said Reginald. Then he added, “Slowly.”
 

“If only I had a pole,” said Nikki.
 

“Writhe against the vending machine,” Reginald suggested.
 

“I like vending machines,” said Nikki, licking her finger. “If I push the right buttons, I can get nuts to pop out.”
 

“Jesus, Nikki,” said Maurice.
 

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Reginald, “were you around for Jesus? I mean, you must’ve been, but did you know him?”
 

“That’s like asking a guy from New York if he knows Derek Jeter,” said Maurice.
 

“So you’re saying Jesus was like Derek Jeter?”
 

“Maybe.” He cocked his head. “Probably.”
 

Then the door banged open and the bright white tombstone teeth of Todd Walker burst into the room. A pair of enormous breasts came with him.
 

Walker looked at Nikki, then Reginald, then Maurice. Then he said, “Hey look, it’s the company vampires.”
 

“Lucky guess,” said Reginald.

“Ha ha!” said Nikki. “I get it. Because we work at night. You’re hilarious. Are you here to have sex with this woman? Go ahead; we can scooch back a bit.”
 

Walker’s facial features went blank. The tombstone teeth vanished.
 

“Yes,” said the woman with the enormous breasts. “Do you mind?”
 

Reginald crossed the room toward Walker and his conquest. He looked the woman in the eyes.
 

“You don’t want to have sex with this man,” he said. “You want to go back to the party and tell everyone that he begged and begged, but that you were disgusted by him. So he paid you to have sex. You were willing to do it, but when you saw the size of his penis, you laughed so hard that you lost your balance and fell forward into said penis, knocking Walker here into that wall over there. Then an open printer ink refill fell from the shelf and coated his penis in red ink. Because of this, months from now, everyone will be calling him, ‘Ol’ Red Dick.’”
 

The woman looked back into Reginald’s eyes and said, “Sure.”
 

Maurice didn’t tell Reginald that he couldn’t glamour the woman and expect behavior out of other people as he had in the past.
Any
vampire could command a person to do things themselves, but Reginald was a glamouring virtuoso. He could influence people to influence
other
people. Reginald’s instructions to humans were always vague, trusting their subconscious minds to fill in the specifics.
 

Reginald looked at Walker. “You’ll help her prepare and then will forget everything that happened in this room tonight,” he said.
 

Walker nodded, and then the drama began to take shape.

Walker stood several feet from the wall he’d supposedly been run into, then ran backward at it and rammed the wall with his rear in order to leave a convincing ass-hole in the drywall. Plaster poofed out in a tiny cloud. Then Walker and the woman found a vial of red printer ink, spattered it on Walker’s pants and on the floor below the shelf, and then tossed the bottle into a corner. The woman mussed her hair, and they walked out.
 

“Will it literally be ‘Ol’ Red Dick’?” said Maurice, fascinated.

“Yes. Human minds are like locks. They are very easy to open once you see the pattern. I planted an idea in her mind, and she’ll plant ideas in the minds of a few of the others outside. In fact, they’ll probably think the nickname was their idea.”
 

There was a crash from outside the door, and the sound of the party increased. There was much hooting and hollering. Even through the door, Reginald could hear Walker called a “douche” at least twice.

Then, relative quiet returned to the closed mail room. There was something in the air — something heavy and unspoken.
 

“Maurice,” said Reginald.

Maurice looked over.
 

“Do vampires have an explanation for themselves?”

Maurice shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you all act so rational, like you’re above believing in the ‘superstitious crap’ that Altus believes. I couldn’t figure out why that bothered me, but then I realized what was going on:
You’re just being human
. Once upon a time, we were
all
human, and even now, as vampires, we live in the middle of a human culture. Sensible humans believe in rationality and science and observable phenomena, and sensible vampires believe the same. But sensible humans also don’t believe in
us
, Maurice, and they don’t believe in incubi and succubi. It’s like vampires have taken this very rational frame of beliefs and have said, ‘The humans are right that magic and supernatural stuff is bullshit… oh, except that there are vampires.’ So I was just wondering — do vampires have a rational, scientific explanation for themselves so that they can explain away the fact that magic doesn’t fit into their sensible worldview?”

“Is this about angels?”

“Angels. Demons. Heaven. Hell. You laugh at it all like you’d laugh at the Easter Bunny, but
the mere fact that you exist
should cause you to at least open your mind to those possibilities. You are a counterexample to your own argument that everything should be explainable and sensible.”

Maurice drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s not that simple,” he said.
 

“Sure it is. History is filled with discoveries of unknown and impossible things. Someone realizes that crazy things exist or figures them out, and then everyone accepts them. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, people wouldn’t throw out their entire system of beliefs. They’d simply fit aliens into that system of beliefs and would make a small amendment: ‘Okay, aliens aren’t ridiculous anymore, but this
other
stuff is still obviously impossible and ridiculous.’”