Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (30 page)

Still, despite Lola’s explanation, Reginald wasn’t expecting the pathetic form they found. He’d expected a tortured man who was still radiant and elegant-looking, but what they found was gross and ugly and smelled like he’d soiled himself.

“Santos,” said Lola.

The unconscious form didn’t move. Lola shoved him with her foot.
 

“Santos,” she repeated.
 

The form grumbled, so this time she actually kicked him. When he yelped, she explained, “They can feel pain when they are like this, too.” Then she wrinkled her nose and said, “Just a big sack of meat.”
 

“What?” said the ugly man.

“Santos. It’s me. Lola.”
 

“Isis?”
 

“I’m Lola now,” she said. Then she turned to the others and said, “Not
that
Isis. It used to be a popular name.”
 

“Mmm,” said the form in the booth.

“Santos. Get up, you drunken shit.” She nudged him again.
 

“Lemme be.”
 

Nikki turned to Karl. “Are you sure that
this
… person… is a… you know…a…?”
 

“Nicole Jane Pilsen,” said Santos, straightening up. “Graduated high school 2001, 4
th
in your class, lost your virginity in a Mazda Miata behind a Taco Bell. When it was over, your exact words were, ‘Well, that was interesting.’ Afterward you went bowling with the guy, and when you noticed that he had a giant cum stain on the front of his pants, you ran out the back door and hitched a ride home with a man named Telly.”
 

“… an angel,” Nikki concluded.
 

“I must apologize for his appearance,” said Lola. “I don’t want you thinking I would be with…
this
. Angels can take human form, but the form they take is like their mood. When he is sad, he looks sad, and when he is sad, he gets drunk and it gets worse.” She kicked Santos yet again and Reginald felt himself flinch, unable to believe she was treating what was essentially her literal creator so harshly.
 

Lola shook her head, disgusted. “The last time I saw him and he was not like this form, he was the Unabomber.”
 

“He looked like the Unabomber?” said Reginald.
 

“He
was
the Unabomber,” Lola repeated.
 

“I got bored,” said Santos, who seemed compelled to explain himself.
 

“Purge yourself,” said Lola.
 

“No.”
 

“
Santos
.”
 

“No.”
 

She leaned forward and whispered something to him.
 

“Fine,” he said. The man in the booth vanished in a flash of blue light. An instant later, there was another flash and a new man appeared in his place. The new man was tall, with fine strawberry blonde hair and a square chin.

“We shall be just a moment,” said the new Santos, rising from the booth. He took Lola’s hand. She shook it off, then began walking toward a back hallway. Santos followed.

“Charmed to meet you,” he said as he walked off.

It was five minutes before Santos and Lola returned from what appeared to be the women’s bathroom. While they waited, Karl explained that all it took for an angel to shake off whatever mortal baggage he or she had accumulated during a stint as a human was to reemerge into a non-corporeal form and then become a human again. Karl likened the process to a dirty person jumping into a lake and emerging clean. He said that Lola had almost certainly bribed him to do it by promising him a quickie in the bathroom.

“He will now follow her around for months,” said Karl. “This will only encourage him.” He added that if Santos would simply spend more time in his natural form instead of being constantly in flesh on the mortal plane, he’d lose all of his interest in Lola because angels were, in and of themselves, emotionless and dispassionate. But he said that what Santos had was an addiction — and that just like with any addiction, the more he indulged in it, the worse the addiction became.
 

When the pair returned, Santos seemed refreshed and Lola seemed disgusted. She excused herself and left the bar, presumably to return to the Chateau for a shower.
 

The tall man that Santos had become sat across from Reginald and smiled.
 

“So you’re him,” said the angel. His voice contained no accent. It was crisp and clean and perfect.

“Excuse me?” said Reginald.

“You’re the one Balestro came to. Interesting choice. I see why. I owe a favor to Isis. Lola. How may I help you, Reginald?”

“So you’re in this with Balestro?”
 

“Yes and no. Think of us less like six individuals and more like six heads of one being. What one does, we all do. We neither agree nor disagree. We simply do and are.”

“So you’re in constant communication with him? Like now?”
 

“Not when mortal. We all flit in and out of mortal. We reconnect when we return to our non-corporeal states. It’s not unlike plugging one device into another periodically to sync them.”
 

“So by talking to you, it’s like I’m talking to him?”
 

“You are talking to me. When I reemerge into a non-corporeal form, it will be as if you’ve talked to him.”
 

Reginald shook his head. “It’s all very confusing.”
 

And so the angel smiled and said, “Would you like me to show you?”
 

E
VOLVED

THE PLACE REGINALD SUDDENLY FOUND himself wasn’t white. It wasn’t black. It was nothing at all. He couldn’t see, but he wasn’t blind. He couldn’t hear, but he wasn’t deaf. He was somehow a disembodied intelligence. He wasn’t floating, but he wasn’t grounded, either. It was like being weightless in a realm where the idea of weight had no meaning. He tried to blink, but he didn’t have eyelids. He didn’t have anything. The feeling was like waking from anesthesia. He had no idea how he’d gotten here — wherever “here” was — and could only take it in as it presented itself, hoping that it would all soon make sense.
 

“We call this the anteroom,” said a voice. It was Santos’s voice, but Reginald suddenly felt quite sure that he was only hearing Santos’s voice because it’s what he expected to hear. And then, because he’d had that thought, the next voice he heard was less of an actual voice and more of a feeling, as if it were coming directly into his mind.
 

“You are not supposed to be here. You cannot stay long. Ask your question. Be quick.”
 

The voice was dry and devoid of inflection, totally unlike the newer Santos’s polite voice in the bar. It was as if he were talking to someone else. But of course, if this “anteroom” was what he thought it was, then he
was
talking to someone else. In a way, he was talking to all six of them.

“The others,” said Reginald. “Are they here?”
 

“The question has no meaning. We are. I am. You are.”
 

“Is Balestro here?”

“The question is senseless. Yes. In a way that is sufficiently true in your capacity to understand, he is here.”

“Am I speaking to him now?”

“Irrelevant. No. But also yes.”

“Are you planning to destroy the race of vampires?”

“Yes.”
 

“Will you succeed?”
 

“Of course. We are immortal and omnipotent. You think you are immortal, but you are not. You can be killed. It is simple to do so.”
 

Reginald’s spirit, or whatever it was, floated in the voidless void. The sensation was hard to put a finger on.
 

Eventually, Reginald said, “Why are you going to do it?”
 

“Do what?”

“Destroy the vampires.”
 

There was a pause. Reginald wondered if maybe an answer wasn’t coming. Then the voice said, “Because your kind is a failure.”

“Because the humans outnumber us?”

“What is a number?”
 

Reginald waited for more, but there was no more.

“I don’t understand,” said Reginald.

“Correct. You do not,” said the voice.
 

Reginald floated and waited. The silence was complete. There was no white noise, no nothing at all.

“This would be easier if you’d stop being so obtuse,” said Reginald.
 

“This would be easier if you’d ask for what you wanted,” said the voice.
 

“Did you make a bet? With the one humans call God?”
 

“No. Your myths are not true, but they are true enough. It is hard to convey. So yes. In a way that is sufficiently true by your capacity to understand, yes. There was a wager. A bet.”

“And was it like a game? A bet over a game?”

“In a way that is sufficiently true by your capacity to understand, yes.”

Reginald couldn’t help but feel that the voice was insulting him.

“By the rules of your game, what did vampires do to lose?”
 

“At the beginning of time, which is to say the beginning of human time, of vampire time, we split the pure nature that was ourselves into two halves. One was given the day. The other was given the night. One was given the tools of the predator. One was given the defenses and the instincts of prey. One was given aggression. One was given protection. One could live forever but had certain mortal weaknesses. The other was much weaker and mortal, but was stronger in terms of will and ambition. Two halves, two brothers, two created from the same source. The light and dark natures of the source were split into a perfect good and a perfect evil. But there was a flaw inherent to the nature of the schism. Both natures became polluted. Humans imbibed evil. Vampires, some of them, imbibed good. Humans became possessed of an evil nature which they had to fight to subdue, and which most of them successfully subdued. You embraced your evil nature and did not embrace the good. You magnified your singular nature. Gloried in it. Your compassion did not grow to consume you, to war within you, as evil did within humans. Humans became whole. You remained half. Humans learned to rule the day and the night, learned to master good and evil. You gloried in your curse and ruled only the night and the darkness. What you were, you sought to become more of. You were strong, so you became stronger. You were fast, so you became faster. You were long-living, so you sought immortality. You fed, so you wanted to feed more. Never did you evolve. Never did you change in any way that was not already within your nature. And when the curse was magnified, when your evolution became slower and slower and stopped, you didn’t fight it. You embraced it. You turned your back on anything that wasn’t within your experience. You purged what had polluted you. And as you did, the game began to end. Our challenger had once boasted to us, ‘Give me a seed of purity, and it will grow even amongst pollution so long as the soil is sound.’ We replied, ‘Will is weak, and any strong seed will grow in any soil.’ We were wrong. Humans became more. You became less. Through their strength, humans have learned to cope with what threatens them, with enemies both great and small. All that’s left before you die by their hand is for them to realize you exist. Then your existence as parasites will end because you have remained of a nature that is singular and incapable of adaptation.”
 

Reginald waited until he was sure that the voice had finished. When he was sure, he said, “So let us fight. Now that we know, let us fight.”

“The fight is lost. A good player knows when to surrender.”
 

“Give us time.”
 

“You have fifteen days.”
 

“We can’t evolve in fifteen days,” said Reginald.
 

“True,” said the voice.
 

“And?”
 

“And so, to borrow an expression from your language,” said the voice, “You’re fucked.”
 

Reginald started to say something else, but then the floating sensation and the whiteness that wasn’t white and the blackness that wasn’t black was gone, and he found himself slumped in a booth in a bar in Differdange with the three others, and Santos was gone.
 

T
URN

REGINALD AND NIKKI LAY ON a bed in their room deep in the catacombs beneath the Chateau. Maurice was in the chamber next door and seemed to have gone to sleep. Nikki was asleep. Only Reginald lie awake, his mind for once struggling to assimilate and solve what he had experienced.
 

You have refused to evolve.
 

Interestingly, Reginald
had
evolved. Or at least, he felt that he represented a kind of evolution within the species. Maurice once said he’d never seen someone so physically ungifted and so correspondingly mentally gifted as Reginald. He couldn’t help but feel that he, as the Vampire Nation’s “step in the wrong direction,” might actually be a step in the
right
direction — especially after what the voice in the void had said. Perhaps that was why Balestro had spoken to Reginald out of all of the vampires. Any geneticist could explain that when a population reached an evolutionary bottleneck, that population began to die. “Mistakes” like Reginald threatened to break the bottleneck because they were nothing if not diverse. And how much newness — how much diversity — had entered the vampire gene pool in the past few centuries? Vampires had gotten bigger, better, stronger, faster, and more beautiful. They’d refined as a species, just like how dog breeders carefully refined a breed of dogs… causing weaknesses inherent to inbreeding. What looked like improvement to the Council was actually stagnation, especially in the eyes of those that moved the chess pieces on the giant board.
 

Humans had grown, expanded, and conquered the night. Humans had been born as halflings, but had recaptured the wholeness they’d been born from. Night and day. Good and evil. Temperance and greed and up and down and…