Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (31 page)

He awoke hours later, not remembering having fallen asleep. Nikki was still asleep beside him. It was just after six PM. He had all the time in the world.
 

Except that he really only had two weeks. They all did.
 

“Maybe they’d let us — just the two of
us
— live,” Maurice had said, walking with Reginald and Nikki back to the Chateau just before sunrise. “I’m old. I’m certainly more open to ‘eliminating bottlenecking’ than the entirety of the American Council, which is of course why they hate me. You were an accident, and the things you can do with your mind and your nervous system are definitely steps forward. Figure out how to breech the daytime and we’ll be golden.”
 

“Do you think it’s that literal?” said Reginald. “What if we
could
walk during the daylight? Humans can’t actually see in the dark. What they did was to adapt. They said, ‘We can’t do this one thing, so we’ll change the rules of the game.’ They didn’t find ways to see in the dark, most of them. They found ways to
change the world
so that it wasn’t dark.”
 

“We’re supposed to learn to manufacture darkness?”
 

“I don’t know.” He felt very tired, for once unable or possibly just uninterested in running through the permutations, the levels of meanings in what the angel had said. “I don’t know, Maurice. I just want to sleep.”
 

“Fifteen days.
Fifteen days.
Do you think you can evolve by then? Should we fly back and try to convince the American Council to come with us to meet Balestro on this hill of yours? Should we begin work on vampire-advancing innovations? Should we start worldwide psychoanalysis groups? Embark on mass turnings to increase our diversity? How about vampire libraries and symphonies? We could turn Tony Robbins and get his take on the whole self-improvement angle. Think that would do it?”
 

Reginald chuckled.
 

Maurice sighed. He looked into the east, where the bright smear on the sky above the horizon was growing marginally brighter.
 

“Suppose I just kept walking,” he said. “Instead of turning up to the Chateau, suppose I walked too far. I could get a coffee down the street when the Starbucks opens, just to see if I’ve started to like it as you do. It’s up there, around the corner; I saw it earlier. Maybe I could buy one of those sugary coffee drinks you always get, and just walk. Walk past the town, into the countryside, onto a deserted section of road, open to the sun when it rises. At my age, I wouldn’t last long. There would probably be hardly any pain, and then it would all be over.”
 

“Don’t talk that way,” said Nikki.
 

“Yeah, you’re a lot older than me,” said Reginald. “You’re supposed to be my rock.”
 

“I just can’t help but wonder. If angels are real, is Heaven? Is Hell? And if we’re the children of six fallen angels, where does that mean we are we going?”
 

Reginald, who wasn’t remotely religious even after recent events, shook his head.
 

“Did I ever tell you about how a few years ago, a group of vampire scientists were talking about partnering with people in NASA to launch a low orbit, geosynchronous craft, kind of like a space station? It would circle the earth once every 24 hours, moving west, always on the opposite side of the planet from the sun. They wanted to build a city.
That
would be evolution. Vampires in space instead of Pigs in Space. I don’t suppose you have a line on some sort of a
Battlestar Galactica
plan to leave the planet, heading out in the path of the Earth’s shadow, heading into deep space beyond the reach of the sun and the stars?”
 

Before Reginald or Nikki could say anything, Maurice smirked to himself.
 

“You live this long, you see this much, you’d think nothing could surprise you,” he said.
 

Now, hours later in the quiet catacombs, Reginald thought back on Maurice’s demeanor. The coldness of it bothered him, especially given how giddy Maurice had been just a day ago.
 

Feeling guilty, he rolled over and woke Nikki. He needed someone to talk to.

“He’s had two thousand years to learn to cope” said Nikki after shaking off the cobwebs of sleep. “He’ll be fine.”

“Will he?”

“We all will,” she said.

She sighed. Then, seemingly out of the blue, she said, “I was thinking earlier. I know how you must’ve felt, all those months ago.”
 

“What do you mean, ‘you know how I must’ve felt’?” said Reginald.
 

“I mean that I’ve finally been cleared by the American Council to be turned into a vampire. It’s something I’ve wanted and trained for for years, and fought for, and studied for, and striven for. And now, if I were turned, I’d have just two weeks to be what I’ve always wanted to be.”
 

“That’s not how I felt at all,” said Reginald.
 

“I mean that I’ve worked and worked, and I was ready to spend an eternity being my own vision of perfect. But if these ‘angels’ or whatever they are…”
 

“You’re perfect right now,” said Reginald.
 

She smiled a small, artificial smile and put a hand to his cheek. “That’s sweet. But it’s also bullshit.”
 

Reginald had brought some of the snack foods in from the kitchenette. As he’d suspected, almost all of it turned out to be garbage. He pulled out a red tube of crackers with chocolate sandwiched between them that had looked interesting. The package proclaimed:
HIT.

“I don’t know, Reginald. This is something I’ve warred with, and fought with myself about, and gone back and forth on, and had finally, just recently, decided that I wouldn’t ever have to face. I’m not ready for it.”
 

“Angels?”

“Death. The existential horror of it all.” She sat on the bed beside Reginald and looked him in the eyes.
 

Reginald unwrapped the
HIT
crackers and ate one. It was delicious. He waited for Nikki to go on, intuiting that it was still her turn.

“Did it ever seem strange to you,” she said, “how easily I agreed to take such a big risk for you back at your trial all those months ago?”

Reginald looked back at Nikki, genuinely curious.
 

“You did it for Claire.”
 

“Claire is a great girl,” said Nikki. “And yes, I wanted to help her. But Reginald, you have to understand how that plan looked from where I was sitting. I know you had no doubts, and knowing you as I do now, I probably wouldn’t have any doubts if you proposed it today. But I’d known you for a week at the time.
A week.
I’d known Claire for just a few days. What you told me seemed crazy. It felt like a million-to-one shot. There was no way I thought it’d work. Too much could go wrong. In your plan, I was supposed to be a vampire. But when the Guard came, I was sure they’d see that I didn’t fight like a vampire. I was sure that when I ‘extended my fangs,’ the Guard would realize that they were costume shop knockoffs filled with incendiary powders. How could they not tell the difference?”
 

“They saw…”
 

“Yes, I know. They saw what they wanted to see. They were the wolves and I was the sheep, and nobody suspects the sheep. But I didn’t know you well enough to trust your ability to read human and vampire nature back then. When we made it out alive, I thought it was sheer luck. And sometimes, even today, I still wonder if it
was
luck, because if you could really read people, you’d be able to read me. And you can’t. I know you can’t.”
 

Reginald simply watched her, letting her say what she seemed to need to say.

“From where I was sitting, going to your trial was a one-way errand. I pretend to be a vampire. They haul me in. They kill you, and they kill Maurice. Then they see me still standing in the sunlight, and they kill me. But they don’t just kill me. I’ve made them look like fools. So they rape me. They torture me. They drain me. And then, mercifully, it’s all over.”
 

Reginald set the crackers aside and put his hand on Nikki’s leg. He felt oddly conflicted and oddly human. He’d known with very high certainty that Nikki would be safe, but he hadn’t realized how sure she’d been that she would die. It changed the nature of both his request and her decision to accommodate it. He felt guilty, despite the outcome.
 

“If you were sure it was a dead end, why did you do it?” he said.
 

A single tear was making its way down the crease between her nose and her right cheek. She didn’t seem to have noticed it.
 

“Because I wanted to die,” she said.
 

Reginald didn’t trust himself to say anything. He simply waited, and the wait felt very long.
 

“My parents died when I was young. They were both unbalanced, both on depression meds. We were constantly under financial pressure, because my dad made some very bad investments, then gambled away what was left. My mom hung in there for as long as she could, but it was always a losing battle. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and see a light on downstairs. I always woke Jackie and she never complained, because we both knew that when Mom and Dad were awake in the middle of the night, it was because they were worried, and because neither was strong. So they’d just hold each other and cry. Can you imagine what it’s like for kids to witness their parents so helpless, when parents are supposed to be the protectors?”

“How old were you?” said Reginald.
 

“Junior high,” she said. “Jackie must’ve been in high school, like in the later years, because I remember that on the night our parents split a bottle of Seconal, after we called 911, she drove out to get us ice cream after it was all over.
Ice cream.
It sounds so ridiculous now, but we were grasping at straws. Anything to feel normal. To make it all go away for a few minutes or seconds.”
 

Reginald didn’t know what to say. Nikki had been shamelessly ebullient for pretty much the entirety of the time they’d known each other. He’d never known her to have dark moods, and she’d always seemed so forward and so incredibly open. But this was something she’d been protecting. And she was right. He’d never been able to read her at all.

“I told you that I found Maurice, and that he was my mentor,” she said, wiping away the tear. “That’s true. But what I didn’t tell you was
when
and
how
I found him. I was seventeen. I was living with my grandmother, and I’d dropped out of school. I hung with a different kind of crowd. Not bad kids, but… outsiders. They made me laugh, but they also smoked and drank a ton. Maurice knew them somehow. I figured he was one of us. He became like a brother to me. We were never… together, though I wanted to be. Years later, when I realized how young I must have seemed to him, I understood. By then, I’d realized what he was. I begged him to turn me. I remember how shameless I was. I
begged
. I was angry. I wanted revenge. It didn’t matter who I took that revenge out on. I wanted to feel in control. Any kind of power at all. But Maurice wouldn’t do it. He didn’t tell me to train — later, the official authorities did that — but he told me that I needed to be emotionally ready. That’s the one part of all of this that he still believes in. It’s all very Zen. ‘Clear your mind and your soul before you decide what to commit your mind and soul to,’ or something. He said there were right and wrong reasons to want to turn, and at the time, my reason was the wrong one. I hated him for that for a long time, but then, little by little, it got better and I came to thank him for making me wait. And the rest, you already know.”
 

Reginald took a breath in, then let it out. Now his hand was on her cheek, and she smiled. He took it away.
 

“So you did it for Maurice,” said Reginald.

“I did it because I never forgave myself,” she said. “Becoming a vampire, it’s like dying. And dying? Well, that’s even closer. I don’t remember consciously weighing the decision to do what you said. I just remember thinking that I could do it and die, or I could refuse and become a vampire and have that power and control I’d always wanted. I knew I was making the wrong choice, but I made it anyway. Looking back, that was my last truly dark moment. I think I’d decided that I’d finally found someone I could take revenge on: myself.”
 

“I had no idea,” he said.
 

She pursed her lips together into a thin line and looked at him, then shrugged.
 

Reginald couldn’t read her as a vampire, but there was still plenty of human in him. He got up, sat across from her, and took both of her hands in his.
 

“Do you still want to die?” he said.
 

She shook her head, sniffed, and met his eyes. “Not in the same way I used to. A lot of that is thanks to you.”

“You understand that whatever Balestro is or who he represents, they may just have a grudge against vampires. You understand that as a human, you’ll probably be safe.”
 

“
You’d
,” she said. “You mean that I
would
be safe as a human, not I
will
be safe as a human.” And softly, gently, her small hands squeezed his big ones. She leaned her head to the side. Her neck was long and smooth. Reginald could see her pulse. A strange hot feeling surrounded him like a cloud. He leaned closer.
 

“This is you punishing yourself,” he said. But it was hard to speak.
 

“No. It’s not.”
 

“You’ll turn. Then you’ll die two weeks from now with the rest of us. You are choosing death over life.”
 

“Not for certain.”
 

“But likely. At least wait and see what happens.”
 

“I believe in you,” she said.