Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (42 page)

Maurice fell into a chair, his anger deflated.
 

“This is about fear,” said Reginald, stepping in front of him.

Maurice looked up.
 

“It looks sloppy, and it looks defiant, and it looks murderous and bloodthirsty. But it’s all happening because the vampires here — and the vampires out there, in the rest of the country and the world — are
terrified
. This is a ship without a captain. They’re doing what feels best because nobody is telling them what to do.” Reginald nudged Maurice. “You’ve got a society of hunters and murders on the verge of chaos, starting from the top down. I suggest you get out there and be the captain, if you still can.”
 

“I don’t know where to begin explaining how futile that is,” said Maurice.
 

Reginald stooped down so that his face was even with Maurice’s. “Nobody wants you to lead, and everyone hates you.
But you are still the Deacon of this Nation.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and ask yourself two questions: One, what will happen if
nobody
leads? And two, who will lead if
you
don’t?”

Over Reginald’s shoulder, Brian Nickerson said, “That reminds me. There’s something else we should talk about.”
   

Reginald stood and waited for Brian to continue.
 

“There’s been talk about a duly-elected president.”
 

“That’s good, right?” said Nikki.
 

Brian shrugged. “So far, there’s only one obvious candidate...”
 

“Wait,” said Reginald, who saw the punchline coming.
 

“… and that would be Councilman Charles Barkley,” said Brian.
 

L
ITTLE
M
ERLIN

CLAIRE CAME OUT OF THE church she went to after school to find Reginald balancing on a fencepost on one leg, his other leg up, and his arms over his head in a crane kick posture. Reginald was glad she came out when she did, because the fencepost was starting to buckle. The fence itself was chain link, but Reginald didn’t know if the fenceposts for chain link fences were sunk in concrete or not.
 

Claire took one sidelong glance at Reginald and kept walking. It was ten o’clock, and the streetlights had been on for a while. She made it all the way into the cone of light beneath one of them before turning back around to let Reginald, who thought she’d missed him, off the hook.
 

“I saw you,” she told Reginald. “I was just ignoring you.”
 

Reginald hopped down and scampered over to her. “Thank God. You commit to a joke like that, and you end up in character forever. I’ve been balancing on that post for like ten minutes.”
 

“Good thing you’re a vampire and don’t feel pain.”
 

“I
heal
,” he said. “But I still feel pain.”
 

They walked a bit further along the sidewalk, content.
 

“That was Daniel-san from
The
Karate Kid.
The famous crane kick move,” said Reginald, gesturing back at the fence.

“It’s cute, your balance ability,” she said. “But is it at all useful? Like in a fight?”
 

“Sure it is. I can crane kick my opponents.”
 

Claire giggled.
 

“Then I can do wax on and wax off.” He put his palms out in front of himself and made circles in the air as if he were waxing a car. The rhythmic motion made his gut jiggle.
 

Claire giggled again, then pulled gloves from her pockets and put them on. Her hood was already up. She said, “Seriously.”
 

“Seriously, it’s useless,” he said. “But you just wait a thousand years, when I finally get some vampire speed and strength. Then I’ll be able to dodge bullets like in
The Matrix
. I’ll be able to walk on my hands along tiny ledges and run across tightropes. I’ll be like Fat Spiderman.”
 

This time, she didn’t laugh.
 

They were nearing Claire’s house. If Claire’s mother Victoria was home, Claire would invite Reginald inside, and he and Claire would sit on the couch while Victoria brought them Rice Krispie treats. Reginald had no idea why it was always Rice Krispie treats, because he hadn’t implanted any such suggestion in Victoria when he’d perma-glamoured her into forever believing that Reginald was her brother. Nikki said that maybe it was some kind of buried motherly instinct, like from the caveman days. Reginald said that cavemen didn’t have Rice Krispies, and Maurice, for his part, said that it was all crap because there was no such thing as perma-glamouring. But Victoria brought him treats and tried to invite him to family reunions, so what did Maurice know?
 

“Hey,” said Reginald, nudging Claire with his elbow. “Happy birthday.”
 

“Thanks.”
 

“I got you a present.” He handed her a small wrapped package that was about the size of a box of wooden kitchen matches.
 
It was wrapped in pink paper and tied with a red bow. Claire stopped under a streetlight to unwrap it and then smiled a genuine, little-girl smile at what she found. She removed the contents of the box and shoved it into her mouth, then tucked the box into the pocket of her coat.
 

“Thanth, Wegi-ald,” she said, grinning at him with gigantic, ivory white fangs.

“They’re for adults,” he said. “You may need to grow into them. Honestly, I counted myself lucky to find porcelain fangs at all, but the plastic ones are crap. Just ask Nikki.”

“Doww I feew vihthus,” said Claire. Then she pulled the fangs from her mouth, returned them to the box, and slid the box into her pocket. “I need to work on my enunciation,” she explained.
 

“Wear them in good health,” said Reginald. They continued walking in silence until they reached her front door. She opened it, walked inside, and closed the door.

Reginald, still outside, knocked. When Claire opened the door, she found that he had turned so that his back was facing into the house. He said, “Have you seen my awesome moonwalk?” and began taking steps backward. An invisible wall of force pushed back, making him walk in place.

“Sorry,” said Claire. “Come in.”
 

Unsupported once the spell broke, Reginald fell into the foyer. When he got up, he found that Claire had walked into the kitchen. He closed the front door and walked down the hall to join her. There was an island in the middle of the kitchen, and tall stools stood around the island. Reginald sat in one, his ass spilling over all of its edges. Claire was making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
 

“Do you know that it’s coming up on a year since I first tried to kill you?” he said.
 

“You don’t have it in you to kill anyone,” said Claire. The way she said it, it was as if there was a double-meaning, but Reginald wasn’t catching it. He could read adults well, but kids were hard. Probably because so little of what kids did made rational sense, or possibly because everything they did made much more sense than the things that adults did.
 

“Since I tried to drink your blood, then.”
 

Claire half smiled. “Looking back, now that you’ve had real blood, how bad was the steak I gave you?”
 

“Well,” said Reginald. “It was no Cheesecake Factory turtle cheesecake.”

Claire looked at where Reginald was looking, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s subtle. Would you like me to offer you a piece?” She pulled the door of the refrigerator back open.

“That’d be fantastic if you offered me a piece.”
 

“Would you like a piece?”
 

“That’d be fantastic.” And he patted the place in front of him on the island, licking his lips. Then, after she’d placed a small plate in front of him, laden with two pieces of cheesecake, he asked if her mother was home.

Claire looked at the clock. “Should be soon. She had a thing that ended at ten, just a few miles away.”
 

Reginald watched Claire while he ate his cheesecake, while she ate her sandwich.
 

“What’s up, Claire?”
 

“Hmm?”
 

“You didn’t laugh at Daniel-san on the fencepost or any of my other hilarious jokes. You seem distracted. Old age getting to you?”
 

Claire took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled. “If I ask you a question, you’ll be straight with me, won’t you?”
 

Reginald nodded slowly.

“All this stuff that’s happening on the news. It’s vampires, isn’t it?”
 

Well, he’d promised. “Yes.”
 

Claire shook her head.
 

“You’ve got an order of protection,” said Reginald. “You and your mom both.” But something felt wrong in his throat as he said it. It felt like lying, and then he realized that it was, in a way. The Council was ignoring its simplest mandates. The Council was allowing wanton creation of new vampires, which was the very charge that Reginald had almost been executed for. What were the chances that anyone would obey an order of protection that had been issued by the Deacon they’d just made irrelevant?

“This is it, though, isn’t it?” said Claire.
 

Reginald almost laughed. It was essentially the question he’d come here to ask.
 

“The what?”

“The war.”
 

“The one you predicted?”
 

Claire rolled her eyes. They’d had this conversation before. When Balestro had threatened to destroy all of the world’s vampires, Reginald had revealed his ace-in-the-hole: Claire, whose absentee father turned out to be Altus the incubus. The only other known incubus-human hybrid had been a powerful wizard named Merlin, but Claire, who bluffed her way through the Balestro encounter, maintained that she had no prescience whatsoever.
 

“My dad was a trucker. Not an incubus,” said Claire.
 

“Altus is your father. I’m sorry, kiddo, but it’s true. Balestro knew it was true.”
 

“Then why don’t I
know
anything? Why don’t I have any powers? Why can’t I shoot lightning and give fortunes? I’m just a normal girl! A
sub
-normal girl, who gets picked on because she’s small and poor!”
 

Reginald made a face, ready to protest, but Claire waved it away. Slowly, she got herself under control and then said, “What about you, huh? Anything come of that lightning bolt he hit you with?”
 

“Maybe it was a warning,” said Reginald, shrugging.
 

“You told me afterward that he’d ‘given you something.’”
 

“Maybe he ‘gave me’ a cold,” said Reginald.
 

Claire punched his arm.
 

“Seriously, I don’t know!” said Reginald, feigning injury and rubbing his arm. “If you can be a wizard who doesn’t know her powers, I can be a vampire an angel hit with a lightning bolt who has no idea what he’s received. I don’t feel any different. I don’t have any new powers. At the time, all I had was a headache, and now that’s gone.”
 

“Maybe our secret powers will show up when we both hit puberty,” said Claire.
 

Reginald ate his cheesecake. Claire ate her sandwich. The kitchen was almost too quiet, but Claire’s house was always quieter than it seemed like it should be. The houses on both sides were now vacant, and Claire’s mother was bewitched into quiet submission whenever Reginald was around.
 

When the food was finished, Claire smiled a tight-lipped smile at Reginald and shrugged. The gesture said,
What now?

“I got you another present,” said Reginald. He was wearing a small shoulder bag. He pulled a rectangular package out of it and handed it to Claire. She unwrapped it and gushed.

“
Columbo
on DVD!” she hooted. Reginald couldn’t help but feel her contagious enthusiasm. Neither Reginald nor Claire would have had any use for
Columbo
if he’d never tried to feed on her, but ever since they’d met and Claire had become a kind of surrogate child to Reginald,
Columbo
had been something they shared.
 

Claire slid the first disc into the player and pressed Play.
 

“Claire, I’d like you to try to stay inside after dark from now on, okay?” he said. “Your mom too. Seeing as you’re the daughter of an incubus and all, I won’t try to lie to you…” He made mystical gestures around her head, but she didn’t smile. “… but there’s been a lot of upset at the Council. The upshot is that I don’t know that you can count on that order of protection.”
 

“They won’t kill me,” said Claire. “I’m Merlin.”
 

“Just the same,” said Reginald.
 

Five minutes passed.
 

“You really are, you know,” he said.
 

The intervening five minutes made the comment totally out of place. Claire looked over at him as if he had two heads.
 

“You really are something like Merlin, I mean. Your mother is human. Your father is an incubus. You may not know that you can see the future, but I’ll bet you can.”
 

Claire looked over, then paused the DVD. She studied Reginald and then, quite suddenly, a knowing smile exploded onto her face. Reginald knew he was about to be mocked, but that was okay because she looked genuinely happy.
 

“You came here to ask me something!” she said. “You did, you did!” She swapped her giddy expression for a serious one, then bowed her head reverently and put her hands together as if in prayer. “What can the master assist you with, my son?”
 

“Play the DVD,” said Reginald.
 

“Come on, champ!” she said. “You’re trying to be all cool now because I’ve already told you I can’t see anything, but you came here to ask my advice. Ha! I’m eleven. You guys are hundreds or thousands of years old and all-powerful, and you want
me
to tell you what to do!”