Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (57 page)

Now, out in the setting sun, it made him nervous to be so far from his comfort zone. The Chateau had become his world. The real world — the one outside — offered nothing but adversity and pain.

Once in Luxembourg City, they transferred to the TGV and closed their blinds. Nikki and Maurice tried to sleep. Reginald found the snack stand and bought Doritos.

Shortly after leaving the station, night on the high-speed train blessedly fell. All four vampires stripped off their extra UV-proof gear and stowed it in their luggage with a sigh. Only after the mortal danger of the sun was safely below the horizon did everyone feel comfortable enough to settle in, so after tucking her hoodie away, Nikki pulled out her book and began reading slowly, at a languishing human pace. The cover showed a grizzled cowboy riding a unicorn and firing a gun in a puff of pink smoke.
 

“That looks like the stupidest book ever,” said Reginald, who was agitated from the day’s events and felt like picking a fight.

“It is. But it’s better than yours,” said Nikki.
 

Reginald, who liked reading when he throttled down his speed and took his time, had forgotten to bring a book. So, in order to not lose the argument, he pulled a Swiss home decor magazine from the rack and pretended to be enthralled by it. But after ten minutes, he sighed, conceded defeat, and put it back. Then he returned to his seat, opened the blind, and stared out the window into the dark French night.
 

Darkness had completely fallen outside. Even the light of the moon left little for the human passengers to see, but Reginald, with his vampire eyes, was able to see everything that they were passing. The train zipped along at 320 kph (Nikki, with her allergic reaction to the metric system, had asked for the mph conversion and Reginald had refused on principle) so everything next to the train was blurred, but farther out, he could see barns and fences and a few animals that had been left out late.
 

Trees. Sheds. Houses. Roads.
 

Reginald thought of how far he was from home — his
real
home, back in the States — and wondered if he’d ever see it again. He wondered if his house had been ransacked by Charles and his minions. He wondered if his old company had been able to move on and stay in business after the murders, and if it had been a second set of policemen (Reginald himself had glamoured the first set) who had first found the blood and carnage or if it had been an office worker who’d made that grizzly discovery. It might even have been a custodian. Reginald could imagine the custodian arriving, taking one look around at the blood-covered walls and the body parts, and then rolling his eyes and complaining that white-collar people were total slobs. Berger was dead. Most of the sales staff was dead — except for Walker, who had been responsible for at least a handful of the deaths himself. Most of accounting was dead. Who would run the place? Who would ever want to work in that building again, assuming they could get all of the blood out of the carpet?
 

Reginald watched France scream by the window.
 

He missed his couch. He missed his television. He missed sitting around doing nothing because it was all there was to life, as opposed to the way he’d been sitting around doing nothing recently in order to avoid reality. He missed being around humans, who were just as evil as vampires but who he could at least take comfort in knowing would die someday. He missed being a worthless fat guy, instead of the most important fat guy in the world. He missed the days when nobody expected anything of him.
 

He missed Claire.
 

He’d tried to call her before they’d left. He’d called late enough that she should have been home from school, but Reginald didn’t know how normal Claire’s life was these days. Her old routine was to attend school during normal hours, then to go to an afterschool program at a church down the street until late, because her mother worked late. But then her mother’s schedule had changed, and Claire had gone to the church less often. That had been back before Victoria had been attacked by vampires and had become a kind of invalid. So was Claire still going to the afterschool program? Was she even still going to
school?
She and Victoria might have bunkered down, now only leaving the house for groceries during the brightest of afternoons. Given the increased frequency of vampire attacks — particularly in run-down neighborhoods like Claire’s — Reginald sort of doubted the schools were paying much attention to who attended and who didn’t anyway. Roll call these days probably accepted replies of, “Oh, he’s dead” as normal. Principals these days probably sat in their offices with shotguns, unshaven and nursing a cup of brandy-spiked coffee, unsure what monsters they should be afraid of. Life was no longer what it used to be.
 

When Reginald had tried to call, the phone had rung and rung. Claire’s family didn’t own a cell phone; their phone system consisted of an ivory cordless and a similarly ivory wall unit with a cord so stretched out that it brushed the floor. They did have an answering machine. For the longest time, the voice on the machine was Victoria, but a week ago it had changed, and now it was Claire. Reginald wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It meant that Claire was at least alive, and the fact that she’d thought to do something as trivial as re-record the answering machine message said several encouraging things in itself. Reginald sometimes called just to listen to the message, just to hear that ten-second snippet. He found himself trying to read her entire life from that brief segment of recorded voice. Didn’t she sound more mature? Didn’t she sound almost happy, or at least chipper? That was good, right? The message didn’t sound defeated or beaten up. He listened to it the way the CIA watched video messages from terrorists.
Does the tone of this message sound like a person whose mother died recently?
he asked himself. He decided that it didn’t, aware of just how ridiculous his assumption was. Still, he listened and he decided — if only to keep himself sane — that Claire was fine and that Victoria had hung on as well. She’d been not much more than a drained and bloody rag the last time Reginald had seen her in the alleyway, so it was good to hear — to believe — that she was okay.
 

Hi, you’ve reached the Hutchins Household.
 

And Reginald thought,
It’s good to hear that she’s healthy.
 

We’re not able to answer the phone right now…

And Reginald thought,
It sounds like she understands that Nikki, Maurice and I can’t help what we are.

… but if you leave us a message…

And Reginald thought,
Her mother is doing better and she’s happy!

… we’ll call you back as soon as we can.
 

And Reginald had left a message, the same as he had many other times:
This is Uncle Reginald. I just wanted to check on you. I’d love to catch up. Here’s how you can call me for free, or I’m always on Skype.

Click.
 

And still Claire hadn’t called, but it was okay. Reginald could hear the lack of anger in her answering machine message and knew that everything was going to be okay.
 

Nikki didn’t ask Reginald about Claire anymore. At first, she’d been as neurotic as Reginald had. They’d tried to pick Claire up before fleeing to Europe, but she hadn’t come out of her house. They’d tried to call — frequently at first, then less and less often as time went on. Reginald still called several times a week, but when the answering machine message changed, Nikki stopped trying. To Reginald, the message change meant that Claire was alive and well. To Nikki, it meant that Claire had gotten every one of their messages and was choosing to ignore them.
 

Outside the window, the world whipped by. Reginald wondered if Maurice could run as fast as this train. He decided that the answer was yes, but also decided that even Maurice, who was currently asleep two seats down, appreciated the value of sitting back and letting someone else do the work for a change.
 

With that thought, before he could stop it, Reginald’s thoughts flitted into Maurice’s mind. Maurice’s eyelid fluttered, and Reginald forced himself to pull back. Maurice and Reginald, as maker and progeny, would always share the bond of blood. But during their escape from the Council, Reginald had discovered that not only could he read vampires he was related to, but that he could, to some degree, control them as well. Afterward, when Reginald told Nikki and Maurice that he had been sending them what they’d thought were their own inspirations to move, both had been shocked. Maurice had been paranoid ever since. Out of respect, Reginald had tried to stay out of his mind, but it wasn’t easy. They were like the closest of brothers. When Maurice was hungry, Reginald felt it. When Maurice was happy, Reginald’s mood lifted. Secrets were hard to keep. And lately, something else had started to happen, something he hadn’t shared with Maurice. He could now sometimes see pictures from Maurice’s mind. He could almost see through Maurice’s eyes. It was no longer just about telepathy and control. The feeling was closer to slipping on a Maurice suit — or would be, if Reginald indulged it, which he didn’t.

But when he did — when he slipped into Maurice’s blood, before he caught himself — he could get a sense of Maurice’s entire bloodline. There were amazing and dreadful vampires in Maurice’s family history. Maurice had always said that it was common to feel a connection (Nikki still sometimes dealt with out-of-control thirst that Maurice attributed to ties along her bloodline; she was, in essence, feeling the emotions of others) but this was different. It was like logging in to a network. Once he’d tuned in to Maurice, he gained access to those others. And he suspected — but had never tested — that if he were to step fully into Maurice’s mind, he’d feel the relations closest to Maurice as being as mentally close as Maurice himself felt them. And then Reginald might be able to step into
their
minds from Maurice’s, and thus hopscotch up and down vast bloodlines, seeing the thoughts and sights of vampires worlds distant without ever leaving his chair. He could transcend great distances. He might even be able to experience movement back and forth through time.

Reginald looked one seat closer, at Nikki. Her book was open on her lap, but her eyes were closed. She really was beautiful. He felt a sudden sense of attraction, looking at her now, that he realized he may never have fully felt before. He’d been traumatized by life and by Walker and by his newfound vampirism when they’d met. Shortly thereafter, he’d been on trial for his life. Nikki had come with him when the Balestro and Ring of Fire affairs had occurred, and they’d co-habitated on and off throughout the disintegration of the Vampire Nation and the crumbling of the Council. Life since becoming a vampire had, for Reginald, been one long string of perilous situations, most of which made him feel inadequate and unprepared. Nikki had been by his side the whole time, but there had always been an emotional wall between them — despair in the face of defeat, sarcasm in the face of success. Had he ever had the quintessentially
human
experience of looking at Nikki and simply being attracted to her… of wanting her in a way that was divorced from the simple, factual truth of her availability at his side? He wasn’t sure. Guys like Reginald didn’t look at women like Nikki and hope to be with them. They
wanted
women like Nikki, sure — but
hope?
Hope implied that trying might lead to success. Hope was a light at the end of the tunnel. But it hadn’t been that way with Nikki. She’d simply been there by his side from the beginning, before he’d had a chance to want or to hope. That easiness had leapfrogged him right past the stage of pining. Really, he thought now, it had kept him from appreciating her. It had kept him from being as aghast as he should be that she was with him at all.
 

Because he was her maker, he could see in Nikki’s mind, too.
 

Sitting in the train, he did.
 

Reginald closed his eyes. He felt the vibration of the train underneath him. His head thrummed against the headrest. The world became a dull red as his eyes saw the insides of his eyelids in the train’s interior lights, but then he gave a push and it was as if someone had turned off the lights. The vibration was gone, too. Reginald felt himself floating down a tunnel. Only he wasn’t Reginald; he was Reginald’s spirit, or ghost, or consciousness. He didn’t feel clumsy or awkward.
 

He found Nikki, felt her blood. It wasn’t like seeing her, but he
could
see; there was a green and sun-lit landscape he’d encountered before when his mind had touched Nikki — something she knew, or missed, or that represented a world she’d never see again in reality now that she’d given herself to the night.

He could feel himself slipping into her, putting her on like a glove. But it wasn’t an intrusion; she felt his presence and he felt her sensing his presence, and she invited him in. The morose self-pity of the past months had fallen away. Reginald felt light. Something about looking over at her with his eyes open; something in his head had clicked and he’d realized who he was and where he was without pondering the baggage of how he’d gotten here. Right now, he was Reginald Baskin; he was a vampire; he was perhaps the most mentally advanced vampire in centuries and very important to the species’s survival; he had a mission that he could handle; he was with a beautiful young vampire who would be beautiful forever.
 

Nikki’s thoughts colored yellow, then pink. The pink surrounded him like a caress. He felt a smile — though in here, neither of them had lips. He felt a sense of pleasure. He wasn’t sure if it was his own. He sensed a halfhearted rebuke, a playful chastising of Reginald’s mind for invading hers. Then her thoughts wrapped him and he felt her all around him. A series of rebus images appeared in front of him, each only for a fraction of a second, speeding at him and each leaving a mental imprint. He was seeing her mood, her impressions, her mental landscape, her feelings and desires: blood, a flower opening in a time-lapse video, lips on the skin of a long, soft neck, fangs descending, a deep, warm breath, her lips, a hand on a naked breast, a trickle of blood welling in the hollow beneath a clavicle, a tongue, an embrace. Reginald felt his own thoughts and images flowing out into the pool of hers, swirling and mixing. The thoughts touched and combined, shifted, changed shape. The blood became his blood. Became her blood. The warm breath was hers, on his neck. The hand was his and the naked breast was hers.