Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (60 page)

“I seem to be able to influence blood that’s close to mine,” he said.
 

“That’s splitting hairs.”
 

“Maybe. But I have to remind myself, ever since that morning we got out of The Asbury, that hearing other vampires’ thoughts is trespassing. It doesn’t feel that way, though. It feels like I’m talking to my own blood. That’s the way it seems to me, like I’m telling my own arm to do something, or seeing something through my own eyes. Especially when it happens with you and Maurice. He made me and I made you. He’s forever in me and I’m forever in you.”

Nikki sniggered.
 

“Grow up.”
 

“I’m not being immature,” she said. “I’m being horny.”
 

Reginald stopped. His feet squished in mud. In the distance, the wreck of the TGV was still visible. Helicopters and rescue squads had arrived and the entire site was awash in light. The rescuers would find nothing but hamburger and ash, and then higher authorities would intervene and the official version would report that it had been a freak accident that had killed one hundred percent of its passengers. Perhaps a cow had broken through the fence and stumbled onto the track.
 

“How can you be horny?” he said.

Reginald was wearing a backpack. He’d found it just outside the train and had filled it with candy bars and snack foods a few cars further down, where they’d discovered an ejected snack cart. In his hand and in his cheeks was a Chunky bar.
 

“How can
you
be hungry?” she countered.
 

“It’s my coping mechanism,” he said.
 

Nikki gave him a small shrug.

Reginald nodded, conceding a point made, and resumed walking.
 

A half hour later, they found a country road and waited for a car to pass. Eventually one did, but it refused to stop when they waved at it. A few minutes later, another car approached, and again they waved, and again the car drove on. Nikki was more aggressive when the next pair of headlights appeared, standing halfway into the lane. The car swerved wide and kept going.
 

So as the next car approached, Reginald laid down in the middle of the road. Nikki danced around above him, waving and trying to look like the distraught relative of an unfortunate hit-and-run. This time the car did stop, but not in time. The driver was talking on a cell phone and laid on the brakes just ten feet from Reginald. Nikki dove out of the way and Reginald, seeing the writing on the wall, tried to stand. But a half-second later, the car ran him over and became briefly airborne as if it had struck a giant speed bump.
 

Reginald made a formidable obstacle. The car flew fifteen feet and barrel-rolled onto its side before coming to a stop amidst much sparking and grinding of metal. Reginald felt his face crushed by the car’s left front tire and felt his genitals pulverized by the left rear. What the other tires did was irrelevant by comparison; before it rolled, the car dragged him several dozen feet and rubbed him against the road like cheese across a cheese grater.
 

Cracking his neck, Reginald stood. His wounds healed, leaving his clothing tattered and shredded for the second time in two hours. The back was especially bad. Nikki actually laughed when he said his back was cold, then reported that everything was visible from his shoulders to his ass to his heels.
 

Reginald, fifty percent naked, walked over to the car. It was one of those tiny, boxy European jobs. The driver was a young man with long, stringy blonde hair. He was wearing a giant rainbow Rastafarian hat over his fried mane. The car reeked of marijuana through its broken windows.
 

Nikki was looking down into the car, her back arched, her palms on her knees. The car’s airbag had gone off and the kid had been wearing his seatbelt. Good for him.
 

The kid groaned. Then he looked up.
 

“My bad,” said Reginald. “I didn’t think you’d hit me.”
 

“Did I hit you, dude?” the kid croaked. He sounded American. He looked at the two vampires, seemingly trying to decide if he was dreaming.
 

“Yeah. I don’t recommend it.”
 

“Dude, I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s
my
bad.”

“It’s cool, dude.”
 

“Dude.”
 

Nikki looked from the kid to Reginald and rolled her eyes.
 

The kid, sideways in the car with the airbag deflating in his face, covered in cubes of safety glass, his scalp bleeding, a joint actually still in the corner of his mouth, held up a fist.
 

“Respect bump,” he said.
 

Reginald bumped his fist.
 

Nikki reached down and began prodding at the kid, pushing him randomly. The touch made him laugh as if he were ticklish or possibly just really high. Like a pothead doughboy.
 

“Are you hurt?”
 

“I think I’m cool.”
 

“Hang on.”
 

Nikki walked to the rear of the car and picked it up by its trunk. Then she rotated it and set it back down on its tires. None were flat.
 

“Dude,” said the kid. “Did you just pick up my car?”
 

Nikki looked at Reginald. Reginald stepped forward and prepared to glamour the kid, but then the kid in the car said, “Are you vampires, dude?”
 

Reginald shrugged at Nikki. Then he looked through the car’s window and said, “Yeah.”
 

Nikki made violent gestures at Reginald.
 

“That’s cool,” said the kid, digging a lighter from his pocket to re-light the joint. “You want a ride?”
 

So they rode. The kid’s name turned out to be Snick, which Reginald decided might not be his birth name. He drove the entire way while toking up and singing Credence Clearwater Revival songs, then dropped them off at a train station. Reginald thanked him for the ride. Snick thanked them for not biting him and then offered up another fist bump. Reginald gave it. Nikki rolled her eyes.
 

Moving from rail to rail and glamouring whoever they needed in order to secure free passage, they made their way back to Differdange, finally stumbling through the door to the giant stone staircase just before sunrise. They found Maurice waiting in the cathedral room, pretending to read. When Maurice saw them, Reginald immediately found himself squeezed in a bone-crushing hug. Maurice picked them both up off of the floor. Reginald heard a rib crack, then and asked Maurice to put them down.
 

“You took the long way, I take it?” he said.
 

“We walked,” said Reginald.
 

He didn’t offer more. He caught a glimpse of Maurice’s thoughts and knew that he’d followed the tracks all the way back to Rheims, where he’d caught a local train to take him the rest of the way. Reginald and Nikki hadn’t done the same. Reginald couldn’t run that far that fast, but Nikki could, even with Reginald on her back — but Reginald had wanted to spend time putting one foot in front of the other, letting his mind’s wheels turn. He was still coming to rediscover his own head. He had to find the mental groove that had gotten so rusty over the past few months.
 

Maurice stepped back and cocked his hands on his narrow hips. His left hand brushed the hilt of his sword, which was safely back in its scabbard after being broken during their escape from the Asbury club. He’d had it repaired by a metalsmith soon after arriving, and Reginald had subsequently expressed astonishment that metalsmiths still existed.
 

“Well,” said Maurice.
 

“The derailment was intentional,” said Reginald.
 

“Yes.”
 

“And I’m related to the vampire who did it.”
 

Maurice nodded, his eyes finding the corner of the room. He sighed.
 

“Yes. I saw him. His name is Claude Toussant. He’s my brother. My literal big brother. We were turned together, but haven’t spoken for hundreds of years. I wanted to say hello using my teeth when I saw him on the train, but he was with a group. It just seemed much smarter to head back and meet you back here.”
 

Reginald said nothing. He could tell Maurice later about the impulse he’d delivered into his mind. This didn’t feel like the time.
 

Maurice sat heavily in an overstuffed chair. His sword, even cocked back, got in the way, so he unbuckled it and laid it beside him. Reginald waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

“Where is Karl?” Reginald asked.

“Bed. The train thing was a kind of assassination. Karl was a target.”
 

Reginald nodded. He knew.

“We think that the Romanian Deacon is dead. It’s hard to tell through the human bullshit. They’ll probably blame this on terrorism, but they know. They know that vampires caused it, and they know that a team of vampires walked through the wreckage and methodically killed all of the survivors. They’ll be livid. Pitchforks and torches livid. Because we never got a chance to talk, they won’t know we were on board, and that the Romanian Council may have lost its Deacon. They’ll only see the cost in human life, which was substantial.”
 

Nikki’s eyes were in the corners of their sockets. “Wait,” she said. “How was the Romanian guy coming from Luxembourg City?”
 

Maurice’s head fell. He put his face in his palms.
 

“That’s right; you don’t know,” he said as if it had just occurred to him. “
Three
trains were derailed tonight. All at about the same time. All three of the trains were headed into Paris for the summit. And we think more. Maybe derailments, but maybe other things. It’s all a fog.”
 

“
Three
trains?” said Nikki.

“
Maybe
other things?” said Reginald.
 

“Remember 9-11? How long it took for the authorities to sort through it all and determine that there were only four planes involved, instead of like a dozen that were reported at one time or another?”
 

Reginald remembered. Maurice had probably slept through the September 11, 2001 attacks, but Reginald had still been human at the time and quite vividly remembered watching it all unfold live. And Maurice was right; new reports had come in the whole time about additional planes, about bombs, about men on the ground. There was even a term for it, Reginald remembered:
The fog of war.
 

Which meant, little as Reginald wanted to admit it, that the opening shots of a war had now been fired.

“What else?” said Reginald.
 

Maurice rubbed his head. “I’m very tired.”
 

S
KYPE

MAURICE WENT TO BED. NIKKI washed up and did the same, giving Reginald a peck on the cheek before retiring. Reginald took her hand and held it for a few extra seconds, then gave her a grim smile and wished her goodnight, never having quite made the adjustment to “good day” or something more literal.
 

Then he sat with a laptop on his legs and settled in with cup of blood and coffee, knowing that he’d be up all day.
 

Slowly, a very large and very troubling story began to emerge. What he’d at first taken as a random act of terrorism by an angry vampire fringe group began to look more and more like a widespread, organized attempt to consolidate and seize power. What had at first seemed like a strike against the human population in the spirit of “only human” now looked like something that had been masterminded and carefully coordinated. Maurice’s mention of September 11 clanged in Reginald’s mind. Reginald remembered how he’d felt back then, human and vulnerable, as he’d heard about the first plane striking the first tower. When they’d started saying that it might be terrorism, he’d been afraid. If terrorists could turn a plane into a weapon, what could be more terrifying than that? But soon after he’d gotten his answer: terrorists enacting a well-thought-out plan to turn
many
planes into
many
weapons. He could almost have gotten his head past the act of one small group of crazies, but it was much harder to wrap his mind around a group that had planned, and planned, and planned. It hadn’t been done in the heat of the moment. It had taken years of hatred and premeditation and… and
evil
. It had sent a chill up his spine. It had changed the way he saw the world around him. Innocence was gone in an instant.
 

This felt that way. And even though Reginald was far less vulnerable as a vampire, he could still be killed. His friends could still be killed. And those humans? How many had died overnight? Reginald didn’t know the capacity of a TGV train off the top of his head and refused to look it up because he knew it would only depress him, especially since he’d have to multiply it by three to find the grand total. What else was a group that evil capable of? What would they do next? Since the Ring of Fire, the world had become a very different place. A warning shot had been fired across the bow of vampirekind, and many vampires had taken that shot very, very seriously. Some had done as he and Maurice had, looking for new ways for the species to evolve. Others believed what Maurice’s brother seemed to believe — that the only way to save all of their skins was to wipe out as many humans as possible, and to do whatever was necessary to disrupt plans to restore peace. After all, what was a summit but a wrench in the plans of the radical faction? The killing and turning had to continue. You couldn’t have softies like Karl Stromm and the late Romanian Deacon meeting with human leaders to talk about peace. Let the war rage. Vampires would come out on top, right?
 

A ringing noise came from the laptop and a notification appeared in the corner of the screen:

INCOMING CALL FROM