Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (65 page)

Reginald shook his head, becoming more certain as he spoke.
 

“We can’t sway the vote unless we tell the vampires of the world, and we can’t tell the vampires of the world without the humans also somehow hearing what we’re saying. No, this has to be handled quietly. We need to take this election from him in a fair fight somehow. He’s got to lose, but we have to make that happen with our hands — with our biggest information bomb — tied behind our backs. We can’t tell people that Timken and Claude are evil. We have to convince them that Charles and Walker are awesome.”
 

Nikki clasped her hand over her mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said. Then she ran into the bathroom.
 

Maurice looked at Reginald. “Or we could kill them,” he said, his fangs popping out.

Reginald laughed. It felt good, having his old strategic mind back and feeling his confidence in his abilities return. “A thousand troops, he has protecting him,” he said. “And he’s always training more. Have you heard about his Young Seditionists group?”
 

Maurice nodded, already conceding the point. Of course he’d heard. Timken hand-picked the best, most high-ability members of each vampire academy’s newly turned graduates and invited them into an elite group called the Young Seditionists. It was considered a huge brand of honor, on par with being tapped for Phi Beta Kappa (appealing to the intellectuals) or the Navy SEALS (appealing to the athletes and warriors). Initiates were given a snazzy uniform and everything.
 

“Why does nobody find it odd that his group still thinks of itself as seditionists?” said Maurice.
 

“It’s just become a brand name,” said Reginald, shrugging to reinforce the point that vampires, like humans, tended to be stupid when making decisions as a group.
 

Nikki returned from the bathroom with a red-stained paper towel in her hand. “It’s bad,” she said. “Now I’m vomiting blood.”
 

So they found themselves back at square one, faced with an impossible task: convincing tens of thousands of vampires to vote for the man they’d collectively deposed and imprisoned, instead of the man who’d saved them from chaos and restored order and calm to the Nation.

They started by telling Karl and the EU Council what they knew. Karl seemed surprisingly nonplussed. The Council was aghast and required some convincing, but that happened quickly once Karl said that he agreed with Reginald’s conclusions. All of the EU Council members were old enough to know about the Annihilist movement, and the more they thought about it, it seemed convenient that all of those “responsible” for the TGV disaster had been killed. It was a little too tidy. They trusted that Maurice was telling the truth about his brother, and Karl had never really been comfortable since the first time he’d seen the Boom Sticks in action. He hadn’t liked the way Timken had seized power, regardless of whether power needed to be seized.
The shock troops. The speech. Climbing onto a chair like a conqueror.
It had all rubbed him the wrong way from the first.
 

“Okay,” said Karl. “So we kill him.”
 

“That’s your solution to everything,” said a Council member named Gregory who was easily the size of Brian Nickerson. Gregory should have been intimidating, but his voice was tiny and feminine and he had a tattoo of Bugs Bunny on his calf that was always visible because Gregory always wore a huge pair of mustard-colored shorts. Gregory was the one who’d told Reginald about tattoos. Apparently tattoos were similar to scars, but not similar enough for the vampire agent to universally save them when a person turned. Gregory had had an “awesome” tattoo on his back of a clockwork woman that had vanished when he’d turned, but he was forever stuck with Bugs. It was as if something inside of him hated him and was playing a cruel joke.
 

“We can’t kill him,” said Reginald, and explained his strategic reasons why they’d never get close.
 

“We can try,” said Karl, who often disbelieved Reginald’s predictions on principle. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Reginald; it was that he believed in free will and felt that Reginald’s analyses contradicted it.
 

“Sure,” said Reginald. “If you want to die.” And he reminded Karl about the Boom Sticks and the armor that all of Timken’s men wore.

Karl pouted, reluctantly deciding that Reginald was right and not liking it at all.

Pent up and needing to vent, Reginald even bored Claire with the dilemma during a few of their almost-nightly Skype sessions. Claire feigned interest as far as an eleven-year old could feign interest in the political machinations of a different species half a world away, which was not much. So while Reginald told her about Charles and Timken and what sounded like a thrilling door-knocking campaign that was in the offing, she amused herself by using her Merlin powers to manipulate both her Skype image and, disturbingly, the contents of Reginald’s hard drive. Her nose elongated. Her mouth widened like the Cheshire cat. She took photos from Reginald’s photo album, manipulated them, and showed them back to him.
 

“Who’s this, Reginald?” she said as a photo appeared on his screen. The photo showed him standing next to the Wolfman.
 

“How are you doing that?” he asked.
 

“What?”
 

“Where do I start? How are you using the computer without touching it? How are you accessing
my
machine? And how are you Photoshopping these images so well? It looks like I’m actually there with him.” Reginald touched the screen as he’d touch a real photo, as if to see if it was real. And as far as a collection of electronic images and light could be real, it was.
 

Claire shrugged as if the questions bored her.
 

“Do you consciously think about each step, or…?”
 

“Who’s this, Reginald?”
 

The new picture showed Nikki and Reginald with SpongeBob SquarePants.
 

“Should we be done? Maybe we’re done for the day.”
 

The picture disappeared and again he found himself looking at Claire. She was waving both hands in surrender. “No, no,” she said. “Okay, fine. I don’t know how I’m doing it. Other than that I’m just
doing
it.”
 

Reginald had watched her abilities develop at a frightening speed. He’d seen kids click with new abilities before; he had a nephew who, after weeks of failing to even stand erect on downhill skis, had one day begun skiing intermediate slopes at high speeds and executing perfect turns. But Claire didn’t just click with her new abilities. She clicked on top of the clicks she’s already clicked. Last week she’d figured out that she could access Reginald’s hard drive, and he’d luckily had time to get all of the sex videos that Nikki had wanted to take safely onto a thumb drive before she’d found them. But then within a few more days, here she was, manipulating images like a pro. Next week she’d be editing random audio into masterpieces.
 

“What do you mean, you’re ‘just doing it’?”
 

“I just think it.” She shrugged. “Like… watch.”
 

Reginald watched the photo of himself next to SpongeBob. In front of his eyes, SpongeBob turned from yellow to blue.
 

“Do
you
know how I might be doing it?” she asked.
 

Reginald shook his head. “This is new ground as far as I can tell. But ultimately all of this —” He tapped the computer, causing his video image to shake. “— is just energy. You’re pushing around electrons.”
 

“And the whole ‘seeing the future’ thing? My knowing about your train crash half a world away?”
 

“There’s a lot we don’t know about energy in the world,” he said, deciding not to bore her by telling her about quantum entanglement and faster-than-light particles that seemed to be moving backward in time.
 

Claire made a resigned little frown, as if she’d gotten tired of talking about it.
 

Watching her, an idea flitted into Reginald’s mind. Then, like one of those quantum particles he’d just been pondering, it vanished, leaving nothing but uncertainty. He had a sensation of a near miss, as if Claire had almost solved a problem for him without even meaning to. But he couldn’t grasp it, and so he told her goodnight and let it go.
 

Over the following night, Reginald and Karl tried to brainstorm ways to assist Charles’s campaign. It felt like wasted time, and Reginald wanted to give up and order a pizza. They compromised by ordering a pizza
while
wasting the time. Then, when the buzzer at the Chateau’s side door buzzed, Karl ran up the stairs before Reginald could, through the hidden door in the back of the Chateau’s Cave, and up through the empty school to the door to the outside. He returned with Reginald’s pizza in one hand and the pizza man’s hand in the other.
 

The pizza man seemed to be an American on exchange. He had long, stringy blonde hair that had been tied back into an untidy ponytail and sported a nervous, impatient expression.
 

“This place seems earthy,” he said to Reginald, looking around with approval. “Do you sprout your own beans down here?”
 

That didn’t make sense to Reginald, but the kid already looked pale and strung out and was jerking his head around like a bird on speed, tapping his foot and slapping his hand rapidly against his leg. Reginald had seen massive blood loss drive people into one of two extremes — sedate and drugged, or a fight-or-flight kind of mania, as the body fought its torpor with adrenaline.
 

Karl offered him a seat next to Reginald.

“You’re keeping him?” said Reginald. “He doesn’t look like he can take any more.”
 

“I have not bitten him yet,” said Karl, still gesturing toward the chair. The kid refused to sit.
 

“Oh. Well, he just seems so keyed up from…”
 

“I haven’t glamoured him yet, either,” Karl said, interrupting him.
 

“So you guys are vampires?” said the pizza man, looking at Karl’s fangs. “That’s cool. Blood comes from the body. There are no additives or preservatives. You can’t get any healthier than blood.”
 

Reginald looked at Karl. Karl looked at the kid’s neck.
 

“You could have fed outside,” said Reginald, wanting to chastise Karl but unable since the Chateau was, essentially, his own house.
 

“My dog is a vegan,” said the kid.
 

Reginald didn’t know how to reply to that. So he offered the kid a drink.
 

“Okay,” said the kid.

“We have pop, wine, water…”
 

“Whatever’s healthiest,” the kid interrupted him.
 

Karl brushed a few loose hairs off of the pizza man’s neck, moved his face closer, and inhaled slowly.
 

“… gasoline…” Reginald continued.

“Whatever’s healthiest.”
 

That’s when Karl bit him. Blood welled under his lower lip, then spilled to the kid’s clavicle. The sight of Karl feeding made Reginald want to feed as well. So he leaned forward on the pizza man’s other side, reached over his shoulder, and removed two pieces of pizza from the box. Then he sandwiched them cheese-to-cheese and began to devour the whole works like a sandwich.
 

It was as if the kid didn’t realize someone had bitten his neck. His eyes followed Reginald, whose fangs were out and making holes in the pizza sandwich like a cashier punching a Sub Club card.
 

“I don’t think it’s healthy for a vampire to eat pizza,” the kid scolded.
 

Reginald dipped the tip of his pizza sandwich in the pool of blood that had formed in the hollow at the kid’s clavicle, then held the red-tipped pizza up in demonstration before taking a bite.

“My dog is a vegan,” the kid repeated while Karl made sucking noises at his neck that sounded like someone who’s reached the bottom of a cup with a straw.

The fact that Karl had brought the kid down seemed to indicate that Karl wanted to eat while strategizing as Reginald had planned to do with his pizza, but the kid had large bug eyes that wouldn’t stop staring at him, seeming to judge him for his unhealthy vampire habits. They were like the eyes on a magical painting. They seemed to follow him around the room. He thought about glamouring the kid to make him stop, but he didn’t want to look into those eyes. He wanted to let Karl deal with it. He was the one who’d made the mess.
 

Because Reginald refused to talk shop with the kid watching him, Karl rolled his own eyes in frustration, took a final drink, and led the kid upstairs. When he returned, he reported that he’d glamoured the kid but that the kid had initially refused to leave because he seemed to suspect that Karl might have weed. So Karl had pulled a handful of grass from the lawn and had handed it to the kid, who’d run off with it tucked in his palm like a secret.
 

“Remind me why we want to stop Maurice’s brother from killing all of the humans?” Karl said as he descended the large stone staircase.
 

Then they got down to business, but the arrival of a pizza hadn’t made the effort feel any less futile. The election was in less than two weeks and sentiment had shifted even more firmly toward Timken. Informal Fangbook polls showed that Timken commanded fifty-eight percent of the vote and that Charles’s percentage had dropped to nineteen. Maurice was holding firm at five percent. The only reason he hadn’t formally removed himself from the ballot was a conviction that doing so would swing the entirety of that five percent to Timken, no matter what he told his supporters in his concession statement. If the polls were exact predictors, which they weren’t, that left eighteen percent undecided. Even in the best-case scenario, eighteen percent undecided plus nineteen percent for Charles was still less than two-thirds of what Timken commanded.