The Falstaff Vampire Files (28 page)

Vi punched in a security code to a keypad, and the door clicked open. We went down a concrete stairway that led to another security door then down-sloping tunnel. Behind that was a modest set of rooms with literally no decoration. Bare pipes overhead and concrete floor. It smelled of animals. I began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Don’t look—” Vi began.

“—in their eyes. I know. Oh, my God.”

Most of the cages were glass boxes occupied by gray blobs of substance with round, red eyes. They were all sizes. A set of tables held cases small enough to hold mice, and a few more for slightly bigger animals. A really big one in the corner held a gray blob that was nearly as large as a human. They had few identifying features, and I didn’t dare examine them too closely for fear of getting hooked. They did not look happy. “What are they?”

“Others in embryo,” Vi said grimly. “They once were mammals of some kind—too small for humans. Dr. Quiller has been trying to treat them, but he admitted he’d had no success. I was the only one who ever got better—maybe because of Sir John’s blood and the onion juice.”

She paused in front of a set of regular wire cages. Only one was occupied. A normal-looking, thin gray cat with orange eyes stared out at us. “He’s a vampire cat,” Vi said. “I just wanted you to see.” She looked around. “Usually there are attendants.”

I looked at my watch. “Can we leave now?”

“In a sec. We’ve got to work fast.” She cast another look around the room. “What the hell,” she said, and snapped the lock off the cage as if it were a toothpick. She reached in and pulled the cat out.

“Here, hold him for a minute.” Vi put the cat in my arms and reached into her coat pocket to pull out her sprayer of onion juice. Then she saw the cat sniffing the pulse points on my wrist and up along my arm with interest. She stopped, reached out and moved the cat’s head away. “No, no. No biting. We’ll find some mice later.”

The cat looked at her steadily and did not return to sniffing my arm.

The lab had five cages filled with Others in various stages of metamorphosis. Vi sprayed onion juice into the air vents of each of the cages and the small Others, who all resembled caterpillars with huge staring eyes, shrieked, and each one vanished with the popping sound that had grown familiar.

She took the cat back from me and slipped him under her jacket, tucking her blouse around him and into her jeans to support him. It made her look somewhat pregnant. An audible purr rose up in the quiet room.

We left immediately, walking upwards this time. The tunnel was deserted, but when we got to the first landing Dr. Quiller suddenly stepped in front of us. I hadn’t seen him approach—he seemed to have simply appeared in our path. Short and upright, he wore the same immaculate tweed suit and huge mustache. He radiated power that was almost visible, like the air trembling on a hot day.

“What have you done?”

“What I had to.” Vi was an inch or so shorter than Quiller, but her iron resolve met his power aura with a palpable feeling of engagement.

“The animal under your jacket is our property. He has to be returned to the lab. We still need to perform experiments to make sure that we have a weapon we can use.”

“No more cats, Dr. Quiller.”

Quiller’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Who are you to tell us what to do and what not to do?”

Vi fixed her eyes on his, and they began to radiate redness like red hot heated metal.

I had to turn away a little from it, but Quiller felt the full impact. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw him stagger, and then fall to his knees. Veins stood out in his neck and forehead as he tried to break the eye contact.

“No!” he screamed. He shuddered all over.

I took a step away from Vi, pierced with terror by the glowing in her eyes.

His eyes still locked on Vi’s, Quiller fell down to lie on the grimy concrete walkway. Vi finally released him from her gaze.

The only sound was Quiller’s labored breathing, and that unearthly purring from the gray cat under Vi’s sweater. It took Vi several breaths to come back to herself. I kept my eyes down on Quiller’s pitiful frame.

“Dr. Quiller.” Vi’s voice was soft, but more sibilant than usual, as if it were coming from beyond her. There was a sort of echoing buzz in her words. “Dr. Quiller, do you hear me?”

“Yes,” he whispered, barely audible.

“Leave the cats alone. We will find a neutral place where you can test my blood. You will never use a cat or a dog, or a mammal, again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because neither of us wants to have the conversation again. If you disobey me, I will send you where you can observe the Others firsthand.”

“No, please.”

“Do you doubt that I can do it?”

“No.”

“Good. Now do you agree to leave the cats and other animals alone?”

“Yes.”

“I will know instantly if you disobey me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If you find another vampire cat, you will let me know, and I will claim it. If you find a cat that has been attacked by the Others, let me know, and I will treat it. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“Then we understand each other.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be able to get home, or can we help you to get to safety before dawn?”

“Help.” His voice was faint.

She helped him up as if he were a sack of feathers. They were close enough in height that she could support him with her arm around his waist and his arm around her shoulder. I held open the doors for them as we took our tortuous way back up to the surface and to the car, where she gently settled him in the back seat. I drove and Quiller whispered directions to an old Victorian on Laguna and Pacific. We helped him up the steps, held his hand while he worked the key in the door. The place was jammed with ornate Victorian furniture, with lacy doilies on every chair and legions of gilded doodads on every flat surface.

We settled him in his ornate bronze coffin on a pedestal in a back bedroom.

“He probably decorated that place back in the 1870s,” Vi commented back in the car.

I drove her home, half expecting to see some kind of vampire police force following us, but none did. The cat popped his head out of her jacket, looked around a little, and then snuggled back in.

“Was the cat on his way to getting like those caterpillars?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was too.”

“How are you going to save him?”

“I already let him drink my blood when I went to the lab to scout it out. I also rubbed him down with onion juice. He hissed when I did it—living cats hate onions, too--I think they’re toxic to them. But this guy licked it off his fur, and now he’s better. I’m going to keep giving it to him and taking it myself, just in case. I think this little guy was a vampire before Quiller got him. Some vampire brought him over and then either got killed or maybe they just dumped him. Even after death some people are irresponsible. If I can stop Quiller, things will be at least a little better for the animals.”

“I’m totally with you on that.” But I wondered what we might have got ourselves in for.

When we reached the house, we both saw.

The Others were back.

Chapter 73

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 29th continued

The Others swarmed around the house
in greater numbers than before. Several broke off from the main swarm and crowded around the car.

“Keep your head down.” Vi said.

“I know, maybe we should run.”

“Walk fast, but be careful. If you fall and cut yourself, they can kill you faster.” Walking from the car to the house seemed to take forever. Vi kept the cat close under her jacket, and finally we got inside. A few followed us in. I gasped to be in the same room with them.

Vi shook her head. “Don’t say a word,” she whispered. “That just makes it worse.” She picked up her onion juice primed plant mister and zapped the creatures floating nearest her. They did their silent shriek and vanished, tearing a hole in the air right in the living room. She cast around for more victims and found that the place was now clear.

“Wait here.” She went down to the basement with her new cat. “There you go,” I heard her say to him. “You can sleep with me in this nice coffin.”

I could hear the purring all the way up the stairs.

From the back yard I heard a hose-squirting sound and the whump of Others being hit and ascending into the odd pink cloud rift in the sky. Vi came to stand beside me.

“Wow.”

Bram and Mina were standing just outside the doorway of the cottage with water cannons. They were both sighting and hitting the Others with great effectiveness. They might have cleared the garden easily if there hadn’t been such a horde out there.

“Vi, do you think that what you did to Quiller—?”

“Brought them back? Maybe. Even if it did I had to rescue that cat.”

“I know.” On the kitchen table I saw one of the garish plastic water cannons, smelling strongly of onion juice. “Look, Mina and Bram must have left this for you. May I?” I picked it up.

“Be my guest.”

I whirled on the Other floating around Vi, spraying the juice full in its face.

A more muted whump sound, and the Other screamed and rushed away to wherever they went. I adjusted the stream from the stream and squirted it several times to dispatch an Other that had been hovering around the ceiling.

Vi unexpectedly hugged me. She was so cold that I started to shiver. She saw and stepped back. “Thank you, Kris. Please thank Bram for me. I’m going out to hunt now. I’ll take this big squirt gun bottle with me.”

“I’ll leave you another bottle of fresh onion juice so you can refill.”

Chapter 74

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 29th continued

Going out Vi’s back door
I walked through swarms of Others, kept my head down until I got to Bram and Mina. Their faces were flushed and damp—with tears, I realized. They were creating clouds of onion spray.

Bram wiped his face with his arm and handed me the water cannon. “Here, take this. I’ve got another loaded inside. Be right back.”

“Get wet dish towels,” I said, “for our eyes.” I stood next to Mina and began firing at Others. They disappeared up into the cloud with regularity, but there were still many swarming Vi’s house, although they had cleared away from my cottage.

“Did you notice?” Mina said. “Bram can see them now.”

“He can?” I turned to look at her and paused while she expertly sprayed one of the creatures who followed my head motion to bob beside her, trying to catch my eye. The Other screamed soundlessly and jetted up into the cloud escape route.

“Yeah. I think I figured out why.”

“Why?”

Mina winked. “Think—what happened last night that was different?”

Before I had time to react, Bram was back with a freshly primed water cannon. The three of us started working together. Mina was right. It was clear from how deftly he was aiming that Bram could see them, all right—and he never seemed to be tempted to look them in the eye.

It took another half hour for the three of us to clear the yard. Then Bram and I went along with Mina back to her apartment. She persuaded us to swing by Hal’s house on the way out. It was just an old house in the dark—no sign of the swarm of Others there.

It felt like a good night’s work. We left Mina at her apartment with a juice-loaded water cannon, ten pounds of onions and a small food processor. A week earlier none of us would have thought of this as armor.

“Suddenly you can see them,” I said to Bram on the drive back to the cottage.

“Mina asked what was different.” He gave me a significant look.

“You mean sex is the answer?”

“Depends on the question, but that’s a pretty good answer,” he said.

I was driving, so I couldn’t hit him on the arm. “Seriously. It seems that sex with someone who can see the Others can communicate that ability.”

“You say those things can feed through window glass without making physical contact. We don’t have enough information to know what it takes to see them. But it’s sure easier to shoot them if you can see them.”

“If we’re very lucky, maybe they’ll just go away.”

“We’ll have to take it one night at a time.”

So we did.

Chapter 75

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 30th

The next evening
Vi came out to meet me with the thin gray cat balanced on her shoulder. His eyes had less orange and more pale green as he regarded me with the same insolence he had shown the night before.

“There’s one cat who’s not afraid of you,” I said.

“I don’t think he’s afraid of much. We went out hunting last night and he stalked a pit bull terrier.” Vi reached up and scratched under the cat’s chin. It stretched its skinny neck out and began a loud, rusty purr.

“That’s not funny.”

A pained look came over Vi’s face. “We don’t kill our victims. Mrs. Battle taught me that only a certain amount of blood and a large helping of life force are necessary to survive. We can harvest a victim off of any Muni bus, and we can make it a pleasant experience for all concerned. He’s adopted me now.”

“Have you thought about names? What about Fang the Wonder Cat?”

Vi petted the cat from head to tail, and it stood on her shoulder and purred louder. “His name is Brutus now.”

“E tu, Brutus.”

“I’ll teach him to be much nicer to his prey. I’m starting a new organization with some of the other vampires in my orientation class. We’re going to call it—Vampires for the Ethical Treatment of Prey.”

I hadn’t seen Vi so happy since—well, since she died.

“I think I’ve figured out why they don’t recruit more older women for the ranks of the vampires,” she said.

“Why?”

“They don’t want their authority challenged.”

“And older women are more likely to do it.” I finished up the thought. “I guess it’s too late now. The vampire establishment is in big trouble.”