Charming (23 page)

It’s an unfortunate complication, but audio recordings of Christian prayers and rites don’t have any impact on undead beings. There are complex doctrinal reasons for this, but it really boils down to belief. Most Christians believe that the power of prayer comes from establishing an active, living connection with God. Ask most Christians if an evil man could use a tape recording of a holy man to banish evil spirits, and for most the instinctive, primal response will be
no!
In fact, this is where the Holy Spirit comes into play in the Christian religion. The Bible itself says that the devil can quote Scripture—it is the presence of the Holy Spirit that makes the word of God
true and alive. And a recording is a soulless thing. Don’t get me wrong, someone listening to the recording with humility and honesty and reverence might get something out of it, but vampires aren’t that kind of audience.

With Buddhist recordings, however, there is a kind of theological loophole for sound-based holy weapons.

Buddhists believe that the sounds of their chants are sacred in themselves, whether you believe in them or know what they mean or not. If a serial killer repeats Buddhist chants while dismembering an innocent victim with a hacksaw, Buddhists believe that the serial killer’s soul will be marginally improved on some level even if the chants aren’t affecting his or her actions in a material, tangible way at that very moment. The chants can’t be desecrated, and they aren’t contingent upon intent.

I’m intellectually OK with this idea, but I don’t really believe it, any more than I believe that eating beef is bad for my karma. Fortunately I don’t have to believe it, because all over the globe thousands of Buddhists are reciting the actual chants at any given moment. That—I don’t know, call it
psychic resonance
—drives into a vampire’s ears like carpentry nails. The effect won’t kill vampires, but it will cause pain and distraction and lack of focus, and cover up a lot of background noise.

Short version: if you don’t want vampires overhearing you, play Buddhist meditation CDs.

Taoist incense works the same way on a vampire’s sense of smell, by the way, but I didn’t have any on hand, and it’s important to not just order sacred incense off the Internet. Taoists believe that the smoke of ceremonial incense is imbued with the holiness of the temple that a priest blessed the incense in, but they also believe that the yin energy of incense that is improperly dedicated will attract hungry spirits.

“Friendly-looking place,” Choo commented, gazing at the club.

“There are a lot of cars parked here for a place that doesn’t open until after eight,” Sig observed. There were ten vehicles of varying quality, sports cars and sedans and beat-up pickup trucks and a tan panel van with dark-tinted windows.

“It’s the crows I don’t like,” I murmured, staring at the lights where dozens of the black birds were hunched.

Molly looked over her seat at me inquiringly.

“Carrion birds,” I explained.

“How much business could a place like this do?” Molly wondered.

“We’re not in a big city, we’re in the Bible Belt,” I said. “There’s a certain kind of strip club customer that likes out-of-the-way anonymous places. And certain kinds of strip clubs that don’t like to do lots of public advertising.”

“You can call me Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty,” Choo said for no apparent reason.

“I’ll bet lots of lonely single men come here by themselves and don’t use their real names or tell anyone where they’re going,” Sig reflected.

“And that storage building over there would be a great place to hide vehicles or bodies if things got out of hand,” I agreed. “For a vampire, this place would make one hell of a Venus flytrap. Call it a Venus guy trap.”

“So how do we want to do this thing?” Choo asked impatiently.

He was asking Sig, so I stayed quiet even though the wolf didn’t like sitting in a metal box. It wasn’t the right time to be stationary or cut off from the air currents that would warn me of approaching enemies. But groups can’t have more than one leader in a dangerous situation, and Sig knew these people and what they could handle a lot better than I did, so I waited.

“We have a couple of hours of sunlight left,” Sig mused. “Let John and me do our things while we scout around.”

Nobody had a problem with that.

There were no visible security cameras, and all the windows in the strip club were covered, so I walked around freely. We were definitely in the middle of vampire central. The parking lot held over half a dozen different vampire scents, though I didn’t smell Anne Marie or her perfume anywhere. The panel van was empty.

With the all-too-familiar scents came a rush of adrenaline and anger that washed away the last of my reluctance, the wolf recognizing its ancestral enemy. There was a reason the parking lot wasn’t concrete. People had died here, and when they had, the vampires had just dumped more gravel to cover the bloodstains. There were probably bags of the stuff in that storage silo along with God knew what else.

I dug my hand deep into one of the patches where the smell of death was particularly strong and came up with a handful of gravel. One of the small rocks had an edge that was stained red.

The world shouldn’t be like this.

When we reconvened in the van I spoke grimly and tersely. “I smell eight vampires. Seven males and one female. But I don’t smell Anne Marie.”

“The head vampire is named Ivan,” Sig added. “But he’s not Russian, he’s French.”

More ghost gossip?

“Wait,” Molly said. “We know Anne Marie is the head of her group, but she’s not in charge here? And John can’t smell her? Why is her phone here?”

“We don’t know it is her phone,” Choo pointed out. “All we know is Anne Marie gave a number to some vampire wannabe in an e-mail, and the phone that number belongs to is here.”

“That’s not all we know. Parth says that the same phone was used to call Steve Ellison a few times a couple of months ago,” Sig corrected.

“But we’re pretty sure Anne Marie didn’t desert Ellison’s group until two weeks ago.” I wasn’t really confused, I was evaluating the information. “If they communicated by phone, why would it only have been a few times in a specific period with a phone that’s still active? And why wouldn’t Anne Marie have ditched that phone like she did all the others?”

“Maybe this Ivan also broke off from Steve Ellison’s group, but he did it earlier?” Molly asked. “Maybe he sort of inspired Anne Marie?”

“No, Ivan has been a hive master for a long time,” Sig said with certainty. “There are ghosts around that have been here for years.”

“Do you know anything else about this Ivan that might be useful?” I asked her directly. Never mind how she knew it.

“He’s arrogant,” Sig said. “And old. He likes people to know who he is before he kills them. He likes people to take that with them when they die.”

“He’s got himself a credit record and legal ID and all that mess too,” Choo said thoughtfully. “Or the human running all this is his bitch. You don’t just go and get yourself a liquor license.”

Sig was looking at me. “This is like Ellison’s house all over again. Things just don’t add up.”

“Maybe this Ivan’s a middleman,” Molly speculated. “Maybe he’s like a vampire broker, or Anne Marie’s mentor.”

Vampires don’t have mentors. They have masters. There is no in-between, not even in Between.

“Why don’t we ask him?” Sig wondered.

So we did.

We didn’t try to hide what we were. Sig, Molly, and I went up to the front doors, and Sig and I both had swords slung over our shoulders in back sheaths, and firearms at our sides. Molly was wearing an overcoat over the cross draped over her chest, but if she was as powerful as Sig said, vampires would have trouble even sighting a gun on her from a distance. She was carrying Sig’s spear like a walking stick in one hand and a gym bag full of stakes and holy water in the other.

Andro moved to the side of the door holding a riot shotgun with the bow of a crossbow mounted on the barrel, the pull lever anchored on the shotgun stock. It was a nice weapon, if a little unwieldy-looking. The right kind of ammo could cover a wide range and slow a fast-moving vampire down. The wooden bolt fired from the crossbow mount would finish the vampire off.

Choo drove away in the van. He didn’t like it, but his specialty was killing things from a healthy distance, and if we wanted answers from vampires, we were going to have to get in close. In that regard Choo’s absence was a greater threat than his presence would have been. As long as someone else knew that we were in there, the vampires would be far less likely to act without talking first.

The double doors of the strip club were wooden. Since I healed the fastest and had the best sense of smell and the least developed sense of self-preservation, I knocked on one of them from the side.

A thin but taut man with long brown hair and a sketchy beard cracked the left of the double doors open immediately. The Buddhist CD chants must have made the vampire hive sit up and take notice. He was human and dressed like a carny, but he was clean, and his Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt and jeans had been washed recently before being pulled on over a Kevlar vest. He was also wearing aftershave, and it smelled expensive.
There was a human hiding on either side of the doors, presumably armed. Both of them were women. They were all scared and covered in vampire stink.

“We need to talk to your owner,” I told him.

“You mean the club’s owner,” the man challenged.

I gave him a flat stare. “I know what I said.”

These people had knowingly helped monsters treat other humans like livestock, and I could tell from the way his pupils had adjusted to the daylight coming through the door that he wasn’t hypnotized. I didn’t particularly want to kill him, but I also didn’t want to let him live.

“Opening hours start at eight.” The man made to close the door and I stopped it with a foot.

“Vampires, vampires, vampires,” I said. “Now do you want us to wait out here in the sunlight or inside where Ivan can come at us if he wants to?”

The man hesitated.

“We’re not waiting until sundown,” I informed him. “You close this door and we’ll leave, but you won’t know who we are or when we’re coming back. You think Ivan is going to be happy about that?”

It had been a while since the door greeter had made a decision by himself. “Come in.”

I heard the people hidden on the sides moving to cover us, and I saw the tip of a double-barreled shotgun on the left moving around the edge of the door. Again, knights are trained to react to threats without hesitation, and it was the day of a full moon, and I reached out and pushed the tip of the shotgun away immediately. This might have been a mistake, since the odds of their weapons’ having silver ammunition were very low and they probably just wanted to cover us, but I never thought it out that far.

These people weren’t trained. The brunette who was holding the shotgun panicked and discharged both barrels as soon as the shotgun began to move. This caused a problem because the door greeter was stepping back and drawing a 9 millimeter ArmaLite from behind. The brunette wound up blowing a chunk of his right shoulder and lower throat away.

I yanked my would-be assailant forward by the shotgun barrel I was still holding and stepped behind her as I entered the club fast, ducking while I pulled my Ruger with my free hand. The woman on the opposite side of the doorway fired a rifle point-blank into her moving partner’s head while trying to track me. I fired as soon as the collapsing body cleared my field of fire and shot the other woman in the face while she was still frozen by the realization of what she had just done.

Neither of the women was wearing Kevlar. In fact, neither of them was wearing much of anything at all, just a tank top and some kind of leather garment that covered the crotch and not much else.

Sig busted the right door open with her shoulder like a linebacker and swiveled her SIG Sauer around the swinging edge, then saw three dead bodies and stopped. She gave me an eyebrow that said
Really
?

I shrugged.

Holstering her namesake, Sig called out to the depths of the strip club, “Sorry about that.”

Her voice lacked complete sincerity.

I stamped on the floor. It was solid concrete. At least we didn’t have to worry about anything coming up through it at us.

The lobby itself was fancier than the outside of the building suggested, with lots of black velvet carpeting that probably made bloodstains harder to identify. A crystal chandelier hung from
the ceiling, and there were paintings on the walls instead of posters, and wood paneling all around us. A long counter at the back of the lobby had two large thick doors on either side of it, both closed. To the left and right of us, open doorways led to an old-fashioned smoking room and a billiards room respectively.

Sig continued addressing the air in a normal tone of voice. “I don’t know how good you are at distinguishing gunshots, but your minions fired first. They tried to take us captive, and we won’t allow that, but I apologize for the mess. We came here because we have information you need to know, not to start a war.”

There was no response.

“Fine, we’ll wait while you work up your courage,” Sig taunted. “But we’re leaving before the sun goes down. And tomorrow I’ll come back with explosives.”

Molly shot Sig a questioning look, but I understood what she was doing. Far better to make vampires come to us than to search through narrow doorways and dark rooms while they waited to ambush us from carefully prepared hiding places.

“Want to play some pool?” I asked Sig, nodding at the billiards room. It would get us out of the direct line of fire from the doors at the back of the lobby.

She shrugged. “Why not?”

So we walked into the billiards room and set up a pool table. Molly remained silent, and Sig gestured her toward a far wall. Andro went over to a minibar in the southeast corner of the room and positioned himself behind it. He never took his hands off his… what should I call it? Rifle-bow? Cross-rifle? Sig and I took pool cues off the wall and racked the balls on the table nearest the doorway.