Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (61 page)

CLAIRE

Reginald scrabbled on the trackpad, suddenly sure that he was going to miss the call despite it being right in front of him. It was a video call. He responded with video and a new window opened showing an empty room. Or, more accurately, a ceiling.
 

“Claire?” he said.
 

Nothing.
 

“Hey, Claire. Are you there?”
 

Reginald was suddenly seized by a certainty: Claire hadn’t called at all. Soon he’d see a vampire’s face fill the screen, his lips wet with blood. The vampire would smile, happy to have gotten a hit while scrolling through Claire’s Skype contacts to gloat. And then the vampire would pick up the laptop and angle it toward Claire’s dismembered corpse, her room covered in blood, and…
 

“Hey,” said a small voice.

“Claire?” Reginald’s breath caught in his throat. It felt like he’d been saved from a firing line. He hadn’t realized how worried he was, and how worried he’d been ever since that night that Victoria had almost been killed, when Claire had disappeared from his life.
 

“Yeah.”
 

“I can only see your ceiling.”

“I know. I…”
 

“Are you okay?” A new certainty was blooming in Reginald’s mind: she’d been attacked and disfigured. She was breaking him in to the idea slowly. Next he’d see her, but she’d be wearing a pillowcase over her head with eyeholes cut through it so that he couldn’t see the slash marks that had been made by teeth or fangs.
 

“What?” An irritated, exasperated noise. “No, seriously, what the hey, Reginald. I’m just… “ She sighed.
“Fine.”
 

The screen tilted and he saw Claire’s face. And it was indeed disfigured.
 

“I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the video to call and I didn’t want to…
ugh
.” She touched the huge pimple that was directly in the middle of her forehead like a hindu dot. It was one of the huge ones that started deep and would hurt to touch.
 

Reginald almost chuckled, but held it in. This was all very fragile.
 

“Aren’t you a little young for zits?” he said.

Claire shrugged. “I’m a little young for a lot of things, but…” She trailed off, giving a
What can you do?
shrug. Reginald sensed there was more behind it, but he didn’t pry.
 

 
“It’s good to hear from you,” he said.
 

Claire shrugged again.
 

“I’ve been worried.”
 

“I can take care of myself.”
 

She always had, but she shouldn’t have had to. It was unfair that just as she was getting her mother back, her mother was incapacitated by vampires. Claire would never admit it, but that was clearly the reason she’d spent three months being angry and refusing to talk to anyone with fangs, regardless of their intention: she’d finally let her guard down and had dared to hope… and just look at what had happened.
 

“I guess you can,” said Reginald.

Claire said nothing, looking everywhere but at the screen or her webcam. It was as if she’d been forced to call and didn’t want to. But nobody else was in the room, and even at eleven, Claire had never seemed big on doing what anyone told her to.
 

“How’s your mom?”
 

“Bad,” Claire spat.
 

“Bad?”
 

Claire sighed as if admitting something she didn’t want to admit. “I guess she’s maybe a little better. But still not good. She’s tired all the time like she’s anemic.”
 

“Anemic?”
 

“I know what anemic means,” she snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”
 

Reginald raised his hands to the screen. “I know you know what it means. I just meant, does it seem like she’s always lightheaded, despite the fact that the doctors keep saying she’s received enough blood and that her counts are okay?”
 

“Lightheaded. Stupid. She can barely remember my name. She can’t cook because she’ll burn the house down. I have to make her sandwiches and then remind her to eat them. All we do is watch soap operas. I haven’t been going to school. Nobody seems to care.”
 

Reginald nodded. He’d figured that much already. When the world started to slide into shit, things like keeping track of school attendance started to matter less and less.
 

“It’s something in our saliva,” said Reginald. “Nobody’s bothered to figure out exactly what it is or give it a proper name, but it’s referred to casually as ‘the agent.’ It works like spider venom and does something short of temporarily paralyzing the victim. And it lasts in the blood for a long time, especially in bad attacks by multiple vampires. But it
does
go away. She
will
get better, and return to her own self.”
 

The video’s resolution was quite clear — clear enough that Reginald could see Claire’s lips purse in frustration and anger. A tear ran down the side of her nose, unheeded.
 

“I’m sorry,” said Reginald. “On behalf of all of us.”
 

“Was it because I knew you? Did they attack her because I was Deacon Maurice’s and Deputy Reginald’s little pet?”

Reginald didn’t want to seem too defensive and protest too much, so he said, carefully, “I don’t know. But I don’t think so. This kind of thing is happening everywhere. The whole Vampire Nation is going through a…”
 

“I dreamed you were in a train crash,” she said. “All three of you.”
 

Reginald stopped mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open. He wondered if Claire had seen the news through her regimen of soap operas. The story of the trio of high-speed rail derailments headed into Paris was all over the news. In America it wouldn’t have the panicked, terrorism-tinged fever pitch it had in Europe, but there was no question they’d be reporting it. But nobody knew that they were on one of those trains. Nobody human or still alive, anyway.
 

“It was at night,” Claire continued. “You were on a train going like hundreds of miles an hour, and you hit something and all of the cars came off the track. Everyone was killed. You were hurt. I remember very distinctly dreaming that you had to chew off your own arm. Then you had to hide, because… because of
something
. Something was trying to get you. And that’s all I remember.”
 

She turned to the camera. Reginald stared at his screen, into her eyes. Because of the positions of the cameras, each would feel like they were staring into eyes that were looking just off the screen. Without being face-to-face, this was as close as they’d get to a sincere heart-to-heart.
 

“That actually happened,” said Reginald. “Exactly like that.”
 

“I know.”
 

“You saw the news?”
 

Claire gave a sad little purse-lipped smile and tapped her head:
I just know.
 

Reginald had been waiting for something like this, wondering how the gifts that he knew were within her would manifest. She had a unique pedigree, being only the second person fathered by an incubus and born of a human woman. The other, according to legend, had been King Arthur’s sorcerer Merlin. Reginald had spent a lot of time thinking about that and had decided that despite all of the fantasy that had surrounded Arthurian legend over the years, Merlin had almost surely been real. He probably hadn’t carried a Gandalf staff and blasted lightning from his palms, but he’d probably had real powers that had become exaggerated over the years, walking through the centuries and growing like a game of Telephone.
 

“It’s starting,” he said. “What we talked about.”
 

“That and the zits.” She pointed at the giant red spot on her forehead.
 

It made sense. Claire was probably still a few years shy of adolescence (how shy of it he wouldn’t know without asking questions that he shouldn’t and wouldn’t ask) but it seemed logical that if whatever power was within her had laid dormant all these years, that it might be the changes during adolescence that would trigger them. He thought of the crack she’d made the last time they’d been together (the last time they’d spoken, in fact) about how maybe Reginald’s own mystery — the bolt of something fired into his head by the angel Balestro which still hadn’t manifested — would show up when
he
reached puberty.
 

“How long has it been going on?”
 

“A few weeks. It’s… it scares me.”
 

So that was why she’d called. Was her addled human mother going to understand her daughter’s blossoming magic? Claire didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Too many changes. She was just a little girl, and she was so small for her age. Despite her ferocity, Reginald had always wanted to protect her — always from a distance, because she’d never accept pity.
 

“What else can you do?” he asked. “Telepathy? Moving things with your mind? Making
The Simpsons
funny again?”

“Mostly dreams,” she answered. “But I know when I’m having them that they’re real. It’s like… I don’t know. They’re mostly stupid, useless things. The other night I woke up in the middle of the night and turned down the volume on my alarm clock because I’d realized it was turned up full-tilt and it was going to scare me to death when it went off. But then there’s also this.”
 

Claire stuck out her tongue.
 

Reginald leaned toward the screen, missing the point. “Wait,” he said. “I didn’t see anything. Stick your tongue out again.”
 

“No… Reginald…” she said, “I
didn’t
stick out my tongue. That’s the point.”

Reginald felt his forehead wrinkle. “What?”

“Just now. You saw me stick out my tongue, right? But I
didn’t
stick out my tongue. Here… watch this.”
 

She reached forward on the desk and came back with a cellular phone in her hand. She pressed a few buttons, then held it at arm’s length in front of her, with the lens pointed back at her face.
 

“Okay, ready? Now watch my face.” And again, on Reginald’s screen, she stuck out her tongue.

“So far, so good,” said Reginald.
 

Claire turned the phone to face her and pressed more buttons. Then she turned the camera so that its screen was facing and close to the webcam. The video was already playing. On the small screen of the phone, Claire said, “Okay, ready? Now watch my face.” But this time, on the phone’s video, she closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to concentrate. Offscreen, Reginald heard himself say, “So far, so good.” The video blurred with motion and then ended.
 

Reginald blinked. “That’s astonishing,” he said. “I wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t just shown me the side-by-side. And I’m still not convinced you didn’t stage an elaborate joke just to fu… to
mess
with me. How did you do that?”
 

“It just happens. I discovered it when I was making a YouTube video. Every time I did a take, I laughed because I was nervous. Then I finally did one where I didn’t laugh, but when I looked at the video, I saw myself laughing. I figured I had the wrong video, but then I did it three more times. It’s like what I think about ends up… I don’t know… pushing things around on the computer. I can open and close windows too. Sometimes I can type.”

Reginald shook his head. After all he’d seen in the past year, he was beyond being outright shocked by something so amazing, but he couldn’t help being impressed. He’d heard about telekinetics who could move objects with their mind, but he’d never before heard of anyone who could create pictures — such vivid, real pictures — from their mind.
 

What Reginald didn’t tell Claire — because it was dangerous and because she might not be old enough to handle it — was that if she could harvest thoughts from a distance and if she could manipulate complex signals in a computer, she might be able to influence the thoughts of others. She might be able to push people to do things. Thoughts were just energy and signals, after all. If she could influence thoughts, it would be like glamouring, but potentially much stronger. It wasn’t something that an eleven-year-old girl should experiment with.
 

“So what do I do, Reginald?”
 

He shook his head again. “I don’t know.”
 

“You haven’t heard about any abilities like this? Not amongst vampires, incubuses, werewolves…”
 

“Werewolves aren’t real. What do you think this is, some stupid horror story?”
 

Claire wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at the webcam. Reginald took it as a good sign. It seemed playful. Maybe she’d gotten her anger out and was ready to stop holding a grudge. Reginald would like that. He’d like having his ward back. And hell… he’d like to have that ability on
his
side, since it seemed more and more likely that there
would
be sides in the coming months and years, for better or for worse.
 

“I’ve never heard of anything like those abilities, Claire. They make you very unique, and all you can do is wait. Do I have to remind you to use your powers for good instead of evil?”
 

“I’m joining the Justice Force.”
 

“That’s good. Its headquarters are here, in Luxembourg. So what we’ll do is…”
 

She was shaking her head.
 

Reginald let her finish, waited a moment, and then spoke. “Did you actually shake your head, or are you demonstrating again?”
 

“I can’t go there. My mom, Reginald.”
 

Reginald shrugged. “
My
mom is here. You’d bring her with you.”
 

“There’s also our house. Our stuff. Our lives.”