The Tome of Bill (Book 7): The Wicked Dead (8 page)

“Why not?” I asked, despite knowing deep down the chances of us getting credit for anything were pretty much nil.

“Because that’s lame,” Carl replied.

“Well, I guess that does makes some sense. I mean, the vampire world kind of does love their names for things. I used to be in charge of Village Coven.”

“Lame,” came Mike’s reply from the backseat.

“Then I was a part of Pandora Coven.”

“Better.”

“Oh, and the guy who turned me into a vampire was named Jeff.”

“Jeff?”

“But he insisted everyone call him Night Razor.”

“Okay, now we’re talking. That’s pretty badass.”

“You got the ass part right. He was one of the biggest ones I ever knew.”

“Was?”

“Up until I killed him,” I replied, embellishing things a bit. It’s not like the one person who could contradict my story was up on the details anymore.

“You killed him?”

“Fuck yeah,” I said. “I didn’t tell you my name in the coven ... Dr. Death.”

* * *

The laughter that ensued did little to mollify my fragile ego. Thankfully, Dave finally spoke up with something to take the spotlight off me.

“How about the Defilers?”

“Huh?” Adam asked.

“Isn’t that what you fuckers called yourselves in the last campaign?” Dave replied.

“Oh yeah,” Mike said. “But that adventure ended on a bit of a low note.”

“Sorry, but when I told you those owlbears were in heat, you really should have fucking listened. Regardless, I thought the name was kind of cool.”

There were a few murmurs of assent.

“Fine,” I said with sigh. “We’re the Defilers.” In the back of my mind, a small part of me realized the pain Sally often expressed when dealing with those less cool than herself.

“Awesome,” Adam replied. “But you gotta lose that gay-ass Dr. Death shit. We just can’t be seen with you otherwise.”

* * *

Deep down in my gut, I knew this was a bad idea. I should have left them all back where I found them. Hell, Newark was pretty much full of assholes anyway.

Any way you looked at things, this did nothing but add complications to the whole affair. Hell, I had no clue how my friends back at the apartment would react.

“I’m just gonna warn you all, well, most of you anyway, that the women in this building are hands off.” I smirked at Adam, and he casually flipped me the finger.

“You afraid of the competition?” Mike asked.

“No, I’m afraid of cleaning up the mess.” I pulled out my key and unlocked the front door. “In addition to me and my roommates, we have another vampire, a witch, and an Icon – any one of which is more than capable of killing you faster than you can say ‘Hey, baby.’”

“What’s an Icon?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment. First off, yes, Christy is a real witch and I don’t mean some stupid Wiccan. Think at least a tenth level magic user here ... maybe higher.”

“Still not a lot of hit points,” Carl commented as we started up the stairs.

“Maybe not, but that assumes you can survive one of her fireballs, which I assure you, you cannot.”

“You don’t know our saves.”

“Oh yeah, I do. Trust me. Then there’s the Icon. She’s the legendary foe of all vampires. Imagine a high level paladin whose favored class enemy is us.”

“Paladins are so fucking annoying.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to her and her +5 Holy Avenger.”

“She has a...”

I stopped and laughed, cutting off Adam’s question. I’d been joking about magic weapons, but I’d forgotten about Sheila’s sword. Holy shit. We really
were
living out a real life D&D adventure.

Sadly, the only resurrection spell I was aware of included being dipped in a glowing orange pool and emerging as a slave to the hordes of rock monsters known as the Jahabich. All things considered, I’d much sooner just gain a negative level.

* * *

I gave the guys the vacant apartment in our basement. I wasn’t sure if it was a result of panic from the weirdness of the world, the doings of the witches who had briefly occupied the building during my three-month absence in Vegas, or some combination of the above, but the apartment building where I lived was now empty save for my friends. Nobody had shown up to change locks, collect belongings, or make repairs, for that matter.

Oh well, when in doubt, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

I had the guys drop their stuff off before taking them to meet the rest of the occupants. I’d hosted my game here on occasion, like that time Dave’s place was being fumigated for roaches, so they all knew my roommates. However, I wanted to make certain no nasty surprises occurred if they ran into the other inhabitants – a far more lethal bunch, all told, than Ed or Tom.

There was no answer at the girls’ apartment. That was odd. It was long past sundown, but still relatively early as far as the night went.

I was tempted to use the spare key to let myself in and check things out, but it seemed I had a nasty habit of running into Sheila during those moments. Not that it was a bad thing. It was just that, despite her control over her powers, she had this tendency to
flare up
whenever I surprised her. I wasn’t really in the mood to get blasted across the room this evening.

Still, if they were in there and awake, they’d have answered.

“I don’t think anyone’s home,” Dave said, his tone bored.

“Shhh!” I took a deep breath and reached out with my senses. The scent of my gaming friends was overpowering at first. At least a couple of them had skipped showering for the past day or so, judging by things. However, I pushed past that, my nose filling with the smells of the building around me, followed by the lingering lilac moisturizer that Christy favored, Sheila’s simple yet slightly sweet perfume, and the overly expensive shit Sally enjoyed.

“Lingering” was the keyword there. It was recent, but it told me nobody else currently occupied this floor. The lack of noise, aside from maybe Carl’s heavy mouth breathing, confirmed that.

No, wait. Faint voices filtered down to me from above. Nobody was home down here, but upstairs was a different story. That wasn’t overly surprising. My apartment had kind of turned into the unofficial meeting area of the place.

“C’mon.” I turned and headed up the stairs.

I dispensed with any pretense of ceremony when we arrived on my floor and just pulled my key out of my pocket.

“Remember what I said about the girls. Be cool or become dust,” I warned one last time before opening my front door – only to find a glowing red ball of death staring me in the face.

My options were limited. I could save myself, relying on my vampire reflexes, or I could eat the brunt of it and save my friends.

Fuck it. When faced with the choice of red wine or white, I’m of the mindset that you make room and down both those mothers.

While cries of “What the fuck?” and “Holy shit!” rang out, I threw myself backward with everything I had, slamming into my friends and scattering them like bowling pins, in the hope that the death ray would pass by overhead, doing little more than singeing our pride.

I landed on my back, looking up at the ceiling, but no fireball of doom appeared. Daring to sit up, I saw Christy standing about ten feet inside of my apartment, a red glow still around her, but rapidly diminishing.

“Bill?”

“No shit!” I snapped.

“Why didn’t you knock first?”

“Because I live here.” I forced my tone to remain calm. There was little to be gained by pissing off the hormonal witch who was very shortly going to be mucking about in my brain. “More importantly, since when have you decided I needed to be blasted into oblivion? Tom’s the one who always leaves the toilet seat up.”

Speaking of my roommate, he leaned back on the couch where he’d been sitting and waved as if nothing had just happened. Dick.

Christy took a deep breath, but the glow remained around her. Her eyes searched out the forms that still lay scattered in the hall behind me and narrowed. “I wasn’t looking to hex you,” she explained. “I put some blood wards on the front stoop to warn me if anyone other than the six of us tried to enter. I set them to tingle especially hard if it was vampires.”

I stood up and smiled. It was hard to be mad at her, despite having just stared my own death in the face and had it give me the finger back. Her precautions were smart, doubly so since I had little doubt the Draculas were aware of my ...
our
... every move.

They’d begrudgingly let us go, having ordered us to kill Vehron or die trying – most of their betting pool probably leaning toward that latter option. I wasn’t dumb enough to think they’d sit back and patiently wait for us to call and tell them how things went, though. We probably had a week at most before they showed up at our doorstep and gave us a friendly
escort
to our fate.

“Who are they?” Christy asked at last.

Tom got to his feet, walked to her side, and said, “Hey, guys!” effectively draining the tension from the room.

I stepped to the side to allow my other friends to enter, hoping they didn’t say anything stupid.

Christy grimaced when she saw Dave. I’d gotten the vibe, during the short time of their acquaintance, that she didn’t particularly like him – not surprising, since on a good day his personality was about as abrasive as steel wool.

I quickly introduced the rest to her as they entered.

A look of confusion washed over her face when I was done. “I thought all the survivors of Village Coven were accounted for.”

“Like these guys would hang with those preppy dickbags,” Tom scoffed. “This is Bill’s gaming group. S’up?” He stepped forward to shake their hands. Though he wasn’t a regular, he’d sat with us on a few occasions when we were a man short.

Christy pulled me aside. I kept half my attention on the group anyway, noting how the nostrils of the three junior vamps in the room were working. They might be on good terms with Tom, but they’d all tasted a lot of blood recently, and I wasn’t about to rule out them trying to make a snack out of him.

“You turned your gaming friends into vampires?” she hissed at me. “When did this happen, why didn’t you tell us, and at what point did you think this was a good idea? Sally is going to be...” She trailed off as she realized the error in that last part. “Well, anyway, what were you thinking?”

“I didn’t turn anybody,” I said. “Dave did.”

“Oh.” Her eyes narrowed in his direction.

“It’s a long story.”

“What have you been doing all this…”

“Duh! Bill needed my research,” Dave said from across the room. Some vampires apparently needed decades to get with the program, while others were quite obviously born for the job. Goddamn, I really needed to remember to buy him a copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
for his next birthday.

“Yes, but first of all, I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I countered, which was true. I turned back toward Christy. “He’s my friend.”

Her eyes softened and she nodded. It had taken me a while after our first disastrous meeting, but I had eventually convinced Christy that, no matter what bullshit spewed out of my pie hole, I was loyal to my friends – to the end, if need be. “So why are they...?”

I mouthed “later” to her. I couldn’t quite say the truth, that I was keeping an eye on them so that they didn’t go on an insane killing spree through the ranks of Dominos and Papa Johns. That wouldn’t exactly endear her to them, especially since she would then – rightfully – assume it meant she and Tom were potentially on the menu.

Speaking of which, my fellow
Defilers
were paying way more attention to my roommate than a casual greeting warranted. “I just brought the guys up to meet the rest of the group.”

I turned toward them and waved them over before any of them got some not-so-bright ideas. “Guys, this is Tom’s fiancée, Christy.” At my use of the F word, Tom’s head spun toward me. He opened his mouth, but then apparently thought better of saying anything that would make Christy happily feed him to my friends.

What can I say? Even with the world on the brink of madness, there was still always time to stick it in and break it off.

Adam walked over and held out his hand, which Christy accepted warily. Mike and Carl were a little slower to do so.

“Which one is she again?” Mike asked.

Christy turned toward me with a raised eyebrow, to which I grinned sheepishly. “She’s the magic user.”

“We prefer to be called Magi,” she corrected.

That got my friends’ attention, and all of them converged on Christy as if she was wearing a chainmail bikini.

“So can you cast Cloudkill?”

“What about Summon Monster Six?”

“Do you have a familiar?”

“Do you prefer wands or rods?”

“You versus a similar level sorcerer, who wins?”

“Do you know Feeblemind?”

She stepped back, a look of confusion on her face. “I have no idea what any of you are talking about.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I think they already got hit with that Feeblemind spell.”

That set Tom at least to laughing.

Christy composed herself and tried to explain that she wasn’t up to speed with anything they were asking about because it didn’t have a basis in real magic. My friends weren’t overly happy with that. Their attention turned toward Tom again as she attempted to explain a little bit about spirits and other shit that, quite frankly, wasn’t all that interesting.

“You can give them a lesson on the finer points of mage training later. I just brought them up to introduce them and let everyone know...” I muttered the rest.

“Excuse me?” Christy asked.

“That they’d be coming with us,” I said with a guilty grin.

Her eyes narrowed. “All of them?”

“Yes,
all
of them.”

Before any protests could be raised, I changed the subject. “Where are Ed, Sally, and Sheila?”

“Sheila?” Adam asked.

Without thinking, I replied, “She’s the Icon ... the paladin I was telling you about.”

“No no no,” he said. “I meant this wouldn’t happen to be Princess Sheila, would it?”