The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant (18 page)

6.

Before the last reverberations of his words had finished bouncing off the church’s wall, Quinn had closed the meager gap between us and hurled me back several feet. I was able to land on my feet thanks to Amy’s potion, but they’d no sooner touched the ground than Quinn was there, delivering a quick blow that knocked me to the ground and shattered the bones in my shoulder.

“Did you think the curse of some apprentice was going to be enough to hold me? I once commanded the magical forces with my own will. The first thing I did upon turning was set up precautions against such manipulations.” He reached down and plucked me from the ground, holding me with the hand still caked in Krystal’s blood. The smell was nauseating, which was strange in itself. Even if I loved the woman it came from, blood should still smell like blood. If Quinn noticed, he didn’t seem to care.

A jerk of his wrist smashed me into the solid, wooden wall behind me. His grip tightened, though it was more symbolic than painful. I wasn’t going to be suffocated anytime soon. Under different circumstances, I might have been thankful for that fact. I kicked futilely. He didn’t even seem to register the impacts against his torso. Switching tactics, I clawed at the wrist pinning me to the wall, but even my undead nails couldn’t so much as scratch his flesh. If Beauregard had been dense, then Quinn was like living dark matter.

“You couldn’t even make yourself useful at the end,” Quinn lectured. Over his shoulder, I saw a sight that gave me the barest flicker of hope. Bubba had shifted, and now a large pony was barreling down at us, followed some distance behind by Amy, Albert, and Neil. Maybe together, the four of us could—

“Beauregard,” Quinn commanded. “Kill the rest of them.” As he spoke, a strange symbol flickered across his throat, too complex and too brief for me to make it out clearly. Whatever it was, it evidently gave his words more weight than Neil’s spell, since the larger vampire rose at the floor and turned to meet the impending mini-steed. The two collided with a sonorous crash, and then Bubba was airborne as Beauregard hurled him away with, apparently, little effort.

My struggling grew more frantic. I tried every move I could remember from a life of being bullied and held down. Wriggling, kicking, scratching, even trying to poke him in the eyes. None of it loosened his grip in the slightest.

“No, Fred, no happy escape or quick death for you. It’s clear I made a mistake in turn
ing you . . . I’ll own that failure. But you must be punished for disappointing me. So, before I tear your head from your body and leave it out for daylight to char, you’re going to watch me turn all your precious friends into bloody chunks. Just like I did to your girlfriend.”

If I could have begged, or pleaded, or whimpered, I’ll freely admit that I would have. Sadly, even the undead, or at least my type of undead, need vocal cords to make coherent sound. Instead, I was forced to flounder silently as Beauregard turned his attention to my more vulnerable friends. There was nothing I could do. I was stuck. We were all going to die. And just when life, in a general sense rather than referring to being alive, had stopped being so lonely.

That was when history repeated itself.

One moment I was stuck there, watching death, shaped like a roided-up vampire, draw inevitably closer to my friends. The next, I was falling to the ground. I surprised myself by landing on my feet, then remembered Amy’s potion was still in effect. I had all of a half-second to appreciate the sense of freedom before Quinn’s bloodcurdling screams began crashing against my ears.

He was hollering in pain, the likes of which I hope I die (the permanent kind) long before experiencing. The stump at this shoulder where his right arm had been was leaking blood at a rapid pace, though substantially slower than a living heart would be causing it to spurt out. I cast my eyes about for the missing appendage, finding it with little difficulty. For one thing, it was on fire, turning to ash at an astonishing rate.

For another thing, it was clutched in Krystal’s hands. Well, sort of. Her hands were now about half-claw, dark twisting things that extended from her middle knuckle and stretched much further than her normal digits. Her skin seemed to be shifting, like something beneath it was rearranging itself. The blonde hair I’d come to know so well turned blood red midway down its length, before ending with a fire red at the tips. That last part isn’t creative description; the tips of her hair were literally burning. It was a strange effect, but at least it matched the mini-infernos blazing where her eyes used to be.

“Awww, does the big, bad vampire miss his arm?” Her voice was still partly hers, yet there was another tone coming out in concert with it. The second voice sounded like the screams of a thousand children waking from nightmares, only to find their families slaughtered around them. If I were still capable of bowel movements, I’m certain I would have pissed my pants upon hearing it.

She blurred for a moment. Then she was next to Quinn, her movements so fast not even my eyes could track them. Casually, she held up the flaming remains of his arm. A wide—too wide in fact—smile drew across her face, revealing teeth serrated and sharp, and too many rows deep. There was a slight surge, and the arm crumbled to the ground, nothing more than flakes of ash.

“I told you I would tear off your limbs. Did you think I was bluffing? Did you imagine it was really that easy to kill an Agent?” Krystal ran a claw along his face. Quinn was either too terrified or too much in pain to react. Where it touched, his seemingly invincible skin split open with a faint sizzling and puff of smoke. “You tried to kill me, which means I’m well within my rights to take you apart in any way I see fit. You also tried to kill my friends, which means I’m going to get a tremendous amount of joy from doing just that.”

“Krystal? Is that . . . what’s going on?”

“Sorry, honey,” she said. She didn’t move her head, but she might have been looking at me. With the blazes in her sockets, it was hard to track her vision. “I guess I have some explaining to do, but it will have to wait until after.”

I didn’t need to ask what “after” meant, and I am certain Quinn didn’t either. He was finally getting a grip on himself, marshaling some control over the pain he was gripped by, but that seemed to be getting replaced by a rapidly rising sense of panic. Fortunately, for him, in the chaos we’d all forgotten that he wasn’t here all by himself.

Beauregard leapt on Krystal’s back from ten feet away, no doubt expecting to send the slender-framed woman sprawling as he had the rest of us. In that regard, he was in for a very unpleasant surprise. Krystal barely twitched at the impact, reaching up and behind her at an angle that should have been impossible for even the most lithe gymnast, and sank her claws into his exposed flesh. She ripped him off and spun around, her free hand running across his torso and shredding his skin like wet toilet paper.

“I appreciate your dedication,
but it would have been wiser to learn how to pick your battles when you had the chance. Still, you were just under orders, so I guess there’s no need to be cruel about this.”

With a single swipe of her hand-claw, Beauregard’s head toppled from his shoulder, beginning the burn before it thumped off the dirty carpet. His body was starting to smolder as well, so Krystal released her grip on it and let it tumble away. The lackey finished, she turned her attention back to the true subject of her wrath.

Only it was nowhere to be found. In the ten seconds Beauregard had diverted our attention, Quinn had somehow managed to scramble away. I sniffed the air, thinking perhaps I could pick up the scent of his blood since he was injured. The smell was thick in the air all right, but it didn’t extend beyond us. Whatever Quinn had used to vanish, it had somehow covered his tracks very effectively.

“And that’s why I hate his type,” Krystal mumbled. “They always have escape plans.” She turned to me and I put all my effort into not letting out a yelp of terror. “Come on. Let’s go check on everyone.”

I complied and followed immediately, partially out of genuine concern, partially out of overwhelming fear.

7.

Several hours, a long phone call, and many assurances to our friends later, Krystal and I were finally holed up in time to avoid the coming sun. We were at her place, which I had never been to, since mine currently had a broken window and a hole in the brick where it had once resided. For most people, that was an inconvenience, but obviously the sun would do more to me than leave a tan. Thankfully, Bubba had promised he could get it at least quasi-repaired before the next dawn, so I would keep my tenure as a houseguest to a minimum.

Her domicile was surprisingly elegant, smooth marble floors and modern décor along with stainless steel appliances. She’d only been here for a month, so I concluded that everything in here was brand new. I hadn’t realized Agents made so much money. Evidently there were a multitude of things I wasn’t aware of, though at least one of those was about to change
.

I settled into a comfortable chair, glass of a pinot noir in hand, and readied myself. Krystal plopped in an opposing seat and cracked open one of her beers. She was almost completely back to normal, though the tips of her hair were still tinged with crimson. Her eyes, real eyes thankfully, were back to their usual brown, though the bags beneath them spoke to how exhausting her endeavor had been. I strengthened my resolve, this was not a time for pity. Krystal had promised me some answers once we were safe, and now that the night was done and her call with the home office was completed, the time had come to collect.

“So,” I probed gently. “You turn into a fire monster.”

“Sort of,” she said, pausing to take a long sip from her beer. “It’s complicated. Are you really sure you want to hear this? You’ve adjusted well to the parahuman world, but there’s still a lot you don’t know. Stuff you are probably much happier not knowing. Vampires can be tough bastards, but they are far from the baddest guys on the block.”

“I noticed. Look, if you’d asked me last night, I’d have probably declined. However, after today, I think not knowing is more dangerous than dealing with the knowledge that boogeymen might be under my bed.”

“Don’t be silly. Boogeymen don’t prey on undead,” Krystal said.

“You’re stalling.”

“Yes, I am.” She took another sip of beer, this one much deeper than the first. “Devil.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s not a fire monster. It’s a devil. A being of Hell significantly more powerful than mere demons. Most of our more religious Agents believe they were the angels that fell in Lucifer’s rebellion, but we’re never seen defendable evidence of that being the case. The more secular Agents see Hell as a dimension that runs close to ours, and devils as beings at the top of its food chain.”

“Okay, and you’re, what, part devil?”

Krystal snorted. “Heck no, only demons can cross-breed. Devils are too powerful. No, I’m significantly more complicated. Do you remember my mother?”

I nodded. “Nice woman. Sold real estate.”

“She got cancer in my first year of college.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Krystal waved me off. “It was a long time ago. I’m okay. Point is that before I was a sophomore, she was gone. Then, on Christmas break of that year, I got into a car accident. It was bad. I was T-boned against a concrete barrier. Steering column went through my chest and crushed my heart. I died.”

I stayed silent as she spoke, watching her carefully. Krystal was never an overly emotional person, but as she recounted her own death, it was clear she was fighting back a full sobbing breakdown. Strangely, on this account, I could relate.

“I died,” she repeated. “That was when I felt this . . . thing
bubble up from inside me. I woke up like you saw me tonight, carved my way out of the car, out of the world I thought I’d known, and out of my nice, normal life.” A quick motion killed her beer, then she walked over to the fridge for another. I waited until the top was popped before speaking.

“I’m sorry, I still don’t really understand what you are.”

“That’s okay, there’s not many of my kind, so we don’t get a lot of press. Sometimes, very rarely, a devil will break into our plane. When they do, it’s a horrific event, more damage than you can even imagine. Killing them is damn near impossible. It’s only been accomplished twice in known history, and the parahuman-history books go back much farther than the regular ones. There are other ways to deal with them, though. Banishing, if you can swing it. Sometimes they’ll go back on their own if properly bribed. Then there’s the method relevant to our discussion: imprisonment.”

“I have a feeling you aren’t going to tell me you send them to Alcatraz.” I took a gulp of my own wine. It wouldn’t get me drunk, yet the motion reassured me nonetheless.

“There’s a ritual that can be used. Binds them, seals them, holds them. You need a virgin girl and a powerful mage to do it. It . . . well it gets sort of technical here, and I don’t even have the magic chops to really understand it all, but the easiest way to say it is that the devil is sealed in a soul and bound by the blood. The spell is tied to that person’s blood, the circulatory system acting as a constant prayer wheel, every pump of the heart reinforcing the cage.”

“So, wait, you were—”

“No. God no. One of my ancestors,
waaaay
back when. The curse, or duty, or whatever you call it, is passed down along the bloodline. When a woman has a daughter, the onus of the spell begins to transfer. It completes itself when the girl hits puberty. From that point on, if the girl dies, well . . . what you saw tonight happens. The devil that’s bound in me shares my fate. If I die, it will kill him too. So until I bear a child, it will always come out like that to revive me.”

“Why didn’t it help your mother then?”

“She already had me. If I had a daughter, I would lose its protection the minute she hit puberty. Mom never died before having me, so she never knew about any of this. I don’t think any of my recent family did.”

“I see. Then it seems like the easiest way out would be to not have children and let your physical clock run out. Surely, it can’t revive you when you die of old age.”

“You wouldn’t believe what it can do,” Krystal told me, her eyes darting to the wall, though I sincerely doubt that is what she was seeing. “I won’t get old. I won’t get sick. I’ll be like this until I pass on the curse.”

“Wow.” Okay, not exactly eloquent, but I’d like to see how you dealt with that sort of revelation. “That is some heavy stuff. I guess your agency filled you in on everything?”

Krystal bobbed her head. “They found me after the wreck, gave me answers and counseling, then eventually offered me a job.” Her eyes came back to me and a small smile graced her lips. “I’m not as powerful as most people in my field, though I do get a few perks from my condition. A little bit strong, a little bit fast, metabolism that helped me shed all that high school fat, plus a hefty resistance to certain magics. My ace in the death hole is what qualifies me for this job, and that’s the one part that almost makes all of the rest worthwhile.”

“I’m glad you found a way to make it into a good thing,” I told her. “Honestly, you seem much happier than you ever did when we were both normal.”

“Thanks. You too.”

I don’t even imagine debating her on that point. My life and my unlife couldn’t be more different in terms of enjoyability.

“Look, Freddy, maybe we rushed into this thing. There’s a reason people in my career tend to date co-workers. Our lives are dangerous by their very nature, and sometimes that danger spills over onto the people near and dear to us.”

“Oh please, don’t even try to play that card. If you recall, those men broke into my apartment, looking to make my life more problematic. You were collateral damage, and if you hadn’t been there, then they almost certainly would have done the same thing using Albert, or Amy, or someone who doesn’t have a get-out-of-death-free card.”

“Point taken.
They were after you . . . this time. I’ve had more jumpings and break-ins than you can imagine. Do you know why you’ve never been to my place before? Because I don’t know if it’s being watched yet. It will be eventually, and I didn’t want you on anyone’s radar.”

“We aren’t worried about that anymore?”

“Not with Quinn the psycho on the loose. He’ll blab to anyone who wants to listen. Agents aren’t universally reviled, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have enemies, though. Sooner or later, being with me will mean trouble for you.”

“Because I would handle myself so well without your protection.”

“I think you’d do better than you realize. We’d line up protection for you, anyway. Sadly, this is far from the first time an Agent has hit this situation.”

“I see.” I finished off my wine and tried to keep the sweeping sense of sadness off my face. “I have to say, as far as break-up excuses go, this is better than ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, but only marginally.”

“Wait, I thought you’d want to break-up with me,” she said, her eyebrows rising significantly. “I just finished telling you I’m a flesh cage for a devil.”

“I’m an undead blood drinker,” I pointed out.

“Being with me will put you in danger.”

“Tonight tells us that vice versa could also be true.”

“Freddy, this life, it isn’t for everyone. I know you. I know how you like to live. You think these past two months are as bad as it gets? You’ve barely gotten past the tip of the iceberg, and the longer we’re together, the harder it’s going to be to get your peace and quiet back.”

I set my wine glass on the table and rose to my feet. Krystal mimicked my motions, I suspect to give me a final embrace before I walked out of the door. Instead, I took her face in my hands and pulled it upward so it faced mine.

“I spent my whole life being very cautious and very safe, and it ended with me very dead under a dumpster. Perhaps I’m not the sort who can overhaul his entire personality with one death. However, I have at least learned enough to not shy away from something that has made my world, while more dangerous, also impossibly more worth being in.” With that I kissed her, an awkward peck far less gallant than I’d been hoping for. As I admitted, I am not the sort to easily change. Perhaps suaveness will come to me in another hundred years.

“I’ll give you this,” Krystal said once we parted. “You sure impressed me tonight. I get all the magic helping you dodge and making you look scary. How did you pull off the snarling and insanity act, though?”

“If you’ll recall, I’m an ardent fan of cinema and theatre. I even auditioned for our high school’s theatre program.”

“Yeah, then you got so nervous you threw up midway through your monologue,” Krystal added. “I will say, the first half was pretty good at least.”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“Where’s my answer?”

“In what you said. I vomited every time I tried to act. A physical impulse that vampires don’t have.”

“Wait, so you’re saying the reason you were able to put on that performance is because vampires don’t puke?” Krystal’s already impressive grin collapsed into a din of laughter which grew increasingly hard to interpret as kindly meant the longer it wore on.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

“Of course you don’t,” she managed to choke out between guffaws. “Oh, Freddy, honey, you really are one of a kind.” She stifled her laughter long enough to pull me in for her own show of affection, this one far more charismatically executed than my own.

Someday I’d get the moves down. Someday I’d be the cool action star type of guy who could make a moment his own. Someday I would figure all of this stuff out.

Ah well, at least there’s no shortage of time to practice.