The Vampire's Betrayal (8 page)

When I answered, he said, “William! It’s great to hear your voice. I was just calling to see if Melaphia had gotten any word from you and Renee yet.”

I thanked Tobey for his concern and gave him a brief recap of what had happened while I was in England, but not about Jack’s own adventure to the underworld. He expressed joy at hearing of Renee’s good health and genuine sorrow at the loss of Eleanor.

As I listened, I realized I needed to warn him about the Slayer. To keep it to myself would be unfair to the other master vampires.

“Try to go easy on yourself about Eleanor, William. It sounds as if you did what you had to do. We all make mistakes from time to time when matters of the heart are involved. I’ve made more than my share myself.”

“I appreciate the understanding, my friend, but let us speak no more about that for the present. I need you to come east again with Iban and Travis. I need to share some additional information that I can’t get into on the phone.”

There was a pause. “Sounds urgent,” Tobey said.

“Very.”

“I’ll talk to my people and reschedule some things. Iban and I will charter a jet and leave as soon as the sun sets. We’ll be there tomorrow night. I’ll put out feelers to try to find Travis, but you know how nomadic he is.”

Travis Rubio, descended from ancient Mayan Indians, roamed throughout the Southwest as well as Central and South America. His value in monitoring nonhuman activity in that part of the world was enormous. “Thank you. Before I let you go, I need a bit of information. I understand you are acquainted with a vampire named Freddy Blackstone.”

“Freddy? Yeah. Why?”

“He’s here in Savannah. He seems to have made a friend of our Lamar.”

“Lamar?”

“Werm,” I amended. I explained the nature of Werm’s new enterprise. “What does this Mr. Blackstone look like?”

“Medium height, brown hair, brown eyes. No particularly distinctive features.”

“Any idea why he came here?”

“I think he has a touch of the wanderlust. He was made here in the West a little after I was and has roamed around from clan to clan ever since. I think he wants to see as much of the world as he safely can, so I wouldn’t expect him to stay in Savannah all that long. He’s really quite harmless, a bit on the goofy side, to tell you the truth. You won’t find him particularly helpful in a crisis, but you shouldn’t have any trouble with him either. He knows how to behave himself.”

In vampire parlance, knowing how to behave oneself meant not killing human beings unless gravely provoked. “Very well. I’ll give him your regards if and when I meet him.”

“Please do,” Tobey said. “When do I get to hear more about that treasure trove of information that Olivia inherited from Alger?”

“Olivia should be able to give us a report tomorrow night. She hasn’t had time to have much of Alger’s material translated as yet, but she might have discovered something of value,” I said. “By that time Melaphia may be able to supplement the information with some research she’s doing on this end.”

And, I thought, I’d have had more time to decide what to tell the other master vampires about the Slayer.

Tobey and I said our good-byes, and I scanned my backlog of e-mail for anything that needed my immediate attention. I saw nothing that couldn’t wait, so I e-mailed Olivia:
Arrived safely with Renee in Savannah. Please prepare a briefing for tomorrow night on behalf of the Americans on the new information you’ve uncovered. If anything on the Slayer comes to light, contact me immediately. Yours, WCT.

I thought a moment and added a postscript:
No more secrets from me. However, you must not tell Jack anything you find out about the Slayer. Leave that to me. I will explain in due time.

I e-mailed Gerard and Lucius to prepare to attend tomorrow night’s meeting as well. I received quick responses indicating that traveling on such short notice would be a hardship due to their schedules and the inherent difficulties of travel.

For the blood drinker, trip-taking was inconvenient at best and outright dangerous at worst. Excursions beyond one’s home territory were not undertaken lightly. That is why I prefer sea voyages when I have the luxury of time and discreet private air travel when I do not. For the purposes of tomorrow night’s meeting, I decided not to press the matter and agreed to let Gerard and Lucius participate via secured telephone.

I could have allowed Iban and Tobey to attend the meeting remotely as well, but I sensed I might need their moral support in convincing Jack of what he had to do for all our sakes. He would pay more attention to a united front of his friends than to me alone.

I powered down the PC and selected an Italian leather sport coat from the armoire that I kept in the vault. It was time, as the young ones say, to go clubbing.

Jack

An alarm clock in your coffin comes in handy now and then. I was especially glad I had one tonight. The last thing I wanted was another confrontation with William about Connie—at least not until I had more information. But who did you turn to for the 411 on vampire slayers?

Under different circumstances, the obvious choice would be Melaphia, but Mel’s devotion to William meant she wanted to see Connie dead even more than my sire did. Since she’d failed to get rid of Connie by helping her into the underworld, she was going to be on the lookout for other ways to make sure my girlfriend wouldn’t kill either of the men who raised her. I couldn’t really blame Melaphia. How could I? But I also couldn’t let her succeed.

There was only one person in Savannah I could think of who might be able to give me some advice, and it wasn’t a person at all. Not a live one, anyway. I had to talk to Sullivan. He had been Connie’s friend in life. Maybe he had seen her when she went to the underworld or learned something valuable since he’d been dead.

As the sun was still setting I had hauled my coffin on my back through the garage to the carriage house. I made a quick call to Rennie to make arrangements to pick up the black box and take it to my unit at the mini-storage before hopping into my Corvette for the drive to William’s plantation where Sullivan was buried.

I roared to a stop beside the little family cemetery and let myself in through the wrought-iron gate. A cold breeze blew off the marsh waters, swaying the Spanish moss in the branches of the live oaks overhead. I heard the murmurs of the dead rising from graves here and there—greetings, entreaties, warm wishes. I didn’t let any of the spirits engage me, not even the ones with sweet, enticing female voices, but made my way directly to Sullivan’s little plot of earth.

Visiting people’s graves was always a little humbling. Charismatic people like Sullivan cut a wide swath of influence in life. In death, he was reduced to a three by six rectangle of dirt. I sighed. “Sullivan. Are you there?”

“Is a bear buried in the woods?” he asked.

I heaved a sigh of relief as I hadn’t been 100 percent sure I’d be able to reach him.

“Say, didn’t you bring me any flowers?”

“That sounds kind of gay, dude.”

“Just kidding.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk to you,” I said absently. I was still thinking about that age-old question of where the soul resides. I remembered how upset the spirits in Colonial Cemetery got when William went on a tirade and disturbed their graves. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. My sire went on to kill a couple of innocent people in the tunnels in a fit of rage. I’d never known him to do that in all my existence. It shook me up, to tell you the truth.

“I’m always here. And always in the underworld. It’s kind of like having a split personality. A little part of your spirit always stays with your body, just enough to communicate, I guess.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “One time I was able to raise a bunch of dead people to guard the harbor. It was pretty awesome if I do say so myself.”

“I heard about that,” Sullivan said. “I don’t know if you know what a big deal that was. Getting the dead to walk again isn’t easy. If a ghost that is reanimated from the grave gets up and walks topside, then its spirit goes into suspension in the underworld. I’m not sure what happens when someone is raised from the dead directly from the underworld. I don’t know if anybody’s ever done that before.”

His voice had an otherworldly quality. It was a little spooky, to tell you the truth. “Sounds like all hell could bust loose.”

“Very funny,” he said. “But I’ve heard that one before.”

I really wasn’t trying to make a joke. My own power to reanimate the dead had creeped me out. It was a handy skill to have, but I hoped nobody ever asked me to do it again. Things could backfire on you quick; my friend Huey, who was a nice guy but also a smelly zombie, was living—er—lurching proof of that. The law of unintended consequences could be a bitch when you had a power that was hard to control.

“Listen, Sully, I’ve got to ask you something. It’s really important.”

“Shoot,” he said. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

I explained to him what had happened with Connie, going into as much detail as I could remember about the angels’ Slayer ceremony.

“Dude, your main squeeze is supposed to kill you? That’s a colossal bummer.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to figure some things out. For example, why do you think she forgot what went on there when she got back here and into her body?” I asked.

“Think about it, Jack. Nobody is supposed to be able to go to the underworld and come back to the land of the living to tell about it. It’s against the most basic rules of God and the universe. So in the rare instances when it’s been done, the people involved are stripped of their memories of what happened in the afterlife.”

“But Connie was always supposed to come back—as the Slayer,” I said. “It seems like she would need to remember being sworn in. Besides, I can remember what happened.”

“Maybe she’s supposed to remember at some later time,” he suggested. “Or it could be that the shock of the whole experience caused her to have temporary amnesia. The only reason I can figure for why
you
can recall what happened there is that you’re not, strictly speaking, a human anymore.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” I said. “Do you know everything now that you’re dead? The meaning of life—all that kind of stuff.”

“No, of course not. There’s just too much to know. What kind of information do you need?”

“I need to know anything and everything about vampire slayers.”

“I guess you do at that. I’m afraid that’s one of the things that’s not in the handbook.”

“There’s a handbook?”

“Kidding,” Sullivan said. “Although now that I think of it, one would be good to have.” His gentle laughter rustled the leaves at my feet, causing them to fly away as if chasing one another on a little updraft of salty breeze.

“You’re a writer. You should get right on that,” I said. “It would make a helluva movie.”

“It would at that. Not a bad idea,” he said. “About the other thing, though—I’m sorry I can’t help you, Jack.”

“Oh well. Maybe she’ll never remember that she’s the Slayer and everything will be like it was before Melaphia figured it out.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

“Why?”

“Destiny is a powerful thing, my friend. That’s one of the things that I
have
been able to learn down here. If Connie’s destiny is to be the Slayer, she can’t escape it. Somehow, some way, she’ll find out.”

“Oh, crap.”

“You asked.”

“I gotta go,” I muttered.

“I’ll see you around,” Sullivan said.

I just love a corpse with a sense of humor.

On the way to check on things at the garage, I wracked my brain for any solution to the Connie dilemma. Olivia might know something, but William would have gotten to her first. Besides, Olivia would be just as anxious to see Connie dead as any other blood drinker. I wondered if any guy in the history of the universe had ever had my problem. What I wouldn’t give to have some sort of normal predicament like in-law trouble or money difficulties. If I went to Dr. Phil with
this
crisis, what was left of his hair would stand on end and he’d go screaming out of the studio.

Nope, I was on my own with this one. I had to protect Connie from the danger she was in from my own kind—hell, from my own family. I couldn’t even tell her about the threat she faced, or she might try to kill
me
. I just wish I knew more about slayers so I could come up with a plan.

There was one last person I might be able to turn to for information if I was very, very careful—Travis Rubio, the ancient Mayan vampire I met a while back. He had told me a story about being spared by the slayers who had slaughtered the Mayan blood drinkers he lived with hundreds of years ago. I’d have to see if I could puzzle out how to reach him without William finding out.

When I got to the garage I paused for a minute outside. I’d only been gone from here a few nights, but it seemed like a lifetime. It was good to see the old place again, and I relaxed a little. As I was about to step inside, I heard something around back. I followed the noise, which sounded like a grunt. A zombie grunt, as it turned out.

“Hey, Huey.” I greeted the little man wielding a spade. “What you doing here, buddy?”

“Oh, hey, Jack. I’m just digging out the Corsica.” Huey stopped long enough to look up at me and grin. At least I think he was looking at me. It was hard to tell with those googly eyes of his. Melaphia had blessed him with some kind of voodoo spell that kept him from rotting any more than he already had in the weeks between the time that he was murdered and the time that I accidentally raised him from the dead. He could still pass for human, though, which ensured that the customers wouldn’t run out of the garage screaming at the first sight of him. Usually they didn’t, anyway.

“Carry on,” I intoned, and stepped inside the back door. We had buried him in his Chevy Corsica with a beer in his hand after Reedrek murdered him. He just loved that car. Like they say, there’s no accounting for taste. Especially if you’re a zombie.

The irregulars—that is, the motley assortment of misfits who hung out at the garage most nights—were playing cards as usual. Rennie, my business partner and the only human in the place, was there. So was Jerry the werewolf and Rufus, who I was pretty sure was some other variety of shape shifter. I’d never quite figured out which kind.