Page 37 of Magnum, Volume 2

“Not yet,” Brooke said, and she moved out of her seat and came to stand in front of me. “If werewolves are real, what else might that mean?”

I stared at her and thought I might lose my dinner. The way she was looking out of her eyes reminded me of that movie where the gay vampires turned a child and then played house with her for a couple of decades until she went mad and turned on them, and others had to step in and kill her.

She nodded. “Most of us turned as young children do not last a full century. I am the exception, and I was the one Magnum had to go to for permission to tell you.”

She did a little pirouette and then faced me again. “But this means I can be held personally responsible if you figure out a way around the magic and convincingly tell tens of millions of people that werewolves and vampires are real. Most won’t believe you, even if you have decent proof, but if even one-half of a percent do…” She tilted her head. “The vampire hunters were once a true danger to my kind. It works for us, to have humans no longer believe we are real.”

Fear threatened to take over when I realized that, if they were telling the truth, I was the only human on the boat. Trapped. I considered jumping overboard and swimming away, but immediately nixed that idea. There was too much I needed to know.

I met Magnum’s gaze. “I’d like to go back to land, please.”

“Brooke is in charge right now. I’ve done what I can to make it so I can tell you my secret, but there’s a process. Would you like me to sit with you? I started over here so I could watch your face, but if you want me close, I can do that.”

“You’ve passed the first and second tests,” Brooke said. “Your mind is accepting the fact that it appears werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural beings are real, and you aren’t immediately considering how to share this knowledge with the world. The next big test comes in whether you will properly follow instructions to be bound to our secret.”

Kitty was sitting on my right, and the wolf was on the other side of her feet, lying down. Gears, Mason, and Magnum were facing me. Brooke had been sitting in Squatch’s lap until he stood to… to turn into a damned fucking werewolf.

Magnum stood and walked to me, his pace slow, as if he didn’t know if I’d want him to sit beside me or not, and that was fair, because I wasn’t sure if I did.

“Kitty,” Magnum said. “Can you talk to Storm about Brooke a little, please?”

“Yeah,” Kitty said. “Brooke saved me. I was in a really bad situation, and she… it’s a long story, but I wouldn’t be here without her. The most powerful vampires have what’s called a coterie — a houseful of vampires and supernaturals, maybe some humans, who are under them, part of their power base, I guess. Brooke calls hers the Island of Misfit Toys, because she takes on those of us who aren’t… normal. Those of us who have a hard time fitting into society, living in the human world. She protects those the Concilio — the big scary Vampire Council — would enslave, and maybe she can’t allow them total freedom, but she gives them as much as she can. As Magnum kind of said, she’s scary powerful, but mostly, she uses her power for good.”

Brooke gave Kitty what can only be described as an adoring look. “I try to. In the beginning, I brought those to me who would come, but over the centuries, it’s turned into my preference, to seek out the ones who don’t… fit.”

Brooke looked at Magnum. “Sit beside your Storm. She’s unsure about pretty much everything, but she doesn’t want you to go away.”

“You can read my mind?” I asked.

“I can do so much more than that, dear Storm.”

Gears stood, went to a cooler, opened it, grabbed a recorked wine bottle, pulled the cork, poured about two inches of the deep red wine into a stemmed glass, and handed it to Brooke. One second Brooke had normal teeth; the next second she had vampire fangs. She pressed her thumb to her fangs, squeezed some of her blood into the glass, and licked her thumb. Her teeth were normal again, and I wondered if I’d imagined it.

“We need a few drops of your blood,” Magnum said from beside me. “Brooke wanted to drink from the tap, but I convinced her to allow us to handle it this way.”

He showed me a small tool, and I watched him open a sterile package and put a tiny needle into it. “Just on the side of your finger,” he said. “A few drops.”

Drink from the tap. Did that mean she wanted to bite me? Fuck. I didn’t want her to have my blood in any way, though. Direct or indirect, so I shook my head.

He looked… scared. I’d never seen that look on him before, and that served to scare me.

“You can’t be allowed out into the world with this knowledge,” Magnum told me. “Not unless you’ve been magically bound to the secret, and I think nearly all magical ceremonies or rituals or whatever involve blood.”

“Three drops of my blood will not turn you into a vampire, nor will it affect your DNA or your energy in any way,” Brooke said. “You and I each take in a few drops of each other’s blood, and you will promise to keep our secrets. If you fully mean it in every way when you say it, the magic will bind you to the promise. The wording will keep you from sharing it any way — written, oral, and you won’t even be able to hint about it. A few more minutes, if you cooperate, and we can take you back to land.”

“And if I don’t cooperate?”

“When you work on video,” Brooke said, “you mark the beginning and end of a section you wish to cut or delete, yes?”

I didn’t like where this was going, but I nodded.

“I put a marker in your memory when you stepped onto the boat. If you do not follow through, I will delete everything from that point forward and replace it with a hazy memory of Gears telling you some names in his head — names he does not remember, but I can see in his memories. I’ll share those names with you either way. Those families deserve to have some closure.”

My blood went cold. Delete everything.

She’d put an in-point in my head like my memories were footage on a timeline to trim, and she could just… cut everything I’d seen, everything I’d heard, every face, every name, every piece of the story that mattered. Gone, and replaced with filler. Delete the clip, and everything downstream shifts to close the gap, so there’s no seam, nothing that would ever tell me something was missing.

I’ve done it to video a thousand times — a stutter, a bad take, an accusation without facts to back it up. But I didn’t take the words and memories from those people, I just chose not to air them.