Page 21
Further up the road, an Irish Pub is blasting the night air with folk music, light, and laughter. It is far enough away to be easily ignored, but close enough to give a semblance of raw, vibrant life that I didn’t expect outside Cat’s Cradle Penninsula, and definitely not in the Border District. Or this close to the biggest veil in Babylon City; the Darkmoon Market veil is just a few streets over, if I am to believe our vampire envoy. Which makes me think that the people living around here might not be completely human.
I get out of the car and walk up the steps while Cor stalks Stanley, who is most likely pondering how to get away from us the quickest. He has been tense ever since he let us into his car, and not just because Cor attempted to jump out of the moving vehicle twice. No, the tension is mainly caused by the way Cor stares at Stanley.
He hasn’t eaten him so far, but he looks like he’s still thinking about it. The way Cor watches Stanley’s neck is almost reverent in its hunger and does absolutely nothing to lessen Stanley’s semi-permanent state of dread. I offered to take the wheel when we left the hotel, but Stanley went pale and wheezy at the suggestion, as if riding shotgun somehow would make him more vulnerable to Cor’s teeth.
Stanley locks the car, and all but crawls over the hood as he tries to reach me as fast as possible. As if I were the safe spot in their weird game of catch. Cor stalks after him soundlessly and unhurriedly. Not that Stanley buys his act; “Can you please make him stop?” he wheezes, grabbing my elbow for a moment. Cor rumbles at him, and he lets go immediately.
Sighing, I close my eyes. I am bone tired, my head hurts, my neck hurts and my arm throbs, and I feel like there is something slightly off about my balance. All I want to do is lie down a bit and wrap myself in a warm blanket, maybe watch some cartoons until I fall asleep. I allow myself to daydream for a few seconds, then I take a deep breath and open my eyes again.
“Cor, please stop scaring him. He will bring you something to eat as soon as he can, but it will take a little while.” I don’t turn around to check if he understood me. I’m not sure I care right now.
It takes a few tries to find the right key, but not long enough to give Stanley a chance to run off. The door is real wood and heavy, with peeling brown paint and a wide, sweeping brass handle, like they have in Europe. The hallway behind it sports reddish wallpaper and a light wooden floor with dips and divots where uncounted amounts of boots have stepped and turned on the same spots, leaving marks that nobody cared to polish out. A dark wooden stair leads up into the unknown, while three doors further down the hallway beckon to be opened. The house might be slim, but it is longer than expected, and my exhaustion recedes a little at the prospect of exploring.
Cor herds Stanley through the front door as I examine the first room to our right. Spartan living room, a little dusty, with beige walls, linoleum floors, and standard wood furniture. A wooden bench with cushions takes the place of a couch, two chairs with similar cushions and wide arm rests flank it in case company wants to sit just as uncomfortably as whoever picked that bench contraption. An old TV sits on a little sideboard across from the seating area, complete with a decorative knitted tablecloth beneath the TV. On the left side and across from the street side window, a surprisingly wide arch leads into the next room, which turns out to be an L-shaped kitchen with a breakfast nook. A bowl-shaped lamp dangles from the ceiling above the table, too dusty to identify the color.
The whole house has a weird lived-in feel to it, like it should be owned by a mid-sixties lady called Martha after being handed down for generations in her family and having been renovated exactly once after the Cold War. It’s not ramshackle or anything; everything is in working order, but nothing is new. Not even new-ish. Sturdy furniture, sturdy cutlery, cheap sideboards, and bulky chairs. Stuff that nobody would miss if it were to break under the weight of a raging fang-baby, which is the purpose of the house, as Stanley explained in the car.
I eye a bunch of cobwebs dangling from the kitchen lamp for a moment as I collect my thoughts, then turn to watch Stanley scramble after me and flit into the spacious breakfast nook across from the kitchen door. With Cor following him like an unstoppable lava flow. It’s not his brightest decision, because now he’s caught between a wall and a… Cor. Stanley seems to realize the same thing and tries to scooch around the table and out on the other side, but it’s not really helping. He knows it, and Cor seems to know it as well; he grins widely, showing teeth, leaning forward just a little.
For a moment I wonder if I should intervene, try to distract Cor or lure him away from his chosen snack, but I am not sure if I can or should. As much as I try to reassure myself of Cor’s good character, I don’t know him. He’s a stranger, even though I seem unable to remember that fact whenever things get dicey. Hell, Stanley has known Cor longer than I do, and he is scared shitless, so what do I know?
It takes Stanley’s half angry and half pleading side glance to decide. I step forward and touch Cor’s arm carefully, just a stroke with two fingers to get his attention. My fingers brush over the dark hairs on his arm, making me shudder and speeding up my heart, because he is real, and he is here, and I just remembered that. He doesn’t quite react, eyes still fixed on his prey, but he straightens minutely, and the grin slowly seeps away. It’s not much, but by the way Stanley swallows, I just showed a feat of strength worthy of a god.
Still, whatever non-verbal communication I just performed, it seems to have worked. After a few more seconds of hungry ogling, Cor turns away and sniffs the air, then prowls off, through the kitchen door and deeper into the bowels of the house. I’m not sure if that is better than him scaring Stanley, especially since the front door isn’t completely closed, and he could sneak off whenever he pleases, but I can’t really complain. Instead, I sit down and rub my forehead, trying to ease the tension headache that roams around my brain. When I look up again, Stanley still sits across from me, head slightly tilted and much less panicked than before. He is still a little pale around the gills and looks ruffled, but his demeanor is a lot calmer.
“So, rotting vampire, huh?” he says and crooks his brow in question.
Seems like we’re simply going to ignore what just took place; fine with me. “Is there some coffee in here or something?” I ask and eye the kitchen cabinets.
“Might be. The young ones sometimes like to drink it. No real nourishment, but the taste seems to calm them down,” Stanley says and shrugs. Guess I’ll have to find out on my own.
AS IT TURNS out, the safe-house has an impressive stack of non-perishables, and that includes some powdered coffee. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t even look at it with my butthole. Tonight I nurse my cup like it’s artisan special brew. “What do you know about the rotting vampires?”
Stanley still sits across the table, all upright and attentive. Cor passed the door once, glanced at us, and then took off again up the stairs. I hear him rummage around every so often, and I have my suspicions that he’s making noises for my benefit. Not that I’m protesting.
“Nothing. The first time I heard about that was from you.”
“Nobody missing from your kiss, or clan, or whatever? No weird disappearances? No rumors?”
Stanley huffs exasperatedly. “How should I know? There are tons of rumors and strange goings-on, but I have no idea if I know anything about rotting vampires, because you haven’t given me any clues yet.”
Which makes sense somewhat. I can’t imagine the things going on in any veil, especially in a big metropolis like Babylon City, but it makes things harder for me. I can’t just blab out whatever comes to mind. Stanley isn’t stupid, and he wouldn’t have a hard time guessing the connections that I have yet to form. And going with it instead of waiting for me to catch up. Which could end really badly for either Cor, Asha, or me. I’d prefer none of these options, thank you.
“Rotting vampire, Gideon,” Stanley prompts me and rips me out of my daydreaming. Damn it, I need to lie down soon.
“Ah, yes. Sorry. I—we, Asha and I—found the vampire that we think killed the Theology students. Only it wasn’t one, it was two vampires, and they were,” I pause and shrug helplessly, grasping for words, “sick, for lack of a better word? Like, blackish veins and gray skin, rotting meat falling off, a horrible stench. Didn’t seem quite sane either. One of them, the male, took off as soon as he realized we were Hunters, but he left the other one, the female, to attack us. It was the weirdest thing.”
I pause and take a sip of coffee, listening to the quiet upstairs. No movement now, as if Cor might be listening as well. His hearing is more than good enough. “We—I, I guess—tried to kill her, the female vampire I mean, but it was like the rot made her immune to silver or something. It barely slowed her down, and if Cor hadn’t intervened, she would have killed me. Easily.”
Stanley frowns. “And that’s it? I mean, oh gosh, rotting vampires, that is bad. But not worth the help I’ve given you so far, and you know it. There better be more to tell.”
The coffee cup touches my lips, but I set it back down without drinking. He is right, of course, but I have to be careful what to tell him and what not to. Especially since parts of it involve Asha and her weird behavior. But I do have the feeling that there is something going on that I can’t quite grasp yet. Gotta take chances once in a while. Carefully. “I’m just trying to make sense of the weird things I’ve seen tonight, okay? I’m offering you all conclusions I come to while we talk; that’s gotta be worth something. Now, Cor had something around his neck, a medallion of some kind. Do you know anything about it?”
Stanley rolls his eyes to the right as he thinks, shrugging slightly. “I don’t remember everything, but I know that there was some kind of warden or handler in charge of Cor the last time they let him out. He had a medallion that seemed to be magic as well. Wouldn’t be the first time someone tries to use hocus pocus to control a vampire. Never ends well. But again, not information that helps me.”
An image from the shootout jumps to mind. That flash of metal in Asha’s hand. The vampires didn’t have any jewelry. But what if… And that would mean the thing she tried to give Arzel could have very well been the control thing.
Stanley leans forward and murmurs quietly, “whatever you just thought, I’d like to know about it. Because you look scared.”
