Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (34 page)

Balestro kept his hands high. The fire grew. The voice became louder:
Seven. Six.

“And her mother,” said Reginald, extending a hand, palm up, toward Victoria.
 

Four
.

“And her father, of course.”
 

Three
.
 

Balestro lowered his hands. The fire receded a bit, waiting. The countdown stopped.
 

Reginald’s other hand had extended in the other direction, now pointing at Altus the incubus.
 

The countdown stopped. The fire waited, now changing from a fiery red to a quiescent blue. Reginald could almost feel all of the world’s vampires waiting, watching.
 

“It is true,” said Balestro.
 

Behind them, Karl barked laughter.
 

“What?” said Claire.
 

“Claire,” said Victoria suddenly. “Why aren’t you wearing a coat?”
 

Reginald went down on one knee and turned Claire around, both of his hands on her shoulders.
 

“Claire,” he said. “Six months ago, I spent an hour in the middle of every night in your living room, watching TV while your mother slept upstairs. Not once did she wake up. Not once did she come down. Not once did she stir. Didn’t that strike you as strange?”
 

“She was drunk,” said Claire.
 

“No. She was under the influence, but not of alcohol. Not all of the time, anyway.” He looked up at Altus. Claire’s gaze followed his, and Altus turned around, suddenly very interested in the stone altar.
 

“She didn’t recently get clean,” he said. “She recently
became free
. When she lost her job, the thing that has had a hold over her for your entire life stopped seeing her walk by the place where it lives, and it lost interest, and it moved to someone else, and it let her go. It wasn’t her fault, Claire.”
 

He let go of her shoulders and she turned, taking her glamoured mother by the hand.
 

Balestro looked down at Claire. He said, “Speak.”
 

“Um… what?”
 

Nikki’s lips were at Reginald’s ear. “What just happened?”
 

Maurice was looking at Reginald with curiosity, as were several members of the EU Council. So, loud enough for everyone to hear, Reginald told Nikki, “Usually, incubi just toy with women, getting their rocks off. They seldom get women pregnant, and when they do, the children never make it to full term. So far, so good, Altus?”
 

Altus nodded self-consciously.
 

“Except for one time,” said Karl, moving up to stand next to Reginald. “
Only
one time, an incubus had a child of a woman. The child’s name was Merlin.”
 

“What?” said Claire.
 

“Speak,” repeated Balestro, looking down.
 

“What does he want me to do?” Claire whispered to Reginald.
 

“He wants you to do the one thing he can’t,” said Reginald. “He wants you to tell the future.”
 

P
RESCIENT

THE BLUE RING OF FIRE continued to circle, continued to churn. Claire looked up at Reginald, then at the angel. Reginald gave her a small nod.
 

“Uh…” said Claire.
 

“If you have nothing to say,” said Balestro, “we’ll continue.”
 

“Uh…” said Claire. She tugged on her mother’s pantleg. Victoria looked down, a wide smile on her face. Finding no help there, Claire looked back at Reginald.
 

“Fine,” said Balestro. He raised his hands again. The fire swelled.
 

“Wait!” said Claire.
 

Balestro lowered his hands. The fire shrunk again, became blue again.
 

“It’s like Reginald said. They’re going to evolve. He’ll… uh… he’ll show them the way.”
 

“What way?”
 

“The smart way.” She waved her hands around in mystical-looking spirals. “It is thus predicted.
Shazam
.”
 

Balestro looked up at Reginald. Squinted. Then he looked back at Claire.
 

“Tell me more,” he said.
 

“There’s… uh… a great change coming. A war, between humans and vampires.” She looked up, having caught Reginald making sharp head-shaking motions and drawing a finger across his throat. “Wait. Not really a war,” she continued. “Like a skirmish. Yes. I see it now in the third eye. It’ll be all good. And then there will be change. Like, you know, good change.”
 

“A war?” said Balestro.
 

“Just a little one. Nothing to get worked up about. I mean, just a few skirmishes to, like, clear out the pipes, you know? Shake things up. There will be… uh… bad vampires. And… like, some good ones. But…” Her eyes jumped open as if something brilliant had just occurred to her. “Oh! Like, lots of
evolved
ones, like, you know,
evolved
vampires. Like Reginald! And they’ll use their big brains and become more. Uh… Like, they’ll invent stuff like that True Blood blood substitute or whatever, which isn’t to say that they’ll be, like, sellouts, you understand… but, like, that makes them more flexible.” She looked at the angel, met his icy glare. “But they’ll still be evil! Not too evil. Like, the perfect amount of evil. Like, what I’m saying is, here: They’ll be the hunters they’re supposed to be, and they’ll drink blood and be eternal and all, but they won’t be assholes. Oh, sorry, Mom. They won’t be jerks, I mean. They’ll… what?”
 

She turned her head to look at Reginald, who was doing an odd dance with his chin held high and his lips pursed, his expression superior, his hands tugging at imaginary tuxedo lapels. Then he made big X motions over himself. He stopped when Balestro looked over.
 

 
“And the vampires will… not be fancy? They won’t be… uh… gay? No! No, I guess they’ll be gay sometimes.” Her eyes were darting back and forth between Reginald and Balestro, trying to read a frantic game of charades.
 

“Pompous!” she yelled, suddenly triumphant. “Yeah, that’s what it was… uh… I mean, what ‘the eye’ was trying to tell me. All the stuff they do now, with, like, trying to be some sort of a super race, that’s over. Like, in the near future.”

Balestro thought for a second. Then he said, “Why?”
 

“Why what?”
 

“Your…
vision
… says that vampires are going to stop pursuing a bottleneck of perfection. If this is true, why would it be?”
 

“I don’t know,” said Claire, offended. “I don’t write the songs. I just play them.”
 

“I’m sure it’s because they recognize that evolution doesn’t come from the bottleneck you mention,” said Reginald. He dropped his eyes to the ground when Balestro snapped his head over to look at him.
 

“Yeah,” said Claire. “I see Reginald leading a lot of this stuff, so there you go.” She made jazz hands. “Booga-booga.”
 

Balestro stood tall on the altar. The blue fire continued to roil. Reginald watched it, seeing it boil past trees and rocks and leaving them untouched. It was in his mind. It was in all of their minds. What would happen if Balestro unleashed it? Would vampires simply explode? Or would they have the vampire equivalents of embolisms, quietly breaking inside and falling apart? He could feel Maurice’s consciousness inside of his mind — and now, joining it, Nikki’s as well. Through Maurice, he could sense dozens of others, and through them, scores of others. A giant family tree stretched below him in the recesses of his mind, and he was sure — yes,
sure
now — that every vampire alive was watching the ring of fire wherever they were, knowing exactly what it was, waiting to see what would happen.
 

“I can’t read her,” said Balestro, looking down at Claire.

“Strange,” said Reginald. “I can.”
 

“I couldn’t read Merlin either,” said Balestro. Then he looked at Reginald. “But
you
, I can read.” He looked at Maurice. “And you. And the rest of you.” He sighed. Reginald wondered if sighing was a human affect, something he did because it was a habit of the flesh. Did angels sigh in Heaven?
 

The fire blinked out like an exhausted gas flame and was gone.
 

“You, I can read,” Balestro repeated. And then, without warning, something came out of Balestro and blew through Reginald like a shotgun blast. He felt his head come off, watched as his vision went a brilliant white and then black. The world spun and he hit the ground, his head an arm’s length away, and he could see it now, and he reached out his hand for it and his neck was ragged and bleeding and he could feel his pulse, could feel his life leaving him, and then…
 

And then he was standing where he’d been a moment earlier, intact, and nothing had happened after all.
 

But something
had
happened. But something had changed.
 

“We will be watching,” said Balestro.
 

And then, accompanied by the fire and light show that had heralded his arrival, he was gone.
 

28 D
AYS
L
ATER

“YOU ARE THE BIGGEST NERD ever,” said Nikki. “You’ve got carte blanche to do whatever you want with a hot girl, and this is how you spend it.”
 

“Shut up,” said Reginald. His fingers touched ceramic, backed off, touched it again.
 

Nikki grabbed the front of her shirt and jiggled her breasts dramatically.
 

“Stop it. I’m trying to think,” he said.
 

“See? Right there. The fact that you care about the game at all proves your nerdness. I’ll bet I could get action if I had giant cinnamon buns on the side of my head like Princess Leia. Let’s lay down on this board and get nasty.”
 

“There’s a war on,” said Reginald. “Is that all you can think of?”
 

“There’s not a war on,” said Nikki.
 

“Give it time.”
 

Reginald’s intuition on the hilltop had proven correct. Whatever Balestro had done with the ring of fire was evidence of Balestro’s — and, presumably, the others’ — dominion over their creations. Every vampire he’d encountered in the days following the hilltop events had seen the blue ring of flame. Every one knew exactly what it had been:
Extinction
. There was nothing they could have done about it. The phenomenon was psychic, inside of their collective minds. There was no way to fight something that came from within. They were only alive because Balestro had let them live. Because he had chosen, not because of anything else.
 

“She was just making it up,” said Nikki. “It’s a talent that girls around you seem to be required to learn.”
 

“She thought she was,” said Reginald. “But I doubt she
actually
was. She has power she doesn’t recognize yet. I wasn’t making it up about Altus and Claire. Balestro would have known if I was. The second master wizard ever and I’m already in good with her. What are the chances?”
 

“Exactly. What
are
the chances?”
 

Reginald sat up from his semi-reclined position and ate one of the cheese nachos on the plate at his side. “Impossible chances. It could really only have happened by plan.”
 

“How?”
 

“What am I, an angel?”
 

Nikki leaned forward and kissed him. “I’m not rising to that rather obvious dig for a compliment,” she said. “But nice try.”
 

Reginald made his move. Rather quickly, Nikki made her answering move, and then started tapping her fingers on the table, indicating that Reginald should hurry up yet again.
 

“Don’t rush me.”
 

“Come on, smarty pants,” she said.
 

He moved his lips against each other, thoughtfully.
 

Then she said, “You really think there’s a war coming?”
 

“There’s
something
coming. You’ve seen the Council. Bunch of idiots. It’s like they were given a choice between right or left and were told that left led off a cliff. And so they chose to go up.”
 

“I don’t understand that metaphor. As usual.”
 

“Exactly. It doesn’t make sense.”
 

Nikki waited for elaboration. None came.
 

“Charles, with his little crusade. You think he’s trouble?”
 

Reginald scoffed. “Come on! You’re prescient enough to know the answer to that. Charles, like so many of our other friends, has taken the simplest set of directions in the world and read them incorrectly.”

“Ah,” said Nikki. “That’s him ‘going up’ instead of going right or even left, in your metaphor.”
 

“Correct.”
 

“Because he’s going the wrong way. Because he read the directions wrong.”
 

“Exactly.”
 

“It’s as if you had a wagon full of hay, and suddenly Al Roker showed up,” said Nikki. “That’s a perfect metaphor for the situation.”
 

Reginald ignored her.
 

“Are you ever going to move?” she said.
 

Reginald placed his hand on his remaining rook and moved it across the board, to check Nikki’s king.
 

“Check.”
 

Nikki moved. Reginald countered.
 

“Check,” he said again.
 

Nikki threw her hands up and hooted. Then she moved her queen in front of her king, checkmating Reginald’s king.