The Medium

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Kim, Zebedee, and Deaf Coyote met the undead law enforcement in the parking lot of the Department of Public Safety, the most neutral ground they could think of. Tony and Edith brought two minivans and six assorted minions of varying flavors, ranging from an acne-scarred teenager to a Polynesian woman with an eye patch. They didn’t look like much, but they were all guaranteed to be formidable.

The vampires arrayed themselves in a semicircle to one side of the cars. Tony, the balding man with the loud tie, tapped a cigarette out of a pack and lit up.

The big German-looking one, Edith, lifted her sunglasses to peer at the welcoming party.

“Had you made a plan for coordinating this?” she asked.

“Can’t,” Coyote said. “They’re moving around too much. I’m tracking the guy we dug up, the one he lobotomized. They stopped in Lampasas this morning. Not making very good time, but I’m guessing they think we can’t trace them.”

“Sounds likely. And this other party, the hostage. Will he be a problem?”

“I doubt it. He’s completely in Duran’s pocket, but the bastard was keeping him totally dry. Even if he’s been gorging… How much can you guys take in? Five or six quarts a day, max? He still wouldn’t be at full strength.”

Edith nodded thoughtfully, and Tony blew out a cloud of smoke.

“You can take care of the hostage,” he said. “We’ll take care of Duran. I think it’s past the point that a trial is necessary or appropriate, and you shouldn’t be seen to take part in an execution. Although we’ll probably have to justify killing him at some point, so if you want to keep trying to rehabilitate your self-storage friend, we’ll comp you for the trouble.”

Kim nodded. “And if you could maybe cut me some keys to a local blood bank…”

Tony smiled. “Picky,” he chided. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The teenager unfolded her arms and glanced at her watch. “We should get a move on. It’s an hour and some to Lampasas if the traffic’s decent. And he could already be moving.”

Four of the vampires broke off and climbed back into their minivan. One shook out a map and put a finger on US 183 North. Coyote heaved himself up into the cab of Zeb’s pickup.

“I know this guy’s psycho,” Kim said, “but do you really think it’ll take eight of you to take him down?”

“Probably not,” Edith admitted. “But it sends an important message. We’re willing to use excessive force. Maybe that’ll keep the other nut jobs quiet.”

“Fair enough,” Kim said. She couldn’t argue with that. She climbed into the seat behind Coyote, letting Zeb drive.

Four minions took the lead, with Edith and Tony and two more following and the wizards-and-cowboy trio bringing up the rear. Kim saw someone in the middle car break out a game of bingo. An execution was probably like a field trip for them. That thought made her queasy, but it was a comfort to know they weren’t worried. She wasn’t worried either, except for Rocky’s sake. Nobody liked Duran. No one would be coming to his aid. It was one against eight, and everyone knew not to look him in the eye or give him a chance to speak. Kim might have found it unfair, if she didn’t have boxes and boxes of files detailing his exploits, the people he’d ruined. Hell, it might even be a mercy, putting him out of his insanity. He’d probably been a person, once. Maybe even a good one. One who wouldn’t want to carry on like this.

Lampasas had a population of just over six thousand. It was a nice little town, no panicked residents to indicate that a fugitive vampire was causing trouble. Zeb poked Kim awake, and they piled out in the parking lot of a grocery store to compare notes.

“Gotta find a phone book,” Coyote growled, and he stomped into the store to appropriate theirs.

Kim watched him go, then turned to shrug at Tony and Edith.

They waited. The teenage vampire tilted her head back and inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring. The whites of her eyes had begun to stain pink.

“Five minutes?” she asked.

Edith frowned, but nodded. “Three,” she said. “We’re in a hurry.”

The kid nodded and grinned, snapping a sloppy salute, and disappeared.

It occurred to Kim that the teenager was probably older than her. She stretched. Her back crackled and her shoulders popped. Zeb gave her a grin.

“You’re too young to be old,” he told her.

She grinned back and they stood in silence until Coyote came back with his phone book. He flipped it open to the back and ripped out the map of Lampasas. Then he pulled a wad of gum out of his mouth, stuck a snippet of a blond hair in it, and stuck both to the corner of the map.

“Sic ‘em,” he said.

The glob of gum mobilized, stretching out and creeping across the map like a spit-covered caterpillar. It wormed down the expressway, across a few residential neighborhoods, and stopped with the bit of hair pointed at a street corner off the main road.

Coyote held it up for everyone to see, grunted, and climbed back into Zeb’s pickup. Thirty seconds later, the teenager was back, looking more cheerful. She glanced at Edith, and something passed between the two of them. Edith nodded. She moved over to Kim and Zeb as Tony slipped into the driver’s seat of one of the minivans. The other six vampires simply melted into thin air.

Kim looked around to see whether any of the mundanes had noticed, but no one was looking.

“We lay low until evening,” Edith said. “You three stay out of sight and far enough away that he can’t sense you. Edge of town, just in case. Someone will come get you when it’s time.”

Then Edith disappeared as well, and Tony drove away. Zeb checked his watch and jogged into the grocery store, coming back with a sack of chocolate.

“Emergency power,” he said.

Then they piled into the pickup and headed out of Lampasas. They turned down a side street and into the cracked driveway of an empty lot. A man with a garden hose waved from across the street. Kim waved back, trying to look like she had every right to be there.

“Anyone know when to expect sundown?” she asked.

“I’d guess ‘nother three hours,” Zeb told her. “There’s some movin’ blankets in the toolbox if anyone wants to hang out in the back.”

The sun crept across the sky. Kim stretched out across the back seat and hung her jacket over the window to keep the light out of her eyes. Coyote grumbled under his breath, then climbed out of the truck and hobbled a slow circuit around the lot, poking at the dirt and whacking the fence with his cane. There was no tingle of magic, so Kim put it down to nerves rather than ritual, confirmed when he shrugged out of his flannel overshirt and pulled it over his head, a habit she’d learned meant he was praying. Kim fingered the cluster of medals at her throat and picked one at random. Saint Anthony of Padua, patron of missing persons and lost things. She kept him around mostly for keys and paperwork and other things that tended to walk off when she needed them, but he seemed appropriate for her current situation, as well.

I know you’re probably busy, she thought in Saint Anthony’s direction, and we do kind of know where our missing person is, approximately, and there’s probably some moral gray area in this whole thing, and I don’t know what your stance on dead people is… Not asking for a miracle, or anything, but some slightly improbable good luck would be nice. Also, if you know someone Up There who covers swift justice or hostages or not getting killed by the bad guys, could you put in a word for us? Thanks.

She shut her eyes and tried not to think about what was happening to that hostage. Instead, she tried to plan, to play out what would happen in three hours. She was reasonably certain Duran was hiding out in a motel. He had low cunning, but not much real smarts, and she doubted anything more creative would have occurred to him. If it was a motel, Tony and Edith would have no trouble breaking down a door, cornering him, and executing him. On the other hand, if he’d forced an invitation out of someone and was inside someone’s home, things would be trickier. The Amarilloans would have no way in without an invitation of their own.

No, she corrected. She’d forgotten that Tony and Edith weren’t the good guys. They would burn him out of someone’s house if they had to, him and Rocky and any humans inside. They would regret it, and they would send out enormous compensations to the next of kin, labeled as checks from a fake insurance company, but they wouldn’t let innocent lives stand in the way of their justice.

She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes and prayed, not to anyone in particular, that her trying to stop one murderer hadn’t enabled more. She folded her arm under her head, milagro bracelet digging into her cheek, and the past week caught up with her. She dozed.

The sun was brushing the horizon when someone tapped on the truck’s window. It was the vampire woman with the eye patch, except she’d ditched the patch and picked up a horrible, greenish glass eye. She climbed into the back with Kim as Zeb started the engine.

“Dinky motel,” she said. “Zillion years old. This won’t take fifteen minutes. We’re going in. You stay in sight of the door and hex the s**t out of him if he tries to run.”

Kim breathed a sigh of relief as her visions of murder evaporated.

“Cowboy. You got any magic?”

Zeb backed out of the lot, making for the expressway. “Not a lick. But I got guns, an’ these beauties never let me down.”

“Shoot for the head,” the woman said. “You hit him in the torso and miss the heart, it’ll slow him down but mostly just piss him off unless you fill him completely full of lead. Wizards?”

Coyote grunted.

“No fancy stuff. It’s hard to kill a vampire, even with magic. I recommend fire or big, flying objects. Don’t get closer than you have to. Don’t look him in the eye, and don’t let him talk. Name’s Bernice, by the way. If you got any questions, ask now.”

Kim wolfed down one of Zeb’s chocolate bars, sank back in the seat, and pulled her semiauto from its holster in the waistband of her jeans. She shook out her bracelets and made sure her necklace was as tight as she could safely make it. Coyote gripped his cane and pulled a massive bowie knife from who-knows-where. Bernice tensed her hands, and the tips of her broad, blunt fingers twisted into reddish-black talons. Zeb whistled Dixie.

They reached the parking lot, and Edith and Tony appeared in front of the truck. Zeb threw it into park, and the four climbed out. The molten rim of the sun sank below the horizon, and Bernice’s glass eye lit up like a candle flame.

Suddenly, there were vampires everywhere. Edith and Tony, Bernice and the spotty teenager clustered together under an unlit streetlight. A football-coach type with a billed cap covering his bald head appeared beside them, accompanied by a dark-skinned, Aztec-looking man who gave Kim a grin filled with deadly teeth. An older woman in a track suit lounged on the hood of someone’s car, and a small, round, smiling man waved from the motel roof.

“He’ll already know we’re here,” Tony said softly.

He turned to Coyote. “Which room?”

Coyote pointed silently to the far end of the block. In the time it took Kim to blink, Bernice was at the door. She looked at the key card slot, shook her head, planted her hand flat against the wood, and pushed it down. It gave with almost no sound at all. The inside of the room was dark.

“I don’t see him,” she said. “Lisa, Dave. Quick search.”

The coach and the woman in the track suit slipped into the room behind Bernice. After about ten seconds, they came back out.

“Duran’s gone.”

Tony ran his tongue over his teeth. “You think he knew we were coming and split?”

“Doubt it. His bag’s sitting in there, and so’s the other guy. I say we scatter, take cover. Watch for him to come back.”

“What’s the hostage’s condition? Will he be a problem?”

Bernice grimaced. “No. He’s… repairable. Maybe”

Zeb drew his revolver and c****d it. Kim leveled her semiauto and clicked the safety off with her thumb, stretching out her mind to feel for ambient energy she could use. Enough power saturated the air that she could turn her bullet into an incendiary and do the same for Zeb. She pulled it in, through her core, and sent it down along her skin and into the firearm.

“We’re going to want to back off some,” she told Zeb. “They can sense magic. We don’t want to tip him off.”

A quiet noise to Kim’s left turned her head reflexively, in time for her to see the woman in the track suit tear off the teenager’s head. The girl’s body jerked, and her skin sloughed away, baring the muscles underneath. The muscles disintegrated, leaving bones, and the bones crumbled. A pile of fine, powdery gray ash began to blow away in the early evening breeze.

For a moment, nothing moved. Tony frowned. Edith opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

Kim could see Lisa’s face; her pupils were dilated, expression rapt, listening to something very interesting. She had seen that expression before.

So had everyone else.

Bernice let out an animal roar, flickering across the parking lot to tackle Lisa, who fought back with teeth and claws. A low, wet splat accompanied a shriek of pain. Blackish fluid sprayed outward, but it was impossible to tell whose innards had been breached.

Edith screamed in a language Kim didn’t know and moved to intervene, but the smiling man from the roof sailed through the air like a cannonball and locked taloned hands onto her face. The musty, cold non-smell of dead blood seeped into the air.

A shot rang out to Kim’s right, and from the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of recoil rippling up Zeb’s arms. Lisa’s head burst in a spray of gore, and she dropped. Bernice was up in an instant, her chest and face ravaged, and she and Tony pried Edith and her attacker apart.

“It was a pretty good plan,” an accented voice whispered in Kim’s ear. It was smooth and low and warm. She relaxed. Something was happening, but it didn’t seem as important as she’d thought it would be. It felt natural, and it felt good.

“Someone forgot that you don’t just go up against me. You go up against me and everyone I can touch.”

Cool fingertips brushed the back of her neck, raising goosebumps down her arms. That felt good, too.

“Go make chaos,” Duran whispered.

It sounded like a fun idea. Kim’s skin was numb, anyway; it wasn’t like she could get hurt.

But something buzzed past her like a missile and hit the man behind her with a report as sharp as Zeb’s gunfire. She turned and saw the Aztec, his knife-sharp features contorted in a feral snarl, his hands buried to the wrists in Duran’s belly. He sank his teeth into Duran’s shoulder and tore away a chunk of flesh and cloth, pulled one hand out of his victim’s innards, and raked glistening claws across his face. Tears streaked his weathered cheeks.

So she shot him.

She didn’t have Zeb’s precision, but her target was a foot away, and she shoved the barrel of her gun under his arm and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash was bizarrely bright, and the bullet burned through him, leaving smoldering holes in his shirt. He staggered, and Duran’s elbow caught him in the face as Coyote’s cane caught Kim in the back of the head. The world went bright, and without knowing how, she found herself on her knees with her gun gone and her right hand smarting.

The smiling man was still smiling, eyes wide and empty. He had Bernice by the throat and was smashing her head over and over into the asphalt. Her glass eye had come out and rolled a few feet away. It burned like a green ember.

Dave the coach was missing a leg, but he had Tony in a headlock. Edith, her face slick with dark blood, appeared behind him and snapped his neck neatly. Bernice grabbed her attacker by the face and slid her other hand into his abdomen, up through his ribcage, gripping his heart. He froze long enough for Edith to kick him in the head, and he went down, but only for an instant. He scrambled to get up again, and Bernice squeezed, and he crumbled into ash.

Kim touched the back of her head gingerly.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

The light in the west hadn’t gotten any dimmer. That had taken all of sixty seconds. Duran was gone.

A thin, hard face appeared inches away from Kim’s. He thrust a hand out, and she flinched, expecting retribution for that burning bullet, but his fist was full of blood-soaked black hair.

“Find him,” he hissed. His voice was cold and harsh, with a warning of frenzy in it, an edge of incipient madness. And something else. Anguish.

“Find him,” he said again, shaking the fistful of hair. He added a tiny push to the command, so small Kim doubted he knew he was doing it. She took the offering and nodded.

“We’ll get the bastard,” she said. “We’ll hit him hard.”

He nodded back and knelt by the teenager’s corpse. There wasn’t much left, but he peeled off his shirt and began to scoop her ashes into the cotton. His shoulders quaked.

Kim struggled from her knees to her feet and went after him. She hugged him from behind, and he didn’t kill her for that.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He laid a gory hand on the side of her face. His claws were still out, and the razor tips dimpled her cheek.

“Find him,” he said once more, and he went back to his funeral preparations.

Coyote examined the damage to Lisa’s head.

“Son of a gun,” he observed. “Took out four of us without ever raising a hand. Is he gone?”

“He wouldn’t stick around,” Tony whispered. His throat was black with bruising. “Itzli got him good. You okay, Itzli?”

Itzli hissed and threw a sharp grimace over his shoulder but said nothing about the cauterized bullet hole through his lungs.

Kim found her gun against the tire of an SUV, where Zeb had kicked it out of her hand. The word chaos drifted through her mind when she picked it up, but the notion was too weak to be called a compulsion. She stuck the gun back in her kidney holster, sucked in a deep breath, and held it until her lungs ached. When she breathed out, she imagined all of Duran’s crap blowing away with the spent air, out of her head and into the night, and she felt better.

But not by much.

The door to the room still loomed open.

“Somebody cover me,” Kim called, not caring who came, and she trudged across the parking lot, shoving the handful of Duran’s hair into her jacket pocket.

It was pitch black inside, except for the glowing orange light switch by the door. She flicked the lights on and leapt back, because if it had been her, she would have laid any booby traps right where a human would reach first. Nothing jumped out at her or exploded or came swinging out of the ceiling, but Duran was a subtle bastard. Kim stretched out her senses, feeling for magic or hotspots of potential energy. Nothing.

“We did surprise him,” she said aloud, in case someone actually did have her back. “Well, maybe not surprise him, but he wasn’t waiting for us. Wasn’t prepared or anything. I bet he was just out and came back and saw us there.”

Blood speckled one of the dingy pillowcases, bright red and human, but not more than a nosebleed. Duran was a tidy eater, if nothing else.

“Disposing of a body, probably. Or out picking up dessert.”

She glanced back to find Itzli regarding her impassively, supporting Bernice.

Bernice popped her glass eye back in and blinked a few times. “If that’s the kind of fight he puts up unprepared…” She trailed off, frowning.

Kim nodded her agreement and stepped into the room. An open duffel sat on the foot of the single bed. Clothes were jumbled inside, a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts, one sock hanging out of the bag. An electric razor sat beside the sink, toothbrush and toothpaste nearby. Other than the blood on the pillow, nothing showed what kind of person had stayed there.

There was also no sign of Rocky. Nothing moved or made a sound.

“Honey?” Kim called. She made up her mind to find out his name as soon as possible. Someone had to know something, if only she could figure out who to ask.

She crept further into the room to peer around the bed. Nothing. She checked in the closet and under the bed. Nothing. There was, however, a shadow behind the shower curtain.

He sat perfectly still, curled in the bottom of the bathtub, still wearing the rumpled sweats he’d had on when he was taken. His right arm hung limp, all the joints at strange angles, and dead blood smudged his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves. His eyes stared ahead, flaming red and devoid of consciousness, the pupils huge. He was deathly pale.

She touched his shoulder, and his fangs ran out in involuntary response, but he didn’t move.

She turned to get help and jumped when she found Itzli there by her shoulder.

“Are you going to take him?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Fix him up. This isn’t right.”

“No,” he agreed. Then, “He might know where Duran would run.”

“Maybe, but there’s no telling how long it’ll take to get him talking again.”

Itzli nodded and shouldered Kim out of the way. He scooped Rocky out of the tub and carried him out to Zeb’s pickup truck. Kim pulled some of Zeb’s moving blankets out of the toolbox and started to build a nest around the vampire in the back seat. She had doubts about having him in the cab for a long ride, but he didn’t twitch a muscle, just sat as she positioned him, staring.

Itzli crouched in the bed of the truck and watched the darkening streets. Then he stiffened, head c****d to one side, and vanished. The others were gone, too, some bearing the injured. A moment later, Kim heard approaching sirens.

“Move,” she said quietly. Zeb leapt into the driver’s seat and reached across to haul Coyote up. Kim slammed her door and rolled into Rocky’s motionless form as Zeb peeled out of the parking lot, drove a few blocks away, and stopped. He killed the engine, shut off the lights, and they waited. Red and blue flashed over the tops of the houses. Kim counted up slowly. When she reached five hundred and twelve, Zeb started the truck again and went back the way they had come, moving at a snail’s pace past the motel. Not one officer looked twice at the truck. After all, they were going in the wrong direction to be running away. He stuck to the speed limit through town, onto the expressway, and all the way back to Austin.

Kim held Rocky’s hand. He didn’t look at her, didn’t respond.

So, Saint Anthony, it’s me again. I found who I was looking for. But I think he’s still lost.