A Demon Lady With Love Read online

Chapter 5

  The Times That Try Men’s Voles

  I followed Mike back into the mausoleum’s musty smelling interior as a dozen or so plump voles scurried around our feet and through the opening before it closed.

  “The voles ought to mask any scent we’ve left behind,” the vampire said as we rushed down the stairs and into his subterranean apartment. He led me into a spacious pantry stocked with boxes of powdered blood and placed a travel pack into my hands. “Pack this with all the O-positive you can find. After that, AB-negative keeps my energy levels up.”

  “What are we doing,” I asked, more than a bit worried. “Who is after me? What’s going on?” I hated feeling helpless, and right now I had no idea of what waited in the world . . . plane . . . whatever right outside the cemetery gates.

  Mike sighed. “The baron of this principality is a demon that doesn’t like competition. He doesn’t let anything supernatural in and has a perimeter of detectors and defenses set up to keep things like us out.”

  “So what does any of this have to do with me?”

  Mike looked at me strangely. “At first I thought that the genie’s arrival triggered the first search that you saw. But those Vandugga are a whole other matter.”

  “What’s a Vandugga?” I asked as my hands moved quickly to pack the boxes Mike indicated.

  “Vandugga are reconnaissance drones cooked up after scientists here reverse engineered an alien spacecraft. The aliens landed by accident twenty years ago not too far from here.”

  I took several water bottles from Mike and stuffed them into the sacks. “You mean aliens, like from outer space?” I asked. “What happened to them?”

  “The demon fed them to his pet chupacabras,” Mike grimaced. “Which is what you will be if I don’t get you somewhere safer.”

  I stopped what I was doing and waited until Mike looked at me. I needed to know the answer to this question.

  “Why?”

  “I told you that the demon doesn’t like competition. And for him to set those things out looking for you means that you are on his short list of enemies.”

  “No . . . I mean yes . . . we’ll get to all that in a minute. Why are you helping me, Mike? I’m supposed to be food to you.”

  Mike’s cheek flinched as if I had just poked him in the eye. “When the genie transformed me, he didn’t turn me into a full vampire. I suppose that turned out to be a good thing, because—never mind—that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say I’ve been helping run an underground rescue for supernatural beings like us for almost as long as I’ve been here.”

  Before he could go on, I interjected. “Us? I’m not anything like you or that freak parade calling himself a genie.”

  Mike pointed a long finger straight up where the Vandugga or whatever they were might very well have been at that exact moment. “Somebody thinks differently, Jack. Those ships have the tech to find you and do the kinds of things to your body and soul that would turn a serial killer into a celibate monk. I’ve been on one once. I know what they do. You’re special, and that alone makes you worth saving in my book.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew that Mike had to be wrong in his estimation of me. I could just introduce him to Liz’s family. They’d happily tell him that there was nothing unique about me.

  Mike zipped the bags closed and disappeared into his room where he came out with another bag already packed with supplies. “With my kind of hobby I always have to keep one of these packed,” he grinned.

  I caught a motion on the floor by my feet, and looked to see the dark brown eyes of a vole starring up into mine like it wanted to tell me something. Damn that was uncanny. “Ah Mike,” I said, “One of your fur buddies is here.”

  Mike took the thing into his hand and nodded knowingly as the rodent launched into a long string of unintelligible, gibbering squeaks. “Just as I thought,” he said and took a breath before translating for me. “The Vandugga have congregated in the sky above the cemetery. They’ve sent landing teams down, which means the Nightwatch are on the prowl.” He cursed, and then to the vole said, “Please tell Max to meet us at the usual site.”

  The vole let out another stream of burbbling squeaks and padded quickly out of the room and through some unknown hole into the cold night.

  “Quite useful, those voles,” Mike said. “Their size makes them hard to detect and they put out a scent that interferes with the demon’s searchers. I helped stop a serial killer that had been stalking magical animals. Called himself Cat-O-Nine-Tails.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Go Mike. How’d you stop him?

  “Most of the credit goes to the voles. Once they followed him home, all I did was set him up for a IRS tax audit.”

  “Tax audit doesn’t sound too threatening,” I said.

  Mike chuckled. “The Infernal Revenue Service doesn’t play around in this Principality. It’s run by a demon. One that feeds off of envy, vanity, and greed. It can’t have anything like a killer upsetting the apple cart. Cat-O-Nine-Tails liked to prey on humans too, though they weren’t his preferred targets. He blamed it all on a Cat Nip addiction. I worked hard to track him down and almost got myself killed in the process.”

  I could tell by the look on his face that a lot of bad blood bubbled below the surface of that topic, so I left him alone for a bit. He needed some time to think before we made our next move, anyway. Eventually we sat and talked as he gathered his thoughts. When he was finally ready, he led me down a hallway with smooth concrete walls lined with utility lights spaced at wide, irregular intervals. At times I had to keep a hand extended in order to feel the wall beside me so I didn’t stumble in the dark. I lost all sense of time, and when Mike placed a cold hand on my shoulder, I nearly screamed. If you’ve ever nearly leapt out of bed when your significant other used your back as a heating pad for their ice cold feet, let me tell you it has nothing on the undead flesh of a creature of the night.

  Mike leaned close to me and whispered, “Be quiet, we have to go topside now.” He had a better chance of keeping my silence if he wore gloves in the future.

  I followed Mike up a vertical row of metal steps. Iron grated on concrete as he lifted a manhole cover with one arm and pushed it aside. I emerged into a narrow alley sided by windowless brick walls rising thirty feet into the night sky. Mike stood with his eyes closed, listening for any signs of pursuit or discovery. After carefully placing the iron cover back into its seatings, I joined him, and he said quietly, “Welcome to the lair of the beast.”

  Only a few cars passed us as we walked down a nearly deserted main street that ran between a row of quaintly decorated shops, hairstyle boutiques, and restaurants, all of which screamed affluent homespun downtown America. The lair of the beast looked downright bourgeois if you asked me. “So . . . this is the domain of the demon?” I asked, looking up at a barber shop sign proclaiming specials for dads and their children that hung next to another for a bakery advertising fresh breads and homemade European hot chocolate.

  Sinister.

  Across the street from us, an upper-end Italian restaurant heralded made-from-scratch crusts, pastas, and exquisite cannoli. Beside it sat a consignment shop with several pricey wedding gowns adorning display mannequins behind plate glass windows.

  What evil bastards.

  “Mike, this place doesn’t seem so bad.” I knew I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover and all that. I felt really grateful to be away from the cemetery hideout. In times of stress, I always preferred to be in motion. But this place looked as if the worst it suffered from was the thick veneer of upper middle class ostentation. Except for the malevolent presence of the airships in the sky about two miles away, that was.

  “It’s early yet. In a few more hours the Vandugga will withdraw with the sunrise. The things powering them don’t particularly like the sunlight, so we will have that on our side, but we need to hurry so we can cross over into a darker Principality.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. He was a vampire after all. “Will it be any warmer there?” I asked. After all, I was cold.

  “We will stop at Walmart.”

  “They have those here?” I asked.

  Mike nodded his head. “They’re everywhere, though the demon here doesn’t like them—too plebian.”

  We continued walking out of the town and past a number of pricey sub developments, and as the neighborhoods grew farther and farther apart, I asked, “So how is it that a demon rules over a place that looks so . . . normal?”

  Mike admonished me, “Remember that I told you how looks can be deceiving, Jack. This demon likes to keep his subjects’ sins at a low simmer. What better way than to encourage banality and conformism. People line up in droves to live here in the heart of suburban damnation.”

  I was confused. “What kind of people?”

  A look of revulsion crossed Mike’s face. “Yuppies.”

  I thought of the snobbish condescension I got from Liz and her parents who never failed to brag about all their expensive things, so I understood.

  Mike went on. “The people living here will sell out their mothers in order to keep up a successful façade. The lengths they’ll go to in order to look the proper part set off chain reactions of mediocre avarice, deceit, envy, and snobbery that the demon revels in. That’s why he guards the security of this place so forcefully. If people are exposed to real terrors—the kinds of things that draw them out of their narrow preoccupations and high brow aspirations—like a serial killer or blatant demonic infestation, they’ll be forced to make a moral choice and possibly take a side that requires a love for something higher than themselves.”

  Looking around at the dark houses arranged in clusters of tastefully landscaped lawns, I noticed how perfectly resplendent the flower beds were and absolutely sterile the front yards seemed; they were completely barren of children’s toys, whimsy, or spontaneity. God forbid someone leave an offending item of lawn furniture out to annoy the neighbors.

  The low growl of an approaching engine alerted me that we no longer had the road to ourselves. Mike pulled me off of the asphalt and into the thick cover of bushes on the other side of the ditch. When he placed a finger over his mouth, I nodded. The steady increase of headlights nearly blinded me, but the glare cut off abruptly as not one, but three SUVs with tinted windshields and the initials H.A. emblazoned across their doors turned sharply and tore into the driveway of a generically tasteful cape cod. I watched as five heavy bodied men dressed in black uniforms poured out of the vehicles, stormed onto the cape cod’s porch, and began battering the door open. Muffled shouts of surprise and children crying within drifted across the lawn. My hands clenched and I nearly shouted, “What the hell?”

  Mike shook his head and shushed me. “Keep quiet and just watch; there’s nothing we can do for them.”

  I looked helplessly in Mike’s direction. His granite hard face somehow managed to look tense and strained. Several minutes later a man and woman in their nightclothes were lead out along with two weeping children that looked around with terrified eyes.

  A smartly dressed woman in a tightly fitting business suit got out of the second SUV’s passenger side and strode with a harsh and stiff gait. The woman in nightclothes saw her and immediately cried out, “Please! Please! We were taking care of it!”

  The woman in the business suit wore her hair back in a severe braid. She was beautiful in a cold, wintery way. Her taut face held no lines of sympathy or kindness. When she spoke, her voice drew across my nerves like a rusty nail across an eyeball. “You’ve had twenty-four hours to comply with our requests. I’ve received numerous complaints from your neighbors on this matter. I’m afraid this has now become a matter of collection, Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

  The woman motioned to the men to put the family into the vehicles, but one child refused to go and grabbed ahold of the mother’s pajama legs, wailing pathetically. I strained not to move, biting my tongue in the process. Pulling the child—a little boy—away from his mother proved too difficult for just one man, and when a second one joined in the effort, he backhanded the boy across his face with so much force I heard the slap as if it had happened right next to me.

  “Hey!” I bellowed, unaware I had left the concealment of the bushes. “You can’t do that to a child. Come over here and I’ll make you my bitch!”

  Everyone across the road froze as their attention turned toward me . . . everyone except the ice woman in the suit, that is. When her eyes locked onto mine I felt as if someone had just poured a bucket of cold water over my head. Behind me, Mike let loose with a string of expletives, and I did the only thing that seemed logical at the time.

  I raised my fist and flipped her the bird.

  “Get him!” she shrieked.

  I felt Mike yank on my shirt so hard he nearly gave me whiplash. “Idiot! Run!” I turned and followed Mike, charging pell-mell into the dense forest of pines behind us.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I shouted as we ran.

  “That was the demon’s Homeowner’s Association! And you’ve just made my job of keeping you safe much harder.” Mike didn’t sound winded at all.

  Behind us I heard the sounds of rough pursuit as large men tore through the low growth among the trees. “We have a good lead on them,” I said, having to measure my breathing so I could talk and run at the same time.

  “They aren’t men,” Mike snapped. “They’re the same things that were looking for you earlier!”

  I strained my muscles to propel myself further, to try to open the gap separating us, but no matter how much effort I spent, they were slowly narrowing the distance. I do not know how long we ran, maybe an hour or more. My legs felt like they were on fire as the forests and subdivisions we cut through grew increasingly rural. Every time I looked back I saw the same hulking figures with the bodies of men drawing closer. Then I saw something that nearly made me loose control of my bowels. The lead figure drew a strangely shaped gun.

  I punched Mike in the shoulder to tell him what I saw.

  “Into the trees,” he said. “They know we’re close, so we’ve got to put something between us and them.”

  Closer to what?

  My lungs felt like they were about to melt and run out of my nose. As I dodged between trees, I didn’t know how much longer I could keep this up until I heard a strange, keening wail behind me and an explosion took off half of a tree trunk in front of me, convincing my legs to drag the rest of my body along with them.

  Behind me I heard a gun go off, but instead of the sharp report of a pistol, what I heard was another shrill wail. A sharp hiss shot past my head and I watched as a blurred object struck another tree in the distance, cutting it in half with an ear-splitting rumble.

  Before I mustered enough wind to scream in mortal terror, I suddenly felt as if I had collided with an invisible wall made of gelatin.

  This time I did scream.

  Everything around me blurred. Colors became indistinct and I struggled to breathe air that became dense, like running into a strong head wind. Yet as soon as it was there, it was gone. The pressure lifted, and I stumbled when I made it through, barley managing to catch myself before going all the way to the ground.

  It took real willpower to right myself because I was breathing like an asthmatic racehorse. Mike grabbed me before I started running. “It’s okay, Jack. We’ve crossed over.”

  All the muscles in my body quivered and twitched as adrenaline coursed through my veins, turning my limbic system into a fireworks display. “What the hell happened back there?!” I shouted. “Those were children. Children, Mike!”

  Mike nodded his head sadly. “And that is why only a fool buys a house with a Homeowner’s Association. The only thing worse are gated communities.”

  “What did they do to deserve that?” I panted.

  “Oh, I suspect someone complained about the chalk drawings on the driveway. Hopscotch as far as I could tell, but it was dark,” he said matter-of-factly.

  My face twisted into an expression that it still hurts to think about. I was disgusted and incredulous . . . I was discredulous. “You mean this Homeowner’s group took that family because they let their kids play hopscotch on the driveway?!”

  Mike nodded his head. “Mmm-hmm. That and I suspect because the garden hose hadn’t been completely rolled up.”

  I wanted to scream or hit something, and then after a moment’s more reflection, I wanted to scream and hit something. I decided to ask Mike where we were, and he answered by pointing a long corpse’s finger into the night sky where two moons lit the world in a banshee light.