Dead Matter

14

Aidan knocked and then pushed the enormous door open like it weighed nothing, but I doubt I would have been able to move it by myself. The wooden planks of the door were thick and looked like they’d take a week to get through using an ax. Aidan walked into the dark room beyond it. Connor followed him through, and the second he cleared past Aidan, he broke into a sprint.

I came into the room. Brandon’s chambers were ancient and sprawling, a mix of cold stonework filled with treasures both ancient and modern. Off in the darkness, a distant screen glowed at the far end of the room, which was lit by a fireplace. Several figures were seated by it, and that was where Connor headed. I ran after him. As we neared the circle of chairs, a man with shoulder-length wavy black hair stood. From the way the other figures remained seated, it was clear he was the alpha male. Brandon.

Connor leapt at him, pulling a wooden stake out from one of his sleeves.

“You did this to him?” Connor shouted. Twenty years of rage, loss, and sorrow was bubbling to the surface in an instant. “You made him this?”

Brandon did not look at all like what I pictured. He was tall but looked a bit like his television-show namesake, only with longer hair and a bit more hip in the clothes department. He wore dark jeans and a brown long-sleeved button-down with an Ed Hardyish swirly print on it, but I didn’t have time to figure out what it was. He blurred out of Connor’s direct path, but Connor-seasoned as he was-must have caught something in his movement and compensated. My partner swerved right and raised his hand with the stake in it. The blur of motion connected with it and there was the tearing sound of fabric. Brandon slowed to human speed, checked the tear in his shirt near his chest, and knocked the wooden stake from Connor’s hand. It slid off across the floor.

The rest of the vampires leapt to their feet, their faces pulling back like taut leather as they popped their fangs, their true monster natures revealed. Their wave of emotion engulfed me and I stumbled backward, the sense of their projected fear overwhelming me. Brandon waved his hand, and the mob transformed back into their more human forms as the intense feeling subsided. For the moment the bloodsuckers were at bay, but who knew how long that would last?

“Forgive me,” Brandon said. His voice wasn’t what I would have expected from the lord vampire of the manor. In fact, he sounded like he might have a little West Coast in him, maybe due to his television-viewing habits. It helped put me a bit at ease. Brandon turned to Aidan. “And you are interrupting my council… why now?”

“This is the one I kept having the dreams about,” Aidan said, pointing to Connor.

Connor stepped forward. “What the hell is going on here? For almost two years this city has been vampire free. Now I find that not only are there vampires in town; they’ve got their own Medieval Times castle built inside some high-rise.”

Brandon went to speak, then stopped as he noticed Connor’s similarity to Aidan for the first time. His eyes widened as he looked back and forth between the two of them. Aidan, on the other hand, still just looked confused.

“Aidan, my dear boy,” Brandon said. “Will you excuse us for a moment?”

Aidan fell into the prototypical teenage sulking pose, shoulders forward, hunched over. “But…”

“Now,” Brandon snapped. Aidan looked a little shocked, straightened up, and gave a quick nod before blurring off across the room, letting the heavy oak doors slam shut behind him. Brandon turned his attention to both Connor and me. “I realize the nature of this situation must be hitting the two of you somewhat hard,” Brandon continued. He reached out, snatched my bat from my hand, and collapsed it down before handing it back to me. “I’m sorry, but I cannot allow you to insult me in my own home. Do you really think I’d allow you into my chambers if I thought you could do me any serious harm?”

Connor looked off to the far end of the room where the wooden stake had slid away. “It was worth a shot,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I doubt any sort of surprise attack would have worked.” Brandon smiled, turning his full attention to Connor. “You see, we’ve been expecting you.”

“Me?” Connor asked. “Excuse me?”

“We’ve been expecting you,” Brandon repeated. “More or less. It’s why we took Aidan in the first place. We believe you have a role to play in our future, Connor.”

Connor got right up in Brandon’s face. He looked ready to explode. “Yeah, right. Maybe you don’t understand it, but I’ve spent half my life thinking my brother was dead.”

Brandon’s face was impassive. “An unfortunate circumstance, I agree, but given our reasons for doing so, the conversion of one human into our kind is a small price to pay for the safety of my people.”

Connor was becoming more and more unhinged by the second, but I couldn’t let that happen. We’d be dead with that kind of raw emotional reaction.

“Easy,” I said, stepping between Connor and the head of the vampires.

“Got anything pointy on you, Simon?” Connor asked. “I’m not asking you to do the deed. I’m just asking what you’re packing.”

“Maybe we should let this all sink in,” I said, “and take it easy right now. You’ve just come across your brother, for God’s sake. Take a step back on this. Nobody is staking anybody.”

“You sure about that, kid?” Connor said, looking around for something readily available.

“I’m not sure of anything right now,” I said, “but look at it this way… Nobody seems like they want to feed on us. That’s a step in a positive direction, I suppose.”

Brandon clapped Connor hard on the shoulder, and then helped himself to one of the now-empty chairs in the circle. “You should listen to your partner,” Brandon said.

“Why would you do this to my brother?” Connor asked, the pain on his face killing me. “Why make him one of your kind? Why are you here?”

I could tell by the look on Brandon’s face that he was trying to keep his patience with Connor. “The reason that we’re here,” Brandon said, “is that we are vampire… We’ve always been here.”

I thought of the giant white erase board that hung over the main bull pen of the D.E.A. offices, recording the days since any of the divisions had to deal with vampires. “According to our records,” I said, “your people have kind of gone off the grid for the past two years or so.”

“Not that we mind,” Connor said. “It cuts down on a hell of a lot of my day-to-day workload. But why my brother?”

“As I said, we believe you are key to our future, Connor,” Brandon said. “We believe you and Aidan hold the key to our salvation. All of our salvation. It is foretold in our prophecies.”

“Christ,” I said. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Do you know how many supposed ‘prophecies’ get reported in to the Department every week? In Other Division alone we’ve had six different chosen ones since last Tuesday. Believe me when I say Connor’s not your chosen one.”

“Exactly,” Connor said. “I call bullshit. What are you really doing here? Stockpiling resources for some form of bloody coup against us?”

Brandon’s face darkened. His voice came out just as dark, sinister. “Believe me, gentlemen, if what we wanted was a bloodbath, we would surely have it.”

His tone and a sudden wave of his emotions hit me, sending a chill down my spine. I tried to shake it off as best I could. “Then what do you want?” I asked.

Brandon stood and turned to me.

“Long life,” he said, “is tiring. For far too long our people have fought your people.”

“So hold on,” Connor said. “You want us to believe you are vampire pacifists? You want to make peace?”

Brandon shook his head. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “What we really want is to be left alone.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Connor said, a dark look of his own coming over his face. “If you had wanted peace, you should have considered that long before you took my brother and made him… this.” His last word dripped with pain and disgust at what his brother had become. “How come he has no idea I’m his brother? Why doesn’t he remember me?”

Brandon sighed, pausing before he started to speak. “When I turned him,” he said, “I took precautions to assure that Aidan’s mind would be free of his past, at least for the time being. The transition would be less painful for him that way and, selfishly, it served to keep him unaware of my purposes regarding our prophecy. It appears, however, my efforts were not as strong as I would have liked. You heard Aidan talking about the dreams he’s been having… Those are memories of his past, of you, manifesting themselves back into his consciousness, causing him to seek you without even knowing who you are. The fact that he hunted you out and stalked you, being driven only by his dreams, proves his value to my people. He’s quite a resourceful young vampire.”

Connor looked livid. “To what end?”

Brandon smiled at him.

“Whether you choose to believe in our prophecy or not, Connor,” Brandon said, “let’s just say I thought this day might come between our two worlds. How you choose to deal with this information is entirely in your own hands.”

Connor paused and his face changed. The anger faded a little and he jerked his thumb over at me. “The kid here’s got some issues with the whole prophecy thing, but you know what? After the past couple months of where my brain has been, I’m willing to take a look at anything that’s going to help me understand why my brother’s been made a part of Club Dead. Or what it has to do with me.”

Brandon gave a tight-lipped smile as if he were showing restraint. “I know you mean that to be insulting,” Brandon said, “but from my perspective, I consider Aidan’s transformation an… upgrade of sorts. Nonetheless, I think it’s high time both our races start acting civilized toward each other. We live in delicate times, gentlemen. Like your ancestors of generations past, we are saying good-bye to the Old World, the old ways of doing things.”

Connor turned to meet my eyes, his cynicism returning to his face. “I don’t know, kid. When we broach the subject with the Department, I don’t really think this is going to fly.”

My biggest concern was what type of conniption Allorah Daniels might have when she got wind of this all-you-can-stake vampire buffet. Still, truth be told, I was feeling pretty good about the situation. By the odds I calculated in my head, I figured I should have been long dead from hanging out here in New York’s largest nest of vampires. Any extra time I was still among the living felt like a bonus level in a video game to me.

“So we make it fly,” I said. “Connor, think of your brother. He’s one of them now. Less than an hour ago you thought he was still dead and gone. Now you know that he’s just dead. That’s a positive… of a sort.”

Connor looked on the verge of crying. The accumulated weight of the past month of mental stress seemed to crush down on him at once. “I wouldn’t call this any kind of life,” Connor said. “You know our training. Vampires are an abomination. Maybe I should have saved that stake to release Aidan from all this.”

I grabbed Connor by the lapels of his coat and got in his face. “He’s your brother! Think about what you’re saying. You can’t kill him.”

Brandon coughed, a totally artificial gesture on his part. “He’s our family, too,” Brandon added, holding up a finger.

“I wouldn’t allow that.”

Connor turned and looked at him. “I guess that’s part of my problem,” Connor said. “You say you people want to be left alone, but I don’t think it would stay that way long. Look what you’ve done to my brother. I’ve been around him less than an hour and I’ve already seen how ferocious he can become. We watched him throw this dark-haired girl across your little faux forest out there.”

Brandon looked surprised. “He did that to Beatriz?” he asked. “That’s rather harsh to be doing to his girlfriend, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “They’re a couple?”

“Fits my point exactly,” Connor said. “If that’s how he treats his girlfriend, what’s he or the others going to do to regular humans on the street who they don’t even know?”

Brandon looked at us like we were stupid. “Aidan doles out exactly what he knows our people can take when it comes to keeping the law around here. He’s one of my key enforcers. He can’t simply go easier on Beatriz, especially around the others. If he gave his girlfriend special treatment, what would the others think? It’s clan politics, and you can’t be too soft around that mentality. It simply wouldn’t do. It would be a show of weakness, and we can’t have that. Besides, he’s young.”

“He’s thirty-seven,” I said.

“Young by our standards,” Brandon corrected, “which explains some of his more interesting outbursts. He gets a bit irked when we’re all out socially. He always gets carded. You have to understand that for the vampire, the mind changes at a different rate, between immortality and the fact that the body never ages. All of us grow differently.”

“What?” I asked. “No finishing school for vampires?” This seemed to agitate Brandon and I could feel it radiating from him. His face was somber.

“We still have much to discuss,” Brandon said, “but that can wait till later. For now, I think it wise we all digest what has happened here today, on both sides.”

“So that’s it?” I asked. “You’re just going to let us walk out of here?”

Brandon looked annoyed. “I could have some of my men chase you out of here, if you prefer.”

“Walking out is just fine,” Connor said.

“But I do need something from you,” Brandon said. “An assurance that you will approach this historic meeting with some delicacy when you talk to your superiors. This is history in the making, history we’ve waited on for a long time.”

“That’s awfully trusting,” I said. “What makes you think we’re not going to send in the troops on this?”

Brandon shrugged and tapped the side of his forehead. “Prophecy, remember?” He turned to Connor and gave him a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “Besides, you’ve got your brother to think about in all this, haven’t you?”

Connor’s face went dark. “That’s why you did this to him,” he said, “thinking you’d get my cooperation…”

Brandon held his hands up. “All I’m asking is for you to think about all this carefully,” he said. His eyes locked with Connor’s. “It’s very exciting to finally meet you.”

“What the hell are you expecting of me?” Connor asked. “What does your prophecy think I can do for you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why do vampires need help with salvation? Immortality and preternatural abilities not enough to keep you going as a dominant species?”

Brandon looked at us as though he were addressing children. “All in good time,” Brandon said. “As I mentioned, I think you need to digest what you have heard today before we address the greater needs of my people.”

Connor’s face darkened. He wasn’t getting the answers he wanted and his frustration was mounting. Before he could go to an even darker place, I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door.

“We’ll see what we can do,” I said to Brandon.

Brandon’s face changed. He looked unhappy. “You’ll forgive me if I seem less than enthusiastic,” he said. “No offense, but despite our prophecy, your department’s previous policy of ‘Dust First, Ask Questions Later’ fills me with skepticism.”

I walked a somewhat dazed Connor to the door at the far end of the room and opened it. Aidan was leaning up against the wall, playing with a PSP.

“Give me a second alone with Brandon,” I said to Connor, still holding the door open. “I’ll be right out. You going to be okay out here?”

Connor nodded, and then looked at Aidan for approval. Aidan nodded, but gave me a look of distrust, eyeing the retracted bat in my hand. I raised it up and waggled it back and forth. “I just need to talk to your boss. Don’t worry about this. There’s no pointy end.”

Aidan laughed, his fangs showing in the gesture, but he waved me back toward Brandon’s quarters and started down the stairs. Connor followed after him close behind. I closed the door and turned back into the room, walking back to where Brandon stood by his fireplace. The rest of his vampiric council had left him alone there, staring up at an oil painting hanging over the fireplace depicting a gorgeous dark-haired woman with Greek features in a blue dress that, given my eye for art, I placed as Renaissance.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Who is she?”

Brandon looked away from her over to me. He seemed surprised to see me there. “She is none of your concern,” he said, turning to look back up at her, “but I was much less enlightened when I knew Damaris, far less studious about the prophecies.”

“Damaris,” I repeated, staring up at the painting for a moment as I put a name to her. I turned my attention back to Brandon. “Women will change a man. Speaking of women, I almost forgot. Your building here… not the castle, but the Gibson-Case Center…?”

Being in the room with Brandon and the rest of the vampires as the only human took on a more somber quality. Without Connor at my side, I felt a lot less secure.

“Yes?” Brandon asked. “What about it?”

“It kind of ate my girlfriend,” I said.

Brandon stared at me blankly. “Excuse me?”

“Jane,” I said. “Her name is Jane Clayton-Forrester. We were using one of the information kiosks and, well… it kind of engulfed her. She’s somewhere in the building’s systems. It even lists her among the tenants. She’s been in contact with me, but she’s not really sure what’s happened to her.”

“I see,” Brandon said. “You must understand. I don’t really handle all these technical aspects. I’m afraid long life has left me somewhat slow in adapting to this changing world.”

“But from what Aidan told me, I thought you were their… leader,” I said, not quite sure what type of title was appropriate for the head vampire in charge. Lord, Master… Big Biter on Campus?

“Make no mistake,” Brandon added. “I am, but as far as those types of details, well, that’s what I have minions for.” He gestured toward the other vampires in the room and made a beckoning gesture. “I will leave that up to my colleague here. Nicholas?”

One of the vampires stepped forward. He looked to be around thirty and had shoulder-length brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were modern, high fashion that bordered on runway absurd for a man, but finely tailored, certainly better than anything I owned.

“Hello,” he said, very politely. With just a greeting off his lips, I could already hear the thickness of an English accent much more Old World than the Inspectre’s. “My name is Nicholas Vanbrugh. I am the one responsible for the supervision and maintenance of this facility. I hope I can be of some assistance.”

I did, too. Not being eaten alive was a good way to start the day, but none of it mattered if I couldn’t get Jane back.