Dead Matter

22

I left Castle Bran and the Gibson-Case Center, surprised to see that, like Brandon had said, it was morning when I stepped out of the artificial world and into the real one. I took the sample of Patient Zero, grabbed the subway, and headed back down to the Village with the morning rush-hour crowd, for once embracing the crush of humanity and not vampires around me as everyone packed like sardines into the car. It beat being crowded by the undead, especially if they had gone feral.

Once I hit the Lovecraft Café, I made my way back through the movie theater, into the offices, and all the way to my desk, figuring out how to best present this fresh sample to Allorah without giving much of anything away. I sat down at the partners desk for a moment, turning how I would handle it over and over in my head until I felt my nerves begin to give. The desire to be invisible washed over me, if only to keep from lying to my superiors.

With a quick look around, I grabbed my satchel, got up, and headed off to find Allorah’s office. It took me several minutes to locate, as it was nowhere near and nothing like the space the Inspectre used. Allorah’s office was like a giant studio apartment with different sections of the space delegated to several functions. Lab equipment, much of it similar to the vampire’s spread of it, filled a long low table along the back left-hand corner, while the far end of the room seemed to be allocated to books and research. There had to be a method to the mad organization of it all, but at the moment Allorah was tearing about the space, working on several things all at once. She was in black army fatigue pants and a white tank top that showcased the muscled contours of her dark skin. Enchancellor Daniels was surprisingly buff.

When she saw me, she paused and looked over. Her eyes were a little sunken in. Allorah looked exhausted. “Hello, Simon,” she said. “You might want to try picking up your phone once in a while.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The reception wasn’t very good where I was in town. Got a sec?”

“Not really,” she said. Allorah stopped and looked over at me, running her eyes down to my lower half. “What are you? A thirty-two waist, thirty-four inseam?”

“Thirty-four, thirty-four,” I corrected. “Why? Are the Enchancellors going to have us wear uniforms now?”

Allorah smiled, but shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said, “but I am requisitioning you a special pair of pants. They’re covered in a Kevlar blend and soaked for over two weeks in a solution of minced garlic.”

“Just what I always wanted,” I said. “Thanks.”

“They might not smell nice, but when you’re knee deep in the undead, you’ll thank me.”

Allorah continued dashing around her office, gathering bits of equipment that were either silver, pointy, or garlicy… sometimes all three. The woman needed to slow down. “Putting those on rush order, are you?” I asked.

“I will,” she said, “but right now I’m seeing if I have anything you might fit into.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

The female Enchancellor kept at her search.

I walked over to her, grabbing her wrist to stop her. “Listen, Allorah, calm down. Why are you in such a rush?”

She stopped and looked at me like I had slapped her. “Why the hell aren’t you? Didn’t you hear?”

I shook my head. “Hear what?”

Allorah sighed, then leaned back against one of the lab tables behind her. “Calls have been coming in to Dave Davidson down at the Mayor’s Office of Plausible Deniability all last night and early this morning before sunrise. There’s more than one of those creatures that attacked you and they keep popping up, centralized in Midtown. We need to get geared up and get out there.”

Shit. I hoped that Brandon and his people would make good on their word to wrangle the escapees, but they certainly weren’t running around in the light of day to find them. Allorah was pumped up by the news coming in, somewhere between bloodthirsty and excited, running to and fro. It was a scary combo and I needed her to be reasonable if I was going to try to pass my sample off to the more scientific-minded part of her.

“Hold on,” I said. “Let’s talk about this for a second.”

“We don’t have a second,” she said. “You think the other Enchancellors are moving on this yet? Not a chance. It’s up to us.”

“Maybe we should let cooler heads prevail while we gather more intel,” I said. “It’s daylight, after all.”

Allorah wasn’t having it. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to the far end of her office where piles of folders and papers were spread out across a massive wooden desk. She was going a mile a minute now.

“Ever vigilant are the eyes of justice,” she said and started sorting through several folders.

“Then why is she always blindfolded in statues?” I asked.

Allorah gave me a look that could kill. “Shush. You’re friends with Godfrey down in the Gauntlet, yes?”

I nodded.

“I asked for his assistance in helping me research a few things,” she said. “I was impressed to hear that you had already taken the initiative concerning vampires with him.”

I tensed. I hadn’t really meant for that bit to become public knowledge, but I hadn’t sworn Godfrey to secrecy on it, now, had I?

“He has several archival projects allocated for development down there. One of them has to do with implementing a cross-reference system of all matters vampiric in the computers.”

“Allorah,” I said, but she didn’t hear me. I grabbed her by both of her arms and spun her toward me. I wasn’t sure what the policy was on manhandling an Enchancellor, but I needed her to pay attention. “Allorah. Look, that’s great, but I need you to do me a favor.”

Something in my desperate look must have gotten to her. Her eyes sharpened, a little calm coming to her face. “Okay,” she said in earnest. “Shoot.”

I reached into the satchel and pulled out the sample Brandon’s people had given me. “Listen, I forgot I had this sample I took when I got attacked.”

Allorah looked a little pissed. “Didn’t I tell you that you were supposed to turn in all the evidence when I asked you for your ruined clothes from the attack?”

“I know, I know,” I said, taking her dressing-down. “I forgot. You know I’m swamped with casework… but I need you to analyze this.”

Allorah was already shaking her head. “I’ve already swabbed all your clothes and analyzed what I got off of them,” she said.

“But this,” I said. “This is special.”

“Why?” Allorah said, skepticism creeping into her voice.

It was now or never. I had to sell it. “When that creature had me trapped on the floor, crushed under it… this came out of a gland on the side of its throat. I think it might be some kind of venom, you know, like a poison sac.” I was bluffing. I had no idea if the damned creature even had a gland or sac like that, but I was also hoping Allorah had no idea either.

She took the vial from me and examined it, enraptured, twisting it around as she held it up to the light. She brushed past me and walked back over toward the laboratory end of the room. She set the vial in a rack of others next to a microscope. Already she was pulling on gloves, prepping a slide, and readying an eyedropper to take a sample.

“Your level of focus borders on really creepy when it comes to vampires,” I said. I slowly crossed the room as she pressed the specimen between two plates of glass and slid them under the microscope.

“What else do I have?” she said, her voice sounding distant as she concentrated, but there was a much darker and more bitter undertone to her words than I was used to seeing on her.

I put one of my hands on her shoulder. “What happened to you?” I asked, not really expecting an answer given how focused she was on the slide.

Allorah pulled back from the microscope, scooped her hair out of the way, and lifted the silver necklace she always wore from around her neck. On the end of it was palm-sized circle of polished silver filled with etched concentric circles. She held it out to me. I opened my hand and let the whole necklace run down into it.

“Here,” she said. “Keep yourself busy.”

When I pressed my psychometric powers into the medallion, I saw Allorah standing at the front of a small classroom. Judging from the ancient-looking lab equipment around the room it had to be at least twenty years ago. That, and Allorah looked totally different.

Yes, she looked younger, as I had expected she would, but what surprised me most was that she actually looked happy. The Allorah in my vision was vibrant, her eyes eager and wide, her smile practically giving off a cartoonish sparkle of sunshine.

Because this was Allorah’s memory, I already knew a lot about what I was seeing. Science was the subject that she taught, but it was after school that she loved almost as much because of her secret passions. Allorah was a Forensics League nerd, coaching a handful of the after-school kids for competitive speech team. There were six high school kids in the room with her, four girls and two boys, all of them diligently going over their scripts for a big regional meet.

Allorah heard a commotion off in the building and excused herself in order to check it out. Her classroom was at the back of the third floor of the four-story town house, and she went to the top of the stair landing to listen. Down below, the lights flickered off on the other two floors. Allorah knew there were several other people still here with after-school programs as well and wondered just what the hell they were doing. She wasn’t sure what the fall production was going to be for the drama club yet, but hoped all this had something to do with that and not with the creeping sensation she felt down her back.

It was the screams that convinced her it wasn’t the drama club. No kid could fake a sound like the one that tore into her ears. Shocked and shaking, Allorah turned and ran for her classroom. Her students had heard the scream and were already standing up by their seats.

“What’s going on?” a blond boy asked.

The sound of struggle was getting closer, coming up the stairs.

“I don’t know,” she said, “and right now, I don’t care. Move!”

Allorah ran to the far end of the room and threw up the window sash. Being a relatively new teacher, she felt almost powerless, but knew she had to be strong in front of her students. She grabbed one of the nearby girls and pushed her toward the open window. “Fire escape,” she said, pushing authority into her voice. “Now!”

No one had to be asked twice. All six of her students bolted toward the window, each of them clawing to be first one out. Allorah grabbed one of the boys, the dark-haired one this time. “Campbell, let the girls out first. Then you can go, in an orderly fashion.”

The boy Campbell nodded and held back, though I could see on his face it was killing him. The boy was terrified. While she waited on her students, Allorah took stock of the science room. Not much going on for equipment this early in the semester, but…

There was something not quite human standing in the doorway to the classroom. I knew what it was. The taut, leathery skin pulled back over its face, the exposed fangs. Vampires had taken over the school, but that didn’t compute to the innocent Allorah of twenty years ago. She merely went with instinct. She threw on two of the nozzles sticking out of one of the lab tables and backed herself toward the open window. The creature blurred into motion toward her and she freaked the hell out, almost dropping the lighter she was fumbling in her hand. Her arm thrust forward, her thumb rolled over the wheel, and flame jumped to life, igniting the two jets of gas. The vampire was caught in the stream and immediately burst into flames itself, howling with an inhuman pain. Allorah gave it a weak kick with one of her boots as the last of her students went out the window and she followed, slamming the window shut behind her.

The kids were hauling ass down to the school’s courtyard below with Allorah close behind. When she reached the bottom, Allorah jumped the last ten feet from the hanging ladder of the fire escape to the ground. She looked around. The only exit from behind the school was actually going straight through it and out the front. That was chancy, but there was also…

“Campbell!” she whispered. “Help me lift the others over the back wall here.”

“Isn’t that like a consulate over there?” he said. The school was near the United Nations.

“Do you want to wait and see what’s on this side of the wall for you?” she asked. “I promise you, you’re better off dealing with consulate security. Now, get lifting.”

Campbell nodded and ran to the wall. He and Allorah started once again with the girls.

“I’m scared,” the second one said as they lifted her.

“It’s okay,” Allorah said. “We all are.”

Feeling Allorah’s waves of emotion hit me hard. This was not the steady and even-keeled Enchancellor I was getting to know. This was a scared woman in her early twenties freaking the hell out as the supernatural thrust itself into her world. People either accepted it or their minds snapped. If Allorah didn’t have the kids to think of, I think her sanity would have already made a trip to the latter state.

Now it was just her and Campbell. She lowered her hands, fingers interlocked, ready for his foot. He planted his shoe in her hand. A second later, only his shoe remained as the boy seemed to disappear from in front of her. “What…?”

Allorah looked around. Two figures now stood in the center of the courtyard, both savagely gnawing the screaming boy’s neck. Allorah gasped, and put her hand on her chest… only to discover the cool of the silver chain around her neck. She looked down at the medallion hanging on it, which bore a concentric set of circles that resembled an eye carved into a good sized-metal disc.

Allorah had gotten the charm during spring break in Greece, the woman who sold it to her claiming it was a sixth-century BC apotropaic eye. Bizarre market trinket or not, it was meant to ward off evil spirits while drinking, and if something like these creatures didn’t qualify as evil, then what the hell did?

Allorah pulled the necklace from around her neck and ran forward. The creatures immediately reacted, dropping the now-lifeless boy to the paved stones of the courtyard.

“No!” she screamed out and swung the necklace in her hand. Like a table saw blade, the amulet spun around on the silver chain, the edge of it humming with an energy all its own. It caught one of the vampires, this one a male with tangled brown hair, in the cheek and sliced into it, sticking. The creature fell to the ground, clawing at its own face, and Allorah didn’t hesitate, her heart and mind vacillating between anger and fear. While the pained vampire was down, she ran to the wall and pulled down the school’s banner from its post, taking the post in both hands. Caught in a moment where she couldn’t take the time to think, Allorah plunged the post down into the creature’s chest, essentially staking it. It exploded with blood, covering her and sending her mind into total shock.

The sound of another approaching figure filled the doorway leading into the school.

“Stop playing with your food, already,” it said, and I had no trouble recognizing the voice. In fact, I had heard it earlier this evening. The vampire I knew as Brandon stepped out into the courtyard. He was transformed in full-on vamp mode and his features were terrifyingly stretched out, like a canvas pulled too tight over an artist’s frame. This was a far more horrific version of the kinder, gentler vampire I knew now. Monstrous as he looked, Brandon stared in horror at the blood of one of his fallen vampires. It was everywhere.

Allorah was already down on her knees and scrabbling to find her amulet, paying no attention to the other remaining vampire that had been feeding on poor Campbell. It was a female vampire and she grabbed Allorah by the hair and started to lift her. I knew the face of this vampire. It was the woman from the portrait over the fireplace in Brandon’s private chambers. Damaris.

Allorah’s hand found the amulet, and she grabbed it and slashed up and across the throat of the female vampire. The vampire clutched for its neck, but its head was already rolling back and separating from the cut. She hadn’t fed yet because her body fell to the ground and seemed to shrivel up into itself without much of a mess.

Brandon walked forward, stunned, but there was a haughty anger about him that I found terrifying. “What have you done?” he hissed out. I knew how important family was to the now-reformed Brandon, but I doubted that much of anyone challenged his authority back then, and to have two of his companions (three if you counted the one burning upstairs still) struck down by a schoolteacher…

Allorah, scared as she was and on the verge of tears, laughed with bitter anger in it. “What have I done? Are you kidding me?”

Brandon’s face was almost skeletal as he pushed a wave of emotional anger out from himself. “How dare you speak…?”

Allorah was already swinging her staking post wildly at him. “These were children!” she screamed at him. “This is a school, for Christ’s sake!”

The town house was fully ablaze now, lighting up the once-dark courtyard.

Allorah dropped the post and started swinging the amulet again as she stepped forward through what remained of Brandon’s other vampires. The amulet whirred like it was an electric power saw, and Brandon’s face turned back to human. Flesh filled in the holes where muscle had barely covered bone. When his face finished forming, Brandon looked scared. Caught off guard, this other version of Brandon seemed afraid behind all the bluff and bluster of his powers. “Please,” he pleaded. “Don’t…”

Allorah wasn’t having it. All I could feel in her now was anger. She charged forward, brandishing the amulet like she was a knight carrying a Morningstar into battle.

Brandon had no choice but to shoot up into the sky, but so close to the fire of the building that his clothes were already aflame. Allorah watched as he flew away like some half-ignited human torch, hoping the flames would finish the job, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

Her mind had wanted to shut down just then, but there was still one last thing she had to do. Allorah cradled Campbell in her arms and brought him to the flames as well. She couldn’t leave him there, lying like that. She just couldn’t. As the flames laid claim to the boy, I found that I couldn’t take any more of it and pulled myself out of the vision and back into Allorah’s office lab.

My body was exhausted and my head hurt. First things first, though. I went into my coat pocket and started upping my waning blood sugar with Life Savers. I chewed them in between my erratic breathing.

Allorah was standing next to the chair I had sat in before triggering my power. She looked down at me, concerned and grim. “You okay, Canderous?”

“Yeah,” I said, catching my breath. “Thank you for that.”

She kneeled down next to me and looked me in the eyes. There was a sense of sadness and wonder to the look on her face. “You saw it all?” she asked. “The school? The kids? You felt everything I felt, right?”

I nodded, taking in huge gulps of air. “I understand now.” I handed back her apotropaic eye. Allorah stood and walked back to her microscope, laying the medallion next to it while she went back to work.

“When that night was over,” Allorah said, her voice flat, “I was still a teacher, just of a different subject…”

I understood her now, but the matter between the vamps and humans just got a whole lot more complex. Knowing what I knew now, I was even less inclined to let her get near the vampires. Parts of what I knew about them started to make sense to me. Even though Brandon had been a monster back then, these were not the vampires I knew now. Brandon and his people had changed. I had a pretty good idea that maybe that night at the private school had been the turning point for him. The loss of Damaris had touched something still human deep inside, changing him, making him go from an arrogant killing machine to a scholar interested in the preservation of his people.

Even the timing of it all seemed to make sense. The loss of Damaris was when he started giving a shit about the prophecies, deciphering them. It even fit with when Brandon had hired the gypsies to grab Aidan. It was hard to have seen him as that monster, but that wasn’t the vampire I knew. I trusted Brandon now, but if Allorah ever saw him again, there would simply be no reasoning with her.

And here we were prepping for the hunt. I had to find a more proactive way to keep her occupied. “Any luck with the sample?”

Allorah went back to her lab equipment and I stood on shaky legs to follow. When I got to her, Allorah was already bent over one of her microscopes again.

“The concentration level of viral activity is off the chart compared to the samples off your clothes,” she said.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

Allorah nodded.

She looked so serious. The change from who I had experienced just minutes ago had me seriously missing that version of her. I felt such deep sadness.

“It gives me a lot more to work with,” she said. “If I can find a weakness to these monsters, we can find a better way to destroy them.”

I could feel the tension rising in my shoulders at the thought of the bloodbath that would come on both sides of that effort. I had to try to change how this was going to be handled. All-out war didn’t seem like the healthiest of options for either side, but with the general black-or-white ideology of the Enchancellorship possibly making decisions on this, I was worried about Manhattan becoming a ghost town.

“What about other alternatives?” I asked.

Allorah looked at me like I was crazy. “Like what?”

“I mean, we could potentially try and make an antivirus, couldn’t we?”

Allorah stood up from the microscope and gave me her full attention. She crossed her arms. “Now, why would we want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, dodging the question. “I mean, wouldn’t a regular vampire be easier to contend with than these mutated things? If we were able to tone down this vampire variant, maybe we’d stand a better chance of eliminating them. Personally, I’d rather fight a guy in a dinner jacket, cummerbund, and cape than these clawed snaggletooths.”

I didn’t want anyone dead if I could help it, but taking this tack would at least help soften Allorah to the idea. I hoped. I stood there, maintaining my composure as she thought it over.

Thankfully, the stillness in the room was broken when she closed her eyes and nodded. “You have a point,” Allorah said. She put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “They’re vicious enough in normal form. I can’t imagine how powerful this new breed is. If they’re as savage as you described, you’re right. We need to do what we can to reverse the virus. I’ll get to work on it.”

Allorah went back to work with the same extreme intensity, but as I backed myself out of the room without her even noticing, I was at least happy that her preparation was now pointed toward more science and less slaying. Some days it was the small victories that got you by.